John G. Messerly's Blog, page 151

Revolt Against Transhumanism

Having introduced transhumanists ideas to university students over the years, I am familiar with typical objections: if we don’t die the world will be overpopulated; it would be yucky not to have a body; this is all science fiction; lots of things can go wrong; technology is bad; death makes life meaningful; immortality would be boring; etc.

So I was surprised after yesterday’s post to receive hostile responses of the “we shouldn’t play god,” or “we should let nature take its course” variety. You can find similar critiques at links like : “The Catholic Church Declares War on Transhumanism1  and “Transhumanism: Mankind’s Greatest Threat.” Here is a statement from the latter: 

Various organizations desire to use emerging technology to create a human species so enhanced that they cease to be humans. They will be post-humans with the potential of living forever. If these sciences are not closely monitored and regulated, transhumanists’ arrogant quest to create a post-human species will become a direct assault on human dignity and an attack on God’s sovereignty as Creator. We must decide on an unmovable line now, one that upholds human dignity based on Biblical Truth.

It is no longer enough to be pro-life; we have now entered a time when we must be pro-human. Education about the full implications of these emerging sciences is a key to be able to directly confront these assaults on humanity.2 

If one truly believes that humans should practice acceptance of their fate, that they were specially designed and created by the gods, and that the divine plans includes evil and death, then the condemnations of transhumanism stand. But these arguments probably can’t win the day. Most do not desire to go back to the middle ages, when believers prayed so hard for cures and then … died miserably. Some may still consult faith healers but the intelligent go to their physicians. More generally, everything about technology plays god, and letting nature takes its course means that half the people reading this article would have died from childhood diseases before the advent of modern medicine.

Still, there are good reasons to be cautious about designing and using future technologies, some of the best were outlined more than a decade ago in Bill Joy’s piece “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us.”3  (A published criticism is reprinted on this site.)4 Yes, we should be cautious about the future, but we should not stand still. Do we really want to turn the clock back 100 years before computers and modern medicine? Do we really want to freeze technology at its current level? Look before we leap, certainly, but leap we must. If we do nothing, eventually we will go extinct: asteroids will hit the planet, the climate will change irrevocably, bacteria will evolve uncontrollably, and in the far future the sun will burn out. Only advanced technologies give us a chance against such forces.

If we do nothing then we will surely die; if we gain more knowledge and the power that accompanies it … we have a chance. With no risk-free way to proceed, we should be brave and bold.

1. http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/10/04/t...

2. http://personhood.net/index.php?optio...

3. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8....

4. See “I’m glad the future doesn’t need us: a critique of Joy’s pessimistic futurism,” published on this website.

Transhumanism and the End of Religion

We know what we are, but we know not what we may become. ~ Shakespeare

Mankind is still embryonic … [humans are] the bud from which something more complicated and more centered than [humans themselves] should emerge. ~ Teilhard de Chardin

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman — a rope over an abyss. … What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal. ~ Nietzsche

1. THE END OF RELIGION 

Transhumanism is: 

The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities … transhumanism is a way of thinking about the future that is based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase.1

Transhumanism appears to have nothing in common with religion, defined as: “the belief in and worship of a god or gods, or any such system of belief and worship…”2 In transhumanism gods plays no role.

Yet the two are not entirely dissimilar. Like transhumanists, the religious generally want to overcome the limitations of the body and live forever in eternal bliss. Religions, arising before transhumanist ideas were conceivable, advised its followers to accept death and hope for the best, with no other options available. And religious beliefs provided comfort against natural evils before the advent of science and technology.

But must we relinquish religious beliefs now, before science gives us everything we want? Might we allow the comfort of religious beliefs to those who need them, to  those who must tell their children something when someone dies? The most important reason to abandon religious belief is religion’s opposition to most forms of progress. From the elimination of slavery, the use of birth control, and women’s and civil rights, to stem cell research, genetic engineering, and science in general, organized religion often opposes progress. The comfort provided by archaic superstitions often impedes advancement and should be set aside. 

2. TRANSHUMANISM AS A COSMIC NARRATIVE

But can humans function without the old religious narratives? As I said in a previous post, humans need a new narrative based on a scientific worldview. This narrative could be a transhumanist one, of humans playing their role as links in a chain leading to more complex forms of being and consciousness. But against this seemingly infinite temporal background, what can be said of the significance of a single, finite human life? Not much. For now we must be content to hope that our post-human descendants will experience more meaningful consciousness, grateful to us for the part we played in bringing about their future.

And what is the point of all cosmic evolution producing these higher and more conscious life forms? Again we must hope that our post-human descendants will understand these ultimate questions and that our own lives—by then long past—will be given significance by that knowledge. We can also hope that somehow, in ways presently unimaginable, we will be aware of how we helped bring about a better and more meaningful cosmos. If not, we can still take solace in the fact that we played a cosmic role.

No doubt humans need a new scientifically based cosmic narrative to replace the older less plausible religious ones.  And these narratives are beginning to emerge as our understanding of cosmic evolution and our proper role in it increases.

1. This quote is from the Humanity+ website’s FAQ section.

2. From “The Cambridge International Dictionary of English.”

 

Will Durant on the Meaning of Life

In his book On the Meaning of Life (1932) Will Durant argued that we cannot answer the question of the meaning of life in any absolute sense, for our minds are too small to comprehend things in their entirety. Still he believed we can say a few things about terrestrial meaning. Here are excerpts from a great thinker and wonderful prose stylist:

The meaning of life, then, must lie within itself … it must be sought in life’s own instinctive cravings and natural fulfillments. Why, for example, should we ask for an ulterior meaning to vitality and health? … If you are sick beyond cure I will grant you viaticum, and let you die … But if you are well—if you can stand on your legs and digest your food—forget your whining, and shout your gratitude to the sun.

The simplest meaning of life then is joy—the exhilaration of experience itself, of physical well-being; sheer satisfaction of muscle and sense, of palate and ear and eye. If the child is happier than the man it is because it has more body and less soul, and understands that nature comes before philosophy; it asks for no further meaning to its arms and legs than their abounding use … Even if life had no meaning except for its moments of beauty … that would be enough; this plodding thru the rain, or fighting the wind, or tramping the snow under sun, or watching the twilight turn into night, is reason a-plenty for loving life. [i]

We should be thankful for our loved ones:

Do not be so ungrateful about love … to the attachment of friends and mates who have gone hand in hand through much hell, some purgatory, and a little heaven, and have been soldered into unity by being burned together in the flame of life. I know such mates or comrades quarrel regularly, and get upon each other’s nerves; but there is ample recompense for that in the unconscious consciousness that someone is interested in you, depends upon you, exaggerates you, and is waiting to meet you at the station. Solitude is worse than war. [ii]

Love relates the individual to something more than itself, to a whole which gives it purpose.

I note that those who are cooperating parts of a whole do not despond; the despised “yokel” playing ball with his fellows in the lot is happier than these isolated thinkers, who stand aside from the game of life and degenerate through the separation … If we think of ourselves as part of a living … group, we shall find life a little fuller … For to give life a meaning one must have a purpose larger and more enduring than one’s self.

If … a thing has significance only through its relation as part to a larger whole, then, though we cannot give a metaphysical and universal meaning to all life in general, we can say of any life in the particular that its meaning lies in its relation to something larger than itself … ask the father of sons and daughters “What is the meaning of life?” and he will answer you very simply: “Feeding our family.” [iii]

Durant too finds meaning in love, connection, and activity. “The secret of significance and content is to have a task which consumes all one’s energies, and makes human life a little richer than before.”[iv] Durant found the most happiness in his family and his work, in his home and his books. Although no one can be fully happy amidst poverty and suffering, one can be content and grateful finding the meaning in front of them. “Where, in the last resort, does my treasure lie?—in everything.”[v]

[i] Durant, On the meaning of life, 124-25.

[ii] Durant, On the meaning of life, 125-26.

[iii] Durant, On the meaning of life, 126-28.

[iv] Durant, On the meaning of life, 129.

[v] Durant, On the meaning of life, 130.

A New Book on the Meaning of Life

There is a new volume out from Wiley Blackwell entitled: “Exploring the Meaning of Life: An Anthology and Guide.” The volume contains many of the classic essays from philosophers on the subject, most of which I have summarized in my recent book. But there are a few new articles, and the next few weeks I will read and summarize them for my readers. This first entry summarizes the introduction to the volume written by Joshua Seachris, who teaches philosophy at Wake Forest University.

Seachris begins by contrasting the passion with which a continental thinker like Camus approaches the question with the skepticism of an analytic philosopher like Russell. He wonders which approach is more appropriate. No doubt though, twentieth century analytic philosophers have argued that the question was either unanswerable or meaningless. The juxtaposition of the importance that most people give to the question with the disdain in which it is held by many professional philosophers is striking. This volume suggests that some analytic philosophers are now less suspicious of the question.

Seachris further contrasts the cosmic dimension of the question, the search for a deep universal narrative to render our lives intelligible, with the local or individual dimension, which refers to the search for a good or valuable way of living. Most philosophers argue, as I did in my book, that these questions are related but exactly how they are is debatable.(In my book I put the question in its broadest form: “what does our individual life mean in the context of all actual, possible, and conceivable things taken in their totality?”) Seachris notes that most of the essays in the volume are concerned with the individual dimension; thus issues of ethics, aesthetics, and happiness will be relevant. This makes it a more manageable question than the way I pose it.

The question arises because humans can step outside themselves and ask questions like: “Who are we?” Why are we here?” “Does reality care about us?” In short we can see our lives from an eternal, yet seemingly trivial, perspective. The question is born out of both existential angst and philosophical wondering about the nature of the cosmos and how best to live in it. But the question has taken on a new urgency in the Western world with the decline of the influence of the religious worldview, and the arrival of the modern scientific one. As the religion lost cultural respectability, so too did the worldview that accompanied it. In response to this loss, we are left with a question that torments existentialists like Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre, while the analytical philosophers try to clarify it. Philosophers have made some progress in clarifying the question, especially by viewing it, not as one question, but as an amalgamation of many questions such as: “Why does anything exist?” “What’s it all about?” or “What makes life purposeful, valuable, worthwhile or significant?”

Most of the rest of this introduction cover the same territory that my book did, especially in setting up the supernatural, nihilistic, and naturalistic alternatives as possible answers. The author does note that work needs to be  done to: 1) understand the extent to which death makes life futile; 2) clarify the relationship between the meaningful and the moral, aesthetic, and eudaimonistic; 3) determine the existent to which values can be part of the natural world; 4) satisfy our need to understand how evil can be related to meaning; and 5) investigate the question of something besides religious narratives can give life meaning.

BRIEF REFLECTIONS

As long as the scientific worldview is incomplete—which it always is given its provisional nature—then a final answer to the meaning of life will never accompany the scientific worldview. Moreover, if humans have an innate need for a narrative, which I suspect they do, then humans desperately need a new narrative to replace the less plausible religious ones. In my view there are such narratives available, narratives of cosmic evolution leading to the realization of transhumanist dreams, and our hope in a more meaningful future. And while these narratives lack the supposed eternal truth of religious narratives, they have the advantage of being much more likely to come true. What is needed then is the explication and propagation of realistic, naturalistic narratives combined with their acceptance by a more courageous and educated populace.

Will Durant on the Cycle of Life

Will Durant wondered if there is something suggestive about the cycle of a human life which sheds light on meaning, a theme explored in his 1929 book The Mansions of Philosophy. He grants that “life is in its basis a mystery, a river flowing from an unseen source; and in its development an infinite subtlety too complex for thought, much less for utterance.”[i] Yet we seek answers nonetheless. Undeterred by the difficulty of his task, Durant suggests that reflection on the microcosm of a human life might yield insights about the meaning of all life and death. Thus he looks at a typical human life cycle for clues about cosmic meaning.

In children Durant saw curiosity, growth, urgency, playfulness, and discontent. In later youth the struggle continues as we learn to read, work, love, and learn of the world’s evils. In middle age we are often consumed by work and family life, and for the first time we see the reality of death. Still, in family life people usually find great pleasure, and the best of all human conditions.  

In old age the reality of death comes nearer. If we have lived well we might graciously leave the stage for better players to perform a better play. But what if life endlessly repeats its sufferings, with youth making the same mistakes as their elders, and all leading to death? Is this the final realization of old age? Such thoughts gnaw at our heart and poison aging.

So Durant wonders if we must die for life. If we are not individuals but cells in life’s body, then we die so that life remains strong, death removing the rubbish as the new life created defeats death. This perpetuation of life gives life meaning. “If it is one test of philosophy to give life a meaning that shall frustrate death, wisdom will show that corruption comes only to the part, that life itself is deathless while we die.”[ii]So the individual dies, but life goes on endlessly forward. Durant paints the most moving and poignant image to describe the cycle of life and death that I know of in all of world literature.

Here is an old man on the bed of death, harassed with helpless friends and wailing relatives. What a terrible sight it is – this thin frame with loosened and cracking flesh, this toothless mouth in a bloodless face, this tongue that cannot speak, these eyes that cannot see! To this pass youth has come, after all its hopes and trials; to this pass middle age, after all its torment and its toil. To this pass health and strength and joyous rivalry; this arm once struck great blows and fought for victory in virile games. To this pass knowledge, science, wisdom: for seventy years this man with pain and effort gathered knowledge; his brain became the storehouse of a varied experience, the center of a thousand subtleties of thought and deed; his heart through suffering learned gentleness as his mind learned understanding; seventy years he grew from an animal into a man capable of seeking truth and creating beauty. But death is upon him, poisoning him, choking him, congealing his blood, gripping his heart, bursting his brain, rattling in his throat. Death wins

Outside on the green boughs birds twitter, and Chantecler sings his hymn to the sun. Light streams across the fields; buds open and stalks confidently lift their heads; the sap mounts in the trees. Here are children: what is it that makes them so joyous, running madly over the dew-wet grass, laughing, calling, pursuing, eluding, panting for breath, inexhaustible? What energy, what spirit and happiness! What do they care about death? They will learn and grow and love and struggle and create, and lift life up one little notch, perhaps, before they die. And when they pass they will cheat death with children, with parental care that will make their offspring finer than themselves. There in the garden’s twilight lovers pass, thinking themselves unseen; their quiet words mingle with the murmur of insects calling to their mates; the ancient hunger speaks through eager and through lowered eyes, and a noble madness courses through clasped hands and touching lips. Life wins. [iii]

This is stirring prose, but we remain forlorn. Perhaps we should give up our ego attachment, and leave for the sake of the species. But why? What’s wrong with loving life so much that one never wants to let go? Besides, it is wasteful for life to start over each time, having to relearn old truths and unlearn old falsehoods. As for his claim that life wins in the end, it may instead destroy itself instead, and even if it doesn’t we will not survive as individuals. In the end nothing in Durant’s portrait soothes our worries about the futility of an infinite repetition of life’s trails and tribulations.

In my next post I will mine Durant’s thoughts for some

[i] Will Durant, The Mansions of Philosophy: A Survey of Human Life and Destiny (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929) 397

[ii] Durant, The Mansions of Philosophy: A Survey of Human Life and Destiny, 407.

[iii] Durant, The Mansions of Philosophy: A Survey of Human Life and Destiny, 407-08.

Finding Meaning in Living

The French author Andre Maurois (1885 -1967) wrote that the meaning of life is found nowhere else but in our living struggles, in the experience and activity of life. To illustrate he tells the story of a group of Englishmen who establish a colony on the moon, but do not hear anything from the Earth for many generations. Some of their descendants doubt the story of a king who lives on the earthly orb they see in the night sky, others still believe. Then a philosopher among them utters:

Why search for the meaning of life outside of life itself? The King of whom our legends speak—does he exist? I do not know, and it does not matter. I know that the mountains of the moon are beautiful when the crescent of the earth illuminates them. If the King remains, as always since my birth, invisible and silent, I shall doubt his reality; but I shall not doubt life, or the beauty of the moment, or the happiness of action. Sophists teach you today that life is only a brief moment in the trajectory of a star; they tell you that nothing is certain except defeat and death. As for me, I tell you that nothing exists except victory and life. What shall we know of death? Either the soul is immortal and we shall not die, or it perishes with the flesh and we shall not know that we are dead. Live, then, as if you were eternal, and do not believe that your life is changed merely because it seems proved that the Earth is [the Heavens are] empty. You do not live in the Earth [the Heavens], you live in yourself.[i]

Maurois also tells another story of a philosophical ant who discovers that there is no Great Ant above all others; and that hers is one among millions of ant heaps which are just drops of mud in an endless universe. This philosophical ant counsels her sisters to stop working, to stop being slaves, as life is apparently pointless. To this a young ant replies “This is all very well sister, but we must build our tunnel.”[ii]We find meaning it seems, in what’s in front of us.

Maurois’ insights preview those of another Frenchman, Albert Camus. When a priest visits Meursault—the protagonist of Camus’ novel The Stranger—before Meusault’s impending execution and makes metaphysical promises, Meursault responds “none of his [a priest's] certainties were worth one strand of a woman’s hair.” Camus sees that abstract ideas distance us from the world; they draw us away from the actual. But we should always return to the commonplace for meaning, to what surrounds us, to what we previously called the ordinary extraordinary. No theory or abstract truths mitigate existential realities. He also put the point clearly in his essay Summer in Algiers. There amidst sea, sun, sand, and sex he mused: “Between this sky and these faces turned toward it, nothing on which to hang a mythology, a literature, an ethic, or a religion, but stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch.”[iii]

[i] Will Durant, On the meaning of life (New York: Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, 1932), 52.

[ii] Durant, On the meaning of life, 56.

[iii] Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), 151.

Nikos Kazantzakis: A Rejection of Hope

The power of the story of Ulysses was picked up by the famous Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis (1883 – 1957), who wrote a 33,333 line sequel to Homer’s poem. In it the bored Ulysses gathers his followers, builds a boat, and sails away on a final journey, eventually dying in the Antarctic. According to Kazantzakis, Ulysses does not find what he’s seeking, but it doesn’t matter. Through the search itself he is ennobled—and the meaning of his life was found in the search. In the end his Ulysses cries out “My soul, your voyages have been your native land.”[i]

Perhaps no one thought deeper about longings, hope, and the meaning of life than Kazantzakis. In his early years he was particularly impressed with Nietzsche’s Dionysian vision of humans shaping themselves into the superman, and with Bergson’s idea of the elan vital. From Nietzsche he learned that by sheer force of will humans can be free as long as they proceed without fear or hope of reward. From Bergson, under whom he studied in Paris, he came to believe that a vital evolutionary life force molds matter, potentially creating higher forms of life. Putting these ideas together, Kazantzakis declared that we find the meaning of life by struggling against universal entropy, an idea he connected with god. For Kazantzakis the word god referred to “the anti-entropic life-force that organizes elemental matter into systems that can manifest ever more subtle and advanced forms of beings and consciousness.”[ii]The meaning of our lives is to find our place in the chain that links us with these undreamt of forms of life.

We all ascend together, swept up by a mysterious and invisible urge. Where are we going? No one knows. Don’t ask, mount higher! Perhaps we are going nowhere, perhaps there is no one to pay us the rewarding wages of our lives. So much the better! For thus may we conquer the last, the greatest of all temptations—that of Hope.[iii]

I remember being devastated the first time I read those lines. I had rejected my religious upbringing, but why couldn’t I have a hope? Why was Kazantzakis taking that from me too? His point was that the honest and brave struggle without hope or expectation that they will ever arrive, be anchored, be at home. Like Ulysses, the only home Kazantzakis found was in the search itself. The meaning of life is found in the search and the struggle, not in any hope of success.

In the prologue of his autobiography, Report to Greco, Kazantzakis claims that we need to go beyond both hope and despair. Both expectation of paradise and fear of hell prevent us from focusing on what is in front of us, our heart’s true homeland … the search for meaning itself. We ought to be warriors who struggle bravely to create meaning without expecting anything in return. Unafraid of the abyss, we should face it bravely and run toward it. Ultimately we find joy by taking full responsibility for our lives— joyous in the face of tragedy. Life is essentially struggle, and if in the end it judges us we should bravely reply:

General, the battle draws to a close and I make my report. This is where and how I fought. I fell wounded, lost heart, but did not desert. Though my teeth clattered from fear, I bound my forehead tightly with a red handkerchief to hide the blood, and ran to the assault.” [iv]

Surely that is as courageous a sentiment in response to the ordeal of human life as has been offered in world literature. It is a bold rejoinder to the awareness of the inevitable decline of our minds and bodies, as well as to the existential agonies that permeate life. It finds the meaning of life in our actions, our struggles, our battles, our roaming, our wandering, and our journeying. It appeals to nothing other than what we know and experience—and yet finds meaning and contentment there.

Just outside the city walls of Heraklion Crete one can visit Kazantzakis’ gravesite, located there as the Orthodox Church denied his being buried in a Christian cemetery. On the black, jagged, cracked, unpolished Cretan marble you will find no name to designate who lies there, no dates of birth or death, only an epitaph in Greek carved in the stone. It translates: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”

[i] James Christian, Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering, 11th ed. (Belmont CA.: Wadsworth, 2012), 653

[ii] Christian, Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering, 656.

[iii] Christian, Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering, 656.

[iv] Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco (New York: Touchstone, 1975), 23

A Forgotten Carl Sagan Book

With all the deserved hoopla over the new version of Carl Sagan’s classic TV series “Cosmos,” I wanted to call attention to his wonderful but often overlooked book: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. It was an excellent text for my college courses in critical thinking, deftly distinguishing science from pseudo-science, and the reasonable from the unreasonable. The tools that guide critical or skeptical thinking and allow us to detect irrationality in all its form he aptly calls the “baloney detection kit.” With the medieval mindset that characterizes so much of contemporary American culture today–with its stories of ghosts and angels–Sagan’s calm rationalism shines as a beacon.

But the book deeply inspires too. Sagan, one of the promoters of the SETI project and responsible for the gold record aboard the Voyager spacecraft, denounces the absurdity of belief in ET visits and alien abductions. He wasn’t interested in believing in the fanciful, but in knowing what was true. His intellectual honesty is itself inspiring, as is his belief in the power of reason and science to understand and transform our world.

The book also warns against the temptation of believing what we want to be true, rather than in what the evidence suggests. Sagan knew the truth of Francis Bacon’s claim that: “Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.”Such sentiments lead down a dangerous road, to beliefs in demons, witches and similar superstitions. Such beliefs are not innocuous; people have been killed over them–absurd beliefs often lead to atrocities.

Science and reason are the only means that humans have to educe a little truth from reality. Sagan’s book testifies to the glory of the rational mind; it should inspire and warn us all.

At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes- an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counter-intuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense…. ~ Carl Sagan 

Living Inside a Computer

Here in my small 5 x 8 ft. study, I’m connected with thousands of people. I live, part-time, in my computer. Amazing!

As I child I waited for the book mobile to come to our neighborhood to get new books; the small trailer sat at the bottom of the street next to the lot where we played football. It had 200 or 300 books! Sometimes my Mom drove me to the small branch of the county library a few miles away, but often she was BUSY!The main branch had perhaps 100,000 volumes, but was too far away for frequent visits. Thus a lot of my knowledge about the world came from episodes of “The Adventures of Superman” and “Leave It To Beaver.” 

So books were the only source of real knowledge. By the time I was in college a far bigger library was at my disposal, but the books you wanted weren’t always there. You could use inter-library loan, but that was a cumbersome process. What effort it took to get information back then. Now it all comes to me, and I share my thoughts with thousands of people a day. In fact, “There are 25 Petabytes (10^15) created every day and thrown into the internet.  This is 70 times larger than the Library of Congress.” LINK

Yes deciphering all these facts and figures is impossible; that’s why we call it information overload. We need augmented intelligence and/or artificial intelligence to make sense of all this data. But it comes to me not in a little truck once a month at the end of a little street in a little neighborhood, but electronically.

Thank you science and technology, thank you Alan Turing and all the other engineers and computer scientists for delivering this real miracle. For now I don’t have be isolated as I age. For as long as my mind functions, I am connected to the world.

I am nostalgic thinking about that little truck on that little street in that little neighborhood. But I’m glad I don’t live in that world any more.

Should Public Colleges Teach Religious Practices?

THE ARGUMENT

Marshall Poe wrote an article in the Mar 7, 2014 Atlantic Magazine entitled: “Colleges Should Teach Religion to Their Students.” He’s not talking about religious studies classes–although I don’t think he’d be opposed to teaching them too–but of teaching religious practice by clergy. His epiphany came upon becoming the director of undergraduate studies at a university, where he got to know many college students on a personal level.

What he found “was that many of the students I talked to were disappointed, confused, and lost.” He found alcoholics and drug addicts, as well as depressives and the suicidal.  He also found out the university had no help for these students; counseling was limited and he could not contact parents by federal law. What could he do? In the past he had been helped by a “spiritual program.” He doesn’t tell us what the practice was, perhaps an Eastern religion or meditative technique. The practice help relieve his suffering. Perhaps teaching religious practice to students would help them too.

And what should be taught? To answer this question Poe distinguishes between knowledge-that and knowledge-how. The former refers to religious claims that something happened like Jesus rose from the dead, Mohammed received the Koran from Allah, or an angle showed Joseph Smith some gold plates. These have no place in a secular university. But religions also consist of knowledge-how, prescriptions for living. He specifically mentions Buddhism which focuses on eliminating suffering and transforming character. Furthermore teaching how to do something is common in the university, in the fine and performing arts, engineering, dentistry and other subjects.

Students should not be pressured to join any of these religions, Poe says, but simply informed about the practice of them. He is open to atheists talking about living well, or the teaching of meditation techniques or happiness research. The main deficiency in American higher educational curriculum is that it doesn’t teach students “what to do when they feel confused, alone, and scared.” It doesn’t teach them how to live well.

SOME REFLECTIONS

Poe appears genuinely concerned about his students, and there are a lot of damaged students in college. (There are many horrific persons in academia, including members of the faculty and administration!)  Religious practice would help some students, but so too would vigorous exercise. Should we then inform and/or promote religious practices or the benefits of exercise? Universities are in the business of informing, although promoting tends toward indoctrination.

 

It is true that even the atheist Daniel Dennett has opined that teaching the strength and weaknesses of all religions may be advisable. And the atheist Sam Harris has argued for the benefits of non-theistic meditation. I could tolerate the teaching of religion in public colleges–I have taught world religions myself. And meditation, happiness studies and the benefits of exercise seem fine too.  But Poe says more: “I’m talking about having imams, priests, pastors, rabbis, and other clerics teach the practice of their faiths. In college classrooms. To college students. For credit.”

A REJOINDER

I disagree vehemently. We can inform students about religion in the standard curriculum of religious studies. But please don’t populate public the universities with clerics. They already populate many private universities. Some of the worst people I have ever known in the academy draped themselves in religious garb and religious ideas. I’ve known supposedly religious people who were oppressive tyrants, pathological liars, and pedophiles. Yes I’ve known good clergy too, but there are no good reasons to think the clergy are better prepared to teach students how to live well than anyone else.  And if you believe that go to a religious affiliated college!

So teach students about the role of meditation or exercise in stress management, or what studies of happiness reveal, but teaching religious practice is not a salve for the modern world. And which religious practices do we teach? Should we teach students to practice self-flagellation during outbreaks of the plague? To not have sex till after the ceremony? To feel guilty about sex? To beat their children for misbehaving? To hate homosexuals? To have wives submit to their husbands? To force women to wear burkas? To not dance? To not drink? To have children even if they don’t want to? To give money to their church each week? To give money to their church when they die? To not eat meat on Fridays or touch a pigskin? To not distribute condoms in Africa and condemn thousands to death? To …?

Such behaviors form a large part of religious practice. Sure there are some good elements of religious practice, but open your history book for an honest look at the outcome of centuries of religious practice. Yes, students and many others are lost in modernity– in its consumerism, its capitalism, its materialism, and its environmental degradation. But we will best help students and our descendants live well by disseminating the best information from the natural and social sciences about how this is done, not by promoting mostly archaic practices.