Suppose you were to put me into an fMRI scanner, and take a movie of my brain’s activity levels, while I watched a space shuttle launch. (Wanting to visit space is not “realistic,” but it is an essentially lawful dream—one that can be fulfilled in a lawful universe.) The fMRI might—maybe, maybe not—resemble the fMRI of a devout Christian watching a nativity scene.
Should an experimenter obtain this result, there’s a lot of people out there, both Christians and some atheists, who would gloat: “Ha, ha, space travel is your religion!”
But that’s drawing the wrong category boundary. It’s like saying that, because some people once tried to fly by irrational means, no one should ever enjoy looking out of an airplane window on the clouds below.
If a rocket launch is what it takes to give me a feeling of aesthetic transcendence, I do not see this as a substitute for religion. That is theomorphism—the viewpoint from gloating religionists who assume that everyone who isn’t religious has a hole in their mind that wants filling.
Now, to be fair to the religionists, this is not just a gloating assumption. There are atheists who have religion-shaped holes in their minds. I have seen attempts to substitute atheism or even transhumanism for religion. And the result is invariably awful. Utterly awful. Absolutely abjectly awful.
I call such efforts, “hymns to the nonexistence of God.”
When someone sets out to write an atheistic hymn—“Hail, oh unintelligent universe,” blah, blah, blah—the result will, without exception, suck.
Why? Because they’re being imitative. Because they have no motivation for writing the hymn except a vague feeling that since churches have hymns, they ought to have one too. And, on a purely artistic level, that puts them far beneath genuine religious art that is not an imitation of anything, but an original expression of emotion.
Religious hymns were (often) written by people who felt strongly and wrote honestly and put serious effort into the prosody and imagery of their work—that’s what gives their work the grace that it possesses, of artistic integrity.
So are atheists doomed to hymnlessness?
There is an acid test of attempts at post-theism. The acid test is: “If religion had never existed among the human species—if we had never made the original mistake—would this song, this art, this ritual, this way of thinking, still make sense?”
If humanity had never made the original mistake, there would be no hymns to the nonexistence of God. But there would still be marriages, so the notion of an atheistic marriage ceremony makes perfect sense—as long as you don’t suddenly launch into a lecture on how God doesn’t exist. Because, in a world where religion never had existed, nobody would interrupt a wedding to talk about the implausibility of a distant hypothetical concept. They’d talk about love, children, commitment, honesty, devotion, but who the heck would mention God?
And, in a human world where religion never had existed, there would still be people who got tears in their eyes watching a space shuttle launch.
Which is why, even if experiment shows that watching a shuttle launch makes “religion”-associated areas of my brain light up, associated with feelings of transcendence, I do not see that as a substitute for religion; I expect the same brain areas would light up, for the same reason, if I lived in a world where religion had never been invented.
A good “atheistic hymn” is simply a song about anything worth singing about that doesn’t happen to be religious.
Also, reversed stupidity is not intelligence. The world’s greatest idiot may say the Sun is shining, but that doesn’t make it dark out. The point is not to create a life that resembles religion as little as possible in every surface aspect—this is the same kind of thinking that inspires hymns to the nonexistence of God. If humanity had never made the original mistake, no one would be trying to avoid things that vaguely resembled religion. Believe accurately, then feel accordingly: If space launches actually exist, and watching a rocket rise makes you want to sing, then write the song, dammit.
If I get tears in my eyes at a space shuttle launch, it doesn’t mean I’m trying to fill a hole left by religion—it means that my emotional energies, my caring, are bound into the real world.
If God did speak plainly, and answer prayers reliably, God would just become one more boringly real thing, no more worth believing in than the postman. If God were real, it would destroy the inner uncertainty that brings forth outward fervor in compensation. And if everyone else believed God were real, it would destroy the specialness of being one of the elect.
If you invest your emotional energy in space travel, you don’t have those vulnerabilities. I can see the Space Shuttle rise without losing the awe. Everyone else can believe that Space Shuttles are real, and it doesn’t make them any less special. I haven’t painted myself into the corner.
The choice between God and humanity is not just a choice of drugs. Above all, humanity actually exists.
*
210
Scarcity
What follows is taken primarily from Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.1 I own three copies of this book: one for myself, and two for loaning to friends.
Scarcity, as that term is used in social psychology, is when things become more desirable as they appear less obtainable.
If you put a two-year-old boy in a room with two toys, one toy in the open and the other behind a Plexiglas wall, the two-year-old will ignore the easily accessible toy and go after the apparently forbidden one. If the wall is low enough to be easily climbable, the toddler is no more likely to go after one toy than the other.2
When Dade County forbade use or possession of phosphate detergents, many Dade residents drove to nearby counties and bought huge amounts of phosphate laundry detergents. Compared to Tampa residents not affected by the regulation, Dade residents rated phosphate detergents as gentler, more effective, more powerful on stains, and even believed that phosphate detergents poured more easily.3
Similarly, information that appears forbidden or secret seems more important and trustworthy:
When University of North Carolina students learned that a speech opposing coed dorms had been banned, they became more opposed to coed dorms (without even hearing the speech).4
When a driver said he had liability insurance, experimental jurors awarded his victim an average of four thousand dollars more than if the driver said he had no insurance. If the judge afterward informed the jurors that information about insurance was inadmissible and must be ignored, jurors awarded an average of thirteen thousand dollars more than if the driver had no insurance.5
Buyers for supermarkets, told by a supplier that beef was in scarce supply, gave orders for twice as much beef as buyers told it was readily available. Buyers told that beef was in scarce supply, and furthermore, that the information about scarcity was itself scarce—that the shortage was not general knowledge—ordered six times as much beef. (Since the study was conducted in a real-world context, the information provided was in fact correct.)6
The conventional theory for explaining this is “psychological reactance,” social-psychology-speak for “When you tell people they can’t do something, they’ll just try even harder.” The fundamental instincts involved appear to be preservation of status and preservation of options. We resist dominance, when any human agency tries to restrict our freedom. And when options seem to be in danger of disappearing, even from natural causes, we try to leap on the option before it’s gone.
Leaping on disappearing options may be a good adaptation in a hunter-gatherer society—gather the fruits while they are still ripe—but in a money-based society it can be rather costly. Cialdini reports that in one appliance store he observed, a salesperson who saw that a customer was evincing signs of interest in an appliance would approach, and sadly inform the customer that the item was out of stock, the last one having been sold only twenty minutes ago. Scarcity creating a sudden jump in desirability, the customer would often ask whether there was any chance t
hat the salesperson could locate an unsold item in the back room, warehouse, or anywhere. “Well,” says the salesperson, “that’s possible, and I’m willing to check; but do I understand that this is the model you want, and if I can find it at this price, you’ll take it?”
As Cialdini remarks, a chief sign of this malfunction is that you dream of possessing something, rather than using it. (Timothy Ferriss offers similar advice on planning your life: ask which ongoing experiences would make you happy, rather than which possessions or status-changes.)
But the really fundamental problem with desiring the unattainable is that as soon as you actually get it, it stops being unattainable. If we cannot take joy in the merely available, our lives will always be frustrated . . .
*
1. Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion: Revised Edition (New York: Quill, 1993).
2. Sharon S. Brehm and Marsha Weintraub, “Physical Barriers and Psychological Reactance: Two-year-olds’ Responses to Threats to Freedom,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35 (1977): 830–836.
3. Michael B. Mazis, Robert B. Settle, and Dennis C. Leslie, “Elimination of Phosphate Detergents and Psychological Reactance,” Journal of Marketing Research 10 (1973): 2; Michael B. Mazis, “Antipollution Measures and Psychological Reactance Theory: A Field Experiment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 31 (1975): 654–666.
4. Richard D. Ashmore, Vasantha Ramchandra, and Russell A. Jones, “Censorship as an Attitude Change Induction,” Paper presented at Eastern Psychological Association meeting (1971).
5. Dale Broeder, “The University of Chicago Jury Project,” Nebraska Law Review 38 (1959): 760–774.
6. A. Knishinsky, “The Effects of Scarcity of Material and Exclusivity of Information on Industrial Buyer Perceived Risk in Provoking a Purchase Decision” (Doctoral dissertation, Arizona State University, 1982).
211
The Sacred Mundane
So I was reading (around the first half of) Adam Frank’s The Constant Fire,1 in preparation for my Bloggingheads dialogue with him. Adam Frank’s book is about the experience of the sacred. I might not usually call it that, but of course I know the experience Frank is talking about. It’s what I feel when I watch a video of a space shuttle launch; or what I feel—to a lesser extent, because in this world it is too common—when I look up at the stars at night, and think about what they mean. Or the birth of a child, say. That which is significant in the Unfolding Story.
Adam Frank holds that this experience is something that science holds deeply in common with religion. As opposed to e.g. being a basic human quality which religion corrupts.
The Constant Fire quotes William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience as saying:
Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude; so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.
And this theme is developed further: Sacredness is something intensely private and individual.
Which completely nonplussed me. Am I supposed to not have any feeling of sacredness if I’m one of many people watching the video of SpaceShipOne winning the X-Prize? Why not? Am I supposed to think that my experience of sacredness has to be somehow different from that of all the other people watching? Why, when we all have the same brain design? Indeed, why would I need to believe I was unique? (But “unique” is another word Adam Frank uses; so-and-so’s “unique experience of the sacred.”) Is the feeling private in the same sense that we have difficulty communicating any experience? Then why emphasize this of sacredness, rather than sneezing?
The light came on when I realized that I was looking at a trick of Dark Side Epistemology—if you make something private, that shields it from criticism. You can say, “You can’t criticize me, because this is my private, inner experience that you can never access to question it.”
But the price of shielding yourself from criticism is that you are cast into solitude—the solitude that William James admired as the core of religious experience, as if loneliness were a good thing.
Such relics of Dark Side Epistemology are key to understanding the many ways that religion twists the experience of sacredness:
Mysteriousness—why should the sacred have to be mysterious? A space shuttle launch gets by just fine without being mysterious. How much less would I appreciate the stars if I did not know what they were, if they were just little points in the night sky? But if your religious beliefs are questioned—if someone asks, “Why doesn’t God heal amputees?”—then you take refuge and say, in a tone of deep profundity, “It is a sacred mystery!” There are questions that must not be asked, and answers that must not be acknowledged, to defend the lie. Thus unanswerability comes to be associated with sacredness. And the price of shielding yourself from criticism is giving up the true curiosity that truly wishes to find answers. You will worship your own ignorance of the temporarily unanswered questions of your own generation—probably including ones that are already answered.
Faith—in the early days of religion, when people were more naive, when even intelligent folk actually believed that stuff, religions staked their reputation upon the testimony of miracles in their scriptures. And Christian archaeologists set forth truly expecting to find the ruins of Noah’s Ark. But when no such evidence was forthcoming, then religion executed what William Bartley called the retreat to commitment, “I believe because I believe!” Thus belief without good evidence came to be associated with the experience of the sacred. And the price of shielding yourself from criticism is that you sacrifice your ability to think clearly about that which is sacred, and to progress in your understanding of the sacred, and relinquish mistakes.
Experientialism—if before you thought that the rainbow was a sacred contract of God with humanity, and then you begin to realize that God doesn’t exist, then you may execute a retreat to pure experience—to praise yourself just for feeling such wonderful sensations when you think about God, whether or not God actually exists. And the price of shielding yourself from criticism is solipsism: your experience is stripped of its referents. What a terrible hollow feeling it would be to watch a space shuttle rising on a pillar of flame, and say to yourself, “But it doesn’t really matter whether the space shuttle actually exists, so long as I feel.”
Separation—if the sacred realm is not subject to ordinary rules of evidence or investigable by ordinary means, then it must be different in kind from the world of mundane matter: and so we are less likely to think of a space shuttle as a candidate for sacredness, because it is a work of merely human hands. Keats lost his admiration of the rainbow and demoted it to the “dull catalogue of mundane things” for the crime of its woof and texture being known. And the price of shielding yourself from all ordinary criticism is that you lose the sacredness of all merely real things.
Privacy—of this I have already spoken.
Such distortions are why we had best not to try to salvage religion. No, not even in the form of “spirituality.” Take away the institutions and the factual mistakes, subtract the churches and the scriptures, and you’re left with . . . all this nonsense about mysteriousness, faith, solipsistic experience, private solitude, and discontinuity.
The original lie is only the beginning of the problem. Then you have all the ill habits of thought that have evolved to defend it. Religion is a poisoned chalice, from which we had best not even sip. Spirituality is the same cup after the original pellet of poison has been taken out, and only the dissolved portion remains—a little less directly lethal, but still not good for you.
When a lie has been defended for ages upon ages, the true origin of the inherited habits lost in the mists, with layer after layer of undocumented sickness; then the wise, I think, will start over from scratch, rather than trying to selectively discard the original lie while keeping the habits of thought that protected it. Just admit you were wrong, give up entirely on the mistake, stop de
fending it at all, stop trying to say you were even a little right, stop trying to save face, just say “Oops!” and throw out the whole thing and begin again.
That capacity—to really, really, without defense, admit you were entirely wrong—is why religious experience will never be like scientific experience. No religion can absorb that capacity without losing itself entirely and becoming simple humanity . . .
. . . to just look up at the distant stars. Believable without strain, without a constant distracting struggle to fend off your awareness of the counterevidence. Truly there in the world, the experience united with the referent, a solid part of that unfolding story. Knowable without threat, offering true meat for curiosity. Shared in togetherness with the many other onlookers, no need to retreat to privacy. Made of the same fabric as yourself and all other things. Most holy and beautiful, the sacred mundane.
*
1. Adam Frank, The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate (University of California Press, 2009).
212
To Spread Science, Keep It Secret
Sometimes I wonder if the Pythagoreans had the right idea.
Yes, I’ve written about how “science” is inherently public. I’ve written that “science” is distinguished from merely rational knowledge by the in-principle ability to reproduce scientific experiments for yourself, to know without relying on authority. I’ve said that “science” should be defined as the publicly accessible knowledge of humankind. I’ve even suggested that future generations will regard all papers not published in an open-access journal as non-science, i.e., it can’t be part of the public knowledge of humankind if you make people pay to read it.
Rationality- From AI to Zombies Page 85