Paradoxical Detachment

Let me start with paradox. The Online Etymology Dictionary tells us that the word comes from the Greek and is made up of para- meaning “contrary” and doxa meaning “opinion”; The OED then provides a meaning which seems to have been framed in the 1560s. It is a “statement that is seemingly self-contradictory yet not illogical or obviously untrue.”

I apply that word in adjectival form to detachment. Appropriately, I believe. When we detach, we detach from something. In an ordinary situation, we get exercised about something ridiculous in the news. Our mind is so on-and-on-and-on about it that, finally, we say: “I’ve got to get detached from this.” One of the paradoxes of detachment, for me, anyway, is that taking up my diary and then meticulously recording the irritation, in every conceivable form, sooner or later (usually after writing about three-quarters of a page), the emotional turmoil has diminished. The attachment to my description of it has caused a distance to develop. And from the distance the whole thing has lost its hold on me. And this is so even if the ultimate pain comes from a source we can rarely shake, e.g. noting that I owe a huge sum of money for something I was unaware of and, having examined the circumstances, I see that I’ll have to pay it. Detachment eventually comes when I shrug, at last, and think to myself: “It’s only money.” This though indicates that I’ve reached a point of awareness in which I’ve managed to detach even from the value of money. It won’t last, of course, but for a meaningfully sufficient moment I’ve achieved freedom.

The paradox is that genuine detachment means the embrace of nothingness. That statement is seemingly self-contradictory; but the way it feels is both logical and obviously true.” Another name for it might be religion (another paradoxical word).

I say that because, in a really meaningful way, especially in a time like our own which is utterly attached to sensory reality and its extensions into abstractions like money, a time eventually comes when the world’s madness has reached what seem like maxima; life seems to have lost all value and meaning; everything is going into the bottomless pit. At such a time, in a seemingly self-contradictory way, parts of humanity embrace belief in the unbelievable, a reality beyond the one available for examination. They form or join religions. In effect they detach from the madness all around. And, paradoxically, the continued practice of this detachment creates a reality in which, if you have social patience enough, life resumes again. And the madness then seems to have passed.

Existential and Spiritual Judgement

The question, What are the religious propensities? and the question, What is their philosophic significance? are two entirely different orders of question from the logical point of view; and, as a failure to recognize this fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insist upon the point a little….

In recent books on logic, the distinction is made between two orders of inquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? how did it come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second, What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once here? The answer to the one question is given in an existential judgement or proposition. The answer to the other is a proposition of value, what the Germans call a Werturteil, or what we may, if we like, denominate a spiritual judgement. Neither judgement can be deduced immediately from the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations, and the mind combines them only by making them first separately, and then adding them together.

     [William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 1]

I read this paragraph the first time ever on my first day in college—while waiting for the opening ceremony of our Freshman year to begin. I understood it, no doubt about it, but not the way I do now. Here is the methodological answer to many puzzles that involve matter and mind, body and soul, and so on. There is experience, and who can deny it. Then there is a judgement made of its meaning. And the “examined life” is a fusion of these two.

God as Metaphor

Back on December 24, the New York Times ran an op-ed piece by Tanya Marie Luhrman, an anthropologist at Stanford. It was titled “Religion Without God.” The article’s general thematic was the rise (how measured was not stated) of what Luhrman calls a “kind of God-neutral” faith which, here and there, is openly and professedly atheist but engages in religious observance with (you might say) all the usual bells and whistles.

Today the Times published letters in response to the article. Of the six letters, four are in favor of “religion without God,” one is ambiguous, and only one opposes that view. A good sample of New York Times readers perhaps—predominantly wealthy and sophisticated?

Before Brigitte showed me the letters and caused me thereafter to trace the original, I was out trying to shovel masses of slush, what with the Weather undecided whether it wants to rain or to snow. And in the context of repetitive action, what with wondering where I’d put the salt, a phrase came and started repeating. “If the salt hath lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?” In turn then I also traced that sentence to the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, in which the profile of those destined for the kingdom of heaven is shown. Among these are the poor in spirit, they that mourn, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted, with emphasis on the last. They are the salt of the earth.

In her own profile, T.M. Luhrman describes her work as follows:

I use my training in anthropology to understand how people know what is real. I don’t pass judgment on whether they are right. Instead, I ask: what leads people to make the judgment that God was present? What do they perceive that makes them more confident or more uncertain? How have they learned to pay attention? I observe what people do, and I listen to what they say, and I search for patterns. I am also interested in what happens when that capacity to judge what is real gets broken, and how we help those who are in pain.

To know Luhrman’s sample is perhaps to know what Luhrman’s conclusions about the “real” will turn out to be. As for what is rising, and what is in process of decaying, for that perhaps a more robust study of culture in its cycles might be more instructive. What lies ahead, seems to me, is growing hardship for humanity. And hardship has a peculiar virtue in enlarging the inner perception of what is real and what is merely on the surface.

Dig Down to the Roots

A very thoughtful column by David Brooks in the New York Times today (“Alone, Yet Not Alone”) caught our eyes this morning. Its thematic is in the second paragraph:

There is a gap between the way many believers experience faith and the way that faith is presented to the world.

The first paragraph presents the problem:

There is a vein of hostility against orthodox religious believers in America today, especially among the young. When secular or mostly secular people are asked to give their impression of the devoutly faithful, the words that come up commonly include “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” “old fashioned” and “out of touch.”

The column is well worth reading in full—and should be relatively easy to get on-line even by those who are not subscribers to the paper. It illustrates a general problem reaching far beyond its contrast between religious and secularist behavior. Prejudices arise when people misinterpret what they do not understand and have never experienced. Every human avocation will have its behavioral counterparts; if only the behavior is seen, and the motivation behind it is hidden from view—as internal experiences will inevitably be—superficial appearances will be misread by the uninformed.

Misreading behavior, of course, can also be found among believers—who fail to cut the secularists slack. Pope Francis has been pointing that out in recent times. The story also reminded me of a Sufi snippet I read somewhere in the work of Idries Shah. It concerns a Sufi teacher called Abdul Qasim Gurgani. Eager want-to-be disciples surrounded him and once pestered him about his humility. He said: “My humility which you mention is not there for you to be impressed by it. It is there for its own reason.”

Religious Affiliation

Religious affiliation of large masses of people is damnably difficult to establish with what might be called scientific precision. The reason for this is that the most cost effective method is by telephone survey. A really good census would be prohibitively costly. One way to do that would be to select four Sundays a year, one in each season, by randomized methods. Then, with observers stationed at every church in America, actual headcounts would be undertaken. The usual survey method is quite missy, one might say, because those conducting the surveys rely on the self-identification of the respondents. Thus, in addition to some 41 named religious or non-religious categories, the results include choices like “Christian,” not further specified,  “Protestant,” no denomination listed, and also “Nondenominational.” People could also vote for “No Religion” either by subcategory or by that label. The subcategories respondents supplied were Atheist, Agnostic, and Humanist. Here I am showing results obtained by the most respected survey of this kind in the United States, the American Religious Identity Survey (ARIS); it is run by the Graduate School of the University of New York.

I got to thinking about this while reading an article by evangelical pastor John S. Dickerson (“The Decline of Evangelical America”) in the New York Times this morning.  I got to wondering if ARIS had updated its earlier results, which had been for 2001. It turned out that it had. Data for 2008 are now available and were published in the 2012 Statistical Abstract (link, see Table 75). It now turns out that Pastor Dickerson may be wrong—or that he is reflecting a decline in quality rather than quantity. Those who self-describe themselves as Evangelical and/or Born Again more than doubled between 1990 and 2001 and nearly tripled in number between 1990 an d 2008.

Now when we next look at those who just say that they are Christian, they doubled in the 1990-2008 period (108.5% increase). Those who identified themselves as Protestants, however, declined by 70 percent. But those who called themselves Nondenominational increased by a whopping 4,040 percent. What to make of this? Are we dealing here with a drift in self-identification? So that once church-going people have been re-purposing Sunday and hence are kinda forgetting where they belong? Or does that huge Nondenominational increase mean drawing closer to religion?

The most potent increase in numbers is shown by Catholics (up in this period by 11.2 million, 24.33% in 1990-2008) and Baptists (up by 2.2 million, 6.4%). As for the single largest percentage increase, 4,175 percent, that belongs to Wicca. In 1990 there were 8,000 of them, in 2008 342,000. They know the name of their denomination. In this period, all Christian denominations increased their adherents by 14.7 percent (to 173.4 million), other religions by 50.28 percent (to 8.8 million), and the nonreligious by 138.4 percent (34.2 million). I last wrote about this subject in February 2010 (link). Back then I noted a drift toward unbelief. That still seems to be going on.

Unavoidable Conflict

The conflict between church and state is, you might say, built in. Religion organizes people; it forms communities. The leader or leaders of such communities then come to represent a power. By its very existence, this power rivals that of the secular ruler. The constitutional separation of church and state is a reasonable but awkward stratagem. It works for a while. Here and there. This separation has biblical rootings: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”: quoted in three of the four gospels. Problems surface when Caesar demands what belongs to God—or the Church encroaches on what belongs to Caesar. In a very complex modern world even drawing the line between the two is extraordinarily difficult.

This issue is at the core of today’s runoff elections in Egypt. To one side is a relatively weak representative of Caesar, but evidently backed by a military oligarchy strong enough so that it could simply squash a parliament dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. On the other is the Muslim Brotherhood itself which might, just might, if it waxes strong eventually, impose religious law.

The problem is compounded by the fact that humans are social creatures and that a vast gulf opens between religion as a social phenomenon and religion as an inner experience. My own view of collectives is, to put it mildly, reserved—and no matter what their nominal coloration. They tend to be somewhat less than human. Internal guidance may conflict with the demands of both collectives. As a minimum, let there be separation—be that separation enshrined in constitutional language or not. It won’t always be so. Millions of years to go yet, and a snapshot from the U.S.A. is barely even a moment on such scales. There is no conflict for the individual if Jesus’ words are understood. Caesar is all collectives; we give them what is theirs. The rest is conscience.

Landscapes of Ambiguity

Cultural life produces recognizable fields of activity easily linked to physical things, but pondering them I see strange landscapes of ambiguity. Literature is an example. Literature is letters, writings, books—but, literature as such is only a narrow subset of such things. That word, for instance, excludes the Congressional Record or written forms of scientific discoveries, philosophy, etc. The word embraces imaginative writing about experience: narratives, poetry, plays. But only a subset of that category ranks as literature. To merit the name the product must have a certain structural and aesthetic quality fused with a certain difficult-to-pin-down profundity, feeling, intuition. Letters on paper, plot, rhyme, beat, story, and theme are accessible to objective valuation. Such things are either present or not; if present, they are capable of analysis, comparison. But what really matters is much more difficult to detect. Literature therefore tends to be defined by small but influential groups some members of which may be, but the majority are not, themselves creators of art. The mass of readers is also excluded. Literature has its elites, and the majority of them are neither poets nor storytellers. Rarely, but here and there, critical writings, writings about literature, also rise to the status of literature: they are unusually, creatively insightful and deep. Literature, finally, is dynamic. It has schools, movements, conflicts, camps—in which, among other things, elites compete and declare other schools, movements, or camps as producing trash. Literature also has its revered ancient forms some of which are dying of neglect, others of which enjoy brief renaissances, and so on.

The ambiguity arises because higher forms of human achievement are impossible to break down into manageable bits in order to grasp them—and their recognition by others is also impossible to discern: it depends itself on a higher function.

The analogy to another great landscape of ambiguity, Religion, is tempting. I yielded to that temptation decades ago and view Literature as the religion of the secular age. In religion the creative force arises from saints and mystics. Piety as such does not suffice. Something more must be present—and is difficult to pin down. Piety is accessible to objective valuation, the saintly state escapes it—but we know it when we see it. Religion has its priesthoods, and the majority are neither saints nor mystics. They elevate some of the saints and canonize them, ignoring what the masses of the ordinary people feel; they work by rules. And the same dynamisms apply in religion as in literature where the old is sometimes selectively revived, the new is opposed as heresy and declared as beyond the pale and Satan’s own handiwork.

Three Layers

Yesterday’s posting on the Papal initiative—to invite dissident Anglicans to join the Catholic Church—prompted me to ask myself why that event struck me as pleasing. The event may also be viewed in entirely in negative terms, of course. The Anglican congregation is dividing over a major conflict triggered by the ordination of women and gay clergy. Anglicanism, along with other mainline Protestant denominations, has been drifting into a social gospel for many decades already without that trend, which strikes me as much more serious, having caused any active rifts. The Papal initiative may also be viewed negatively as a power-grab. I’ve always viewed the exclusion of women from the priesthood as due to an arbitrary patriarchal bias rooted in the distant past. Similarly, I am persuaded that homosexuality is not a willed choice but a biological fact; fairly decent theories of how it arises are on offer; in other words, Dante to the contrary notwithstanding, it is natural. It occurs in nature, not by free will. The development of a celibate clergy also strikes me as a strange cultural aberration. You might say, in other words, that I don’t have a dog in this fight.

Pondering this, I realized that my pleasure came from another source. To put it briefly, the Papal initiative suggests a movement in the direction of genuine reform. If something like that inspires a realignment of the religious layer of our culture in the long term, it will be beneficial for this grouping of humanity, the West.

I came across this concept of layers in a quote from Ali Hujwiri (990-1077), a Persian Sufi, teacher, and writer. He said: “There are three forms of culture: worldly culture, the mere acquisition of information; religious culture, following rules; elite culture, self-development.” This was written in Hujwiri’s Revelation of the Veiled, and I saw it quoted in Idries Shah’s The Sufis more than thirty years ago. It struck me as true and appropriate—the more so because in the Sufi realm of thought, each individual is counseled to follow the appropriate requirements of each layer of culture, and these layers are conceived of as linked and ascending, like stairs to a summit.

The religious layer of culture, in other words, has a meaningful, elevated, role in the shaping of human values—and behaviors based on these values. It is a necessary element in human life. When this layer becomes deformed, trivialized, or sinks into the one beneath it, that spells trouble for the society—and individuals in it, of course. A single, coherent faith system is better than a carnival of competing beliefs. The reunification of Christianity is therefore desirable. That in turn implies an institutional organ at its peak which is sophisticated and appropriately tolerant of diversity beneath—and Benedict XVI’s initiative, if it succeeds, also suggests changes in that direction ultimately if unity is to be achieved. Hence my favorable reaction to the news.

Now, needless to say, the other two layers in our culture are not exactly exemplars of coherence and order either. And the relationships between them are correspondingly troubled. But the general trend of things, it seems to me, is better now, despite the seeming chaos, than it was in Dante’s day.

The trouble with this medium (blogging) is that it takes multiple passes to develop ideas. Or maybe that is the medium’s virtue. I’ve yet to make up my mind.