I was listening to an interview on Shrink Rap Radio today in which the guest, Steven Post, talked about his new book and his belief that there is some guiding, loving intelligence, which communicated with him at various points in his life. He told one story - about his wife praying for $100 one day and minutes later a man gave it to them - as an example of the wonderful synchronicities that occur in life.
I found myself getting very angry. I imagine that the Jews in the concentration camps, the dissidents in the Gulags, the slaves in the plantations and the people on board the hi-jacked planes that flew into the Twin Towers did a fair bit of praying. Were they just not such 'good' people? Or does God pick and choose? Or maybe $100 is OK, but avoiding starvation, beatings, chains and death by terrorists are all a bit tricky for the not-so-omnipotent to handle.
Look, it would be nice to think that good things happen to good people (that's the title of Post's previous book), but it sure suggests that the vast majority of us are very bad indeed.
He also put a great deal of weight on other synchronicities - dreams and phone calls just when he was thinking of someone, that kind of thing. I would suggest that research has adequately explained away such claims to Deepak Chopra-esque mysticism. For example, we remember when we thought of someone and they did call, but not all the times we thought of them and they didn't; we recall the dreams that seemed to foretell the future when something analogous happens afterwards, but forget all the ones that didn't. We can also 'create' these kind of moments: if I've just read about falcons and I see a falcon straight after, there's likely no magic - it's just that instead of my unconscious disregarding that bird, it highlights it. Like how you see hundreds of red Citroens as soon as you decide to buy one: they become salient and the unconscious tends to flag them up. It's just how our minds work.
For that reason, as I have said before, it's worth being 'on the look out' for good things. If the unconscious is encouraged to see them as salient, it's likely one will have more moments of pleasure than one would have if 'on the lookout' for the negatives. But it's psychology, not parapsychology.
I am sceptical of the desire to make a story out of life - seeing my accident, say, as 'good for me' in some way because if it hadn't happened I might not have listened to so many audiobooks on psychology and might not have got interested in philosophy and might not have applied to do a Masters. Sure, I can create that story, but why? Oh, I know why: we are pattern-making, story-creating creatures who want to make sense of the world. Thing is, I think the world is largely contingent and out of our control. All we can do is the best we can given uncertainty and chance, but it makes us feel better to believe that either we are self-created forces or that some guiding hand is leading us to nirvana.
Still, in the case of Post, he has done a great deal of good work and to that extent I respect him. In addition, he's a bioethicist and bioethics is one of the subject areas I will be studying. Bioethics is interdisciplinary - embracing medicine and law, sociology and literary studies, psychology and politics as well as philosophy, with views from religious perspectives more evident than in other realms of ethics. As many of the issues relate to life and death, autonomy and identity, community and family, it's valid that bioethics has this scope. The abstract concept of the individual becomes a body in a society, bound by varying and often conflicting constraints. This is a realm where love and money, need and hope, science and desire all play their part.
When considering Karl Jaspers yesterday, I quoted his view that he is not free alone but that freedom is granted by others too being free - which Simone De Beauvoir also maintained. To that extent, I agree with Post's view that connections between us count. It's why I am drawn to the more 'relational' sense of identity manifested in 'intimacy' rather than 'integrity' cultures. If we see ourselves as, in a sense, overlapping with others, so that their interests, needs and vulnerabilities are also ours, then our inclination will be to bear them in mind in making decisions and taking actions.
It seems to me that society would run more smoothly if, instead of the focus on our individual rights we were more focused on the overlapping rights of our fellow citizens. I have considered this before when looking at John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant. One could see it as rights inevitably and by their very nature also imposing upon us duties and obligations. In abstract terms, this can get complicated - we might want to enumerate the exact duties in given situations, taking a rather legalistic approach to the matter. But we could also grow into acting this way more intuitively - through sensitivity, tact, interstanding; through love, trust*, a sense of 'thou' - by virtue of holding true to a relational concept of the self.
We don't need a concept of divine or universal loving intelligence - which, after all, it seems brutal, cruel, to believe in given all the atrocities to countless millions of living things over the course of our planet's history. And how do you make rationalist non-spiritual people like me believe in something so manifestly, egregiously wrong? Besides which, the belief that one is 'guided by' some external intelligence could as much lead one to act inhumanely as beneficently. I mean, what if one has a dream about purifying the Fatherland or creating a communist utopia?
What we need, instead, is a means of inculcating values that everyone can believe in. And I don't know how. Of course I don't. I suppose Post would say, 'I do! You see, it has led me to a position where I can help people, and do help people! It works! Believe in this and we will all be better off!' Maybe he's right. But I just can't put faith in a myth even if it's a benevolent myth. I can't lose what I value most about myself - reason - even for such a good cause. I think that's a valid response. It's reason that says, 'Hold on a minute - those zero-hours workers getting infected with Covid because they need the cash don't need our prayers: they need worker's rights, sick pay and a universal basic income!'
Universal love is, of course, a lovely idea. But justice demands more than love as we humans seem to manifest it, with its partiality and prejudice. Were we able to love all others equally, the world might be better but our individual lives might be less rich. For part of what does make life worth living is experiencing, even occasionally, the sense that someone regards us as uniquely precious. Here I concur with Post to the extent that only a divine or a divine spirit, could do that for all of us. And as I can't believe in a dream, and as I don't believe that we can rely on some unfounded imagining of spirit and soul. I have to say that love is not enough.
Justice demands action. And action means decisions that are evidence-based, fitted to the reality of the situation and able to be put into effect. Real problems need real solutions: they take thought, sweat and work. Our thought, our sweat and our work. Guided by research and reason and the collaborative insights of and the compassionate concern for the whole community, the whole earthling community.
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