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People who are just checking in should be informed that this is a recasting if not recantation of several dominant strands of my joculum.livejournal.com. Longtime readers will find it more of a controlled descent down the rabbit hole, disciplined by my early training in the "phenomenological standpoint," a standpoint to which I aspire despite later philosophers' decentering of all such efforts at finding a place to stand from which to offer dubiously valid opinions. If this preface has already chased some of you off, well, hey, as they say, maybe "I meant to do that."
We are witnessing (or I am, anyway) the evolution of an ad hoc religion that reminds us (or me, anyway) that all religions are grounded in primary experience, and that primary experience is indeed bewilderment just as the Victorian atheists said (also the Muslim and Christian mystics, but let that pass). But since there is no need to be bewildered by natural phenomena, and since everything is by definition natural, the religion seems to assume that the Invisible World is a part of nature because everything is nature, and the personal forces that made us are as natural as anything else, just as an infinite Creator, gods, angels, sprites, elves, fauns, or any other invisible force would be. Miracles would be a force of nature, and miraculous healings in particular.
Most of the time this opinion comes clad in treacly New Age trappings, but more and more often it seems to arrive as a kind of holy agnosticism, a sense of bewilderment and sometimes vague dread at the existence of forces that we so much do not understand that skeptics spend much of their lives trying to prove that they do not exist.
Indeed, according to the best representatives of this conceptual option, we cannot understand some of them, because there is no way ever to trust the supposed communications with invisible personal forces; we know too much about the unconscious mind and the biomechanics of hallucination.
Other phenomena are comprehensible in principle, but are such weak and inconstant forces that it is possible to treat them as nonexistent because they are unlikely to beat statistical randomness under experimentally controlled conditions.
They are like the rare diseases that were long considered not to exist because only one person in 468 million has one of them. “Chest pain and heart flutter? You’re just stressed out, look at you, calm down.” Today, mitral valve prolapse is if anything overdiagnosed; like the autism spectrum in the area of behavioral mysteries, it has become the diagnosis of choice for any vague symptoms that don’t fit into the standard textbook definition. If it had been one of the uncommon disorders rather than a common one not discovered until the 1970s, it would still be regarded as a side effect of psychological tension rather than a birth defect of the heart.
Hence the occasional cases of precognition and telepathy and other paranormal phenomena are, according to the religious agnostics, cases of emergent properties that are dependent on internal training plus external need. This vision of the body and its possibilities dates back at least as far as Michael Murphy’s weird 1972 novel Golf in the Kingdom, the only metaphysical tract to encode its teachings in a tale about a mystical Scottish golf professional and his secret speculations.
Or rather, not metaphysical, except in the sense of meta-physical, in the sense of meta-real or the meta-novel. Physical, only more so.
Murphy carried this opinion, by way of his Esalen Institute, into a whole oeuvre of not-knowing, from his novel An End to Ordinary History about Central Asian Sufism and the Soviet Union’s parapsychological research program to his compendium of marginal and not-so-marginal physical forces The Future of the Body. More recently, the historian of Asian religion Jeffrey Kripal has taken up the task of explaining why this agnostic variety of religious belief has been a part of American culture, and to some extent European culture, ever since the Renaissance, and before that was a minority opinion in global religions. (More often the marginal has been made mainstream by being explained as a god-inspired mystery, and by the way, I alliterate excessively here with semi-malicious deliberation.)
Kripal is so good at teasing out the frequently nonsensical strands of belief in bewilderment that it becomes possible to dismiss the whole thing as just another form of self-deception, just like the philosophical meta-systems that took the place of religion after the Enlightenment, pretending to understand the iron laws of history. And indeed, most of the more perceptive religious agnostics have begun with the question, “Is this real? Or am I nuts?” (I have said before that the problem is that too few of them ever answer, “This is real, and I am nuts, but my craziness does not negate the reality of the phenomenon, it just makes it impossible for me to assert anything about it in a believable fashion.”)
The Cypriot-emigre professor of sociology Kyriacos Markides has also fiddled for years with forces that he does not understand and opinions of others that make vertiginous sense without being supported by more than overinterpreted evidence—his The Magus of Strovolos and successive books studied an empirically minded Cypriot healer who insisted that his researches revealed the real structure of the universe. (As in the American idiom, “they all say that,” unfortunately enough, and their would-be empirical researches parallel one another without being compatible). Having seen enough strange things to convince him that something was real amid all the craziness, Markides went on to examine the marginal aspects of Eastern Orthodox spirituality, for which the Church (or Ekklesia, since Markides continually reminds us that he is translating from oral accounts in contemporary Greek) has its own explanations, which are not necessarily those of Markides. In fact, he has his theories that verge on strongly held beliefs, but no explanations.
This type of “having and not-having” (I quote the phrase from the late death-of-God theologian William Hamilton) is like Wallace Stevens’ “We believe without belief, beyond belief,” which sociologist Robert Bellah found to be a prevalent condition fifty or so years ago. Today it has migrated to various margins, and its proponents range from the intellectually respectable researcher to the truly dismissible lunatic—something that could also be said about the New Atheism as well as the New Agnosticism. (I started out calling it Holy Agnosticism at the beginning of this essay because I was making a joke about the 1950s comic books in which Kripal finds the transmuted religious discontents of American culture—comics in which Batman’s suspect sidekick Robin was given to exclaiming “holy” followed by ever more improbable nouns, as though he had read Allen Ginsberg’s beat-generation poem “Howl” and been overly impressed by it. “Holy agnosticism, Batman!” But that is just too silly, and “religious agnosticism” seems to make more sense as a description, since these folks believe in religion, they just don’t believe in believing.)
There does seem to be an emergent myth that serves as an interim explanatory principle—one that is propounded with the cautionary note that it may all be nonsense. And that is that there is an invisible world of personal forces that find, for whatever reason, that they cannot communicate very well with us. In fact, they are so dimly reflected in our belief systems that even the most ardent of believers “walk by faith, not by sight.” And “belief would be belief in the wrong thing,” as the American-born British poet T. S. Eliot put it in a modernist poem nobody reads any longer outside of a few survey classes in English literature.
These forces seem to want us to wake up, but wake up to what is a matter of contention among the assorted agnostics. Some are inclined towards the gnostic rather than agnostic belief that they want “to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle” (which is how Ludwig Wittgenstein, no gnostic he, defined his linguisic philosophy)—to effect a prison break for souls imprisoned in matter. (Philip K. Dick spent a few thousand pages of exegesis weighing this option versus all the other possible options, speaking of the “Is this real, or am I nuts” phenomenon—Jeffrey Kripal is among the annotators who explicated Dick’s interminable Exegesis in a recent edition.) Others, and Murphy would be among them, believe that matter is where it is at, but that we don’t understand matter and its possibilities, we just think we do. Perhaps we should call these folks the religious materialists.
There is a whole subcategory that believes that our present situation may be the residue of a failed experiment, or a flawed creation, rather than the aftermath of a rescue that went wrong. This belief-ful agnosticism (“think these thoughts without believing them”) embraces versions of a mythos that goes something like this: From the perspective of the Other Side, we really are like pathetic animals that can’t understand the commands, intentions or inbuilt limitations of their rescuers—just as dogs ascribe total beneficence or malevolence, coupled with omnipotence, to the humans they encounter, and expect or fear immediate and reliable results accordingly. Toddlers do the same thing, and dogs frequently achieve the mental level of human toddlers, but they can do no more than that, whereas we humans grow up, albeit dragging our toddlerhood behind us as a weight that burdens us our whole lives. In this myth, we are meant to grow into real adulthood, for which what we think of as the highest achievements of humanity are only the first requirements for starting to achieve maturity. The saints are like the elementary-school students of the Invisible World, according to this mythic story—like first-graders, they are able to speak with fewer grammatical errors than toddlers, but still unable to read very well.
In this mythic tale of the holy agnostics (why not give in and call them that?), the invisible world tells us fairy tales because it knows we aren’t capable of reading college textbooks—or even of doing more than listening to children’s tales around the campfire. As a result of this, and as a result of the fact that the invisible world is invisible, and only intermittently able to communicate with us at all, some toddlers argue that because the grown-ups tell us fairy tales and give us rules of behavior that don’t always make sense, therefore there are no grown-ups, and we toddlers invented them because we wish we had a mommy and daddy to feed and teach us. But in reality there are no absent parents, only the world of two-year-olds into which we are born and in which we shall die as two-year-olds, having reached the limits of our potential.
Well. That’s a tall tale, indeed. Nobody could believe a story like that. But it seems to have turned into a cultural meme that crops up in the most unexpected forms and places.
The most improbable people seem to burst out with exclamations like this one: —Are we in fact like these isolated children, divided among ourselves between two passionately held opinions: one, that despite all the contrary evidence, the parents are in perfect control of the playroom and just staying out of the way to allow us to learn by making mistakes (yeah, right), and two, that there are no parents, and there is nothing but the playroom in which the toddlers made up the notion of “parents.” And then there are options three, four, and five, et seq. (quite a long seq., too), of which no one is really compatible with the others no matter how much we declare with passion, “Truth is one, the sages call it by many names.” One semi-grown-up option might be to declare that the undecidable is undecidable, without foreclosing the possibility that different circumstances and research instruments might make it become more nearly decidable.
—Childhood’s end, but not quite in the way Arthur C. Clarke meant it.
I’m not sure what it means that this cluster of just-so stories is turning into a commonly held (un)belief, but it appears to me that it is so. And those who believe it are properly ridiculed by the faithful of both camps (religious and atheist), for they are making up fairy tales that are only another explanation for the fragmentary evidence, although a few of them stick to the evidence and insist, as I said, that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. But they still insist that the evidence is real, even if all the explanations are not; and that is what makes them true agnostics.
We are witnessing (or I am, anyway) the evolution of an ad hoc religion that reminds us (or me, anyway) that all religions are grounded in primary experience, and that primary experience is indeed bewilderment just as the Victorian atheists said (also the Muslim and Christian mystics, but let that pass). But since there is no need to be bewildered by natural phenomena, and since everything is by definition natural, the religion seems to assume that the Invisible World is a part of nature because everything is nature, and the personal forces that made us are as natural as anything else, just as an infinite Creator, gods, angels, sprites, elves, fauns, or any other invisible force would be. Miracles would be a force of nature, and miraculous healings in particular.
Most of the time this opinion comes clad in treacly New Age trappings, but more and more often it seems to arrive as a kind of holy agnosticism, a sense of bewilderment and sometimes vague dread at the existence of forces that we so much do not understand that skeptics spend much of their lives trying to prove that they do not exist.
Indeed, according to the best representatives of this conceptual option, we cannot understand some of them, because there is no way ever to trust the supposed communications with invisible personal forces; we know too much about the unconscious mind and the biomechanics of hallucination.
Other phenomena are comprehensible in principle, but are such weak and inconstant forces that it is possible to treat them as nonexistent because they are unlikely to beat statistical randomness under experimentally controlled conditions.
They are like the rare diseases that were long considered not to exist because only one person in 468 million has one of them. “Chest pain and heart flutter? You’re just stressed out, look at you, calm down.” Today, mitral valve prolapse is if anything overdiagnosed; like the autism spectrum in the area of behavioral mysteries, it has become the diagnosis of choice for any vague symptoms that don’t fit into the standard textbook definition. If it had been one of the uncommon disorders rather than a common one not discovered until the 1970s, it would still be regarded as a side effect of psychological tension rather than a birth defect of the heart.
Hence the occasional cases of precognition and telepathy and other paranormal phenomena are, according to the religious agnostics, cases of emergent properties that are dependent on internal training plus external need. This vision of the body and its possibilities dates back at least as far as Michael Murphy’s weird 1972 novel Golf in the Kingdom, the only metaphysical tract to encode its teachings in a tale about a mystical Scottish golf professional and his secret speculations.
Or rather, not metaphysical, except in the sense of meta-physical, in the sense of meta-real or the meta-novel. Physical, only more so.
Murphy carried this opinion, by way of his Esalen Institute, into a whole oeuvre of not-knowing, from his novel An End to Ordinary History about Central Asian Sufism and the Soviet Union’s parapsychological research program to his compendium of marginal and not-so-marginal physical forces The Future of the Body. More recently, the historian of Asian religion Jeffrey Kripal has taken up the task of explaining why this agnostic variety of religious belief has been a part of American culture, and to some extent European culture, ever since the Renaissance, and before that was a minority opinion in global religions. (More often the marginal has been made mainstream by being explained as a god-inspired mystery, and by the way, I alliterate excessively here with semi-malicious deliberation.)
Kripal is so good at teasing out the frequently nonsensical strands of belief in bewilderment that it becomes possible to dismiss the whole thing as just another form of self-deception, just like the philosophical meta-systems that took the place of religion after the Enlightenment, pretending to understand the iron laws of history. And indeed, most of the more perceptive religious agnostics have begun with the question, “Is this real? Or am I nuts?” (I have said before that the problem is that too few of them ever answer, “This is real, and I am nuts, but my craziness does not negate the reality of the phenomenon, it just makes it impossible for me to assert anything about it in a believable fashion.”)
The Cypriot-emigre professor of sociology Kyriacos Markides has also fiddled for years with forces that he does not understand and opinions of others that make vertiginous sense without being supported by more than overinterpreted evidence—his The Magus of Strovolos and successive books studied an empirically minded Cypriot healer who insisted that his researches revealed the real structure of the universe. (As in the American idiom, “they all say that,” unfortunately enough, and their would-be empirical researches parallel one another without being compatible). Having seen enough strange things to convince him that something was real amid all the craziness, Markides went on to examine the marginal aspects of Eastern Orthodox spirituality, for which the Church (or Ekklesia, since Markides continually reminds us that he is translating from oral accounts in contemporary Greek) has its own explanations, which are not necessarily those of Markides. In fact, he has his theories that verge on strongly held beliefs, but no explanations.
This type of “having and not-having” (I quote the phrase from the late death-of-God theologian William Hamilton) is like Wallace Stevens’ “We believe without belief, beyond belief,” which sociologist Robert Bellah found to be a prevalent condition fifty or so years ago. Today it has migrated to various margins, and its proponents range from the intellectually respectable researcher to the truly dismissible lunatic—something that could also be said about the New Atheism as well as the New Agnosticism. (I started out calling it Holy Agnosticism at the beginning of this essay because I was making a joke about the 1950s comic books in which Kripal finds the transmuted religious discontents of American culture—comics in which Batman’s suspect sidekick Robin was given to exclaiming “holy” followed by ever more improbable nouns, as though he had read Allen Ginsberg’s beat-generation poem “Howl” and been overly impressed by it. “Holy agnosticism, Batman!” But that is just too silly, and “religious agnosticism” seems to make more sense as a description, since these folks believe in religion, they just don’t believe in believing.)
There does seem to be an emergent myth that serves as an interim explanatory principle—one that is propounded with the cautionary note that it may all be nonsense. And that is that there is an invisible world of personal forces that find, for whatever reason, that they cannot communicate very well with us. In fact, they are so dimly reflected in our belief systems that even the most ardent of believers “walk by faith, not by sight.” And “belief would be belief in the wrong thing,” as the American-born British poet T. S. Eliot put it in a modernist poem nobody reads any longer outside of a few survey classes in English literature.
These forces seem to want us to wake up, but wake up to what is a matter of contention among the assorted agnostics. Some are inclined towards the gnostic rather than agnostic belief that they want “to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle” (which is how Ludwig Wittgenstein, no gnostic he, defined his linguisic philosophy)—to effect a prison break for souls imprisoned in matter. (Philip K. Dick spent a few thousand pages of exegesis weighing this option versus all the other possible options, speaking of the “Is this real, or am I nuts” phenomenon—Jeffrey Kripal is among the annotators who explicated Dick’s interminable Exegesis in a recent edition.) Others, and Murphy would be among them, believe that matter is where it is at, but that we don’t understand matter and its possibilities, we just think we do. Perhaps we should call these folks the religious materialists.
There is a whole subcategory that believes that our present situation may be the residue of a failed experiment, or a flawed creation, rather than the aftermath of a rescue that went wrong. This belief-ful agnosticism (“think these thoughts without believing them”) embraces versions of a mythos that goes something like this: From the perspective of the Other Side, we really are like pathetic animals that can’t understand the commands, intentions or inbuilt limitations of their rescuers—just as dogs ascribe total beneficence or malevolence, coupled with omnipotence, to the humans they encounter, and expect or fear immediate and reliable results accordingly. Toddlers do the same thing, and dogs frequently achieve the mental level of human toddlers, but they can do no more than that, whereas we humans grow up, albeit dragging our toddlerhood behind us as a weight that burdens us our whole lives. In this myth, we are meant to grow into real adulthood, for which what we think of as the highest achievements of humanity are only the first requirements for starting to achieve maturity. The saints are like the elementary-school students of the Invisible World, according to this mythic story—like first-graders, they are able to speak with fewer grammatical errors than toddlers, but still unable to read very well.
In this mythic tale of the holy agnostics (why not give in and call them that?), the invisible world tells us fairy tales because it knows we aren’t capable of reading college textbooks—or even of doing more than listening to children’s tales around the campfire. As a result of this, and as a result of the fact that the invisible world is invisible, and only intermittently able to communicate with us at all, some toddlers argue that because the grown-ups tell us fairy tales and give us rules of behavior that don’t always make sense, therefore there are no grown-ups, and we toddlers invented them because we wish we had a mommy and daddy to feed and teach us. But in reality there are no absent parents, only the world of two-year-olds into which we are born and in which we shall die as two-year-olds, having reached the limits of our potential.
Well. That’s a tall tale, indeed. Nobody could believe a story like that. But it seems to have turned into a cultural meme that crops up in the most unexpected forms and places.
The most improbable people seem to burst out with exclamations like this one: —Are we in fact like these isolated children, divided among ourselves between two passionately held opinions: one, that despite all the contrary evidence, the parents are in perfect control of the playroom and just staying out of the way to allow us to learn by making mistakes (yeah, right), and two, that there are no parents, and there is nothing but the playroom in which the toddlers made up the notion of “parents.” And then there are options three, four, and five, et seq. (quite a long seq., too), of which no one is really compatible with the others no matter how much we declare with passion, “Truth is one, the sages call it by many names.” One semi-grown-up option might be to declare that the undecidable is undecidable, without foreclosing the possibility that different circumstances and research instruments might make it become more nearly decidable.
—Childhood’s end, but not quite in the way Arthur C. Clarke meant it.
I’m not sure what it means that this cluster of just-so stories is turning into a commonly held (un)belief, but it appears to me that it is so. And those who believe it are properly ridiculed by the faithful of both camps (religious and atheist), for they are making up fairy tales that are only another explanation for the fragmentary evidence, although a few of them stick to the evidence and insist, as I said, that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. But they still insist that the evidence is real, even if all the explanations are not; and that is what makes them true agnostics.
