A Salamander's Tale
Page 16
Monotheism served its purpose. A breakthrough in human thinking at the time of its inception twenty-five hundred years ago, a breakthrough in the human capacity to think abstractly instead of concretely, monotheism has outlived its usefulness. It helped unify disparate peoples; it provided inspiration to allow people to fight and die for the survival of their people. The initial monotheism, Judaism, helped a group of people survive when surrounded by hostile forces, the Egyptians and Assyrians, on either side, to survive subsequent expulsions and diasporas and holocausts. A second monotheism, Christianity, helped to unify people throughout the Mediterranean, then into northern Europe, parts of Africa and Asia, eventually into the New World. A third monotheism, Islam, helped to unify the Middle East, much of Africa and Asia, all the way to Indonesia.
But enough, already. Enough of a punitive god created twenty-seven hundred years ago—a god that, according to the first of the ten commandments, is an unusually and pathologically narcissistic god who does not want his name taken in vain, an anthropomorphic god who responds as angrily as a kid on an urban street corner when the kid’s name is taken in vain. Enough of a god that creates his son asexually, through an immaculate conception, a god and a son whose very conception has corrupted human sexuality. Enough of a god whose prophet is actually a gerund, whose people are praising and worshiping a gerund and going to war on behalf of this gerund. A gerund.
Indeed, as Voltaire pointed out, “God is a comedian, but he’s playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.”
In a nuclear age our inner lives have no choice but to go through a transformation, to recognize the potential self-destructiveness of a god who inspires us to got to war, who inspires us to use all of the weapons at our disposal, even if those weapons destroy us in the process. Our warlike nature creates the need for religion: Religion does not cause wars, but it does provide a reinforcement for war in a forceful feedback loop. It unifies people, and then separates them from other people and reinforces our natural xenophobia, our fear of the outsider who then is seen as less than human, as godless, as a pagan.
And who could have predicted that the QWERTY phenomenon would have affected and locked in ideas, not just affected and locked in typewriter keyboards and tufted carpets? The QWERTY principle, as outlined by the economic historians Paul David and Brian Arthur in the 1980s, describes how easy it is, say, for a typewriter keyboard design to get locked in for over a hundred years by the accidents of history. Originally designed so that typists would type slowly on machines that could easily jam, the QWERTY keyboard has not been easy to displace with better designs mainly because these new designs have not been stunningly better than the QWERTY design. For well over a century, typists have learned to type on a QWERTY keyboard, and manufacturers continue to make QWERTY keyboards because typists demand them. We have a feedback loop that has allowed the QWERTY keyboard to take on a life of its own, even in an age of computers and nonjamming keyboards.
To apply economic jargon, the QWERTY phenomenon produces an “external economy of scale.” After World War II American carpet production became concentrated in the small town of Dalton, Georgia, because of a simple accident of history. A teenage girl in Dalton in the late nineteenth century had produced a tufted bedspread that became the prototype for tufted carpeting eventually displacing woven rugs in the mid-twentieth century. The handicraft skills that she and her colleagues developed became essential for the production of tufted carpets. As tufted carpeting took hold, a virtuous circle for Dalton took hold. People with the necessary handicraft skills moved to Dalton. They were assured of work, and the companies that produced the product were assured of expert labor.
Similar feedback loops and virtuous circles have occurred in Silicon Valley and in the Route 128 corridor near Boston in the computer industry—and in Benton, Arkansas, where Sam Walton’s presence spurred a cottage industry of suppliers for Wal-Mart. Likewise in Bangalore and Hyderabad in India.
Most of these QWERTY phenomena are harmless and even beneficial—except in the case of the religion industry. An accident of history, not unlike the appearance of a tufted bedspread innovator in Georgia, brought the writers of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Koran—along with their fictional or real characters, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Paul, John, and Mohammed—into a close geographical proximity. Now this limited geographical area supports a wide network of purveyors of religion, a populous pool of skilled labor. Rabbis, mullahs, imams, ministers, and priests gravitate to this Middle Eastern religious mecca. Yeshivas, madrassahs, and bible schools thrive with the help of government subsidies. Places like Jerusalem and Bethlehem and the Sea of Galilee and Medina and Mecca and Karbala and Najaf draw religious ideologues from all over the world in a phenomenon that the journalist Edward Fox has called “negative cosmopolitanism,” a sense that one can and should live there and only there rather than anywhere else in the world.
Enough, already. It’s time to disentangle religion and spirituality from the badlands and deserts and rubble of the Middle East. This whole planet is sacred. A sense of wonder, a sense of the strangeness of our world and our universe, a sense of the supernatural can arise anywhere.
Oil and holy water do not mix. Oil and religion do not mix. Our old religions and a nuclear world do not mix. Our old religions and our current scientific understanding of the universe do not mix.
The gods are not dead. Religion and faith and spirituality are not dead. Instead, our vision of an anthropomorphic god—a god who rewards us and punishes us, who selects us as the chosen ones, who settles scores with our foes—is in its final agonizing death throes. We can begin to recognize the wisdom of Carl Jung’s line, “Religion is a defense against genuine religious (that is, spiritual) experience.”
Our world is a stranger and more surreal place than the ancients had any clues about. We do not have to invent a supernatural connection between us and the universe. We do not have to invent a Moses as a prophet from God, reshape a mere mortal like Jesus into a Son of God, or believe that an angel from god dictated and created a sacred text like the Koran.
No, the angels and the gods, not just the devil, are in the details.
I am not a physicist. Most of the us on this planet are not physicists. Yet most of us know that our base of knowledge has changed in dramatic ways over the past century. The disparity between our collective knowledge and our faiths is wider than ever before.
In 1927, as quantum theory was getting off the ground, the famed physicists Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg shared their concerns about this disparity. “It’s all bound to end in tears,” noted Pauli. “At the dawn of religion, all the knowledge of a particular community fitted into a spiritual framework, based largely on religious values and ideas. The spiritual framework itself had to be within the grasp of the simplest member of the community. . .. If he himself is to live by these values (the underlying community values), the average man has to be convinced that the spiritual framework embraces the entire wisdom of his society (emphasis mine). . . . The complete separation of knowledge and faith can at best be an emergency measure, afford some temporary relief . . .”
Yes, the gods are in the details. The gods—the supernatural—may lie in the quanta.1 Atoms emit energy only in discrete amounts or “lumps” called quanta (from the Latin word for “how much”) rather than in the continuous waves prescribed by electromagnetic theory. The quantum is a bundle of energy, possibly an indivisible unit that we currently believe cannot be sliced any further. Light behaves as if it were composed of these little energy bundles. And, if light as a wave can be a particle or bundle, then conversely particles can also be waves.
The problem is that particles do not always end up where something called wave function—developed in an equation by Erwin Schrodinger in 1925—predicts they will end up. When electrons are measured and observed, they usually are situated in the most likely place, but they are not guaranteed to be in that place, even though this wave function can be calculated quite
precisely. We can expect certain probabilities, but they are merely probabilities. Nothing is certain. So much is open to the music of chance.
As the English writer and prince of paradox, G. K. Chesterton, pointed out, “The commonest kind of trouble is that it (this world of ours) is nearly reasonable, but not quite . . . It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden . . .” Hidden in the quanta.
From quantum theory has come the complementarity principle. Niels Bohr noted in this principle that, although light is both a particle and a wave, an experimenter or an observer can measure one aspect or the other but not both at the same time. Complementarity and contradictions rule the universe. Ironies and paradoxes rule the universe. Matter leads us to antimatter.
Two decades ago two teams of physicists managed to make current go in two directions at exactly the same time around tiny superconducting loops of wire. Electrons and photons can be pictured, as the physicist Richard Feynman pictured them, as getting from point A to point B by taking all possible pathways at once. Only by observing the electrons in one discrete moment in time can we determine which pathway they took.
So, particles can be everywhere and a specific somewhere at the same time. The world can follow a course of smoothness and steadiness and at the same time a course of quantum fluctuations. Particles can be waves, and waves can be particles. The real and the unreal can coexist. The classical world can coexist with a quantum blur.
Do we need to create anything more spooky and mysterious than what the universe already is?
Even Albert Einstein never entirely got it, never was able to fully put his arms around the weirdness of the universe: “It is hard to sneak a look at God’s cards. But that he would choose to play dice with the world . . . is something I cannot believe for a single moment.” Hey, Alberto, get with it. The gods, the quanta, are the very dice you speak of. At some point, however, he did admit that “something deeply hidden had to be behind things.”
The Bible, the New Testament, the Koran are not going away—but do they have to continue to be such a strong part of the canon for our children? At our most suggestible and hypnotizable age, our elders expose us to stories about a big man in the sky who rewards us for good behavior, who delivers horrifically harsh punishments for bad behavior—floods and pestilence and the deaths of the firstborn—a god whom The Onion once headlined as having been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. His periods of manic wrath are terrifying.
We know why this god and his prophets are always male. Yes, war is the midwife of religion. So, testosterone is the fuel for war; testosterone is the fuel for a willingness to go to war and to one’s death; testosterone is the fuel for male-centric religions that inspire us to go to our death for the sake of our god and our community. Bad behavior is defined as an unwillingness to serve that god. In our heightened suggestibility we become servants, indeed obsessive slaves, to that god.
As the sciences continue to expose the strangeness of our universe, religion will need to reflect that weirdness. No more of the conventional tales and rules, and males, that have previously explained our world. We have moved on to the larger cosmos, a much larger, less parochial neighborhood. As our universe expands, as we learn more about possible parallel universes, as we come to understand the finiteness and infiniteness of our universe, the finiteness and infiniteness of possible multiple universes, our inner lives can begin to expand.
Is it possible to be a deist, albeit a skeptical and cynical deist a la Voltaire, in this present world? You bet it is. We can pray to the gods, to the quanta, to the electrons, to the photons, to the light and the darkness as easily as ever before. Prayer makes even more sense than ever before. With prayer we are removing ourselves from the daily grind; we are stopping our world at one moment in time. We are observing the quanta at that one specific moment in time; we are allowing ourselves to see the light moving along one specific pathway, not along infinite pathways. We are able to contemplate and see the specific space we are in; we are able to contemplate and see what velocity we are traveling in. And we are trying to find a way to influence and move the quanta, the electrons, the photons in a direction that gives us the greatest chance of good health and contentment and occasional moments of joy.
Yes, pray to the quanta, pray to the gods: Hear, O people of this Earth, the Lord is not One. They, the gods, the quanta are infinite and finite at the same time. The gods are ineffable; the gods are invisible; the gods are unimaginable; the gods are undelineable. These gods are not made in man’s image. Man is not made in these gods’ images. These gods are not made in a raccoon’s image, nor in the image of any other animal.
There is no chance that the gods follow the patterns of human social hierarchies. There is no “our Father, our King.” The gods cannot have sons. The gods do not send down prophets and angels from the heavens.
It will be terrifying to give up the old God, the old big guy in the sky, the old prophets, the old books and scriptures—or to at least give up the sacredness of these books and scriptures. Change is always frightening. Familiarity always trumps unfamiliarity. The god and devil we know is better than the god and devil we do not know, we tell ourselves. The old God and books have been organizing and stabilizing and motivating forces for hundreds of years. We cannot underestimate how difficult it will be to give up these ideas and beliefs.
At the same time, it is crucial to realize how far our species has come in the last few hundred years. We are no longer in a Malthusian trap. We are no longer in a zero-sum game in which people’s deaths allow others to survive; we are no longer in a world in which limited food and resources require us to kill so that others of us may live.
We have civil laws that carry as much weight and authority as religious laws have carried in the past. We do not need sharia, we do not need halakhah—we do not need the belief that the laws have come down from a god in order to give these laws the authority they need. Religious laws, particularly the laws from European Catholicism almost a millennium ago, gave us a running start—and now we can begin to move on.
We have begun in the past two hundred years to create civil societies that give men and women the respect and opportunities they deserve. We have gotten rid of slavery; we are getting rid of gender biases; we are getting rid of discriminations against people representing minority differences—whether of skin color or religious upbringing or sexual orientation.
We have begun to design punishments that actually fit the crimes. We do not need divinations from a higher power to determine what is right and what is wrong, what is punishable and what is acceptable in a reasonable and just society. We have moved beyond a Lord of the Flies mentality to a more adult-like view of the world: Our punishments for actual crimes are less frantic, more just, and more fair than those of the ancients, than those prescribed in the ancient texts. No more need for shipwrecked twelve-year-olds to determine the rules of the game.
Our capacity to put in place first-rate leadership, at least in the West, has improved in the past two hundred years. And our capacity to remove leaders who are corrupt, leaders who are demagogues, has improved as well. We no longer need leaders whose authority flows from a presumed connection with the gods, whose royal trappings are linked to the gods. We have matured as a species. We know toxic leadership and good leadership when we see it—even if we are at times unable to change that leadership.
One of the elements that locks in our beliefs in the old God—the big guy in the sky—is our natural suggestibility and hypnotizability as children. As noted earlier, this suggestibility is on the rise in early childhood until its peak at age nine, then tails off until the age of nineteen, at which time it virtually disappears. So, when the Abrahamic faiths command us to teach our children diligently about this one God, about the teachings of this one God, about the rewards and punishments emanating from this one god, we are undeniably hooked. For us as children the notions of God, and the stories from the
old texts get drilled into us at a time when we are the most open and most vulnerable and most hypnotizable. We get locked in. We get indoctrinated. It all sticks. Yes, time to dehypnotize ourselves.
On top of this suggestibility lies our concrete thinking before the age of twelve. Indeed, our capacity to think in abstract terms only begins to develop at the age of twelve and thereafter. At a time of heightened suggestibility, we can only think of a god in purely concrete terms, in purely anthropomorphic terms. Without literal concrete idols to serve as stand-ins for the gods, we create as children, a vision of a god that is just as concrete as any idol. We get locked in to that vision.
When facing any struggles, any sense of helplessness as adults, we return to that vision of an anthropomorphic god—a god who can even have a son. When coming to grips with our own fragility, we return to that vision of a god who will save us and protect us and take care of us—not just in this life but also in the afterlife. With a kind of wistfulness as we age, we return again and again to a god that seemed to make the world a more innocent place when we were children. We yearn for our old innocence that allowed us to see the world as a more reasonable and exact place than it really is.
A changeover in our conception and understanding of the gods is inevitable. Just as we human beings are waves and are riding certain waves, so are religions riding certain waves. Apoptosis: Every living cell is programmed to die, to be replaced by a new, more vibrant cell. Every human being is programmed to die, to be replaced by a new, more vibrant human being. The ancient religions are programmed to die, to be replaced.
When apoptosis is eliminated and denied, cancers develop; pure destruction and death ensue. Apoptosis is the fuel for creative destruction—the new replaces the old. Every organism is programmed to die. No point in extending life unnecessarily, no point in making the eighty-something into a ninety-something, and no point in making the ninety-something into a centurion. The new replaces the old; new ideas replace the old ideas. A new kind of Malthusian world in which the older cells and organisms die so that the newer ones can live.