Fate

If I've learned anything in the last ten or so years of my life, it's to appreciate the fact that there's much in it I can't control...especially fate. Time and again I've set myself on a course of action and decided: "This is it. This is the way my life will go," only to look back later and realize how short-sighted I was. Regardless of the thoroughness of our plans, of the care and thought we put into them, they do not always come to pass...and this is not something to be bemoaned, either, because our plans for the future aren't necessarily the best that we might have pursued. In deviating from plans, either by accident or thoughtlessness, we may in fact put ourselves in a situation where we are better served.

For my own part, part of me sometimes thinks I might have been better off had I gone directly to university after high school, bypassing community college and the 'wasted' years between my graduation there and my entrance into a full university. But had I not gone to that community college, I would not have met particular people, people who changed my life.  And the time I spent working a factory between college and university was most formative to the person I am today. It was there that I learned to be an adult, to stand on my own two feet - there that I learned the value of money and time, there that I started to question the way society worked. If I had gone directly to university following high school graduation, would I have gained anything by it? Would a Pentecostal boy have appreciated the intellectual stimulation of the university? Would I have flourished intellectually as an adult had the soil of my mind not already been tilled by those difficult years following graduation where I struggled to find myself?

I do not know, but I'm tempted to say, I doubt it. Maybe early separation from Pentecostalism would have freed my mind more quickly, but I for one think whatever mental strength I have came from the fact that I had to fight for my ideals, my thoughts, and my beliefs against oppressive dogma.  There are other examples in this theme; for instance, when I moved to university I became friends with someone who betrayed me, and while part of me thinks if I had known that in advance I would have avoided him from the start, I am glad for the experience.  The end of that friendship changed my life dramatically; it introduced me to the study of Stoicism, and  made me aware of my own weaknesses. It gave me humility, which I never anticipated needing or profiting by.  These little events could make quite a list. Time and again my plans for life have fallen apart, and for a time I thought myself lessened for it. I might groan at my mistakes, or regret hoped-for opportunities that never transpired. I might think my life had derailed...but every time my life has gone off the route I had planned for it, I've somehow found myself better off for it.

A more traditional person might say this is the Hand of God active in my life, moving me to where I am intended to be, working to ensure the best outcome. This is not the attitude I take, but when I reflect on my life I can't help but feel a sudden burst of gratitude. I didn't intend to live the life I'm living now, but I'm happy.

You may have heard the saying that fortune favors the prepared mind. This question of destiny is to me an interplay between fortune and virtue. Fortune, the happenstance of life, is fickle. It is a mistake to believe we can direct its course, either by praying to deities or relying on good luck tokens. For us, it is chaotic. One small action can set into action a course of events that leads in a different direction that we might have ever intended. We can't plan fortune;  but we might manage it.

I mentioned an interplay between fortune and virtue, virtue being (in this case)  preparing ourselves for the fickleness of fate. We do this in part by not becoming attached to any one series of events: we can't predict the ultimate outcome, so the attachment is foolish. An excellent choice one moment might set us up for great failure down the road, and a mistake might be a launching pad for greater success than we could ever imagine.

 I'm reminded of a favorite fable or proverb I read a few years ago while doing readings in Buddhist philosophy.

There was a man in a distant village with a prized horse, and one day the horse ran away.  The man's neighbors approached him in sympathy, saying, "How terrible this is! Your best horse, gone! You must be distraught." The man only shrugged, and said, "We'll see."


Shortly thereafter the horse reappeared, but he had attracted followers, his own herd. There were dozens of horses, and the man and his son corralled them all. They had enough animals to begin breeding them! Profits would be enormous! And the neighbors came by to celebrate, saying, "What a marvelous stroke of luck! You must be so pleased!". But  to their surprise, the man only shrugged, and said -- "We'll see."


The next day one of the horses kicked out at the man's sons; both of his legs were broken. Again the neighbors came in sympathy, saying, "Your only son, crippled! How terrible!".  And the man shrugged, and said, "We'll see."


A few months later, the nation went to war, and all the villages were called upon to send their young men into battle. The village's young men all went, with the exception of the crippled boy, who could not march. The nation's forces met in battle, and all of the village's sons were lost on the field. The grieving parents came to the man and said to him, "Of all of us, only your son has been spared. You must be pleased."

And again, the man shrugged, and again, he said: "We'll see". 

The fable ends there because all must end somewhere, but the point is that this interchange between the man and the villagers could have gone on forever. Life is never finished:  it is a perpetual chain of events. We can never see what awaits us.  That in mind, another way to be prepared for fate  is to anticipate the responses we might need if life goes awry. For instance, I am saving up to go to graduate school and get a degree in library science --but I am also trying to find a way to learn less specialized skills, because there's no way of knowing that librarianship will be a viable career. The jobs may not be there, or the few which are may not enough to support me.  That in mind, I want more resiliency.  I also think we need to be courageous enough not to shy away from unexpected roads. Not only must we let go of plans which have been rendered impossible, but we have to move forward...and that is difficult to change-adverse creatures like ourselves. For my own part, I take courage in the words of Marcus Aurelius, who advised himself not to fear the future....for we will meet it with the same reason we have with us today.

All that we can do, essentially, is the best that we can do.  We must make the best choices we can, in any given circumstance. If these turn out to be the wrong choices, or choices inferior to others (in hindsight), there is nothing to be gained in berating ourselves for these mistakes. We are not omniscient; we cannot account for everything, We have to make these choices moment to moment, based on information which is limited at best.  Life is not a gaming competition: there's no scoreboard, no judge, no points to stack against one another. We're alive, so we might as well enjoy it.

Burn the Necropolis

The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.

We live in a world ruled by rotting bones: cemetaries seat empires. The dead hold power that defies measure over the living. The dead reign largely because people are ignorant that corpses hold them in bondage. Few people would consciously bow before tombstones, and yet people carry on the bidding of decaying masters with every unconsidered thought, with every expression of an idea, belief, or value that they did not forge by hand themselves.

The dead rule the living because their ideas rule us. We become the property of despots as children, when we are most vulnerable, when reason's stern blade has not yet forged and tempered. Parents, society, and authority figures bind us, although they are slaves themselves. Sometimes they are conscious of the role they play as agents of tyranny, a role that allows religious sects and political ideologies to thrive. They perform the great trick of turning fetters into jeweled bracelets that we snap on happily and cling to.  In enlightened times such as these, when people tacitly endorse freedom of speech and thought, they might feel somewhat guilty for imposing ideas on the innocent -- but then they feel it is righteous on their part. Every culture maintains itself: that's the way "it should be". Their political and religious ideas are right, after all: what's the harm in making children think right? In this way, all the horrible sects of the world maintain themselves, and children are taught to hate and are deprived of their potential. They are robbed the glory that lies in being free and living life with courage. Instead, the spear of Tradition beats their knees, forcing them to the ground where they bow before corpses.

Before Muhammed, people worshiped a box in Mecca that contained the relics associated with  various Arabian gods. After Muhammad, they worshiped a box that contains a stone supposedly given to Abraham. Worship of the dead is still worship of the dead.

Our ideas are, in large part, not our own. We inherit them: to which decaying mounds of flesh we pay homage  depends on where and when we were born. A family born in Rome four hundred years before the reign of Augustus would have kept an icon of a favored deity in their home, possibily of Apollo. Apollo's priests would rule there. Eight hundred years later, that same family would worship the doctrine of Paul. Paul's priests, his agents, would be that family's masters. Our parents give birth to us in the same gloomy prison cell in which they sit: they instill beliefs in us that their parents instilled in them. We call this cycle, this endless transmission of ideas, 'culture' -- and the promotion of one corpse over another 'progress'.  Shall we allow an accident of birth to determine  our beliefs and character?

I despise the rule of the dead, the tyranny of ideas over life. I reject their reign first on principle, for no human has any right to rule another in body, let alone in mind. Secondly, there is no reason we ought to be bound by tradition. Why should our ancestors rule us? What justifies the tyranny of parents, even? Maturity, intelligence, and a sense of responsibility are not required for procreation: the lack of these traits seems more conducive to arranging a pregnancy.  Parents force themselves on their children, molding them into their own image,  by the virtue of brute power -- nothing more. No one would contest their sacred right to produce copies of themselves, and so we are blessed with the heritage of racism  and dogmatic religion generation after generation.  It strikes me that the ability to mold a mind is a terrible responsibility, not a right -- one to be taken with humility and cautiousness, not pride. To the detriment of humanity, the only responsibility most parents seem to keep in mind is the' responsibility' to pass on the limited beliefs of their own parents.

Are the dead so much wiser than us? Hardly. They were human, just as we are, and prone to the same mistakes and indignities, and yet being dead seems to accord them great respect. The further removed they are from the world of the living, in fact, the more honor we give them. They can tell us they flew to Heaven on a horse and saw the dead walk again, and we believe them. If the living told us these things, we'd gently escort them to the mental ward. I suspect we give the dead such honor because we feel we cannot take ourselves seriously, and so we cling to the ideas of people who are removed from us. We seek objectivity. But whatever noble personages we honor shared the same insecurity: Jesus looked to Moses, Plato to Socrates. They too, sought objectivity, for they were limited by their times just as most people are today. Moses thought nothing of murder, Jesus nothing of racism, Paul nothing of slavery. The United States' founding fathers beat their chests and spoke nobly of democracy while maintaining slaves and denying all but the landed gentry the vote. Few individuals are spiritual anarchists, who based their lives on their own hand-made ideas, beliefs, and principles. Those who do stand out, because they have found a more elevated foundation:  ideas and morals based on free reason. If we are to seek objectivity, I believe reason is our best hope.

I understand part of the reason people cling to the fetters of their ancestors is the knowledge that one day they will become ancestors themselves. Every person who spends their first night in a crib will eventually spend their last night in a casket. In modern times we humans can live close to a hundred years: our ancestors would have thought fifty a boon. Even so, we know we are but leaves blown in the wind, simply passing through life. Cognizant that our time on Earth is short, we long to be linked to a tree.We seek meaning by attaching ourselves to something bigger: a religion, a state, a worldview.  Perhaps this is unavoidable,  but there is no cause for slavish attachment. If we wish to ground ourselves by referencing a tradition, why not do so with a level of sobriety, of knowing what we are doing and doing it with respect for ourselves. Even the mightiest oak will fall in time: I suggest it is better to make the most of the time we have than to hide ourselves in longer-lived traditions.

When it comes to "honoring" tradition, I think we take stock of ourselves and ask: are we maintaining tradition deliberately to serve us? Or...are we protecting it because we depend on it, unaccustomed to living, thinking, and believing on our own?  If we are trying to protect ideas to protect ourselves,  we are not free. We cannot be free to live, to grow, to flourish if we're constantly hobbling on a crutch.

Too magnificent a jewel to waste on the hands of the dead.

For my own part, I believe Earth and life belong to us, the living. The dead have had their day. Let it rest with them. Ours is still upon us, and we ought to seize it -- to live as our needs and desires demand, not the putrefying flesh of yesteryear.

Foundations may crumble,

And structures will tumble,

And free men will cry,

"Die Gedanken sind Frei!"

But free men will cry,

"Die Gedanken sind Frei!"

("Die Gedanken Sind Frei", English lyrics by Pete Seeger)

Professoranton

A week or so ago I found a regularly-updated philosophy channel on YouTube: the host has focused on Stoicism several times, which may be of interest to some readers here. This particular video sees him ask the question what Stoicism most offers the modern world given that we use technology to alleviate so much. His sees  Stoicism's approach to death as its most important potential contribution today.

Philosophy Bites

I was recently introduced to the podcast "Philosophy Bites", a series of short interviews with modern philosophers on a variety of subjects, and am beginning to explore their archived contents. There's at least one podcast with humanism as its subject, and  British humanist A.C. Grayling is one name I've recognized. I haven't sampled enough of the content to comment on it, but I have enjoyed those interviews I've listened to so far. One obvious reccommendation is Alain de Botton: I've read a couple of his works and have found them intellectually stimulating.

Feelings? Nothing More than Feelings?

I have heard a number of times from apologists like C.S. Lewis, Ravi Zacharias, Donald Keller, and those who subscribe to those authors’ works that the existence of real, god-given principles is proven by our reaction to their being violated. At the same time, they decry people making choices based on their feelings -- this they call relativism.

The aforementioned apologists are correct in that there are some principles at work. I doubt very much that deity hammered them out in its cosmic workshop and then built a world out of them, but I think they’re there. For instance, I’m very much opposed to the idea of being murdered or physically assaulted. I object strongly to the idea of my food being stolen. Am I to believe that these feelings -- and that is what they are -- are the result of my witnessing Thou Shalt Not Kill and Thou Shalt Not Steal being violated, rather than that they are my very natural, wholly biological, response to my well-being being violated? When my dog growls at someone who attempts to take his food away, is he observing religious principle or simply responding to this attack on his well-being? The same goes for an angry bear who has been shot by a hunter’s rifle.

I believe in natural morality, in not doing to others that which I would not have done to myself. That I can plan my behavior accordingly is an example of emotions being tempered by reason: I am making myself stronger, better prepared to live among my fellow creatures. Everyone, to an extent, follows this principle. Rage or power might change the extent to which they follow the “golden rule”, but they follow it all the same. The exceptions are sociopaths. Thus, just because morality may be based on emotional responses is no reason to discredit it.

At the same time, however, feelings themselves must be examined. In the case above, the feelings exist naturally: I don’t want to be hurt, you don’t want to be hurt. In many other cases, however, the feelings exist only because they have been made to be there: the people involved have been conditioned to feel a certain way. In the sect I grew in, women were expected to keep their hair uncut and their rears in dresses -- trousers were “men’s clothing”, and were not to be worn by females. The observance of these "Holiness" and "Separation" standards were very important to the Pentecostal identity, and observance of the rules resulted in smug or honest satisfaction that "God's will" was being observed. Thus, when my pastor’s eldest daughter showed to church with nicely-trimmed hair and a pair of fashionable slacks, her friends were reduced to tears. "Her glory is gone", they said. A Muslim may be driven into a dreadful rage at the idea of Islam being mocked, because for him Islam is world-definingly important and utterly personal. These are both examples of conditioned responses: the feelings are artificial, subjective to cultural background.

These two categories are not wholly mutually exclusive: take the case of a high-school teenager who is reduced to weeping when his team loses a homecoming game. This may have both biological and cultural elements: emotional investment in tribes and groups being biological and that instinct being applied toward an athletics team being cultural. The same is true, too, for xeno- and homophobia. The root may be fear of those who are different, but these feelings are interpreted and magnified by culture.

I do not consider fabricated or culturally-driven feelings to be of much use in my own life, and I doubt laws based on them will be either rational nor humane. To be of use to human beings, moral laws must be based on our natural feelings as they are tempered by reason.

God, Religion, and Me: Musings

The below are scattered thoughts I've been having on God and religion. I just wanted to try to collect them and see if they made any more sense once they were ought of my head: I also wouldn't mind constructive feedback. For those interested, I have a few essays in the works -- mostly about humanism.

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I can’t say I ever identified with God or Jesus growing up as a kid. I was close to identifying with God -- the Hebrew god. He was violent and brutish, but he was reliable and he only got violent when the rules were crossed. Sure, the rules were a tad silly at times -- “Don’t boil a goat in its mother’s milk”, that sort of thing -- but they were there, and if you followed them you wouldn’t get boils and God would protect you from mean people. That sort of thing appeals to a bullied kid like myself.

Jesus I never understood. He was a bully in his own way: he stoked the fires of Hell, even as he said nice things. I didn’t appreciate that much. There’s no way to reconcile love of any kind with eternal pain. Once I got old enough to walk away from Christianity , I did. But as a humanist, I wanted to identify with people: I wanted to understand my fellows more. What about Jesus or God did they need?

When I left Christianity and realized that Humanism was what I’d wanted for my entire life, it seemed clear to me that religion was ridiculously unnecessary. It seemed to me an imposition: the priest thinks up a religion and makes people under his power swear to it, and since not everyone has the same priest, people start killing one another over their religion. I didn’t appreciate this: I hated it. It made my blood boil.

I remained mostly confused about why people tolerated religion bossing them around until I became aware of ethical philosophy -- living philosophy. I then started seeing philosophy in religion and began thinking that maybe religion was just a power structure for implementing ethical philosophy. I forget when I discovered ethical philosophy, but it was probably in 2007 when I began reading about humanist spirituality and discovered Doug Muder’s excellent “Humanist Spirituality: Oxymoron, or Authentic Path to Enlightenment?”

I began thinking about ideals. I seemed to rely on ideals, and I wondered if perhaps religious people were the safe way -- if they hadn’t just taken their ideals out of their head and put them in the cosmic ether, where they assumed a human form which they called a God. Maybe God is a projection of what people want to be or value most? When I put the ideas of God-as-ideal and religion-as-power-structure together, I thought I had some sense of what made religion tick. I knew there was more to it -- the need for community and connection -- but I was concentrating on why people thought they needed God, not just a community.

Around the same time, I was studying Stoicism and its view of God. The ancient Stoic view of God is more subtle and complicated than any I’d encountered previously: they saw God as being sort of the fabric of the universe. It wasn’t a being separate from the universe: it was the universe. It was the order in the universe: it was reason and conscience both. The Stoics believed that when we do as we ought, -- as reason dictates -- we will be happy. Although I’m still trying to find the right balance between my emotional humanism (“Dammit, Jim!”) and my more Stoic leanings “(“Control yourself, Doctor.”) -- between the need for detachment and the need for attachment -- generally speaking I think Stoicism works well even for a nontheist like myself. Someone at the Stoic Registry, now called the “New Stoa”, wrote that the difference between a theistic Stoic and an atheistic Stoic is that one sees the Order of the universe as conscious while the other doesn’t.

What this did for me was make me aware of the power of the God-as-source idea. Previously I’d thought of this as silly. People pray to God and he doles out courage or wisdom? But now I get it: Marcus Aurelius referred to a well within us that will bubble forth if only we will dig -- if only we will apply our reason to find the best course of action. I don’t know how to explain this idea properly beyond that I get why people think of God as a universal source now. I understand it. If I thought it were real, I could revere it. As it happens, though, I cannot think of the universe as being conscious based on the information I have.

At the same time, I’ve realized there are bounds to knowledge. We can’t understand the universe as it may truly be -- only as it appears to us. I think we can know a great deal about the universe for our purposes: we can destroy a disease, land a machine on Saturn’s moons, invent a farm machine that analyzes the viability of rice even as it picks it from the ground. We can do an awful lot, but I don’t think we can contemplate the walls of the petri dish we call the universe. That’s sort of how I think of us at times: one-celled creatures in an overwhelmingly vast universe who don’t have a shot at really understanding it.

This is the mystery: this is where rationality cannot go, because it has no evidence to operate from. The natural laws I understand that explain the formation of our galaxy and of Earth and the development of life and society can’t penetrate the walls of the universe, wherever or whatever they may be. I suppose this is where ideas like “faith” come in, and so help me if I haven’t gotten to the point where I can say I understand a little of what that means.

My worldview is ever-evolving, and not in ways I would have ever expected. I keep wanting to connect to religious humanity -- to come to terms with the people who I once couldn’t understand, but who now I do but cannot connect with anyway. My own sense of spirituality, and even my sense of religion if you want to go that far, are distinctly Humanist: I believe we’re all alone and should do the best we can. I don’t think life is anything to complain about.

What’s happening to me is a growing sense of not having answers, but not really needing them too much. Sometimes, though, I wonder if all my claims to understanding God and faith are just attempts by some part of me to connect to the rest of humanity. I think about this, and then I think that maybe we’re not that different to begin with, that we’re all just doing the best we can to get along and that we all try to make the universe make sense to us. Most of us do this within the bounds of our culture: some of us reject that. Maybe that’s the difference? I don’t know where all this is going, really. Only time will tell.

Left and Right Together: Reccommendation

I’d like to share what was for me a thought-provoking read, UU minister Doug Muder’s “Left and Right Together”. This is the text of a sermon, available online, and it addresses what the religious right and the religious or spiritual left have in common. Although he uses the word “religious”, the UU take on religion is broad enough that he's also addressing life stances like Humanism. Muder is a humanist himself.

He begins the sermon with readings from someone I would never expect to hear from in a UU fellowship: James Dobson. What we have in common, Muder says, is that we are mutually concerned with the way humanity is shaping up. “Both have loyalties that go beyond self and the convenience of the moment. Both reject the materialism of popular culture. Both seek something more substantial than the momentary satisfaction of desire or the endless striving after status. The committed (liberal) life is a different way to pursue these goals, not a denial of them.”

Muder states that both ways of life are concerned about the unhealthy growth of the same thing, the religion of “Consumer Hedonism”. This is a religion that dominates the culture to the point that it needs no building, names, priests, or anything of the sort: it’s become the very atmosphere we live in. To show this, he lays out what Consumer Hedonism is and elaborates on what values it instills in everyone -- values that are rejected by those who are concerned about bigger things. “Liberals and conservatives alike reject the emptiness of Consumer Hedonism, and nurture values that transcend desire and image: Values like family and friends and community. Compassion for the stranger. A just society. Appreciating the wonder of creation. Building a personal relationship with Beauty and with Knowledge and with Understanding. When those values are part of your experience of every moment, when you have trained yourself to experience them as immediately as you experience your physical desires, you're there. [...] The main difference between religious liberals and religious conservatives is in where they look for those values and how they hope to bring them into the world. Conservatives look to traditional values, a way of life that they believe worked for our ancestors. Typically, a conservative faith has a Golden Age it wants to preserve or restore: Eden, ancient Israel, the Jerusalem of the Apostles, the Medina of Muhammad, or even the small-town America of Norman Rockwell. Conservatives see the deeper values of those communities being replaced by practices that satisfy more superficial desires.

Liberals, on the other hand, attach their vision of deeper values to a future Utopia or to a Platonic ideal. They see themselves not as restoring a Golden Age, but as marching onward and upward towards a world more perfect than has ever existed before. Two centuries ago, a world without slavery was a complete dream. No Golden Age had ever achieved it. But here we are.”

He ends with thoughts on generating a dialogue between the human-concerned left and the religious right. I found the sermon to be very…thought-provoking and more than a little heartening. I’ll own to going weak at the knees for ideas that bring people together, but outside of my own biases I think Muder makes a valid observation. What say you?

Epicurus at the Painted Porch

I am a student of Greek philosophy in two ways -- I both study the schools of thought academically and practice them in my life, especially with regard to Epicureanism and Stoicism. The two philosophies have been in my experience pitted against once another, painted as competing philosophies. My academic study of the two philosophies is very shallow: I have read from both philosophies’ texts, but I have never emerged myself in an in-depth study of how they were received in the Greek world at the time, so I don’t know how accurate such a portrayal is. On the surface, it would seem to make sense. The Stoics believed that virtue was the only “Good”, and the Epicureans believed that happiness was the only “Good”.

Do they contradict one another? Both begin from absolute statements that on the surface differ from the other, and one philosophy is grounded in divinity while the other is not. Epicurus had little regard for the metaphysical: he believed that happiness in the here and now was what people should focus their attention on. The ancient Stoics believed in cosmic order and saw this Order as the source for all that is good -- like beauty, truth, and virtue. To live in compliance with this Order is to live with virtue and thus be happy. The chief Stoic doctrine is to “live according to Nature”: living within our limits. Epictetus, whose work I enjoy immensely, began his Handbook by stating that happiness can be achieved through the knowledge that there are some things we can control and some things we cannot .[1] To act on this knowledge is to live with virtue. But notice what Epictetus is focusing on: happiness. This is the same then Epicurus was focused on.

This is why I do not think that Stoicism and Epicureanism are actually contradictory. Each seem to begin with the object of human happiness as their goal, they just attempt to reach it through different (but not necessarily opposing) practices. Epicurus advocated the simple life and abstaining from insatiable pleasures: Stoics believed in mental discipline, the cultivation of mindfulness. But what would stop Epicures from using Stoic mindfulness, and what would stop Epictetus from living the simple life? The two philosophies differ only in theoretical beginnings, I think, and for the modern Stoic or Epicurean, that simply doesn’t matter.

I count myself a Stoic, but I do not believe in a living Cosmic Order the way Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus did. Erik Wiegardt commented in his The Stoic Handbook that the difference between an atheistic Stoic and a pantheistic Stoic is that one believes cosmic order is unconscious and the other believes it is conscious. I believe laws govern the universe, but I do not think they are divine. I believe in gravitation and friction and inertia and thermodynamics and all manner of universal laws, but I think they are natural. What lies beyond them -- what caused them -- is not my concern. I can no more be aware of supposed metaphysical realms and gods than can a microbe be aware of a soda can.

If I take Epicurus’ approach that supposed metaphysical worlds are meaningless when it comes to human happiness, on what basis do I call myself a Stoic? I do so because there are certain patterns of behavior that lend themselves toward happiness and unhappiness. If I become addicted to a drug, for instance, I will be on the whole unhappy. This is not divine punishment being meted out by Athena: this is chemistry. If I fret about what someone is thinking of me, I will be unhappy. Again, there are no punitive deities involved: this is psychology. If, however, I becoming addicted to substances and adopt the Stoic practice of giving no attention to things I cannot control, I will find contentment -- and the joy I have for living will not be tainted. “Virtue” is the practice of living sensibly, by following patterns of behavior that create long-term happiness. For me, Epicureanism and Stoicism go well together, because the virtuous life is -- in Epicurus’ own words -- the happy life. [2]

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[1] My immediate source for this is Sharon Lebell’s The Art of Living, but the same sentiment is expressed in the same basic way in more conservative translations of Epictetus' works.

[2] “The Principle Doctrines”, Epicurus

Tending the Natural: Humanist Spirituality II

"Remember that philosophy requires of you only that which your nature recquires." - Marcus Aurelius

"We're different, and yet all the same -- we all want to be happy." - Anne Frank

"I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we are all seeking something better in life." - the Dalai Lama

Almost two years ago, I posted an essay that I called "All and Enough: Humanist Spirituality". I took the title from the third Humanist Manifesto, which declares that the natural world is "all and enough". There, I tried to explore what spirituality meant to me. Beginning with my center of reason and empathy and a joy for living, I wrote that I thought spirituality consisted of enjoying life and living it well by cultivating our inner essence. This inner essence has been called a soul or a spirit, but if I did so it would only be as a metaphor. My perception of my own essence is wholly naturalistic: For me, "I" am made up of biological drives and the psychological drives that a lifetime of living have given me. I do not pretend to understand the "stuff" of consciousness, but on precedent I accept that it is probably completely natural or based on the natural.

It is on this foundation of naturalism that I build, and this is part of the reason I call myself a Humanist. My joy for living comes from accepting life on its own terms -- not on the terms of the supernatural. I enjoy life -- I revel in it. I cozy under trees, reading good books and letting the grass caress my fingers while I listen to the wind blow through the trees and the birds sing, and the sheer enjoyment of it all can stop my heart and bring tears to my eyes. I believe in just being happy, in "letting the soft animal of [my] body love what it loves."* This means for me living in accordance with nature: nature is both a beginning and a direction. My natural "center" is reason and empathy -- or more broadly, reason and emotion. I think these two attributes are the essence of human nature. We are intelligent creatures who can use reason to ponder philosophical questions and do things with purpose, and we are emotional creatures, evolved to live in social groups. We experience emotions while living life in our communities, and ideally we would use those emotions reasonable to create ways of living that make us happy (or at least help us survive). This is the beginning of law -- indeed, of most every aspect of civilization.

I labor to live according to my nature: I practice freethought or skepticism, and I try to connect to other people in whatever ways I can -- in spending time with friends, or reading literature and connecting to people who have been dead for centuries. "Cultivation" is a word I like to use in reference to spirituality: I see my life as a flower, a bird of paradise perhaps, that must have good soil and a reliable source of sunlight and water if it is to flourish. I need to stimulate my mind and emotions to grow -- and I need to live within their bounds. A flower only needs so much heat or water: too much will scorch it or drown it respectively. This is what I was trying to get at in my first essay: a life lived with empathy and reason, with sunlight and water, leads inevitably to human flourishing, to eudaimonia, to "invincible happiness".

However I might appreciate the need for living as naturally as possible, this approach has a problem: just because something is natural does not mean it is good for me. Anger is natural, for instance, but if I try to revel in anger, I will find myself visiting the pharmacist with a doctor's prescription for blood-pressure pills. My body's chemistry can be modified through my behavior so that it develops a dependency on alcohol: is it then "good" for me to drink all the more? How do I advocate living a natural life when doing what comes natural is not necessarily the best thing for me to do? For a year or so I've pondered this question every so often, but then just a couple of weeks ago the issue resolved itself with a single word: tending. If you have experience working in a garden, you will know that you have to fight weeds and pests to protect your plants. Weeds and destructive insects are a natural part of a garden, but they are not good for my purposes. I must tend the plants -- pull the weeds and get rid of the insects. Feeding and watering the plants is not enough -- I must continually destroy natural but destructive forces that would render my watering pointless.

So it is, I think, with human nature. I first became interested in the idea of humanist spirituality -- natural spirituality -- when I read Doug Muder's "Humanist Spirituality: Oxymoron or Authentic Path to Enlightenment". One of the topics he discusses is mindfulness among the Stoics: being aware of our thoughts and feelings and asking ourselves if these thoughts and feelings are doing us any good. I found this practice to be intriguing, and I took it up. I have found this practice of mindfulness to be quite helpful -- I no longer fixate on the things I used to, and a year of practice has molded me to possess a near-constant sense of peace. I'm not just interested in peace, though -- I want something active, something forceful: I want to keep the fountain of joy inside me that Marcus Aurelius wrote of bubbling up. What I mean by "tending the natural" is mental practices that bring this bubbling about. I'm not the only person who has noted a need for tending, or disciplined attention: I note that many philosophical and religious teachers have advocated mental discipline of some form or another, the Stoics and Buddhists being the most devoted examples. A few modern teachers advocating mental discipline are the Dalai Lama, Rabbi Zelig Pliskin (an Orthox rabbi, interestingly enough), and the late M. Scott Peck. The point of mental discipline is twofold: being mindful helps us "weed" ourselves, allowing us to grow, while active forms of discipline attempt to manipulate growth in the direction of our choice. Both forms have the end of human happiness in mind.

I have noted through the course of my reading a potential common theme in the philosophical, religious, spiritual, and psychological teachings of the past and present -- that of human happiness. Sometimes this is approached from the angle of the divine, using the idea of a deity as source. I used to use ideals for the same purpose, although I seem to be growing less concerned with reaching some outside ideal and more interested in what will develop from my life if I just enjoy it.

Recommended Reading:

• The Art of Living, Sharon Lebell. A modern translation of Epictetus' Handbook and Discourses.
• The Art of Happness and Ethnics for a New Millenium, Tenjin Gyatso (the 14th Dalai Lama).
• Doug Muder's "Humanist Spirituality"

* "Wild Geese", Mary Oliver

Philosophical Media

I accidentally found an enjoyable and informative series of YouTube videos tonight. The username "PhilosophicalMedia" has videos on Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Albert Camus, Nietzsche, Plato, et cetera. So far, I have watched the series "Epicurus on Happiness" and "Seneca on Anger" and have enjoyed both. Some of the series appear to be general surveys, while others -- like the two I mentioned -- are smaller and focus only on one subject. I'm personally looking forward to viewing other videos. The videos seem well-put-together, and are sometimes funny in unpredictable ways. In one, the host tries to employ the Socratic method to urge people to think about their lives; in another, he talks to the camera while pedaling across the field. As he pedals, he's looking sideways at the camera, and I kept wondering if he was going to ride straight into a tree.

I found that through the "Related Links" section while re-watching a favorite series of videos, the Virtual University lecture on Marcus Aurelius, in which a classical historian delivers a lecture on the man and his philosophy. I have arranged the videos in a playlist. The first part is slow and is mostly background, but it really picks up during the second part.



User NLPNVC's videos are also of interest. Known as "NLP", he frequently posts videos in which he asks philosophical questions of his viewers and in which he tries to deal with ideas he's encountered, like "non-violent communication". In some videos, he addresses people whose approach and opinions he disagrees with, but tries to find some way to empathize with them. Sometimes he posts music videos about a particular theme, like "Hypnotized to Enjoy Violence". In one not-so-recent video, he asked people what they wondered about. The result is funny, and touching on some levels. This is a guy asking questions and trying to deal with people in a personal way, and I've found that his videos are not only provoking, but moving, as I said before. "All I'm saying with this video is...I wonder if you wonder like me."

The Art of Happiness

I recently read The Art of Happiness and found much within it to recommend it. The book is a dialogue between psychiatrist Howard Cutler and the 14th Dalai Lama, but much of it consists of the psychiatrist asking the Dalai Lama questions and then commenting on his answers. Although the Dalai Lama is a religious figure, there is very little dogma in the book: spirituality, for the Dalai Lama, seems to consist of practicing a compassionate, tolerant, patient, humble, and mentally disciplined life. He is very much aware of the importance of reason and empathy in living our lives, and I dare say he's a humanist at heart.
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"I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we are all seeking something better in life." - the Dalai Lama

"Happiness is determined more by one's state of mind than by external events." - Howard Cutler

"You can relate to [people] because you are still a human being, within the human community. You share that bond. And that bond is strong enough to give rise to a sense of worth and dignity. That bond can even become a source of consolation in the event that you lose everything else." - the Dalai Lama

"We [...] often add to our pain and suffering by being overly sensitive, overreacting to minor things, and sometimes taking things too personally."

"Honesty and self-confidence are often mixed."

"I believe it is essential to appreciate our potential as human beings and to recognize the importance of inner transformation."*
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*By which he means using the practices of compassion, tolerance, and so on to better ourselves.

Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek, Humanism, and Me

Thinking about my enjoyment of Star Trek and my humanism is a bit of a "chicken and egg" scenario. While I cannot tell you which came first, I can tell you that the two are inextricably connected. I was a misfit as a child, left alone when I was not being harassed by the class bullies. Looking back on those experiences now, I realize how instrumental they were in forging my character: my contempt for abuses of authority, my intense craving for justice, my emotional self-control, and especially my yearning for tolerance and kindness in human affairs. Whenever I was able to watch Star Trek, I could see the kind of world I wanted myself and others to live in: a world where people got along, where they treated one another with respect and tolerance, even if they didn't always agreed. The Starfleet officers in the various shows were always striving forward to improve themselves. In high school, I happened upon an interview with Gene Roddenberry where he spoke of his childhood and I realize that we had similar stories, and that made Star Trek all the more appealing to me. Roddenberry was a humanist, and there is little doubt that his humanism shaped at least the first two shows. Those childhood lessons grew into humanism for me, and now I appreciate Star Trek even more than I used to. Just last night I listened to Inside Star Trek, which contains the interview in which Gene talked about his childhood and the making of Star Trek. Because of my relationship to his ideas and his legacy, I transcribed part of the interview and share it here. Please note that I attempted to convey the pattern in which Roddenberry spoke, hence why some sentences trail off in thought and why there are sentence fragments.
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I can talk about things now that would have embarrassed me once. And maybe my story could be helpful to you if you're somehow different from other people, or handicapped. Most of us are, in one way or another. I guess Star Trek had its first beginnings in the fact that as a child, I was different. Handicapped. I had difficulty breathing, eyes that didn't work well in bright sunlight... spindly-legged, weak, uncoordinated. I wasn't a very pretty thing, and I suffered the awful embarrassments that only a child can feel. I don't suppose every writer has to start like that, but -- if I had been the things that I dreamed of being, agile, athletic, admired and popular, I know now that I never would have ended up with as happy a life . I became a reader. Thank God, I became a reader. I lived in a dream world because...it was a helluva lot better world. I was Dr. Doolittle, I was Zane Grey's* Lonely Cowboy...an explorer. Most of it trash, I was an Indian fighter, a fearless soldier...a fighter ace. If you read Peanuts, I was Snoopy. I fought the Red Baron many times.

Certainly, part of Star Trek was written by that boy...dreaming maybe as you do of a better world, in which people would look past our exteriors and see whatever loveliness we had inside us. I remember being about 8 years old in the backyard, sitting in the soap carton, pretending it was a great vessel of some kind -- and the bold, strong person hidden inside of me, he was the captain. I remember that it was an enclosed vessel, because I had a second soap carton pulled down over my head. After sitting there for several hours, still encased in soap cartons, I heard the concerned voices of my parents speculating whether my illness had led to brain damage. Ah, how lovely all our daughters are inside. How fearless, all our sons -- if only we could see it. I remember helping my father clean the garage. Actually, he was cleaning. I was facing the firing squad. The bullets caught me, spun me to the ground, and as I lay there bravely dying, I looked up to see my father watching me with pity on his face, assuming I was suffering some new kind of seizure.

Years later, something brought me back to reality: science fiction. Yes, incredible. Science fiction taught me to live in the real world. Thank you, Homer, my ex-convict friend. Thank you for John Carter of Mars. It made your cage more bearable, and it helped rescue me from mine. And thank you, Claude, for that first copy of Astounding Stories magazine. Sorry you didn't reach sixteen, and grow out of your illness as I did. I was lucky -- a miracle of adolescence. My body mended, I actually became stronger than average -- but science fiction saved me from that, too, saved me from the perils of a strong body.

I'd learned by then that reality is incredibly larger, infinitely more exciting than the flesh and blood vehicle that we travel in here. If you read science fiction, the more you read it, the more you realize that you and the universe are part of the same thing. Science still knows practically nothing† about the real nature of matter, energy, dimension, or time -- and even less about those remarkable things called life and thought. But whatever the meaning and purpose of this universe, you are a legitimate part of it. And since you are part of the all-that-is, part of its purpose, there is more to you than just this brief speck of existence. You are just a visitor here in this time and this place -- a traveler through it. What a difference that makes! As a traveler here, it no longer crushes you that this world is not always fair, or orderly, or understandable. Your passport allows you to fix what you can, to love, to refuse to take part in ugliness -- but meanwhile you are delighted that this is such a varied, colorful, exciting place. As a traveler, you're not here to judge, but to experience. You begin to feel a new affection for the life-forms here. You no longer feel threatened that some may be greater, or lesser, than you. It's only important that you've been given this marvelous opportunity to enjoy this trip -- to learn from it, and in my case, to write about it.

Perhaps you know where I'm leading. On a trip like this -- and it is a trip -- its loveliness is not in the sameness of people and things, but in their incredible variety... Eventually this led me to the Star Trek statement IDIC: Infinite Diversity from Infinite Combinations. Thank whatever created us, we are different. Each of us, and everything around us. To the end of time, if it ever does end, no combination will ever come up quite the same. That's quite a travel package. All of this is how Star Trek began, and it's also something of what it is about. I am an alien -- and so are you. And yet, and this is the loveliest thing of all, we are also part of each other and part of everything that is. I don't know if this has a moral or not, unless it's "don't sit inside soap cartons too long -- unless you enjoy traveling."

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* I was unable to make out the name Roddenberry said and tried to get as close as I could. I have been unable to find a character or comic strip with the label of "Lonely Cowboy". I would appreciate it if anyone reading is familiar with that label and can tell me the author responsible for it.

** I attempted to type the name as Roddenberry pronounced it. That may be his pronunciation of "Claude".

† This interview was produced in the late seventies or early eighties, judging by the fact that the interviewees kept referring to the product as a "record" and there is no mention at all of the movies or The Next Generation. As such, Roddenberry may have been unaware of advances in physics in the past few decades.

Community and Identity

"We humanists serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any familiarity, which is our community." - Kurt Vonnegut

I've been thinking about the question of identity and community. We human beings are social creatures, and to meet our needs we associate with one another and form communities. Outside of this urge to be social and to be with our fellows, however, there seems to me to be another driving force behind our gathering in communities: it is an urge to create identity for ourselves by attaching the idea of who we are to communities bigger than ourselves -- consequently enlarging our own feelings of self-worth. How attractive to think of oneself as member of something greater -- how well it feeds the ego. How many billions have perished because of pride in one's town, region, or country?

Searching for and creating identity seems to be a major occupation of the human race. Many people seem to try to create their identity based on the objects they own: their idea of self-worth based on the condition of their home, their cars, their clothes. They form their identity based on the television shows they watch, the music they listen to, the people they quote. Religion is a good example of people attempting to create their own identities by attaching themselves to something they perceive as greater -- and so is humanism. I have realized that I find greater meaning in thinking of myself as a member of Humanity. I now look at my deconversion experience through the lens of identity, and find that it makes much more sense now -- as does my progress in being able to move on.

Outside of the human need to socialize, I suspect the driving force behind this quest for community-centered identity is that of our own sentience. We are aware of our individual selves, so much to the point that it's very easy to regard ourselves and small and insignificant. While I have never felt small or insignificant, I have felt the loneliness of sentience, that longing to find a situation in which one belong. It was a loneliness that departed swiftly when I realized my humanist heart, but that loneliness is kept away through my persistent reaching-out to people. I don't want to depend on an idea or an ideal for my identity, even if it be a noble one: I want to be comfortable in my own skin, and I think I'm growing more and more so. At the very least I now realize when I am being drawn toward an organization to feed that subtle desire for identity. I seek to be so comfortable in my own identity that the only benefit organizations would bring me would be to give me a social outlet -- for I know that there are some needs that I cannot meet on my own. I need community, but I do not need an identity through it.

Truth and Meaning

One of the biggest obstacles facing a dialogue between believers of a particular faith and nonbelievers is that of the meaning people ascribe to ideas they believe as truth. It is one thing to believe something as true, but quite another to attach meaning (and thus emotion) to the idea. Meaningful ideas are not "bad", and they are probably unavoidable -- but when two people are discussing the truth-or-no nature of an idea, if they do not separate the meaning they derive from that idea from the idea itself, they will unavoidably confuse the issue. As Epictetus said, "the first duty of the truth-seeker is to rid the mind of one's conceits": do not assume the premise you attempt to prove.

I do not expect the people I encounter on a daily basis to separate the meanings they attach to ideas to the ideas themselves. I would if I were dealing with historians or scientists attempting to work out the truth of a matter, but on a daily basis, people aren't that engaged in the seeking of the truth. There are professions where truth claims are quite important -- banking, law, academia, and so on -- but for most people, I don't think truth claims come up that much. I think most people just live their lives, only needing to deal with the occasional truth claim. As such, the meaning attached to an idea they think of as true is more important than the actual veracity of the idea. I'm going to address Christianity specifically because it is the religion I have the most contact with. The average Christian, I would wager, does not spend a lot of time thinking about arguments for and against the idea that Jesus was God. If they were a serious Christian, though, they probably do spend time thinking about the meaning of that claim. They draw inspiration from his life: they are moved by feelings of mercy, humbleness, and love when they think of them. Other meanings are less pleasant to dwell on -- think of how a fundamentalist sees Jesus. What matters to most people, I think, is not the truth of the matter, but what meaning their ideas have for them. This is why it is easy to embrace theism and reject atheism: what meaning is there in atheism?

There isn't any. There isn't supposed to be. People can ascribe meaning all they want, but I don't think it is a far-fetched claim to say it's easier to create meaning out of a god than it is a lack of a god. The biggest obstacle to a civil discussion between Christians and nonchristians, or between believers in general and nonbelievers, is this matter of truth having taken on intense personal meaning. Personal meaning is subjective: it cannot be debated to any real purpose anymore than two people in an art gallery can argue over the "real" meaning of a painting. They can learn from or derive value from the other's interpretation if -- and only if, I think -- they accept that both of their interpretations are just that, interpretations. A Christian who is proselytizing, whoever, is not likely to accept the idea that what they believe to be true is just an interpretation -- nor are they likely to react to the proposition that their interpretation is wrong with any amount of grace. This is not a jibe at Christians in particular: if you believe something so forcefully that you're willing to knock on doors and intrude into the personal worldviews of strangers, it is not likely that you are a person who will suddenly back off and say "Well, yes, mine is only an interpretation". (Or, for that matter, that the people who wrote the text you take so seriously are only in possession of opinions, and not truths.)

I am starting to believe that discussions about atheism and theism are completely irrelevant. I recognize that some of my ideals are just that, ideals: they are not practical truth claims. I may have some rational justification for practicing the Golden Rule or for regarding all of humanity as important, but I accept that these are primarily ideas that mean something to me -- that I can't argue them, I can only say "This is what I believe". In so doing, though, I also put myself into the position of recognizing that for other people, the rational justification for believing in Jesus may be of only secondary importance -- that for them, what is important is the meaning they attach to those ideas. That, for someone who believes in the importance of believing what is true, is an odd thing to get used to. Stranger still is the fact that I'm more or less okay with this apparent contradiction between values. (I say apparent because I think the truth of the matter is, expecting humans to be rational is irrational.) What I want is for people to treat people decently. I want people to believe in themselves, to attempt to make their lives better. I'm starting to realize, though, that the philosophical life isn't for everyone and that those who do pursue self-growth may not do so on the terms I do -- and that's okay. (The idea that it wasn't okay at one point now strikes me as bothersome.)

So those are my thoughts, as they are now, on truth and meaning. I may develop this further as time wears on, but for today I just wanted to organize and express some thoughts of mine.

The Art of Living

I read from Epictetus recently, via a translation from Sharon Lebell, which she called The Art of Living. It combines his A Manual for Living and Essential Teachings into one volume.
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Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: some things are within our control, and some things are not. Keep your attention focuses entirely on what is truly your own concern, and be clear that what belongs to others is their business and none of yours.

When something happens, the only thing in your power is your attitude toward it: you can either accept it or resent it. What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance. [...] We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.

People don't have the power to hurt you. Even if someone shouts abuse at your or strikes you, if you are insulted, it is always your choice to vie w what is happening as insulting or not. If someone irritates you, it is only your own response that is irritating you.

Our desires and aversions are mercurial rulers: they demand to be pleased. [They] are but habits -- and we can change ourselves to have better habits.

Circumstances do not rise to meet our expectations. Events happen as they do. People behave as they are. Embrace what you actually get.

Never depend on the admiration of others. There is no strength in it. Personal merit cannot be derived from an external source. It is not to be found in your personal associations, nor can it b found in the regard of other people. It is a fact of life that other people, even people who love you, will not necessarily agree with your ideas, understand you, or share your enthusiasms. Grow up! Who cares what other people think about you? Create your own merit. Personal merit cannot be achieved through our associations with people of excellence. [...] Other people's triumphs and excellence belong to them. Likewise, your possessions may have excellence, but you yourself don't derive excellence from them.

As you think, so you become. Avoid superstitiously investing events with power or meaning they don't have. Keep your head. Our busy minds are forever jumping to conclusion, manufacturing and interpreting signs that aren't there.

Regularly ask yourself, "How are my thoughts, words, and deeds affecting my friends, my spouse, my neighbors, my child, my employer, my subordinates, my fellow citizens? Am I doing my part to contribute to the spiritual growth of all with whom I come into contact?" Make it your business to draw out the best in others by being an exemplar yourself.

Let your reason be supreme. Inculcate the habit of deliberating. Practice the art of testing whether particular things are actually good or not. The virtuous life depends on reason first and foremost. If you safeguard your reason, it will safeguard you.[...] Be suspicious of convention. Take charge of your own thinking. Rouse yourself from the daze of unexamined habit.

Popular perceptions, values, and ways of doing things are rarely the wisest. Many pervasive beliefs would not pass appropriate tests of rationality. Convention thinking -- its means and ends -- is essentially without credit and uninteresting. Its job is to preserve the status quo for overly self-defended individuals and institutions. [...] Judge ideas and opportunities on the basis of whether they are life-giving. Give your assent to that which promotes humaneness, justice, beneficial growth, kindness, possibility, and benefit to the human community. Examine things as they appear to your own mind: objectively consider what is said by others, and then establish your own convictions.

Socially taught beliefs are frequently unreliable. So many of our beliefs have been acquired through accident and irresponsible or ignorant teaching. Many of our beliefs are so deeply ingrained that they are hidden from our own view.

The instructed respect the Kinship that we share with the Ultimate and thus comport themselves as a compassionate, self-aware citizen of the universe. They understand that the wise life, which leads to tranquility, comes from conforming to Nature and to Reason.

One cannot pursue one's own highest good without at the same time necessarily promoting the good of others. A life based on narrow self-interest cannot be esteemed by any honorable measurement. Seeking the very best in ourselves means actively caring for the welfare of other human beings. Our human contract is not with the few people with whom our affairs are most immediately intertwined, nor to the prominent, rich, or well-educated, but to all of our human brethren. View yourself as a citizen of a worldwide community, and act accordingly.

When people do not act as you would wish them to, exercise the muscles of your good nature by shrugging your shoulders and saying to yourself, "Oh, well." Then let the incident go. Try also to be as kind to yourself as possible. Do not measure yourself against others or even against your ideal self. Human betterment is a gradual [...] effort. Forgive others for their misdeeds over and over again. This gesture fosters inner ease. Forgive yourself over and over again -- then try to do better next time.

To live a life of virtue, you have to become consistent, even when it isn't convenient, comfortable, or easy. It is incumbent that your thoughts, words, and deeds match up.

Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed. [...] It is time to really live ,to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now. You are not some interested bystander. Participate! Exert yourself. Give your best, and always be kind.

On Goodness

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a universal definition for ‘good’. I didn’t intend to do that: it popped up while I was writing on another topic. The definition that came to me was the measure of how well we fare when compared to our ideals. This definition makes it both objective and relative, in that you can use the same standard to understand the word “good” when it is being applied to a variety of situations.

For instance, say I had an uncle who I described as a good mechanic. This means that this uncle of mine comes very close to meeting the standards of an ‘ideal’ mechanic (the ones I can think of, anyway): he is extremely knowledgeable about all automobile matters; he is deft with his hands and always strives to prevent accidents; he treats his customers fairly, and he is creative at figuring out what the problems are with a car when the customer has a problem. Good’s opposite, “bad”, is a measure of how poorly we fare when we compared to our ideals. The bad mechanic, then, would possess limited knowledge, would be clumsy, would cheat his customers, would do his work sloppily, and so on. This does not mean the mechanic is a bad person -- just a bad mechanic. (Of course, if he is cheating his customers, I would not wager that he is a good person.)

I can apply this approach to any matter, I believe, and it works. I use it to understand why people say the things they do. We can see the reason why people from different systems of thought frequently come into opposition: their definitions of "good" vary. The reality that "good" is dependent on individual perceptions is objectionable to many, who strive for Absolutes. This is a topic I've written on before -- but even if someone were to set up an absolute code, goodness would still be dependent on independent perceptions, because "absolute" laws have to be interpreted by individual people. A good example of this is one of the Jewish "Ten Commandments", "Thou Shalt Not Kill". What does that mean? Ask five different people and you will probably arrive at five different answers. That statement has given rise to pacifist interpretation, vegetarian interpretation, only-in-self-defense interpretation, if-there's-a-just-war interpretation and a well-if-god-tells-you-to-it's-OK interpretation. Even as something as basic as "thou shalt not kill" is subject to a wide amount of interpretation. How many more interpretations are there for more complex codes of behavior?

Interestingly, based on this approach, I can see how people can come into conflict with themselves. If they are judging themselves by two separate sets of ideals, those ideals might conflict. For example, let's take a soldier who holds himself to the idea that you shouldn't kill. Another ideal he has, though, is that one should serve his country -- so he joins the Army and is taught to kill. He goes to a place like Afghanistan, for instance, and has to shoot people who attack him. He's taking life: he's betraying his ideals. The result would be self-conflict, but because his ideals are subject to his purposes, he rewrites the rules to make murder not-murder: he makes it self-defense. But what if he has to attack someone on suspicion that they might attack him, like say a checkpoint? Then he has taken life without actually being attacked, or even knowing he was attacked. Self-conflict ensues unless he is able to rewrite the terms once more, to justify it to himself somehow. There are many other opportunities for self-conflict: a businessman who tries to provide for his family and create a good business without mistreating his employees or cheating his customers with shoddy equipment: a lawyer who provides defense to someone she knows is guilty: an idealistic preacher who tries to keep a couple together even though the man is beating the woman, a young woman who has an abortion because she knows she can't provide a good life for a potential infant, or because it would be born with severe birth defects, and so on. In each instance, one ideal is conflicting with another.

Also, using this approach, we can see how people can come into conflict with one another and each party think of themselves as "right": We can see conflict between multiple "rights", and this is a very uncomfortable idea to live with. Take the immigration issue, for instance: I don't see a battle between the unconsciously illegal immigrants and the hard-working people who are being shut out of their jobs. I see a tragic conflict of rights: the immigrants, in my view, have a right to feed their families -- and so do the people who they are accidentally displace. Look at the American War of Independence: from the British perspective, the colonists had cost the Realm money because of their aggressive settling of Indian territory, leading to the necessity of the British defending the colonies, and the subsequent expense of it. The colonists were expected (fairly, from their perspective) to help pay for the expenses of maintaining an army. And yet from the colonial perspective, I can understand why they would resent the sudden imposition of financial burden. I understand both sides: I can support neither over the other.

I began writing this to share my definition of goodness, but I see this train of thought is not yet ended. I believe the definition I propose -- goodness being how well we fare when measured against our ideals -- is quite workable, and shows the origin of conflicts. I want to write on how we can greatly mitigate self-conflict and interpersonal conflict, but that will have to wait for another time: it strikes me as an important enough issue to merit its own post.

Emotional Maturity

I'm beginning to think that the foundation for emotional maturity is the realization of two things:

• We cannot control what happens to us.
• The only thing we can control is our response to what happens to us.

In the summer of 2006, I fell sick for nearly two weeks. I don't know what hit me, but the two symptoms I was conscious of were (1) extreme fatigue and (2) prolonged and severe headaches. I was bedridden the majority of the time. Despite this, though, I somehow had the presence of mind to write "...we have good days and we have bad days, but we deserve neither." I realized that I was sick, but I realized as the first week wore on that the symptoms were lessening, that it would pass.

It was this attitude that allowed me to maintain my composure while I was sick, to not give in to despair. I simply laid in bed, resting, thinking of other things. I won't deny that if I could have fallen asleep and died that I would have welcomed the relief -- for such was my physical misery -- but I survived. The lesson of that sickness has stayed with me, and has guided my thinking ever since. It's important to me. I don't know where it came from, but ah! -- how useful it is.

We do have bad days. We're attacked by viruses, mistreated by others, are stuck in traffic jams, have unexpected financial difficulties -- in summary, suffer from circumstances beyond our control. You can't stop people from talking about you -- you can't help catching a viruses. The air is filled with them. On the same note, though, we also have good days where traffic moves just the way we want. We go to the zoo and the animals amuse us: our path crosses that of a friendly stranger, and we make a personal connection. We have an easy day at work -- we go outside and find that the weather is ideal.

The idea that we can keep bad things from happening, or make good thing happen, is behind every superstition. Our ancestors did rain dances and sacrificed virgins to keep the sun rising: our contemporaries pray to the heavens to send rain. They weep and pray at their alters, trying to invoke the gods' favor to give them a raise, find them a mate, keep them from harm. People buy rabbit's feet and contractors design buildings that skip from floor twelve to floor fourteen.

Despite all of this effort, though, they can't actually change what happens. If I pray to Athena for good traffic on my drive to someplace, the effect will be exactly the same as if I had prayed to a bag of Skittles or not prayed at all (provided the time I spent praying instead of driving is taken into consideration). I can be as friendly as I like to people, but I'm not going to generate "karma" that makes people treat me kindly in return. Oh, some will return my smile with a smile, but that's only a natural response in people who like being treated with friendliness. We can't change these vents of life, and we waste considerable time, effort, and energy in trying to do so.

As much as we can't control, though, there is one powerful thing we can control: our own mind. It's safe to say that our emotional impulses give us much reason for regret: we make bad choices on them, and later say "I wish I'd thought that through". How many people are in the prisons today because they did something out of impulse -- threw a punch at someone, for instance? Human beings are so passionate that many religions and philosophies push for more self-control. Even emotional Pentecostalism teaches that self-control is part of the fruit of the spirit -- although it's not actually practiced. (An ex-Pentecostal joke: when is self control not a fruit of the spirit? In a Pentecostal church.)

People do learn self-control in varying degrees. They learn fairly quickly, for instance, that you have to watch what you say in front of authority figures. Some people are better at controlling themselves than are others. But this kind of self-control is limited to what we do, to how we respond rather than react to what's done to us. It doesn't include an ability to control what we do by ourselves, or how we think -- and these things are just as if not more important.

Why is how we think important? I believe it is so because our thinking defines our reality. If you go outside and look at a tree, you're not really seeing the tree: you're seeing the image your brain drew of the tree, using the light that is reflected or absorbed from them and taken in by your cones and rods. If you have "normal" vision, you will see it as a collection of greens and browns, probably. But what if you're color-blind? What if the equipment that draws your image of a tree is different from most everybody else's? The image drawn will be different.

The same is true of every sense, I think. Our brains create a reality based our senses. This is true for the sense of reason, which has to be trained rather than being automatic. (The idea of reason as a sense is another essay, I think.) I learned at a fairly young age that I could manipulate the way I sensed things. Have you ever noticed that a location that is new to you looks different than it does when you're familiar with it? Take a house -- does it "feel" different from the way it did when you first moved in? When things are new, they are colored by our imagination, by possibilities: when we are familiar with them, they're colored by our experiences. I realized that I could manipulate my thinking and see something old through new eyes -- and see something new through a sense of familiarity.

Not everyone is conscious of this: just last year, while walking up the stairs in my residency hall at my university, I commented to someone that 'I can still see this place the way it was when I first moved in.' He turned his head and looked at me, replying "It looks just the same. We haven't changed anything..." It wasn't the sight of the place, it was feeling of the place: what it meant, and through that, how it looked. It's a subtle difference, and I'm not sure how to explain it. But this taught me that I could manipulate the way I thought about things.

In late 2006 or early 2007, I read an essay titled Humanist Spirituality: Oxymoron or Authentic Path to Enlightenment? by Doug Muder, a Unitarian minister. In it, he explores the idea of spirituality, and connects it to the Stoic practice of being mindful of one's thoughts: of thinking about how you think and how your thoughts impact your state of mind. The lecture impressed me to the point that I re-read it every so often, and when I read it I began trying to put it into practice. I began to examine my thoughts, to apply reason to them and ask if they were doing me any good. When the way people treated me inspired anger, I seized that anger and thought: will growing angry do me any good? Or will it just make matters worse? When I want to give in to hate, I think: do I really want to sacrifice part of my emotional well-being to this person? Why? When I grew upset or despair at a situation, I turned that anger or despair into the willpower to change the situation. I forced my emotions to work for me -- and if they weren't useful, I neutered them. The podcasts of Zelig Pliskin -- amusingly, an Orthdox rabbi- helped. He advises his listeners to think about the way they're thinking and feeling, to apply reason to them.

I think that this Stoicism is a logical extension of being a freethinker. I said in my "This I Believe" essay that inspired by the successes of the scientific method, I adopted critical thinking as part of my worldview. If I use reason as my guide for what I believe, why not use it to order the way I think? A year ago -- Thanksgiving week, 2007 -- I read my first bit of Stoic literature, that of Marcus Aurelius' meditations. Shortly before Thanksgiving this week, I read Epictetus' Discourses and Manual for Virtuous Living. In both, I found amazing insights that built on this distinction between that which we can control and that which we can't. I've shared my favorite quotations from Aurelius before, and I plan to post my favorites from Epictetus in a week or so. I've been thinking about writing this essay -- or musing, whichever it has turned out to be -- since the summer, and I didn't want to post Epictetus until after posting this. The reason is partly vanity: the distinction between what we can control and what we can't is the essence of everything Epictetus said, and I like the fact that the stuff I think of independently has already been thought of before by people I consider wise. It makes me think I'm doing something right.

Because I read Epictetus before I finished articulating my own thoughts, I'm going to end this with a few quotations from his works that illustrate the theme of what I was writing about. It seems an apt way to conclude.

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Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: some things are within our control, and some things are not. Keep your attention focuses entirely on what is truly your own concern, and be clear that what belongs to others is their business and none of yours.

When something happens, the only thing in your power is your attitude toward it: you can either accept it or resent it. What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance. [...] We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.

People don't have the power to hurt you. Even if someone shouts abuse at your or strikes you, if you are insulted, it is always your choice to vie w what is happening as insulting or not. If someone irritates you, it is only your own response that is irritating you.

The Fruits of the (Humanist) Spirit

“Nothing human is alien to me.” - Karl Marx

So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law.The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; 20idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.

During the summer I visited my parents and noted that a verse from “Galatians” in the Christian bible was stitched on a throw pillow. The phrase in particular was “Through love, serve one another”. On the face of it, it was a sentiment I could identify with -- I am a humanist, after all, and believe in Woodrow Wilson’s statement that ‘there is no higher religion than human service.’ While I am not religious, I believe religions were created by people to serve particular functions, and that one of those functions is to promote values -- and some of those values are bound to be good, just as some of them are bound to be rotten. As such, I like to read religious texts and beat the bad ideas out of them -- adding the good stuff that’s left to my own worldview.

Even so, I normally avoid the New Testament because of the cultural chauvinists who associate themselves with it. By this, I do not mean all Christians -- merely those who raised in a "Christian" culture and are obnoxious about it, even if their own worldviews aren't very "Christian" at all. Despite this, however, there must still be good to be found in the motley collection of books Christians call the "New Testament" -- regardless of the people who claim it inspires them.

When I re-read the “Fruits of the Spirit” in Galatians, I found myself surprised. Stripped of their supernaturalistic elements, these “fruits” have anagrams in my own worldview. As I began compare and contrast these values with my own, I thought I should share them for those who may not be aware.

1. Love:
- Christian: those who are sincere about their religion try to practice agape love, or “God’s love”. These Christians see their god as loving people unconditionally and believe that people ‘filled with the Spirit of god’ should be able to love people unconditionally.
- Humanist: Humanism as a life stance is rooted in both reason and empathy. The American Humanist Association partially defines humanism as “a rational philosophy informed by science, inspired by art, and motivated by compassion.” What is the source of this empathy and compassion? Human beings, as mammals, are naturally given toward forging social ties -- especially with kin. We protect our family, or who we see as our family. The mapping of the human genome has proven that human beings are overwhelmingly more alike than not. Humanists by large see the entire body of humanity as one huge family, six billion strong, and thus feel natural empathy toward any human being in physical or emotional pain -- and experience feelings of kinship with all.

2. Joy:
- Christian: “Joy”, or invincible happiness that is not subject to random happenings, is supposed to be a natural gift from God. To quote a pastor I remember from my teenage years, “Happiness is based on happenings; joy is not.” This joy is typically associated with being saved.
- Humanist: I never fully understood the concept above until early 2006, when I began explore philosophy. I discovered in 2006 a source of inner joy -- or I should say sources. The root, I suppose, is a love for life. I am sometimes intoxicated by how happy I am, bewildered even. I cannot articulate why -- except to say that I have no reason to be otherwise. There is no kind of music that I can’t enjoy to some degree, no moment that I can’t seize and find some satisfaction in. Part of my own source of joy is a kind of stoicism, or realizing that I can’t control everything that happens to me -- and that I’m okay with that. (For more elaboration, I wrote an essay over a year ago entitled “All and Enough: Humanist Spirituality”.)

3. Peace:
- Christian: peace, or spiritual tranquility, is supposed to result from a relationship with God.
- Humanist: I see joy and peace as being part of the same essence. My own peace comes from the Stoic influences on humanism, or at least the influences I see. I believe that emotional maturity begins when someone realizes two things: one, that they cannot control everything; two, that they only thing they can ultimately control is their own self. When I realize that I am the master of my responses to what happens to me, and when I exercise that mastery, I maintain inner peace -- emotional stability.

4. Patience:
- Christian: Patience is fairly self-explanatory. Christian emphasis on patience seems to be on withstanding persecution or opposition.
- Humanist: Humanism is not a prescriptive worldview: there are no Ten Commandments, Four Noble Truths, Five Pillars, or list of “fruits of the Spirit”. The foundation of the worldview or “life stance” of humanism is reason and empathy, both of which come natural to human beings in various degrees and thus are not really prescribed -- just naturally practiced. As such, there’s no direct anagram but one can be derived from both reason and empathy. It is both rational and a practice of empathy to be patient, as it is to endure what one must. On the subject of “what one must”, you can read Stoic influences. I’ve read that Paul of Tarsus -- who wrote Galatians -- was influenced by Stoicism, which would not surprise me. Zeno -- the first Stoic -- preceded Paul by some 350+ years, and the early stoics believed in a universal being. (Stoicism, like all worldviews, is subject to interpretation. Marcus Aurelius, who inspires many of my own ideas, believed in the Roman pantheon -- not a universal spirit.) A quotation from Aurelius that applies toward patience is this: “Men exist for the sake of one another; teach them, then, or bear with them.”

5. Kindness:
- Christian: I’ve never actually heard a commentary on kindness by a pastor, so I have to wing this. I’m going to guess that kindness is “love in action” -- dealing with people justly and with compassion.
- Humanism: Kindness, of course, is central to humanism. I cannot exaggerate the influence that simple kindnesses have had on my own life: acts of kindness by a few people I knew in my youth inspired me to live in a spirit of empathy, which led to something of a rebirth for me. When I deal with people, I try to do in a spirit of loving kindness toward them -- which is not always easy with certain personalities.

6: Goodness:
- Christian: What is goodness? Again, this is something I’ve not heard much of a commentary on. The only universal definition of goodness I can think of -- one that applies to any worldview, from the best to the very worst, is this: how well do you fare when judged by your ideals? In a Christian worldview, a “good” person would be someone who lives in love, with perfect faith in their god, who strives to obey the guidance of their god who is supposed to be the ultimate ideal -- all-knowing, all-powerful, ever-present, etc.
- Humanist: The universal definition I used was “How well do you fare when judged by your ideals?” A humanist worldview, founded on reason and empathy, would define a good person as someone who lived in love and who strives to find truth with and live using reason.

7. Faithfulness:
- Christian: Interpretations vary. A faithful person is someone who keeps the faith, which is important in Christianity. It can also mean that someone who is faithful can be relied upon.
- Humanist: “Faith” has no real counterpart in humanism, it being a rational worldview that eschews emotional appeals that have no grounding in reason. Humanism is an optimistic worldview, however, and so it may be said that some humanists are faithfully hopeful.

8. Gentleness/Meekness:
- Christian: I’ve heard varying interpretations for this. One I’ve heard (and don’t particularly find helpful) is that meekness means to be humble and live subject to guidance from the pastor and God. This particular interpretation came from an authoritarian pastor, which will come as no great surprise. Another interpretation -- one that is basic and seems to be more helpful -- that being “gentle” is a combination of being both loving and peaceful -- to be motivated to help and so control one’s passions to further that end, without allowing strong emotions to endanger that goal.

- Humanist: When “winging” it and contemplating on the definition in the Christian section, I tend to rely on my own thoughts and then interpret them based on what I know of Christian doctrine. My own view, then, is my own thoughts without the Christian swing to it. I believe in dealing with people with a gentle and considerate manner. There are times when no amount of consideration on your part is going to help matters, but I find it’s a good idea to stick to ideals even in those cases just for the practice.

9. Self-Control
- Christian: Christian beliefs hold that humanity is basically corrupt and tempted constantly by carnal nature and the Devil to sin against God. Christians are to practice self control and abstain from worldly pleasures - -sex, alcohol, strong expressions of emotion (the use of strong language), etc. In a broader, more philosophical sense, this can be seen as evidence of stoicism.
- Humanist: Humanists believe that people contain within them the rational ability to abstain from doing evil -- to restrain our primitive, animal passions and treat one another civilly. My own worldview is both humanist and Stoic, and I am quite keen on self-control. I control my thoughts, and spent much time in consideration while trying to figure out a good way to respond to issues of life. I believe self control is crucial to peace of mind.

My rediscovery of the “Fruits of the Spirit” tells me that Christian philosophy and humanist philosophy need not be considered foes. Both philosophies, I believe, come from the same spirit -- the human spirit -- and thus are more alike than they are different. The problem is that the Christian religion often gets in the way of Christian philosophy.