Orwellian Times

      The Putin regime, the Chinese Communist Party under Xi, the followers of Erdogan in Turkey or Orban in Hungary, the pop-fascist movements in France and America (Trump followers who reject election results and the courts i.e. the rule of law) – their controllers have all achieved something that even Goebbels did not dare in his conduct of Nazi propaganda. The absolute standard of patriotism, of loyalty, and thus of humanity, of goodness, is to embrace uncritically . . . not just embrace but passionately espouse and propagate whatever construction of “reality” their fearless leaders determine serves the interests of their “movement” (i.e. their controllers). Anyone who insists on comparing a propagated belief with the hard facts is a “traitor” by definition. Truth is simply irrelevant, of no importance. Important is commitment, and whatever world version heightens commitment is by definition “true”. (Seems the logical outcome of Sartrian existentialism: being before essence, commitment before truth.)

       Goebbels, by contrast, when confronted with some fact that could not be plausibly denied without destroying credibility did what propagandists have always done: accept the fact that could not be plausibly denied, and spin it in ways that served the Party, or frame it in ways that disarmed its potential to harm the Party. He couldn't just put it out that the Wehrmacht won the battle for Stalingrad - as Trump would have, I guess - but framed the defeat as a glorious triumph of German heroism, etc. 

       I find this new power to create reality for a mass of people amazing and depressing. I find the utter tenuousness of our hold on reality (truth) shocking and depressing. “Reality” and “truth” – it’s not just weaponizing false constructs of reality, influencing people’s perceptions of reality in the service of power. The atomic bomb here is that truth and reality themselves have been made radically indeterminate, and thus in their very essence negated. It is a making true of Nietzsche’s idea that all claims to truth are masks for a will-to-power such that the only choice is what makes me more powerful.

    Power: I remember a definition from course in government: the ability to enforce one’s will over others, even against resistance. But Trump’s power over the minds and hearts of his “base” is more than that. Resistance is precluded from the outset. Trump’s kind of power, like Hitler’s, is Orwellian. Orwellian power: when the insurrectionist believes Trump’s lie in the face of all contrary evidence; when, therefore, every source of information or judgment that even at the margin’s casts doubt on the Trumpian fantasy version of the world is automatically rejected as “fake news” coming from the enemy (who are “vermin”). He is immune from truth. He invents his own “truth.” Trump says x; therefore, x is true. He once bragged: “I could shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Well, not really bragging: he really is untouchable: corruption on a massive scale, sexual assault, the Hollywood tapes, a coup attempt – nothing touches him. He determines what is to be believed and his base demands that he determine what is to be believed. Many of his inner circle wanted him to distance himself from the attack on the Capital. He understood better than they that would have meant the end. His base wanted the Big Lie and would never have forgiven Trump had he not given it to them. They are one, Trump and his base.

      Recall the scene in 1984 when Winston Smith really believed 2+2=5 because Big Brother said it did. That was after extreme torture. Trump’s people believe it because they want to believe it, no torture necessary. And if truth is nothing but whatever the powerful say it is, why not? (If the Nazi’s had won, the history of WWII would be very different – so the line of thought. No it wouldn’t. Only people would be prevented from knowing that history.) Through him those who felt powerless feel powerful. That is his trick. That is all he cares about; that is all they care about in their hearts: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Never mind that he is using the suckers; a Jim Bakker of politics.)

    We see the same thing in individual personalities on a small scale – the narcissistic personality of our times tends toward the same deconstruction of the distinction between truth and lie. Nietzsche preached the superman who determines for himself what is good and evil, what is true and false. Seems we have a whole country of little supermen and superwomen now. 

     What a fragile and utterly precious and essential thing is truth for our humanity! How easy it is to lose the love for it.

 

. . .

 

Alternative  facts, or the reduction to absurdity of the notion that reality is essentially socially constructed. Trying to control what people think about something horrible Trump did, his propaganda minister used some technical jargon from the trade: ‘we need to come up with some alternative facts,’ which of course is logically absurd, since a fact is by definition ‘what is the case’ and what we agree on or can be brought to agree on. The limits of what we can think and feel, the determinant of our thoughts, actions, and responses to our lives and all that happens in our world is ultimately a function of what we take to be real (or true) and good. But the Trumpian 'alternative facts' reveals something philosophically interesting. The subversion of truth doesn't happen at the level of facts. 'Alternative facts' already imply a different conceptualization of things. Define your terms differently, and you get 'alternative facts.' It's actually a quite sophisticated propaganda tool that plays on the radical lack of determination of meaning in language. 

     You can see this clearly in the current Putin "special military operation." Putin largely controls what those who are in his bubble think is real, factually and conceptually - his base only, not all or even most Russians, I have read; no more than Trump controls all Americans.  Russians are not supposed to believe there is a war. Well, depends on what you mean by 'war,' doesn’t it? And the ‘special military operation’ that is not a war has the purpose of ‘de-nazifying’ Ukraine – for example, of their Jewish president – and ‘liberating’ the Ukrainians, who perhaps don’t realize yet they are being liberated. In an alternative reality, words like ‘war’, ‘propaganda’, ‘liberate’, and ‘Nazi’ mean different things, things that have only the most tenuous connection to reality if they have any at all. They are like bad interpretations of a poem nobody knows directly. 

     This is just an example of how reality is not constructed by changing the facts; what is a fact at all depends on how reality is conceptualized, and this happens at a deeper level than facts. If any form of Ukrainian nationalism is defined as 'Nazi,' and given that Ukrainian nationalism is part of the resistance to Putin's designs for the country, then it is a 'fact' that the 'special military operation' seeks to 'de-nazify' Ukraine. Translated: seeks to remove Ukrainian nationalism in all its forms. Facts are only facts when one agrees on concepts. People who think it is absurd to think of the current Ukraine government as Nazis simply don't share Putin's implicit definition of 'Nazi' to include Ukrainian nationalists. 

     (Of course, there were some Ukrainian nationalists who embraced the Nazis during WWII, a very bad lot to be sure, probably full of fanatical hatred because of the mass starvation in the 30's caused by Stalin's destruction of traditional agriculture. To get revenge on Stalin they slaughtered Jewish women and children, because in the Nazi conceptualization the Stalin regime was a tool of the whole Jewish race. Well, if this is the concept you believe in, then it would be perfectly rational to murder every single man, woman, child of Jewish heritage. When concepts get so detached from the world, anything goes.)

        Facts depend on concepts, and concepts depend on seeing the world as a whole in one way rather than another. And like Orwell’s 1984, Putin or Trump have enormous power based on their ability to determine what is real – partly in a dance with the resentments of large sections of the population that want to live in a different reality and through the fearless leaders can, in their own minds, live in an alternative reality. They would revolt against Trump in a heartbeat if he started speaking truth.  It’s not that it is forced on them at gunpoint – that’s what makes it so powerful. 

      I suppose the Catholic totalitarians of the 17th century feared the loss of their power to define reality when they persecuted Galileo and others - they needed the stake to enforce belief, unlike Trump. They cared more about the power to say what the cosmos was than any particular model of the cosmos. They didn't give a hoot about science; they were interested in the power to define reality, to define what universe we live in. What power! God-like! To stipulate what the cosmos must be like for everybody, authoritatively.  In the desire for that kind of power I think may lay the deepest essence of evil.

 'Seeing As' verses 'Seeing That'

    I can see that a birch tree is in front of me; I see the birch as part of Creation. A man with a different inner life might see the birch tree as nothing but a natural resource. A poet or a saint might see and imagine the birch tree – even if they see it as part of Creation – in ways much more profound than I can.

       Walking among the redwood trees of California, three hikers stop to take in the vista. One, a poet, says: ‘The forest is sublime.’ One, a rich socialite, says: ‘The forest is quite pretty.’ A third, the owner of a major coal company, says: ‘Being unsentimental, I would say that is a very valuable resource that is currently being unutilized due to people’s self-indulgent Romanticism.’  

       A kind of philosopher-physicist joins them and says: "Actually, the coal company owner is closest to the truth. The poet and the rich socialite are projecting subjective feelings onto a reality that can only be objectively described by a de-subjectivizing language of science. What the poet should say is rather ‘I have feelings of awe when I behold the forest’ and not just assume his feelings has anything to tells about the forest itself. His reaction tells us only about him. The evolutionary and biochemical scientist could explain the hardware determining this response; the social scientist could explain the social software. In any case, the feeling can only be sentimental: the idealization of reality in fantasy [the psychologist could explain that] to produce some self-gratifying feeling – perhaps to project an image of a sensitive soul onto others or feel that way about oneself. This should be obvious from the fact that you all disagree, and yet there is no ‘reality’ out there independent of all your views except science to refer your disagreement to."

       The sublime and the pretty, being subjective-psychological reactions, have no place in the discourse of science. Thus the businessman is closest to the truth.’ This illustrates how making the language of science or brute de-meaned facts normative disconnects responses like the priest from the real world. In fact, though,  people do use the language of the sublime for sentimental or counterfeit reasons – the critical vocabulary of many kinds of emotional responses (grief, love, joy, remorse, wonder, etc.), the way we test such emotions against reality, is of just this kind: is the response authentic or sentimental?

       I say the poet is right. His response reveals something of the reality of the Redwood forest the others are blind to. That is a view that science can neither confirm nor falsify; it has nothing to do with science as science at all. The poet’s language belongs to the human language, more specifically, the language of love and wonder; the rewriting of the human language by the reductive scientist-philosopher takes humanity out of the language along with subjectivity. There is nothing in the nature of things that rules out in advance that a complex thought-emotion tells us something about the real world. Only by elevating one particular and idiosyncratic way of seeing to absolute status – the one compatible with technological-capitalist interests – does the seeing mind get deformed into a tunnel vision that keeps us from truly becoming better acquainted with reality, perhaps even intimate: with people, places, living things, the universe – whatever. (Acknowledgement to C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, a section of the Philosophical Investigations.)

Autonomy and the construction of reality

 

I want to add a thought to yesterday's entry on the anniversary of the insurrection. 

     From Freud I learned about fantasies of omnipotence and primary narcissism – experiencing the world and others as extensions of self with no independent value or reality. Autonomy. What Trump does in politics – constructs reality to suit his egoism; constructs tiny epistemic bubbles and ferocious echo chambers in which his fantasy-self has  some "reality" – has been the cultural norm for his social class for centuries now. That is what every narcissist does in a small way: social media makes it easy (most of us have at least a bit of the narcissist in us; another way of saying we are sinners). Trump has millions in thrall to the fantasy world required by his narcissism. It's just a matter of scale. 

       The prototype was Milton’s Satan – “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”  

That may be said to be the root of all evil, as Milton perceived. It is the pure condition of sin unless modified by some real care for something outside the ego. (I love Paradise Lost read aloud by Ian Richardson.) Narcissism might well be translated as "original sin." And the difference between us fallible mortals and an angel like Satan is that our narcissism is a form of spiritual damage, a spiritual disease - not chosen in pure unconditioned freedom as an angel theoretically could choose it. (Read about Trump's family and you will know where the damage - which he at some point embraced and identified himself with - came from.) 

    The proper emotional response to Trump is pity or compassion. But he can only be helped by breaking the link between his worshippers who feed his narcissism and the man himself. The courts may be the last best chance for the man to be forced to see the truth and be saved ("... and the truth will set you free,"). To see him as a broken spirit is the last best hope for his worshippers. Being made into an idol is the secret goal of every narcissist. By cooperating with this project his worshippers become idolaters, worshipping a fantasy rather than the true God. Everything is says is Truth. Everything is does is purely good. It is not an accident that the first commandment is against making idolatry. His appeal for so-called Christian nationalists reveals something deeply disturbing about that mentality, for Trump is about as close to Christ as I am to the edge of the universe. 

   ("Christian nationalism" - what a devilish oxymoron. Jesus a xenophobe? Jesus a hater of the downtrodden? Jesus directing the construction of a wall to keep all those hopelessly impoverished people out? What happened to the Good Samaritan? What happened to the beatitudes? "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did to me." But as we know, all kinds of horrible stuff is done in the name of God. Idolatry, all of it. Any bad or evil thing done in the name of God or Christ makes an idol, a human construct, out of God. Well, what does the epistemological bubble say: “This is an invasion. This is like a military invasion.... Drugs, criminals, gang members and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. We’ve never seen anything like it. They’re taking over our cities.” Scrooge. Dehumanize and demean to cut the heart off from compassion.  Just dehumanize whoever you want to be cruel to. I don't know what to do about immigration but I do know there is nothing Christian about that. And people like me? In comes the echo chamber: WOKE or RINO or LIBERAL or VERMIN - i.e. someone without anything to say who is just insanely and obsessively out to get Trump, as though that were their life purpose. Lord have mercy. Pardon this digression.)

      Acknowledging the worth of others, that other people are limits to a person's will like nothing else in the world, limits the ego. Nature, if it is Creation, limits our range of choice in different ways. We may use it well, but not destroy it. We must preserve in our use its essential beauty and goodness (“And He saw that it was good, very good.”)  It is not ours but God’s and it exists only because God loves it. At least, that has been the mainstream Christian teaching. The common good also limits the will of those who govern (with or without consent). It may be difficult at times to judge what the common good requires; the one who governs needs practical wisdom to understand what is right and the courage to do the right thing. All these limits define our humanity and yet are precisely what must be rejected at all costs by the narcissist - who is spiritually sick and deserves pity, at least while they are not in the process of destroying something good; then they must be stopped - for their own good as well as the good of what they would reduce or destroy. 

       That is what Trump and his radical left antipodes have in common: a refusal to recognize that reality limits the will, whether the reality be nature, one’s own body, the country, or other people. They share a refusal to recognize any value that does not have its source in their own uneducated desires. They can have nothing to be accountable for; they are their own judge and jury. They are, in Nietzsche’s words, beyond good and evil. They are autonomous. 

 

. . .

Afterthought

      The state of culture in America reminds me a bit of the setting for many of Plato's dialogs in Athens, with the sophists being the enemies of truth, the servants of the autonomous ego. Socrates in conversation really cares about truth – about the whole family of truth concepts: deepened understanding, more comprehensive insight, awareness of alternative viewpoints, conceptual clarity, logical consistency, etc. His sophist interlocutors often do not. Their egos and their social capital are typically at stake. Argument and conversation become a veneer; not a vehicle of understanding and self-disclosure but a mask concealing the desire to be right elevate their egos and increase their social capital, partly by diminishing their interlocutor. Words become weapons. They kill Socrates. 

    The driving conceptual metaphor (discussed in Metaphors We Live By) that informs our language of argument (as in giving reasons to support a conclusion) is ARGUMENT IS WAR, and it represents the attitude of the sophists: we attack, undermine, destroy the opponent’s argument and defend our own from attack, etc. The point is not to understand together with a partner, but the propagandist’s: to produce an emotive effect creating the mere appearance that puts you in a good light and the opponent in a bad one. Arguments in this sophist version are not a means to justify or understand but one tool among others to diminish others and elevate the self. 

    Using argument like that is like using an umbrella as a sword or a book of philosophy to hit someone over the head. 

       

 

 

Epistemological Bubbles and Echo Chambers - Thoughts on January 6

    An “epistemological bubble,” is “an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission.” In other words, a space in which a belief system is protected from any thought – true or false – that might cause doubt. Epistemological bubbles are bad – if truth matters, if seeking wisdom and insight matters: if the mind matters. (For a free society, all these goods matter.) Bubbles create the illusion that everyone thinks the way we do even when they don’t. They live by concealing issues from view. 

       An example: you will never see a major broadcasting company in America thematize the destructive impact of corporate capitalism on so many aspects of life, from the destruction of rural America (farmers and the small towns that used to support them) to the destruction of the land (e.g. in strip mining) to the destruction of the manufacturing base – and the working class –  during the “globalization” craze to the influence of big money in writing the rules we live by, to the concentration of wealth at the top and the squeezing of working people as a result of this. More recently, Fox News has created a still smaller bubble by excluding not only those kinds of things but also anything that would cause its MAGA viewers to question the fantasy world created by their reality show host leader, a crazy little bubble in which truth plays no role at all. The other corporate media were bubble creators, but within their bubbles, there were still standards of factual reporting; they couldn’t just make stuff up; there was also a limited space for critical journalism.  (Fox News did have to pay over 800 million in defamation damages promoting the election lie; so not completely free to make stuff up.) To show how times have changed: had Nixon tried to do a Trump, he would have been laughed out of Washington.

    Yet epistemological bubbles can be dealt with: just make truth accessible; make other serious arguments available. To pop the bubble just make the facts and arguments available that have been excluded from the bubble. This happened in my case because I read books from a great variety of viewpoints argued by serious authors.

    More worrying than the bubbles are the echo chambers. An echo chamber is “a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited.”  In other words, any argument or factual evidence that might make someone doubt the bubble must – by definition – come from a corrupt source and thus are worthy only of being mocked, not taken seriously. This has been at work in all the darkest movements in my country’s history – as it was in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Putin’s Russia (the ideal form of state for MAGA).  McCarthyism thrived on it. 

      Rush Limbaugh – who, alas, seduced my beloved father for a good while, in spite of his good heart – was a master of it. (Perhaps Goebbels was his teacher?) He taught his listeners not to trust anyone who criticized him. He painted a picture of a malicious elite out to get him and his audience – and his audience ate it up. He questioned the integrity of anyone who presented views that were outside the bubble he constructed such that they were not mistaken but malicious. Political opponents you believe mistaken are met with argument and evidence that they are mistaken; Limbaugh’s opponents were mocked and ridiculed, often with utmost cruelty, making his audience complicit in the cruelty when they laughed. He transformed political debate into a cold civil war. Great for his ratings. I think he was only interested in money.

     But Trump took over the playbook and has dramatically expanded it with the techniques of the reality show and by using the new technologies to their maximum potential. His opponents are not only malicious human beings but "vermin" that he wants to "rot in hell." Well Limbaugh never went that far. Breaking through an echo chamber is not nearly as easy – not that it is that easy – as popping an epistemological bubble.  If any outside view is by definition corrupt, the bubble is immune, can’t be popped. My former government professor and friend, Dr. Georg Bluhm, who survived Hitler's Germany, once told me that the great strength of democracy, as opposed to totalitarianism, is that it can criticize itself. Well, here we are. Thus I have very little faith that my country will even retain the trappings of democratic government. You can’t have a democracy without democrats, as Germany learned in their history. I try not to lose hope.

    I have focused on right-wing populism as an example, but the same phenomenon exists on the left, which has in a way affected me more personally. To present a philosophical argument against the dogma that society arbitrarily assigns a sex to a baby at birth – that nature has nothing to say here – will get you expelled in disgrace for many postmodernist clubs as some kind of oppressor.

 

It's all a form of fanaticism.

 

. . .

 

The media structure of a society is critically related to its capacity for freedom and justice. I think the best media structure for a democracy is the dominance of the printed word, with publishing being widely distributed and a lot of it being local. As soon as big money, a party, a movement, or a strongman controls any media, then bubbles are constructed; media becomes a power to control hearts and minds. Any technology with that kind of power must be limited and regulated in the interest of the public good and an open society.

    Behind this there needs to be a culture oriented to reasoned discussion. As part of the ethos of this culture would be the love of truth over being right. In philosophy I was taught from the beginning that a true lover of wisdom loves to be corrected since it brings them closer to wisdom. It would involve an attitude of intellectual humility. We are all radically finite and fallible. None of us are close to knowing everything. To understand how ignorant we are - how far from perfect wisdom - is the beginning of wisdom. All of us can continue to learn till the day we die. 

      It follows that it is in our interest to listen attentively to those who see the world differently. And in their interest to listen to us. Humility means respect. And this should be reflected in broadcasting. No propaganda. As soon as someone who things differently is discredited, a red flag should go up. Serious people who see things differently trying to seek truth together as partners – that should be the model. How to create such a culture in the present technological-economic constellation is beyond me.

 Another take on emotions as paths to understanding

    A man never thinks of his wife. He never does anything for her. He is indifferent to her needs. He feels nothing when she dies. But he says ‘I loved her.’ I would have great trouble making sense of this. I don’t think I could believe he genuinely loved her.

     A pet dog dies. The pet’s owner or human companion suffers “inconsolable grief.” He buries the dog with its picture on an elaborate gravestone. 

He visits the grave once a month, bringing flowers. Every year he lights a candle and weeps on the day of the dog’s death. He posts all this on Facebook. I would have a hard time believing the man truly loved the dog rather than using the dog’s death to put himself on display. I could only think of him as sentimental.

    But a man could grieve for a dog – I cried over Maxi – and that real grief partly reveals what a dog is as well as what a human being is. Emotions like grief are forms that our convictions about what is real and good take – paths of understanding what something is. They can be counterfeit but they are essential to be able to understand many things.

    I think when you unexpectedly come in the presence of a roaring waterfall, as I did hiking once in Yellowstone, awe is a response to what the waterfall is, to what it symbolizes as well. If a person came around that bend and in the presence of that waterfall said “cute”, I would say that person didn’t have a clue of what they were looking at even if they knew the definition of a waterfall and the geology behind it. Emotional responses can be more or less true to reality; more or less disclose or cover up the reality they respond to. “Cute” hides the reality of the waterfall.

    If you asked Lt. Commander Data from Star Trek to respond to the waterfall – an android without emotions, without flesh and blood, without a sense of mortality even – he could call up his memory banks and identify the phenomenon as a waterfall. He could – like an AI Chat these days – recount the geology of waterfalls, etc. But it would have no more significance than a speck of dust, a strip mine, or a garbage dump for him. I would say: Data cannot understand a waterfall any better than he can understand humor or emotion, because lacking emotion he lacks an essential capacity to understand anything. Without an emotional life connected to imagination, the world would just consist of meaningless objects and arrangements of objects, flat, nothing more significant than anything else. 

     [The purely logical view of the world described by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, one of my favorite books of philosophy: “All propositions are of equal value,” a proposition being nothing but the naming of objects or statements about factual states of affairs. Wittgenstein went on to say: “Everything in the world is accidental (only logic is necessary), and so nothing in the world can have transcendent value. If something has value or meaning, that value or meaning must lie outside the world.” To a Data, this would be right. But if the heart puts you in touch with dimensions of the world that are real and that pure logic and science are necessarily blind to – the thought I have been trying to make sense of – then value and significance are a part of the world and a part of human beings. It is the waterfall itself that is awesome, and my response is a response to that awesomeness. Data in this respect - responding to the waterfall -  is like a dog watching TV, or me looking at a piece of modern art.]

    That is why past philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine believed that educating the emotions was essential for a good upbringing. I would say all of our predecessor cultures believed that the universe was created such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it. Folks believed that objects did not merely receive, but could merit our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt, awe or shock. The point was to teach the young to love what was lovable – beauty in nature, for instance, or kindness shown to others – and hate what was hateful (e.g. the desolation of a mountain forest through mountaintop removal; well hating in this case what was done to the mountain). Once our hearts are in the right place, our heads can make progress in understanding the world. But if our hearts are stunted, no degree of intellectual power can access the most profound truths about the world. Again, that is one reason why I think great books like A Christmas Carol are so valuable. And yet I cannot get my sons to read it.

 The Lovable, the Good, and the Real

    There are deep conceptual relations between ‘love’ and ‘real’ - the thought I started this series of reflections with. A conception of ‘real’ that is restricted to physical objects makes no sense in general; many things (love included) are real without being physical objects. Love can be real or not, but as we normally speak, we mean that can be (more of less) genuine, lucid, pure verses counterfeit, sentimental, or distorted. 

   It sounds odd to wonder whether in general all experiences of love are unreal (e.g. illusory), as do some people who want to reduce everything spiritual to something evolutionary. Mothers don't really love their children; they are programmed to behave in certain ways because it promotes the survival of the species. Rubbish. 

  Sartre thought that loving someone was like ‘giving them permission to be.’ I would probably curse the day I was born if I didn't see myself as loved by someone or if I had never been loved by anybody such that it wouldn't even make sense to me that someone could love me. I think this is true of all people. 

    Another connection: love does cognitive work – it shines a light on reality. To pity someone suffering, for example, tells us something deep about the nature of a human being and what it means to suffer: pity is a form of the conviction that someone is suffering (Ludwig Wittgenstein). Being pitiless is a way of making the ego a tyrant over reality; of building walls around the ego to shut the reality of suffering out – like Scrooge. [How pitiless my country has become as a whole.] Grammatically, logically connected to human suffering is the intelligibility of pity – that pity is the natural reaction to suffering –  and we understand what suffering is (and thus means) through our pity. We don’t cognitively determine, like a scientist, whether someone is suffering, and then add the emotions on (or not).  

    Also loving someone lucidly, profoundly, you may know them in much deeper ways than, say, a stranger armed with a PhD in psychology might know them – which is why I don’t put much stock in therapy without completely disparaging the “professional” view outside of intimate acquaintance and love. Love is a form of the conviction that the person (or whatever) is wonderful - that it is "good, very good" that they exist. 

    So if emotions are like thoughts in that they relate us to a world outside our ego, reaching out to what we can't reduce to abstract or purely scientific categories, then forms of writing or art that connect us to true, genuine emotions will connect us more directly to reality than abstract words like mine here. That is what Dickens does in A Christmas Carol. That's what great literature does - as opposed to many pop versions that sentimentalize reality in order to make possible self-gratifying fantasies and emotions. A Christmas Carol is great therapy to me. Some - not all - of the movie versions are counterfeits of the real thing. 

 

 

The Heart Has Its Reasons (Blaise Pascal)

      Am I not taking the little novel too seriously? Am I not treating it as a work of philosophy – or scripture even? Literature reaches us not through abstract thoughts but through emotional response – through the heart. And the heart is a central theme of this book. I think some truths, perhaps the most important ones, require the participation of a pure and lucid heart. This is what great literature speaks to and can bring out in attentive readers. I have nothing against reason and logic. I love logic. I have nothing against science as long as it is conscious of what it is doing and what it cannot do. But great literature is even more important for understanding things. 

       A friend, who had recently converted to Islam, reported to me in conversation how a naïve, uneducated person responded to her conversion: namely, with the question “But how do you know it’s true?” That was supposed to be evidence of the friend’s naiveté. But that question is right on target. It is the question any honest person must ask themselves about whatever core beliefs guide their lives. In this society, concern about truth and how truthfully one lives does indeed seem naïve. I think my friend’s uneducated friend asked the crucial question.      

     So I repeated it: “How do you know it’s true?” “I know it in my heart,” was her reply. It might seem that this response is a conversation-thought stopper. Why? Because it is so personal, so “subjective.” No one can really look inside her heart. Even her closest friends have only ‘indirect evidence’ of what is there – her words, acts, attitude to life in general, the way she does live. I grant that can be ‘evidence’ of a certain kind for her, though it can never attain the status of a proof. It can flow into her words, acts, attitudes, and life such that her life itself can be evidence of a sort, though not proof. After all, as Pascal movingly wrote:

 

The heart has its reasons, which Reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart that feels God, and not Reason. This, then, is perfect faith: God felt in the heart.

 

The imagination is the interpreter, the translator of these feelings. This is extremely complex and difficult to describe. It depends on how pure and even “childlike” the individual heart is, on the one hand; on a kind of wisdom and goodness, on the other. The “enemy” in this battle takes the form of wishful thinking; or narcissistic, self-gratifying, self-elevating, or simply self-consoling fantasy.

      Here the concept of sin can clarify the difference between imagination and fantasy: sin is that which divides us from Creation, from a community with our fellow human beings, and focuses on an Ego born in this opposition – to our family; to that potential in us that I think of as the soul (capacity for joy, for hope, faith, love). Sin is whatever dissolves these connections, imprisoning us in an ego-fantasy world that is in reality what Hell is. In contrast, whatever belongs to our inner life that is joyful, loving, affirming, hopeful, trusting, reconciling, healing – and in a way amazingly impersonal, though you are never more yourself – forces the concept of God (or for some, Goodness) on some people. You can pretty much know whether the imagination or the fantasy is in play by asking the simple question: does it cut me off from my essential relations or illuminate them? Does it connect me more deeply and deepen my understanding or is it merely self-flattering? Does it relate me to God – or to truth, hope, faith, above all love – or does it elevate my self-brand over other? (When I speak of connections, I’m not talking about being connected mindlessly to some cult or sect to keep the ego afloat, which is pure division, an central image of sin perhaps.)

    The key feature of the heart – feelings, emotions, moods, and attitudes – is that through the heart alone higher realities can be revealed to us. The preciousness, the true worth of my children manifests itself alone in the love that I have for them – more, that I rightly have for them, for a person who lacks love for their children is rightly considered defective. The preciousness of a loved one may be revealed through the grief of losing them. Our awe in beholding the sea, mountains, or a waterfall reveals the beauty of nature. Our horror over evil done reveals again the preciousness of the victims of evil. A person who betrays someone and feels no remorse – more, does not even find it sane to feel remorse – doesn’t understand what he has done when he betrayed someone. The emotional component is necessary to know what is real and true.

      Moderns tend to want to write off the pronouncements of the heart as subjective emotions projected onto the blank screen of nature. Reason-detached-from-the-heart alone is at work here, blind to another possibility. Our hearts are vehicles of knowledge, of knowing a dimension of reality we experience all the time but to which pure reason – the head – is blind. Or they can be: emotions like thoughts can also be false – they can be sentimental, for example. If we mean by ‘Reason’ that which connects us to a reality – i.e. that which cannot be reduced to our subjective desires, wishes, needs, or beliefs – then the heart belongs to Reason. In any case, reason alone, the head, cannot determine whether only that to which reason has access exhausts the possibilities of reality – and so Reason cannot exhaustively understand Reason.

       A key belief in how we experience and understand emotions I find in how we answer the Hamlet challenge – to do believe, with Hamlet, that there are more things in Heaven or Earth than are dreamt of in our science? Or do we deny this. Our convictions on these colors all emotional experience. And many other beliefs as well.

    I want now to briefly unpack some of those feelings that can give rise to a longing for something beyond what reason can reveal. Joy as C. S. Lewis understood it; as the opposite of narcissistic fantasy and sentimentality: “…an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction”; “a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth.” The longing produced in many readers by Tolkien’s forests, for example, makes all real woods a little enchanted. Its antithesis is narcissistic fantasy – daydreaming of being a great athlete admired by the girl you want. There is no ego in this special kind of longing that Lewis calls “joy.” Joy is a feeling that can force the concept of “God” on a person.

        Love is a crucial feeling that can give rise to intimations of God. Many – sadly not everyone – express the joy over the birth of a child in the language of love: ‘my baby is a gift.’ There is not irrationality involved if the new parent doesn’t go on to say: ‘And therefore God must exist.’ If there is a gift, there must be a giver. Still, some people, inhabiting a certain attitude toward life, will feel the idea of God forced on them by such love. Of course, we all experience bouts of despair as well, and despair points us towards the Nothing. But if you have experienced both genuine love and a bout of despair, your heart will tell you that in love – except for perhaps sexual love, typically a realm of illusions – you are in reality; despair deals with self-pitying illusion. In love you feel reality, the true goodness of what you love; in despair you feel the unreality of the world and yourself. Love is like listening to a wonderful prelude or fugue of Bach – real music. Despair is like listening to a Death Metal band shouting obscenities at the world.

        I recall very well when my grandmother (Granny Lovan) died – on the day before Christmas Eve. I was in my second year at the university and was home for Christmas vacation. Over a year of university had removed any remaining doubts about the sense of religion for me at that time. I saw it – like Spock perhaps – as a superstitious belief system to be superseded by the scientific Enlightenment. That faith went deep with all my grandparents I attributed to their generation. It followed I did not believe in an afterlife. My grandmother was gone. At the funeral, I was aware that my scientific rationalism alienated me from most of the rest of my family, including my grandmother. I listened to the funeral sermon with discomfort. At some point during the reading of the 23rd Psalm, the actual meaning of my grandmother’s death, the thought of what a loving and good woman she had been to me – and to everybody else as far as I know – took possession of me. She was real to me. All the memories came back. And all of a sudden, my cold, scientific rationalism was revealed to be what it was: cold and condescending – not a heroic recognition of truth over comforting illusion.

      It’s not that I immediately believed in an afterlife. My faith 40-plus years later tells me I may hope and so I hope. But rightly or wrongly, my faith doesn’t depend on whether I think there is an afterlife. But at my grandmother’s funeral, I did immediately feel shame. Years later, I read something that made sense of my shame. ‘To love someone means you believe they will live forever.’ My love for my grandmother forbade me at least to rule out the possibility of continued life for her; forbade me from coldly pronouncing ‘she is dead’ and considering my family sentimental for hoping otherwise. As we cannot possibly know what lies beyond the grave and as we do love, nothing stops us from hoping except an ideology taken as fact and a cold heart. None of that is evidence or proof of God’s presence in the world. It is a kind of refutation of cold, hard rationalism – of strict naturalism. It is also a matrix within which a non-sentimental faith may make sense.

    A strict, scientific naturalist would interpret these feelings as purely subjective, a product of evolution, or whatever. And I can’t prove him wrong. He can’t prove me wrong either. He can point out that my evidence is subjective and is most likely wishful thinking on my part. We human beings are for better and worse not fully rational creatures. But the inner life – the heart – forces itself on us. We cannot always bracket it out, or brand it as illusory or sentimental, as I have been trying to make sense of. Do our deep human desires and aspirations point toward a real fulfillment or are they inevitably doomed to frustration? Are our longings for meaning, dignity, immortality, and deep spiritual experience a dead-end street, or are these and other such aspirations destined for fulfillment? Here is what C.S. Lewis wrote about the emotional response of awe in The Problem of Pain:

 

There seem to be only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, and saint; or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name revelation might properly be given.

    Intellectually, I simply assert that it is a draw, an intellectual stalemate. (I would be glad to respond to arguments that it is not a stalemate.) The facts can be read one way or the other. Philosophers of genius have tried to make sense of both possibilities. People worthy of respect have led authentic lives based on both. Relying on the head alone we can never reach a judgment. But if we love – my grandmother in this instance – it seems a betrayal to side with the skeptic. Ultimately, if we love the world, if we love life, it will seem a betrayal to side with the cold rationalist.      

      Our judgment on Shakespeare's line – ‘there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of your philosophy, or science’ – determines whether it is rational only to believe what the objective (scientific) evidence supports. If I believe there is more, then obviously my natural reason (my head) will not reach it. Perhaps my ‘heart’ is the only portal through which to experience it. If I deny there is more because I decide only to believe that for which there is objective evidence, then my denial itself is not based on objective evidence, but just as much on the heart, though a heart of a different quality. Like my heart just before my grandmother’s funeral. My current belief: We trust what our hearts tell us, what our hearts can honestly bear.

    In any case, this is the dimension in which books like A Christmas Carol can reveal reality. Not as a newspaper report of transcendence but by giving profound expression to the truths the heart (always in partnership with the head) can reach.