12 Rules for Life
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The problem with "ancient wisdom"
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Essentially you are correct - if patterns of human behaviour have changed so much since the "ancient" text was written, that it may as well have been written by an alien, then any exposition of the text merely serves as a sounding board for the expositor's own views.Adherents of religions in which this practice is accepted however, would claim that their adherence to the same precepts and mores as the original author, provides them with an empathy and insight into the soul of the author - so that their exposition represents a modern day application of these original truths.
A cynical champion of the practice would reply that there really does not seem to be much truth emanating from modern society, which would be worth decoding in 3000 years time.
Edward wrote: "Essentially you are correct - if patterns of human behaviour have changed so much since the "ancient" text was written, that it may as well have been written by an alien, then any exposition of the..."Great points, though I suppose the reply to the cynic would be that, relative to thousands of years ago (even hundreds), life is better today in almost every conceivable way. With notable exceptions, and from our own perspectives, most of us live peaceful, nonviolent, healthy, and prosperous lives in comparison to the majority living at almost any point in the past, thanks to the advances in science, medicine, and humanism.
These are the kinds of modern values we can get behind, fighting for further reductions in violence, better education, the eradication of disease, and the amelioration of hunger. While violence will never be reduced to zero, that doesn’t mean we haven’t and cannot continue to make progress. The humanistic values of trying to make life better, right here on earth, require no esoteric interpretation of texts.
So if you asked the cynic if they would rather live in any other time other than the present, if he/she’s not being disingenuous, they’d have to choose the present.
Also, I would claim that there are several valuable truths emanating from modern society, even excluding the truths of natural science, technology, and medicine. These are the truths of modern psychology, which provide valuable insights into what makes us happy, successful, and tolerant. The more we understand about our own psychology—and the fallibility of our own minds—the less likely we’ll be captivated by dogma and the more likely we’ll be to display empathy.
I would be much more wary of anyone who dismisses ancient truths based on the current age, because their bias is completely constricted to the present without any context of the length of humanity. That is to say, their point of view comes down to a simplistic now > then. Do you think we actually suddenly have longer lives than ancients? Not at all. The main factors are a) infant mortality and b) ridiculous life extension (having cancer drawn out).The entire point is that these truths of human psychology were discovered ages ago and written into books like those found in the Bible. If we take 20th century studies of nutrition as an example, we can fairly say that perhaps other modern scientific endeavours are likely to be seriously out of whack with reality. The Bible does a better job of depicting human psychology than the thousands of non-replicable modern 'studies'.
Specifics:
Why wouldn't the cynic choose 3000 years into the future as the best time to live? I mean, given your thesis that things have only become better with time then surely another 3000 years will be even better, no?
Your thesis around psychology is doubtful. The truth is that we largely don't understand our own psychology, and we don't care. We don't care because technology overwhelms us and laws are made for us and we don't have agency. Why are depression and anxiety rates going up if we are gaining a better understanding of our psychology? Everything can be sorted out with a pill or a video screen, without any effort made.
Your fundamental flaw with your entire world view is that you think people will just do it. They will suddenly give up violence. You know why violence has decreased? Because we are better at policing. You think education has gone up? Quite the opposite, unless you consider that MORE people are educated. Perhaps try and read The bugbear of literacy. Humanistic values will never triumph without a solid metaphysical underpinning, because human biology always wins out.
Thomas,Appreciate the reply, here are a couple points.
1. First of all, I question the possibility of even being able to read an ancient text without modern bias. Consider how people read the Bible. For example, Deuteronomy 22:13-21 states that, regarding a woman’s virginity before marriage, “If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the young woman’s virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death.”
Assuming you think this is generally bad advice, you do so because of modern moral sensibility found in modern culture, not within the pages of the Bible. As you decide which verses to follow and which to ignore, you’re not really receiving your morality from the Bible anyway (and there are many passages you wouldn’t want to follow just like the one above).
Unless of course you’re a biblical literalist, but not many are. And as Sam Harris said, “The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt.”
2. I’m continually baffled by the insistence of trusting the moral and psychological intuitions of a people that believed the earth to be only 6,000 years old, that mental illness was caused by demonic possession, and, my favorite, Leviticus 21:17-24, which states that God doesn’t want any sacrifices from men with “damaged testicles.”
I mean this is too easy, I could spend the entire day citing either ridiculous, patently incorrect, or harmful (especially to women and the disabled) statements on nature or the human mind taken directly from the Bible.
To be fair, this isn’t their fault. This is what you’d expect from a pre-scientific human population desperate for explanations and the control over their environment. But if the history of science has taught us anything, it’s that our intuitions are not reliable generators of knowledge.
3. The cynic wouldn’t necessarily choose 3,000 years in the future because progress is of course not guaranteed to continue. Just because things are better now doesn’t mean they will be in the future if we make the wrong choices.
4. Keep in mind that it was only in 1820 that the percentage of people who could read and write in the world was around 12 percent. Today the number is around 86 percent! We can imagine what the literacy rate was in biblical times.
5. There is a strong correlation between the reduction in violence and literacy rates, increased empathy, cosmopolitanism, and tolerance. You can’t honestly believe that your own aversion to violence, and that of the majority of the people in your community, is the result of better policing?? On the contrary, you usually require a strong incentive to harm someone else and that incentive usually comes from some dogmatic “metaphysical truth.”
6. If you need some kind of metaphysical underpinning, simply adopt the one principle found in all religions and all systems of moral philosophy, which is some formulation of the Golden Rule. It’s the recognition that we’re all part of the same species and that our own priorities do not take precedence over everyone else's. Broad based education usually gets us to this conclusion without having to believe in absurd and anachronistic things about the world or our own minds.
1. Given that most Biblical scholars take the period into context, we can safely say that most people who try to interpret the Bible are doing every thing they can to place it within context. That said, what JBP says has nothing to do with strict laws like you have quoted. To cherry pick the laws of the time as evidence that the Bible is itself faulty is disingenuous. 2. Wait, I thought literalists TODAY thought it was 6,000 years old? Hmm? To be fair, I don't think many even back when the Bible was written believed the earth to be 4,000 years old. Do you have proof that they all took the Bible 100% literally? Do you really think that the Tree of Knowledge was real, or perhaps it was a metaphor for something...maybe how 'learning' too much can leave us vulnerable? None of those things undercut what JBP is trying to do, and that is find metaphor in stories. I do not take your statement about our intuitions to be self-evident.
3. Fair, I was making the point though that given the Whig view of history, surely the future would be better? But really, how do you know that life wasn't satisfactory back then? You are confusing the macro view of history as being good for humanity as a whole, and applying it to individuals, when individual life satisfaction may have actually been higher! Just because things are good now doesn't mean they weren't back then.
4. What is your point? What does literacy actually do? Did they need literacy during the Biblical period? You see a graph going up and you say, 'Good!' without a thought to any context or consequences. Literacy lets you read signs that say 'Halt Citizen' and read newspapers filled with gossip.
5. Fair enough, I agree it was probably not solely down to better policing. But that isn't QUITE what I meant. It would be a multitude of things. Your reasons are just as lacking as a complete reasoning. However, you are completely wrong about dogma creating violence. We can point to Islamists using violence, yes, but violence more often arises from a lack of self-control. And so, alcohol. Greed. Inequality. Lack of education, yes. Our society is less violent because we are able to police ourselves. That is, we are comfortable. We have no need to be violent. That is the fundamental truth. Drink too much alcohol and let your existential dread out, and you will have violence. Take away amenities and you will have violence. It hasn't gone away, it's just under the surface. And religion goes a long way to maintaining that, especially in the absence of luxury.
6. Honestly, your opinion on this is far more naive and utopian than anything religion can come up with. First of all, humanity is littered with examples of people wanting to take precedence over others. It happens to the individual on a daily basis: they want to be preferred over everyone else, whether in queues or in the workplace. We are built to discriminate and we naturally discriminate for ourselves first. You completely misunderstand metaphysics if you think you can start from the Golden Rule. Why? Who says? What for? Importantly, how? That is completely foolhardy. JBP very rightly says that we could learn a lot from religion, and indeed perhaps you may have missed this, but in order to love your neighbour you must love yourself. Change begins from inside out. Truth, however, does not change, but it can decay in the minds of men. Science and rationality are great for eating away at the truth, particularly because they often blind one to reality (back to the Tree of Knowledge).
Thomas,On point 2, you got me. I should have wrote 4,000, so nice catch. You’re also right about the causes of violence being more complicated than simply dogma, including poverty, greed, lack of self-control, etc.
However, there are two questions you raised that I’ll answer.
1. You said “You completely misunderstand metaphysics if you think you can start from the Golden Rule. Why? Who says? What for? Importantly, how?”
Just as I found it hard to primarily attribute better policing to reduced violence, I find it just as unlikely for religion to cause its decline. Think about yourself and your community again. Are you willing to make the claim that, were it not for God’s command, you would stop treating people decently and turn to violence if you could get away with it?
This seems absurd. You seem like an intelligent and well-read individual and, without really knowing you, would guess that this is the reason you respect other people and act decently. Not because it’s in the bible. Not because God says so. Because of something called empathy and sympathy.
Yes we have selfish tendencies but also altruistic and cooperative ones built right into our psychology. Education, especially literature, expands our empathy and concern for a wider circle than our own tribe. We care about other people whether we’re religious or not.
If I’m wrong, then I wonder how hundreds of millions of atheists, agnostics, or otherwise non-religious people manage to get by each day without killing each other or themselves. They get by because they take the same pleasures in life as the religious do and have the same regard for other people.
2. You said, “But really, how do you know that life wasn't satisfactory back then? You are confusing the macro view of history as being good for humanity as a whole, and applying it to individuals, when individual life satisfaction may have actually been higher!”
Perhaps we can’t agree on much, but I’m sure we can agree on some basic truths such as life is better than death, health is better than sickness, wealth is better than poverty, and pleasure is better than pain. Fortunately, we can measure all of these things over time.
I get the impression that, because of your complete aversion to the idea of progress, you’ve never bothered to look at the data or consider the level of terror and suffering humans used to endure.
Consider just a few examples of life back then:
First of all, the probability that you would live past the age of 5 would have been only 50 percent or lower. That also means that on average half of your children would die before adolescence. Not exactly conducive to happiness to have your children die. Now multiply that suffering by a million.
If you managed to survive, there was an unbelievable number of things that would bring an early and painful death. Disease ravaged populations, simple blisters could lead to sepsis and death, broken bones would leave you disabled for life. If you required surgery, you can forget about anesthesia. You would spend the majority of your day gathering food, and were susceptible to famines that would result in mass starvation. People often turned to cannibalism just to survive.
There was a constant fear that natural disaster and disease was punishment from God, so you’d be in constant fear and suspicion of others. You run the risk yourself of being accused of witchcraft, in which case you’d be subjected to unspeakable torture and ultimately death.
Not to mention you would have no rights or freedoms to say or do as you please.
Fast forward to today and infant mortality is under 1 percent in the US. If the rate was what it was back then, millions of children would die each year, an unfathomable level of suffering.
Today no one has to worry about starving and can say and do as they please. Most people don’t have to worry about dying a violent death, not to mention being stretched on the rack. If we get sick we take antibiotics and if we need surgery we get sedated. We enjoy a gigantic number of luxuries and don’t even have to suffer a headache without tylenol. We’ve also eradicated several diseases that used to be deadly, like smallpox. That is no small feat, saving hundreds of millions of lives, and it’s not because we prayed for it. We saw it as a problem and we solved it.
We’re so accustomed to progress, moral and scientific, that we’re completely blind to it. Spend some time reading personal accounts of medieval torture and suffering and you’ll get a better idea of the unthinkable level of suffering humanity once faced.
You'll also find that the way out of this suffering didn't come from religion, it came from science and liberal democracy, both products of the Enlightenment.
OK1.
Just as I found it hard to primarily attribute better policing to reduced violence, I find it just as unlikely for religion to cause its decline. Think about yourself and your community again. Are you willing to make the claim that, were it not for God’s command, you would stop treating people decently and turn to violence if you could get away with it?
JBP makes the point that any of us - most of us - could have been Nazis, and we had better realise this. Just because things are easy, making being good simple, doesn't mean we will be good under all circumstances. Correlation =/= causation, and if there is a link between A and B perhaps it is caused by C.
I am not making that claim about God, laws are made to enforce a self-evident truth, etc.
This seems absurd. You seem like an intelligent and well-read individual and, without really knowing you, would guess that this is the reason you respect other people and act decently. Not because it’s in the bible. Not because God says so. Because of something called empathy and sympathy.
I would say that I act in certain ways thanks to this sensibility being passed down through the generations. Another way of doing this sort of thing is via a book or doctrine, like the Bible. Empathy is not inherent, but the best ways to act were worked out long ago and have since been passed down.
Yes we have selfish tendencies but also altruistic and cooperative ones built right into our psychology. Education, especially literature, expands our empathy and concern for a wider circle than our own tribe. We care about other people whether we’re religious or not.
Not going to deny that we play both zero and non-zero sum games. That's life. But I will point out that I would need to see proof about education expanding empathy, especially since the whole idea that literature 'makes you a better person' has been shown to be complete bullshit. When push comes to shove, we care about our own tribe.
If I’m wrong, then I wonder how hundreds of millions of atheists, agnostics, or otherwise non-religious people manage to get by each day without killing each other or themselves. They get by because they take the same pleasures in life as the religious do and have the same regard for other people.
Refer to my earlier point about correlation/causation. There is not some magical fairy dust that is making everyone better people. Societal structures play a big role in this and a far more likely culprit than any rationalistic kumbaya attitude.
2.
I get the impression that, because of your complete aversion to the idea of progress, you’ve never bothered to look at the data or consider the level of terror and suffering humans used to endure.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, I never said I was against progress and I am well aware of all the metrics. Thanks, capitalism.
First of all, the probability that you would live past the age of 5 would have been only 50 percent or lower. That also means that on average half of your children would die before adolescence. Not exactly conducive to happiness to have your children die. Now multiply that suffering by a million.
Now who is the one transposing modern ideas to the past? It's been well proven that life satisfaction is connected to perception of others. So, quite likely, if everyone in a society has children die at a young age, why do you think they would care as much? Today, people take days off work because their cat died.
If you managed to survive, there was an unbelievable number of things that would bring an early and painful death. Disease ravaged populations, simple blisters could lead to sepsis and death, broken bones would leave you disabled for life. If you required surgery, you can forget about anesthesia. You would spend the majority of your day gathering food, and were susceptible to famines that would result in mass starvation. People often turned to cannibalism just to survive.
Life expectancy after childhood was nominally the same throughout all of human history. The main thing that has pushed up life expectancy is better childcare.
Do you have any evidence regarding that claim about cannibalism? Are you talking, like, 5000 years ago? Because even that long ago I call utter bullshit.
Gathering food, or suffering famines (agriculture)? Different situations. You are projecting an image on to the past very obviously here.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expec...
There was a constant fear that natural disaster and disease was punishment from God, so you’d be in constant fear and suspicion of others. You run the risk yourself of being accused of witchcraft, in which case you’d be subjected to unspeakable torture and ultimately death.
Again, can you back up your claims about witchcraft? And torture.
Not to mention you would have no rights or freedoms to say or do as you please.
I can't run around saying nigger, can I?
Today no one has to worry about starving and can say and do as they please. Most people don’t have to worry about dying a violent death, not to mention being stretched on the rack. If we get sick we take antibiotics and if we need surgery we get sedated. We enjoy a gigantic number of luxuries and don’t even have to suffer a headache without tylenol. We’ve also eradicated several diseases that used to be deadly, like smallpox. That is no small feat, saving hundreds of millions of lives, and it’s not because we prayed for it. We saw it as a problem and we solved it.
'No one' has to worry about starving? Huh, wow. See, what you're doing here is relying purely on materialistic visions. There are types of suffering beyond an empty stomach. Not minimising any of these achievements, but they are not the be all and end all. Let me refer you back to my earlier point again about correlation/causation. We were smart enough to make technology solve many of our problems. Education, violence, disease, all fixed by technology. There is nothing philosophic or metaphysical in that. These are surface details but they do not speak to the (idea of the) human soul.
We’re so accustomed to progress, moral and scientific, that we’re completely blind to it. Spend some time reading personal accounts of medieval torture and suffering and you’ll get a better idea of the unthinkable level of suffering humanity once faced.
Please provide these accounts. You are basically making any time before the Enlightenment sound like a level of Hell. Your hyperbole is showing.
You'll also find that the way out of this suffering didn't come from religion, it came from science and liberal democracy, both products of the Enlightenment.
Yes, science has solved material suffering. But there are other types of suffering.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/1...
My favourite part of this:
'Perspective taking, empathy, and concern for others have declined, not increased.'
You actually said “So, quite likely, if everyone in a society has children die at a young age, why do you think they would care as much?” Even the most basic understanding of evolutionary psychology would suggest that our basic emotional profile could not have changed in the blink of evolutionary time that represents the last 5 or even 10 thousand years. It’s more reasonable to believe that people were attached to their children and cared when they died.
Do you recall JBP’s discussion of lobsters and dominance hierarchies? Evolutionary processes are built into our psyches and established over millions of years. The mammalian bonding between parent and child is no different. Saying otherwise makes you sound like a blank-slate postmodernist.
If you’re asking for evidence of witch hunting and torture you’re going to make me reconsider my previous comment about you seeming to be well-read. These things are well documented.
Torture:
http://www.historyextra.com/period/ho...
http://www.torturemuseum.it/en/
Witch hunts:
https://www.thoughtco.com/european-wi...
Here are 10 historical famines that caused cannibalism.
http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-histori...
You can also read Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature if you want 600 pages of further proof in just how violent and bloody history has been.
Your ignorance of basic history is showing.
So we solved hunger, disease, and drastically reduced violence, but big deal, there are other forms of suffering, right? Like my cell phone has been really slow lately so I can relate to the women being stoned to death in biblical times. Give me a break.
Here’s a fitting quote from Steven Pinker’s latest book Enlightenment Now:
“The idea that the ultimate good is to use knowledge to enhance human welfare leaves [some] people cold. Deep explanations of the universe, the planet, life, the brain? Unless they use magic, we don’t want to believe them! Saving the lives of billions, eradicating disease, feeding the hungry? Bo-ring. People extending their compassion to all of humankind? Not good enough—we want the laws of physics to care about us! Longevity, health,understanding, beauty, freedom, love? There’s got to be more to life than that!”
I guess some people, like JBP, need fairytales to make life worth living. For others, life itself is enjoyable enough without needing to believe ridiculous things written thousands of years ago by ignorant people.
I guess some people, like JBP, need fairytales to make life worth living. For others, life itself is enjoyable enough without needing to believe ridiculous things written thousands of years ago by ignorant people.a) The question seems to be if life has a higher purpose (a.k.a. religion). Whereas life may be deliriously enjoyable if you are 18 and surfing in Hawaii, it can be less deliriously enjoyable if you are 81, in ICU and do not beleive in life after death.
b) As a general note on the above gentlemanly discussion - one of the reasons that we are living in a golden age of reasonableness, is because of the global mood-swing that occurred after the Second World War. People became vaguely fed up of being killed in the millions because of their dedication to a "higher purpose" and decided there wasn't one (hence hippyism etc.) Hence we live in a somewhat balance world of moral standing combined with personal expressiveness (also the hippies etc.). This is not a static state, this state is due to historical forces that act on the world today, and we have no proof that this state can continue indefinitely.
c) Concerning people with crushed testicles not serving as priests in the temple and brides who are unable to demonstrate their virginity being killed, this seems to be a question of social contract.
Deformed people may not represent me in my service to God, women who are adulterous between betrothal and marriage are liable to the death penalty.
These laws are no more grotesque than permitting abortion for careless teenagers, IMHO (at least not from the foetus's perspective).
d) Calling someone else's beliefs fairy tales gets into the problem of scientism. I.e. a very ancient Greek position of - if it is not palpable then it does not exist.
Science is brilliant at describing things which science can perceive - but saying anything that science can not perceive is unscientific (meaning backwards) is rather circuitous.
e) We will only know whether or not humanity is currently careering off the edge of a reality cliff in about 1000 years time, when all the chickens we are currently releasing have come home to roost.
It seems a bit premature to give ourselves 10/10 for management of humanity without giving time for a historical perspective to be formed on our own efforts at running the world in a non-catastrophic manner.
f) From the point of view of half-a-million people killed in Syria over the last 5 years, we're probably not doing that brilliantly currently.
Very true, Edward. Good points, well made.Ryan, you are reductionist of the highest order, I am not engaging with your ill-conceived opinions any more. I will apologise for not making myself more clear, that is on me.
Edward,Thanks for the reply.
First, progress does not mean the absence of problems. There will never be zero instances of violence or suffering or despair, and no one is under the illusion that we’ll ever achieve perfect utopia. So pointing out the 81 year old in the ICU or abortion or Syria does nothing to refute the overall thesis that for the average person, particularly in the West, life is infinitely better and easier and safer and healthier and more enjoyable.
To your points:
a) Why is higher purpose confined to the afterlife and restricted to religion? Many people experience a higher calling and great satisfaction in helping people in their communities, championing worthwhile social causes, working with charity, pursuing meaningful work, teaching others, spending time with friends and family, enjoying artistic and cultural artifacts, and taking advantage of an unprecedented amount of leisure time to travel the world or access the wealth of human knowledge at their fingertips.
Whether or not there is a God or gods or an afterlife, we should enjoy and make the most of our time here and now on earth. The point is, we are in the best position to do that today and it's wasted on people that say, “yeah, we’ve made all this progress but it’s not good enough, I want to live forever and if I can’t everything sucks.”
It’s somewhat ironic that you mention the ICU, which is itself a modern marvel, especially compared to the gruesome and painful ways most people throughout history have died without the benefit of pain medication and sedation.
Ultimately, we must all take personal responsibility for our own happiness and meaning in this life. All of the prerequisites are available.
b) We live in a golden age of reasonableness because of the hard-won products of the Enlightenment, including liberal democracy, science, and human rights. Free speech and press and religion are not pre-Enlightenment goods, and came to us through the US founding documents and the subsequent declarations of human rights.
You’re right to state that continued progress is not guaranteed. The progress we’ve made so far is the result of human ingenuity and hard work. Progress is guaranteed only to the extent that we view our threats as problems to be solved instead of leading to inevitable collapse or simply hoping things get better. That’s why I wonder what the benefit of pessimism is, exactly.
c) Abortion is a tricky issue and not one we should probably start, but there is a distinction between a not yet fully conscious being and an already sentient adult being murdered for religious reasons. However, keep in mind that the same secular reasons that tell us it is wrong to stone a woman to death are the same reasons we could use to support a pro-life position, which would be infinitely more persuasive than any reasons grounded in religion.
The idea is to develop rational laws that make sense and result in the least amount of human suffering and subjugation. Over and over again secularism has paved this path.
d) You’re confusing “if it’s not palpable it doesn’t exist” with “if it’s not rational it’s not likely.” The ancient Greek position was one of doubt and rational skepticism, but it’s worth remembering all of the non-palpable gifts from ancient Greece that form the foundation of Western civilization: democracy, philosophy, objective rational history, and mathematics to name a few.
I never made the claim that science can determine our values. That would be the job of philosophy, particularly Enlightenment philosophy, which prioritizes the well-being of human beings. It can’t tell you where you go when you die, but while you’re here on earth we can decide that we all want to be healthier and wealthier and wiser and happier. And once you’ve established those goals, science sure has something to say about achieving them. Science is simply a method of generating reliable knowledge, with the assumption that just because we think something is correct doesn’t necessarily mean we’re right.
By the way, “not religious” doesn’t equal reductionist. Science and religion are not the only two ways of viewing the world and the richness of philosophy fills the gaps between what science can tell us about material things and what values we should pursue.
e) People have been saying this all throughout history for thousands of years and yet here we are. Of course something catastrophic can happen but again our ability to identify and solve problems is the defining characteristic of the human race.
f) There will always be exceptions to progress, but it’s telling that the most troubled part of the world is the least secular, democratic, educated, and literate while at the same time the most religious. Hence back again to the problem of ancient wisdom.
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