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nemorathwaldMore and more often I find myself referencing Eric S. Raymond's essay Dancing With The Gods. It's very close to Karen Armstrong's book The Battle For God on my required reading list for the power of the explanatory models of religious experience and institutional development that these writings provide. The essay makes me wonder if god archetypes have ever manifested themselves in me, and if so, which ones. Perhaps if I brought it up somebody would say "oh yeah, we see you acting like so-and-so sometimes." Dancing With The Gods left me with some questions.
Raymond writes about his early phase as a dogmatic secular materialist, "I'd known the score since my early teens; religion was an instrument of oppression, deities a delusion, mysticism a bag of sterile mind-games and somatic circus tricks." In college he discovers "... there is a kind of live internal logic to mysticism and religion, something entwined with psychology that sends runners and shoots all through culture and art. Not that I took any of it seriously as a description of the real world. It was an intellectual chew-toy, perhaps at best a way of understanding the pathologies that prevented human beings from living the infinitely more desirable life of reason and science."
He hints very strongly throughout this section that he is going to present something that changes this conclusion. And yet just like Karen Armstrong, he never seems to do so as far as I can detect. Eventually in the narrative of his life he has what he describes as "a wrenching re-adjustment of my world-view" and starts talking as if the somatic circus tricks which happened to him had overturned a rational, explicable universe, despite the fact that he still rejected supernatural explanations and apparently still does to this day. The fact that the gods are explainable, as archetypes in our innermost psychological nature, a lizard-mammalian hindbrain planted in the subconscious by evolutionary DNA, leaves materialism unthreatened.
He says "that cold and mechanistic way of thinking about the Gods simply will not work when you want to evoke one." A hundred times while reading the essay, I asked, again and again, "why would you want to?" "...becoming a whole human being for the first time in my life. Opening up emotionally. Playing beautiful music. And ... um ... getting laid."
I would never, ever, mess around in the operating system of my computer, much less with my brain. I would definitely break something. There's got to be a better form of therapy and self-adjustment than tinkering amateurishly with scary altered states. Something that involves more reliability, less messiness and impairment and what Cory Doctorow in 0wnz0red called "conditional operators left behind by a sloppy coder." "... a computer that won't boot unless you restart it twice, switch off the monitor, open the CD drive and stand on one foot. If you're a luser, you do all this shit every time you want to boot your box, but if you're a l33t hax0r like you and me, you just figure out what's wrong with your computer and fix it. You don't sacrifice a chicken twice a day, you 0wn the box, so you make it dance to your tune... I say, you should be super-user in your own body."
As Greg Egan wrote in The Planck Dive about ritual and myth, "They're the product of a few chance attractors in flesher neurophysiology. Whenever a more complex or subtle story was disseminated through an oral culture, it would eventually degenerate into an archetypal narrative. Once writing was invented, they were only ever created deliberately by fleshers who failed to understand what they were. If all of antiquity's greatest statues had been dropped into a glacier, they would have been reduced to a predictable spectrum of spheroidal pebbles by now; that does not make the spheroidal pebble the pinnacle of the artform. What you've created is not only devoid of truth, it's devoid of aesthetic merit." "I told him that if he was ever embodied in a space-suit, floating among the stars, he ought to try sneezing on the face plate to improve the view."
Raymond writes about his early phase as a dogmatic secular materialist, "I'd known the score since my early teens; religion was an instrument of oppression, deities a delusion, mysticism a bag of sterile mind-games and somatic circus tricks." In college he discovers "... there is a kind of live internal logic to mysticism and religion, something entwined with psychology that sends runners and shoots all through culture and art. Not that I took any of it seriously as a description of the real world. It was an intellectual chew-toy, perhaps at best a way of understanding the pathologies that prevented human beings from living the infinitely more desirable life of reason and science."
He hints very strongly throughout this section that he is going to present something that changes this conclusion. And yet just like Karen Armstrong, he never seems to do so as far as I can detect. Eventually in the narrative of his life he has what he describes as "a wrenching re-adjustment of my world-view" and starts talking as if the somatic circus tricks which happened to him had overturned a rational, explicable universe, despite the fact that he still rejected supernatural explanations and apparently still does to this day. The fact that the gods are explainable, as archetypes in our innermost psychological nature, a lizard-mammalian hindbrain planted in the subconscious by evolutionary DNA, leaves materialism unthreatened.
He says "that cold and mechanistic way of thinking about the Gods simply will not work when you want to evoke one." A hundred times while reading the essay, I asked, again and again, "why would you want to?" "...becoming a whole human being for the first time in my life. Opening up emotionally. Playing beautiful music. And ... um ... getting laid."
I would never, ever, mess around in the operating system of my computer, much less with my brain. I would definitely break something. There's got to be a better form of therapy and self-adjustment than tinkering amateurishly with scary altered states. Something that involves more reliability, less messiness and impairment and what Cory Doctorow in 0wnz0red called "conditional operators left behind by a sloppy coder." "... a computer that won't boot unless you restart it twice, switch off the monitor, open the CD drive and stand on one foot. If you're a luser, you do all this shit every time you want to boot your box, but if you're a l33t hax0r like you and me, you just figure out what's wrong with your computer and fix it. You don't sacrifice a chicken twice a day, you 0wn the box, so you make it dance to your tune... I say, you should be super-user in your own body."
As Greg Egan wrote in The Planck Dive about ritual and myth, "They're the product of a few chance attractors in flesher neurophysiology. Whenever a more complex or subtle story was disseminated through an oral culture, it would eventually degenerate into an archetypal narrative. Once writing was invented, they were only ever created deliberately by fleshers who failed to understand what they were. If all of antiquity's greatest statues had been dropped into a glacier, they would have been reduced to a predictable spectrum of spheroidal pebbles by now; that does not make the spheroidal pebble the pinnacle of the artform. What you've created is not only devoid of truth, it's devoid of aesthetic merit." "I told him that if he was ever embodied in a space-suit, floating among the stars, he ought to try sneezing on the face plate to improve the view."
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Date: 2004-10-01 03:10 pm (UTC)I'm a little startled
Date: 2004-10-01 10:02 pm (UTC)of my essay, and I'm not sure whether the problem is
in my writing or your comprehension.
You're right. My mystical experiences didn't change my ontology or my belief that I live in a rationally
explicable universe. What they showed me is that
"rationally explicable" had to include weirder and
more wonderful phenomena than before -- that, in my
naive materialism, I had been ignoring important
realms of experience because I thought (incorrectly)
that they could not be reconciled with a materialist
ontology or scientific cosmology.
The whole point of the essay is that it is possible
to become a mystic without throwing out rationality -- in fact, that you get better-quality mysTicism if
you keep the rationality.
Re: I'm a little startled
Date: 2004-10-02 08:48 pm (UTC)Here's what I didn't understand. Mere mutual disarmament between reason and mysticism only establishes mutual indifference, not a motive or need for integration which you've talked about. I suppose you had no choice but to presuppose it for granted that the reader desires mysticism, because how could any essay create such a desire? If a cure for deafness is invented, I can imagine that people who were born deaf might ask us why they should take the cure, when they could just as easily see a symphony as a wave on a screen, and keep out any possibility of the musical mind-control which I've experienced in church altar-calls. As you say, you can be a better mystic by applying reason. So? I can be a better, safer drug-user, musician or sex partner by keeping my wits about me. I know what function reason serves. But how can we be better at reasoning by applying mysticism?
In Greg Egan's novel Distress, he depicts a future in which science has proven that our perception of knowing the minds of others is an illusion. Autistic people have damage to Lamont's area, and lack this illusion. According to the movement of "voluntary autists," Lamont's area a natural brain defect, so as adults they lesion it from their brains. Even though it's troubling, I can't dispute that character's right to be considered fully healthy and not "inhuman." Do we need mysticism to be, as you said, a "whole human being"?
Fhew. Hope this makes sense.
Date: 2004-10-04 06:56 pm (UTC)Like you and the younger version of Eric, I have been deeply, dogmatically rational much of my life. Like Eric now, I've also experienced too much of the power (and danger) of mystical thinking to dismiss it as a totally useless artifact of the mind.
Where emotional responses are unimportant, such as in any good science experiement, mysticism is useless and should be ignored. However, emotion is important in almost any social setting. Social interaction follows rules, but not mathematical ones; the rules are instead based in terms of the emotions of the participants. Causality is often turned apon its head; instead of one event causing another, anticipation of one event will cause an earlier reaction.
Mysticism might be a good blanket term for an innate understanding of those rules. This understanding is inheritly illogical, and the danger is that it can be applied in places it shouldn't be. Wishing won't cure cancer or fix a vehicle. But it might get you the birthday present your wish for, or the girl you're hoping to catch the eye of. It changes your emotional stance, and that of those around you, whic may influence things toward the desired outcome.
Its possible to reason through social interaction; which is typical of a lot of geeks (myself included). Too many of the basic rules are different; logical structures can emulate them, but only with a loss of performance. Confidence, which also plays a large part, can't be evoked logically. Our interaction is therefore stilted and slow, lagging behind the optimised structures of more mystical people.
I think mysticism and logic are ultimately tools, with proper and improper areas of application. When you apply the wrong tool, the results can be anywhere from stilted to dangerously wrong. Using both gives you a wider and more correct range of solutions to any problem.
Re: Fhew. Hope this makes sense.
Date: 2004-10-05 07:30 am (UTC)I'm sure that you aren't saying that confidence is always unjustified, but rather that when it is justified and you know it, usually it requires a sort of non-rationalized faith belief to truly internalize it and make it part of your behavior. Perhaps someone who knows about cognitive therapy would disagree and say that it can be done with just telling yourself the confident statements that you know to be true, over and over until that sub-rational brain is forced to believe it. Perhaps when one does that, one is "mythologizing."
Last week I went to the art theater to see "What the Bleep Do We Know? A Quantum Fable." It was entirely possible to leave the film as a healthy rational mystic or a totally screwed-up blind follower of faith healers and the psychic friends network. It seems to have been deliberately designed to not offend those who indulge in harmful spirituality and anti-rationalism. That's what got me on this track. The basic problem that I have with most rational mysticism is that it doesn't take a strong enough stand against its own abuses. It seems to indulge in spiritualistic language and god-talk which is the equivalent of l33t-speak in my opinion. This use of code-language seems to be aiding and abbetting the tendency in society to get these tools working on the wrong problems. So, if I come across as a dogmatic materialist sometimes, it's because I'm fighting back a tide of irrationalism. Talk to me again in a more rational age and I'll agree to use spiritualized language to say secular, non-spiritual things as you and Eric do.