Beyond Rivalry

My irregular annotated link dump:

>> Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death by Jesse Bering in the 22 Oct. 2008 SciAm:

The crux: "So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the 'simulation constraint hypothesis,' is that in attempting to imagine what it's like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences -- because that's how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn't 'like' anything we've ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren't good enough."

Fun for the Whole Family: "In a 2004 study reported in Developmental Psychology, Florida Atlantic University psychologist David F. Bjorklund and I presented 200 three- to 12-year-olds with a puppet show. Every child saw the story of Baby Mouse, who was out strolling innocently in the woods. 'Just then,' we told them, 'he notices something very strange. The bushes are moving! An alligator jumps out of the bushes and gobbles him all up. Baby Mouse is not alive anymore.'"

What We Can't UnLearn: "Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people didn't cease to exist simply because you couldn't see them. Developmental psychologists even have a fancy term for this basic concept: 'person permanence.' Such an off-line social awareness leads us to tacitly assume that the people we know are somewhere doing something. ... We can't simply switch off our person-permanence thinking just because someone has died. This inability is especially the case, of course, for those whom we were closest to and whom we frequently imagined to be actively engaging in various activities when out of sight."

>> For a Fee, a Thai Temple Offers a Head Start on Rebirth by Seth Mydans in the NYT, 26 Sept. 2008. (Reminds me of a vividly described scene in the movie My Dinner with Andre.)  What interests me about the Thai story is the explicit connection between anxiety due to the state of the economy (i.e., decline in prosperity) and the need for this kind of burial and resurrection ritual:

"Nine big pink coffins dominate the grand hall of the temple, and every day hundreds of people take their turns climbing in for a [minute and a half] as monks chant a dirge. Then, at a command, the visitors clamber out again cleansed -- they believe -- of the past. ... A cardboard sign warns visitors not to stand behind the coffins, where bad karma sucked from the 'dying' devotees may still be hovering ...

"It is a renewal for our times, as recent economic hardship brings uncertainty and people try seeking a bailout on life. In growing numbers, they come here from around Thailand to join what has become an assembly line of resurrection.

"'When the economy is down, we latch our hopes onto some supernatural power,' said Ekachai Uekrongtham, the writer-director whose movie The Coffin is in Thai cinemas now with a plot revolving around such funerals for the living."

>> Psychology Voting: 'My Candidate, Myself,' by Robert Burton in Salon, 22 Sept. 2008 (I previously cited Burton's work on certainty when it appeared in a 9 Oct. SciAm piece): The lead-off quote is this: "Let's make sure that there is certainty during uncertain times" -- George W. Bush, 2008.

Burton laments humans' inability to change our minds, to view our own opinions with skepticism, to refuse to be swayed by logical appeal.

He cites a 1999 paper reporting on a study of Cornell undergraduates, which found that the most incompetent people overestimate their abilities to the greatest degree. In other words, "People who lack the knowledge or wisdom to perform well are often unaware of this fact. That is, the same incompetence that leads them to make wrong choices also deprives them of the savvy necessary to recognize competence, be it their own or anyone else's." And, conversely, "smart people tend to believe that everyone else 'gets it.'" They overestimate other people's abilities.

Further: "Closely allied with this unshakable self-confidence in one's decisions is a second separate aspect of meta-cognition, the feeling of being right. ... [F]eelings of conviction, certainty and other similar states of 'knowing what we know' may feel like logical conclusions, but are in fact involuntary mental sensations that function independently of reason. ...  The evidence is substantial that these feelings do not correlate with the accuracy or quality of the thought." And, "Like other powerful mental states such as love, anger and fear, they are extraordinarily difficult to dislodge through rational arguments."

He cites another study in which "staunch party members from both sides" are asked to "evaluate negative (defamatory) information about their 2004 presidential choice:

"Areas of the brain (prefrontal cortex) normally engaged during reasoning failed to show increased activation. Instead, the limbic system -- the center for emotional processing -- lit up dramatically. ...'[B]oth Republicans and Democrats 'reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted.'"

Burton suggests that we would know more about our political candidates if we could give them thought experiments that would demonstrate how they think. He'd also like to focus on "each candidate's intellectual grasp of scientific method, from choosing and evaluating evidence to seeing how they would respond to a well-constructed contrary line of reasoning." And what do they do when they are presented with evidence that their answers are wrong? Can the candidates recognise their intellectual limitations? And can we?

I'm re-reading James Alison's Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatalogical Imagination. Alison speaks of the importance of the Resurrection as a subversion of our human story (which is framed by death) -- and not as the abolition of the human story -- and as "including that which is capable of being rescued and transformed: the human story of violence and victimization," and he calls to mind the English mystic Julian of Norwich in this context:

"Julian of Norwich ... affirms that in heaven our sins will be not shame, but glory to us. This seems to me to be the authentically Catholic intuition. I try to make sense of it in terms of the transvestite prostitutes whom I knew in Brazil when they were in the final phrase of their struggle with AIDS. I hope to know them again in heaven, not so transmogrified that their personal life story has been, in each case, abolished, but rather so utterly alive that their fake beauty, arduously cultivated, their sad personal stories of envy, violence, frustration in love, and their illness have become trophies which are not sources of shame, but which add to their beauty and joy."

And oh, that we would live more often in heaven now.

House: People get what they get. It's got nothing to do with what they deserve.   (House MD, ep. 5x01, Death Changes Everything)

Reminds me of a (fictional?) poem quoted in a crime novel I read on my vacation:

"People don't die because they're bad.

They die because they're available." (The Falls, Ian Rankin)

"'Is this any time to make enemies?'"

-- Voltaire, on his deathbed, on being told to renounce Satan

David Foster Wallace, postmodern author who ended his life last week at the age of 46 (RIP), talks about the real value of education in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech.

I'm going to be away until the end of September and won't be posting, but I leave you with Foster's exceptionally honest words to college grads, which include these:

"Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence.

"We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real. ...

"As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. ...

AN EXAMPLE: Having to shop for dinner after working 8-10 hours at a challenging, boring, stressful, daily job and dealing with crazy traffic and awful muzak and carts with bad wheels and people who get in your way and aren't nice, and so on:

"The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

 

"Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

"

You get the idea."

Read the rest for something sublime.

Love this, from Rowan Williams via Inhabitatio Dei:

"To believe in Jesus' God, the God of unconditional accessibility and even-handed compassion, to believe in an anarchic mercy that ignores order, rank and merit, is to accept that our projects and patterns are the mark of failure, of illusion, of the infantile belief that we can dictate truth and reality. Because it is menacing and painful to be confronted with the knowledge that our constructions of controlled sense are liable to be empty self-serving, we readily turn to violence against the bearers of such knowledge: in Johannine terms, we have decided that we want to stay blind when the light is there before us, claiming we can see perfectly well."  --  Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (1990)

At Overcoming Bias today, report of a study finding that "when we are reminded of when others have victimized us, we are less able to see that we victimize others."

Researchers reminded participants from the U.S. and Canada, and, separately, North American Jewish participants, of various attacks and atrocities, including, variously, the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S., the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Nazi atrocities in Poland during World War II, a deadly terrorist attack in Sri Lanka, and the genocide in Cambodia.

All the groups were less likely to perceive "the distress the [Iraq] war has caused many Iraqis, and less likely to feel collective responsibility" when they were reminded of an attack in which they felt themselves to be victims.

For U.S. participants, reminders of both the 9/11 attacks and the attack on Pearl Harbor caused participants to feel less guilt or responsibility for the distress of Iraqis than when reminded of the tragedy in Poland. The Jewish volunteers, on the other hand, felt "reduced guilt and responsibility for Israeli actions that cause suffering among Palestinians when they are first reminded about the Holocaust, compared with when they are reminded about the genocide in Cambodia." Canadians showed no difference among the scenarios, none of which affected Canadians personally.

This, I think, is why resentment is so corrosive. Resentment -- or re-sentiment -- is our internal, ongoing way of reminding ourselves of our own victimhood, of refreshing the feeling of being the victim, which apparently tends to make us more insensitive to others' victim status and less able to perceive our own role in perpetrating violence. But,  remembering times when we have felt victimised might also, perhaps, lead us to be more compassionate for victims of any sort, knowing what that experience feels like, realising that others suffer just as we do.

(Abstract of the study in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, June 2008)

This essay, "Messianic Politics: McCain and Obama," by Halden Doerge at Inhabitatio Dei, names the particular kind of drama that U.S. national politics seems to me now -- a battle of "messianic demagogues" vying for power, articulating and simultaneously cloaking their message and personality in Biblical and religio-heroic terms; apparently, it's what they think we want.

"The state of politics in America leads one to wonder, is a non-messianic mode of political discourse possible? Is it possible for America? I tend to doubt it. Both Obama and McCain were not the least bit shy about conjuring up a picture of America that is shrouded in biblical and messianic imagery."

Halden cites excerpts from both McCain's and Obama's convention speeches.

McCain's speech "was rhetorically crafted in such a way that it actually read more like a conversion narrative than anything else. McCain suffered greatly, and through suffering came to believe in the myth of American as some sort of savior. ... America is the savior. America demands total allegiance. As long as McCain is alive he will fight for America. His whole life, his whole being, his whole person has been offered up to her as a living sacrifice."

Likewise, in Obama's speech, America is "equated with the ekkelsia of God, the heavenly city in which difference is united in reconciliation, and the American spirit was very nearly equated with Christ's priestly work." Obama references 2 Corinthians 4:18, Eph. 2:11-17, and Heb. 10:23, but "rather than Christ faithfully making a sure and certain way for his people into the presence of God, this role is taken over by the promise that America will lead is 'into the future.'"

Halden feels that it's only through local politics and local community work that we find "any possibility of a non-messianic politics." I doubt that, since most politicians begin in local politics and very likely learn this rhetoric and take on this mantle long before they're actually running for U.S. president. (After all, even community organizers can become presidential candidates.) Still, maybe Halden is right, that working together within small communities we can have at least a hope of workers who don't take on the role of hero, saviour, sacrificial sufferer for the sake of all. 

I'm unclear whether Halden is claiming that Obama and McCain are actually equating America to Christ, but I am clear that he sees their words as idolatrous. (The comments on his essay further clarify this.) My observation in reading or hearing excerpts from all four candidates' speeches (Obama's, McCain's, Palin's, and Biden's) is that they and their speechwriters knowingly use the language of salvation, of conversion, and of the Bible to deftly insinuate themselves as not only able leaders but as our Christian saviours. Not really, of course, just rhetorically. Just a smidge outside the realm of reason, where it's hard to refute or even perceive the elements of the equation. While the overt message may be that America is the saviour (at least in these excerpts), the subtext is that an America led by McCain -- who offers up his special relationship with America's salvific powers -- or by Obama -- who speaks the language of the Bible and who carefully elides Christ with his America (one that unites, or it would, if he were leading it) in his listener's ears -- is our salvation, our healed and whole future.

---

Shortly after reading the essay cited above, I came upon this quote, by Quaker evangelical commentator Johan Maurer, which speaks to the same topic from another angle, I think:

"What fascinates me in the American political scene, where separation of church and state is an established constitutional principle, [is that] the current trend, charged by incredible emphasis on personality, seems to emphasize an almost aggressive attention to candidates' faith. Woe to the candidate who is not 'born again' according to the most trivial criteria."

Q.v. The Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency.

---

Then today I saw this, at "In All Things," the weblog of the Catholic weekly America:

"Jesus was a community organizer, Pilate a governor. ... Or so it is claimed by T-shirts printed off this week in the wake of the Republican VP nominee's put-down of Barack Obama's former profession in her speech last Wednesday."

This seems to me a (mis)use of religion to foment 'gotcha!' rivalry.

I recently read Patricia Highsmith's People Who Knock on the Door (1983), about a teenager and his family in early 1980s small-town middle America: "In a pitiless story of prying suburban self-righteousness, Patricia Highsmith introduces the Alderman family as the descend into moral crisis." The father and his younger son embrace the mores and rules of a moralistic church, while the older son, whose pov we follow, rejects it; "when the church elders start to interfere in [his] love life, events spiral toward violence."

The back cover had me at pitiless and prying (that, and the London Sunday Times' contextless blurb 'Venomously accurate') -- and it was a good read. Highsmith wrote Strangers on a Train (1950), which Hitchcock later filmed, and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), and is a master of creating a sense of disturbance and uneasiness in the most ordinary circumstances - or perhaps of revealing it.

Here is a comment on ritual, as the older son, Arthur, considers it in his mind:

"Ritual, he thought, kept people on an even keel. He remembered thinking this in the days just after Maggie's letter of good-bye to him, remembered making himself do things in the same old way, when he really felt like breaking something, maybe a piece of furniture. He remembered thinking that ritual kept people calm and that it was a major part of religion, the getting up and sitting down in church, the singing of hymns when nobody bothered to think much about what the words meant. Outward form. And what was inside half the time? Misery, hell and confusion. And why didn't people face it? Because they couldn't."

Pema Chödrön talks about the trait or activity of curiosity in Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living (1994). There are lots of ways to be curious: one can be intensely curious about one subject or one person, widely curious about everything or many things, curious about new places and experiences, sexually curious, culinarily curious, curious about how machines work, and so on.

I think I am particularly curious about the way people think and behave, individually and in groups, and I'm also curious about the details of stories, the details of experiences that happen to other people, and the details of beings in the natural world  -- So I hear myself asking questions about what colour and shape things are, how many there are of each kind, exactly what it felt like, every item they wore, what they ate, what other people thought about what happened, how the factors were related, how they got from A to B, what happened in that small time period you skipped over in your narrative, and so on.

Here is some of what Pema says about curiosity:

She talks about "the burden of maintaining your own private happiness," and suggests that we can "lighten up," and one way to lighten up is to be curious: "When your aspiration is to lighten up, you begin to have a sense of humor. Things just keep popping your serious state of mind. In addition to a sense of humor, a basic support for a joyful mind is curiosity, paying attention, taking an interest in the world around you. You don't actually have to be happy. But being curious without a heavy judgmental attitude helps. If you are judgmental, you can even be curious about that."

Later she speaks of a Zen master who, asked what enlightenment was, answered" 'Lots of space, nothing holy.' Holiness harks back to the sacred, which is what sacrifice creates -- it "makes sacred."  By contrast, for me, curiosity, and taking an interest, and making friends with oneself and others -- the elements of compassion -- seems very light and spacious, something I can do, something I would love to be in the midst of others doing, and I can see how it can help relieve us from rivalry; there is no urge to be 'holier than thou' (or more profane than thou) when there is no holy. And if I see that I am envious of you, or resentful of you, or you of me, I can be curious about it, look at it, consider it, without making it so personal and burdensome that I get entangled in it.

Pema speaks of this idea of working with our experience. She says, "We may so take for granted the multitude of daily minor irritations that we don't even think of them as something to work on. To some degree they are the hardest obstacles to work with, because they don't reveal themselves. The only way to know that these are arising is that you feel righteous indignation.  Let righteous indignation be your guide that someone is holding on to themselves, and that someone is probably you. Later, she talks about the slogan, 'Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment.' She says, "instead of the resentment being an obstacle, it's a reminder. Feeling irritated, restless, afraid and hopeless is a reminder to listen more carefully. ... Resentment becomes a reminder not to feel bad about ourselves but to open further to the pain and to the awkwardness. If we really want to communicate, we have to give up knowing what to do."

She also talks about using curiosity to ward off resentment (although she doesn't put it that way). One of the (many) slogans is 'Don't expect thanks.' I love this one, because so much resentment seems to come from this specific expectation. I think it's related to our yearning to be seen as helpers, as givers, that I talked about in my last post. When we're not thanked, we lack reassurance of our identity as a giver or helper, and we feel insecure about our role. Anyway, Pema expands on it: "More than to expect thanks, it would be helpful just to expect the unexpected; then you might be curious and inquisitive about what comes in the door."

She addresses our desire to be givers and helpers by widening the often one-way street to a two-way road: "We work on ourselves in order to help others, but we also help others in order to work on ourselves. ... [The] tendency to refer back to ourselves, to try to protect ourselves, is so strong and all-pervasive. A simple way of turning it around is to develop our curiosity and our inquisitiveness about everything. This is another way of talking about helping others, but of course the process also helps us. The whole path seems to be about developing curiosity, about looking out and taking an interest in all the details of our lives and in our immediate environment."