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LA Day of Dance Celebration

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As a special birthday bonus, yesterday I attended the Day of Dance celebration down in at the Civic Arts Center in LA.

I came planning to participate in the workshops, and managed to make it through the “warm-up” routine, but it was hot, hot, hot. The performers were up on a covered stage, and they were complaining. The crowd had only an artsy fabric shade cover, and only about a third were able to take advantage of its shelter.

So I quickly found myself standing in the shadows at the front of the Music Center. As for the rest – they were not about to be deterred. LA apparently has a growing dance movement. Many of the attendees were young people and their parents. The early workshops focused on dance routines that had been posted on the internet, and the personal flair in each interpretation was a joy to watch.

I was expecting to have fun and be inspired, but dance is an ancient practice. As the event rolled into the second routine, the fitful breeze wasn’t keeping me cool, even in the shadows. My thoughts wandered up into the heat. Answering back came a surprised gratitude, and then a deep sorrow. People have always danced this way, in celebration of the light. It didn’t want to oppress them. The sorrow spread, and began to encompass the flora and fauna. This wasn’t the way it was meant to be.

The early morning activities were meant to be accessible. There wasn’t anything done by the performers that I didn’t think that I could do myself, and the attendees were involved in an enthusiastic celebration. I finally broke away at 12:30 for lunch, and when I came back, the tone became a little more serious. The Australian Special Olympics dance team performed, and the music and movement conveyed clearly the struggle and pride they have in achieving independence. But the capstone of the event, for me, was the performance by the Jacob Jones Company. The accompaniment was a meditation of the nature of time. I found myself anchored in this nexus of energy, the celebration of the dance tying the past together with the future. When the dancers left the stage, I had the feeling that the audience had been reduced to humble awe by the power of their evocation.

The Civic Arts Center is conducting a series of Friday dance celebrations this summer. I plan on attending as I am able. For those of you in LA: Hope to encounter you there!

Warriors and Healers

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In The Soul Comes First, I interpret the Bible as the story of the investment made by unconditional love to organize matter with the goal of allowing spirit to purge itself of selfishness. That process is manifested in all of the physical processes of this reality, spanning history from stellar evolution to the knowledge economy.

The apparent contradiction is that these processes appear superficially to reward selfishness. The most impressive lights in the sky are the giant stars. It is the massive dinosaurs that capture our attention as the pinnacle of pre-human history. And civilizations are recognized for the geographical extent that allows them to acquire resources to support promotion of their culture, with limited weight given to the degree to which the benefits of power were distributed to the common citizen.

The antidote to selfishness is rapid energetic collapse. The stellar giant, in a fraction of the time allotted to its lesser peers, exhausts its nuclear fuel and collapses, ejecting its hoarded mass in a supernova that populates the heavens with heavy elements that become the seeds of planets. While the dinosaurs (and other giant life-forms) are prolific consumers of biomass, the biophysics of large life-forms ensures that they are vulnerable to ecological stresses, among which include the global effects of asteroid impacts and ash spewed from volcanic vents. In human history, great civilizations collapse when vulnerable urban populations face the collapse of agricultural and energy supplies, whether due to the accumulation of clay on irrigated land, loss of soil following destruction of natural flora, or the burning of energy stored in biomass faster than the rate of replenishment.

Humanity has been granted two great boons that allow it the opportunity to escape this course. The first is the mammalian amygdala, which includes among its affects social bonding that causes us to mourn the loss of our intimates. The second is the intelligence that allows us to understand causation, and thus to manage our lives to minimize painful experiences, extending to the loss of our intimates.

In The Empathic Civilization, Jeremy Rifkin posits the possibility of a transition from predatory consumption to empathic sustainability. Rifkin catalogs the technological capabilities that make the latter possible: global information systems that expand the geographical reach of our intimacy, materials science and engineering that will allow us to tap into reusable sources of energy, and modelling methods that will allow us to design economic systems that are sustainable given the known limits of raw material supplies.

In my experience, the manifestation of that potential collides in the tension between the warrior and the healer. As I explain below, these are behaviors that both support the transition to sustainability but that often contradict each other’s expression.

In the early stages of cultural development, the natural context is dominated by predators. Survival of a species lacking either prolific breeding or natural armaments requires tools that can be used to defend against predation. Naturally, these same tools, sufficient to protect against species that survive by destruction of weaker animals, empower the wielders to become predators themselves. As technology advances, the destructiveness of weapons makes organization of their deployment a source of social power. There is no great civilization in human history whose origins cannot be traced either to a monopoly on weapons technology or to superior military organization.

The warrior culture is a domestication of the primitive predatory impulse with the goal of protecting access to the resources required to sustain civilization. A true manifestation of this culture dates only to the Cold War era, when military planners in the West realized that generalized conflict, always guaranteed to produce a loser, no longer even produced a winner. Furthermore, the complexity of modern weapons systems ensures that maintaining and deploying military dominance requires the involvement of a citizenry firmly committed to the survival of the society. In fact, while the warrior is often the recipient of sophisticated training in the use of destructive force, they rarely possess the intellectual skills to design and manufacture modern weapons. Thus the Cold War was not just a struggle over the efficacy of planned vs. liberal economies. It was also proof that in the modern military-industrial economies, nations that turn military force against their citizens (tyrannies) cannot compete with nations that cultivate a warrior class.

The problem with this social contract is that it preserves our focus on the dominant threat to the stability of civilizations – homo sapiens sapiens itself. It simply ensures that our predatory impulses remain focused on those parts of the ecosystem that lack political representation. Thus, while Europe responds to Russian adventurism in Georgia and the Ukraine by seeking alternative supplies of fossil fuel, still the world failed to control effectively carbon dioxide emissions that some predicted (as far back as 1950) would undermine ecological sustainability all across the globe (much as did the asteroid that triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs). Even now, most of the larger wild species have been decimated, being replaced by domesticated herds.

As a result, we are faced with a future that is going to require extensive investment in healing of broken ecologies. This requires another huge leap in human culture. The psychological force that motivates the healer is empathy, or compassion.

Working ecosystems are enormously complex. The biogeneticists struggle even to control the metabolism of the cyanobacteria in flooded iron mines. The biochemistry that leads to cyanide production has a multitude of pathways – remove one protein catalyst and another pathway springs up in its place. The only means of control appears to be annihilation – make the environment so poisonous that even bacteria cannot survive. But that would be to introduce poisons to the environment worse even than cyanide.

Given this overwhelming Rube-Goldbergesque complexity, accreted through billenia of random trial and error, the only means of assessing the wellness of an ecosystem is to engage spiritually with a sense of its workingness.

The fundamental disconnect is that, while western economies proclaim the domestication of war, the forces that drive conflict – scarcity of resources that make the daily lives of most humans a desperate search for basic necessities – have not been resolved. Desperate people adopt predatory behaviors, stealing sustenance from one another, and the surviving communities celebrate the strength of the predator. This is visible in Russian idolization of Vladimir Putin, and in lionization of third-world potentates all across the globe.

In the framework that I have defined, we cannot escape the reality that the workingness of the ecosystems that sustain human life are irretrievably broken. This spawns predators, which the warriors of the West beat down in order to secure access to resources needed to sustain our unstable societies. But the healer recognizes that the problem is one of sustainability, and the only way to ensure peace, over the long term, is either to annihilate the exploited populations (a la the Third Reich) or provide them the resources to create a sustainable society.

Of course, the warrior looks at the latter proposal and says: “But we just finished destroying this threat, and now you want to go and stand them on their feet and give them the power to attack us again? Do you understand how many of us have surrendered our futures to protecting you? And you want to do what?”

And of course the healer says: “But have you been to see these people? How can you ignore their suffering?”

In America, to this point the warriors have been given priority. The era since the Vietnam War has seen a steady erosion of the influence of the Department of State in deference to the Department of Defense. This slide was reversed only recently by the Obama Administration. There is some justification for allowing the leaders of those sacrificed in military conflict to control the adventurism of inexperienced civilians. While Muslim extremists make much of the revelation that the Bush Administration asked military planners to chart the conquest of the tyrannies of the Middle East from Iran to Libya, my understanding is that the carefully couched response was, in effect, “Are your out of your fucking minds?!?”

While I celebrate the ascendancy of economic containment over military conflict, I attend still the creation of institutions that extend that practice to cultures that exploit ecosystems. It is only then that healers will have the opportunity to address the root cause of predatory behavior, and thereby justify the reallocation of resources from military competition to cultural development. Predation is not the only urge that destabilizes ecosystems – so too does procreation. It is only when the vast majority of humanity has the psychological strength to subject all such urges to rational control will the ultimate goal of global sustainability be secured, and the healers be able to succeed in their essential work.

Until then, warriors, please recognize that it is for your children that healers assume these risks. And healers, recognizes that the warrior’s anxiety has a rational basis.

Purging Psychopathy

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When I was on travel in Portland a little over a year ago, I encountered a woman in recovery from an abusive relationship. As she described it, the most terrifying part of the experience was being abandoned by her family and friends.

While the most visible of our psychopaths seek temporal power, I think that this evidence confuses our response to them as personalities. The mechanisms of temporal power are useful only in that they can be used to induce fear in the victim. The victim, believing that there is no escape from their prison, ultimately surrenders their soul to be infected by the psychopath.

I have myself felt abandoned on more than one occasion. The ties of love, unfortunately, are a two-way street. Through them comes solace, but if we aren’t strong enough to keep the predator out, venom can flow back the other way. Often, it is those who have been most secure in their relationship that provide the most productive target to the predator. They lack defensive skills, and their personality is deeply embedded in a rich field of supportive relationships. The lady in Portland was ostracized by those seeking to protect themselves. In more primitive societies, the victim of rape might be “put out of her misery.” (The movie “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” explored this in a more contemporary context.)

Fear is an incredibly effective tool for acquisition of temporal power. Apart from certain privileged elites, almost every human society has been dominated by this dynamic. Even where established, the fragility of that privilege is evidenced by the tens of millions of people displaced by insurrections around the world. Guerrilla armies that do not seek to establish and defend fixed boundaries are almost impossible to control (witness IS, al Qaeda and the Boko Haram).

So how is the religious avatar to deal with this situation? The approach advocated by most is to “Render unto Caesar.” They surrender temporal power and gather to themselves the “weary and burdened,” those beneath the notice of fattened predators. But as that cohort grows, sooner or later the predators are enticed to feast on the spirits of the protected community. The avatar is then confronted with the reality that his charges are not strong enough to keep the predators out.

The challenge is faced by any individual seeking to sustain a blessed community, even if that be only a family or kindergarten classroom. This has been my challenge over the last twenty years. For a long time, I fought against the predators that surround me. They feel the power of my mind and the strength of the loving associations that I evolve through my writing, dancing and meditation. They create conflict in my life and then plead innocence as I fight back against their influence.

For the last seven years, I have woken up every night in the wee hours of the morning to take up consideration of this dialectic – the dialectic of “blame the victim” that becomes so convincing as the history of a relationship with a psychopath evolves. The psychopath focuses on the wrongs that have been done to them in the recent past, attempting to bury the seeds of the evolution of conflict behind a psychic wall. They use that wall to fence out the beloved community, to suck away the energy that we have accumulated through loving.

So two nights ago I took up a different tack: I simply announced, “I’m really tired of thinking about you.” I listened to praise music as a means of re-affirming the principles that guide my loving relationships, and I pushed methodically against the massed predatory presence. I forced them to the outside of my mind, and re-established the connections to my beloved community. When the poison began to seep back in, I visualized the arrival of guardians to turn the tables on them.

And last night, for the first time in seven years, I slept peacefully.

Planning Your Mid-Life Crisis

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To be blessed is to receive gifts before knowing that they are needed. I’ve survived several mid-life crises thanks to wisdom I received from Delorese Ambrose back in my mid-forties.

Ambrose wasn’t speaking about mid-life crisis, although the context may have warranted it. My employer, a large national laboratory, had discovered that scientists might be motivated to master project management, but very few of them mastered human relations. During an era of declining budgets for basic science and a reduced role for nuclear weapons in national security, people needed to learn how to work together so that new missions could evolve.

Ambrose came in as a management consultant, which in part involves providing an organization with a framework to facilitate selection and support of leaders. In a plenary session, Ambrose spoke about the cycle of power. Her model had six stages, each stage involving a ground-breaking shift in perspective that made it almost impossible for people at one stage to understand the behaviors and priorities of those at the next. In many respects, the structure echoed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but the cycle as Ambrose presented it illustrated the dependencies of those at the upper reaches on the strength and success of those below.

When I sent Ambrose an e-mail, I was given to rue that I had passed the “sexy” part of the arc she described. The cycle begins without power, an existence in which almost every waking moment is concerned with the basics of survival. It ends with wisdom, in which enormous influence is contingent upon the continued success and good will of the community we serve, and thus power again is (paradoxically) elusive. The “sexy” stage – the stage at which we can be assured of getting things done – is at the half-way point of personal achievement.

Achievement evolves from association when our peers recognize that we have unique skills and traits that can be supplemented to create a competitive advantage for the community. This is the first true stage of leadership, and the leader often believes that it is due to their initiative that the organization succeeds. But the reality is more subtle. Success grows from the meshing of behaviors acquired through years of adaptation and compensation. The uniqueness of the leader’s innovative drive requires that others adapt that urge to the rest of society. In that process, they gain unique insights of their own, and become qualified to take their own turn in the sun.

When that time ripens, the leader feels abandoned. I observed several people wandering through this period of their lives, and the experiences were terrifying. It is to watch an individual in the prime of life, at the full height of their powers, watching the end of a life that they have struggled valiantly to obtain. It is like dying, and some will go so far as to destroy others in their attempts to avoid the inevitable. Among our commercial captains are those that are masters of this art, methodically exploiting middle layers of management in order to sustain reputation and position.

The end, when it comes against such resistance, is crushing. The individual is left without support or purpose. Those that studied their methods no longer need them. Lee Iaccoca was inspired to run for president while thus adrift, wandering the halls of his mansion. My mother spoke of retired businessmen who, working as fundraisers for the American Cancer Society, had never learned to book their own travel.

The exit from this stage is self-knowledge. It is, ultimately, the realization that it wasn’t simply the things that we did that brought us success. It was rather our ability to adapt to the constraints of success. When first mounting the ladder of achievements, that process happens organically. The changes in ourselves occur one step at a time as needs are presented. We often fail to recognize that those changes were indeed choices. We could have chosen to take that second honeymoon, rather than flying to Singapore to open a new market. We could have coached the little league team, rather than staying late in the lab to perfect a new fuel mixture. While these choices may have been formed under pressure, our decision to respond and adapt to those pressures was our choice, and the outcomes reflected our capacity to control ourselves.

Self-awareness is a taking stock of who we are, with the purpose of preparing ourselves to become the person that we want to become. From that place we enter the last two stages on the path of power. Given that we have complete control over ourselves, what is it that we want to do? What purpose do we wish to serve? And once we have entrained a community in the wake of our purpose, they then turn to us for wisdom.

So my advice to those entering mid-life crisis is, “don’t fight it.” Yes, resist it. Get as much as you can for your achievements. Allow people the time to envision a future without you. Force those that replace you to become as good as they can be.

But attend also liberation from the tedious requirements of a life that chose you into a life that you have chosen. Take advantage of the good will that surrounds you to ask “What moments with me were most inspiring to you?” Trace the evolution of those moments to recognize the strength of the choices you have made. Prepare yourself to enter again into the furnace of self-creation to rediscover and reclaim all the passions and dreams that were surrendered so that others could share in your success.

But for heaven’s sake, don’t succumb to the sad spectacle of trying to repeat your unreflective youth!

It’s in the Cards

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Father’s Day and the Summer Solstice coincided for me down at Ecstatic Dance LA on Sunday. My devotion to that practice is encapsulated in this wisdom from Devdutt Patnaik, from Seven Secrets of Shiva:

Lord Shiva taught through dance because words are too literal to capture the essence of the intangible nirguna. One needs symbols that dance is best able to communicate. A book occupies space but not time, a discourse occupies time but not space, a dance occupies both space and time.

The workshop was an introduction to sensual Salsa that was focused with a declaration of spiritual intention. We were asked to choose from a deck of the feminine avatars. I waited, torn, until the other participants had settled back to their mats. Then a card called clearly to me, and I found myself holding “Isolt”:

Undying Love: No matter the situation, the love that you share is eternal.

When I read it to the facilitator, all she had to offer was “Thank-you.”

From that moment of clarity, the dance unfolded into the usual confusion and chaos. Whether the sexy temptress that tried to attach me to her sister, any of five young ladies crying out for love in exchange for passion, or the woman that reminded me of the lost love I offered to Persephone’s manifestation, I found myself wondering why it is so hard for women to understand that the power that surrounds me is not intended to make people feel good, but rather to make them stronger. That became clear in my interaction with Atasiea – after we finished rolling over each other on the floor, I touched his crown and suggested timidly “Say hello to my little friends.” With their affirmation, I then knelt to take his skull in my hands and ordered, “Now say hello to my bigger friends,” as I raised his mind to the sky. Trying to make certain that he didn’t get detached, I pressed my thumbs into his palms and feet and pulled on his arms, stretching him to his full extent so that they might clearly apprehend the limits of his body.

So it was only at the end that I was able to refocus. As we sat in a circle, each affirming in turn the joys found in the dance and the glory of the light, I hesitated before offering:

I came here today to plead with the light. To plead with it to be gentle with us. To be gentle with us through the summer and winter. To be gentle with all the living things.

A terrible sorrow filled me then. While Robin took the time to say that he liked what I had said, it is clear that we haven’t learned our lesson yet. It will unfold as it must.

California Seeks New Answers in Drought Struggle

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Governor “Moonbeam” Brown announced that he would tap the skills of former Governor Davis to lead the state’s drought initiatives. Waiting at the State Capitol for an Uber connection, Brown enthused that the state needed a “Gray Water Czar.”

This blogger has obtained papers outlining the nascent strategy. In a “farms for schools” swap, teachers unions have agreed to convince students to shave their heads. The schools would be credited with 15 gallons of water per bald student per day, reflecting both the water saved in the shower and the decreased chemical load on treatment facilities. These credits would be traded on a state-wide water exchange to raise money for education.

Davis and his advisors, observing the success of the California Raisins and Dairy Cow marketing campaigns, have licensed the “Cabbage Patch Kids” trademark and reserved the #BaldEagles hashtag for shaming of non-participants. Recognizing that more extreme measures may be necessary if the drought conditions prevail as the children age, the Czar’s office has entered into negotiations for the rights to the “Arid Extra Dry” trademark and is planning to register “Seche Pistols.”

In related news, in the St. Louis area, former energy traders have pooled their resources to fund a water exchange. In honor of the profit potential created by California’s two most famous governors – one famously libertarian and the other famously forward-thinking – the concern will be called “MoRon.”

Will the Pope Speak for Life?

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The Republican climate-change deniers were busy this week pre-empting the expected declaration by Pope Francis that responding to global climate change is a moral necessity. The foundation of their argument was that the Pope is not a scientist, and he should leave scientific matters up to those that understand the issues.

But is that the authority upon which the Pope Francis will issue his declaration? I certainly hope not. I think that the Pope should boldly speak for God, because in my meditations on this matter, it is clear where God stands on the issue.

To establish the scriptural basis for this assertion, I re-iterate the Book of Revelation. God sits on his throne surrounded by the twenty-four principal angels (in whose image we are made). In one of the most beautiful passages of the Bible, John describes (NIV Rev.4:9-11)

Whenever the living creatures give glory, honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne and who lives for ever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down before him who sits on the throne, and worship him who lives forever and ever. They lay down their crowns before the throne and say:

“You are worthy, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they were created,
and have their being.”

What this is telling us is that the virtues of the angels are expressed and tied to life on earth. When life flourishes, the joy of its expression flows up through the angels to God. This is not just the joy of humanity, but the joy of all forms of life. The power of that gratitude is enough to force the angels to surrender their sovereign independence in deference to unconditional love.

But it is not limited thus. If joy and thanks is transmitted, so too must pain. I have felt this pain, a great crying out from the heart of life as it succumbs everywhere to humanity’s merciless exploitation of the bounty of the earth. Reading this passage, can anyone doubt that God would not hear and heed that grieving?

Pope Francis does not need the authority of science to speak out on this issue. That’s too bad for those who have purchased “scientific” opinions. No, if Pope Francis speaks, he will speak with religious authority, the authority of a true representative of God on earth. He will speak for all of Life. He will speak the truth of God’s anguish for the hypocrisy of those that claim to speak in his name while carelessly murdering his creation.

Capitalism: Friend or Foe

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This is a response to Kiss Me On a Burning Barricade and other recent post at Gods and Radicals. I do sympathize very much with the intentions and energy of this forum. I would just hope to see it focused more precisely on human behavior, rather than abstract ideology.

A speaker at a recent conference exhorted liberals to reclaim Adam Smith, whose concerns regarding abuse of workers under the system of capital have been ignored by the “Greed is Good” and “Invisible Hand” libertarians that took over the Republican Party during the Reagan era. Smith saw capitalism as simply the use of wealth to invest in technology that would amplify the effects of labor. It was this process that finally overturned Malthusian poverty (see The Grand Pursuit) because while the cost paid per shirt went down, the cost of a shirt fell even faster.

Under your definition of productivity, the core problem in the situation that you describe is psychopathy, which is subtle and seductive and has infected many of our institutions. In Smith’s work, this is articulated as the problem of the Commons: well-meaning people create value for one another, accumulate wealth, and then the psychopaths come in and steal it from them.

For example, the sleepy Savings and Loan industry of the ’60s and ’70s allowed the middle class to pay itself interest at 6% while borrowing at 7%. Reagan deregulated the industry, allowing raiders to take the assets it had accumulated and transfer them to high-risk instruments. Now the middle class borrows at 18% and gets interest on deposits of 0.2%.

Regarding the specific situation you outline, there is a movement among the restaurant workers to establish humane working conditions in an industry that exploits mercilessly. Among the industry’s crimes include lobbying against a general working wage increase in order to protect an extremely low minimum wage for their industry. As agitators document, in many states the tips we leave are in fact the bulk of the worker’s wage.

Abstracting from Smith, the theory of Capitalism and productivity is a means for organizing information about economic activity, including work practices. While proponents of capitalism cite the benefits in increasing productivity, the information they gather can also be used to identify psychopathic behavior. The reason that you have the numbers to criticize the workplace practice is because of that theory. Don’t blame the messenger – attack the root cause.

Terrorism: The Use of Pseudo-Sociology to Foment Cultural Hostility

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One of the lynchpins of the Third Reich was the “science” of eugenics. The conflation of genetics and culture justified an organized assault on disadvantaged minorities that spread to those that spoke out against their annihilation.

I find it hard to escape this precedent in reading Kenneth Krause’s “Religion, Violence and Terrorism” (Skeptic Vol 20, No.1, pp 48-56). The primary defect of Krause’s analysis is to reason backwards from his conclusion, which is militantly anti-religious. This leads to pseudo-sociological analysis that ignores the historical context that inflames conflict between the Muslim world and the West. Moderating those passions is going to require analysis that is both better and more honest than Krause presents.

For example, on page 49, Krause advances David Eller’s theory of violence as a basis for an argument that religion contains all the characteristics that foment violence. However, Krause fails to notice that the characteristics of religion are generically characteristics that cause believers to “expand both the scope and scale of their activities.” In my reading of history, that has included much that must be upheld as good, such as caring for the disadvantaged and speaking out against injustice all over the world.

What matters, then, is what religious leaders actually teach their followers, and whether scripture provides a sound basis for exposing immoral teaching. In substantiating his opinions (pp. 50-52) regarding the uniquely perverse nature of the traditions of Abraham, Krause cherry-picks from the most objectionable passages, failing to recognize that the exhortations he decries, when implemented methodically, are reported in scripture to have resulted in the destruction of the community of believers. Applying the discipline of anthropology, honest treatment of the religious edicts of the Old Testament would also recognize numerous occasions on which God decried the extent to which he suffered from the perfidy of the religious and political elites. This should be taken, by the mature reader, as an indication that human political ambitions corrupted the practice of the religion, which obviously would best be implemented by subordinating scripture to political ends. This is known to have occurred in documented history – so how could we not expect it to have occurred when the elites had complete control of the holy word?

Finally, Krause avoids the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, who overthrew the religious justification for violence and eviscerated all dualistic systems of judgment (not only “good and evil”, but all legal codes that purport to categorize us as “guilty” or “innocent”) with edicts that we are to treat every interaction with people as an opportunity to create strength in them. Jesus’s exhortations reiterate the wisdom of the judgment upon Cain: our Darwinian heritage makes moral conduct difficult. Rather than destroying those that fail, we should give them the opportunity to pass on the lessons they have learned.

In summary, Krause’s scriptural analysis of the traditions of Abraham suffers terminally from confirmation bias. He seeks out passages that support his thesis, and ignores all others. Worse, he advances his selections and interpretations as typical dogma, when in fact I have never heard these passages used as moral guidance in any American church, synagogue or mosque. At least in the developed world, the religious have moved on. So should Krause.

The remainder of the article presents survey data that substantiates the oppressive opinions of the populations of largely Muslim nations. The glaring defect of this study is its failure to consider other factors that might contribute to the attitudes expressed by the sampled population. For example, at the recent Skeptics Conference, Ian Morris noted that foraging societies tolerate violence to a far greater degree than do fossil-fuel cultures. Islam is the religion of the poor: many of the nations in the survey data lived at or near foraging levels until last century. That lifestyle was obliterated when a large number of these nations were granted enormous oil wealth, which has given their monarchical elites the means to propagate their social codes in an attempt to secure stability in the face of sophisticated social critiques brought back by youth educated in Western universities. We should not be surprised that these nations, granted sudden and enormous wealth, should use it to propagate their social standards. That includes, as happened during the Spanish Inquisition, support for religious “scholars” willing to corrupt scripture to justify violent oppression (Wahabbism, which foments the most virulent extremism, is a recent construction of the Saudi monarchy). I would argue that the failure to consider this and other social factors (such as the organized attempt by Western-educated elites to uproot Muslim culture in the 20th century) leaves readers of Krause’s article vulnerable to the classic misattribution of “correlation as causation.”

My disappointment is that this shoddy piece of analysis was published by an organization that claims to promote science.

The Moral Arc

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As a scientist and mystic, I am frustrated with the conflict that divides the scientific materialists from the Biblical literalists. Both camps contain people that are well-meaning who tend to focus on the defects in the world-view of their disputants, rather than considering the good that can be done by joining forces.

When I first framed this debate at everdeepening.org, I celebrated three great threads of human thought: science, which is concerned with creating languages that accurately model objective reality; philosophy, which refines language to ensure that we understand one another; and spirituality, which is concerned with the negotiation of the boundaries between the I and the we (encompassing politics as well as religion). I have argued here that science can explain spiritual experience, but we cannot avail ourselves of its predictive powers to control spiritual growth. We simply cannot establish initial conditions without mutilating the personality that we would like to study. As a result, moral growth is unavoidably consensual.
The Moral Arc
Looking at the moral liberation of humanity from that perspective, with a balance between material and spiritual experience, I summarize our moral growth in the figure. We began as animals, completely amoral creatures. This is to say that morality was not initially a consideration of our existence: we simply did what needed to be done to survive. As relative newcomers on the spiritual scene, the weight of mammalian behavior patterns overwhelmed rational analysis. The exit strategy towards moral discourse was monotheism: a cold and callous rejection of all spiritual associations that were not wholly human in their origin.

Was this a clean process? No, it was a bootstrap process (witness the Bible). People exhibiting animalistic behaviors had to learn painfully from experience the consequences of failing to think carefully about the consequences to others of our actions. They had to develop languages to support moral analysis (philosophy), and they had to form communities willing to surrender resources to those pursuing that study. The Bible is best understood as one culture’s experience of that growth.

The rise of moral philosophy that culminated with Jesus of Nazareth asserts that Unconditional Love, which is the divine presence, propels our ascent. In part, it is because the contract is that the moral analyst must commit himself to the service of others.

Not everyone can master the nuances of moral discourse. What the faithful can do instead as moral actors is to invest their hearts and souls in caring for the world. There is no social system that can guarantee that investment – in fact, most of our social structures tend to consolidate the gains of those that abuse the contract. Only by reliance upon a divine external source can the less clever be ensured that their investment in moral conduct will be made good. Does this presence actually exist? Well, that is a matter of faith and personal experience (see the closing paragraph).

The difficulty in modern moral discourse is that the power of science outraced our philosophy. The world is changing rapidly around us, and most of humanity is still mired in amoral patterns of behavior. The power of science is often unleashed with terribly destructive consequences. This creates fear in the faithful that the institutions that safeguard our spirituality will be destroyed.

The counter of the scientist is to reject spirituality in favor of pure rationality (top of the diagram). What they seem not to understand is that most of humanity is not capable of participating in the discourse under those terms, but requires the deep psychological immersion of religion to substantiate trust in the mysteries tended by the intellectual elites. The faithful can only judge the trustworthiness of that elite by their pronouncements. Words like “stupid”, “sheep”, and “irrational” obviously will be interpreted as inconsistent with reliable moral stewardship, and tend to push the faithful into the arms of sociopaths that promise to protect them (as if that were possible, given the problems that we have mounted up against ourselves).

My experience is that economic exchange exploits our strengths and exacerbates our weaknesses. Obviously, it is in the interest of intellectuals to trumpet and enhance their virtues. But what I find, with Hume, is that spiritual engagement with such people is often hollow in the heart. The substitution of science for monotheism elevates rationality without replacing the guarantee of moral stewardship. In my own experience, that guarantee takes this form: when my heart is ready to break under the burden of the pain in the world, I open it a little wider and a great flood of love rushes through. I know that power is not mine.