He himself is searching for answers:
Are spontaneous and authentic spiritual experiences nothing more than “experiments of nature” telling us how the brain works?… Do these cold, hard clinical facts suck the divine nectar from our spiritual lives? My answer is an emphatic NO!
We are, he believes, “poised on the threshold of a new era that holds tremendous promise for a new level of spiritual exploration.” But his faith in spiritual experiences isn’t really explained. And his scrupulosity leads him to remark that “basing one’s spirituality on science is as foolhardy as basing one’s science on spirituality.”
Nelson’s ideas on near-death experiences make sense, at least to me, but, as with Parnia, I find it difficult to join him in his “optimistic” belief that “understanding the brain as a spiritual organ strengthens our quest for meaning and complements a mature spirituality.”
* * *
UNFORTUNATELY, THESE PROFOUND ISSUES are being turned into battlefields in the culture wars. Dr. Eben Alexander, the author of Proof of Heaven, puts it this way:
Science—the science to which I’ve devoted so much of my life—doesn’t contradict what I learned up there [in heaven]. But far, far too many believe it does, because certain members of the scientific community, who are pledged to the materialist worldview, have insisted again and again that science and spirituality cannot coexist.
“Certain members” is the language of the witch hunt, and the mutual exclusivity of spirituality and materialism exists primarily in the eye of this particular beholder: As we have seen, men of science like Parnia and Nelson (and, among others, Freeman Dyson) are deeply interested in the spiritual, and seek to reconcile it with their purely scientific insights. What’s really happening here is that the words “materialism” and “spirituality” are being used by Alexander as code for “atheism” and “religion.”
By far the most contentious and rancorous of the books I’ve been considering is Life After Death: The Evidence, by the right-wing politico Dinesh D’Souza, who “remained lukewarm” in his religious beliefs until he became religiously engaged, leading to a new career as a Christian propagandist (What’s So Great About Christianity, What’s So Great About God), complementing his ongoing career as a disputatious patriot (What’s So Great About America, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, and his 2014 best seller, America: Imagine a World Without Her). Life After Death isn’t really about life after death—it’s a zealous assault on atheism. “I want to engage atheism and reductive materialism on their own terms, and to beat them at their own game.”
D’Souza goes about it by leading us through step-by-step “logical” arguments that might just convince naive school kids, his specious logic matched by his smug certainties and his conviction that he has proved his thesis: “We have repelled the atheist case against the believers.… By examining the arguments for and against life after death, we have concluded that there is a strong intellectual and practical case for belief.” In other words, he agrees with himself. (Recently, this self-proclaimed patriot and Christian has not only been forced to resign his position as president of a small Christian college following an ugly sexual scandal that cost him his marriage, but has also pleaded guilty to charges of using straw donors to make illegal contributions to a United States Senate campaign, in violation of the federal campaign finance law, and to making false statements in this regard.)
D’Souza’s discussion of NDEs is as skewed as the rest of his book, directed not at understanding them or explaining them scientifically but at using them as another weapon against atheism: “While the critics of NDEs have raised some interesting possibilities—it might be this and it might be that—on balance, near death experiences do suggest that consciousness can and sometimes does survive death. By itself this is a very damaging conclusion for those who deny the afterlife.” Who those “critics” may be, I have no idea. People who do not accept NDE narratives as literal truth? The deployment of such straw men is typical of D’Souza’s methodology throughout.
* * *
AS THESE VARIOUS BOOKS SUGGEST, then, two struggles are taking place simultaneously. One is the grappling of the neuroscientists with their new discoveries about the brain and about death—an endeavor that is clearly only in its early stages. The other is political and cultural, between skeptics and defenders of the faith. Because this latter struggle is so fierce, and because the discoveries of the neuroscientists are so challenging and even threatening, hyperbole, delusion, and anger dominate far too much of what should be disinterested discourse. After all, death and the possibility of an afterlife are matters that concern everyone and demand serious rather than overwrought consideration. Whom can we turn to for informed, rational reflection on the subject of NDEs?
One obvious choice is the sometimes controversial but always illuminating Oliver Sacks, himself a leading neuroscientist (and an admirer of Kevin Nelson’s The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain). In a 2012 article he considers the question of out-of-body experiences and religious epiphanies:
Both OBEs and NDEs, which occur in waking but often profoundly altered states of consciousness, cause hallucinations so vivid and compelling that those who experience them may deny the term hallucination, and insist on their reality. And the fact that there are marked similarities in individual descriptions is taken by some to indicate their objective “reality.” But the fundamental reason that hallucinations—whatever their cause or modality—seem so real is that they deploy the very same systems in the brain that actual perceptions do.
NDEs tend to occur, he tells us, in some measure echoing Nelson, in the “transitional stages, where consciousness of a sort has returned, but not yet fully lucid consciousness.” As for Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven, “to deny the possibility of any natural explanation for an NDE, as Dr. Alexander does, is more than unscientific—it is antiscientific.” Sacks’s conclusion:
Hallucinations, whether revelatory or banal, are not of supernatural origin; they are part of the normal range of human consciousness and experience. This is not to say that they cannot play a part in the spiritual life, or have great meaning for an individual. Yet while it is understandable that one might attribute value, ground beliefs, or construct narratives from them, hallucinations cannot provide evidence for the existence of any metaphysical beings or places. They provide evidence only of the brain’s power to create them.
Assuming, then, that in some way those who have experienced NDEs have unconsciously created their own scripts, why these scripts? We’re told by Moody and others that people from Asia and elsewhere have recounted NDEs reflecting patterns of behavior and belief very different in detail from those we’ve come upon in recent American narratives, but none of the books I’ve read has provided any such foreign accounts. In fact, there’s an extraordinary sameness to our native NDEs—a unanimity of experience that has been proposed as confirmation of their genuineness: This vision of heaven corroborates this other vision of heaven, give or take the obvious differences in sophistication between, say, Colin Burpo and Eben Alexander.
It was not like this in earlier days. In Life After Life (1975), Raymond Moody went to great pains to tell us, “I am not trying to prove that there is life after death. Nor do I think a ‘proof’ of this is presently possible.” And he goes out of his way to insist that none of the experiences he’s been told of involve Jesus, God, or heaven—“Through all of my research … I have not heard a single reference to a heaven or a hell anything like the customary picture to which we are exposed in this society.” But somewhere along the way, his cautious approach to the near-death experience—even so, dismissed by some professionals as purely anecdotal and highly unscientific—has been transformed by the Christian narrative.
Or by that part of the Christian narrative that is basic to fundamentalist or evangelical believers—and more than twenty-six percent of Americans belong to an evangelical church. Almost all the writers of today’s NDE narratives have had a Christian upbringing, although
a few came to religion later in life. They’re certainly all believers—if they weren’t, they would report surprise at finding themselves in heaven. (Or hell: several narrators stop by there, too.) They have known of Jesus and God and heaven from their earliest days as children in Sunday school and weekly churchgoing, from their parents, from TV evangelism. The appurtenances, the images, the surroundings, must be deeply engrained in both their conscious and unconscious minds.
So it should come as no surprise that for such people of powerfully held religious belief and lifelong acquaintanceship with Christian doctrine and chronicles, their dreams, or hallucinations, or visions—or NDEs—should take the form of visits to Christ in heaven. If people can believe that they’re possessed by the spirit of Christ in a church (and millions of evangelicals do believe they are), why should they not be equally convinced that their dreams are the reality? And since we’re dealing with faith here, there’s no point in arguing or denying, or calling on science to refute belief. After all, a large number of Americans don’t accept the idea of evolution.
The recent rash of books on NDEs and connected matters is further witness, if we require further witness, to the extraordinary power of the evangelical vision of life. It withstands science, it withstands the reality principle. A majority of Americans simply insist on the reassurance of life after death, and many, many religious authorities—both before and after the heyday of Billy Graham, now ninety-five, who, with his mix of good sense and jingoistic motivational language, seems to me the most impressive of them all—have offered that reassurance. Besides, however much we skeptics may scoff, is there any real danger in Betty Eadie’s seeming “to melt with joy” as she was held in Christ’s arms and comforted? Perhaps rather than being derided or censured, she should be envied.
The New York Review of Books
OCTOBER 23–NOVEMBER 6, 2014
A Trio of Go-Getter Trumps
TRUMP, THE TOWER! Trump, the Plaza! Trump, the Palace! Trump, the Castle! And let’s not forget Trump, the candidate, and Trump’s The Art of the Deal, and Trump’s Ivana and Trump’s Marla. And here’s to the ill-fated Trump Shuttle (with its in-flight magazine, Trump’s), and the Trumping of the Plaza Hotel and Marjorie Merriweather Post’s Palm Beach extravaganza, Mar-a-Lago, and Adnan Khashoggi’s $30 million yacht (on which the new owner never spent a night, even after renaming it Trump Princess), and the rescue of Wollman Rink, and the near-bankruptcy in Atlantic City, and the feud with Mayor Ed Koch, and the endless battles over Westpride. Let’s celebrate, too, the authentic Trump voice: “That woman is a fat pig”; “Fuck Hyatt. I have them signed, now I can do what I want”; “I would never buy Ivana any decent jewels or pictures. Why give her negotiable assets?”; “You have the palace and you have the castle, hence you have the kingdom.”
Now, reading Gwenda Blair’s convincing and instructive book The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire,1 we can relive our decades with “the Donald” in just a few hours—a big step in the right direction.
Blair begins with a common strategic error: thinking she has to start off with a bang. Her bang of choice is a day in 1989 when Trump is signing copies of Trump: The Game, at F.A.O. Schwarz. This gives her a chance to pile on the clichés and the hype—Donald Trump is not only “the most famous man in America, if not the world,” but also someone who has “hobnobbed with the glitterati” (no wonder the media “were slavering at his feet”). Once she’s dutifully exploited this grotesque scene—the crowd shouting, “Donald, how much money do you make a minute, anyway?”; a cocktail pianist crooning, “Big bucks will never seem the same / After you’ve played Trump: The Game / If you should forget that Trump’s his name / You’ll see it 553 times in the game”—she gets down to business, the business of telling the fascinating story of the three generations of go-getters who made the Trump name and the Trump fortunes.
In the beginning was Friedrich, who in 1885, at the age of sixteen, alone and with no prospects, made his way from Kallstadt, his village in southwestern Germany, to “the giant, throbbing metropolis” of New York. It’s the classic American immigrant story, except that, for Friedrich, the streets did turn out to be paved with gold. He began as a barber, but quickly decided that his main chance lay out West—and by 1891 he had started his first enterprise, a modest dairy restaurant in Seattle. Next stop was a mining town called Monte Cristo, but he had no intention of mining: Instead, he put up a boardinghouse and began “mining the miners.” There were complications over the title of the land this establishment was built on, but as Blair puts it, “the type of people who would be attracted to Monte Cristo were not the type to pay attention to fiddling details like legal titles.” (Later Trumps would skirt other laws with equal insouciance.) By Monte Cristo standards, Friedrich prospered, and in the 1896 election (in which William Jennings Bryan lost a bid for the presidency) he was elected justice of the peace. The margin of victory was thirty-two votes to five; Friedrich was twenty-seven years old.
Then came the Alaska gold rush, and Friedrich was off to the Yukon. Far from having to eat his shoes and laces like Chaplin in The Gold Rush, he struck it rich—first in the tent restaurant business (“A frequent dish was fresh-slaughtered, quick-frozen horse”), and then as the proprietor of a hotel-cum-bordello and restaurant. In 1901, after making his pile, he returned to Kallstadt to take a wife; a few years later he decided to settle there for good. Worth $350,000 in today’s money, he was a rich man, and Kallstadt welcomed him. But there were strict laws in Germany for dealing with presumed draft-dodgers, even if they were now American citizens, and Friedrich wasn’t forgiven. Appeals to the Kaiser were rebuffed, and by the summer of 1905 he was back in New York permanently: “The Trumps were to be Americans, after all.”
Friedrich (now Frederick) was the pioneer. His oldest son, Fred, born three months after the return to America, would be the consolidator. “I always wanted to be a builder,” Fred was to say. “It was my dream as a boy, just as some kids want to be firemen.” He worked at menial jobs, at carpentering; he studied engineering and estimating; he put up family money to begin constructing homes in Queens (his father had died when he was twelve). By the time he was twenty-one, he had built—and sold—a score of houses. (One satisfied customer remembers that “Fred Trump was too young to be at the closing, so his mother came.”) By 1938, his hard work, his passion for detail, his grasp of opportunities both large and small, and his political smarts had made him, according to the Brooklyn Eagle, “the Henry Ford of the home-building industry.” He quickly learned to work profitably with the New Deal’s Federal Housing Authority as well as with New York’s all-powerful master builder, Robert Moses; he became an intimate of Brooklyn’s leading pols and lawyers, and he dealt at less than arm’s length with the local mob; he hired a public-relations firm—unusual for a real estate operation then—and he gave prodigally to charities. (“Mindful of the growing prominence of Jews in the real estate industry and local politics, he became so active in Jewish philanthropies that people often assumed he belonged to that faith.”)
In other words, Fred Trump was a master of realpolitik. But he was also genuinely in love with building (even if, according to one of his architects, “everything always came down to money, money, money”), and his love of building led him to put a little extra something into whatever he built, from those first modest Queens houses to the huge Trump Village in Coney Island. (Yes, plastering the Trump name on things runs in the family.) And nothing ever really interrupted Fred’s success story. There may have been trouble along the way—for instance, public hearings in 1966 questioned his windfall profits on a government project; “outrageous,” “unconscionable,” “greedy,” one commissioner proclaimed—but there was no indictment.
At that point, Donald was twenty years old. He had absorbed his father’s obsessive work habits, his genius for spotting and grasping opportunity, and his ruthless determination to prevail. But he was a very different kind of man.
From the start, he
was competitive, hardworking, and boastful (as a senior at New York Military Academy, “dropping the usual Trump family reticence about their wealth, he pegged his father’s worth at $30 million and bragged that the number doubled every year”). Donald went on to Fordham and the Wharton business school (where, he has said, “[real estate] was the only thing I could see studying”), and then plunged into the family business. At twenty-six, he had sealed his first multimillion-dollar deal. When his father made him president of the company, he immediately dropped the various innocuous corporate names used by Fred and renamed the whole thing the Trump Organization.
And he moved to Manhattan. Friedrich had made his pile out West; Fred had been content with Brooklyn and Queens and a few out-of-town venues. But for Donald, as one observer of his early years put it, “the purpose wasn’t the money. It was to be famous.” Whereas Fred had been driven to build and to succeed, Donald was driven to deal and to win, and on the largest scale. He had the ability. He had the charm. He had the conviction. He had the backing of his father and his father’s powerful connections. He had the desperate need to prevail that motors so many stars. And he wasn’t encumbered by the kind of scruples that make one hesitate or regret—his only regret was at losing. The Manhattan of the seventies and eighties proved to be the perfect setting for such a personality.
His string of early successes was remarkable—and made to seem more remarkable by his constantly exaggerating his triumphs and disclaiming his failures. He had mastered the big things, like tax abatement, and the little things, like “creative floor numbering” to make tall buildings seem even taller. He had mastered, of course, the art of the deal, and he had mastered the art of getting away with it—surviving three FBI probes, for instance, and a press that turned violently against him, labeling him a vulgarian, a sorehead, a conniver, a racist, a liar. He was a supreme salesman because, as Blair makes clear, he was selling himself—eventually “he would be his own marketing gimmick, charging premium prices for condos and rentals in buildings bearing his name.” Where Friedrich provided services and Fred built things, Donald projected image.
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