| Start Where You Are |
By Ronald Tower Preface This is a series of meditations on practical, hopefully useful, philosophy. Explore truth, goodness, beauty, happiness, problem solving, ethics, science and religion, and the meaning of life and death.Contents A Place to Start Living Together Predicting and Controlling Experience Seeking Broader Meaning Getting a Life Facing Death Unsolvable Problems We must always start somewhere, so let me start where I am. I am here typing this. I want to type it. I like what I am typing, more or less. It is a certain kind of experience. Before this I was experiencing something else. Later I hope that there will be more experiences. I am writing these words, but I often speak the words, to others or in my inner thoughts. Abstracting out of this scenario a little, what I have is language, experience, and desire. Language includes natural languages and texts of those languages, texts written or spoken or thought, texts about experiences, texts about desires, texts about texts, conversations, monologues, rules, unspoken assumptions, norms, artificial languages, logic, mathematics, computer languages, visual languages, body languages, dance, languages of tone and pitch, basically anything that can be a sign for something else. Experience can be active or passive, inner or outer, verbal or silent, now, or later. It includes all my sense experiences as well as my experiences of performing actions. It includes my inner thoughts, dreams, visions, and intimations. It is what appears to me, what I interact with, and what I do. Desire is like, dislike, want, need, preference, goal, purpose, motive, drive, impulse, command. It is what moves me to action and accounts for many of my reactions to experience. You can consider language, experience, and desire, each alone. For example, you can suspend language and desire and just experience in this moment until you seem to experience the silence behind experience itself, but then you want to talk about it or to get on to some goal. Or you can relate them to other instances of themselves as texts to texts forming a coherence of texts. But you can get even farther by relating them together. For example, you can systematically test texts against experience and get science, or tease out experience into symbols and get art, or construct texts that meet goals and get designs, or execute on such texts and get technology, or reconcile all three and get happiness. Language, experience, and desire when combined together form configurations. Life seems to be a vast diversity of such configurations, as do cultures and practices and technologies. Even an individual life seems to be a sequence of such configurations. This is not certainty, but it can take us very far. But is this the best starting place? It seems pretty open ended, not very definite. Maybe we should start with some text, like a sacred book or a coherent set of assumptions. But these are after all just texts. Texts must be tested. They can't just be assumed. Or they can be, but then it is just a desire. We prefer this text, or we desperately want it to be true. When we are totally absorbed in a text, suspending disbelief, totally in its world, it can seem obvious. But then we look at the book we are holding in our hands. It is an object. We set it on the table, and go outside, and the world is still there, mysterious and large. Truth is a word we use to compliment texts that are coherent and well tested against experience. So first of all, truth is a word. It is something we say about texts. It does not refer to any object in the world of experience. It refers to a relationship of agreement. For example, when we say, "That is true", we often simply mean, "I agree". We mean that the text agrees with our experience or with other texts that we take to be true. Since truth is not an object that can be immediately perceived, a text must somehow be evaluated to see if it is true. It must be tested. For simple observation statements, we can simply check to see if we experience what is stated. For example, you say, "It is snowing," and I look out the window and see that it does indeed appear to be snowing. Then I am willing to say that your statement is true. It is an honorific I confer on your statement as a result of my testing. For more complex texts, more complex testing is needed. For example, if I say, "This is an accurate map," it will be difficult for you to immediately make a judgment. You can try to use it and see if you get lost. As long as it works well, you will tentatively accept my assertion. On the other hand, if you have had bad experiences with other maps I have given you, you may have your doubts. In this case, you are not comparing the map directly to experience but to a whole network of other texts and experiences. One approach to evaluating texts is to consider all of the texts that you tentatively accept at any point in time. You use this network of texts until a problem comes up. One problem may be that you discover an inconsistency between some of the texts in your network. Past experience has shown that texts that are coherent with other true texts are more reliable than those that are inconsistent with them. The world of experience seems to be largely self-consistent. So when your working set of texts gets out of coherence, you make moves to restore it to coherence, by changing or ejecting some of the texts. The same process is needed when you have a new experience that contradicts one of your texts. You need to make adjustments. What specific adjustment you make is fairly open. Which texts need to be altered depends on many factors. For example, we would tend to try changing the rules of logic or some well tested, highly useful physical theory only as a last resort. Instead, we may go back to check our experience again. Maybe we were mistaken. Maybe we misinterpreted what we experienced. But eventually, if there is no other way, even these texts may need to be changed. This process does not result in one true network of texts, though, since others may decide on different adjustments that could still work. This makes the truth of the texts tentative and evolving. Some people have trouble with this rough and tumble approach to truth. They would prefer something less fluid. But even with this approach, a great deal of the system is usually preserved. Only rarely is a major rearrangement needed. Still, is there a more stable approach? Take the two main threads of coherence and testing against experience. If you emphasize coherence, perhaps taking mathematics as your model, you can imagine that the world is one vast system of inter-related patterns. By developing more and more comprehensive, coherent systems, you can hope to get closer to that universal pattern. You can further claim that you have direct access to those patterns though your reason. Then you can get at the truth without all the messy interactions with the world of experience. The problem though is that the systems you develop may in fact have no relationship to the world of experience. They are simply texts, however elegant. And it is very difficult to show others that you have direct contact with a universal world of patterns when all they see is words. Going to the other extreme, you can emphasize testing against experience, perhaps taking observation statements as your model. You can then say that truth is a direct correspondence to reality. The first problem with this is with the term reality. How does reality differ from experience? You could say that it is the world behind experience, that causes experience, but that we cannot experience it directly. It must always be mediated through experience. But then how do you know your experience reflects it? All that it seems that you can do is test against the experience itself. Reality seems to be just that in experience which resists your desires, forcing you to "face reality". The second problem is that observation statements do not cover enough territory. Almost immediately you are into theories and maps and hypotheses and you cannot derive these from observation statements. Instead you invent them and use observation statements to invalidate them if they are inconsistent. Finally, the observation statements themselves can be very theory laden. Why did you choose those particular words and concepts? Couldn't you have used others? So it seems we are left with a whole range of texts that need to work together, some closer to the pure coherence end, some closer to the direct description of experience end, but a lot in the middle. We can make these texts more useful by keeping them as coherent as possible and by testing them against experience as best we can, and we can use the word truth to praise them. This may be a weaker use of the word than some of us had hoped for, but it is still a useful word and in the thick of practical inquiry and problem solving, this is what we usually mean by it anyway. Good is a word we use to compliment things that we desire. Suppose you say, "It's raining." I might respond, "That's good," if we really needed the rain, or "That's bad," if we are having a lot of flooding. Sometimes we say that something is "good for" something else if it leads to something we think is good. We may like the first thing or not, as when we are told, "This is good for you," and the implication is that you may not like this, but that it is worth it for the good it will bring. So we use the word good for things that we desire in themselves or that we desire because they lead to something else that we desire. Why then does "good" sometimes have the connotation of something that is going to ruin a "good time"? Because we have conflicting desires. On the one hand we may want to have the good time, but we may also be fearful (or our parent's may be fearful) of the possible consequences, which we don't want. Each of us has our inventory of, often contradictory, desires. Some of the desires are basic, such as the desire for survival. Others are derived. Part of our struggle in life is to sort through our conflicting desires to determine what is really in our "best interests". This leads into a natural conflict between our interests and the interests of others. We consider someone selfish if they only consider their own interests, and we consider someone a "good person" if they are concerned about the interests of others. If they take this to an extreme so that their own most basic interests are threatened, we may consider them a hero, a saint, or a fool depending on the circumstances. All of these uses of the word good seem to resolve to desire in one form or another. Something may be good in one circumstance but not in another, or to one person and not to another. There are goods that many of us do agree on. But still this all seems to provide a very unstable definition for good. How do we know what to seek when good is such a shifting sand? Isn't there an ultimate good that can provide a firm foundation? But how would we find this ultimate good? We could list out all of the goods we know about and try to arrange them in a hierarchy, then pick the highest. But wouldn't this hierarchy vary from person to person or culture to culture? There does not appear to be any object in the world of experience which is "the good". Good is an evaluation we make of such objects. So where does that leave us? Back with desire. All of this doesn't mean that we are on the brink of chaos though. There are in fact many desires that most people agree on. Otherwise we would not have survived as a society or as a species. For example, most of us want to survive, to have a few enjoyments in life, and to be a part of a group, to have friends, be a member of a family, to belong. These basic desires give us enough in common with others so that we are often in agreement with what is good with members of the social groups we belong to. Most people are more than willing to allow others these basic goods within a system in which they can also enjoy them. Beauty is a word we use to compliment things that we like to contemplate. When we say that something is beautiful we are saying that it gives pleasure to our senses or to our mind. It is something that we like to see, hear, feel, or think about. It is a joy to contemplate. It could be a natural scene, a human body, a sound, music, a painting, a scene in a movie, a poem, a particularly elegant and well done action, a design, even a mathematical theorem. It is difficult to understand what is in common among all these things that we think of as beautiful. Maybe it is a particular symmetry, each part fitting well with the others, everything coming together just right. There is also an element of it being desirable for its own sake, independent of its utility. We think it is beautiful independent of what use we could put it to. Maybe it is because it invites us to suspend striving for a moment so that it can bring a certain order and peace to our mind. A strange twist on beauty is how the same thing can be beautiful from one point of view and ugly from another. Something can be so ugly that it invites contemplation and becomes something beautiful. Or it may normally be rather unremarkable but in a certain setting it becomes beautiful. Consider the human body. What is it that makes a body beautiful? Symmetry, how each part flows into the other, with no part overpowering or clashing with the other, how all the parts function together in harmony, how the whole moves together with grace and ease. Still, different cultures and times have had different ideals of physical beauty. Also, our perception of beauty can get mixed up with different things. It is a commonplace that a parent may think their baby is beautiful when others have to hide their smiles. The person you love may seem beautiful to you independent of what others think. A treasured grandmother can look beautiful even if they would not appear so to anyone else. It is because contemplating them gives you pleasure because of past associations or future hopes. It is the peace and pleasure you get in contemplating them. Appreciation of beauty also varies according to background and taste. For example, a mathematician may get great pleasure contemplating a simple and elegant proof to a complex theorem while others just see a bunch of boring and confusing symbols. An art lover might find an abstract painting or a disturbing surrealist image beautiful while someone without a similar background would just shake their head and look for the seascapes and covered bridges. Take the example of disturbing works of art. You may be repelled by them and never want to see them again, or there may be something about a particular work that compels your attention. It captures something that you feel a need to contemplate. It gives form to something that you know is there on the fringes of your awareness. The artist's ability to capture it makes it a beautiful. The pleasure of contemplating beautiful things is very powerful and even though the beauty itself may be independent of utility, beauty is often put to use. For example, associating beautiful bodies with products helps make the products desirable, or so the advertisers hope. If we ourselves are not beautiful, we may somehow hope that associating with the things that the beautiful associate with may make us more beautiful. But why do we want to be beautiful? Because beauty invites attention and appreciation. It grants a certain status. It also gets mixed up with sexual attractiveness. It is ironic that someone with a beautiful body may be a terrible lover and a very annoying person to be around. But we still want to give them the benefit of the doubt because we want the status of being associated with beauty. But beauty is associated with more elevated things as well. Some philosophers and mystics have considered the intellectual, dispassionate contemplation of beauty as the greatest good. One reason could be the peace that comes with contemplating beauty. And if beauty comes from symmetry and order of design, what is more beautiful than the universe itself? Are not all things striving toward their most perfect form? And what could be more beautiful than the mind that created it all? What greater bliss could there be than the beatific vision of the divine mind? Others of us though can't quite see it. Even the contemplation of beauty can go to an extreme, loose its balance and harmony. As we can abstract truth and good far outside of normal human experience until we consider them divine, the same can be done with beauty. But ultimately, it is still just us, down here with our language, experience, and desire. Knowledge is our current store of texts that are coherent and well tested against experience. When we say that we know something, it implies a greater degree of conviction than when we say that we think something or believe something. Knowledge is considered to have more weight than mere opinion. Still if we say we know something, we first have to believe it, so knowledge at least implies belief. Suppose we believed something that was not true. Could we be said to know it? No. So knowledge implies true belief. But suppose we just happened to guess the truth. Could we be said to know it then? Again, no. We have to be justified in our belief. Similarly, if we followed a procedure that is considered reliable to validate a belief, we would be justified in our belief. But we could still be mistaken. The belief could still be false. Because of these considerations, knowledge has been defined as justified, true belief. This seems like a pretty good definition. The problem is that the only way we can approach truth is through justification. We do not have direct access to truth. If we want to know if a statement is true, we have to go through a process of justification, like checking for its coherence and testing it against experience. If truth is a word we use to compliment texts that are coherent and well tested against experience, the implication is that we have texts and experience and various tests involving them, but we do not have access to some transcendent truth or knowledge. So justification, testing, validation, truth, and knowledge are all slightly different ways of talking about the same issue of texts and their reliability. One distinction is that with knowledge, I am the subject. I know something. With truth, the text is the subject. The text is said to be true. But the way we determine if we are justified in using the terms is the same. The word knowledge has the further function of designating all the different truths we have at our disposal. It is a store of true texts. The phrase "the truth" has a rather more lofty connotation as the one and only truth. Knowledge, at least in contemporary usage, does not necessarily have an implication of permanence. For example, today we speak of knowledge workers, knowledge production, and knowledge engineering. Knowledge has taken on more of the connotation of something that is produced rather than found. We produce knowledge by creating texts and then thoroughly testing them for coherence with other texts and with experience. What passes for knowledge today may well be modified or superceded based on more work in the future. Thus we talk about the current state of knowledge. This is not in any way to denigrate knowledge. Knowledge is one of our most precious possessions. It is of great value both in itself as an object of contemplation and for its usefulness in solving problems. Still, this view of knowledge is somewhat less than some people had hoped for in the past. They distinguished knowledge from opinion as they would distinguish something that is perfect and unchanging from something that is variable and evolving. But in the world of language, experience, and desire that we seem to be confined to, these absolute distinctions are more difficult to make. It is more a matter of degree. When we have not been able to do enough testing, we may still express our opinion. But we reserve the word knowledge for cases in which we feel enough testing has been done so that we feel fairly confident. I am a sequence of configurations of language, experience, and desire, a changing bundle of identities. Many of us at some point in our life have felt lost. We don't know who we are or where we are going. Sometimes this is because we have experienced things that contradict our concept of ourselves and our culture. This often happens when people go off to war. It can also happen when we are dislocated or we suddenly realize that the ways we have been taught are not the only ways. There are other cultures, other paths, other practices. So who are we fundamentally? If we just stop and try to observe ourselves, we may feel a very disconcerting vertigo. What is behind the flow? Are we just one thing? Like many seemingly obvious things, when you look for an I, it is very hard to find. What we do find are conversations, sensations, imaginings, dreams, likes, dislikes, hopes, blank spots of dreamless sleep, and much more. Many of these can be said to be intentional in the sense that there seems to be someone talking and sensing, but when you get right down to it, you just have different configurations of language, experience, and desire, one after another. So the best I can do is define myself as that sequence. I could say that I am that which stays the same through the sequence, but I seem to be changing all of the time. If I look back on myself at 12 and then at 21 and then now, I am not the same person, although there is still a lot that is the same. But that could just be because one configuration leads to another and then to the next with linkages all the way back. I do seem to have some groupings of configurations that have similar behavior patterns and thought patterns, patterns I keep coming back to in similar situations. These could be called my identities. For example, there are my identities related to work, school, home, social gatherings, and ethnic associations. I have various degrees of control over these identities, but they most always involve playing a role. Others must accept me in an identity or it becomes undermined. For the most part I am hardly conscious of my shifts from one identity to the other. I feel that I am the same person, even if others cannot see it. One thing that doesn't change is my physical body. I still have the same body. Of course, it is getting older, but I can still see the similarities when I look at pictures or in the mirror. It is the only thing that others see of me, my body and its actions. That could be why I take it so seriously when my body is classified in one way or the other. I am my body. I am not my body. I am more than my body. It is hard to know. From the point of view of my experiences, I can never see my complete body at any point in time. I can see more of it in the mirror or in pictures. I can definitely feel it. It is at least my constant companion. I don't really know if it completely defines me. It doesn't seem that way. What I do and what I think seem important. But are these just phenomena of my body? Some people are artists of their identities. They can recreate themselves. But doesn't their past prevent them from assuming a different identity? You can redefine yourself without lying about your past. You can say, "I was that person then, but then I changed and became a new person." People undergo radical shifts and conversions all the time. But the elements of their new identities were always at least partially there in their old ones. Think of a stereo with levers for different channels. You can shift different levers up and down and get a new sound. What was de-emphasized before can become central now. Other things can be muted. New channels can be added. To really play the new role though you must convince others to accept you in that role. There are many ways to construct an identity. You can catalog the history of a sequence. You can list your social roles. You can describe a region of space and time. You can mention your memberships. You can endorse cultures and tastes. You can make a shrine of preference. You can set out a display of your purchases. You can write your numbers in ledgers. Just to name a few. Of course, many people are never concerned about their identities or even very aware of them. They naturally grew into them and they continue to work. But when there is considerable social change it may be difficult to maintain the same identities. Even if you are satisfied, social pressures may force you onto a new path. When this happens it can be useful to realize that what you are is more like faces reflected in a stream than a face carved in stone. Here's a recipe. If you are unhappy, change the language, change the experience, or change the desire, or some combination of these, until they are reconciled. Change how you talk about the situation, change the situation, or change what you want. It's very simple to say. To put it into practice is another thing. We are happy when things are going our way, that is, when our strongest desires are being met. Obviously, if we are hungry or thirsty or in pain, it is hard to be happy, unless we have unusual powers of detachment. On the other hand, even if we wish we were a movie star or the president, it is still possible to be happy because these desires are usually weak, more like daydreams. Part of this is expectations. We feel that it is very unlikely that we will become a movie star. We don't take it seriously, so the desire is weak. On the other hand, some people are really driven to become a movie star. It is one of their strongest desires, and they will never be satisfied until they make it. Without this drive, it may be impossible for them to become a movie star because of the many obstacles that they will meet. They must keep going and not give up. Their desire must be strong. But there may be a way to balance ambition with happiness. You can have the strong desire to do what is needed to become a movie star while maintaining a weaker desire for the end result. In other words, indulge in the daydream but do not become obsessed with the final result. Instead be obsessed with the process. Save your strongest desires for things that you can control. You can control seeking the result. You cannot control your ultimate success. Take another common desire. Suppose that I want everyone to like me, to respect me, to think positively of me. Because of this I am always trying to conform myself to people's expectations, or my view of their expectations. When I realize that I have done something or that I have some characteristic that people will not respect or like, I can feel desperately unhappy. Part of the problem could be my views. I may have the unreasonable view that people are always watching me, that they really care what I do and are waiting for me to screw up. I may also have unreasonable views about my characteristics or of what people think of me. This is a problem with the sort of inner monologue I carry on. The whole situation could change if instead I believed that people are really not that concerned about what I do unless it affects them. Also, what would be the consequences if some people didn't like me? Would it really harm me in any way? Can I reasonably expect everyone to like me? Why do I want that? Still appearances may be important, as when we dress a certain way for an interview, but they are not centrally important. We can view them more functionally. I can take the attitude that I like to get along with people, but if they don't like me or don't respect me, I don't care that much unless there are real consequences that really matter to me. So some ideas are to desire what you can control and to test your views to see if they really match the situation. That is, change your desires or change how you think about the situation. Of course, it is not always a matter of trying to adjust yourself to the situation, sometimes the situation needs to be changed. If you really hate something, maybe it is time to do something about it. We do this all the time. We are hungry, so we eat. We are worried about our retirement, so we save and invest. It is cold, so we turn up the heat. Take the example of your job. If you really hate your job, what should you do? First look at your views about your job. Test them against experience. Do you have reasonable expectations? Are you expecting your job to provide your self-respect as well as your income? Maybe you could shift some of those desires to other activities. You could take your job for what it is and make the best of it. In other words, adjust your language and your desire. In addition, you may need to change your experience. You could try to adjust your assignments to areas you do like and avoid or de-emphasize areas that you do not like. If you like your field, it may just be where you are working. Maybe it is time to change companies or organizations, but try to determine if where you are going would really be better. Or it could be that you really don't like the type of work you do, so you may need to work out a plan to transition to another occupation. Similar considerations can apply to where you live, to your relationships, to your life style. Understand and test the texts you use. Determine your true desires. Try to understand what could change in the situation. Then reconcile, adjust, minimize and maximize. Take your happiness into your own hands. Still, there are times when you really do understand the situation correctly and there is nothing you can change. To be happy then, you must learn detachment, that is, you must weaken your desire. You may still wish things were otherwise, but you can't do anything about it. So you just have to let go. A problem arises when there is a new conflict of desire. I could be going along in my life and then something changes so that my desires are now in a conflict with my experience or it might be a longstanding conflict that I am just getting around to addressing. I might have developed some new goals or been given a new assignment or project. The goals by definition define some state of affairs that are desired and that do not already exist. The first step in problem solving is to understand the problem. What are the goals? What do I mean by the language I am using to describe the problem? Is there a better way to describe the problem, better language? I need a problem statement. It should be clear from the problem statement what state of affairs would constitute a successful solution to the problem. The goals should be clearly listed and should be testable. The second step is an exploration of the problem area. Is this a new problem or have others solved it before? How good were their solutions? What is the relevant knowledge and tools that apply to this situation? Are they practical for me in my circumstances? This step may involve talking to people who have solved similar problems, doing a literature survey, or doing some experimenting or prototyping to try out ideas. One danger here is paralysis by analysis. We need to set limits on how much exploring we should do. When does the problem need to be solved? How much money and time can I spend? The third step is to enumerate alternatives based on the explorations that we have done and to compare them to the problem statement. How well do the alternatives meet the goals? Maybe we need to go back and change the problem statement because the goals are too ambitious. Sometimes it may be useful to list out all of the goals and to give them weights, say from one to ten. The tens are essential. The ones are nice to have but really optional. Then for each alternative, we estimate the probability of meeting the goal using a number between zero and one. We then multiply each probability times the corresponding weight and add up all the results. The alternative with the highest number wins. Of course, you may only rarely go to this level of detail and if you do you may still choose an alternative with a lower number, but this illustrates the sorts of tradeoffs you may need to consider. The fourth step is to implement the chosen solution. As you implement the solution you may find that you need to go back and revisit any of the previous steps. The final step is to evaluate the results of your implementation. Did it really solve the problem? Maybe you have learned new things in this implementation that can be applied to another iteration of problem solving. Or maybe your time is up and you have to either decide that you have not solved the problem or that this solution is good enough for now. This may sound like a very formal process and in fact in engineering these steps may be formally defined with groups of people performing different roles, a formal paper trail, and gates between steps. But we also do this sort of thing everyday. We need to fix our kitchen faucet. We draw on existing knowledge or read up on how to do it. We consider alternatives. Then we pick one and try it out. If it works, OK. Otherwise, it may be time to call the plumber. Notice the use of language, experience, and desire in this process. We experience a conflict. We use language to articulate the desires that need to be met. We draw on past experience or texts to come up with alternatives. We put the selected alternative into action. And in the end, we have been successful if language, experience, and desire are back in balance, at least in this particular area of concern. In its broadest sense culture is all of the artifacts and practices of a group of people. But it is more generally used to mean those artifacts and practices outside of politics, science, and technology such as books, arts, crafts, music, dance, fashion, movies, television, food, conversation, and group activities. Higher culture and popular culture differ in the amount of effort and prior background it takes to appreciate them. Popular culture is oriented toward larger numbers of people and it does not require extensive training to be able to appreciate. However, popular culture blurs into higher culture when it is filtered through more and more sophisticated theories. Culture criticism takes the broadest definition of culture including politics, science and technology and covers both higher culture and popular culture. It is criticism in the sense that it evaluates and develops broad comparisons. The social sciences also study culture, and culture criticism draws from their results; however, the social sciences are more specific, collecting data and developing theories that can be systematically tested against the data. Culture criticism is not limited in that way. In a sense it is a form of literature used to orient us in the broad flow of culture. Each specific discipline has its own methods and vocabularies and theories. But once you have surveyed all of the specific disciplines there are still a lot of unanswered questions. For example, what is the value of these disciplines? What areas of importance are not covered by a discipline? Are there combinations of results from different seemingly unrelated disciplines that could be useful? Are there disciplines that have special authority? Is there a hierarchy of disciplines or are there just different purposes? It could be that new disciplines could come out of these considerations, or they could just remain texts of a particular place and time and be purely of historical interest. In any case, it seems that there will always remain a region of discourse between and above all of the other discourses that can cover what is left. Culture criticism is not limited to an academic or literary environment. In fact, many people at various times have stopped to consider what kind of culture that they are living in. This may especially happen when they encounter another culture or when they notice some seemingly irreconcilable conflict within their own culture. Before that they were at home in their culture. They did not question or evaluate. This was just their way of life. So we are all potential culture critics, but some people have become more or less professional culture critics. They might be interdisciplinary humanities professors or philosophers who have moved on after finding their discipline evaporate from underneath them. They may be art critics who keep expanding the scope of art until all of culture is art. Some of the culture critics have used very obscure language. Is this obscurity really necessary? It could be argued that they need to break with normal discourse in order to avoid being pulled in. Culture has a force and if you do not break with traditional discourse you are not really getting beyond it. For example, some culture critics have argued that there are logical structures and oversimplified concept pairs that are built into our discourse. To really get beyond that you must invent more novel forms of discourse. Some have taken this so far that it would be hard to distinguish their texts from particularly obscure prose poems. I would argue that while it can be interesting to push language in these ways, it is also possible to be clear and direct and to use everyday language. Everyday language is the common base we have before we dig into some specialized language for some specialized purpose. When we draw back into our common space, are we not back into the realm of culture criticism? Or maybe we could distinguish popular culture criticism from higher culture criticism. Higher culture criticism will be in a dense language with many associations with other dense texts. It thus becomes "higher" because of all of the reading and study needed to understand it. It can also serve a sort of gate keeping function, keeping out all of the unwashed masses. On the other hand, this all could be just a kind of tenure scam. It may be necessary to use some of the specialized vocabulary of the target disciplines that you are studying. It may also make sense to use some special method such as semiotics. But you have to ask what the purpose is of seemingly unnecessary complexity. The most useful distinctions for a professional culture critic would be the depth and breadth of their knowledge of cultural artifacts and practices, their ability to evaluate them and make comparisons, and their ability to suggest new disciplines or combinations of disciplines. If they could further do all of this in a clear, everyday language that is useful to the majority of people who are concerned with these issues, that would be even better. Now let us consider conflicts between cultures. Take a dominant, relatively homogenous culture and add some new immigrant subcultures. These subcultures may have different languages and religions, different concepts of marriage and family relationships, and many other fundamental differences. If these subcultures make a concerted effort to assimilate and the dominant culture remains dominant, there may not be a problem. But if they attempt to maintain their distinctiveness, the dominant culture will be affected in one way or the other. There are a couple of possible configurations. Suppose that the dominant culture has a universalizing ideology, that is, they feel that their culture is uniquely legitimate and that all others should follow. They will then want to see the subcultures merge into theirs without changing it. They may use different strategies such as a forced assimilation, ridicule, and discrimination. Another possibility is that the dominant culture may simply be self-preservationist, that is, they want to preserve their culture, but they do not have the desire to change the subcultures. To do this, they need to preserve strict community boundaries. They need to prevent intermarriage, or at least if there is intermarriage the children need to be raised in the dominant culture. Different communities may live in separate neighborhoods or towns. The relationship between the communities is something like a federation of states with the dominant culture being the superpower. Both of these scenarios are very difficult to maintain in the same country. Some of the members of the dominant culture that have more contact with the subcultures may start to question the dominant culture. They may want to move over to one of the subcultures, to adopt some of their features, or to change aspects of their own culture because the subcultures provide evidence that they are after all just cultural, not facts of nature. This multiculturalist or cultural relativist faction will then come into conflict with the more absolutist elements of the culture. The absolutists may take a number of stances. They may not think of what they are trying to preserve as merely an aspect of a culture. They may see it as divinely ordained, for example. Or they may be fully aware that it is cultural, but they still feel that it is superior. Or they may just want to preserve it because it is theirs and gives them a more powerful position. Finally, they may just be afraid that rapid change will throw their culture into chaos with disastrous results. The immigrant subculture could be from immigration into Western countries, from Western specialists, businesses, or missionaries going into non-Western countries, or from various types of colonization. In some cases, the immigrants may become the dominant culture and the original people may become a subculture in their own country. Similar considerations come up even without immigration, for example, with converts to new religions, with youth subcultures, with students trained in another country, or with academic subcultures. The dominant culture may react in similar ways. Something like this is happening in many countries of the world. In Moslem countries, for example, there is the conflict between traditional Islam and the secularizing West. Similar conflicts are underway between various traditional cultures and the West. This carries over into Western countries when members of these non-Western cultures immigrate. But the West has its own problems. Within Western culture there is a conflict between those who hold to traditional Judeo-Christian values, those who hold to Enlightenment ideals, and those who are influenced by postmodern multicultural ideas. The traditionalists are continuing their long battle with the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment partisans are in conflict with the postmodernists because the postmodernists question the exclusive legitimacy of scientific rationalism. Many of the traditionalists are also at odds with the postmodernists because the postmodernists question the unique legitimacy of their tradition. But there is an odd wrinkle here. Some traditionalists are drawing on postmodern ideas to justify their right to belief and their unique way of life as one of the cultures of multiculturalism, a new defense against their old Enlightenment enemies. The postmodernists by embracing pluralism allow space for different traditions, as long as they do not seek hegemony. This can seem to be workable compromise to some moderate traditionalists. Also, postmodernism can be seen as a sort of super Enlightenment, carrying the Enlightenment ideas to their logical conclusions, these ideas having in their turn been influenced by Greek skepticism. Where does this book fit into this landscape? It is trying to work out a way of living within the limits of language, experience, and desire. It acknowledges diversity and relativity. This would seem to position it in the general territory of postmodernist multiculturalism. But it also wants to preserve within this framework some of the most useful insights from the Enlightenment and from traditional culture. It wants to do this, though, while giving up the attempt to give these insights an absolute justification or legitimacy. This seems to position it as a sort of moderate compromise between the three. One final question: Is our culture too fragmented into subcultures? As long as there is a common basis for interaction between the subcultures, such as democratic institutions and the market, it can be enriching. It can make it more difficult to come to common decisions, but this seems like a price worth paying for the richness, variety, and excitement that it adds. Philosophy is thinking about the most general issues of life. It is what is left over when you have no specialized discipline to appeal to. It is the most general form of criticism. But when there are specialized disciplines then they should be used. For example, in earlier centuries philosophy addressed some of the same issues that science or mathematics now address. So now if we want to know about motion and the components of matter, we go to physics. If we want to know how societies function, we go to sociology. If we want to know about formal structures, we go to mathematics. At the same time, philosophy has recognized that many of the problems that it had considered central are in a sense problems about how language is used. What useful role then can philosophy play? Philosophy has a rich history and has produced a rich literature, so there is considerable room for the history of philosophy and criticism of philosophical texts. Also, there is still the need to look across all the specialized disciplines of our culture as a whole and see how they hold together, to examine their basic vocabularies, to see if they are meeting the goals we have for them. We have a need, in other words, for a general criticism of our culture, to help us think about what we are doing in different areas and how they are related. There is also a need for philosophies of life, going back to the original definition of philosophy as the love of wisdom. Philosophers can act like aunts and uncles or family friends who sit on the porch and offer their advice about how to pull together the different threads of our culture in order to live a good life in our particular time and place. The more they understand about culture and its different disciplines and practices, the better advice they can offer. But philosophy as a self-contained discipline with its own problems for which there are definite answers and methods seems rather limited. Beyond a few basic observations about language, experience, and desire like the ones given in this chapter, it seems best to proceed to more specific discussions in culture criticism and the philosophy of life. Let's define ethics to be the study of standards for human behavior and morality as the application of those standards in our everyday lives. We need these standards of behavior because we are social beings. We live together in social groups and sometimes our desires come into conflict. One approach to ethics has been to say that ethical statements are simply an expression of human preferences about human behavior. It is difficult to find an experience that directly corresponds to "Do not kill". This is a command and as such does indeed express a human preference. The problem is that some people have concluded from this that there is no basis for discussion on ethical issues. If ethical issues ultimately come down to preferences, how can we judge someone with different preferences? If we do, it seems that we are in effect saying, "I don't like that your preferences are different than mine. Change yours!" Even if this were the total situation, it would still be very useful to have some common basis for discussion. For example, if most people want to survive, we can analyze ethical judgments in terms of their usefulness for our survival. Take the example of "Do not kill". It would seem that if everyone would avoid killing, it would improve all of our chances for survival. So on the one hand, ethical statements do ultimately seem to be expressions of desire, but if we have some agreement on some basic desires, then we can use our knowledge and skill to find rules of conduct that work well in meeting those basic desires. What are our most basic desires? One list is survival, enjoyment, and group membership. This is probably a question for psychology, but psychologists do not seem to have reached a consensus on this point. Some favor a few basic human drives. Others have a longer list. Maybe there is no universal list or hierarchy that applies to all human brings. Still we may be able to justify a few common desires as basic for most people. Some candidates that have been proposed as basic desires include the desires for sex, power, respect, identity, parenthood, meaning, and transcendence. The desire for sex is tied to the idea that the most important thing is for genetic material to be passed on. This transcends individual survival. If the genes survive and inspire behavior that disperses them widely enough so that they continue to survive, then it doesn't matter how long the individual lives. They just need to live long enough to pass on the genes. One problem is that babies thus produced need to be raised. At least someone has to be around long enough to see the babies to their reproductive years. So the parents do need to live a little longer. Also, this flies in the face of a common respect and love we have for our elders. In evolutionary terms maybe this could be explained by the need to pass on the body of cultural lore that the group needs to survive. But in any case, it seems that a society that was totally driven by sex would not long survive. And one thing we do know is that many human societies have survived, at least up to this point. At the same time, a society that does not reproduce itself will be gone in one generation, so the sex drive is important. Another variation on sex as a basic desire is that many of our other desires can be interpreted in terms of sex. So if a person is tortured by unfulfilled sexual desire, they may go on to build bridges, write poems, or conquer countries when what they really wanted was a good sex life. Somehow this basic sex drive has been diverted into other things. I suppose this is a matter for empirical research to resolve if it can. For now it seems simpler to just recognize that we do have a strong sex drive. It is very important. It can be a very pleasant pastime. It ties parents together, which is better for child rearing. It sometimes does get diverted into seemingly unrelated themes of self-esteem and power, but there is no need to universalize all desires into an expression of sexual desire. And sexual desire can be explained by the need for the species to reproduce itself, plain and simple. All its other allures may be just there to make that happen. Another favorite basic desire is power. The more powerful are better able to pass on their genes and so the drive continues. The powerful just use moral standards to control the weak. But in a sense the powerful are dependent on the weak. Could we have a society in which all are strong? And in terms of numbers, there are more of the weak that succeed in reproducing than the strong. While the strong were out there defending their territory the weak were at home having babies. Society as a whole may need some of its members to have a drive for power, but it doesn't seem like everyone has it or needs to have it. A general theme is starting to show itself. We survive together. We are social. Even the strong need the weak. None of us can survive on our own. If we want to survive individually we need to survive as a group. So people who can work together in groups are the ones who have survived. And to work together in groups we need some standards of human conduct. At the same time, there needs to be some outlet for the individual. They cannot be totally assimilated. This is why I have listed survival, enjoyment, and group membership as basic desires. While not everyone would agree to these being the most basic, still most people would likely agree that most people desire to survive, to have some enjoyments in their lives, and to be a member of a social group. Respect, identity, and parenthood also seem to fit well into this theme. They each in some way are involved in our desire for group membership and the needs of the group to survive. Meaning and transcendence, however, seem to go beyond these issues. There is something in us that, even after all our physical and social needs have been met, still aches. We still want some answers on why we are here and where we are going. While these can be tied to ethical standards, they are more related to other issues that will be addressed later in this book, so I will hold them until then. Right and wrong are words we use to classify behaviors that support or undermine our most basic desires. Ethical statements seem to be expressions of desire, but when we use the words right and wrong, we mean more than "I like that" and "I don't like that". This "more" could be a reflection of the strength of the desire or it could reflect consequences that could affect a strong desire. For example, when I say that it is wrong to kill, I could be expressing a strong, direct dislike for killing or I could be expressing a concern that allowing killing would threaten my survival and the survival of those that I love. In either case, the root of the judgment of right and wrong is a strong desire. So reasoning about right and wrong can proceed along two lines. On the one hand we can try to identify a basic set of desires that most people will agree on. Then we can evaluate behaviors in terms of their direct conflict with or support of these basic desires or in terms of their consequences that in turn might conflict with or support these desires. This means that ethical judgments do not have an absolute warrant, but they are not totally arbitrary either. There can be a more or less objective analysis of consequences and of what societies need to survive and flourish. This questioning of moral absolutes has caused a considerable amount of concern. It is claimed that if there are no absolute guarantees for our morals, then all things are permitted. Absolute moral standards give us a sense of assurance especially if we want to confront those who do not live up to our moral standards. What is the basis for social order if there are no absolutes? One answer to that is to point out that societies develop moral codes on their own without the need for an absolute basis. If there were societies that were completely devoid of moral standards, then they no longer exist. Moral standards seem to be a requirement for a society to survive. So it is right to be concerned if there is a collapse in basic moral standards, but it is not necessary to look for an absolute justification. Ethics then becomes something we need to work out together. It is not something that has an absolute justification. It is not something that is objective in the sense that it can be directly tested by experience except through the testing of the consequences of different rules of conduct and how those consequences match up with our basic desires. We need to look at the traditions of our society, what works well and what should be changed. But since we are often short sighted it is not a good idea to jump to replacing longstanding moral standards. They have stood the test of time and should be respected for that. We also need to compare our traditions with the traditions of other societies and cultures. We can learn from what we have in common and what is different. Ethical knowledge can grow and develop just like knowledge in other areas as we gain greater understanding and try to apply our ethical standards in new situations. Do not kill, do not steal, do not lie. Treat others as you would like to be treated. Do no harm. Consider the consequences. These are some of the most commonly accepted rules of conduct. While rules of conduct often have exceptions, they can be very useful guides. In general, you want to follow the rules, and when you don't, you feel a need to justify the exception. The rules listed here are some of the most common, found in many cultures. They also seem to be some of the most useful. We will examine them one by one. Do not kill, do not steal, do not lie. These commands are the very foundation of society. Starting with killing, how can a society survive if its members are killing each other? It could be that only the strong are selectively killing off the weak, but even in this brutal situation, the strong will need to be careful. Their strength and strategy of life revolves around exploiting the weak. How can the weak be exploited if they are dead? While there are societies where the strong can kill the weak without consequences, this has proven to be a less than effective approach. The weak will eventually get their revenge and a lot of useful effort is expended in killing and planning to kill that could be more usefully expended in improving the society as a whole. Also, most everyone feels sorrow and pain when one of their loved ones dies. Common and natural feelings of human sympathy therefore come into play. Unless we are particularly hardened, if we kill someone we can relate to their pain and to the pain of their family and friends. Also, many people feel gratitude for life and awe at its mystery, so much so, that life itself is sacred in many traditions. People feel it is particularly serious to violate this sacred territory. Still, there are cases in which people feel justified in killing. For example, if someone has done particular harm to me or my family, I may feel justified in killing them for revenge and to make it clear to others that they cannot attack us with impunity. It is very difficult to be objective in these situations though. While I may feel they were only getting justice, my own interests and my own strong feelings of grief and shame may likely cloud my judgment. Therefore, in most societies this use of deadly force has been reserved for the government, after some attempt at objectively understanding the offense. Of course, governments can also be corrupted and use their monopoly on killing to force their will or to punish dissent. This tendency has been offset by jury trials, strict rules on when capital punishment is allowed and other attempts to safeguard citizens from abuse. Some societies have decided that even the government will not be allowed to kill and have outlawed capital punishment. This attempt to limit the use of force to resolve disputes has spread to relations between countries as well. The search for global peace on the one hand recognizes that if we kill people in other countries, some of our own people will likely be killed in the process. Also, even if we feel the need to have weapons for self-defense, the use of those weapons means they have to replaced, often at great cost. Also, global business and trade will be damaged. These considerations along with more noble considerations about the oneness of the human family have led to a greater and greater reluctance to resort to violence even between countries. Still, most people would recognize a right to self-defense, at an individual level and at a national level. Also, there may be times when killing is the only way to stop even worse killing. Not stealing is also a pillar of social order. Our ability to survive as individuals and families depends on our ability to acquire material things and to plan adequately for the future. We need our crops for the winter as well as our seed corn for next year. If we cannot rely on this, we have to expend considerable effort protecting it, at great personal and social cost. On the other hand, if stealing is fairly rare, we can concentrate on more socially useful activities. So a society that allows stealing is very inefficient and may not survive in the long run. Also, fundamental feelings of fairness come into play. Why should someone do all the work to provide for their family and have it taken away by someone who does not make a similar effort? This seems fairly clear. Where it becomes hazy is when certain individuals accumulate more and more of the social resources for themselves. They may have done this totally within the rules of their society or they may be building on acts of theft perpetrated by their ancestors or themselves when they were younger. Take the example of colonizers who succeeded in stealing land from native peoples. From the point of view of their societies, the land may have had no clear title and therefore was open for settling, or they may have paid some nominal sum for the land. So they may feel justified. If the natives could not adequately exploit the land, it was only natural for someone to take control who could make good use of it. Similarly, suppose my great grandfather made money in illegal activities and then "went legit". Here I am two generations later benefiting. But I did nothing myself. Why should I be blamed? And suppose I am a new billionaire who was skillful or lucky enough to come up with an idea and execute on it, all in a perfectly legal and above board way. I did not steal from anyone. Why should the government "redistribute my wealth" through taxes. Isn't that just stealing by the government? But the system may have unjustly favored me, allowing me to succeed where others did not have a chance because of their family situation, education, and cultural patterns built up over generations of injustice. And even at a purely practical level, starving millions will eventually come to where the wealth is. It is only in my self-interest to assure that the poor are helped, even if I do not consider how I got my wealth "stealing". Now to not lying. This is also a pillar of society. Societies are built on mutual trust. If we cannot rely on people to uphold their agreements and be good to their word, we again have to expend great efforts to protect ourselves in case they don't. Society as a whole already spends considerable time and money enforcing contracts and agreements. This needs to be kept to a minimum. Also, our justice system depends on truthful testimony. If it becomes generally believed that testimony in court is usually questionable, the whole notion of giving over the monopoly on force to the government breaks down. Each person then needs to become their own enforcer, or to hire it done. There are cases when even in fairly ordered societies we need to stand up to protect our interests, but we do not usually need to resort to force to do that. There are mechanisms within society to allow for that. A society that cannot rely on a basic standard of truthfulness is in serious trouble. This also applies in personal relationships. If we cannot trust our friends and family, it can make all of lives miserable. Take the example of marriage. Implicit in the marriage vow is the mutual commitment that the two parties will reserve sexual expression for each other. This has clear survival advantages in terms of disease. It also makes it clear who is responsible for raising children. But many complications come into play. Risk of disease can be reduced with safe sex practices. Risk of unwanted babies can be reduced with birth control. So the harm of sexual adventures or "seeking comfort elsewhere when you can't find it at home" can be reduced in terms of pure survival issues. But sex is also tied to romantic love and to the idea of a life long partnership. If we cannot trust our partner in this, what about in other things? Do they really love me if they would betray me in this? It is possible to imagine other arrangements for sex, child rearing, life partnerships, and romance, but the institution of marriage has been very powerful, possibly because it combines all these aspects. It is a foundation of most societies, and it is built on mutual trust. Still, there are times when lying seems justified. We would all feel justified in lying to prevent a killing, for example. If a killer asks where a potential victim is, we would feel justified in saying that we don't know where they are, even if we do. In war spies feel very justified in lying to the enemy. Even many of the social niceties involve lying or at least not telling the complete truth. There are many examples of how brutal honesty can undermine friendships and basic social harmony. But we must be very careful that a line is not crossed where lying becomes so prevalent that the basic ties of trust on which society depends begin to break down. Now to the golden rule. Treat others as you would like to be treated. There are forms of this rule in many societies. It implies many other basic rules, such as not killing, stealing, or lying, since we do not want to be killed, stolen from, or lied to. But it goes further to include a basic concept of reciprocity and fairness. It is also more positive. Instead of just listing what we should not do, it tells us what we should do. Not only do we need to avoid doing bad things to others, we also should do good to them as well. It also is more sweeping and general. If I do not like people backbiting about me, I should not backbite about them. If I would like to be treated with courtesy and respect, I should treat others with courtesy and respect. These are not laws, but they do improve the overall functioning of society and make it more pleasant for everyone. But what if people do not treat me the way I want to be treated? According to the golden rule, I should still treat them as I would like to be treated. I do not turn nasty and seek revenge. I still treat them well. There is the danger here that people who do not follow this rule can take advantage of those who do. On the other hand, how can we improve the moral tone of our society if no one takes the first step? Someone needs to start the process. Also, if I stole from someone, would I want them to not prosecute? No, I would expect to be prosecuted. So the rule does not necessarily mean that I must let myself be trod on. At some point, I need to stand up and resist the abuse. The next rule, do no harm, is also very general. It is harmful to kill, steal, and lie. It is also harmful to treat someone cruelly or to exploit the environment so that other species or future generations will suffer. We can also talk of not harming ourselves, so this could also cover bad personal habits like smoking and excessive drinking. This rule has an opposite function as well. It can be used to loosen traditional moral constraints. If something has been condemned for generations, we can ask what harm it does. If it is basically harmless, why not allow it? For example, dancing and playing cards have been considered bad by some in past generations. These restrictions loosened up as time went on and people saw that these practices where basically harmless and could be very enjoyable. More recently, similar arguments have been made for opening up acceptance of different sexual orientations. Why should we condemn same sex sexual practices if there does not appear to be any harm in them? So gradually sexual orientation has lost some its moral dimension. It is just one of the many differences that people have. If it does no harm, why condemn it? Related to this rule is the final one on our list: consider the consequences. In a sense this can be used as the general justification for all of the other rules. The other rules are good rules because if they were followed the consequences would be a greater chance of meeting our most basic desires. This rule also has a cautionary element. It suggests prudence and thinking thinks through before embarking on a course of action. This can be very useful in personal habits. I can hopefully weigh immediate gratification against future results. Finally, this rule opens up ethical considerations to empirical study because what consequences certain actions might have is an empirical question. Whether those consequence are desirable or not, however, is still a question for what we really want most out of life. One of the interesting phenomena of sexual morality is that the same people who had quite a few sexual adventures in their youth may be the most insistent on the sexual purity of their own young people. Part of this may be that they are very aware of the risks that they took and they do not want any harm to come to their children. And it is true that sex can be very risky. There is the problem of disease. There is the problem of sexual violence. There is the problem of the extreme emotions and obsessions that can be associated with sex that can distract young people from preparing for their adult life or can cause emotional scars because they are not mature enough to handle them. There is the danger of premature parenthood, too many responsibilities at too young an age, again preventing them from preparing adequately for adult life. Given all of these risks and dangers, it is easy to push for abstinence as the safest course. And indeed, it is the safest course. What harm is there in waiting? Some ridicule by your peers. Maybe you feel you might miss out on the love of your life. Maybe you feel that you should experience the full measure of all of this love and excitement when you are young in heart and body, before the responsibilities of adulthood weigh you down and quench the flame. It is the perennial argument. Seize the day versus taking the safe path. Parents naturally worry about their children and want to protect them. But there can also be harm in creating a feeling of mystery and forbidden fruit around sexuality. Even worse, it can be treated as something disgusting and reprehensible, instead of a natural part of life. And ultimately our children will likely be just like us. They will rebel. They will take risks without enough thought for the consequences. They will be curious and want to explore. Probably the best we can do is to make sure they understand the risks and to try to take the pressure off them by encouraging them to wait, while helping them understand that sex is a natural part of life and not some centrally important goal that will solve all their problems. But it is not just young people who need to grapple with the morality of sex. In general, is it wrong to have sex outside of marriage? If it does no harm and it is not too risky, what are the downsides to it? Maybe it could be argued that it does not create a good example for the young people. But we can still argue that they are too young and should wait. Maybe if it becomes too obsessive? But then it is doing harm. Maybe if it a betrayal of trust? Then again, it is doing harm. If safe sexual practices are used, the risks of disease and unwanted children are minimized. Given all of these caveats, it is difficult to make a case that sex in itself is wrong. What about particular sexual practices? Here again, if it does no harm and is not too risky, what can we really say about it. It is a personal preference. But what if the practices are degrading and exploitative? This would be harmful. What if you were not entirely sure of your partner and what they might do? Then it would be too risky. What if it becomes too obsessive and takes over your life? Then it is harmful. So the final recommendation is to be practical, consider the potential harm and risks, and try to make a good decision. And in particular protect children while trying to give them as realistic a view of sex as possible, not giving it too much importance. Another approach to ethics is to concentrate on virtues and ideals. What are the characteristics that we would most like to see in our society, in ourselves, and in others? One view is that the purpose of life is to acquire virtues and that the true worth of a person is in their knowledge and character. Here are some ideal words: freedom, justice, compassion, tolerance, peace, courtesy, kindness, patience, trustworthiness, love, courage, honesty, moderation, hope, creativity, competence, joy. The ideal words listed here are some of the most common virtues and ideals that are praised by many cultures. Each ideal word can be looked at in terms of whether it should be maximized or exercised in moderation. For example, courage, if maximized, could be considered recklessness. On the other hand, justice in most cases should be maximized. Different ideals should also be balanced off of each other. For example, freedom should be balanced against justice. We want as much freedom as possible that does not at the same time infringe on the freedom of others. These ideal words are so important to us that at times we have invented a whole separate world for them. We know that they are only imperfectly realized in this world. It could be that they exist in a pure form in some world beyond this and this world is an imperfect reflection of that world. At other times we have considered their perfect expression to be God, and we are imperfect images or expressions of that ideal person. But it is also possible to take a more pragmatic view. Starting with freedom, we all have desires that we would like to fulfill. Society has traditionally put constraints on the fulfillment of our desires. Freedom is the ideal that we should be given as much latitude as possible to seek whatever we want. The limitations on our freedoms are then related to allowing the same freedom for others. Certain freedoms have had such central importance that they have been written in laws and constitutions. For example, the freedoms of religion, speech, opinion, and association are central in Western democracies. No one has the right to impose their religion and beliefs on anyone else, and everyone has the right to seek out ways of expressing their own religion and beliefs. Freedom also has a more basic meaning that no one should be the slave of any one else. No person can be the property of another. In principle if someone does not like the conditions of their employment, they can change jobs. They cannot be forced to work in one place or to live in one place. There is freedom of movement. At a more personal level, we usually disapprove of someone dominating or "lording it" over someone else. Everyone should be free to be their own person. And although it is often counteracted by peer pressure or general social pressure, people should be free to dress the way they like and pursue their own life style. Of course, society is not expected to pay for it, so economics often limits what we can do. The ideal of freedom also extends to the personal level of inner freedom. Addictions and obsessions are a form of slavery, and we would like to help people get free of them. And at the more mystical level we, somewhat ironically, talk of being free of the slavery of desire. There are of course practical limits to freedom. One is that we have to live with other people. They also have similar rights to freedom that we should respect if we want our freedoms to be respected. This brings us to justice. The basic concept of justice is that everyone should be treated fairly. Especially in the justice system, justice should be blind, in the sense that everyone gets the same treatment irrespective of social and economic level or position. Society does not operate on absolute equality. Leadership can have its privileges. Wealth can buy more favored treatment. But in basic rights and position before the law, everyone should be treated the same. This basic ideal of justice also applies to discrimination and prejudice. People should not be classified and treated differently based on race, gender, sexual orientation, social class, or national origin. Getting this basic standard of justice uniformly applied has been a long struggle, even in countries that have exalted ideals of freedom and justice. Another aspect of justice is distributive justice. The goods and services of society should be distributed fairly. In most countries the main method controlling this distribution is the free market. However, there are times when the free market allows such a disparity of wealth that it seems that basic fairness is violated. So societies need to work out some means of redistributing wealth, usually through taxes but sometimes through direct transfer such as land reform. Justice does not mean absolute equality since we want to reward effort and the application of skill and intelligence. However, when the differences become extreme, our sense of justice often makes us feel that society should step in. Even if everyone is treated fairly and equitably, there are times when through misfortune or past mistakes people need our help. This is when compassion comes in. Part of it is reciprocity. If my town is hit by a tornado, I would hope for society's help, so I am willing to grant such help for other communities when it happens to them. Other examples are special needs children. Out of compassion, we provide additional resources for their education and training. Another example is young people who have made a mistake and need some help getting turned around. We could just throw the book at them, but if we feel there is some hope, we want to give them a second chance. I could say that it is not my fault that these things happen, so why should I have to pay, which from a strict justice point of view may be correct, but many of us do not want a society that shows no mercy. Of course, there is compassion fatigue and being taken advantage of by the recipients of compassion. These need to be factored in. But there is also the hope that if we are ever in an unfortunate situation that people will also have compassion for us. The next set of ideals, tolerance, peace, courtesy, kindness, and patience, address how we deal with each other as individuals or groups. Tolerance of other people's views and life choices is related back to the ideal of freedom. In many areas there is no way to show conclusively that one way is right and all the other ways are wrong. Such a dogmatic attitude would naturally create conflict. On the other hand, there must be a limit to tolerance. We cannot tolerate killing, for example. But let's take a more difficult case, public nudity. Some people feel that it is only natural to expose some or all of their body. Why should society restrict their freedom? On the other hand, I may say that that is their right, but I also have the right to not have to look at their bodies, and especially I may feel that my children should not be exposed to them. Some societies have resolved this by having places set aside for public nudity, such as clothing optional beaches. Most people are happy with that, but what about various forms of dress that emphasize the body or expose parts of it, like translucent or mesh materials, scanty cloths, and other ways of pushing the limits? Should we try to enforce some standard of modesty in public places? When we don't, some people talk about the decay of morals, as if the most important moral issue is how we dress. Is exposing the human body really a moral issue? Were native people who went largely without cloths immoral because of that? Is it just a matter of preference? We need to take into account many factors. One is that nudity in our culture is largely confined to sexuality (or to doctor visits), so public nudity can be very distracting to the business at hand. If we are trying to get some business done and someone walks by in very "suggestive" cloths, it can be distracting. It is entirely possible that that person has no intention of suggesting anything sexual, but maybe they should try to be tolerant of the narrow views of those around them. Still, dress that would have been considered highly suggestive in the past is hardly noticed today. Peace in our relations with others is also an ideal. Excessive conflict undermines order within a society or between societies. Sometimes conflict is necessary, but we need peaceful ways to resolve it. Considerable effort is put into mediation and consultation to avoid open (and expensive) conflict in the courts or on the battlefield. Striving for peace requires the application of other ideals such as tolerance and patience and a real effort to understand the language, experience, and desire of others. One essential tool in peaceful coexistence is courtesy. Taken to an extreme this can be artificial and stilted, and some cultures enjoy some rough and tumble and "animated discussion". However, they need to know when they have crossed the line to rudeness and insult. How many terrible episodes in history can be ultimately traced back to insult or lack of sensitivity? Just a routine level of common courtesy helps society to function more smoothly and makes life more pleasant for everyone. Kindness and patience have similar benefits. A society that discourages cruelty and is willing to wait when necessary functions better and the individual members feel better about themselves and each other. Trustworthiness is related to truthfulness and competence. Being able to trust what people say and to rely on them to do their part is essential for our mutual survival. Love is a very complex word with many meanings. On the one hand, there is romantic and sexual love, which dominates much of our thoughts and popular culture. Then there is love for friends and family, and especially love for our children. This has the connotation of affection and liking their company as well as hating to see them harmed. Broader is love of our fellow human beings. This is a generalized feeling of good will and a desire that no harm come to them. Love also applies to things and practices. We can love nature or writing or stamp collecting or sports. Love is so central to our lives that one philosopher has defined the good life as one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Courage is important at many levels. There is the raw physical courage that has been so importance in war and exploration. There is the courage to stand up for our convictions in the face of social opposition leading even to death. There is courage in the face of disaster and difficulties. There is the courage to face the fear of failure and to keep going. Finally, there is the courage to be ourselves, to take our own path. All of these kinds of courage can be extremely beneficial to the ongoing survival of society and to the progress of the individual. A basic level of honesty, as with trustworthiness, is necessary for the functioning of society. It is related to truthfulness. It is also related to following the rules. If we feel that we are the only ones following the rules, social order will break down. There has to be a general belief that most people are following the same rules that we are and that those who do not will be punished. So I may benefit in the short run by dishonesty, but in the long run we will all suffer. And my dishonesty will only work as long a most others are honest. This is not a scam that can last forever. Moderation is important for individual well-being as well as for society as a whole. Many health problems are caused by lack of moderation. Extreme behavior in general is more dangerous than moderate behavior. Lack of moderation can also lead to fanaticism and obsession that can damage the individual as well as all those around them. Moderation also needs to be applied to moderation. There are times when we need to go all of the way and push ourselves to the limit. Hope can be a foolish dream, but there are many cases where a lack of hope causes us to give up too early, to dismiss possibilities that however remote they may seem could yield to long and hard effort. For example, if slaves and abolitionists had given up hope, the whole grand drama of freedom leading to emancipation and eventually to the civil rights movement would have never got going. At the time it must have seemed hopeless. The same applies to many huge problems. It may take generations, but if we loose hope now, it will never get going. This also applies to individual achievement. It may seem impossible that I could ever get to be a great scientist or artist or athlete, but it will definitely not happen if I give up. Creativity and competence are different sorts of ideals. They are not commonly considered to be moral concepts, but they are very important values and are essential to society and to progress in art, science, technology, and many other areas. They are so important that we have even considered them divine. The Creator, the Maker, the All Powerful are names we give to God. We admire them so much that we admire people for them even when otherwise we would condemn them. Take the example of stories about assassins or the gunmen of the Wild West. They are just killers, after all, but we are fascinated by their ability and trace step by step how they are able to accomplish their crimes. We also admire other more positive heroes of accomplishment, such as athletes or astronauts, even if they are not personally great people. The final ideal word on our list is joy. We talk about people who have a joy for living with admiration. We talk about the simple joys of life. The ability to appreciate life and take joy in it can enrich us and those around us. There are other ideals and virtues that could be listed. They define what we would like to strive for. It is a useful practice to just contemplate them and see how they can be applied to our lives and can be encouraged in others. But here again, they do not have an absolute warrant. They help us meet our most basic desires and they express some of our most treasured hopes. It is very useful to promote them, but we cannot claim a cosmic tragedy if some people disagree on their importance. As will be discussed in a later chapter, absolute justification seems unattainable. The very definition of the concept leads to an infinite regress and thus to an unsolvable problem. But does this situation undermine morality? It may be true that an absolute warrant for our rules of conduct would make it much easier to argue for their validity. But it is not necessary to go from the relativity of morality to the extreme that all things are permitted and therefore society is impossible because of the simple fact that we do have many cases of societies that have survived. Societies need some common rules and when the generally accepted rules for a society are undergoing change, it is natural to feel apprehensive. And there is real danger that the changes may be too rapid or extreme. But these are practical problems that need to be discussed and worked through. As we have seen so far in this section on ethics, we do seem to have some common basic desires. Right and wrong, common rules of conduct, and virtues and ideals can all be justified in a practical sense by their usefulness is helping us fulfill these basic desires. Very few people want chaos. With tolerance and flexibility, we can still have a stable and healthy society even if some of our traditional moral ideas are undergoing change. Many of the most basic moral concepts remain intact. Once we shift from absolute justification to practical justification, many of the same values remain. They have stood the test of time and should not be discarded lightly. Why were they successful? Are they still useful today? As we have seen, many of the basic moral concepts common to many cultures seem to be on a good practical foundation and can still be the basis for our society. If we find alternatives that work better, so be it. Then we need to consider how to implement them in a way that will not undermine our society's ability to fulfill our most basic desires. There are many social norms. Some are good for the smooth functioning and health of our society. Some are essential for its survival. The most important ones or the ones that have complicated exceptions and applications may need to be written down as formal laws. It is also important to write down these laws when we want to have a uniform application of sanctions. Informal social norms are often not uniformly applied. People can use their personal position or charm to circumvent the sanctions. For less serious infractions this may not be worth the effort of trying to force uniformity, but for the most serious norms, it is much more effective to make them formal. This increases the feeling among potential lawbreakers that the punishment will be sure and swift, and therefore will hopefully provide a significant deterrent value. This is particularly relevant to criminal laws. There are other types of laws, of course, that may still have moral implications. For example, the general idea of having laws to enforce contracts is very important for the building up of truthfulness, trustworthiness, and honesty in a society. The specific provisions, however, may have purely practical purposes and not necessarily be tied to moral issues. But if morality is relative, how can we judge those who break the rules? Maybe they are just following a different path. Judge not lest you be judged. Still, it is hard not to judge a mass murderer or a serial killer. Can we really stand back and give moral ground to the sociopaths of the world just because of some theoretical reservations? Maybe we do not have an absolute basis for a judgment, but we do have a practical basis. Such behavior threatens our very existence as a society. We cannot accept a society that would tolerate such cruelty. So our judgment is based on the consequences of their behavior to our most cherished desires. Their freedom must be checked because it threatens too much. And it is very natural to feel anger and even hate for such cruelty. The harm is too great. If they want the benefits of living among us, they must follow the rules that allow us to live together. We thus invoke social authority, even if we cannot see how to invoke authority based on absolute justification. On the other hand, they could be breaking rules that really need to be changed. For example, if an abolitionist refused to obey the fugitive slave laws, can we really condemn them? There are times when laws have to be resisted and changed. But this does not apply to those who break the fundamental rules upon which all societies that we know about are based. Again, if morality is relative, why should I pay attention to it? It is just some human rules. I can make my own rules. The same arguments given above apply. If I want to be a part of society then I need to follow its basic rules. It is a part of the cost of group membership. And many of these rules are really needed for our mutual benefit. In the case of basic moral rules which try to prevent harm to others, hopefully I can draw on my natural feelings of sympathy. Whether due to evolutionary pressures or due to some deeper source, most of us can sympathize with others. We can sense their pain and the pain of their loved ones. Our natural feelings of sympathy can be blunted by ambition and prejudice and strong desire, though. Also, it seems that some people are born without this natural human sympathy or they have it driven out of them to due to mental illness or early traumas and confusions. In such cases we have to hope that the social sanctions will act as a deterrent. If they do not, we need to track them down and remove them from society. Maybe they can be retrained and can re-enter society later. Maybe not. Some people have the feeling that morality applies to family life and Sunday School but that it does not apply to the market place. There it is survival of the fittest. Also, they may be concerned that these soft concepts do not apply to the hard realities of business, science, and technology. However, all of these are social activities. Today they are central to our social life. The issues may be more complicated than not killing and not stealing, but sometimes they are not. If a business pollutes the water so that children die of cancer, isn't it murder? If a corporation forces people out of their homes to buy up the land at half the value, isn't it stealing? Similar considerations apply to medical experimentation, allocation of money to unproductive scientific research projects, and technology that does more harm than good. As a more complicated example, consider the genetic modification of food. If the genetic modification greatly increases the productivity and disease resistance of the plant, wouldn't that be good? Perhaps it would reduce hunger in developing countries and reduce the amount of pesticides that need to be used. This would seem to be just a practical issue of comparing the benefits of the new seed to more conventional seed. But where do we get the seed from? When we look into it we find that the seed company has a patent on the genetic modification. Furthermore, the seed does not produce seed that can be replanted, so new seed must be purchased each year from the seed company. The first issue is the idea of ownership of genetic material. On further investigation we find that the genes spliced into the plant to get the new characteristics come from a particular plant in the Amazon jungle. Were the natives of that area paid for the use of this genetic material? No. Is that theft? Can the genetic heritage of our planet really be owned? If not, how will companies be paid for their research? Is it right in principle to tamper with genes that have taken millions of years to evolve? Are the scientists taking risks with all our lives? Could there be dependencies created that reduce the genetic diversity of food crops so that when the climate changes, we suddenly have food shortages? This is just one of many possible examples. The main point is that ethical considerations need to be included in what may seem like purely technical or economic decisions. These are situations that may not have not existed before, so it could be that past ethical concepts may not be flexible and subtle enough to deal adequately with them. It is very important for people who understand these issues to develop ethical rules that apply well and look out for all of our interests and are not just a smoke screen to protect the interests of the business and scientific elites because in the heat of developing a product or doing a research the engineers and scientists may not think of ethics. It is not their main concern, and the bad consequences of what they do may not be immediately clear. Even with ethical rules in place, there will still be many situations where decisions need to be made. These may be decisions, for example, on the management of common resources where it is not possible or useful to have the specific situations covered by general rules of conduct. Or it may be that new rules of conduct are needed or that existing rules need to be formalized as laws. Since there will be multiple interests involved in these decisions, there will likely be conflicts of desire. How will the decisions be made? There are several possibilities: the powerful choose, the rich choose, the few choose, the majority choose, the elected representatives choose, all choose. Sometimes one strong person takes control and he or she decides. Others follow for protection. The strong person becomes the chief or monarch or dictator or chairman of the board. Access to force, access to skill, intrigue, ability to convince others to follow define their strength. Sometimes the rich decide because they can pay the strong to enforce their wishes and they can create dependency on the part of the weak by spreading their wealth around. Sometimes groups of the powerful and the rich form ruling blocks and these few decide. They may add in those who have special access to the sacred to give the arrangement some added legitimacy. These methods have predominated throughout history, but as time has gone on some decisions have been made more widely. It is difficult to control so many people. They simply have to be able to make some of their own decisions individually and as groups. In groups debate and voting become important. Debating all of the problems takes a lot of time, so some become specialists, to proxy for our votes or to carry out group actions as needed. This leads to elected representatives. Still some decisions can be made by all of us. For example, in the market individual decisions to purchase or not to purchase products and services accumulate to make decisions on the value of those products and services. A more direct example is referendums where the specific issue is decided by a direct majority vote. This sketches our some of the main alternatives. Now we can look at some of the advantages and disadvantages. Having one or a few people make the decisions has some advantages in terms of efficiency, but basic issues of fairness come into play. What gives them the right to rule over us? Also, there are more practical issues. The more power someone has the more likely they are to abuse that power. Despite all of the hopes for a philosopher king or a benevolent dictator, mostly these rulers have become tyrants. And even if they really were benevolent, there are too many decisions that need to be made. Decisions need to be decentralized. Then the ruler's subordinates often become mini-tyrants. Eventually more people need to be involved to guard the guardians, which gradually expands the franchise. Each group that is left out then demands to be included. And there does not seem to be any legitimate reason to leave them out. So after many struggles we get to universal franchise. But people also fear mob rule. They want to make sure that they are not treated unfairly just because they are in the minority. One way to address this is to assure as much individual freedom as possible. Only bring essential decisions into the group decision making process. When it must be a group decision, try to assure that the electorate is as informed as possible so that they can make good decisions. As described earlier, when there are decisions that can be understood by most people, they can be decided directly using referendums, but for many decisions, there will need to be more time to study the alternatives. We all do not have time to do that, so we hold elections and choose our representatives to decide for us. But here is where the rich and powerful can sneak back into the process. They can influence our representatives. Of course, we can vote them out again, but we need, again, to be well informed, so we know what they are doing. Another concern related to mob rule is that the rights of minorities may be abused by the majority. Each of us is a potential minority in different situations. To address this problem, we need to enumerate some essential human rights. These need to be guaranteed in law so that they cannot be overruled in the heat of the moment. Government in general is not very efficient. It cannot manage very complex systems effectively. Democracy is even more inefficient because of how many people need to be involved. So it should only intervene in the big issues. This is where the market can be more effective. The market provides a mechanism where conflicts of desire can be worked out through competition. Everyone can try out their idea if they can get the investors and if their idea makes money. This way many different approaches can be tried out. The government needs to step in only when the competition becomes unfair or the commons is being infringed on. To further deal with complexity, decisions should be made at the level of democratic government closest to those affected. This allows a better decision to be made because local knowledge can come into play. Also, it is more fair. Efficiency is also affected by the degree of consensus. If everyone has to agree, then the decision will likely take longer. On the other hand, if fewer people agree, then the decision may be reopened when the dissenters can get the votes together. Therefore, the broader the consensus the better. And here again, consensus seems more fair. So there are problems with democracy. It's not perfect. We need to patch it where it has flaws. But here we fall back on the standard defense: it's better than any of the alternatives. If the market is given as much latitude as possible, experience has shown that some people will need help at least for some periods in their life. So a social safety net is needed. It should be provided as fairly and efficiently as possible, while not creating excessive dependency. There are various arguments against providing a social safety net. The first is the "survival of the fittest". It is not natural to intervene. We need to encourage and reward those who are best able to survive. By needing help, the poor have shown that they are not fit. This argument takes ideas that really apply to whole species and tries to apply them within social groups at the individual level. We as a species have been able to survive because of our social organization. We survive as a group, not as individuals. Now it is true that mutations are selected for their survival value, but the poor are not genetically different, they just occupy a different social position and they may occupy it only temporarily due to circumstances beyond their control. A variation on this is the "thinning the herd" argument. In order to keep the herd strong the weak members need to be thinned out by predators. Again this does not apply. We were able to fight off predators precisely because of working together. Even if the idea of a predator is expanded to mean anything that threatens individual survival, such as scarcity of food, it still does not apply because we are not talking about the extreme and heart breaking case where some must starve so that a few can survive. We are talking about allocating the resources of a wealthy society that can feed all of its members. The last biological argument is the "natural hierarchy" argument. Social animals such as wolves and apes organize themselves into hierarchies. But there is no evidence that members of the group starve because of their low station. It is more of an organizational issue. In any case, all of these biological arguments miss the main point that we are social and moral. Our social organization is not biologically determined. We have quite a few degrees of freedom. Now it is true that there are social organizations that reduce the chances for survival of the whole group, but there is no evidence that helping the poor will cause a society to crumble. Now let's go on to some social arguments. The first is to "give resources to those who can make the best use of them". According to this argument, the poor by being poor have shown that they cannot make good use of their opportunities, so why shift even more resources there where they will not be productively used? If helping the poor means just paying them enough to survive in return for their compliance, then it may be true that this is not as productive as it could be. On the other hand, resources can be used to help the poor become more productive. If they are given a chance most of them can be very productive. The next set of arguments are different variations of "blame the victim". Why should we help them when they are to blame for where they are? If they would just work harder, they would be fine. We cannot subsidize laziness and lack of ambition. How can we pay people to just have more babies that we in turn need to feed? Before making claims like this we need to find out as best we can what the real causes of poverty are. It could be built into the social and economic structure. It could be because of past injustices that are perpetuated to future generations. The children may have been trained to be dependent. And are there really opportunities available that are better? Are there jobs? Is there transportation to those jobs? Is there job training? Do those jobs provide health benefits and childcare? There may be some lazy people, but does that account for more than a fraction of the cases? An underlying assumption in the discussions so far is that there is a permanent class of poor people. But there is also a group of people that cycle in and out of poverty, and there are people who were fairly well off who have fallen into poverty because of divorce or disability or loosing a job. Many families are one or two paychecks from the streets. So if people cannot have simple compassion, they may want to consider that it could happen to them. Another argument is "there are too many of them and too little of me." That is, we simply cannot afford to take care of the poor. This is applied to the poor within wealthy countries. It is even more of an argument when we consider the poor in other countries. It is true that we need to look at how much of social resources should be dedicated to the social safety net. There are practical limitations, but especially in wealthy countries there should be enough for a social safety net plus some foreign aid for poor countries. There is no danger that it will cause us all to be uniformly poor. We are not talking about making everyone the same, just providing the basics and helping people help themselves. Now to some arguments for a social safety net. Starting with the most cynical, it is argued that "we need to contain them where they are or they may come to where we are". This is the fear of the rich that a mass of poor people with nothing to loose will storm their comfortable neighborhoods looking for food and revenge. Applying this to countries, they may swarm over our borders. There is only so much you can do with gated communities and border guards. It is tempting to see this as the main reason there is any sort of social safety net. If the poor would just quietly die, how many people would be overly concerned, especially if they would die quietly somewhere where we can't see them? But what if someone we know becomes poor or someone in our own family. Can we still turn a blind eye? This brings us to a fundamental desire. I do not want to see other people suffer and die. If there is something we can do, I want us to do it. This desire comes from just basic feelings of sympathy. It is independent of the more pragmatic reasons related to maintaining social order, but I also want to maintain social order. While many people may be upset with the current way the social safety net is organized, most would hopefully agree, especially after considering this discussion, that we need something. The main issue is how to provide it most effectively. Then it becomes a matter for empirical study. There will still be various arguments about what basic needs should be met, how to provide incentives for people to become self-supporting again, how to prevent fraud, and various other practical issues. All of these need to be worked. The system needs to be constantly monitored and improved. But we should never get to the point where we argue for abandoning the poor to their fate because of problems with the current system. The arguments should be about how to improve the system. Some sex and violence seem appropriate in works of art because they are a reality of life and they can have cathartic and escape value. But when it goes to an extreme it can do harm. It has become difficult to draw the line in our culture. Suppose someone created violent and sexual materials in private and that these materials did not influence him to perform any illegal actions. Would we be concerned at that point? Probably not. We might think him a little sick, but if he represented no danger and he kept it to himself, it would really not be our business. But suppose it did lead him to illegal actions. It would be the illegal actions that would concern us. But what about the materials? Did they cause the illegal actions? Could we protect ourselves better by censoring their production? There are a couple problems here. First, did the materials really cause the illegal actions? What percentage of people consuming such materials performed those actions? And what percentage of people that performed the illegal actions consumed the same kinds of materials? Are we justified in restricting the materials if they are only loosely correlated to the behaviors? And how do we precisely delimit the materials? When do the materials cross the line? Can we really be that precise? We do have a rating system for movies, television, and some music, but it is fairly imprecise, and it does not apply to private materials, or to books. Consider just publicly purchased and rated materials. If someone watches a slasher movie a few times and is not really affected by it, we would not be concerned. But what if a disturbed teenager watched the same movie over and over again and they replayed scenes in their mind substituting people they know into the scenes. Is this an issue with the materials or with the teenager? Should we limit everyone's access to slasher movies in order to prevent this situation? Movies may be less of a problem than television. Television is always available in the home. The sex and violence is toned down compared to movies, but it is more pervasive, especially sexual suggestiveness and innuendo. Here is one view. We need good rating systems. We need good ways of limiting access to children. We need to limit exposure to higher rated materials in more public areas. Otherwise, we should err on the side of freedom of expression. Another view is that we should only produce materials that would get lower ratings, and even if we do allow some immoral people their "right" to filth, we should not allow it to be accessible anywhere where children might see it. Furthermore, we should have the right to not have to see those materials in public places or on our televisions. For all intents and purposes, these immoral materials should be invisible to us. If there were good rating systems and good screening systems, then we could at least partially meet the concerns of this second group of people. There may still be disagreements though on what should be in public view, for example, in museums or on advertising posters. Another problem for these more conservative culture consumers is that they will not have as many products to choose from since the market will decide what cultural products will be produced. And it is the market that is driving many of these issues. If there were no demand for slasher movies, there would be no slasher movies made. If there were no demand for crude sexual humor, very little would be produced. This argument may be a little flawed though because in the past there was still tremendous demand for cultural products that were much more closely censored. But wasn't that because that was all that was available? And do we want to eliminate whole parts of life from our art? Do we really want our art filtered through a particular ideology? It seems that the best we can hope for is an uneasy compromise. There are significant improvements that could be made in rating and screening systems. This could provide more of a balance between the freedoms of the different groups. In the mean time we need to know more about the affect of media on behavior. Does a prevalence of sex and violence in media really cause an increase in sex and violence in real life? Or do people really understand the difference between media and real life? Predicting and Controlling Experience Science is considered our most reliable source of knowledge. If we want to be as sure as we can be sure, we go to science. Science addresses everything from the physical to the living to the psychological to the social. It has been spectacularly successful in growing and building on itself. There has been true progress in science. Part of science's success has been because it is very selective. In the whole range of language, experience, and desire, it has staked out just coherent texts applied to public experience. Its purpose is to create a comprehensive system of texts that are coherent internally and with each other and that are systematically tested against publicly accessible experience in order to allow us to better predict and control future publicly accessible experience. Science thus does not include texts that cannot be reconciled and made coherent with all the other texts of the community. This leaves out all texts where there is a significant amount of individual interpretation and expression. It does not include the personal or the inner. This leaves out much of our lived, everyday experience. It does not include the fleeting or the one time, the haphazard or the episodic. This leaves out anything that cannot be reliably accessed again and again for further study by different people at different times. It does not include the purely enjoyable or skills that cannot be explained. This leaves out things that we do just because we like to or just because they work for us. So while science can do quite a lot, it is not the be all and end all. Is it valid, for example, to limit knowledge just to scientific knowledge? In the search for the most reliable knowledge possible, science has had to limit its scope. Still all these other areas of language, experience, and desire are still there. We can still have knowledge of them. And as we shall see, science itself is not a pristine, unchangeable, and authoritative set of truths. It evolves, adjusts itself, and sometimes parts of it need a total overhaul. Science is one of our greatest treasures, but it is not our only treasure. The scientific method is the systematic testing of coherent texts against publicly accessible experience within a community of research. Induction is generalizing from specific cases. For example, we observe that all the swans we have seen are white and then conclude that all swans are white. Since there is always the possibility of encountering a black swan in the future, induction is inherently tentative. Deduction is deriving new statements from existing statements using rules of inference. For example, if p implies q and p is true, then we can conclude that q is true. Deduction is more definite than induction because if the initial statements are true and the rules of inference are valid, then the deduction can be proven correct. But if the initial statements are in doubt, then we cannot be sure of our conclusions, and in a purely deductive system you must eventually start from axioms or assumptions, statements that you just assume to be true for the purposes of defining the deductive system. Another potential problem is that the rules of inference may not apply. For example, most rules of inference are based on two-valued logic, where every statement is either true or false. There are, however, other types of logic such as three-valued logic where each statement is true, false, or unknown or fuzzy logic where the truth values can range across a continuum from zero to one. So deduction is very useful for organizing our thoughts, but it does not in itself allow us to find truths about the world of experience. One description that has been suggested for the scientific method is that it follows the inductive-deductive method. In this method you make observations, make a generalization from the observations to form a hypothesis, deduce from the hypothesis predictions of observations, and then compare the predictions to actual observations. If the predictions match, your consider your hypothesis to be supported. If they do not match, then you need to revise your hypothesis. One of the problems with this definition is that it does not match much of scientific practice. Scientists take much more degrees of freedom in coming up with their hypotheses and theories, and in many cases, they are not just simple inductive generalizations. Another description that has wider support is the falsification method. With this method it doesn't matter how the hypothesis is formed. Any creative means can be used. Induction may be used, but the scientists are certainly not limited to induction. Once the theory is created, the scientist attempts to falsify the theory through experiments or through showing that it contradicts other accepted theories. If the theory is falsified, then it needs to be adjusted or the related theories need to be adjusted until it is not longer falsified. If the theory is not falsified, then it can be provisionally accepted as a good theory. Under this view the production of scientific texts is a creative activity drawing on observations, imagination, deductions or associations from other theories, or any other means. The theory then must be tested for coherence within itself and with other theories and with publicly accessible experience. As long as it passes the test, it can be tentatively accepted. If it fails the test, then something has to give. There is a lot of freedom, at least in principle, about what has to give. The whole body of scientific texts needs to be adjusted until it passes the tests or the tests themselves need to be invalidated. This seems pretty good as far as it goes, but it leaves out a big factor, the community of scientists. Science is not done in isolation. It is done in the context of a community of research. New theories are proposed and new experimental results are reported to a community of other scientists, usually through peer reviewed journals or at conferences. In this process, there are gate keepers who decide what papers will be published or presented. These gate keepers are the reviewers, the editors of journals, and the organizers of conferences. The broader community of scientists is further divided into various specialist communities. Within each community there are norms of research, what vocabulary should be used and what formal or experimental methods are appropriate. Innovations are possible, but the community must be convinced. Within this community there is competition for funding and recognition, hierarchies, authority figures, and the whole range of social interactions. Still, the central norm is to find theories that work, that allow us to better predict and control a certain region of experience. Given all of this, it is hard to say that there is one scientific method. There are some general social norms of the research community, but the methods used are wide and varied. Ultimately, though, the prestige and position of science in society as a whole depends on producing results, so this all works pretty well. However, there is no guarantee that some useful theory might not have been overlooked. As a matter of fact, there is a widely noted phenomenon called a paradigm shift. Scientists can be very reluctant to make radical changes to a successful theory. They would rather patch it up, make small adjustments. At times though, the patches may get to be too much and there may be too many open issues. Sometimes a theory, such as relativity theory, comes along that causes a major shift in theory and future research. The more plodding approach is called normal science and the big shift is called revolutionary science. How a particular line of research will progress depends on many factors, not the least of which are the creativity of the scientists and the complex social dynamics of the research community. Science is divided into various specialties, each following its own methods and research programs. Typically scientists are not concerned with combining all of these results into one uniform picture. Also, scientists may or may not be concerned with interpreting their results for the general community. From time to time though a scientist or a science writer may try to draw some general conclusions from science or form a philosophy of life based on science. This philosophizing needs to be distinguished from science itself. It is a legitimate intellectual activity, but it is not science. One common example is the philosophy of scientific realism. This philosophy claims that the theoretical entities of science actually exist. Furthermore, it claims that these are all that exists. What we really have in science are scientific texts and experiences used to test those texts. Many fundamental scientific objects are not experienced directly. Their existence is included in theories because it helps in prediction and control. This is not to say that some of these things do not exist. For example, atoms probably do exist, but they are not necessarily totally described by atomic theory and in any case we do not experience them directly. We experience other things such as tracks in bubble chambers that help to confirm theories about their existence. It could be that many scientists routinely assume the realist hypothesis in their work. This is how they think of it and it helps them come up with new theories or to test existing theories. But this realism is really their personal belief. It is not needed for the theory itself. Some believers in scientific realism will associate the success of science with their philosophy and assume that this success proves scientific realism, but scientific realism is just a metaphysical theory. There are also scientific idealists who correspond scientific concepts to an ideal world of forms and say that the success of science is related to how close we get to the forms in our theories. There are other possible metaphysical theories of science. These theories cannot be tested scientifically and are not necessary for science, but they don't necessarily hurt it either. This point is important because much of the conflict between science and other parts of human culture could really be conflicts with one of these interpretations of science and not with the practice of science itself. In actual scientific papers scientists are much more careful. There is an effort in the scientific community to keep the actual science well grounded, but scientists are people too and they also operate in social situations outside of the scientific community. And they have their own inner lives and may, like others, engage in a little culture criticism of their scientific artifacts. It is only natural. But they should really be careful not to use the prestige and rigor of science to lend reflective glory to their private and often untestable personal theories. This being said, it is still important for people to realize that theories that contradict well established scientific theories have a real problem. Science is very careful to test its theories, so if you advocate theories that are directly contradicted by scientific findings, it is difficult to claim truth for them. This does not mean that if you have a theory in areas that are not covered by science that you have a problem, just if science does cover that area. Science restricts it scope to get the most reliable theories. It really has nothing to say about things outside of its scope. Theories outside of the scope of science are probably less testable than scientific theories. If they could be thoroughly tested by publicly accessible experience, they would be a part of science. There is a temptation on the part of scientifically minded people to dismiss other types of theories just because they do not fall into the realm of science. These other theories may need more caveats and may be less reliable than scientific theories, but that does mean that whole realms of human experience should be just dismissed out of hand. Science explicitly does not accept arguments from authority. Theories are considered established because they are well tested against publicly accessible experience and are coherent with other well tested theories. Authority has nothing to do with it. So it is ironic that attempts would be made to put science in the place of fallen authorities from the past. Authority also has the aura of permanence and infallibility, but science is inherently tentative and evolving. Even the most well established scientific theories may need to be revised or replaced based on future experience. Scientific theories do deserve some special status though because of the strict and rigorous tests that they must pass. For what they cover, they are our best source of knowledge. This special status however is not based on authority. On the other hand, we do talk about someone being an authority on some subject, meaning that they have studied it thoroughly and know most all there is to know about it. It makes more sense to rely on someone who is an authority in this sense, if you can trust them, than to rely on someone who does not know much about the subject. In this sense science does have authority, or more particularly, scientists are authorities on areas of experience covered by their specialty. We would be better off listening to what they have learned than to listen to someone who is not well versed in that area. This does not give them any authority in any other area of life though. It is tempting to ask a great scientist about all kinds of other areas. But they are an authority in a particular area. Outside of that area they are just like us. They may have a habit of rigorous thought that we could draw on, but who knows if they make use of it uniformly. Often people compartmentalize so that they may be totally logical in one area but totally emotional in another area. It seems impossible to generalize, so it would be best to think of them as like anyone when talking outside of their specialty. Because of science's great success, it is tempting to universalize and say that it is the only way of knowing, but as we have seen science has had to limit its scope in order to be as reliable as it is. We have used the word truth earlier as a compliment paid to texts that are coherent and well tested against experience. Science applies this in a particularly rigorous way. First, it limits its scope to the most easily studied experiences, those that are publicly accessible. Then it concentrates on rigorous testing for coherence within the theory and with other theories. Then it goes a step farther and does this all within a community of research where there is extensive review and cross checking of results. So science is the best we can do, but it gets its power from limiting its scope. There are many other aspects of life that can still be studied and for which truths in the more general sense can be found. They may not be as reliable as scientific truths, but they may be in areas that are more important to us. It could be that the more important something is to us the less we can reliably know about it, but that does not necessarily mean that we can't know anything about it. Scientism takes the extreme view. It only accepts as knowledge those aspects of life that fall under science's purview. It says that what science cannot discover, we cannot know. But surely this goes too far. On the one hand, it seems to overestimate the perfection of scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is good and it may be as reliable as we can get, but it is far from perfect. On the other hand, there can be degrees of rigor depending on what is practical for a particular area of study. We can test our beliefs for coherence and against experience to the degree possible in the particular situation. It may not be science, but it can still be the best knowledge we have in that area. Scientism could be interpreted as a power play for some scientists. It could be a defensive move to disarm those who would restrict the freedom of scientific research and try to place it under the control of ideology or arbitrary authority. As a rhetorical device it might be effective, but it is really not necessary to go that far. Instead we could use the seeming unattainability of absolute justification, the unreliability of appeals to authority, and the need to test our theories as best we can for coherence and against experience as the antidote to dogmatism and authoritarianism. A Brief Survey and Appreciation of the Sciences Talking about science in general can only get you so far. You need to dive into the specific sciences and their applications. Each science has it characteristic language, methods, problems, and results. But there is a little that can be said about the overall structure and content of the sciences and their implications for thinking about our lives. Science divides experience into the physical universe, life, and, in particular, human life. It is interesting to contemplate at the highest level what science tells us: The physical universe is made up of patterns of energy, it is vast, and our planet is one small planet orbiting a medium sized star in just one of many galaxies. Living things are mutually dependent, they require very special environmental conditions, their bodies are communities of cells, and they group into ecosystems that combine into one global system. We humans are animals. Our bodies like those of other animals evolved from simpler bodies over time. We are part of nature. We are social animals. We can develop tools and technologies using our scientific knowledge. There could be others like us in the universe, but that we could conceivably be unique. But to really understand what science is all about, you need to study the various sciences, or read some science books for the general readers. Starting with the physical sciences, here is a partial list: physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, mechanics, optics, acoustics, thermodynamics, electricity, magnetism, relativity, quantum mechanics, particle physics, nuclear physics, physical chemistry, organic chemistry. Here is a partial list of applications: mechanical engineering, civil engineering, structural engineering, electrical engineering, electronic engineering, chemical engineering, aeronautical engineering, space engineering. These are some of our greatest human treasures. They are also some of our most well established and mathematical sciences, partially because they cover the simpler, physical phenomena that admit to more direct testing and experimentation. They are an endless source of fascination and useful applications. Moving on to the life sciences, here is a partial list: organic chemistry, biology, botany, zoology, microbiology, ecology, physiology, evolution, paleontology, genetics. Here is a partial list of applications: agriculture, food science, medicine, environmental engineering, genetic engineering, biotechnology. These are our next most developed sciences behind the physical sciences. They study more complex systems, but it is still possible to do a lot of testing and experimentation. There are well accepted theories and applications, but they are much less mathematical. These also are priceless treasures of endless fascination and interest. Finally, moving on to human life, here is a partial list of social sciences: anthropology, psychology, sociology, sociology of science. Here is a partial list of applications: psychotherapy, opinion polling, political science, marketing. These are our least developed sciences. They study the most complex systems we know about, human beings and their societies. Statistics is the most common mathematical tool used. Once again what we have learned here is of great value. It helps us to understand ourselves better and sometimes even to heal our inner fractures and torments. Applying Scientific Concepts to Philosophy This survey of the sciences also invites us to go beyond science to the significance of these disciplines for other parts of our culture and of our lives. Beyond their inherent beauty and interest, what implications do they have beyond themselves? A central idea in these sciences is energy. There are many types of energy, but a common characteristic is that energy can do work. It can cause motion and is itself a medium of motion. Mass is equivalent to energy, so for those of us who like a unifying concept, energy looks good. Also, energy has a positive connotation. It suggests liveliness and life. When we loose all our energy we are close to death. It also suggests possibilities beyond the merely material. Electromagnetic waves can move invisibly through space, yet they have very real effects, and they can be seen as visible light. Mystics and near death experiencers have described seeing beings of light. Science, of course, is more specifically concerned with measurable energy, but the fact that science can use energy as such a broad concept tempts us to expand its use for theories beyond science. So picking out "patterns of energy" as what the universe is "made up of", while not necessarily distorting science, does have ulterior motives. If you get right down to the use of "energy" in science, you encounter mathematical formulas, measurements of heat given off in chemical reactions, pictures of spectrums, and waves on oscilloscopes. Still, if we want to briefly summarize what the physical universe is about, energy is a good start. The next part of the summary again draws from science something that positions us in the universe. It brings out that commonplace that we are not the center of the universe, that we are very small, on a small planet, in a vast expanse of space. The mere numbers of stars and galaxies, the great distances, the powerful explosions, the mysterious black holes, all inspire awe. So this summary statement of what science tells us about the physical universe, while not totally incorrect, is slanted toward what is most interesting to many people who are not scientists. You see this selection process in many popular books on science. For example, there seems to be a cottage industry for books about physics and its relationship to mysticism or how the seemingly most solid part of science is now the source of some of the most mind boggling concepts, many that seem to fly in the face of common sense. These books seem to be bringing science full circle back to mysticism with a flourish of irony. But this is a full circle back not to ancient dogmas but to ancient experiences. So "patterns of energy" suggests a lot. It suggests hydrogen atoms oscillating in space, being pulled into clouds, baked in stellar ovens into carbon and oxygen, exploding out, gathering again into planets moved and strained by volcanic forces, warmed by suns, atoms joining into molecules, then into self-replicating molecules, then into life, then into brains with neurons firing. It suggests a lot. If it also suggests beings of pure energy moving in the vast cold of space along beams of starlight, so be it. Moving on to the life sciences, here again, we want to select from these sciences things that provide lessons for the rest of our culture. If nature follows a certain course, shouldn't we pay attention to it? First we notice that living things are dependent on each other. We are living things, so we are depend on other living things too. It's obvious that our food, for one, comes from plants and animals. Our air comes from plants. Microorganisms break down dead plants and animals and feed them into the cycle of life. So we need to understand how we fit in and make sure that we do not destroy the basis of our own life. This seems very different from the brutal struggle for existence that was associated with nature in the past. It is true that there is a struggle for existence. It is true that living things that cannot adapt themselves to their environment die out. But this struggle is a part of a web where predators indirectly help their prey, at least at the level of the group. Maybe we can learn from this to be able to combine competition and mutual dependence into a much more subtle view of social life (hopefully without the predictors, though). All these analogies continue with bodies as communities. Each tissue has its role in the body, so we each have a role in our own communities, and these communities combine and interact all the way to a global system. So we need to work out a global social system that works as well. When we are in nature we also often feel that we are part of it. This whole vast system includes us. We belong here. This is our home. We need to learn to inhabit the place where we are. This is one thing that can ground us while our culture spins off into endless variations that leave us bewildered and confused. On the other hand, very few of us would like to go back to nature. The bugs, the hard work, the harsh conditions, the life spans just long enough to reproduce and then die. It is not exactly paradise. So we can also see nature as that which we are at least to some extent able to rise above. Finally, again moving on to human life, once again, there are valuable implications for our broader study of our culture and our lives. We are relatively recent arrivals on this planet. Our bodies evolved from less complex animals over many millions of years. Notice that I say, "our bodies". That is where our evidence really is. Whether we are just our bodies is for additional discussion later in an even less testable area, death. At any rate, it seems clear that our evolution was tied in with our social organization and that we would not have survived without it. And our brains got bigger as we evolved and we made increasing use of language and tools. The study of our societies and cultures has led to the recognition of cultural relativity and has demythologized many of our most cherished beliefs. It has even relativized our most successful attempt at comprehensive knowledge, science itself. The sociology of science studies how scientists themselves behave within their communities of research and studies science's textual artifacts and how they relate to social practices. The more we understand about ourselves, the more we seem to want to know if we are alone in the universe. It seems at least possible that there are other planets like ours and that intelligent life evolved on them. But should we give any credence to people who have claimed to experienced aliens? This seems a very difficult area to test at this point. For maybe very good reasons the aliens seem to want to remain hidden from most of us. But consider this. Suppose that the conditions for life are very rare. And in the rare cases that life does evolve beyond the level of microorganisms, suppose that the evolution of self-conscious beings is even more rare. Suppose it only happened once. Wouldn't those unique beings wonder sometimes as they looked out into the unimaginable vastness of space how they could be the only ones? And suppose that the speed of light is really the fastest that we could ever conceivably go. Wouldn't it be really impossible for these unique creatures to ever know for sure, unless some pattern showed itself from within the interstellar static? And if this pattern showed itself, would it be from intelligent life, or would it be the final proof that a billion, billion stars, like the million monkeys typing, could someday vibrate together the complete works of Shakespeare? The Boundaries between Science and Non-Science We have defined knowledge as our current store of texts that are coherent and well tested against experience. Scientists put further qualifications before they want this knowledge to be called science. They are very rigorous about coherence and extend it to coherence within the whole body of accepted texts in the research community and they limit experience to publicly accessible experience. Knowledge, if it is even admitted as knowledge, that does not fit within this scope is relegated to the humanities or, even worse, to pseudo science. In looking at whether a particular research discipline is to be called a science, therefore, we need to look at these two factors of coherence and publicly accessible experience. Take the example of history. Is it a social science or a part of the humanities? It does deal with public experiences, but these experiences are no longer accessible. Historians have to rely on source texts such as diaries, newspaper articles, letters, photographs, and film or video footage. These texts are necessarily filtered through their original authors, so the historian does as much cross checking as possible between different sources and applies interpretation and filtering of his own. On the issue of coherence, any competent historian will try to be coherent within their own writings. They will also cross check with other historians, but if their interpretive framework is different, it is very possible that they will have a different view of the same events. This in itself does not disqualify their work. In the scientific community though, texts that are not coherent must be reconciled or one must be rejected. For example, if two physics papers contradict each other, something has to give. Given these considerations, history, while respected as a category of knowledge, is usually grouped into the humanities. Going further along this scale into the humanities we have literary history and criticism, art history and criticism, philosophy, culture criticism, and so on, until we merge into texts that are frankly literary such as poetry, fiction, and speculative essays. At some point in the transition into literature we pass beyond the bounds of knowledge into text creation that does not claim coherence or rigorous testing against experience although it can still tell us much about what it is like to be a human being at a particular place and time. Take the example of literary criticism. It usually strives for coherence, but usually within a particular interpretive framework. It also tests its text against experience, in this case the experience of texts. So it is a form of knowledge, but there are times when it crosses over into literature. As poetry or fiction can reference to other works, literary criticism can become a form of literature that refers extensively to other works of literature. Still, many literary critics are trying to contribute to the knowledge of the literary works they are studying and try to produce works that are coherent and well tested. Pseudo science presents another set of problems. Usually the problem is that the experiences are not publicly accessible. Take the examples of UFO researchers, parapsychologists, and near death researchers. Are they just trying to assume the trappings of science to lend some credibility to their activities, or are they dealing with experiences that are inherently difficult to test, especially in a publicly accessible way? Most of them are probably in the later category and the real dispute with scientists is over the use of the term science and over conflicting philosophies. The scientific realists will have trouble admitting some of these experiences as more than hallucinations, but is that science speaking or their personal philosophy? For some scientists, the social sciences present a boundary case. The main issue seems to be the complexity of the experiences being studied and the difficulties in testing theories against experience. You cannot easily do experiments on whole societies, and there are serious moral reservations about it even if you could. The same moral reservations apply to experiments on human subjects at the individual level. So testing can be difficult. Also, when you have a very complex system, you often run into the blind men and the elephant problem. Each researcher picks a part of the elephant and there may be seeming contradictions in their respective results. But this may be just the fact that they are studying different aspects of the same large system. Another problem is participant studies. Social science researchers may get involved in what they are studying to the extent that their personal interpretations play a larger and larger role, so that at times social science works may seem like works of philosophy or culture criticism. Given these considerations, some scientists have wanted to put the social sciences outside the scope of science and limit science to the hard sciences, but this is really an issue of the success of the particular science and arguments over the prestige of a word. At least in universities, the social sciences are still called sciences and not renamed just social research, for example. One possibility is to extend the use of the term science and speak of physical science, biological science, social science, historical science, textual science, paranormal science, and inner science as long as each of these disciplines strives for coherence and systematic testing against experience. But at best this seems somewhat artificial. Perhaps the best approach is the usual practice today, using the term knowledge in the broader sense and restricting science to knowledge that is particularly strict about coherence and about testing against publicly accessible experience. We also need to keep in mind the gray area where knowledge transitions into literature. Given all of these considerations, it still seems valid to draw the line in such a way as to include social science within science. People who don't like this can always distinguish between the hard sciences and the soft, social sciences, as they often do. Mathematics is a language commonly used in science, but it is not in itself a science since it is not directly tested against experience. As with the sciences themselves, you are invites to explore mathematics as a fascinating human treaure. Here is a partial list of the different areas of mathematics: algebra, analysis, geometry, topology, logic, foundations of mathematics, computation theory, number theory, probability theory. Here is a partial list of applications: statistics, computer science, numerical analysis, accounting, science, engineering. Mathematics deals with the general theory of forms and patterns. It is a collection of deductive systems, each with axioms, rules of inferences, and theorems derived from the axioms using the rules of inference. Algebra deals with sets of discrete objects and transformations on those sets. Analysis deals with the study of continuous curves and transformations on functions of those curves. Geometry deals will points, lines, surfaces, and shapes. Topology deals with contiguity under different transformations. Logic deals with rules of inference. Foundations of mathematics deals with the overall structure of mathematics and mathematical reasoning. Computation theory deals with the theory of algorithms and recursive functions and with whether certain problems can be solved mechanically or not. Number theory deals with different number systems. And probability theory formalizes the concepts of chance and randomness. Mathematics provides a collection of ready made theories. If the axioms of the mathematical system fit the application area, then you have a ready made set of relationships and deductions that can be applied. This has been put to very good use in the sciences, and in fact many aspects of mathematics arose in the course of developing new areas of science and only become formalized later. There are a few mathematical platonists who believe that mathematics refers to a real world of forms. Others believe that mathematics refers to forms in the human mind. But most people today treat mathematics as a language. It is the most definite discipline, the one place where you can prove your theorem and as long as the axioms are correct and the rules of inference are correct and you did not make a mistake in applying them, people will almost always agree that you are right. This definiteness though comes from the fact that you do not need to test mathematical statements against future experience. They are proved in a purely deductive way. Mathematical systems are judged by their coherence, usefulness, elegance, and simplicity, not by whether they allow us to predict and control experience. And since mathematical statements are not tested against experience, they are not scientific. On the other hand, since mathematics is the model of coherence, which is the other essential characteristic of science, mathematics is still sometimes given the honorific, science, and we speak of the mathematical sciences. Sometimes we think of science as being this pristine reality separate from the rough and tumble of social experience, but as we have seen science is a social activity that produces texts that we want to use as a society in various ways. And like any social activity we have to decide on priorities. First we need to have a community of scientists, and these scientists must be paid. There is an old myth of the wealthy scientist who can finance their own research, but often ability in science and wealth do not go together, so most scientists will need a salary. Next, beyond the time of the scientists there is the money it takes to do the research, materials, laboratories, support staff, travel expenses for on-site work and conferences, and other expenses. Someone needs to pay for these things. There are basically three sources for this funding, universities, government, and industry, with a little money thrown in from other sources. Universities are the basic frontline of support for the full range of sciences. They need a range of experts to teach classes, and professors are given a certain amount of their time for research. What research projects that professors will take up will be influenced by their personal interests and background and by the competition for tenured positions. It is also influenced by the availability of graduate students to do some of the work and by grant money. This grant money will come in most cases from government or industry. In both cases, it will usually be designated for specific research. The government funds research in agriculture and technologies that can be used by the military or for space exploration, for example. They may also fund some long term fundamental research or some scandal ridden subjects like the sex life of cockroaches (which may not have been such a bad idea after all, under the general principle of knowing your enemy). Industry will mostly fund projects that have relevance to their business, for example, in electronics, optics, computer science, genetics, pharmacology, oil geology, and various engineering disciplines. They also might fund some fundamental research on speculation or for the prestige it might bring. There is also, of course, direct employment for scientists in government or industry research institutions, and a few nonprofits. The research at these institutions will be determined by the missions and the sponsors of the institutions. So most decisions about research are made by government and industry, and this issue hardly ever comes up for public discussion. Of course, most people are not interested in these issues and are happy to leave the decisions where they are, unless they hear about some scandal related to research funding. The most freedom for research is for professors who can decide on their own research when the projects do not take much money and can be tied in to the training of graduate students. Sometimes something fundamental comes out of that. And finally you have the rare genius, like Einstein at the patent office. When these rare individuals make the big discovery or the great creative leap it seems like a miracle. But most science is a group activity. In all of this, how often are projects determined by the needs and interests of the general public? Could we imagine a sort of scientific suggestion box where people could drop in what they would like to know about? Could the general public get a report on the relative funding for different areas of research and express a preference? Could we ever have a well enough educated electorate where these issues would be brought out in public debates? At this point, our elected representatives and the market and to some extent the professors decide. But what about when research moves into ethically questionable territory such as germ warfare tests, nuclear weapons research, genetically modified foods, human cloning, propaganda and brainwashing? Some of these only come to the forefront because of concerned scientists blowing the whistle. Should there be public disclosure of the types of research projects being done? Many of these questions get at the general issue of the helplessness that the general public feels in the face of greater and greater scientific and technical complexity. In many cases, we just do not have the background to understand. In the mean time we get various images of scientists from the media, the mad scientist, the scientist just driven by curiosity without ethical concerns, the scientists who has lost control of their own science, whose pride is in danger of destroying them as well as all of us. Are scientists so driven by curiosity or by professional ambition that they cannot see beyond their technical discussions to the larger picture? We truly have a long way to go before the general public knows enough about science to form any sort of informed opinion. We need people who can bridge the gap and bring to the public in an understandable way the ethical decisions and priority calls that need to be made. With the great success of science religion has lost much of its prestige to the extent that in many people's mind it is associated with superstition, narrow-minded dogmatism, and wishful thinking. Much of this was probably because of the inflexibility and ignorance of religious leaders, with their model of orthodoxy and heresy instead of openness to truth from wherever it might come. Part of it probably had to do with their fear of loosing power in society. But in any case the extreme reaction of religion probably did more damage than good. Imagine if the theologians had looked into Galileo's telescope and said, "Praise God! His wonders to behold!" Maybe the scientists would not have been driven to make science into a sort of counter religion. This of course is a European view of the conflict. It was to be different with other religions, where the conflict was more with Western secularism than with science itself. But eventually the conflict has to be addressed since science claims for itself all publicly accessible experience and can be tested by anyone regardless of religious affiliation. Science is independent of religion and requires no religion. Even with all of this though religious experience is still there and cannot be easily denied. People will perform untold intellectual gymnastics to keep religion going. They will compartmentalize their minds, privatize their religion, suspend disbelieve, ignore any contrary evidence. Is it just fear of death or fear of cosmic loneliness that drives some of us to preserve religion at all costs, even at the cost of our own wholeness of mind? We are forced into rational discourse in the work place and the class room. If we keep it out of religion, our minds will have to be fractured. But is religion really irrational? Or is it a just a particularly dogmatic approach to religion fighting it out with a particularly dogmatic approach to science? The basic strategy outlined in this section is for religion to concede the territory of publicly accessible experience to science. Religions may still have something to say in this arena, but their ideas must be subjected to the same scientific tests. Science doesn't care where the ideas come from, only that they can be rigorously tested. On the other hand, science has so narrowed its scope that it leaves uncontested much of religion's original domain. So there appears to be ample room for religion, if it will be willing to give up dogmatism and explore the religious dimension of language, experience, and desire with an open mind. Most religions deal with one or more of the following: meditation, morality, and wisdom; sacred texts and sacred practices; a connection to the sacred; a community. If you observe different religions usually they have some sort of discipline in which the follower will find time in the flow of everyday life to reflect. This could be prayer, some ritual, reciting some words from a sacred text, observing a moment of silence, being mindful of breathing, of inner thoughts, or a natural scene. A general word for this sort of activity is meditation. Much of religion is also concerned with how we should behave toward each other or what thoughts and feelings we should have about each other. They provide moral guidance or set out moral rules and laws. Many of the innovations in moral practice have come from religion, or at least religions have formalized and given special emphasis to these moral innovations. Another common area is advice and guidance on how to live a good life, how to think about life and things that happen to us. This goes beyond mere knowledge to inspiration and comfort. Most religions also have some concept of the sacred, that which is set aside as being somehow central and most valuable in life. This might be an experience of inner freedom, an experience of awe, visions, a harmonious relationship with nature, or mystical experiences of some being beyond the human. These ideas about a sacred element to life may be captured in texts that are given such respect that they become set aside or sacred themselves. For example, the texts about meditation, morality, and wisdom that are especially defining for a religion will take on a sacred character. Certain religious practices such as meditation, rituals, meeting together in a sacred precinct may also be set aside for special respect and thus become sacred. So the sacred is some aspect of life that is set aside for special respect and awe. The sacred may have a mysterious quality and may come to be a focal point of the follower's whole life. One of the functions of religion is to provide a connection to the sacred for the follower. We all may in reflective moments have some hints or intimations that there is something going on here that we don't quite understand, some deep mystery, some precious gift, if only life itself. Sometimes we suspend language and desire for some reason. Maybe we are deliberately meditating. Maybe some sight or sound or thought transports us to that place. This is a state of pure experience, just the flow of experience from one moment to the next. In this state, we may marvel at the bare fact of experience. What is behind experience? What is the source of it? It seems like a great, mysterious silence, but with such power that it circumscribes all that we are. This experience or hints of experiences like this may become very precious to us, deserving of great respect, set aside, sacred. Another great mystery is death, the seeming ending of experience. But there are also experiences, visions, intimations that suggest that there may be something beyond death. This hope becomes of great importance in many religions. And so death, as well as birth, becomes a sacred passage. Religions provide us a way to approach the sacred, to mediate these feelings through images and rituals or through direct meditative practices. Religions also provide us a community of people who are approaching the sacred in a similar way. We can give each other mutual support and pass along these valuable insights to our children. Our religious community can become so important to us that it embodies our whole society. Leaders of society sensing the power of the sacred may add to the religion elements of society that they want to see preserved or to be given special status. It becomes hard over time to sort out these culture specific elements from the essential experiential or linguistic elements. This may be why some people feel so particularly threatened by new things coming into their culture that appear to undermine what they feel is so important. How do they know what is essential? Will letting some aspects change undermine the whole structure? Of course, religions vary quite a lot in details, what elements are emphasized, how they understand their relationship to other religions, how flexible they can be, or how important it is to defend their religion from innovations or changes. For example, to preserve a religion from fracturing apart, it may be necessary to have some authority that will preserve its integrity. This is the authority to define the religion, to say what is a part of the religion and what is not. Without this clear authority many religions have split apart into sects. Different religions may attach greater or lesser importance to avoiding this. Religions differ, but all religions seem to have enough in common so that they can at least have mutual respect. For example, most religions have many common moral standards. Most have rules against killing, stealing, and lying. The Golden Rule shows up in many religions. Concepts of justice and kindness are common. And while the sacred may be described in different ways and given different names, most religions have some concept of the sacred. Stepping back then from all of this, religions seem to be primarily about certain kinds of inner experiences and ethics. These inner experiences give us contact with some sacred aspect of life and ethics teaches us how to live together. This basic core is then elaborated in various texts and practices and cultural forms. The more you know about religions, the harder it is to believe that there is only one true religion. It seems more likely that there is good and bad in most all religions. Still, as it is possible to have one true love, it may be possible to have one true religion. Some religions do not claim to be the one true religion. They see many paths up the mountain and they are one of them. As you would see different things on different paths up the mountain, so the experience of different religious paths will be different but there is still some essence that is the same. Other religions claim to be the one true religion or at least the latest and most legitimate religion. What is the basis for these unique claims to legitimacy? In most cases the claim is based on a revelation. Founders of religions often report having revelation experiences. These include such things as seeing visions, being spoken through, seeing a book that they transcribe, being visited by angels or other spiritual beings, hearing a voice that claims to be God that they converse with, or experiencing intense and unusual flows of energy. These experiences usual give them a mission and continue to direct their path. They also add to their charisma. Their followers may see them transfixed with light or feel that they see into their very thoughts and motives. These revelations are often put into writing although they may only be passed on verbally and the followers may write them down. Reading these words strikes a deep core in their followers. It seems that life's most difficult questions are answered. The followers have a just guide, and they feel that they have found the right path. How can someone investigating a revelation know that it is a revelation? Let's assume for the sake of argument that the person receiving the revelation is accurately reporting their experience. What does it mean? Why is it so compelling to the people who hear about it or read about it? How does it have the power to attract people to such an extent that a new religion is founded? First of all, many of us would really like to receive some reliable guidance. Guidance that is based on experience just doesn't seem like enough because it doesn't tell us some of the things that we would really like to know. And we are so fallible. We would hope to find some guidance that is infallible. But if we are fallible, how can we recognize the infallible guidance? Since we are fallible, we may be mistaken. On the other hand, what if the revelation is true? If we reject it we could also be making a mistake. So perhaps we should take a chance on it. When people are asked why they accepted a revelation, there are several categories of answers they give. The revelation revealed something that was independently verified, but that was unknown before. For example, the revelation predicted a future event and that event came true. The revelation does not say anything that has been shown to be false. The revelation fulfills predictions from previous revelations. The teachings when followed have the results they say they will. The revelation has a great impact on people so that their characters are changed and in some cases they have given their lives because of it. It is eloquent and seems like miraculous speech. It explains difficult to understand parts of other revelations. And when the follower suspends disbelief, they feel a deep sense of rightness and calm. People who are not founders of religions may also have experiences similar to revelation experiences but on a much smaller and less intense scale. The experiences seem real. They are the opposite of hallucinations and delusions. Instead they make them feel more sane. Sometimes these experiences guide them to a revelation or confirm a revelation once they find it. So the direct experience of guidance takes them part of the way and the revelation takes them the rest of the way. Some people frankly say that they cannot judge, but they have seen nothing better, so they decide to assume that the revelation is true, take it as a working assumption. As they do this, it becomes integral to their lives, and they want to continue with it. Also, perhaps they have become a part of a supportive community of believers in the revelation which they do not want to give up. It is not at all clear what to do in this situation. You could dismiss the revelation, but on what basis? You could simply suspend judgment and go on. Or you could follow one of the above scenarios and become a believer or at least someone who cultivates the habit of suspending disbelief until it becomes in effect belief. To really enjoy a novel or movie you often have to suspend disbelief to enter into its world. You could have reasons to develop this into a habit, a habit of not questioning, a decision to assume. You may be fully aware that you would not have adequate justification to believe it under normal circumstances, but these are not normal circumstances. This is a potential revelation from the transcendental realm. It seems worth the risk of being fooled. And it really helps if the revelation is moderate and helpful and makes your present life better. And some of these considerations apply even to religions that do not claim uniqueness. You may not know if they will lead you to top of the mountain after all, but you have no other map that seems better and the path does not seem too burdensome. As with anything though you may find that there are elements in any choice that you would make that are good and bad. Maybe if you cannot see why one religion is the one true religion, its claim may be just one of the bad things about it that that you have decided to overlook. Some followers may emphasize that aspect, but you don't like to make such claims. Still the overall mix of the religion seems right to you. It gives you a way to a rich inner life, it gives you good moral guidance, it gives you many interesting things to think about, and it gives you a community of warm and interesting people to walk the path with. So you decide to go with it. And at what cost? You do not question its claim to uniqueness. You allow it a sort of social infallibility to define itself, to control its self-definition. It becomes like falling in love, respecting the identity of your loved one, overlooking their faults, and in time it becomes the one true religion for you. Whether you need a religion depends on you and the society you live in. It seems possible to live a good life without a formal religion, but a religion can also have much to offer. You will be tortured for all eternity if you do not choose the right religion. You will stunt your spiritual growth. It is just a personal choice, best approached by weighing the costs and benefits. It is an issue of respecting social norms or the wishes of your family. You should follow your heart. You should follow your mind. You should balance your heart and your mind. You should suspend judgment. You should admit that religion is harmful. You should actively oppose religion. Now choose. And by the way, not choosing is a choice. The torture theory is the most frightening. It would be grossly unfair to be tortured for not knowing or for disagreeing. The advocates of this theory will say that it is only just, or we may not understand it, but we will eventually see that there is no other way. It must be this way. Or they may just become indignant at your pride at questioning God. But are you questioning God or just their theory? And could a just and loving God do such a thing? If a human being did it, even for a few minutes, we would think of them as a monster. So this cannot be true. It must be the bitter imaginings of cruel priests, not the inexplicable act of a loving God. And if not, we are in a hopeless situation anyway. Why would such a God keep his promises? The biggest mystery is why people who otherwise believe in kindness and justice could accept this. It must be something that they just choose to overlook. Is there any way they could reconcile it with their other views of God? Maybe it is because they believe that their holy book says this. To question one part is to bring down the whole edifice. You cannot just pick and choose. It's all or nothing. Even at the risk of incoherence. Another less extreme approach is that religion is essential for your spiritual growth, your long struggle to be more moral, to understand the human condition, to learn to control your desires, and to become mindful and aware. If you do not learn these things, you will be underdeveloped in this world and the next, and may have to keep coming back to suffer on the earth in an endless round of birth and death. You need the help that religion provides. This seems a lot more fair than the torture theory, but it is still a little puzzling why this whole system was set up in the first place. Who decided to set this wheel spinning and for what purpose? One answer is that God wanted to gain experience through us. But why would an all-knowing God need to have experience through us? And does that desire justify all the suffering in the world over the ages? Another answer is that this is just the way it is. We don't know why. We just have to deal with it. There is at least some evidence for the idea that our future mental state is determined by our past actions, experiences, and thoughts. We can do things to improve our inner health and happiness. And we can harm ourselves and make a sort of hell for ourselves by doing other things. There is inner cause and effect. And if it does continue into a world in which our inner state determines our environment, then there could be heavens and hells of various degrees, but there would always be hope that we could change or that we could eventually work out the effects of what we have done. Even if all of this is true, why do we need religion? We need religion to remind us of these things. Even if we are not active in preserving these ideas, someone needs to be. Otherwise, they will be forgotten by future generations. We need religion to teach us and to help us stay on the path and we have an obligation to help preserve it and make it available for others. We can also take a more consumer oriented view. We can look for a religious group like we look for a town to move to. Do we like the people? What services does the religion provide? What will it cost us? Does it provide what we need? We may have just started a family and we are concerned about the moral and spiritual training of our children. We may not feel that we need religion, but we want our children to have a religious foundation. The actual beliefs then are only a part of it. There are interesting stories and comforting words and encouragement to keep us on the path, but we do not need to worry too much about doctrinal purity. Sometimes we need religion because it is an important aspect of our identity. Maybe to belong in a particular social group implies membership in a particular religion. Maybe it is family ties or ethnic identity. So we maintain our religious identification and follow its central teachings out of a sense of loyalty. We don't much care about the theory behind it. It is the job of the religious professionals to keep that all sorted out. Or we may have these inner longings for some lost home, we know not where. We feel a pulling and we seek for our lost friend, who has somehow become hidden. Or we are consumed with questions and are constantly searching for answers. Sometimes a religion can provide us the way to satisfy our heart's longing or to answer our mind's questions. We were seekers lost in the wilderness, but now we have found our way home. Some seekers are all heart, some all mind, some both in various degrees. Different religions or approaches to the same religion may satisfy one or the other. Or we may need to suspend the disbelief of our questioning mind to find our heart's desire, or to give up our fondest wish to find our answers. If we are lucky we will find a way to balance the two. But what is all of this vague talk, anyway? Where is the proof? It seems like just a lot of superstition and wishful thinking. If we do not know, why pretend? Just let it go and move on. We can be moral, be mentally healthy, keep learning, be mindful and aware, learn self-control, meet our goals, and much more, without all this extra baggage. Going further, we may start to think that religion is actually harmful. Look at all the wars and hatred and intolerance that religions have brought. It is wrong to believe in something without adequate evidence. And many of the ideas of religion have been disproved by science. We can't let all this go unchallenged. We will be doing a disservice to our society. If some misguided people still want to follow these man-made superstitions, that is their right. Hopefully we can convince them of their folly. If not, we can provide an alternative to people who might otherwise be enticed and fooled. And so it goes. There seems no end to this dispute. Religion has had its excesses. Where they continue they need to be opposed, but religion has also been a great source for good in the world. Religion can provide moral guidance, a sacred dimension to life, practices that link us to each other and to the mysterious source behind our experience, suggestions of places and states beyond this world, texts and music and art that are fertile and enriching, meditative and contemplative practices, and a family of fellow travelers and seekers on the path. Mixed in with this can be dogmatism, exclusivism, authoritarianism, outmoded social attitudes and theories, and a history of errors and even atrocities. Some religions or sects of religions have a better mix than others. But in any case, like the loved ones in our life, we do not have to like everything about them to make them a part of our life. We may have to overlook some things or to make some compromises. No one and no religion is perfect. Despite whatever mystery underlies them, religions are after all human creations. But does society need religion? Societies need a core set of rules that their members must follow. Religions have often provided that core. But it seems possible to have a healthy society with members following many different religions or no religion. One way to approach this is to imagine our society with no religions. Just imagine present day society without religion, ignoring what that would mean about the past, for the moment. What would we be missing? Presumably people would still stumble across some unusual inner experiences. Maybe they would just describe them in direct experiential terms. I felt calm and a deep feeling of love as if I were in the presence of some hidden friend with whom I was profoundly at ease. Or, I became so absorbed and mindful of the present moment that I lost myself for a while. I experienced a profound silence and just a sequence of thought moments with nothing apparently behind it. Or, I was alone and a stranger sat down beside me and we talked about my life. This stranger seemed to know me, but then there was a small shift in my consciousness and the stranger was gone. Even with religion, most people would just shrug off such experiences, but a few might take them seriously and talk about them or write poetry about them. Some of this might become public and be preserved as texts. Maybe some people would read about it and seek such experiences themselves because they see in them something more than their everyday existence. Would they meet with other people, and maybe practice together? Maybe someone would start teaching about it. Soon we would be back to something that sounds a lot like religion. People who are trying to make sense of something strange or unusual will seek others to explore it with. They will naturally form groups surrounding something of such profound interest. So if religions did not exist, most likely such experiences as these would lead back to some type of religion. But if religions do exist, these experiences can be given a ready made context and can be channeled into a structure that does not disrupt social life. But let's go back again to our society without religion. Some people will naturally wonder about their life. Is life just one thing after another? Is there anything behind experience? How did I get here? What will happen when I die? Since these questions are outside of the scope of science, people might start speculating. Maybe there are other beings that are hidden and we can have relationships with them. Maybe there are many worlds other than this world. Maybe we go to another place when we die. Will it be a happy place or will we sad that we are no longer in our beautiful world? All kinds of ideas and images could come to mind. It is comforting to hope that there could be something more. Over time these comforting words might be written down and passed along and hope might turn into belief in the telling. And if these comforting words are re-enforced by inner experiences, they can become even more powerful. Maybe people would meet together to read these words and support each other in the hope. So again a human situation could lead back to religion. But if religions are already there, providing comforting words, supporting their members in their hope, again they can channel these longings. Let's go one more time back to this society without religion. If the society is at all viable, it must have solved some of the problems about how to resolve conflicting desires and allow people to live together in such a way that at least the majority of the people can get their most basic desires met. These solutions are likely to be in the form of social norms and moral rules that hold the society together. When new situations come up, new norms and rules may be needed. Moral innovators might propose new solutions and teach them to others. People will need inspiration and motivation to follow the rules and to learn to go beyond their own desires. These norms and rules will need to be passed on to the children. The family can do part of this by telling stories and by example, but families need support by society, especially when they become harried and split across many localities. Maybe groups will come together to preserve and pass on these norms and rules and the stories and exhortations used to emphasize them. Since a society can only support so many groups, these texts and practices might be combined with the comforting words and the texts about inner experiences and we are back to a religion again. So societies need religion or something that will play the role of religion, and this role can be seen to be to provide a channel for an inner life, to provide hope and comforting words, and to provide a repository of moral exhortations and stories. Some religions will work better than others in certain circumstances and given all the rest that is going on in a society. Religions will naturally become embellished with the cultural dress and vocabularies of the societies that they originate in. And they will evolve as they move from place to place. There will be people who do not need religion, but there will be a pressure toward religion just in the nature of human experience. No one religion will necessarily be the best for all people and a diverse society will need to tolerate and support many approaches to religion. In some times and places one religion may be particularly successful, but unfortunately this often happens through force or strong rhetoric and tireless missionary work. There will be a tendency for aggressive and dogmatic religions to be more successful because they re-enforce behaviors that spread the religion and keep people from changing to other religions. But there will also be resistance to their pushiness and intolerance except perhaps in more homogenous societies where they might become dominant and thus seem like the natural order. But in times of great change and mixing of many subcultures and innovations, tolerance and accommodation to diversity will eventually become a necessity. It can be similar to finding someone to love. It may take a search. You may want to list out what you want and see which one matches. Or it may come easily like the most natural thing in the world. Still yet, you may discover you don't need one after all. There is a common story of a person who travels far and wide through many heartaches looking for love and they eventually find it back where they came from with the girl or boy next door. This can also happen with religion. If you are seeking a religion, it must mean that either you never had one or you are looking for one other than the one you were raised in or are currently in. But consider. If you already have a religion and you are dissatisfied, maybe all you need is a new look. There are advantages to staying where you are. First, you already know it. You may find that other religions have some of the same problems but you just don't know about them yet. They may be even worse. Another advantage of staying is the sense of continuity and connection. If you were raised in the religion, your family may have been in it for many generations. That tradition and connection to the past can be very meaningful. So first try looking at your original or current religion with new eyes. The things those other religions offer may already exist in your religion, but in a different form. Or maybe you can adopt some of those practices without changing your whole religion. For example, you can adopt a form of meditation from another religion for use within the context of your own religion. Next, maybe you should participate in the reform of your religion instead of just abandoning it. Or there may be other sects or groups within your religion that are essentially the same but have already reformed the troublesome areas or at least have made it easier to overlook them. It is difficult with religions that maintain a rhetoric of all or nothing, but it is always open to you to pick and choose despite what the purists might say. Will you let them chase you away from a religion that you find beautiful and fulfilling in most respects because they insist that you be just like them? Now there could be aspects of a religion that are essential for its basic premise. To ignore or undermine those things would be to redefine the religion in your own image. It is important to be sensitive to these essential elements so as not to attempt to highjack a religion. Consider a religion that is particularly tolerant and flexible within a particular tradition. That tradition gives them their sense of identity as a religion but they are very open to other views. Over time this religion has built up resources, buildings, training institutions for leaders, texts, practices, and the loyalty of longtime members. If this religion is too flexible it is possible for another religion that does not have these resources to in affect highjack the religion. The first religion is very open about membership. These new members are definitely welcome. When they become members they bring new practices and beliefs and over time take over the resources of the original religion to the detriment of the longtime members. Is this fair? It is a very difficult question. At the other end, a religion may insist on 100% compliance with no flexibility. They will probably be more successful in retaining their identity and the infrastructure that they have built up, but it will be hard to retain members or to attract new members. Children may drift away to more flexible religions. Seekers will think twice. It could be that your current religion is too loose and you want more structure or it is too strict and you need more room for innovation. If you have looked at the various ways that you could stay and it will just not work out, then it may be time to look around. There are various approaches you can take. You can read about different religions. You can visit. You can just leave it open and drift and hope you run across something. The search can be very confusing and disconcerting with many ups and downs. You may find a religion that sounds promising but they are small or nonexistent where you live. There is no infrastructure. When you join a small group, you will likely need to take on a lot more. They will not have programs and resources. For example, they may not have classes for your children. You may need to travel to other cities or countries for meetings or conferences. It can get very difficult and tiring. Unless they really have what you need, think carefully about it. Another pitfall is that many religions are anxious for new members and they naturally put their best foot forward. It may take time to uncover the full story about the religion. It can be heartbreaking to go through all of the seeking and struggle and then find out something that leaves you feeling betrayed and deceived. Be wary of secrets and a lack of openness. Take your time and investigate. After all the searching you may find that there is no one group that is really what you are looking for, even after you consider that no religion is perfect and you have considered what you can overlook and how far you can compromise. If none of this works, then you have a further option of picking and choosing from various traditions. You can then have your own private religion or be a perpetual visitor to various groups with which you have some affinity. Your final decision may be to give up on religion. Most people wish for and try to find a life partner. But there are those who remain single. You can still live a good life without a religion, and there are many like you out there. You can join to together on a different basis than religion and fulfill your religion feelings in other ways such as art or politics or psychology or social service. Suspend language and desire for a time and just be mindful of your breathing, or of the motions and sensations of your body, or of a natural scene, or of a visualized image. Or quietly watch a candle or listen to a bell or chimes or music or repeat a phrase or word. Or find some time to yourself and ask yourself questions and give yourself the answers. Or read a text closely, following the flow of meaning and syntax with attention and even love. Or project to every living creature feelings of loving kindness and goodwill. Or ask for the help you need and then rest for a moment in the presence of that mysterious other. Meditation is the deliberate cultivation of inner experience. Many of the inner experiences that inspire religion happen spontaneously and are not necessarily sought out, but once an inner life is recognized, people often seek ways to cultivate it. There are many and varied approaches to meditation. Some involve language. For example, a common practice is to repeating a word or phrase such as "Om" or "Namu Amida Butsu" or "Jesus", sometimes synchronized with breathing. This is intended to associate the person with a sacred concept or presence, or to simply remind the person of some centrally important aspect of their life. The result of this is often to bring about a feeling of calm centeredness. Another use of language is inner dialog. This could be talking to yourself or to an imaginary friend or to a "spirit guide". It may be hard to really know which of these you are really talking to. Still this can provide a way of working through problems and getting some comfort. Prayer can also be a form of inner dialog, but you most likely do not hear a direct answer back. You might feel a certain calm or a feeling of a peaceful and loving presence. Sometimes you may forgo the words and just "practice the presence". Another use of language is reading sacred texts or affirmations or comforting words. This can be prayer. The reading can be out loud or silent, followed perhaps by a brief silence. Then there is close reading where you try to uncover layers and layers of meaning or just savor the words. Or you might ask a question and turn to a random passage and see what answer you get. This is a sort of divination where you give meaning to something like the way sticks fall or the direction a pendant turns. Although this hardly seems like a very reliable method for getting your questions answered, it may give you some ideas. Going beyond language, you can use various ways to quiet your mind and to suspend desire and striving for a brief time. You can focus your attention, without strain, just being mindful, on your breathing, your body, a scene, a candle, a sound, or just the sequence of your thoughts. This can help you to learn to observe and be more detached. Beyond this there is active imagination. You can visualize a scene or a picture of spiritual being in every detail. You can go further to visual and analyze different sequences of images. This is used in some forms of psychotherapy, but it can also be used to contact the sacred dimension. Some particularly vivid and perhaps involuntary examples of this are visions. There are some cautions that should be put forward on these practices. Practiced in moderation for relatively short periods of time (twenty minutes to an hour, for example), they can be very beneficial. But if taken to excess or practiced with great intensity, they could be disturbing and in certain cases could even lead to hallucinations (through sensory depravation, for example) or other problems. So moderate, consistent practice in a calm state of mind is the key. If you want to go much farther than this, it would probably be wise to find a teacher who has covered the territory before. Again, though, caution is very warranted. Make sure the teacher is someone you can trust to be playing around with your mind. Some people who cultivate these practices, after a while, become convinced that there is "something more", something behind the veil, something hidden and beautiful. Could it be that there are many worlds of experience and our absorption in the flow of everyday experience prevents us from sensing them? This is the experiential basis of religion. There is something more than the outer, there is the inner. And at times they seem one, so you think, "as above, so below", "as within, so without". Obviously this is not at all as clear cut as the publicly accessible experiences that science deals with, or that we deal with in our everyday, practical affairs, so it is tempting to just dismiss it. But some people just can't dismiss it. It seems "real". It seems centrally important. Scientifically minded people are probably very justified in viewing this sort of experience as less "objective", less definite, difficult to test, just private. On the other hand, meditation shows that one person can have these experiences and then tell others how to experience the same thing. So they are repeatable and publicly accessible in that sense. But the interpretations cannot be easily tested. Was it a hallucination or a vision of the sacred? How can you test it? It becomes more an issue of choice and risk. Do you want to spend your time this way given the risk that you might be fooling yourself? Or do you want to dismiss it and risk overlooking something vitally important? There is no easy answer. It is dangerous to turn your will over to someone else. If you are expected to follow with unquestioning obedience, beware. On the other hand, if the teacher has something to share and leaves it up to you to take it or leave it, then investigate for yourself and make your own choice. What do religious leaders have that the rest of us don't have? In established religions it may just be a matter of training. They have gone to some special school that trains religious leaders. They know about the sacred texts and practices and about religious education, giving sermons, and counseling. They may be trained in meditation and can teach others how to meditate. They may provide a range of services as the leader of a religious community and are supported in return by the donations of the members. Or they may give classes in exchange for fees. This all seems fine. If you want the service, you pay for it and you help subsidize those who can't pay as much. This is an exchange among equals, as when you hire a doctor or a psychotherapist. They have specialized knowledge, so they can provide a service. They do not have an authority over you. They are there to advice and help you. But often religious leaders claim authority. What can the basis of this authority be? As religious leaders you would hope that they are especially serious about practicing the religion, so they can claim some moral authority, or the authority of example. They may have some administrative authority in the sense that they can make decisions about the administration of the resources of the community. But we are really talking about something more. Do they have the authority to tell you what to do and believe? They can tell you what the religion teaches, or at least their interpretation. This gets to the crux of the issue. Some religious leaders are given authority to interpret what the religion really teaches and how it should be applied. If you are a member of that religion, do you give over your will to the authority of the teachings and to the official interpreters? A more social interpretation is that when you join any group there are formal and informal agreements about what you will do and say. If you do not follow the agreements there could be sanctions, such as expulsion from the community. This may be fine if you know what you are getting into and you can leave if you no longer want to hold to that agreement. The problem comes when arbitrary authority is given to a religious leader and there are pressures to prevent you leaving. In extreme cases, your life may be in danger if you oppose the teachings or the leader. This is the sort of situation you want to be very careful about. But do different rules apply when a religion is in the process of being founded? The founder of the religion is still alive and is actively creating and forming the religion. This founder is the source of the teachings. These teachings may be coming from profound revelation experiences. And the personal charisma of the leader can be overwhelming. This is a fairly rare situation, but what authority does the founder have in this case? Since they are creating the religion, it seems only fair that they will have the creative copyright. Even in this highly charged situation, however, you have the right to your individual choice. You have to understand that the situation is fluid and that what you originally thought you were getting into may change, but you still must maintain the right to withdraw if things change too much. It is dangerous to give over your will to the leader because how do you know what is really going on? So religious leaders are very important. They may be creating the religion or they may be particularly knowledgeable about it, so they deserve some respect and some social authority. However, you always need to keep some distance. You are still your own person, and you must think for yourself and evaluate what is happening. But shouldn't there be some trust? These are sometimes saints we are talking about. Can't saints be trusted to not do you any harm? Well, one person's saint is another person's mad extremist. The central rule of negotiation seems applicable: trust but verify. Is science in conflict with religion? When religion expects unquestioning faith, there is a natural conflict. If religious ideas are open to testing, there is no conflict. Also, religion deals with realms of desire and inner experience that are outside of the scope of science. Science and religion each have their bases in different experiential territories. Science is based on publicly accessible experience. Religion is based on inner experience. If science says that its methods do not apply beyond publicly accessible experience and religion says any revelations it has about publicly accessible experience should be open to the same kind of testing that scientific claims are, where is the conflict? There are differences, of course. Science is more rigorously tested. Religion is more open to interpretation and there is a lot more variability in approach. Science can usually achieve wide consensus within the community of research once a theory has been sufficiently tested. Religion has many different "communities of research" using different methods. Therefore, individual choice and mutual tolerance is much more of an issue. This will be made easier as religions give up unsupportable claims to unique authority and legitimacy. At the same time science needs to recognize that it has deliberately limited its scope to those experiences that can best be subjected to its methods. Beyond this, there are still whole realms of knowledge that are a part of human experience. It is true that they are less testable and definite than science, but they are still part of life. Religion explores some of these regions. Religion also gives a whole pattern to life of which science can be a part. Religions include ethics, stories, songs, art, community life, and many other areas within their practice. They supply more of a complete picture of life. Religion can embrace science as one of our great human treasures once it is properly understood not to be a real threat to religion. Science has already recognized that there are many areas beyond its scope, history, journalism, everyday problem solving, art, art criticism, craftsmanship, ethics, personal experience, parties, games, fun, love. Science can study some of these, but it cannot subsume them. Surely some of these are part of how we know the world. Religion is one of these different ways of knowing the world. Part of the problem is a universalizing attitude on the part of advocates of both science and religion, but this attitude is not necessary to the functioning of either science or religion. It is like saying that the only real people are those in my group. Anyone on the outside must be less than human. We have long ago found that a live and let live attitude will get us much farther. A counter argument to this play friendly approach to science and religion is that God knows best what He has created and therefore if He says something in His holy book, then science will just have to accept its authority. Science is only tentative. It has had to change its theories in the past. Eventually even the scientists will have to see that God is right and they are wrong. But scientists are more than willing to admit that their theories may need revision based on future experience. Their theories are presented as the best view they have at this time. But defenders of religion who insist on the correctness of their theories will not admit that they may be taking creation stories from pre-scientific cultures as fact just on authority. Religion does not need to be in conflict with science, but arguments from authority invite such a conflict. Suppose that the sacred scriptures are not books that come from a particular cultural setting and that they are not human interpretations of inner experiences. Suppose that they are direct words from God. Could it not be that we are misunderstanding them? Could it be that the text could have a different meaning? How do we know we have the right one? And didn't God also create the human mind as a way to search out the secrets of nature? There is a confusion about authority. Authority is a social concept. It has to do with who can make certain decisions. But much of our experience just happens. We can't decide for it to not be that way. None of us has authority over whether the force of gravity pulls objects toward each other. It is just part of the pattern of our experience. There can be authority about whether texts can be changed and about what it means to be a part of a religious community but not about the basic structure of the universe. It is what it is. So some of this is an argument about what people should be allowed to say. Religious people who insist on the authority of their text are in effect saying that we are not allowed to question the text. Furthermore, we cannot claim truth for texts that contradict this text. To question this text undermines the social structure of their religion, and they cannot tolerate that. It also calls into doubt the hopes that they have based on that text. It comes back to the problem of universalizing. If they could accept that their hopes could still be there even if they were to admit that their holy book contains some ideas that no longer apply or that apply in a different way than they originally understood, they could avoid this problem. For example, creation stories from all cultures can be very interesting and can have very deep inner significance. They do not have to be treated as scientific texts. There are many different kinds of texts with many different purposes. Science and religion do not have to be in conflict if extremists on both sides will just back off. Each side needs to recognize their own human limits and to respect the territory of the other. Science has legitimate claims to being the best source of the well tested, coherent theories that cover the realm of publicly accessible experience. Religion has legitimate claims to opening up realms beyond science, the inner realms, the ethical, holistic patterns of life that can include science as one of their many treasures. Faith as a choice to trust someone or to follow a certain pattern of life does not necessarily conflict with openness to other possibilities or to putting our ideas to the test. And there is always the possibility that the choice may change based on future experience. Suppose I say of someone, "He doesn't believe in anything!" What problem am I having with this person? I am saying that he has no inner core. He cannot be trusted. You cannot know what he will do because he has no guiding principles. Faith then does not mean accepting something without question. It means a firm decision to live life in a certain way and perhaps to take certain ideas and theories as working assumptions. But what if I take as working assumptions things that end up being contradicted by experience? Can I still be a person of faith if I change my beliefs? I don't necessarily change them quickly but I note that this experience needs to be reconciled with my faith, and if it can't be, then I change my working assumptions. My faith is firm, but it can change if needed. This is not the same as just jumping from one thing to another. From the other end, some people say that it is always wrong to believe something without sufficient evidence. It is OK to decide to follow certain ethical principles, but I cannot claim truth for things that I cannot verify. But taking something as a working assumption is not the same as claiming it is true. It is deciding, when there is nothing better to go on, to try a theory out in practice and to see what comes of it. It is suspending disbelief for some purpose. It is not claiming absolute certainty since we are only human, and it is not insisting that other people must make the same choice although we might recommend it to them. The problem comes when we insist that our faith must be accepted independent of any future experience, and that it must be universally accepted. We want certainty from our faith. We want assurance that our faith will never, never fail us. But this is a confusion of categories. A decision is not the same as truth. And refusing to consider contradictory evidence is not the same as absolute assurance. Intellectual integrity is the willingness to test our theories despite our hopes and fears. It is avoiding wishful thinking and insisting that something must be true just because we want it to be. It is resisting the temptation to compartmentalize and to give our most cherished beliefs preferential treatment. It is facing up to our limits. But we can do all of this and still explore options and be open to possibilities. It is not wrong to hope. It is wrong to deny evidence in the name of hope. It is not wrong to have working assumptions. It is wrong to claim that our working assumptions are absolute truths. It is not wrong to join a community of faith, to decide to take on its norms and practices. It is wrong to declare war on other communities of faith and to try to force other people to make the same decision. But wouldn't it be better to be more conservative with our working assumptions? Shouldn't we apply Occam's Razor and keep things as simple as possible? Shouldn't we suspend judgment on areas that we cannot easily test? It depends on what you want from life. It is possible to not try anything unless you know for sure that you are making the right choice, but that would severely limit your choices. Most choices have an element of risk. But what are you risking when you decide to join a community of faith? And what possibilities are you opening up for yourself? One problem is that many people of faith will not be so careful about their claims. They will be dogmatic and intolerant and exclusive. It is a danger of faith. It may be hard for you to accept this attitude and it may eventually chase you away. Also, these others may look at you with suspicion. You are not a true believer, not like them. Maybe you are a covert heretic. We have already discussed that religious communities may have legitimate concerns about preserving the integrity of their religion. But you do not want to change the religion. You are not a highjacker. You just want to be honest with yourself. If the community cannot accept that, you choices are to keep it to yourself, to find a more open community, or to withdraw into a private religion. But religion is not just a matter of making working assumptions about things you can never know for sure. It is more about finding a context and structure for your inner experiences and ethical choices. A view of knowledge that takes in the whole range of experience and accepts that some experiences are easier to test than others, leaves a lot of room for exploration. It is not just beliefs, it is experience and mutual support in ethical choices. Such an approach to faith can be very compatible with intellectual integrity. The better tested a text is, the more justified you are in believing it. Still, there are texts that are difficult to test beyond feelings that this is the right way to go. In such cases, it seems that we should have the right to choose to believe it or to take it as a working assumption. But we do not have the right to force our choice on others. The question is not whether we have a civil right to believe, it is whether in the community of serious thinkers, we have a right to be treated as an equal if we are a believer. Does your belief mean that you are careless and gullible whereas the nonbelievers are rigorous and clear thinking? It is almost a question of whether you can believe and still be "cool". There is a range of belief. It is not difficult to believe things that have been well tested against publicly accessible experience. Even here the belief is tentative. Future experience could change it. Still within the public realm, rare and complex experiences are more difficult to test and therefore they require more of an element of decision. Either we decide to suspend judgment or, if it is important to us, we decide to accept working assumptions. For example, in social and psychological experience, we may need to make decisions in the face of incomplete testing. When we move into the ethical and the inner, testing becomes even more difficult. The ethical has elements of social experience and of desire. It can be tested whether the ethical rule will most likely have the desired result in social experience, but the desire is beyond testing. It is in the realm of will and decision. Once we get to inner experience, testing becomes even more of a problem. Each of us can test individually and report back, but other people will only have the reports, not the experiences themselves. There is much more of an element of interpretation and decision. At this point the element of decision may become more prominent because the testing is the most difficult. Disputes come up along two main lines. Some people feel that once you get to where testing is too difficult, it is best to suspend judgment. Others feel that if the issue is important, then it is appropriate to make some working assumptions. The other area of dispute is the nature of these working assumptions. Some people treat them as more than just working assumptions. They may even treat them as having more credibility than well tested theories. Since they cannot be tested, they may seem even more invulnerable. Saying, "I have tested this as much as I can. From here I am taking it as a working assumption because it is an important area to me. I recognize that others make other decisions, and I respect their right to make them," is very different than saying, "I believe this. I can't test it. But it is the truth, and you are very mistaken if you do not make the same decision that I have made." So we "serious thinkers" could grant respectable status to those who choose some working assumptions in an area that is difficult to test as long as they are clear that that is what they are doing. Still we may have a problem with those who do not recognize that they are making working assumptions and instead claim absolute truth for their decisions. There is a world of difference between the two. But why are these especially uncertain areas so important to some of us? Because they go to the center of who we are, to the core our beings, to the mystery that surrounds us, to the mystery of why we are here. For some of us, these become ultimate concerns. And it is not all just guesses. There are social experiences that tell us something about ethics. And there are inner experiences that suggest something about the mysterious core of our life. And if we do not claim too much, aren't we justified in exploring these areas and forming groups for mutual support and for passing on what the great explorers before us have found? A Case Study - The Founding of Georgism Did George ever really exist? You as the reader of this can never know for sure. We the eyewitnesses can make our claims. We can tell you what we saw and heard around July 4th in the year 2000, the end of a millennium or the beginning of one, as you will. The most likely situation is that the eyewitnesses do not even exist and that I am making this all up as I go along. You will need to decide if it makes any real difference. George we believe came in with the carnival people who were setting up for the Fourth of July. I first saw him sitting on one of the benches in the small park at the center of town. He was talking to a small group of bemused onlookers. "I have had a revelation from God. Yes, God exists. But she is much more than we can imagine. She has revealed herself to many throughout history in a form that they could understand. I refer to God as a she because that is how I experience her. But she could equally well have come as a he or as a being with no gender or as just a mysterious presence or as a feeling of calm assurance or as a shattering experience of transcendence. "I do not claim any uniqueness in this. I am just one of God's prophets. You don't owe me anything. You don't need to follow me, or to make a religion out of what I will tell you. This is a path that I have chosen. Well, I didn't totally choose it. You can't choose to have a revelation. It just happens to you. "You can seek guidance, but what you receive will always be doubtful. Imagine an inner voice that you talk to or vivid sights and sounds that may come to you. The most likely situation is that these are just aspects of yourself. "Now I have experienced similar things to a degree that is so real to me that I refuse to doubt. It is deep and shattering and utterly convincing. She exists. She is always with me. I love her, and she loves me. And she reveals to me such treasures, such treasures." He went silent. He seemed to radiant light and calm assurance and deep, deep gratitude. A young man sitting there spoke up, "But how can we know you have had a revelation? Why should we trust you?" George smiled. "You cannot really know. Consider. God is that behind your experience that makes your experience happen. Just stop here for a moment and just observe your experience, here in this park, on a hot day. The sky is blue with a few clouds. There is a nice breeze. You are sitting with an apparent madman discussing mystical states. This is what you know right now. But what is behind your experience? I call that God. She is the source, the ground of your experience. But you can only know the experience. "Now I come and tell you that that ground behind experience has manifested herself to me. There is an unknowable source and there is its revelation through me. How can you know a relation between an unknown and a known? You can't. Pure and simple. But to me it is different because the revelation is my experience and it is so real and vivid to me that I do not doubt it like I do not doubt that I am experiencing this sunlight. Oh, I could doubt it. Are all of these experiences real? They could suddenly disappear and I could wake up in another place with my virtual reality gear on. But I doubt it. It seems very real to me." The young man asked, "Can we have the same experience. Can we be so sure?" George smiled again. He smiled a lot. "Yes, you could, but then you would be a prophet, too. And that is a goal you cannot really seek. It just happens to you. And I would not recommend it as a career choice." The young man frowned. "Then why should we listen to you?" "You don't need to. It might be amusing to listen to a crazy man in the park. I am no danger to you. I don't want anything from you. I am glad that you are asking these questions because there are many dangers here. If you were to uncritically start following someone, it could be dangerous. "You are puzzled by life. You are desperate for answers. Your life is boring and meaningless. You want something more. I come here and claim that I know it. But I don't come out straight and tell you the nature of my experience. I create a mystery around it. I claim authority. I start acting like a parent to you. You conveniently suspend disbelief. And then there we are. Ten years later you wake up in a compound in Montana and wonder how you got there, and how you will make a living if you leave. "So think for yourself. Be able to suspend disbelief for a while, but know that you are doing it. I tell you that my revelation is real. God did come to me, and she continues to come to me. I am one of her messengers. Take it or leave it. It matters little to me, although you may get something out of it." Everyone just sat there in silence for a while. George appeared to be meditating. He was very calm, just waiting for what he had said to sink in. The young man spoke up again. "Well, what do you have to reveal? Why are you here?" "I am a wandering prophet. My mission is to small groups for short periods of time. Something more may come from it. I don't know. I will be here for a few days and then I will move on. I will tell you all I can while I am here. What you do with it is up to you. But I ask you to be honest about it. Don't make yourself into an authority. "So, let's start. God exists. She is the source of this situation we are in. She has set up this game that we are playing. Why? She won't tell me, but it will all work out well in the end. We will see. She is there for us if we seek her. She will help us through it. "There is much evil and suffering in this world. Much of it is the result of human action, but much of it just happens. We say that it is an act of God. Why does God allow suffering to happen? Why are there natural disasters and terrible accidents? Why does she allow evil people to torture, oppress, kill, steal, all of the evils that they can think of? Again, she will not tell me. She just radiates love and patience. It can be quite infuriating, I can tell you. "You may think that this is not much of an answer. But she has told me some things. It is not because we deserve it, or because we have chosen it. Is she some kind of sadist? I can only say that she cannot be. Is it all really beyond her power? Would she stop it if she could? Is she a finite God? Did she set this all up, and then it got beyond control like a genetics experiment that escaped the laboratory? She won't say. "But now that we are in this situation what are we to do about it? That is the point. She has revealed herself to me for that purpose. "Again, I say she, but that is just how she comes to me. God is beyond all that we can imagine and yet she is very close to us at all times. She is transcendent and yet she comes in many forms to help us. You could think of God as a force that underlies our experience and our world and that governs its basic structure and patterns, and that would also be true in a way. God is an endless font of creativity and forms and ideas and images pouring out at all times into unnumbered worlds of experience. Yet she is very practical and down to earth. "Also, I can tell you that we survive death. This is not our only world of experience. There are many things that are beyond our power in all of the worlds of God, but there is also a lot that we can influence. How we experience can change based on our thoughts and actions and desires. We can make a difference in what happens to us and to others. But there is much that we cannot control. "What you have heard about near death experiences is all true. When you die, you do enter a sort of tunnel and review your life and go on to a different world. What happens after that though is very diverse. People have had different visions of the next world, but it is not a village with a few well-named buildings. It is not created in the image of one religion or the other. It is worlds within worlds. "We are energy beings. We are conscious energy. We enter a body. We operate a body. When the body is broken, we may be in a sort of limbo state until the body dies and frees us. In other worlds our energy is more free. What is energy? It is the ability to do work. It is the ability to act. It can move through material universes. Material universes exist in parallel with each other and can interpenetrate each other. It is a vast and fascinating structure. "We are immortal. Our energy does not cease to exist. It can be transformed. And there are dangers. We can through our thoughts and actions and desires damage ourselves seriously. Sometimes we can find help and can reverse the damage. Some are just too damaged. They do not or cannot choose to get better. "This whole universe of universes, all these worlds of God, whatever you can imagine of them, it is greater than that. Whatever you can express in language, whatever systems you come up with, it is greater than that." The young man asked, "What can we know? How can we know? How do we make decisions? How can we test and justify our choices?" George answered, "You have to start where you are. Examine your life. What are your basic resources? I would say they are language, experience, and desire. At the center there is experience. Your life is a sequence of experiences. You are in a world of experience. That is ultimately what you can know. Then there is how you talk about your experience. There are all of the languages that you use and the texts of those languages. Language is a very broad term. It refers to all our symbol and sign making activities, not just words. The culture you were born in and that you contribute to is a fabric of texts. Some texts are intended to describe or make claims about experience. They can be tested against experience or for their coherence. Texts that are inconsistent do not often describe experience, if ever. There are many ways to describe experiences, but a text that is inconsistent within itself has never been shown to be consistent with experience, as far as I know. "So our knowledge is our current store of texts that are coherent and well tested against experience. Our knowledge grows with our ability to create new texts and to test them. We cannot have a justification for our knowledge beyond this. Suppose we want an absolute, unquestionable justification for our knowledge. Let's just take one statement. There is often disagreement. There is a diversity of opinion. Some will think it is true. Some will deny it, or have their own variation on it. It may appear true or false at different times and places. It is a matter of perspective. One culture may accept it and another does not. And there is a problem at the core of the concept of justification. A statement is justified because of something else. But that something else also needs justification. Like a child that always asks why, the process can continue forever. It leads to an infinite regress. So absolute justification seems unattainable because of diversity, relativity, and infinite regress. And truth is just a compliment we pay to texts that are coherent and well tested against experience. This appears to be our situation. Let's make the best of it. We can still go very far. "On decision making, we always come back to some desire. We want to live, to be a part of a stable and orderly social group, to enjoy our life, to be moderately comfortable, whatever our desires are. These are our motivation. And desires definitely are variable. We cannot provide any sort of absolute justification for them either." The young man raised his eyebrows in surprise, "And does God approve of all of this?" "Well, she is the one that set this all up. Even my revelation is just an experience that I am telling you about. I want to do my duty and tell you about it. You at least for now want to hear about it. It is words backed up by an experience that only I have had. Am I an honest man? Am I a deceiver or a madman? Did I really have this experience, but it doesn't mean what I think it means? All this is possible. But I tell you straight out. I am telling you the truth. That is, what I am telling you matches my experience. You can trust me our not. It is up to you. I don't really care one way or the other. Even if you think I am crazy, you might get some benefit out of it." At that point a group of carnival people came through and asked George for some help setting up. He said he would be in the park the next day and went off with them. The next morning George was at the same bench in the park with a small group of people. Surprisingly the young man who had asked so many questions the day before was not there. After some small talk, a young mother with two young children playing close by asked, "How should we live our lives?" George said, "As God said to Micah, you already know how to live. Be just and compassionate, and walk humbly with your God. The thing is to put it into practice. I could give you other answers you already know. Do not kill, do not steal, do not lie. Treat others as you would like to be treated. Love one another. Do no harm. Help the poor. Do your duty without attachment. Consider the consequences. Test what people tell you against experience. Be mindful and aware. Be patient. Balance freedom, justice, compassion, and democracy. Treat others as ends, not means. Do not discriminate based on race, gender, sexuality, creed, or origin. Treat others with dignity, courtesy, and respect. Respect differences. Seek unity in diversity. Be one human family. Consider the consequences of your actions to the seventh generation. Do not eat the seed corn. Keep your promises. Trust, but verify." The young mother asked, "But why should we put these things into practice?" George answered, "I could say because God says so. But she only says these things because they are in our own best interest. She reveals rules for life to help guide us, to help us live our life better. And most all of this would make sense even if there had never been any revelation. This all can be justified just by an appeal to our history in trying to live together, our joint social experience. We could go through them one by one and explain why they make for a better social experience. "Most of us want to have our basic needs met, to be able to predict what others will do, to be at peace with our neighbors, to enjoy our short life with our friends and family. We come into conflict when other desires come into play, or when scarcity causes competition for the basics. Then our social experience can spiral down into conflict and struggle and disorder. Our children are not safe. We worry about what will happen next. But there is always the hope for a better world. We can figure it out. We can learn to solve problems. Science and technology can help. Working together for our common good can help. Putting these rules into practice can help. Life can get better." The young mother looked puzzled. "But what does God have to do with this? We can do this all on our own." George said, "Yes, we could, but we often don't. God sends messengers to remind us and to refine the message for different circumstances. And God does not need for us to believe in her. She only wants to help us. If we do this on our own, no one will be happier than her." Something seemed to come loose in the young mother, all her long held questions rushing forward. "Ok, then what about spirituality. Isn't there more than this?" "Well, yes. There is much more. For example, suspend language and desire for a time and just be mindful of your breathing, or of the motions and sensations of your body, or of a natural scene, or of a visualized image. Or quietly watch a candle or listen to a bell or chimes or music or repeat a phrase or word. Or find some time to yourself and ask yourself questions and give yourself the answers. Or read a text closely, following the flow of meaning and syntax with attention and even love. Or project to every living creature feelings of loving-kindness and goodwill. Or ask for the help you need and then rest for a moment in the presence of that mysterious other. "All of these can help your inner life as the rules for living with others can help your outer life. One definition of religion is meditation, morality, and wisdom." The young mother asked, "Ok, what about wisdom?" George answered, "Wisdom comes from examining your life. Think about things. Study science, history, politics, literature, whatever you can. Read texts of many kinds. Learn from others. And examine your own motives and experiences. Look at the different configurations of language, experience, and desire that make up your life. Try to be detached. Look closely at your experiences from mediation and prayer. Use critical thinking without being too critical of others as people. Be patient. Keep learning. Improve your store of knowledge by testing texts for coherence and against experience." Then the young mother came to the question that seemed to be the one most on her mind. "How can we be happy?" George answered, "There is an easy answer that is hard to put into practice. Reconcile language, experience, and desire. When you are unhappy it is because there is a conflict between your desire and your experience or your views about your experience. So when you are unhappy, change the language, change the experience, or change the desire until they are reconciled. We often are unhappy because we are mistaken about the true situation. We think something is the case that conflicts with our desire when it fact we are just looking at it the wrong way. We should test our views to see if they really match experience. Other times we just need to change the experience, take the appropriate action to make the situation better. Finally, we may need to just give up the desire. It may be unrealistic. It may be in conflict with other desires. Examining and reconciling our language, experience, and desire is a lifelong practice that can bring us closer and closer to enduring happiness. "And we need to be realistic about things that are in our control and things that are not in our control. To a certain extent we can control our own efforts, but we often cannot control the outcomes. If ultimately there is nothing we can do about something, we need to learn detachment and just give up the desire. I suppose if we were completely free from desire we would be completely free from unhappiness." The young mother got starry eyed for a moment, and asked, "Can we become enlightened?" George answered, "There are people who have gone very far down the road of meditation, morality, and wisdom, and of learning to reconcile language, experience, and desire. I would call them enlightened. But I do not use that term in any absolute sense of being merged into an undifferentiated oneness. I suppose if you had no desires at all, your energy body would not have anything to move it and you would stretch out and merge into undifferentiated energy. But I don't know why you would want to. Of course, if you wanted to it wouldn't happen either." At that point an elephant ear vendor came by with a big box of powdered sugar and asked George to come with him. He promised to be there the next day. The next day there was another small group there. Many of the same people were still there, some new faces. The young mother was there and seemed a little happier. George started out, "I am leaving soon. This will be my last talk with you. Is there anything else you would like to know about my revelation?" A rather cantankerous man in his forties volunteered, "It's not much of a revelation. Seems like a rehash and watering down of other religions and philosophies." George said mildly, "Yes, most revelations repeat themes from previous revelations because there is a message there that still needs to be heard." The cantankerous man asked, "Well then what is unique about your revelation?" George said, "I don't claim that it is unique. It is just a message for this time." "What makes it suited for this time?" the man asked. "People now have a lot more access to knowledge and to a variety of cultures and perspectives. They need to think for themselves. Still, they want some hope, and some plausible ideas about God and life after death, and about the most important elements of religion." The cantankerous man snorted, "We don't need a revelation to have a religion. For that matter, we don't need religion. Ethics and pragmatism are enough." George said, "Yes, they could be enough. If God does not exist and there is no life after death, there is still the need to live together and to make sense of our individual life and to examine it and to learn to be happy." The cantankerous man seemed to soften a little. "Well, then why are you here then? Why are you talking about a revelation?" George answered, "I am here to remind people of the basics. I am here to show a way that is not based on dogma, authoritarianism or exclusivism. What I know about God and the next life has been revealed to me. It is an open and inclusive message. I give it to you because it is my duty to give it to you. I don't know why God has chosen me to do this. Her ways are beyond me." The man, now not so cantankerous, asked, "Well, you are leaving. What should we do?" "Put these things into practice, as it suits you." "I mean should we start a group, or something? Are there other groups?" George said, "I didn't really come to start a religion. I had this revelation, and I am passing it on. That's all. If you want to start a religion, that's up to you." The man brightened like the idea of starting a religion really appealed to him. "What do you call your religion?" "As I said, I really didn't come to start a religion, and besides, all the good names are taken." George winked. "Don't you have any ideas?" the man asked, sliding a little bit back toward cantankerous. "How about postmodern postreligionism? No, that's a little
long. How about Her "It may spread beyond Granville." "I doubt it, but if it does, it can be Her Temple on Earth. I doubt that it will spread beyond the Earth, but if it does, it can be Her Temple on Mars, and then Her Temple in the Milky Way, and so on." "It sounds a little too religious." "Ok, how about Her Discussion Group?" "You're not taking this very seriously." "It's hard too." He paused. "How about Georgism? The followers can be called Georgists." "Sounds a little strange, but we'll get used to it. And it is shorter. Any advise on how we should organize?" "The biggest problem that religions get into is claiming exclusive legitimacy. Then you have to figure out who is in and who is out. So I would avoid creeds and have a democratic organization. Give no one any special spiritual authority. Even me. I am a man who received a revelation and passed it on to you. That is all." "What would tie us together?" "An interest in this revelation and learning how to put it into practice. Make it a sort of special interest and support group." "But we don't have any scriptures." "You have what I have told you. I noticed this fellow here has been recording our talks." He pointed to me. "Make your own poems, songs, stories, and talks. Celebrate life and its passages. Celebrate nature and its seasons. Meet to meditate and pray and study and socialize. Help each other and help others. Keep learning. Bring in speakers on different topics of interest. You may decide you want to pay a facilitator at some point, but do not give them any special doctrinal authority. You are all on an equal journey." At that point an old man came by with a bunch of power cords coiled around his shoulder and asked George to help them tear down. George smiled at us and went off with him. The next day the carnival people were packed up and gone. We have not seen or heard from George since. A few of us meet once a week in one of our homes. We discuss what we remember and what I recorded of our talks with George. We have written a few songs and poems, and we publish some of our talks on our Web site. There is a nice couple in Topeka who are interested. It may be true that we are limited to various configurations of language, experience, and desire, but that still leaves a lot of territory. There are all of the moments of life, serious, tragic, humorous, fun, pleasurable, painful, all the vast range of experiences, of times and places, of people and episodes, all of the explorations and struggles, the grand dramas of love and death. There is the whole range of knowledge, patterns of language and experience, from the structure and expressiveness of natural and artificial languages out to the reaches of space, to the stars and galaxies and planets, to our own planet with its complex systems of geology and weather, to the dense and intricate web of living things, to our own human drama and history and on in to the inner depths of the human personality and spirit. There is all of the rich diversity of our cultures, from dance and music and stories and songs, to the literature and art of the world, the folk art, the popular culture, entertainment, sports, gatherings, religious traditions. There are the stories of our lives, from childhood to school to work and family, the pleasures and suffering of the years. There is our growing ability to make and to build and to transform and to organize, science and technology, craftsmanship, the dignity of work and the pleasure of a job well done. There are the tender moments with our children and our families and the emotional storms and the intricate back and forth of our relationships. There are the untold realms of our imagination. And who knows what worlds of experience there may be that we can't begin to imagine. There is of course a dark side to life, disasters natural and human, storms, famine, draught, volcanoes, death from disease or predators, wars, butchery, tortures, boredom, meaninglessness, injustice, the brute struggle for bare existence, drudgery, cruelty, helplessness, ignorance, hopelessness. And the unknown horrors that haunt our dreams, terrors that we imagine for ourselves at the hands of demons and monsters and vengeful gods. We find ourselves in a mysterious world, thrown into a situation that we did not create, like prisoners in an endless labyrinth that we cannot escape, beings unto death. Yet we mostly do not seem very concerned. We know very well how to overlook the inexplicable. Why waste too much spleen on things we cannot control when there are all of the robust and delicate pleasures of life? And we can improve our situation. We can get better. Despite everything only very few would give up their life. It is so precious that we even love our misery because it tells us that we are still alive. There does not seem to be one purpose for life. Each person needs to decide the purpose or purposes their life will have. When we ask what the purpose of a particular project is, we are asking for its goals. What are the end results of the project that we hope to see? Similarly for a particular organization or social role, the issue is the mission or goals. For example, a school may have particular goals such as helping students to learn certain texts and practices, securing funding, developing teachers and staff, and maintaining facilities. You can examine the results and see how well the school is doing. There is an increasing emphasis in many areas on quantitative goals like the performance of students on standardized tests, the number of students graduating, and the number of students going on to good schools at the next level. In businesses, you have such things as revenue, market share, profit, and market capitalization. At the individual level, a poet, for example, may have the goals of getting their poems published in particular magazines, the periodic release of books, and maybe literary awards. These are fairly definite. But they may also have more intangible goals, things they want to express, personal competitions with other poets, breaking new ground, many things. But how can the concept of purpose be applied to a whole life, or to life in general? Some people have a list of things that they want to do before they die, for example, finish college, raise a family, make a million, visit Tasmania, and write a best selling novel. Others may emphasize more general goals. They want to be healthy, make a decent living, preserve their personal sense of integrity, and enjoy life with their family and friends. Some people try to come up with more general reasons for living. They may emphasis moral goals such as acquiring virtues, being a "good person", or helping others. They may have more mystical goals such as to know and love God or to attain enlightenment. Or they may have social goals such as working for peace and justice or contributing in their own way to the advancement of a global civilization. But when we talk about the purpose or the meaning of life, we usually mean something more than this. When we start a project, it usually has a goal that defines it. Is our life a project? Do we have a particular goal in this life? Do we have a mission to perform? Who defines the goal? We want something more than just a set of personally chosen goals. We want something more "official". Some people believe that we choose, before we come to this world, in consultation with our spirit guides, what we want to do in this life. Then when we are born we forget it all. We have to find it again. But how? There is a similar problem if our mission comes from God. If we have a definite mission or purpose, then why isn't it communicated to us in a definite and personal way? Is the searching and guessing a part of the whole strange system? So it becomes harder and harder to talk about one purpose or meaning for life. Even if we each have a different purpose, it is hard to know for sure what it might be. There are many goals that it seems it would be worthwhile to pursue. We can try to pursue these goals within the context of general moral principles, and if we are members of a religion, we can see what goals our religion sets for us. We can think about the things that we would really like to do with our precious allotted time. But there seems very little to go on if we want a universal and definite purpose of life. Life goes by very quickly and it is easy to just drift. Society and seemingly random events lead us here and there, and we can feel aimless and without direction, or we can just go with the flow, and not be too concerned about it. If nothing really bad happens, why worry? Still it may be good while you have time to examine your life. When you get to the end of your life, will you able to look back without regrets? Will there be things you wish you hadn't done, and things that you wish you had at least tried to do? What is important to you? How are you spending your life? Some things are forced on us by necessity and circumstance. Some of us are willing to take more risks or put in more effort than others. But we are still left with many degrees of freedom. There are many choices. Are you making the choices that really matter to you? This may seem like just a string of cliches, but some things are repeated often for a reason. To the extent that we emphasize the preciousness of life and are grateful for the gift of life, it is sacred. Life becomes its own purpose. Sacred things are those things that are set aside for special respect because of their central importance to us. But what is more important than life itself? We usually take it for granted, but at transitions, births, deaths, marriages, coming of age ceremonies, we sometimes stop to think of time and how little of it we really have. Sometimes it comes to us in mystical moments. Stopped in a car at a corner, we might notice a certain slant of light in the clouds or just the movement of a weed in the wind. And we may wonder at the mystery of our bare existence in this moment, that we are alive here, now. Our most basic desire is to live. Everything else depends on it. We are especially saddened by a senseless loss of life. We may not know why we are here, but we are glad for what time we have. At times it seems that we treat life as nothing. Murder and war are treated as facts of life. But, no. We cannot let it stand. We have to hold the line against the most basic crime. It is not just a fact of life. We must not just accept the killing. But when it is far away, happening to people different than us, we let it go. Life goes on. What can we do? We cannot allow our life to be consumed with remorse for things we cannot control. In a sense this seems right. We cannot allow death to diminish the life that is left. Yet for all we know this could be the only planet with life. And despite whatever hopeful signs there may be, this is the only life we know we will have. All that cosmic significance must be respected. To do otherwise would be an insult to our very existence. If life then is so precious, we need to examine it, enjoy it, treasure it, make the best use of it we can. A life well lived can be the ultimate act of worship and in a sense the ultimate act of rebellion against the seeming randomness and meaninglessness of life. The antidote to feelings of meaninglessness is not to give up, it is to summon our will and to project out into the void our meanings. One of the things we admire most is when someone who seems beaten down by circumstances can retain their dignity and courage and show that they still have that spark of life. They still have humor and creativity and can show acts of kindness to others. To rebel against inhumanity and drudgery and hardship by refusing to let our humanity be taken away is the ultimate affirmation of life. And it is even more important when we are comfortable and well fed to pay attention so that life does not just leave us behind. Life is fleeting, but we can give it great significance by how we live it. This is not to say that we need to be deadly serious and make our life some kind of pressure cooker where we must succeed. We may not meet all our goals. Many things are beyond our control. We can't let ourselves be consumed by them. And there is value in letting go and relaxing and letting the moments flow all around us balmy and full of calm silence. We need to respect the reality of this unstoppable flow as well. It is a matter of balance, work and play, planning and spontaneity, defiance against the void and laughing into the void. We do not want to be so driven that we fail to recognize the things that life gives us for free, if we are just aware. The point is to be present and aware of what we are doing, and to be human and free, grateful and full of joy and satisfaction, adaptable and yet stubborn against the pull into hopelessness. We may be surprised at the end and find that there is much more of life for us, but if not, we can appreciate what we have had and offer upon the alter of our experience all those moments and efforts and all of the love and struggle, making our life an anthem of praise for life itself. This may sound hokey and cynicism and irony definitely have their place. We don't want to turn our life into syrup either. But we can choose to make our lives broad and full despite the limitations. I can dwell on my situation and my prospects, my faults and my insignificance, stew in my own juices for a few more decades and then go down bitter and hollow and disappointed, but I don't have to. Whichever way it goes, I can cry at the sorrows and laugh at the jokes. I can determine what I really like to do and what I really want to be. I can send my letters out to blow around and tumble across deserts and city streets. I can do what I can, and mourn the rest, but still keep my balance and my joy. Really examine what you want and why you want it. Look at the consequences of your acts of consumption and see if you could make choices that have less negative consequences. Then choose what is really important to you and base your life and your enjoyment of life around those choices. After a long week of speed and stress, pressed forward by the desire for money and advancement, we roam the malls looking for our reward. And do we really want what we buy? There seems no way out. To make the money we want we have to adapt to the pace of a global economy and "internet time". If you snooze, you loose. If you take lunch, you are lunch. We want to avoid being a looser, being left behind, at all costs. Some people really like the rush of the game, but many of us at least now and then stop and wonder why we are doing all of this. Isn't there a better way? It's not that we want to go back to the Middle Ages. We like running water, sanitation, electricity, and central heat. We like books and movies and a variety of foods. We don't want back breaking labor and an early old age. But isn't there some middle ground? Can't we just slow down a little? And what is all of this mad rush to consumption doing to the planet? Where does all the waste go? How many resources are we using for our high consumption life style? And what about other places in the world? What is the real cost of our consumption? What are we giving up to have enough money for all of this stuff? And who are we hurting? Fortunately, there are things we can do. It is a free market. No one is forcing us to buy, buy, buy. There are basic decisions we can make. For example, buy a smaller, cheaper car and drive it longer, or buy a smaller house and pay it off early. Buy simple functional cloths. Keep your computer longer and buy one that does what you really want it to, not always the biggest and the fastest. And stay away from the mall. Find other recreations than shopping. Make your own food. Forgo cable. In other words, make choices. Don't let others tell you want you want. Decide for yourself. If you did all of this, could you work less? Could you work one job instead of two? Maybe one spouse could stay home? And in high skilled jobs, it is increasingly possible to work part time. If you are making good money, you could go to four days a week and still live quite well on four fifths the salary, and in most cases still keep your benefits. Or you could become a consultant or contractor and have more control of your time. Because what all this consumption really translates to is your precious time. Do you really want to be a slave to a mortgage for a mini-mansion you hardly ever see until you fall exhausted into bed? There are other choices. You could move to a part of the country where living expenses are less. You could take a job that pays less but that is less stressful and doesn't consume your life. And think. Do you really want that promotion? Will it really be worth the trouble? If you can, choose assignments that you really like, even if they are not the best for a promotion. Why be promoted to your level of incompetence? Stay doing the things you really like doing. Or switch professions altogether. Go back to school. Transition to something else. Live your life! This is not to say that all of this will necessarily be easy. Not all expenses are optional. And you do want your children to have access to good schools and to have every opportunity. But for what? To find what they really love to do, to learn skills that will allow them to choose their jobs, to enrich their lives. What is more important than buying? Life time learning, being in nature, getting some exercise, sports, spending time with friends and family, writing, art, crafts, music, volunteer work, religious activities, many things. Not all of this is free, of course, but the main resource is your time. This is all at the individual level. There is quite a lot we can do, but society limits us in many ways. For example, if there are no nice, mixed use neighborhoods where you can walk to the places you want to go, you will need to get in your car and fight the traffic. If there is no convenient public transit that goes between your house and your work, you will have to commute by car. You can make consumer choices that will hopefully influence companies and your can try to influence the government. You can support non-profits that work for improvements. And slowly things may get better. But all of this comes down to your choices and where you put your efforts and you will be the main beneficiary. Consider the well know injunction, "Live simply so that others may simply live." This implies that there is a moral component to simple living. Can your consumer choices affect people half way around the world? Won't reducing consumption ruin the economy? If you don't buy the tennis shoes made in poor countries, won't that make them even poorer? It does seem unfair that rich countries consume so many more resources than poor countries. If we shift our buying habits and the ways we spend our time to less wasteful activities, we will pollute the air less, fewer trees will need to be cut down, the water will be less polluted. The fossil fuels will last longer. These all seem like good benefits, but how will this allow others to simply live? This assumes that somehow the resource that we do not use will be made available to the hungry masses. How does this transfer take place? One possibility is that if we reduce our consumption, more of the land in poor countries currently being used to support production for the global market can be shifted to local food production. But this will not happen automatically. Local elites will still control the land unless there is land reform. And a sudden reduction of money coming in from foreign trade would probably hurt the poor people the most. So it seems like a reduction of consumption would need to be joined with a reallocation of more of our society's resources to helping the poor here and in other countries. And more attention and research would be needed to understand how reducing consumption can be channeled in a way that will really help the poor. While we can get some benefits from a simpler life, and there can be improvements to the environment and to the conservation of scarce resources, for this to translate to helping the poor, something more direct will be needed. Pick difficult and stimulating goals, where there is a significant risk of failure, and then aggressively pursue them. Vary your stimuli by traveling or living in a complex and changing environment. And really embrace the change rather than fear it. Some people say that they could not stand to be immortal because of the boredom. You would have seen everything before. The people you love would always be dying around you. After a few hundred years you might start withdrawing to avoid new pain. Then life would become just an endless sequence of days. The technology would gradually change, but people would be largely the same. There would be no surprises, no adventure. For some people it doesn't require being immortal to get into a similar situation. Nothing interests them. They roam aimlessly from distraction to distraction. They live for the weekend, and spend that trying to avoid life. Why do we get bored? Surely there is a lot to be interested in. There is always a lot going on in the world. There may be, but we can get cut off from it. Our jobs and responsibilities can take up all of our time. We don't develop outside interests, or we may have many things we would like to do, but we can never get to them. Our life seems to conspire against us. Or we may like what we are doing, but it is not in balance. We may love our work or taking classes, but not too much at any one time. We like some heavy thinking from time to time. But we need to mix it with down time and lighthearted play. Maybe we are limiting our interests too much. We may be carrying over unexamined assumptions from childhood. Science is boring. Learning is boring. Reading is boring. Gardening is boring. Crafts are boring. Travel is boring. Work is boring. Museums are boring. Or from the other direction. Acting is scary. Going out on your own is scary. Meeting new people is scary. Moving to a new place is scary. Failure is scary. It is not always easy, but it may be time to re-examine some of these assumptions. If we can get out from between these two brick walls of boring and scary, we may really open up our options. Maybe we will even find some adventures. Adventure involves some conflict of desires, a contest, some risk. It may be a conflict between people, between goals and obstacles, between human will and nature. There is a significant risk of failure. New things that we have not handled before could come up. We may look stupid. People may think we are crazy. We may spend untold hours working for something that we will never get. We may roam for years and never quite get where we were going. Adventure will vary from person to person. To one person exploring all the details of some subject, tracking down obscure sources, traveling to distant locations for fieldwork can be an adventure. For others it may take being a freedom fighter or extreme sports or getting the story in a war zone. To still others it may be starting a business or moving into a poor area to be a teacher or seeking for spiritual enlightenment or the ultimate absurd gesture, becoming a poet. Since there are dull times in any adventure and times we want to give up, it may not be all excitement. We may fall down and have to start again many times. But in the end, if we stick to it, maybe we can say that we have really lived. But is it necessary to make big changes and to go long distances for adventure? Doing anything well, with great interest and passion, can be an adventure. Raising children can be an adventure. Mastering a skill and advancing through the ranks of experts can be an adventure. Maintaining extensive contacts with many people, having varied interests, figuring out how to keep your sanity in crazy times, really inhabiting a place, following the cycles of nature, trying to learn to live simply in a materialist culture, all these can be adventures. A common pattern is that our youth is an adventure and when we settle into the routine of adulthood, all the excitement fades away. Why is youth more exciting? There are many things, many risks, many new experiences. There is the whole drama of love and romance and our first sexual experiences. There is figuring out what kind of job we want to do, getting the training, finding the job, just starting out. There is leaving home for the first time, going to college, a community of people our own age. Maybe there is the drama of rebellion or social activism, of thinking we can change the world. But it doesn't have to just fade into disillusionment, hopes beaten down, ideals abandoned just to make a buck. Each time of life has its potential adventures. We can find them if we are open to them. Life itself, the whole diverse and grand sweep of it, can be a fascinating and exhilarating ride. Assuming that you are not born with it and that you want to avoid criminal activity, getting rich requires a combination of understanding what people want and giving it to them along with wise investing. You need to maximize the value of the product or service times the number of people you can provide it to. You may need to convince people that they really want it. Then wisely invest what you make. If you are lucky enough and smart enough, you will get rich, but it is usually not quick. What is material wealth? It is owning relatively more material resources than most other people in your society. What is ownership? It is having control over resources such that you can use them for your own purposes. It is recognized by society if the transfer of those resources to your control has followed certain rules. For example, if you stole them, then society reserves the right to return them to their original owner. If there is a critical social need, then society can directly transfer a certain portion of your wealth to the government, for example, in the form of taxes or confiscation of land. Wealth takes several forms, the ownership of land, the ownership of physical objects, the ownership of the right to use ideas or texts, the ownership of a company or shares of a company, and the ownership of cash either physically or in financial accounts. In the last case, the ownership amounts to the right to withdraw the cash as physical currency or to transfer it to another account. You may make such a transfer as a gift or in return for the transfer of ownership of something else, such as a house or a car or food, to you or in exchange for services. Ownership of a company amounts to the right to the profits that the company makes and a responsibility for the debts. One nice variation of this is limited liability ownership, where you own shares and can loose your shares, but you are not held responsible for the debts. This happens through the creation of a fictional legal entity called a corporation. A nice trick. To increase your wealth you need to increase the difference between the ownership being transferred to you and the ownership that you are transferring to others. How can you do that? There are only a few basic ways. You can buy something low and sell it high. You can make something and sell it for more than your expenses in making it. You can get paid for a service you perform. You can invest. That is, you can give money in return for an agreement to be given some of the profits that are realized through the use of that money. There may be no profits in which case you loose your investment. Ideally, the profits are enough to pay back your money plus a healthy return on your investment. To become rich you must first see what you have to start from. You may be starting with some money, an inheritance, a gift, or winnings from a contest or a lottery. You hopefully have some skills. The government will likely have given you a basic education. Your parents may have been able to augment that. You will have some natural talents to draw on, and some character qualities such as determination, passion, efficiency, or the ability to influence people or put them at ease. Your physical appearance can be an asset or liability. Being physically attractive can be useful, but in some cases it can be harmful. If you are attractive people may be willing to help you more. On the other hand, they may not take you as seriously, or they may actively try to exploit you. Family contacts also can be very helpful. Or you may already have an in if you want to go into the family business. But let's assume a more even playing field. You have some natural talents, and you have the opportunity to develop them to at least some degree. You have access to education based on your ability. You may need to go into some debt for it, but it is open to you. And you are operating in a fairly free market economy where family connections and prejudice are not major factors. This may be a little rosy, but in fact many people are in this fairly favorable position. The key to wealth is to have something that people are willing to pay for. The most basic thing you have to offer is your own services. You can do something in exchange for money. The more valuable the skills you have, the better pay you can get. So the first route you should consider is through education. You excel at some subject in school. You go into engineering, business administration, accounting, finance, medicine, or the law. You graduate and get a good job. From a young age you are careful with money and you invest. Your investments do well. You advance in your profession. You move up into management and eventually are a high level executive or your services are highly in demand. A variation on this is that at some point, you decide that you are not getting where you want where you are and you decide to go out on your own. You find some investors and you form your own company. You have good ideas and your products or services do well in the market place. The company goes public and your stock options become very valuable. Another variation is that your services are very valuable. You are a very skillful medical specialist or a successful lawyer or a high priced consultant. The combination of your fees and your wise investments make you rich. Suppose you did not necessarily get the high level education or the high paying job, but you do have a good head for business. You come up with a good solid idea for a product or service and are able to get a business going. Through the years you build up the business. You expand and it continues to do well. After many years of hard work, your business has made you rich. A variation of this is sales. You are an exceedingly successful salesman in real estate or insurance or even cars. You make good investments. At some point you go out on your own with your own agency or dealership. It does well. All of these have some common features. You develop a skill or you have a good idea, and you find people who will pay for it. You make good investments. There is an element of luck. Many people don't make it up through the corporate ladder or their business fails or their medical practice falters. The point is to put yourself in a position where you can be lucky. There is luck, but there is much less of a chance if you do not put in the hard work to get yourself in the right position for it to happen. Another scenario is that you have some special talent as a performer. Through great effort and competition you become successful as a musician, singer, actor, or talk show host. You are able to develop this talent so that others are willing to give you a chance because of the money they can make by managing you or financing your concerts, recordings, films, or shows. This is higher risk than the previous scenarios because at least with the others you do have a way of making a decent living even if you do not become rich. An engineer can still go back to working as an engineer if their big idea does not work out. If your music career does not take off, it is a very good idea to have a day job lined up. Here again, if you do not take the risk and put out the effort, you will never get the lucky break. But this can be like playing the lottery. Someone is going to win. Why not me? And you are putting in a lot more effort than buying a lottery ticket, and your chances may be just as bad. How many people have real talent? How many are able to develop it? And how many are successful with it? But if you love what you are doing and you really have the desire and are willing to work for it, why not try? It can be a great adventure, if you can keep your perspective. Another variation on this is if you have rare athletic ability. First you need to really love the sport in its own right. You should have another career in mind for when you get older or in case you do not become a sports star. But this is another path to wealth. You get your money from winning events or from being on a team, but a big part can also be from lending your image to advertisers through endorsements and then again through wise investments. It is also possible to become rich through writing, but it is very rare and unlikely given the number of people trying their hand at it. And it can be very unreliable, so it is a good idea to be careful with investments and to maintain a path back to a day job. Or you may be lucky enough to at least make a decent living as a writer. That is probably least likely to happen with literary fiction or poetry, so many literary writers have been teachers or editors. Some have even been doctors, lawyers, engineers, or insurance executives. In the rare event you do have a bestseller, the same need to wisely invest is still there. So the general theme is to find a product or service that you will be able to sell to enough people at a good enough price, and really work at developing and improving your product or service. This will be the basis of your wealth. Then be careful with your money and make good investments. Get trustworthy financial planning help if you need it. But do not rely on getting rich. Do what you really love to do. If you can make a decent living at it, great. If not, you will need a day job. Put yourself in the position to be lucky, but if you are not, you will have still enjoyed what you are doing and will have something to fall back on. Understand what people need that they are not getting. Look at your skills and your potential. Find organizations that provide the service you want to provide or find ways to finance the service. Get training in the area you choose. Then work hard for this goal. Here the term service is used in the more narrow sense of trying to help those in need rather than just any action you perform for money. Still, any useful work that benefits others can be a service. Providing software to manage the telephone network can be a service. Providing convenient places to buy good quality products can be a service. Being a doctor or even a lawyer can be of great service. Being of service and becoming rich do not necessarily have to be mutually exclusive, but the orientation is different. If you want to be rich, you will need to at least find something that people want or need. But you may be more concerned with how much you can get for it than with its benefits. And you may even try to stimulate artificial wants that are fulfilled at the expense of basic needs. Why would someone want to serve others? They may hate to see injustice. They may have seen things in their life that make them want to fight against the exploiters and the oppressors. They may want their life to mean something more than just money grubbing. Or they may be driven from natural feelings of sympathy and kindness. They don't like to see people suffer and they cannot turn a blind eye to it. They want to dedicate their time to helping reduce the suffering. Some of the helping professions can still pay well, like being a nurse or a doctor, but service minded nurses and doctors may orient their practices more to people who do not have ready access to medical care. So they may not make much money at it. The same could apply to lawyers who work for people who will never make them rich. In other cases, such as social work and drug counseling becoming rich will hardly ever be part of the equation. What are some obvious areas of need? The first things that come to mind are the need for food, clothing, and housing. These are basic needs. Hunger and homelessness should not exist in wealthy countries, but it does and there is a constant need to try to help those who for one reason or the other cannot make it on their own. Another area is the need for equal and just treatment independent of race, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, and other differences that are not just a matter of individual choice. Despite the democratic guarantees, these issues seem to need constant watching. There is the problem of basic civil rights being abused, such as unjust trials, torture, and political oppression all around the world. There is the lack of education and medical treatment for poor in many places. There is the exploitation of poor countries by rich countries. There is corruption and bribery. There is damage to the environment. There are wars and ethnic and religious strife. There are many areas of need and there are organizations that are trying to help fill the gaps. There are social service agencies of local and national governments and the United Nations. There are NGOs. There are private and religious social and economic development organizations and projects. So the first thing a person can look into is what skills these organizations need and go and get the needed training and go to work. In some cases there will be places and needs that are not being covered. It is a much more difficult task, but people with experience and training can try to raise funds and start new organizations. Those who cannot make a career of it can volunteer in local organizations or contribute money. Or they can be sensitive to the needs of those around them and do what they can, like visiting those in hospitals and nursing homes, or helping out a family in need. It takes great patience to keep up the service. Society does not seem to respect people who do this, dismissing them as do-gooders or suspecting them of being political revolutionaries. Even when society gives lip service the resources in the hands of a social worker or a teacher in a poor school seem to be always inadequate and nothing in comparison to those available to an engineer or a business consultant, for example. And there are the conflicts with those they are trying to help. They may not want their help or not the kind of help they are trying to give them. They may be trying to help their clients adapt to a global system that they wish would just go away. And there are people who think they deserve a handout, are not grateful for what they get, and do not seem to make any effort to take advantage of whatever opportunities there may be. Compassion fatigue can set in with the workers in the field and donor fatigue can set in with those who contribute money. The problems can seem insurmountable and improvements hopeless. Still despite all of this there are people who keep going at it. They try to understand the problems better and propose solutions, and they try to help the rest of us understand. They are preserving a legacy, keeping hope alive, holding back the chaos, and are living proof of probably a thousand other cliches. They deserve our respect and more help in getting their jobs done. Find out what really interests you and what you have a talent for by experimenting with different creative activities. If possible, get some training in that area. But most importantly, practice and practice and develop your skill. Then find ways to support yourself while you dedicate more and more time to it. If you can sell what you are creating, market it as best you can or find someone else to market it for you. Otherwise, make it your hobby and avocation. It is said that true artists are compelled. They have to keep going, to keep creating. It would seem that the desire must be strong because the market will only support so many artists. A vast majority of artists will need to support their own art habit, with little encouragement. At times it will seem like an absurdity flung into the void. But in spite of everything they will feel the need to keep creating, to keep producing meaning, form, and pattern. Maybe they will be recognized when they are old or when they are dead. They don't know. To some this is a constant ache. Others learn to leave it to the future and they are happy if they can just be given the time for their art. As with athletes, artists get arranged into tiers and hierarchies. There are those who are honored and recognized, may even become rich. Then there are those who are at least selected to be presented to the public, in galleries or in print. Then there are the larger number of artists who receive little or no recognition and yet still keep going. To be an artist (painter, sculptor, composer, novelist, poet, or one of many other types) you need to pick your discipline or disciplines. Where is your talent and what do you love? And why are you doing it? You may never be recognized as an artist. People may mock you and think you are silly and presumptuous. What drives you? Why do you want to create? Who is your audience? Let's take the example of poetry. Many poems are short. Many people can sit down and write a poem in their spare time. They may start writing poetry to work through some personal issues or as a way to get some attention from teachers or as a romantic tool. They may just want to share special feelings they have for someone they love on a special occasion. They may just want to have a song to share. They are occasional poets and their audience is their family and friends and lovers or maybe just themselves. Beyond this there are poets who want to go public. But who is the public for poetry? The biggest public is that for popular music. The lyrics to songs are poems and poetry started as song. But that is almost an entirely different discipline of songwriting or rap. Some poetry gets close to this in the form of performance poetry and poetry slams. Here the poetry is almost like a script for a performance. And the performance is the central issue, not the written text, although even here the "script" can live on as a written text. Narrowing the focus, then, who is the public for poetry as a written text? It is part of the reading public, but the most popular forms there are novels and nonfiction. Poetry has a rather small percentage of that audience. There is still a diehard group of poetry readers out there, but many of them like to read the romantic or modern poets. The audience for new poetry is even smaller. There is then a small group of diehard fans for new poetry, but increasingly the audience is largely made up of other poets and poetry editors, critics, and teachers. Some poets may get a larger audience because of something else they have written or because of the subculture they represent or because they are writing for children, but the poetry audience still remains fairly small. Similar considerations apply to other arts, but in different ways. For example, painters who are not just filling orders for interior decorators will also tend to have a small audience of collectors and museum goers. And composers of music that is not intended for a popular audience will find that their music is, well, not that popular, except for a small group of concert goers. But back to poetry, despite the small audience, there is still a thriving poetry scene. Part of it is tied to venues for readings and a larger part is tied to universities and to poetry workshops or small ad hoc reading groups. Beyond this it is like a religion with few members, many isolated believers tied together by small magazines and an occasional conference. Poetry is largely a solitary activity. The amount of time that must go into perfecting your craft, the number of drafts thrown away, the stolen moments when you are not left drained by your day job, the discouragement and feelings of futility and of wasting your time all seem to work against you. But if you stick to it and keep writing and keep writing, you may create a few poems of enduring beauty and you may end up with a body of work that you are at least satisfied with. The end result of all of this work and struggle will likely be, if you are very lucky, a few inclusions in standard anthologies and a collected poems collection of a few hundred pages. And that is if you did not become so discouraged that they went decades at a time producing nothing. Similar struggles and discouragement go with many art forms. But if, despite all this, you are still driven to create, you may just be an artist. Find a way to support yourself and your family. Find a way to dedicate time to your art. Find ways to learn from others, read, go to shows, talk, find mentors. But most of all, keep at it year after year, keep improving, keep your best work, throw away drafts or experiments that did not work out. Don't be afraid to start again in a new direction. You may eventually get where you want to go. At least, try to enjoy the journey. Here are some common life patterns: Disappointed Hopes, Floating, Ups and Downs, Rising Expectations, Sudden Reversal, Wind Fall, Adventures and Interludes, Long Decline, Recovery, Conversion, Rehearsals and Performances, Long Struggle Rewarded, Doing Fine, Everything Comes Easy. A life pattern is a sequence of configurations of language, experience, and desire. One life pattern can follow another as when Sudden Reversal is followed by Long Decline. Or they can run in parallel as when Disappointed Hopes and Doing Fine occur together in different parts of the same life. What defines a life pattern is the configuration of language, experience, and desire and how it changes over time. For example, desire can be in conflict with experience and then be reconciled and then be in conflict again in an oscillating pattern. A life can be viewed as a combination of these patterns. For example, a life could be Rising Expectations followed by Sudden Reversal followed by Long Decline. This could be in one area of life, for example, literary ambitions, in parallel with a life long Doing Find pattern in finances and family life. Looking at each pattern in turn, Disappointed Hopes is experience continuing to be conflict with a central desire in a lingering fashion so that the person is always looking back in regret that they did not meet their goal. They had felt at one time that they had a good chance of fulfilling the desire, but their experience has disappointed them to such an extent that they have lost hope. They do not then just give up the desire. They continue to dwell on it. Floating is maintaining a state of only very mild desire in any particular direction. The person has no big goals. They have no particular expectations, hopes, or purpose. They do not expend much effort interpreting their experience. They just move without much comment from one experience to the next. Their life seems aimless and lacking in direction. Ups and Downs is an alternation between experience and desire being in conflict and being in harmony again. Sometimes the person is very happy. Sometimes they are very upset. There does not need to be an extreme range, but the characteristic attitude is not expecting their good or ill fortune to last long. Rising Expectations is a pattern is which desires are met leading to further expectations that even more ambitious desires will be met. As the expectations become higher and higher, the danger of a great disappointment becomes greater. Sudden Reversal is a sudden change from harmony of experience and desire to conflict. It is an unexpected change. The person has been satisfied up to this point with no expectation that they are about to run into trouble. They are blindsided and often traumatized by the sudden change. The lesson is that you can never be sure when your good fortune may change. It is best to not take it for granted. Wind Fall is a sudden change in the other direction. The person desired something but had no realistic expectation of achieving it. Then suddenly their fortunes change, and their desire is seemingly miraculously fulfilled. Adventures and Interludes is a pattern in which is a series of adventures are separated by times of rest and preparation. Adventures are conflicts and struggles toward some goal. These adventures have a beginning in which the person is introduced to the conflict, a middle in which the conflict is played out, and an end in which the conflict is resolved either by achieving the goal or not. These adventures are followed by interludes, periods of little or no conflict in which the person is prepared for the next adventure. An old example is going on a sea voyage and then returning to your homeport to rest up for the next voyage. Long Decline is a pattern in which some fundamental conflict between experience and desire starts out small and progressively gets worse. An example is a long illness or a decline into alcoholism or madness. Recovery is a reversal of a decline. It may take a long time or it may be sudden and seemingly miraculous. The recovery can be because of a change in external circumstances, but it is often related to a change in habitual self-talk or actions. Conversion is a sudden change in a person's approach to life. This is primarily a change in language. The person was using a certain collection texts to guide their life, and then they change to a different set. This can be related to an extreme or significant experience or can seem to come from nowhere. The person is suddenly a different person. Rehearsals and Performances is a pattern in which the primary theme is preparing for new roles and then performing those roles. It could be the pattern of an actor who literally goes from acting project to acting project. But it could also be for a person who takes on different identities one after another. Or it could be the pattern of a con man going from one scam to the next. Long Struggle Rewarded is a pattern in which a long sought goal is finally achieved. The person has been frustrated but they kept at it a long time and at last they are successful and achieve the recognition they had hoped for. An example is a writer or poet who labors unrecognized over many years and is finally recognized in their old age. Doing Fine is a pattern in which the person's desires are usually fulfilled. They do not have any great disappointments or great triumphs. Things just seem to keep going along on an even keel. Finally, Everything Comes Easy is a pattern in which the person seems to live a charmed life. Everything goes well for them. They are rich, good looking, successful in their career, happy in love, and live a full and happy life. They take it almost as their birthright and do not seem for a moment worry that it could be otherwise. An individual life can be just one life pattern from start to finish or a relatively simple sequence of patterns. But often there are several different patterns interrelated in complex ways, for example, Doing Fine in parallel with repeated Conversions followed by Disappointed Hopes all in parallel with a Long Decline in a different area. Then a Wind Fall followed by Everything Comes Easy. Ending with a Sudden Reversal followed by a Long Decline. The point of these life patterns is to provide a nomenclature and tool in looking at a life. The general view of life as a sequence of configurations of language, experience, and desire can be made more understandable and concrete by breaking the long sequence into patterns. A good life is a life in which you have done what you really wanted to do and you have done it ethically and well. If good is a word we use to compliment things that we desire, a good life is a life in which we have achieved our fundamental goals. We can leave life without great disappointments or regrets. Most people regret their ethical lapses and their failures, so a good life also implies doing what we wanted to do ethically and well. This is not a universal definition, but it covers what many people mean when they speak of a good life. Still, because there are so many variations on what people want from life, there will be many ideas of a good life. It is an interesting exercise to think about what you really want. Often we are so pulled by what society or other people want from us that we loose track of our own fundamental desires. It seems that if people can meet their desires in an ethical fashion, they should be free to make their life what they really want it to be. Here are some possible statements of life goals. I just want to live a simple life. I don't want to be swept away in the rush of materialism. All of that really doesn't matter to me. What matters is my family and friends, my community, and having time to really enjoy the simple things of life. I don't need every gadget that comes out. I don't want corporations and advertisers to tell me how to live. And I want to leave a small footprint. I don't want my life to take life from others or to make the lives of those that come after me poorer. I want to be rich in my inner life and in my relationships and interests. Some wealth is needed, but I do not want to sacrifice myself and others to the struggle for the almighty buck. I want excitement in my life. There are so many interesting things in this world. I want to experience them. I want a full life. I want adventures and new sights and new sounds. I want to meet new people and live in new places. I don't want to just sit around and wait to die. Life is there for me if I am just willing to take some risks and go out and get it. And if I fail, I will get up and try again. I will keep going ahead. Life is for the living. I want to be rich. It is not just that I want things, or that I want my bank accounts to have a balance above some magic number. I want to create wealth, to rub shoulders with people whose actions really matter. When I spend money it helps people. When I start a new business I am giving people jobs. And I want to enjoy the finer things of life. I want to live in a fine, comfortable house. I want the best. I don't want to waste my time with routine and uninteresting tasks. What is money for? I can pay people to take care of those things for me. There is the fun of the game, but I am not interested just in the money. It is what the money can buy and the security it can bring. I won't have to worry about all these mundane things just to live. I won't have to be a slave for a paycheck. I will have my independence. I want my life to be a service. I want my life to really matter to people. I want to know that because of me people's lives have been better. I can't solve all of the world's problems, but I can make the world a little bit of a better place. Sure I need to make a living and to help support my family. I have responsibilities. But I don't want to waste my life chasing after things that don't really matter. What will last? Money will just circulate around to its next temporary holders. Fame is a mirage. But if I can change people's lives for the better, that lasts through generations to come. And I don't need people's praise. I will know what I have done, and what my struggle has been. I want to create something. I want to have some texts or artifacts to leave behind that tell that I was here. I have seen such things and thought such thoughts. I have been a center of mindfulness. My life is flowing by so fast. It seems so fleeting. I want to leave a record. There is also the pure pleasure of bringing something into existence that never existed before, never in exactly this form. It may mean nothing in the grander scheme of things, but I hope there will be someone who gets pleasure from it, that it gives someone a new insight, or gives them a deeper appreciation for some aspect of life. I want to find my spiritual center. This world is a passing shadow. Soon it will be over. This is my opportunity to get to something that will really last. It is not easy. It will take a search and a struggle. I won't always know what is going on, and why things happen. But I can improve. I can find my center. I can be of service. I can make my life an act of worship. I want to know and I want to create new knowledge. I have so many questions, and there are so many new things to learn. This world is endlessly fascinating. How could anyone ever be bored? I will pass on what I learn to others. I will discover things that will improve life on this earth. I will find new ways to express the deepest ideas. I don't want to be an ignorant speck swept along by inexplicable forces. There must be some rhyme and reason to it. If there is, I will find out as much as I can about it. I just want to live my life in peace. I want to do what I can. I want to have my little pleasures and enjoyments. I like to learn. I like to create. I want to be reasonably comfortable, but I don't really need that much. I want to do my job reasonably well. I want to help people when I can. I don't mean anyone any harm, but I am no saint either. I don't need all these grand schemes. Life does not have to be so complicated. Let's just live and let live. Maybe when it is all over, we will understand what it was all about better. Maybe not. Life, yes life, what is it all about anyway? If we suspend all of the self-talk and theories for just a moment and try to be as honest as possible with ourselves, it seems that we just don't know. Even if we have read about or met someone who says they know, we can't really judge their claim because we ourselves don't know. Take anything we do not know, and someone who claims to know it. How can we determine if "That person does know this thing unknown by me" is true or not? This is a relation between a person and something they claim to know. We know the person and what they are saying. We don't know the unknown thing. Therefore, we do not know the relation between them. That does not mean that we will not have some good reasons to take their claim as a working assumption. Maybe we believe them to be very trustworthy, or their claim is the best option we have and we need to make a choice. Life is not just one thing. There does not seem to be just one purpose, one pattern, one narrative interpretation, one way to live a good life. Once you get beyond the basic desires that most of us seem to have in common, individual differences and circumstances take over. There is no one grand scheme. You can abstract out very far and make a broad statement like life is a sequence of configurations of language, experience, and desire. This can be useful, but ultimately it just points to the amazing diversity of individual lives because each element is so variable. A particular person has their own languages, experiences, and desires, their own configurations, and their own unique sequence. There may be similarities, but there is not one thing that life is, or even a million. Of all of the people in the world, are there two people with identical lives? It doesn't seem possible because at the very least they inhabit different bodies. This diversity has led some people to a state of confusion and disappointment. Life seems absurd because there does not seem to be one way. But this can also be interpreted as an invitation. There are endless ways to create a meaningful life. They are endless paths to explore. They are endless things to learn and do. There is the whole subtle, rich interplay of elements. It is largely a matter of recognizing the opportunity and setting out to take advantage of it. The broad territories of ethics, science, religion, and culture, the experiences of nature, human created spaces, games, social interactions, love, and family life, there are endless opportunities. It is true, however, that many people are unjustly beaten down by life. They struggle for bare existence. They are constantly traumatized by tragedies and reversals. Some of this is beyond our control, but as a global society, we need to help where we can. But even in these dire circumstances, there are opportunities. There is still a feast, a dance, stories, songs, being with friends and family. There are still the inner stirrings and intimations. There are still moments of human dignity and victory over circumstances. To face all this and still to wrest some meaning from life is an example of true human heroism. For those of us with more choices, the issue often becomes that we do not recognize our choices. We are moving along a particular path and somehow think that it is foreordained. This can be fine if we are happy with the way things are going and if we examine our life and feel that we are making reasonable choices. Otherwise, it is really up to us to see what we can change. We may be thwarted. Disasters happen. There are many things beyond our control. But in the end it is we who must make of life what we can. The purpose of this section is not to prove that there is life after death. The evidence has too many problems for that. The purpose is to show that it is not unreasonable to hope for life after death. Life after death does not have to be an incoherent notion. And there are some experiences that suggest that death may be a transition rather than just an ending. Near death experiences and experiences of communicating with the dead seem to indicate survival. Brain chemistry and hallucinations seem to indicate that these experiences may not be valid evidence. So there may be hope for survival, or it may just be wishful thinking. You are in an auto accident or in surgery, and you die. At first you float over the scene and notice a few physical details that you could not know otherwise. Then there is a rush up into a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel you go into the light and encounter a being of light. You review your life. You may see other hints of a next world. Then you find out that it is not your time. You don't want to go back, but you have to. Then you find yourself back in your body. Medical science says you were dead. You are reluctant to talk about your experience, but eventually you do. You later find out that the physical details you had noticed are confirmed by independent observers. This is an example of a near death experience. Many people who have been declared clinically dead have experienced something like this with many of the same elements. What does it mean? To those who experience it, it seems very real. It has a different quality than a dream, hallucination or drug experience. Many of them loose their fear of death and are sure that they have experienced the next world. The most common counter explanation is that this is an elaborate hallucination. It may not be like other hallucinations because it is a unique circumstance. Some elements of the experience have been reported in other abnormal experiences with known physical causes, but not all of the elements and not with such a feeling of reality. Still the death of a brain may be different and cause a different experience. Our lived experience seems to be constructed by the brain from various physical inputs. We know that our body sometimes protects us in extreme situations from the full brunt of the experience. This could be the last effort of a dying brain to construct a reality to protect us from the ultimate harm. At death the sensory inputs are reduced and the brain fills in the details. The problem with this explanation is the similarity of the accounts. Would all the brains construct the same or similar elements? The reason we consider our physical experiences real is because of their vividness and because they are shared. Near death experiences have some of the same characteristics although they are very different than physical experiences. And what about the physical observations? Perhaps they were caused by unintentional influencing of the near death experiencers, but this doesn't seem likely in most cases. Still, some people will insist that there must be a physical explanation. Why? Because physical reality is the only reality. But how do we know that? There could be many worlds of experience of different kinds. At the very least, this seems to be an open issue if you can see beyond a dogmatic physicalism. Here is another experience. Your father is dead. You are very upset. That night you see your father in your room. Furthermore, he tells you where some important papers are. You feel much more at ease knowing that your father is OK and in the morning you find the papers where he said they would be. Did you experience your dead father? Suppose you are a medium. You see dead people. They communicate to you and you pass on messages to their loved ones. Are you really seeing dead people or are you a skillful hoaxer who can read what people want to hear? There are many experiences like this on the border between the physical world and what may be a world beyond. The experiences are hard to test. They are episodic and beyond our control. This does not mean that they are not real, just that we cannot be as sure of them as whether or not it is raining outside. And they may be some unique kind of hallucination. There are no guarantees that there is not one more way that we can be fooled. But they at least suggest that there may be something more than the narrow physical world that some of us imagine. Given that the universe is made up of patterns of energy and that a continuous curve can be infinitely divided, there could be room for many worlds here and now, right where we are. People used to think that heaven was up in the sky and hell was beneath the earth. The discoveries of science have made that fairly unlikely. But if there is a next world, then where is it? If our experiences of the dead are true, the next world must be in some sense right here. How would that be possible? One idea is that there are parallel universes and that sometimes they come in contact. But how would we move between universes? Another idea is that there is some kind of subtle matter or energy that we cannot normally experience but that we do in unusual circumstances. Consider the electromagnetic spectrum. It is possible to send complicated data over the same airwaves by multiplexing the data. One method is frequency division multiplexing. In this you divide a band of frequencies into smaller and smaller bands reserved for particular signals. Another method is time division multiplexing where you use the same frequency but different signals get different time slices. Our instruments are limited. There comes a point when we cannot divide up the frequency or the time any finer. But it would be theoretically possible to keep dividing up the energy frequencies finer and finer well beyond our ability to detect the differences. Suppose that the range of energy patterns around and through the earth can be divided up into extremely thin bands of energy, so thin that we cannot see them or detect them with our instruments. If we do detect them, they just seem like static or noise. But maybe this noise has a pattern and this pattern is the activities of energy beings in a different world. Sometimes the energy of some part of that world comes into phase with the kinds of energy that our sense organs or our brain or our instruments can process. Then we have experiences of another world. But these experiences are very unusual and beyond our control and therefore are very difficult to test. It is physically possible that there could be these very fine bands of energy, but the idea that other worlds coexist with ours in these bands is not a respectable scientific theory because it cannot be tested. Suppose when people saw ghosts we were able to record the energy of the ghosts. This would be physical evidence to go with the subjective experience. But you cannot predict very well when ghosts will appear and you cannot measure such subtle energies. So there is no good test. Therefore, this idea is just a speculation. Another idea is that the next world is not physical at all. It is like the dream world. It is a totally different kind of world. If that is so, then how do the two worlds interact? This is the consideration that has lead many thinkers to reject dualism, a world of mind and a world of matter. Since we are fairly sure about the world of matter, then the world of mind must be in some since produced by the physical, that is, the body. Therefore, when the body dies, the mind must also die. One way around this is to think of the mind as a special pattern of energy that could perhaps exist without the body. The mind and body then are both physical. They interact, but one is not necessarily dependent on the other. On the other hand, the rejection of dualism may be unfounded. There may even be more than two types of worlds. There may be many, leading to pluralism. Here again though there is the problem of how these worlds communicate. If they do, then there is something in common between them and in a sense they are similar kinds of worlds. This common element could be energy and the plurality is the different configurations of energy. So the subtle matter theory of the next world seems more coherent, if still very difficult to test. There are reports of people remembering their previous lives or of visiting the places where they lived in a previous life and knowing all about it. But as with survival itself, there are problems with the evidence. Your six year old daughter starts talking about where she used to live and about her husband and children. At first you think it must be just an active imagination. But then for some reason you decide to check into it and you find that the family she describes exists and that the mother died ten years ago. You arrange a visit and your daughter leads you to the house and can name all of the people there by name. You are a hypnotherapist. You practice hypnotic regression on your clients. At some point you decide to keep going further and further back until you follow them back to the world before birth and then back even further to previous lives. The clients are able to describe in great detail aspects of daily life in the past. There are many reports of experiences like these. How can they be explained? One possibility is outright hoaxing, but after close examination it seems that at least some of the reports are authentic. Perhaps there are subtle influences at play. For example, the little girl may have heard stories that influenced her. Are there more reports like hers in societies that believe in previous lives? When she visited the family, she may have been picking up on subtle cues and the observers of the episode may have been caught up in the moment and read more into her actions than was justified. In the case of the hypnotherapist, why did he begin this practice? Apparently he had some ideas about previous lives. Could these have influenced him to then influence the clients? Could he be influenced maybe in unconscious ways by potential book royalties to interpret anomalous experiences in his practice to fit a particular theory that will sell better? These doubts are commonly countered by the reports of investigations who claim initial skepticism but who were entirely convinced of the reliability of the reports after their investigations. How easily fooled were these investigators? They must have had some interest in the subject in order to even spend the time on these investigations? Are they exaggerating their initial skepticism and the thoroughness of their investigations in order to gain credibility? It is very difficult for the wary reader of books from the New Age section of the bookstore to be able to know the answers to these questions. It may seem unlikely that people would just make these things up, but it is hard to know. And even assuming complete integrity and objectivity on the parts of the authors, the experiences themselves are difficult to test from a variety of angles. Like the experiences suggesting life after death, they inhabit a border territory that the dogmatic materialist will quickly dismiss and the true believers will embrace as justifying their every wish. Caution is warranted but speculation can still be an interesting pastime. The border regions may be strange, but they may also be very real. Exploring them seems justified as long as the claims are not too extravagant and the limits of testability are readily admitted. Spirit is what underlies the sequence of configurations of language, experience, and desire that forms our lived experience. Perhaps it is a pattern of energy that inhabits the body for a time, but exists independently of it. One of the great mysteries of life is how the chemical reactions in the brain could cause the lived experience that we call consciousness. On the one hand you have the scientific study of the physiology of the brain, firing synapses, receptors, endorphins, structures of the brain, and much else. Brain surgeons have put electric probes to the brain and the patients have reported vivid memories. There is some relationship between this live experience and the brain, but what is it? One problem is that the only way the scientist knows what the person is experiencing is by reports. They can measure brain waves and study the structure and functioning of the brain, but they cannot see into the consciousness of another human being in any testable way. All they can do is do something and get a report. They can correlate their actions and the reports, but they cannot directly test the relationship between the brain and consciousness. So the theory that consciousness is caused by the brain cannot be tested directly. Now shifting focus to lived experience, what we have is our old sequence of configurations of language, experience, and desire. Let's use the term spirit in a neutral way to refer to what causes or underlies that. My spirit then could just be the activity of my brain. It could be like sound. Vibrations in the air transmit it but when the air stops moving the sound is gone. Another possible theory is that the brain and the spirit are independent entities that interact. So when the surgeon puts the probe to the brain something is communicated to the spirit and the spirit accesses a memory. When there is a brain injury, the spirit is overwhelmed and numbed and looses itself because of its deep absorption in the life of the body. Suppose that the spirit is a pattern of energy. Suppose that we are energy beings who from time to time inhabit a body. We operate the body like a machine using the brain as our contact point and set of controls. While we are plugged into the sense stream coming from the body's sense organs we are totally absorbed. If the brain is damaged while we are in such a state of absorption we may be tied in to such an extent that we go into a coma of the spirit as well as the body. But when the body dies the spirit is then separated again and is free to re-enter the world of energy beings and interact with them directly. There is no apparent way to test which of the two theories of the relationship between the brain and the spirit is correct. The spirit may just be a name for brain activity or it may be a separate entity that interacts with the brain. The same experimental results could come from either scenario. One argument against the idea of a separate spirit is that it cannot be observed directly. But science accepts many entities that are not observed directly, such as the elementary particles. Another argument is that it introduces an unnecessary concept and should be cut using Occam's Razor. But it provides a possible explanation for experiences that suggest survival, so it is a useful concept. So at this point the idea of a separate spirit is not incoherent, but neither can it be said to be well tested. On the other hand, the idea of the spirit as brain activity is also not well tested since we cannot directly observe consciousness and show its relationship to the brain. There have been some reports of communications with the dead, but it is difficult to sort through what the supposed receiver knows or can guess with what would truly indicate communication. The dead, if they have survived, are in their world and we are in ours. How could the two worlds communicate? Take as a working assumption the theory that the two worlds exist side by side but at different frequencies. This is the subtle matter theory discussed before. Normally a human in this world would not see or hear the dead. In a similar fashion the dead are absorbed in their own concerns. However, suppose that the dead although operating at a higher frequency can still move in our world. We just normally cannot see them. For the dead to be visible to our physical senses they would need to reduce their frequency at least in part into the visible spectrum. An example of this could be ghosts who presumably can be seen by people with no special abilities. Another possibility is that there could be people whose brains can be directly influenced by the dead so that a dead person can appear to be visible, side by side with the living. Energies come into our sense organs that are interpreted by the brain. Perhaps energies from the dead could directly influence the brains of some people. We call these people mediums. The problem with this situation is that if we see a ghost, it could be some kind of hallucination. This could also be the case with the experiences of mediums. People who consult mediums are often satisfied if they receive a communication from a dead loved one with information that the medium could not know otherwise. But it could be the case that mediums, if not outright hoaxers, are just particularly sensitive to their clients and are able to interpret subtle cues. A medium may be perfectly sincere and may in fact commonly have conversations in their mind with various people claiming to be dead. Are these voices truly from the dead though, or are they some aspect of the medium's mind? Even if the medium is not a conscious hoaxer the voices may be pretenders picking up on subtle cues from the clients. Some people go so far as to suggest that the mediums may be telepathic and they get their information directly from the thoughts of the clients. But if they are willing to accept telepathy, why not communications with the dead? Are they suggesting that some of us are telepathic but that still there is no afterlife? Telepathy then presumably would be explained as some capability of the brain, maybe the ability to pick brain waves from another brain. But this just may be to point out that communications with the dead are not the only possible explanation for successful mediums. To get around this, there would need to be something only the dead could know but that could be tested by the living. For example, if only the dead person knew where the account book for the Swiss account was located, and they communicated that and it was where they said, that would be interesting. Or suppose before dying, someone put parts of a message in different sealed envelopes and mailed them to different people around the world. They seal the envelopes in some way to guarantee that there will be no tampering. Then they communicate the message after they die to a medium. Various tests could be imagined. Despite all of this there do not appear to have been any clear tests that have demonstrated mediumship in an unambiguous well. Acceptance of mediums still operates at a personal level, and different mediums may well give different messages. For example, different mediums have given different views of the next world. Could it be because the dead people they were talking to had different views, or were they influenced by their own beliefs and agendas? Near Death Experience Research and Science Since near death experience research deals with reports of inner experiences and these experiences are not publicly accessible, it is not in the strict sense scientific. That is not to say that the research is not rigorous or that its explanations are not true, just that it is operating beyond the scope of normal science. Of the different areas of research that suggest life after death, the most promising seems to be near death experience research. This is because the experience is fairly common (although not universal) among those who were close to death and it involves all sorts of people, most of whom were not involved with this sort of thing before. These researchers have also been fairly careful in the ways that they interview experiencers and in how they handle their data. The experiences themselves have been fairly consistent across different categories of people and have resisted explanation in a purely physical fashion. They have also at times had elements that could be subjected to physical testing, such as what the doctors were saying and doing in a different room or what was happening on a different floor as they drifted toward the tunnel. There is the problem that there is now a cottage industry in near death experience books, so the profit motive needs to be considered. When people are in the position to make money from what they write, they may not always clearly explain evidence that is anomalous or present other explanations than those their audience wants to hear. These books have taken on more and more of a religious overtone instead of impartial research. Also, potential subjects are more likely now to be aware of the elements of the near death experience. This might influence their own experiences or reports. Near death experiences, also, by their very nature are not publicly accessible experiences. Theories about them cannot be tested easily. For example, you cannot get together a test group of people who have not heard about near death experiences, kill them, revive them, and then ask what they have experienced. Also, you do not want to prowl around hospitals making sure that good candidates are insulated from influences that would invalidate the test. This means that evidence will be episodic and opportunistic. So near death experiences are largely outside of the realm that science normally considers. This does not mean that the experiences are invalid or that the research is sloppy. It would be fair to say though that is not scientific in the strict sense of the term. If we do survive death, then we will each know very soon. If not, then none of us will be around to complain about it. Still it may be wise to take the possibility seriously in the conduct of this life. And it is OK to have hope. What we have are some reports of experiences that could be experiences of life after death and some speculative theories that, if true, would make it coherent to think of other worlds and spirits while still taking seriously the implications of scientific knowledge. We also have that science has not disproved life after death. Instead we have some other speculative theories that suggest that consciousness is merely the activity of the brain. The strong push for this is based on a materialist philosophy, not on science itself. Given such an equal support for different views it is often wise to just suspend judgement on the issue. It is OK to hope, but we would probably be stretching things to insist on one approach or the other. This is unfortunate for those who wish for some assurance about their destination after death. This wish for assurance can be so strong that we may be tempted to ignore all doubt and jump to a firm position. We want to survive, so we ignore all contrary possibilities. Or we do not want to be fooled by false hope, so we dismiss any evidence for survival as superstition or pseudo-science. We may decide to take one or the other position as a working assumption. I may not know for sure, but I take as my working assumption that this is my only life. If I wake up in the afterlife, I will be pleasantly surprised. Or I can take as my working assumption that we do survive, perhaps because of a revelation I have decided to accept or because the reported experiences seem compelling to me. I therefore prepare for the next world as best I can. If I am wrong, then I will just not wake up. Either way it does not diminish what I can do with this life, and the importance and preciousness of this life. As stated at the beginning, some people may be dissatisfied with the proposals in this text because they were looking for something more definite, something absolute and unchanging and universally valid. But are these goals really attainable? Some problems just can't be solved, or at least we can't see any way to solve them right now. The following sections give some questions you might want ask about the problems you set for yourself. Life is short. Don't spend it trying to solve the unsolvable. People tend to judge differently depending on where they are coming from, culturally or personally. Even you might judge differently at different times and places. Judgment seems to be relative. This also seems to apply to our perceptions. An object appears square far away and cylindrical close up. A runner seems very fast when we are standing still but very slow when we see them from a train. The earth seems flat when we are on the ground but spherical from space. When we were young leaves were clear and distinct, but now, without glasses, they seem like a blur of green, unless we are colorblind, then they are gray. If we cover one eye with a patch, we loose depth perception. We don't see infrared, but with different eyes, maybe we could. This relativity applies not only to cultures and sense perception and personal views, it also seems to apply to fundamental physical concepts like mass, space, and time. According to the Theory of Relativity, objects observed from different frames of reference moving at different speeds appear to change their fundamental properties. So as an object approaches the speed of light, its mass increases. And clocks at that speed move slower. Suppose that we recognize this relativity, not in any absolute sense, but just as an observation. When we are trying to make judgments, we find ourselves in this relative position. We judge from a perspective. We don't claim that all things are relative. How do we know what all things are? Now suppose we form a problem statement: I want to justify a statement, p, absolutely. But I am a limited human being, who apparently can only see things from a perspective, relative to my position. So this can't be done. The problem statement is inconsistent from the beginning. It states that a relative human being must be able to make an absolute judgment. It requires a being that can see all perspectives to make an absolute judgment. Such a being may exist, but it is not me. Is it you? Consider the counting numbers. In mathematics, the counting numbers are defined in terms of an initial number and then a successor function, say s(x). So if we start with 1, we can define 2 as s(1) and 3 as s(2) or s(s(1)). We can continue this forever. This successor function can be applied to itself over and over again, forever. So the initial number and the successor function lead to an infinite regress, a series that will never end. It is built into the definitions. Now instead of numbers, let's take statements, and instead of a successor function, let's introduce a justification function, "because of", or b(x). Suppose we want an absolute justification for a statement, p. We apply the function, b(p), but that also needs justification, b(b(p)). It is the same pattern. It is built into the definitions. Just like the child who keeps asking why, at some point we just have to stop. As long as we insist on absolute justification, we are defining a problem that cannot be solved. Some problems are theoretically possible but they are practically unsolvable because of the limitations of time and space. This may change in time. For example, two hundred years ago, if someone set as their life goal to determine if there is life on Mars, it would be an unsolvable problem. They could speculate all they want, but they simply did not have the technology to go to Mars and find out. Suppose I set myself the problem of how to live for 500 years. There is no practical way for me to solve this problem. Maybe in the future medical science will have progressed to the point of extending life that long, but for now I had best go on to other problems, maybe even ones that might lead to that in future generations. On a more personal level, suppose I want to solve the problem of having everyone like me and approve of me. Is this a problem I can really solve? So in general it seems best to just let go of unsolvable problems, whether the ones that are logically unsolvable (like the ones that involve inconsistent goals or an infinite regress) or the ones that are practically unsolvable given our current circumstances. On the other hand we may decide to do our part toward solving a problem that may see a solution in a hundred generations as long as we fully realize that we will never see the solution in our lifetime. If I start where I am, in my concrete human situation, I see different configurations of language, experience, and desire. Language includes natural languages and texts of those languages, texts written or spoken or thought, texts about experiences, texts about desires, texts about texts, conversations, monologues, rules, unspoken assumptions, norms, artificial languages, logic, mathematics, computer languages, visual languages, body languages, dance, languages of tone and pitch, basically anything that can be a sign for something else. Experience can be active or passive, inner or outer, verbal or silent, now, or later. It includes all my sense experiences as well as my experiences of performing actions. It includes my inner thoughts, dreams, visions, and intimations. It is what appears to me, what I interact with, and what I do. Desire is like, dislike, want, need, preference, goal, purpose, motive, drive, impulse, command. It is what moves me to action and accounts for many of my reactions to experience. But maybe I should start with some text, like a sacred book or a coherent set of assumptions. But these are after all just texts. Texts must be tested. They can't just be assumed. Or they can be, but then it is just a desire. We prefer this text, or we desperately want it to be true. When we are totally absorbed in a text, suspending disbelief, totally in its world, it can seem obvious. But then we look at the book we are holding in our hands. It is an object. We set it on the table, and go outside, and the world is still there, mysterious and large. Truth is a word we use to compliment texts that are coherent and well tested against experience. Good is a word we use to compliment things that we desire. Beauty is a word we use to compliment things that we like to contemplate. Knowledge is our current store of texts that are coherent and well tested against experience. I am a sequence of configurations of language, experience, and desire, a changing bundle of identities. To be happy, reconcile language, experience, and desire. To solve problems, reconcile language, experience, and desire. Absolute justification seems unattainable because of diversity, relativity, and infinite regress. Beyond these basics, there does not seem to be much useful to say in general. It seems most useful to go on to specifics or to expand out to general culture criticism. Some of our most basic desires are survival, enjoyment, and group membership. Right and wrong are words we use to classify behaviors that support or undermine our most basic desires. Some widely accepted rules of conduct: Do not kill, do not steal, do not lie. Treat others as you would like to be treated. Do no harm. Consider the consequences. Some ideal words: Freedom, justice, compassion, tolerance, peace, courtesy, kindness, patience, trustworthiness, love, courage, honesty, moderation, hope, creativity, competence, joy. Sex is wrong when it does harm or is too risky. Morality is not undermined by relativity when it is derived from an understanding of human needs. Criminal laws give social consequences to those who break what we consider the most important rules for the preservation and smooth running of our society. Can we judge those who break the rules? We can hate what they do, and we can argue that what they do is harmful. We can then enforce the laws of our society. Why would anyone bother to be moral? Because of natural feelings of sympathy, desires for group membership, and fear of social consequences. Since we all start from the same concrete human situation, no one of us has special authority. So we should maximize freedom. But our freedom should not undermine the freedom of others. We need justice. But sometimes, even if treated fairly, someone will need help. We need compassion. There are many complex issues of living together that must be decided. No one person has the right to decide. We need democracy. A democracy that combines individual freedom, educated voters, referendums, elections, representative decision makers, legal protections for human rights, and a market economy seems like the best form of social decision making. Decisions should be kept as close to the people affected as possible, and the greater the degree of consensus the better. If the market is given as much latitude as possible, experience has shown that some people will need help at least for some periods in their life. So a social safety net is needed. It should be provided as fairly and efficiently as possible, while not creating excessive dependency. The scientific method is the systematic testing of coherent texts against publicly accessible experience within a community of research. Science in itself does not advocate any particular worldview. Ideally, it should just report its findings. Science in itself does not have any authority. However, when it applies, it can have practical authority because of how well tested it is. Scientism is the belief that science is the only way to valid knowledge. It seems best to just say that science provides the best source of knowledge, when it applies. What does science tell us about the universe? That it is made up of patterns of energy, that it is vast, and that our planet is one small planet orbiting a medium sized star in just one of many galaxies. What does science tell us about nature? That living things are mutually dependent, that they require very special environmental conditions, that their bodies are communities of cells, and that they group into ecosystems that combine into one global system. What does science tell us about ourselves? That our bodies evolved from simpler bodies over time, that we are part of nature, that we are social animals, that we can develop tools and technologies using our scientific knowledge, that there could be others like us in the universe, but that we could conceivably be unique. Mathematics is a language commonly used in science, but it is not in itself a science since it is not directly tested against experience. Are the social sciences scientific? Texts about human behavior and societies are inherently more difficult to test, but they are still scientific to the extent that they are coherent and systematically tested against publicly accessible experience. What should be studied by science? In principle, anything to which its methods apply, but when social resources are needed, social decision making is needed. Also, scientists need to follow the same ethical standards that apply to everyone else. Religion deals with morality and inner experience. What do religions have in common? Meditation, morality, and wisdom. Sacred texts and sacred practices. A connection to the sacred. A community. The more you know about religions, the harder it is to believe that there is one true religion. It seems more likely that there is good and bad in most all religions. Still, as it is possible to have one true love, it may be possible to have one true religion. How can I meditate? Suspend language and desire for a time and just be mindful of your breathing, or of the motions and sensations of your body, or of a natural scene, or of a visualized image. Or quietly watch a candle or listen to a bell or chimes or music or repeat a phrase or word. Or find some time to yourself and ask yourself questions and give yourself the answers. Or read a text closely, following the flow of meaning and syntax with attention and even love. Or project to every living creature feelings of loving kindness and goodwill. Or ask for the help you need and then rest for a moment in the presence of that mysterious other. It is dangerous to turn your will over to someone else. If you are expected to follow with unquestioning obedience, beware. On the other hand, if the teacher has something to share and leaves it up to you to take it or leave it, then investigate for yourself and make your own choice. Is science in conflict with religion? When religion expects unquestioning faith or uses arguments from authority, there is a natural conflict. If religious ideas are open to testing, there is no conflict. Also, religion deals with realms of desire and inner experience that are outside of the scope of science. It seems like they could divide the territory without a need for conflict. Can I reconcile faith with intellectual integrity? Faith as a choice to trust someone or to follow a certain pattern of life does not necessarily conflict with openness to other possibilities or to putting our ideas to the test. And there is always the possibility that the choice may change based on future experience. Do I have the right to believe? The better tested a text is, the more justified you are in believing it. Still, there are texts that are difficult to test beyond feelings that this is the right way to go. In such cases, it seems that you should have the right to choose to believe it or to take it as a working assumption. But you do not have the right to force your choice on others. Still, given all this, you do not necessarily need a formal religion. As long as society has a shared set of democratic values, each person can pursue their own varied investigations, grouping together as they like. Groups should be treated with tolerance as long as they do not try to force themselves on others or infringe on the rights of their members. This is how they are expressing their freedom. There does not seem to be one purpose for life. Each person needs to decide what the purpose or purposes of their life will be. To the extent that we emphasize the preciousness of life and are grateful for the gift of life, it is sacred. Life becomes its own purpose. How can I live a simple life? Examine what you want and why you want it. Look at the consequences of your acts of consumption and see if you could make choices that have less negative consequences. Then choose what is really important to you and base your life and your enjoyment of life around those choices. How can I live an exciting life? Pick difficult and stimulating goals, where there is a significant risk of failure, and then aggressively pursue them. Vary your stimuli by traveling or living in a complex and changing environment. And really embrace the change rather than fear it. How can I get rich? Assuming that you are not born with it and that you want to avoid criminal activity, getting rich requires a combination of understanding what people want and giving it to them along with wise investing. You need to maximize the value of the product or service times the number of people you can provide it to. You may need to convince people that they really want it. Then wisely invest what you make. If you are lucky enough and smart enough, you will get rich, but it is usually not quick. How can I be of service? Understand what people need that they are not getting. Look at your skills and your potential. Find organizations that provide the service you want to provide or find ways to finance the service. Get training in the area you choose. Then work hard for this goal. How I can create something? Find out what really interests you and what you have a talent for by experimenting with different creative activities. If possible, get some training in that area. But most importantly, practice and practice and develop your skill. Then find ways to support yourself while you dedicate more and more time to it. If you can sell what you are creating, market it as best you can or find someone else to market it for you. Otherwise, make it your hobby and avocation. What are some common life patterns? Disappointed Hopes, Floating, Ups and Downs, Rising Expectations, Sudden Reversal, Wind Fall, Adventures and Interludes, Long Decline, Recovery, Conversion, Rehearsals and Performances, Long Struggle Rewarded, Doing Fine, Everything Comes Easy. A good life is a life in which you have done what you really wanted to do and you have done it ethically and well. Life can seem like a comedy, a tragedy, a romance, or an adventure, if you interpret it that way. But at times it seems like just one damn thing after another. Near death experiences and experiences of communicating with the dead seem to indicate that we survive death. Brain chemistry and hallucinations seem to indicate that these experiences may not be valid evidence. So there may be hope for survival, or it may just be wishful thinking. Given that the universe is made up of patterns of energy and that a continuous curve can be infinitely divided, there could be room for many worlds here and now, right where we are. The next world could be one of these. A spirit is what underlies the sequence of configurations of language, experience, and desire that forms our lived experience. Perhaps it is a pattern of energy that inhabits the body for a time, but exists independently of it. There have been some reports of the dead communicating with the living, but it is difficult to sort through what the supposed receiver knows or can guess with what would truly indicate communication. Since near death experience research deals with reports of inner experiences and these experiences are not publicly accessible, it is not in the strict sense scientific. That is not to say that the research is not rigorous or that its explanations are not true, just that it is operating beyond the scope of normal science. If we do survive death, then we will each know very soon. If not, then none of us will be around to complain about it. Still it may be wise to take the possibility seriously in the conduct of this life. And it is OK to hope. In general, people will have many different beliefs that cannot be well tested. It seems best to recognize them for what they are. They may or may not be true. We do not know. We should treat them with tolerance. Maybe some of the good ones will come true. Again, it is OK to hope. |
Copyright © 2002-2008 Ronald Tower (All rights reserved) |