BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: February Things
Thursday, February 26, 2009
February Things
It's been a while since I've posted anything here, and while I've been putting up cell phone stuff on my twitter pretty regularly, 1) most of you don't look there, and 2) 140 chars at a time isn't that fascinating anyway. This may be a long post, since I've got several points to make, but I don't have the time to really do it right, with lots of background info links. I was out most of the afternoon, and this evening I'm trying to finish a column for the D3 site in time to have a couple of hours after that for fiction, with dinner and an hour at the gym sandwiched in between. So imagine the following post being more explanatory, with links to historical information on shamanistic societies, exorcisms, LDS cosmology, etc. And then pretend I wrote it like that in the first place.
Obama gave his first speech before both houses of Congress this week. It wasn't a "state of the union" since presidents don't call their first speech that anymore, but Obama's talk was fairly sweeping and quite formal. I thought it was a good speech, but nothing surprising leapt out at me. Nice oration and some good turns of phrase, as Obama always does. Watch it here, if you've not already.
The bigger news (at least amongst political types, as opposed to real people who actually care about the results instead of the horserace posturing) of the night was the almostuniversally, bipartisianly-condemned response from the Republican governor of Louisana, Bobby Jindal. I haven't been able to bring myself to sit through it, but Chris Matthews' pithy and excoriating commentary on it seems to sum things up pretty well. (Skip to about 1:00 for him, after Maddow hamina-haminas.)
Matthews comments have been overshadowed by his accidentally-on-mike "Oh god!" reaction to Jindal's Lurch-like entrance, and conservatives are fulminating against him because of that, and because it lets them change the subject from Jindal's awful speech and the total lack of alternative policy proposals on their side of the aisle. That puts Matthews in his usual role, since 90% of the time I've heard of him has been after he's said something outrageous -- most often something that outrages the left, rather than the right. For instance, during the last presidential campaign he famously said that Hilary owed her career to sympathy votes over the fact that her husband fucked around on her
Matthews is very id; for a newscaster he has some amazingly large gaps in the filter between his thoughts and his words, and he's prone to blurting out his honest opinions.
As for Jindal, I know almost nothing about him. I've heard that he's one of the smartest Republican politician around (that may be an oxymoron). He's also a young, thin, articulate immigrant (he's Indian), and as a rising political star the comparisons to Obama are obvious. Jindal was mentioned frequently as a potential VP nominee in 2008, and he's one of the leading potentials for the 2012 Republican slot.
What makes him interesting, from the little I've heard, is that he's an extremely devout, old-school Catholic. How devout? He's written, in all seriousness, about participating in exorcisms. He contributed a long article about one such event to the conservative Catholic Oxford Journal Review in 1994. The article is behind a subscription wall, but it's been widely reported upon and excerpted from. For instance. It's worth skimming that to see the circumstances of Jindal's alleged exorcism, since they're pretty telling.
Nickle summary: A girl Bobby knew was very depressed and emotional during a hard patch in her life. Her best friend had recently committed suicide and she was having severe health problems. She was in a social group of very religious Catholics, and was actually at a late night prayer meeting when she collapsed and started freaking out. They all prayed over her for hours, physically restraining her when she tried to escape, and after a great deal of resistance they finally broke her will and she acquiesced to the group's wishes, succumbed to amnesia to block out the hours of psychological torture, and happily read parts of the Bible to get them to let go of her, etc. Bonus; they cured her cancer in the process!
It's a fairly riveting account if you share Jindal's belief in the cosmology and mythology of Catholicism. Demons exist and possess people, causing illness and insanity, and they can be forced out by concentrated prayer and devotion and Biblical passages. I'd say it was a relatively harmless ritual/mass delusion, except that nuns and priests doing this sort of thing routinely murder the mentally ill in their misguided efforts. Not to mention withholding or eschewing actual medical treatment in preference for medieval magical remedies.
If that sounds harsh, look at the situation with fresh eyes. Imagine you've never heard of Catholicism or Christianity, and use your modern knowledge of what causes mental illness, how people react when they're disturbed, etc. It becomes a classic example of brainwashing and indoctrination. A large group with a firm belief in imaginary monsters physically and emotionally restrains a mentally disturbed individual, repeating simple mantras over and over again until the afflicted person breaks and gives in, or goes completely out of their mind. Is there any way you wouldn't consider it a criminal form of torture if it happened to someone you knew, who had fallen into some oddball cult?
If you can't imagine the person going along with it, backtrack a bit. They were indoctrinated into the mythology/religion from their earliest childhood, and they've grown up in a society where those beliefs are honored and respected. The mentally ill person has heard for years that some special types of illnesses are caused by demons and spirits. The person doesn't want to be sick or crazy, they would love to be healthy, and they would love to find some external cause of their misery. After all, most mental illness diagnoses are a life sentence. You don't cure schizophrenia; you just find behavioral or pharmacological ways to ameliorate the symptoms. How tempting would it be to reject that diagnosis and to say, "There's a demon in me. If I pray enough it'll go away and I'll be all better." Talk about faith healing!
The other aspects of exorcisms, and needing an exorcist, are well-documented; see any history about the Nuns of Loudun, for a good case study. Being "possessed" allows repressed people who are forced to live a very controlled, regimented, powerless life to rebel completely. It's seldom something they choose consciously, but when under the control of demons they can let loose in ways they are never permitted at any other time. They an scream, curse, express sexual desires, fight back against untouchable authority figures, etc. As most of us know, it's extremely satisfying to do things we're not supposed to do. In that light it's obvious why most "possessed" people have always and will always be women or children in traditional, patriarchal societies. If demons are in them they can let loose, completely freak out and after blowing off some steam they're able to calm down and return to normal. I'm not saying these people are faking or pretending; many of them are legitimately mad, at the time. It's just a fairly predictable form of madness, given the circumstances that drive them to it.
Furthermore, this approach (exorcism) has long worked, for some people. Everything in religion is very well refined by evolution and thousands of years of trail and error. Things that don't work or that the faithful don't respond to get jettisoned and replaced. (Or the religion hobbled by maladaptive practices is replaced by one that's more responsive to human needs.) If exorcism never worked, it would have long since fallen into total disuse. (Note that "worked" in this instance doesn't mean it necessarily helps the afflicted. We're talking about the survival and furtherance of the religion, and that result may or may not coincide with the exorcism helping the afflicted. If the exorcism victim dies and the community concludes that it was because they were possessed, and that conclusion strengthens the society's belief in the religion and ritual, then the "treatment" was successful, in the evolutionary success of the religion/meme.)
The placebo effect is well known, and it can certainly work on mental illnesses as well. If the sick person sincerely believes that they will be cured by holding a magic feather, or breathing special smoke, or reading certain lines from a sacred book, there's a good chance they will be. Especially when their illness is something undefinable and internal, like mental illness. Now obviously they won't be cured of the chemical imbalances in their brain that brought on their behavioral abnormalities, but they can certainly achieve temporary amelioration of the symptoms. They just to believe. Like Dumbo.
Also, needless (I hope) to say, the fact that someone believes in something strongly enough to be cured (or made sick in the first place) by it proves nothing about the veracity of the belief or belief system in the first place. There's a timeless and very appropriate Nietzsche quote about that one.
Every human culture has always had some crazy people, so the organizing, controlling, and explanatory mythology and belief systems of cultures have to address it. All religions that last for any length of time are refined and improved upon, so obviously they have to provide some answers for, or at least explanations about, inexplicable phenomena like mental illness, (as well as offering counsel on marital relations, parent/child conduct, conflict resolution, weather, world origins, and death explanations, etc). I can't go into a whole discussion of the function and evolution of religion, but it's a fascinating topic. If you don't want to read books, check out this lecture on the issue by famed historian Jared Diamond, author (more recently) of Guns, Germs, and Steel.
I thought of exorcism, though not of Bobby Jindal, when I was visited by a pair of bright-eyed, red-cheeked, fresh-faced, quiet, polite, and very sincere Mormons. They were both white males of about 20, and they came gently knocking at my door one rainy afternoon last week. I saw them before they arrived, since they walked past my front window to my next door neighbor. I could have ignored the door, or refused to answer, but I got up and spoke with them for a moment. I was in the middle of some website work, so I didn't have that long to tarry, but I did enjoy a brief chat.
I don't resent them or feel threatened by them; on the contrary, I'm so content with my (non) religious views and opinions at this point, with all of the evolutionary and cultural understanding I have of the ways and functions of faith, that nothing anyone says about their beliefs is going to sway me. I find the psychology of belief and the function of religion quite interesting (as should be obvious from how often I blog about it), so I'm curious to interact with true believers. People who are devoting their lives to something that's clearly got no factual veracity, but that provides them with other benefits, are quite worthy of study.
I'm not much of a charity case, so I'm not concerned with trying to deconvert them, or trying to shake their faith. As the famously irreligious Thomas Jefferson said, what nonsense other men believe in neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. (Except maybe it does one, or both of those things. I'll get to that in a minute.) If they want to waste major portions of their lives wandering around Northern California, trying to get people to switch their magical belief from one sect of Christianity to another more modern one... who cares? Imagine if Yankees fans went door to door, trying to talk people out of rooting for the Red Sox or Cardinals, and into wearing the pin stripes? (Substitute the sports teams of your preference if you're outside of the US or as uninterested in baseball as I am.) You'd think it a fairly ridiculous pastime, but would you really care? Would you argue with the Yankee advocates about the falsity of their beliefs, the error of their fraternal adherence, and the walking stain that is A-roid?
Well, perhaps. I did to the Mormons, at least a little. I didn't go into a whole rant about the evident falsity of their religion, though it would have been easy to do. Anyone can; spend ten minutes making the most cursory evaluation of the life of Joseph Smith and you know enough to view the historical foundations of the LDS as a Scientology-esque scam. Joseph Smith was a convicted forger and counterfeiter with a long (legal) history of frauds and rackets, who one day just happened to find some golden tablets written in Egyptian hieroglyphics, which he translated with the aid of a magic stone given him by the angel Maroni, which told an absurd history (effortlessly debunked by any real historian) about the origin of the American Indians as lost Israelites. It's literally LOL quality religious fan-fic, as is the frequently redundant and error-filled, slightly-updated version of the New Testament Smith dictated, I mean translated from the golden tablets. Which Maroni eventually whisked back up to heaven before anyone else could see them.
I left out a bunch of the more absurd details, but trust me, it's literally unbelievable. No one, who wasn't raised from childhood to overlook the absurdities, could grant any belief system that stemmed from such dubious foundational events a drop of credence. The Mormon eschatology is equally ludicrous, with the risen and returned Jesus making stops in Missouri. Where the Garden of Eden was located. (No, really.)
But all that given... who cares? The foundational events of other religions are no less ludicrous, and are frequently more so. Most benefit from having origins that are more shrouded by the mists of history, but they're no less obviously invented fictions. Of course gods and religions are man made, instead of the other way around. No open-minded individual who has made it through a semester of world/comparative religion, or has read a fair amount on the subject, can doubt that. To do otherwise shows an extreme solipsism and self delusion.
"Every other person to have ever lived on Earth grew up believing the religions and mythologies of their society. None of them could have known any better, and they were all wrong and they all believed in false gods. What does that have to do with me? After all, the religion I happened to grow up practicing is the one true one. Lucky break, that. See you in Heaven!"
So no, I didn't go into those details when speaking to the Mormons, but I did ask a few questions about Jesus returning to Missouri, and I mentioned the golden tablets of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Comments which earned me blank stares. I don't think they were faking; they'd just been kept ignorant of the events that purportedly laid behind the foundation of their religion. A wise decision, for men who wished to maintain their blissful belief in their particular highly-organized system of nonsense.
I pointed out earlier that the sincerity of a belief does nothing to testify to its accuracy or veracity. As a corollary, I'll argue that the falsity of a belief system doesn't necessarily have detrimental effect on the consoling potential of belief in it. The fact that Mormonism is nonsense on a fundamental level doesn't mean that people who do believe in it don't derive great comfort, consolation, and peace from their beliefs. Santa Clause puts five year olds into a pretty blissful state too. This point is fairly obvious on a macro level; most people on earth believe in at least one religion, and most people say that their religion gives their life meaning, order, structure, etc. Let's be generous and accept their testimony without cross examination, but that just shuts the trap. If everyone believes in different things, there are countless different things, and most of those things are incompatible, then most people believe in nonsense. It's just math.
Returning to the Mormons, the second guy didn't talk much, but he eventually took his best shot, and he aimed with a non-factual gun. He said he'd give me his "why I'm a Mormon" answer in thirty seconds. I told him to go for it, and he did a decent job. He basically said that he felt the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in his heart, and that he had a personal relationship with Jesus and that he knew He had sacrificed himself because he loved the world, etc. It was basically a happy-times, modernized, historically-ignorant version of the moral of the New Testament, and more amusing to me, it was entirely nondenominational. Nothing the guy said had any special relation to Mormonism; his exact speech could have been given by any type of Protestant or Catholic.
Eventually they asked me what I believed in. I felt rather Christian by that point, and avoided saying, "reality." I instead asserted my opinion that nothing in the world required supernatural explanations, and that I was quite sure that religions were man's inventions to explain things, and that everyone eventually found a religion that helped them get through the night, and answered the questions they found most vexing. The two missionaries nodded and smiled, I think not even attempting to grasp the larger meaning of what I was saying. And after a few minutes and a pair of limp handshakes, they went on their way.
Talking about it with the IG afterwards, her opinion was that they weren't hurting anything or anyone, and if their belief gave them comfort, then it was best to leave them to it. I didn't bring it up at the time, but occurred to me that she was basically giving a very kind version of Daniel Dennett's "belief in belief" argument. It's a condescending opinion, when you boil it down, since it's essentially saying, "I don't need fairy tales to get through life, but those other small-minded people do, and we should just leave them to their little delusions."
I countered, basically to devil's advocate, that they were wasting 2 years of their life on the mission, and that rather than advocating for a different flavor of mental floss, they might have been doing something with actual use and consequences in the real world. No, they weren't likely to cure cancer at 19, wandering around San Rafael with zits on their foreheads and magical underwear under the black Dockers, but couldn't they be in college, getting an actual education and preparing for the real world?
Hypothetically, sure. Said the IG. But she pointed out what I already knew; that most people of that age (and every age) are wasting their lives anyway. And I couldn't argue that. Most guys their age are working some stupid pointless job, taking college classes they don't care about, living off their parents and playing a lot of video games, etc. Compared to that, proselytizing for the Yankees instead of the Dodgers, or vice versa, might be a worthy pursuit. At least they're developing some social skills, learning to talk to people, giving some thought (however misguided) to the larger questions in life, etc.
Yet at the same time, I can't help but think of charts like this, when I think about people devoting years of their life to one mythology or another.
This is somewhat hyperbolic, and humans were continuing to experiment with methods of metal fabrication and attempting architectural advancement during the Christian Dark Ages, but it's not an entirely flawed analogy, either. For most of the sixteen or seventeen centuries between the Romans and the Enlightenment, the vast majority of educated human effort went to improvements in military equipment, or the arguing of theology. Building better swords/guns/boats/cannons/etc had nothing but death and destruction as its immediate goal, but long term those technological advances were useful in constructing the foundation for modern society. What did 1500 years of "angels on the head a pin" do for us? Then or now? It's not as if something magical changed on earth that made building semiconductors possible in 1950 that wasn't there in 1550. Or 1050. Or 550. What changed was the human societies became supportive of intellectual endeavor by non-monks, for non-theological purposes.
Arguing applied philosophy is great for sophomores up late in the dorms, before they do something important in chemistry lab the next morning. When every educated person in Europe spends 500 years at it, to the exclusion of anything of any actual material importance, it's kind of retarding of human intellectual evolution. (And yes, there were advances being made in China and parts of Mesopotamia, but very little that did more than tread water on a technological progress scale. Gunpowder from China was a key advance, but it still took centuries for the chemistry to advance it significantly, and that wasn't accomplished until recent centuries. Read Guns, Germs, and Steel for more on when and why these advances occurred.)
And here's where the clever conclusion would go if I'd written this in anything other than stream of consciousness. Perhaps I'll read over it later tonight while grabbing a quick post-gym dinner, and see if I can fix it up a bit and bring it to a better ending than one of those lame pop songs that just fade out while repeating the chorus 50x.
Man, I hate songs that do that. There are some songs that I really want to like, but because they have like 2 verses and then the chorus repeated 8 times, I just can't.
Anyway, that graph is very western-centric and essentially bullshit. Western science may have stagnated, but in the middle east, asia and india science was still chugging along through the christian dark ages in the west. A lot of our preserved works from ancient egypt, greece and rome came from arabic copies made during that time period.
Hey, seems I can still remember some of my History of Science university course after all! Just not enough to actually be useful. I really wish I hadn't thrown my course reader out now.
True, the graph is western centric, but it's essentially correct from a modern, "computers and spaceships" perspective. The Muslim world kept alive a lot of the Greek and Roman writings during the Dark Ages in Europe, and China was flourishing and discovered gun powder, but nothing done anywhere on earth significantly advanced culture or technology until the Enlightenment and Renaissance in Europe.
To be sure, many places on earth were far more advanced and worth living in than Europe from oh, 300-1600AD, but it was Western Culture, Europe/US mostly, that incubated, from 1500-1900 or so, our modern scientific and technological society. I added a note in the original post on this, but read Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" for an informative and non-racist/manifest-destiny style account of why/how this happened.
South Park did an episode on Mormonism that was hilarious. The funniest part about it was that they didn't really even make fun of it. They just told the story and that alone was LOL-worthy.
If you haven't seen it, check it out: http://www.southparkzone.com/episode.php?vid=712
