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more thoughts on the Dalai Lama's visit (plus a few other topics)
If there are “farther reaches of human nature”—and there is no reason you should believe that there are until you have accumulated sufficient empirical evidence from your own controlled experiments—then we probably don’t understand them any more than we understand the nearer reaches of human nature.
For we are, by and large, clueless about our own nearer reaches…until recent neurological researches allowed us to see ourselves, we have been ascribing to lack of moral fiber, or unwillingness to focus (or what have you), personality defects that are actually the result of definable neurological deficits that have to be compensated for. They can be compensated for, and they must be, but everyone starts from a different set of physical structures within which individual adaptation to society has to take place.
As I’ve written before, this is not rocket science, so the theory doesn’t have to come first; just as human beings learned to throw rocks and spears accurately before they understood the basic mechanics of motion, and subsequently developed a fair number of advanced technological devices without being able to define the theoretical reasons why they worked, spiritual practices have been developed to manage and modify human physiology ever since our ancestors lived in the Paleolithic caves. They didn’t have to know what their neurological deficits actually were to start finding methods to compensate for them and repair their behavior. Methods were developed, and codified in religions.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the exterior spiritual presences long assumed to be messing with our heads in one degree or another don’t exist; they either do or they don’t, but in either case we would be encountering them with the same kind of self-delusion and projection of interior psychic contents that we bring to everything else in the world, from cats to comets to credit default swaps. We never quite get things right, but some things we get considerably worse than others. (And we won’t allow ourselves to be convinced that we do that. We won’t allow ourselves to be convinced of that most of all when we think we have already been trained in getting things right and in being properly suspicious of our own motives and our own thought processes.)
I am not sure why it is so hard for so many people to get this overall point across to their audiences, that at any moment the world is both smaller and larger than we think it is, and the human universe is more diverse than we think it is and not shaped exactly the way we think it is, and we need to learn that we need to learn to compensate for our predilections in that department. It is probably because we have all been immunized against seeing the world any differently from the way we already see it: we possess certain ingrained reactions based on our knowledge of hundreds of years of inherited responses and dozens of years of more recent counter-responses that are often merely the inherited responses with a minus sign in front of them.
Even the clichéd idea that we have to “think outside the box” has become a species of silliness that elicits a kneejerk reaction against the larger prospect that, well, maybe we do have to think differently about who we are and why we are and how much we can actually know about either question, or whether we can even ask the questions the right way.
People not only seem able to understand this point when it comes to their own areas of intellectual specialization (a.k.a. hobby horses or obsessions), they become downright evangelical in bringing the good news of disillusionment to their fellow humans. So now we all know that we are motivated by socially transmitted structures, and/or immediate material needs rationally considered, and/or inner impulses and biological imperatives encoded in our very genetics, and that that (singular) complex of forces is what makes us do what we do. Once we understand that we are that and only that, or so they say, we will see the world rightly.
Which means that we don’t and won’t. Because we are not that and only that. We are all of the above, plus a little more, or more likely minus a little.
What we actually are, we may not be capable of knowing. Or we may not have enough information just yet, or we may not have developed the psychological structures to make use of the information we already have.
And unfortunately, we don’t see that the psychic contagions that rage through our own particularly beloved ways of viewing the world, whether sociobiology or economic determinism or multidisciplinary anti-reductionist cognitive socioanthropology (I just made that last one up), are as full of woo-woo as whatever revelation has come down the psychic pike in the throwaway tabloids. It just sounds better, until someone points out where the argument has gone off the rails and vast quantities of data have been overinterpreted in favor of whatever impassioned debunking (usually) or synthesizing (less frequently but just as passionately) is being undertaken.
So it is particularly good to bang worldviews together for three days the way Emory University did with the Dalai Lama, with the chief rabbi of the Commonwealth and the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church and our leading primatologist and an actor and a novelist and ever so many other folks asking the Dalai Lama’s opinion on this and that, and trying to understand the answers.
The topics I have mentioned heretofore never came up, but they were present throughout the dialogue.
For we are, by and large, clueless about our own nearer reaches…until recent neurological researches allowed us to see ourselves, we have been ascribing to lack of moral fiber, or unwillingness to focus (or what have you), personality defects that are actually the result of definable neurological deficits that have to be compensated for. They can be compensated for, and they must be, but everyone starts from a different set of physical structures within which individual adaptation to society has to take place.
As I’ve written before, this is not rocket science, so the theory doesn’t have to come first; just as human beings learned to throw rocks and spears accurately before they understood the basic mechanics of motion, and subsequently developed a fair number of advanced technological devices without being able to define the theoretical reasons why they worked, spiritual practices have been developed to manage and modify human physiology ever since our ancestors lived in the Paleolithic caves. They didn’t have to know what their neurological deficits actually were to start finding methods to compensate for them and repair their behavior. Methods were developed, and codified in religions.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the exterior spiritual presences long assumed to be messing with our heads in one degree or another don’t exist; they either do or they don’t, but in either case we would be encountering them with the same kind of self-delusion and projection of interior psychic contents that we bring to everything else in the world, from cats to comets to credit default swaps. We never quite get things right, but some things we get considerably worse than others. (And we won’t allow ourselves to be convinced that we do that. We won’t allow ourselves to be convinced of that most of all when we think we have already been trained in getting things right and in being properly suspicious of our own motives and our own thought processes.)
I am not sure why it is so hard for so many people to get this overall point across to their audiences, that at any moment the world is both smaller and larger than we think it is, and the human universe is more diverse than we think it is and not shaped exactly the way we think it is, and we need to learn that we need to learn to compensate for our predilections in that department. It is probably because we have all been immunized against seeing the world any differently from the way we already see it: we possess certain ingrained reactions based on our knowledge of hundreds of years of inherited responses and dozens of years of more recent counter-responses that are often merely the inherited responses with a minus sign in front of them.
Even the clichéd idea that we have to “think outside the box” has become a species of silliness that elicits a kneejerk reaction against the larger prospect that, well, maybe we do have to think differently about who we are and why we are and how much we can actually know about either question, or whether we can even ask the questions the right way.
People not only seem able to understand this point when it comes to their own areas of intellectual specialization (a.k.a. hobby horses or obsessions), they become downright evangelical in bringing the good news of disillusionment to their fellow humans. So now we all know that we are motivated by socially transmitted structures, and/or immediate material needs rationally considered, and/or inner impulses and biological imperatives encoded in our very genetics, and that that (singular) complex of forces is what makes us do what we do. Once we understand that we are that and only that, or so they say, we will see the world rightly.
Which means that we don’t and won’t. Because we are not that and only that. We are all of the above, plus a little more, or more likely minus a little.
What we actually are, we may not be capable of knowing. Or we may not have enough information just yet, or we may not have developed the psychological structures to make use of the information we already have.
And unfortunately, we don’t see that the psychic contagions that rage through our own particularly beloved ways of viewing the world, whether sociobiology or economic determinism or multidisciplinary anti-reductionist cognitive socioanthropology (I just made that last one up), are as full of woo-woo as whatever revelation has come down the psychic pike in the throwaway tabloids. It just sounds better, until someone points out where the argument has gone off the rails and vast quantities of data have been overinterpreted in favor of whatever impassioned debunking (usually) or synthesizing (less frequently but just as passionately) is being undertaken.
So it is particularly good to bang worldviews together for three days the way Emory University did with the Dalai Lama, with the chief rabbi of the Commonwealth and the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church and our leading primatologist and an actor and a novelist and ever so many other folks asking the Dalai Lama’s opinion on this and that, and trying to understand the answers.
The topics I have mentioned heretofore never came up, but they were present throughout the dialogue.
no subject
If we are only those three things on your list, then it's really bad because there is no redemption. Then we are built so that we have to act in ways that we have to perceive as wrong, bad, or evil, and there is no soul that we can extricate from the trappings of society, necessity, and material constitution.
In either case it's very hard not to be convinced that there is an ulterior purpose for our awareness of our conciousness' inadequacy to the rules of this world. Maybe the first thing we need to learn, is to modulate that conviction, or even better, to do away with it; to learn that the inadequacy will not go away whether there is a purpose for it or not. Once we've learned that we might have a better chance of dealing successfully with the inadequacy itself.