Thomas A. Shakely

One of the more frustrating things in the world is the tendency of news media and the scientific community to speak about human beings and of investigations into the brain, cognitive science, etc. in terms of “we did X, man did Y”, as if actions and reactions can tell the story of either Man or Mind — as if they can speak to purpose or meaning, or make judgments on the perennial question of Why?

It’s the tendency to boil down reality to biology, as if, by detailing the processes of chemical and physical reactions in the body, we can infer the reason for that body in the first place, and, more broadly, for the natural world that hosts that body.

John Searle spoke with Reason Magazine in 2000, and in the interview came this gem:

Searle: Behaviorism was the idea that when you do a scientific study of the mind, you don’t actually try to get inside the brain and figure out what’s going on, you just study overt behavior.

Reason: Inputs and outputs?

Searle: Inputs and outputs. And the science of psychology on the behaviorist model was you were going to correlate these stimulus inputs with the behavioral outputs. It’s a ridiculous conception of the mind–the idea is that there’s nothing going on in there, except you have the stimulus input and the behavioral output.

The best comment about behaviorism is the old joke about the two behaviorists after they just had sex. He says to her, “It was great for you, how was it for me?” (Laughter) If behaviorism were right, that ought to make perfectly good sense, because there’s nothing going on in him except his behavior, and she’s in a better position to observe his behavior than he is.

Leon Kass has spoken to the problem of the micro versus macro view of Man:

The science was indeed powerful, but its self-understanding left much to be desired. It knew the human parts in ever-finer detail, but it concerned itself little with the human whole. Medicine, then and now, has no concept of the human being, of the peculiar and remarkable concretion of psyche and soma that makes us that most strange and wonderful among the creatures. Psychiatry, then and even more now, is so little chagrined by its failure to say what the psyche or soul is that it denies its existence altogether. The art of healing does not inquire into what health is, or how to get and keep it: the word “health” does not occur in the index of the leading textbooks of medicine. To judge from the way we measure medical progress, largely in terms of mortality statistics and defeats of deadly diseases, one gets the unsettling impression that the tacit goal of medicine is not health but rather bodily immortality, with every death today regarded as a tragedy that future medical research will prevent.

We live in an age concerned primarily with dialing down with atomistic focus into the functioning of biological life while typically ignoring the larger question of purpose.

When Nicholas Carr published his six page cover story, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic earlier this year, he fired the first serious shot in what must become a central discussion of our generation.

Carr’s assertion is anecdotal and introspective. He’s careful to note in his shot-across-the-bow article that we still “await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition”.

His central point is a compelling one: the internet is re-wiring the way we think and relate to facts, friends, and reality. It may even hold the power to change how we perceive human-ness.

William Deresiewicz made a similarly important point in The Chronicle of Higher Education in January 2009 in The End of Solitude:

And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing “in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures,” “bait[ing our] hooks with darkness.” Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading. The Internet brought text back into a televisual world, but it brought it back on terms dictated by that world — that is, by its remapping of our attention spans. Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude.

Isolation, intimacy, and proximity remain as important now as in the past, but I wonder how actively thought is given to these things by the youngest generation.

Perhaps Deresiewicz asks it best with his opener: “What does the contemporary self want?”

Pulling from Carr’s Atlantic piece:

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

Put another way: are we going to be a people who approach the world with a sort of ruggedness and skepticism informed by an understanding of past and present of a decent depth, or will we be more like sponges, absorbing — but not necessarily processing or placing into a context — minute-to-minute information?

Leon Kass provides greater depth in this respect:

No friend of humanity should trade the accumulated wisdom about human nature and human flourishing for some half-cocked promise to produce a superior human being or human society, never mind a post-human future, before he has taken the trouble to look deeply, with all the help he can get, into the matter of our humanity—what it is, why it matters, and how we can be all that we can be. …

Only a few, a small percentage, of a culture can focus on such questions, on getting into the “matter of our humanity” — an elite, if you will, tasking with the preservation of a culture and its identity.

Solitude, though, is often one of the preconditions for deep thought, and unless we can move beyond a knee-jerk reaction of “change = progress” and a sense of technology as an inherent good, it’s difficult to imagine a return of solitude.

Leon Kass, a noted proponent of liberal education by means of the “Great Books,” delivered the Jefferson Lecture at the National Endowment for the Humanities in May 2009. The following is a series of excerpts from his speech:

On returning to Cambridge, I was nagged by a disparity I could not explain between the uneducated, poor black farmers in Mississippi and many of my privileged, highly educated graduate student friends at Harvard. A man of the left, I had unthinkingly held the Enlightenment view of the close connection between intellectual and moral virtue: education and progress in science and technology would overcome superstition, poverty, and misery, allowing human beings to become at last the morally superior creatures that only nature’s stinginess, religion, and social oppression had kept them from being. Yet in Mississippi I saw people living honorably and with dignity in perilous and meager circumstances, many of them illiterate, but sustained by religion, extended family, and community attachment, and by the pride of honest farming and homemaking. They even seemed to display more integrity, decency, and strength of character, and less self-absorption, vanity, and self-indulgence, than did many of my high-minded Harvard friends who shared my progressive opinions. How could this be?

In summer 1966, my closest friend, Harvey Flaumenhaft, had me read Rousseau’s explosive Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, for which my Mississippi and Harvard experiences had prepared me. Rousseau argues that, pace the Enlightenment, progress in the arts and sciences does not lead to greater virtue. On the contrary, it necessarily produces luxury, augments inequality, debases tastes, softens character, corrupts morals, and weakens patriotism, leading ultimately not to human emancipation but to human servitude.

Rousseau complains that writers and “idle men of letters”—the equivalent of our public intellectuals, not to say professors—subvert decent opinion and corrupt the citizens: “These vain and futile declaimers go everywhere armed with their deadly paradoxes, undermining the foundations of faith and annihilating virtue. They smile disdainfully at the old-fashioned words of fatherland and religion, and devote their talents and philosophy to destroying and debasing all that is sacred among men.” …

No friend of humanity should trade the accumulated wisdom about human nature and human flourishing for some half-cocked promise to produce a superior human being or human society, never mind a post-human future, before he has taken the trouble to look deeply, with all the help he can get, into the matter of our humanity—what it is, why it matters, and how we can be all that we can be. …

Aristotle offers a powerful and still defensible holistic idea of soul as the empowered and empowering “form of a naturally organic body.” “Soul” names the unified powers of aliveness, awareness, action, and appetite that living beings all manifest.

First Things magazine republished last month an article called “How The World Lost Its Story.” Written by Robert W. Jenson, the article originally appeared in October 1993, but it’s still very much relevant today.

The article core’s premise is that the idea of “Western Civilization” has lost a coherent sense of meaning/purpose, either partially or fully as a result of the rise of post modernist thinking. This is weighty stuff, and I hesitate to get into it in a medium designed for brevity and quickness, but I’ll try to split the baby by highlighting the its core ideas.

Jenson’s thesis is laid out with the idea that “story and promise” represent the crux of the relationship between the story of this life (or the order and purpose to be derived from the chaos and randomness of everyday life), and the promise of what’s to come (or church’s place in civilization as articulating certain eternal truths, thus giving reason and cause to our willingness to erect the order and purpose we abide by).

This “story and promise,” he says, is what constituted the notion of “modernity.” Below I’ve excerpted some of the more compelling or question-raising passages:

The self-destruction of modernism can be described basically under two rubrics: story and promise. The question is what the church is now required to do with respect to each. …

… [modernity] has supposed we inhabit what I will call a “narratable world.” Modernity has supposed that the world “out there” is such that stories can be told that are true to it. And modernity has supposed that the reason narratives can be true to the world is that the world somehow “has” its own true story, antecedent to, and enabling of, the stories we tell about ourselves in it.”

On “promise”:

In effect, the church could say to her hearers: “You know that story you think you must be living out in the real world? We are here to tell you about its turning point and outcome.” ….

One of many analogies between postmodernity and dying antiquity—in which the church lived for her most creative period—is that the late antique world also insisted on being a meaningless chaos, and that the church had to save her converts by offering herself as the narratable world within which life could be lived with dramatic coherence. Israel had been the nation that lived a realistic narrative amid nations that lived otherwise; the church offered herself to the gentiles as their Israel. The church so constituted herself in her liturgy.

(Thinking broadly, regard “liturgy” as analogous to culture, or shared ideas, phrases, or observances that make a cohesive civilization possible.)

[Today, many] simply do not apprehend or inhabit a narratable world. Indeed, many do not know that anyone ever did. The reason so many now cannot “find their place” is that they are unaware of the possibility of a kind of world or society that could have such things as places, though they may recite, as a sort of mantra, memorized phrases about “getting my life together” and the like. There are now many who do not and cannot understand their lives as realistic narrative. John Cage or Frank Stella; one of my suburban Minnesota students whose reality is rock music, his penis, and at the very fringes some awareness that to support both of these medical school might be nice; a New York street dude; the pillar of her congregation who one day casually reveals that of course she believes none of it, that her Christianity is a relativistic game that could easily be replaced altogether by some other religion or yoga—all inhabit a world of which no stories can be true.

“Life’s a bitch, then you die,” a friend of mine often wryly jokes (at least, I hope he’s joking). That mentality is what I first thought of when reading the above.

If all of this just pisses you off, or if you’re left feeling overwhelmed, head over to First Things and read the article for yourself, at least to get a sense of a scholarly take on the concept of “post modernity,” regardless of your thoughts on the validity of its propositions.

Related: Did you see or read The Neverending Story when you were small? It’s all about a young boy who’s tasked with saving human imagination in the real world from from an encroaching Nothing, a void, a nihilism of modernity, that is destroying the parallel world of Fantasia in which he fights. (Watch the trailer.)

In reading C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, I came to the chapter entitled “Human Wickedness.” I’ve pulled the bulk of Lewis’s argument:

The second cause [of human wickedness] is the effect of Psychoanalysis on the public mind, and, in particular, the doctrine of repressions and inhibitions.

Whatever these doctrines really mean, the impression they have actually left on most people is that the sense of Shame is a dangerous and mischievous thing. We have laboured to overcome that sense of shrinking, that desire to conceal, which either Nature herself or the tradition of almost all mankind has attached to cowardice, unchastity, falsehood, and envy.

We are told to ‘get things out into the open’, not for the sake of self-humiliation, but on the grounds that these ‘things’ are very natural and we need not be ashamed of them.

But unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one; and even Pagan society has usually recognized ’shamelessness’ as the nadir of the soul.

In trying to extirpate shame we have broken down one of the ramparts of the human spirit, madly exulting in the work as the Trojans exulted when they pulled the Horse into Troy.

I do not know that there is anything to be done but to set about the rebuilding as soon as we can. It is mad work to remove hypocrisy by removing temptation to hypocrisy: the ‘frankness’ of people sunk below shame is a very cheap frankness.

Who comes to mind as possessing shamelessness and that hollow frankness? Disgraced Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Elliot Spitzer’s Ashley Dupree, and Jon Gosselin all come to mind as towering examples of our obsession with “openness” and “frankness” at the expense of any proper sense of shame and civility.

I would argue that shame and guilt, in their proper context (ie – not taken to the extreme sense of, say, The Scarlet Letter’s Hester Prynne), are of great social value in maintaining a balanced culture. Without a sense that certain actions are “just plain wrong,” we become narcissists living in a vacuum (think: cynical politicos, mortgage derivatives traders, the cast of Jersey Shore).

Those feelings of regret and self-loathing are part of what keep us human beings and part of what keep us from becoming monsters.

Related Reading: The Abolition Of Man.

Michael Novak, an American Catholic philosopher, journalist, novelist, author and diplomat recently caught my attention for a newly published book, called No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers.

Mr. Novak offers, I think, compelling commentary on the very dynamic state of religious peoples and the rest, including secular humanists, atheists, etc. I was particularly struck by a particular answer he gave in an interview promoting his new book, where he talks about the coming “end of the secularist age.”

I’ve taken the following excerpt from an interview with First Things which was published at the American Enterprise Institute.

Professor Habermas writes that the events of September 11, 2001, shocked him into recognizing that secularism represents a small island in the midst of a turbulent sea of religion all around the world. Even in the developed world, as in the United States, religion thrives. Certain sectors of European society seem to be an exception. And how long can they hold out?

However this may be, others have noted that secular couples almost everywhere tend to have few children (sometimes none), and thus bring a demographic crisis upon themselves. Further, secular societies seem to enervate the inner self-confidence of whole cultures and make them think that they are unworthy of survival in the face of dynamic, rapidly growing, even violent rivals. In a different vein, secular societies show a pronounced tendency toward moral relativism and have no common means of discriminating moral decadence from “liberation” or distinguishing moral progress from decline. If there is no God, there still remain rational standards. But the question “Why be rational?” gets harder and harder to explain to the wayward.

Judaism and Christianity down through millennia have proved to be adept at generating Great Awakenings in entire cultures. It is not clear that any secular society can do so.

An admirable secular humanism still thrives among us–but it does seem limited only to smallish enclaves. It is difficult to foresee it capturing multitudes. Besides, the examples of those atheist societies that have tried to fashion ceremonies, liturgies, and vast demonstrations (to make atheism discernible to the imagination and sensibility of peoples) are not encouraging. Secular humanism seems better suited to a few strong individuals and to fairly rarefied groups among the elite than to a culture as a whole. It founders on its own perception of the meaninglessness of human life. It offers only the meaning that individuals can put into it–and as easily pull out. [emphasis added]

Once one rejects the possibility for absolutes or certain immutable laws of man, one quickly learns that he has forfeited any intellectual ground for the idea of universal human rights.

Only a Creator — a universal constant — can bestow inalienable rights of life and liberty. Human rights created and bestowed by men alone cannot be guaranteed across all men and all nations.