Mysticism: The way brains sniff glue?

Struck me that trance and mystic mental states in general are a kind of high one learns to enjoy from an ordinarily noxious cognitive dissonance--such as between "the everything" and "the one." That can't be healthy. On the other hand, it does seem like what William James had in mind when he called prayer the "sovereign cure for worry" (allegedly, I can't find the reference). Through prayer we can envision circumventing the ineluctable, see how good may come of bad and construe what things mean as what they don't.
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By the way, let me second my occasional phronesisaical colleague helmut's grave recommendation of this article on the political influence of a publicly little known group of extreme-conservative, mystically-minded Christians.

New Credo ( or: If I Had a Bumper )

HYPOTHESIZE AUTHORITY

On natural law, lying with animals & a well-tempered clericism

I tend to view the doctrines of an organized religion as having aggregated, survived and spread because the people who believe the doctrines want and succeed in making other people believe them, and because the set fosters cohesive productive societies such as can resist or crush other cohesive productive societies. Doctrines that don't bear repeating and/or don't foster cohesive productivity tend to drop from the set, whereas refinements of ideas that make them more attractive and/or strengthen a society tend to become integrated (this is just Dawkins' and/or Dennett's meme theory of religion, as I vaguely understand it). Ironically, I think in arguing "natural law" against homosexuality many Christian folk are reading from the same page as me on this. e.g. Being fruitful and multiplicative doesn't happen without copulation, both they and I hold, and same sex couples can't copulate. Therefore, to a first approximation homosexuality is socially counterproductive, and so it's only natural that society should discriminate (i.e. cognitively) between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Note this reasoning simply leaps from "copulation" to a conclusion about "sexuality," which I think it gets away with because we all accept people love the ones they're with...sexually. That's why you're not supposed to sleep with somebody on the first date, or to have sex before you are emotionally mature. The Bible could instruct the people in homosexual relationships to go forth and copulate with strangers on the side, just as our modern society encourages corporate polluters to buy carbon credits. But, as is I think the secret to its success, the Bible keeps it simple: “Do not lie with a male as with a woman, it is an abomination” the Bible says (Leviticus 18:22). To me, this modus operandi means that the proscription “Anyone lying with a beast shall certainly be put to death” (Exodus 22:19) should be read as applying to the ownership of pets. Pets substitute for human companionship (just ask the cat ladies), so to a first approximation pet ownership is socially counterproductive. Hence it seems to me pets ought to be anathema. Yet I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of U.S. and Canadian Christians in good standing live with companion animals in their homes (their "tents" as it were) and that many let these animals sleep in their beds. I suppose this doesn't contradict church doctrine, they might say, because the devil is in the details. This suits my beliefs as well: Pet ownership does fulfill a constructive social role, just as homosexual relationships fulfill a constructive social role. You just have to move beyond a first approximation.


Note: Duh, I'm not equating or even comparing partnerships between gay people and the relationships people have with their pets--except I guess to the extent I'm comparing pet companionship to human companionship generally.

The fight for free intellectual property: Extreme edition

I think this project to create Islam-friendly comic books in the Middle East, though perfectly legal under traditional copyright law, nevertheless says something about the stakes over which we fight to liberate Mickey Mouse. "Free culture" is about more than the number of TV channels from which we'll have to chose. It's about how and to what extent culture evolves. Here's an excerpt from the NY Times profile:

The story concerns 99 gems encoded with the wisdom of Baghdad just as the Mongols are invading the city in the 13th century - in his version, to destroy the city's knowledge. The gems are the source of not only wisdom but power, and they have been scattered across the world, sending some 20 superheroes (at least in the first year, leaving another 49 potential heroes for future editions) on a quest to find them before an evil villain does. "To create the new, you have to tap into the old," Mr. Mutawa says of the deep historic connections in the comic.

The prospects look good for our heroes, don't they? Well, watch out! Back to the Times:

The religious dimension is the biggest risk for a product whose main market, like all new products in the region, is oil-rich Saudi Arabia, where religion and entertainment rarely mix. Mr. Mutawa has already witnessed the frustration of having a book banned. "Get Your Ties Out of Your Eyes," a children's book featuring Bouncy, a ball who wears a tie - but differently than others - was banned in Kuwait because it seemed to be commenting on the Koran.

"When you're in a place where Bouncy Book 3 doesn't pass the censors, you have to be very creative," he said.

I guess what captures is me is that a seeming natural intellectual outgrowth of a culture--one seemingly with a broad audience awaiting it--nevertheless could be barred on principle for extraneous reasons. I suppose I usually file "censorship" and "conservatism" and "free speech" in different parts of my brain from issues of "free culture," but this story got them firing at once. It made me think cultural stigma, government censorship and private copyright are all just different ways of protecting some ideas at the expense of others--and in the process restricting what everybody thinks and determining the characteristics of our culture.

Probably I'm sympathetic to comic books. If this were about protecting muslim public school cafeterias from Cheez Whiz, I might not have thought twice about it. But a free market in ideas is a nice idea too.

The ship, the sea & the intellectual sphere

Q: What makes any idea a good one?
A: A context in which it's useful.

Let's call this context a body of thought--a collection of previously installed good ideas. Modern dance is a body of thought. The discipline of chemistry is a body of thought. Commercial fishing and the Spanish language are bodies of thought. Good ideas include new nets, new chemical syntheses and new word usages ("niggah").

A body of thought is bit like a biological species: An abstract thing that is mirrored by and exists in embodiments. An individual velociraptor and its fossil femur embody the species we call "velociraptor." An individual chemist and a molecule she draws each embody what we call "chemistry."

Though these bodies are abstractions, still they have structure. Their structure is in the relationships that the component good ideas have to one another--and shows up in such places as in the table of contents of a chemistry text book and in the grammatical categorization of the words of a language.

As good ideas accumulate, previously installed ideas may no longer work well together, and so cease to be good, leading to removal or refashioning. Though the structure of the body of thought evolves, it doesn't evolve arbitrarily, because it survives only if it functions. So let's think of these bodies as boats, to which our culture adds and subtracts, but doesn't change in a way that makes them not seaworthy. Seaworthiness is survival, and it exerts a selective pressure.

Like species and boat designs, bodies of thought may persist or go extinct or evolve or diversify: Natural philosophy begat physics which begat cosmology and particle physics, etc.

But first the bottom line: We don't get new parts for free. Instead the individuals that sustain a body of thought—the ship's crew--pay for each new part. Before money, payment was in admiration, which elevates a creator's status as it accumulates, and this is still the main currency in scholarship, art, politics, teaching, journalism and the evolution of language. It may seem like no one became famous for "niggah," but you weren't there at the creation. It may seem like grade school teachers enjoy little prestige and influence, but you are not a child.

The closer and more pervasive your admirers are, the more admiration you feel. Yet no culture can be more dense on the ground than about one person per square foot, even if the members are two year-olds. So mass appeal brings distant appeal, which brings diminishing returns on admiration and the perception of influence. Financial statements of booming record sales in Japan don't do it like the cheers of fans in a stadium. Add the fact that the global population is finite and you'll see that status too has an upper limit. There's no higher station than King of the World. This means there's only so much prestige to go around.

Not so money, which governments can go on printing forever, at least in principle. With money and patenting, Ms. Widget gets paid to invent even inglorious essentials she never would have invented otherwise. A moneyed society produces more good ideas and makes them faster. Plus it produces stars who never play stadiums and purchasable status symbols such as Rolls Royces (which get how many miles per gallon?).

The new parts to the ships get installed in port, of course--in universities, in record companies, in patent offices, in news rooms. Their inventors usually work close to the hull, though visionaries may take in much more of the ship. The new contributor may make a part that mates precisely with parts already installed or one that lays on top as collage, paint or ornamentation.

Although a part may fail to suit the ship its creator had in mind, crew that's ashore from another ship may notice it and take it for their own ship. So what at first does not look like a good idea may still turn out to be one. But unless a creator has a patent or the other crew is generous, only the finders receive the payment, whether in respect or money.

Now how about we size up the fleet?

The scholarly disciplines are the delicate vessels that never sail out of sight of the academic harbor—though their heartier offspring the applied arts escape. Religions are the battleships and aircraft carriers: Very big, very robust, defenders and menaces of other ships. They sail the high seas in all weather, but they also ply the bays and harbors and even inland waterways. In the real world they ply the minds of the proletariat and aristocrats and merchants alike.

With religion you get to travel the world, meet interesting people, and conquer them. And as in the navy, wearing the uniform may be ample reward for the crewman, lessening your need to earn worldly distinction. You're part of something bigger after all. Belief in an abstract external reference frame enables one to earn self admiration and self respect from undistinguished, internal and/or unwitnessed creations.

In this ship scheme, the sea of course is the minds of the living. The world the sea surrounds is the intellectual sphere. Some forgotten cultures and dead languages still sit on the dry docks of unvisited stacks in the library, although they may no longer be able to float.

Floating is the main thing about bodies of thought, for this is how they move from mind to mind. Note though that only a very small body of thought fits entirely in one mind; and even if it did, it's mirror image may float on the surface of other minds simultaneously. Meanwhile, one individual may comprehend many ships at once, and perhaps serve on several crews. Yet mental space is finite, leading to competition, predation, symbiosis and an ecology of ships.

Any questions?

Oh, why do I think this is even interesting? For one I wanted to build a bigger picture around my idea of an economy in prestige. Also it's that I think an apt metaphor--like Lakoff's parenting and Dawkins's meme--really explains things, and that it guides thought in the way that a theory or model in science prompts tests and applications. Yes, we already know that religions are like viruses and that genes are like ideas. But as I see these metaphors being used, not enough gets made of the fact that genes and ideas have no fixed or absolute value. In truth their value is contextual--their utility or neutrality or disadvantageousness relates to the system in which they appear. Also ideas do not move themselves around, as simple gene analogies seem to overlook, and virus analogies neglect that other things besides viruses carry genes too. And a final viral quibble: Where are the people who aren't hosting the viruses? What are they up to?

I suppose I could have kept the metaphor 100% biological just by labelling the more cuddly bodies of thought "koalas" instead of viruses. Then I could have placed the koalas into an interactive food Web with other bodies of thought, which would be members of other biological species. But what's our own relationship to such a picture? How are we mutating these creatures of thought, and why?

I think we get answers to these question by moving to the sea and demanding payment for parts. Plus boats are simpler than biological species, "floating" and "sailing" are more vivid than "survival" and "reproduction," and anyway what does koala sex have to do with moving ideas around? In case this new mix of metaphor is non-obvious, original and not utterly clunky or uninspiring, I wanted post it. Just remember you read it here first.

E.O. Wilson lays down the gauntlet

Rapprochement may be neither possible nor desirable. There is something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies societal conflict. The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.

Religions continue both to render their special services and to exact their heavy costs. Can scientific humanism do as well or better, at a lower cost? Surely that ranks as one of the great unanswered questions of philosophy. It is the noble yet troubling legacy that Charles Darwin left us.*

- E. O. Wilson

Besides the above perspective, Murky Thoughts also highly recommends Wilson's autobiography, Naturalist

Anthropology of intellectual property law: In a nutshell

My theory:

Intellectual property comes in large part from the instinctive human concern for status and the scarcity of preeminence: Creativity and innovation, like money, aren't things we pull out of our pockets just to get food and shelter (or to get them more efficiently so as to have more leisure time). They're also largely for gaining admiration, power and influence--not to mention a mate. Note that it's easy to imagine societies without personal property but not societies without creativity based prestige--and likewise not a society without symbol-based designations of status, such as the headdresses, soldier stripes, priestly rituals and sumptuary laws. The king owns a sort of design patent or trademark on the crown and scepter and ermine that he wears.

An anthropological perspective on IP suggests why we need IP monopolies in modern society to incentivize innovation even though we didn't seem to need them before: In modern society, cultural and political affiliation encompass millions of people, and yet personal affiliations are remote and dispersed (family, friends and colleagues are not your neighbors). That suggests to me that in the absence of monopoly your innovation won't spread in a way that brings glory to you. It will spread fast, start bouncing off the national borders and soon seem to be coming from all directions-- originating from nobody, least of all you. Also the admiration of distributed fans is more abstract and less satisfying than being the village hero. And so nowadays we want and need our innovations to make us money, which we spend locally on the big home and fancy car that tells the people around us (wherever we drive) that we're special.

This perspective also arguably meshes with the natural poles of "wealth and fame" and Freud's "love and work." It explains why employers don't have to pay people so much money to be teachers and journalists--because such jobs pay a lot in prestige and influence. Scholarship is an almost entirely prestige-based economy that produces primarily IP[1]. Politics seems to be at least a little like this too.

Finally (for now) as I've blogged vaguely about before, I think this means that for "free culture" to work, creators will need to remain associated with their creations in the minds of consumers and somehow earn admiration at a higher margin than they often do in our money-based IP culture. The Web provides free world-wide distribution of creations, but not intimacy between the creator and the audience, and it doesn't actively generate community. It allows exchange with your peers, but it doesn't easily let you feel the admiration of your admirers or show your admirers how admired you are. Britney doesn't see or hear you shout when she shakes it all about. She doesn't even know you're listening. And neither do the other listeners. But once the Web is really up to speed she will and they will. Then, I predict, the monetary cost of a lot more intellectual property will drop to zero.

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P.S. Murky Thoughts is very proud (albeit not expressly licensed) to relate, "Judge Posner read your post and he says it sounds very sensible to him."

P.P.S. I think of "God" and religion as a kind of patent office, and I think part of why organized religion has been so popular is that it gets people producing in all kinds of ways for nothing. I think it's no coincidence IP law has developed as religiosity has waned.

Mysticism & predicting the politics of religious folk

I was provoked by this uninspired LA Times Op Ed, which I read about at All Intensive Purposes, to make my own attempt at fingering the distinction between religious people on one side of the religiously hot political issues--stem-cells, abortion rights, same-sex marriage--and the religious people on the other side. By convention I think we distinguish one side as "the religious fundamentalists." But that seems like more of an operational definition than an explanation, and it also seems to credit some sects as better grasping the essence of their scripture.

In past posts here and elsewhere I've attributed opposition to stem cells and to early abortions to belief in a soul or souls. Now I think it may be more exact to attribute the opposition to something vaguer--mystical belief. Many people, whether they practice organized religion or not, believe that some physical things in the world (e.g. their own bodies) have, in addition another unmeasurable, unobservable, uncharacterizable, unintelligible ("ineffable" or "divine") aspect, which they believe (or at least believe they believe) is as real as the bus that might be about to run them over. In the case of live and thinking human bodies, and in particular their brains, the ineffable divine stuff is their souls--or else the universal soul. Soul seems to be associated with nerve cell signals and circuit architecture, with the underlying biological tissue and with embryonic clusters of undifferentiated cells and biological derivatives thereof. In regard to those books that say "Holy Bible" on the cover, the divine stuff is "the Word," which is in the ink and/or in the paper and/or in the abstract information expressed by the text and/or copies and translations of that text. So divine stuff has a mishmash of superficially, physically inconsistent relations to things, which goes along with its ineffability, and to regard it as real is an extraordinary mental feat. The people who pull this off I would label "mystics" or "mystical believers."

That said, I don't think you need to be a mystic to be a fundamentalist or to vote fundamentalist. You might just belong to a mystical denomination. Most religious traditions seem to have now or have had in the past a mystical branch (e.g. of the Sufis, Tantric Buddhists, Hassids). The evangelical tongues-speaking Christian churches that Americans call "fundamentalist" sure seem to qualify as mystic. And we know where they stand on the issues cited up top.

Given that many people I am placing in the mystic camp are simply followers and not mystically minded themselves, I suppose my politically distinguishing principle isn't any more pure and psychological than the one the Times Op-edder proposed, which was affiliation with one of two stances toward scripture...which goes with denomination. I guess all I have to add is that I'd call one of those stances or styles "mystic." Where's Karen Armstrong when you need her?

Cupertino & the U.S. Constitution

In catching up on New Yorker back issues I just now read about the overtly religious teacher at a Cupertino, California public school and the moves by the principal there to cramp that teacher's classroom style. Somehow the national sensation surrounding this affair and news of the associated lawsuit passed me by.

It makes perfect sense to me that one or both sides in this dispute would reach for the constitution's "establishment clause," which limits relations between church and state. Yet the clause feels distant from the fundamental issue, and I'm afraid the constitution doesn't provide the protection we'd really like.

To me, the upset over the Cupertino teacher's religious demonstrativeness is just like the curfuffle that ensues about teachers being gay. It's constitutional and legal to be gay in the classroom (i.e. while standing alone and in clothes at the front like any other teacher), just as it's constitutional and legal to hold in one's mind the beliefs of an American evangelical Christian in front of a classroom. What raises objections are a) recurrent and overt classroom displays of particular attitudes, values and beliefs, and b) indications by the teacher--for example, through language or behavior that's identifiable with a subculture--that he or she has such attitudes, values or beliefs.

As a designated authority figure and official ambassador of civilized adulthood, as well as simply an individual on whom children are focused much of their day, a teacher cannot help but model attitudes, behaviors, values and beliefs. Thing is, we don't want every constitutionally permitted attitude, behavior, value and belief modeled for our children. We don't even want to leave this modeling to chance. School is a highly engineered environment.

Most of us like the modeling that children are subjected to by virtue of teachers being black or brown or yellow or wheel chair-bound. Such modeling says "if you're black or brown or yellow or accidentally become paralyzed, nonetheless you could be a teacher, a paragon." Note though that being black or brown or yellow or paraplegic is not something kids can emulate.

Fashion and vocabulary are things kids will emulate, and so we have objections to certain garbs and certain words. The courage and/or audacity in being "out" and the idiosyncratic mannerisms of the gay community also are "emulatable." So is disdain for the current administration. So is insensitivity to people's feelings and phoniness. Religion may not be the most easily transmitted of all emulatable behaviors, but once transmitted it is an extremely addictive and domineering one. It's entirely appropriate to take care among children in splashing it around, especially when the person liable to splash is their teacher. The classroom is under quarantine with regard to culture.

A smart constitution would provide against it's own undoing by mandating public schooling not just in the rules it sets (including rules for its own ammendment), but in the values it embodies and expresses. So even while this mandatory schooling need not (and should not) model every constitutionally protected thought and behavior, still it would teach children an abiding tolerance toward these protected thoughts and behaviors. Unfortunately, that's a lesson that starkly conflicts with most religions, and it's unclear our constitution is as smart as all that.

Tell me again about this thing you call religion?

"I've never seen anything like it. Even for a music or sporting event, the number of people who just showed up and camped out just to be close for the funeral was staggering."

- TV cameraman beFrank on the Vatican massing of pilgrims after the death of Pope JPII.

Did the Pope have a soul and where is it now?

I can't believe reporters aren't addressing or soliciting outside comment on this. I mean, wasn't the official statement of the Catholic Church in Poland upon the death of John Paul II something to the effect that he'd devoted himself to the message of "eternal life"? What a scandal if it turns out that the man is simply dead! Talk about dereliction of journalistic duty: How about a little investigation and fact checking here guys?

Religious doctrine for sale

I just thought of a nice variant on reincarnation, which I thought I'd offer to anyone looking to start a new religion--say a disaffected Baha'i, since my understanding is they like to stay close to views of modern science. Instead of imagining individuals being reborn as other individuals, why not just say individuals are reborn "as others"? That is, an indeterminate number of others. I think this metaphor is a lot more true to how genetics works, not to mention to at least one folk notion of it ("All a them's got their grammy's eyes and uncle Jimmy's crooked nose!"). This way it becomes quite reasonable to imagine yourself as Napoleon or Cleopatra. I mean, the odds against having Napoleon or Cleopatra in you are now tremendously reduced: Through the miracle of DNA replication, now it doesn't matter through how many generations the human population might have swelled since the days of your hero of choice. Barring natural selection, there's a geometrically increasing amount of hero to go around. Plus, because complex traits depend on not one gene or allele but on a particular and potentially very large combination, it doesn't matter if every last one of your ancestors came over on the Mayflower two centuries before Napoleon. Napoleon's parents threw together his gene combo entirely out of elements from their extended family and the population at large. It could happen again! So stuff hand in coat and stake that claim. Genetically, Napoleon-ness is untraceable.

Now, keep in mind just how cosmically unlikely it is that you're the whole Napoleon or whole Cleopatra. You're only getting a few traits. But you can have some juicy complicated ones, say a particular insouciance or manner of conniving.

What? You are objecting that Napoleon was a creature of his times and environment as much as of his DNA? Oui, oui. But even people who believe in a perfect transplantation of souls don't believe Napoleon in 21st century Iowa will lead Iowa through a musket-ball-for-musket-ball repeat of 19th century European history. I'm only talking about cloning here, not turning back time. Of course, that doesn't circumvent the impact of environment on personality, personhood and phenotype in general. A doubter could still wonder how 21st century Iowa is supposed to cultivate a Napoleonic characteristic. No problemo, my would-be disciple! First of all, if biologists, psychologists, neuroscientists, historians or any other group of scholars had reached a consensus on which aspects of the environment shape us and how, I have not been made aware of it. What about you? Is it the dynamics of the nuclear family? The contour and blight of the urban landscape? Playground politics? DDT in the water? It's completely up for grabs--for the foreseeable future (don't believe that genomics hype). So nobody they're going to put opposite you on CNN is going to have any academic leverage on you, my fine would-be ideologue. Let me stress, however, this is not a prophesy that every person's genetic inheritance will outfit them in every corner of Iowa for the Napoleonic trait of their choice. You don't get to choose your parents, right? Maybe it'll just be a second-rate Cleopatran wince. The point is, what my religion offers you is near eternal plausible deniability. If you choose to believe that the most important shapers in the environment are hunger, competition, mother- love--anything you choose to designate as "primal"--then Iowa is full of plots that can nurture a Napoleon. Every village of a certain size is practically bound to have one, if we tweak the variables right. So if you buy my doctrine (and I do mean "buy,"because high quality dogma isn't cheap), then if you think Napoleon is living in your head, or if you simply want others to think so, then you're going to have a leg to stand on. I'm going to let the bidding start at 2 cents. If this is going world-wide I want to minimize the commission to Ebay.

[August 13, 2006: At last the Associated Press is on the story: "Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say, the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another." And note my religious doctrine comes complete with the perfect celebrity proponent with which to vie with Tom Cruise and Scientology: Brooke Shields.]