THE MONTREAL REVIEW

BOOKS, ART, AND CULTURE

JULY/AUGUST 2021

Copyright © 2021 The Montreal Review, All rights reserved.

www.themontrealreview.com

Faith, Understanding, Service

Dear reader, The Montreal Review needs your support to continue publishing and expand the scope of its work. We rely entirely on the financial support of readers and friends. You can donate online at www.themontrealreview.com (PayPal/Credit card) or by cheque. Our mailing address is:

The Montreal Review

5775-406 Wilderton Avenue,

Montreal, Quebec

H3S 2V7

Canada

e-mail: themontrealreview@gmail.com

TOLSTOY: “CAIUS IS MORTAL”

THE TWO MIND HYPOTHESIS

PRIMO LEVI'S COSMOS

FOUR POEMS

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REHABILITATION OF THE HUMAN RACE THROUGH UNDERSTANDING THE HUMAN CONDITION

BETWEEN UTOPIA AND ESCAPE

PIETY AND VIRTUE IN EARLY ISLAM

OUR LONGSTANDING LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH VACCINES

THE INVISIBLE ENEMY: JAMES JONES AND THE POLITICS OF GRIEF

IN THE STOMACH OF A TERMITE

REINHOLD NIEBUHR AND THE SCANDAL OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

THE LONG FUTURE OF HUMANITY

IN OUR WESTERN WORLD, NOTHING NEW

INTERVIEW WITH JOEL BURCAT, AUTHOR OF 2021 ENVIRONMENTAL THRILLER AMID RAGE

SHORT STORY: INVAIATURA

ALEXSANDR SOLZHENITSYN: NOBEL LECTURE IN LITERATURE 1970

TOLSTOY: “CAIUS IS MORTAL”

***

By Victor H. Brombert

***

MUSINGS ON MORTALITY: FROM TOLSTOY TO PRIMO LEVI

by Victor Brombert

(University of Chicago Press, 2013)

A Common Law

Does Tolstoy, in his late years, load the dice for the sake of teaching a moral lesson? Does he leave room for any ambivalence, for any genuine irony? Edward Wasiolek reported years ago that his students, fed on Henry James’s belief that reality had myriad forms, used to complain that Tolstoy’s famous novella The Death of Ivan Ilych was arbitrary, preachy, painfully lacking in ambiguity and “levels of meaning.”

The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886) is in fact deceptively simple. Written years after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, this powerful narrative about dying and death is remarkable for its brevity, its succinctness, its ordinariness. The narrator himself comments on this apparent banality at the beginning of the story: “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary, and therefore most terrible.” The tragic dimension of this work is thus from the outset attributed to a very common life experience. The title itself provides obvious signals: “Ivan Ilych.” It is hard to imagine a more unremarkable first name and patronymic. It is like calling the protagonist John Smith or Everyman. And nothing could be more common or widespread than death, the first substantive of the title, a word that in Russian comes bluntly without a definite article, a reminder of a stark and generalized human condition, so generalized indeed as to exclude uniqueness.

All of us, Tolstoy might say, cherish the illusion that we are unique. Ivan Ilych recalls that in school he had learned from a textbook the syllogistic formula “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal.” But what logically applied to Caius and to all the Caiuses of this world did not apply to him. He was special, after all—or so he had felt until now. He was not Caius; he was Ivan, or Vanya, as his mother used to call him, and a very special Vanya at that. But, now that his body is failing and the terror of death has become a daily reality, he can no longer avoid staring into the face of a common destiny. In this new awareness of a common law, a common doom, he feels more lonely than ever. As he lies on his deathbed, he hears the sounds of merriment in his household, the sounds of singing and laughter. He almost chokes with anger: “But they will die too! Fools! I first, and they later.” For they too will have to recognize the truth of the terrible law.

There is more than a little irony here in that Ivan Ilych’s entire professional life has been involved with the law. For Ivan Ilych is a judge. As such, he supposedly represents and administers the law. The story begins in fact under the sign of the law, in the building of the law courts, during an interval between sessions. The judges and the public prosecutor relax, chatting smugly about the latest news, and indulging in professional gossip concerning promotions, replacements, and salaries.

The reader is quickly alerted to a deeper irony. For the notion of law functions at different levels and conveys disparate, even conflicting meanings, all of which come into play in Tolstoy’s story. There are strictly legal laws but also social and moral laws. There are biological and physical laws. And there are transcendental and religious laws that place an individual’s life on trial and are in no way subject to the jurisdiction of worldly judges.

The big subject of conversation that day among the judges assembled in the chambers of the law courts is a newspaper report that their colleague Ivan Ilych has died. Typically, the news is greeted with perfunctory compassion and trivial concerns. Various voices inquire about the cause of the death, while everyone secretly hopes that this death will entail some personal advantage. Everyone also feels complacently that death does not really concern him: “It is he who is dead and not I.”

The End Is a Beginning

Although the story appears to stress in an unbookish manner the clinical realities of dying, Tolstoy’s unstated cultural references invite us to consider The Death of Ivan Ilych as a meditation on mortality. Ashes shall return to ashes. The Bible— in Ecclesiastes, in Job, and in many other places—tells of the vanity of human endeavors, of the mystery of suffering and death. Naked shall man return to go as he came, says the voice in Ecclesiastes. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning. Only fools are drawn to the house of mirth. For desire shall fail, and inevitably the living shall go to their “long home.” Job also knows that man goes down to the grave, that his days are determined, that he must waste away and die. But there are more distinctly literary and philosophical echoes. Did not Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedo, assert that philosophers concerned themselves above all with dying and death? The Stoic tradition, echoed centuries later by Montaigne, stresses the point. Inspired by Seneca, Montaigne devotes an entire essay to the proposition “That to philosophize is to learn to die.” And, in his defense of the Christian faith, Pascal develops a disquieting metaphor of life as a death sentence. We are all on death row. Imagine, says Pascal, men in chains, all condemned to die, watching their fellows being butchered while awaiting their turn with grief and despair: “This is the image of the human condition.”

Tolstoy’s singular achievement is that he conveys Ivan Ilych’s terror in the face of death not in philosophical or abstract terms but as a subjective and visceral experience. The sweat of fear becomes the protagonist’s body language. Tolstoy himself, since his earliest years, had been obsessed with the specter of death and the dread of dying—a dread Levin in Anna Karenina gets to know in wretched detail as he watches his tubercular brother Nicolay in the last stages of physical disintegration. Several of Tolstoy’s short stories deal specifically with dying and death, most notably “Three Deaths” (1859) as well as the late works “How Much Land Does a Man Need” (1886), “Master and Man” (1895), and “Work, Death and Sickness” (1903). Rainer Maria Rilke commented on Tolstoy’s profound and helpless fear, on his conviction that “death in the pure state” exists, and that we must drink, from the hateful cup, the bitterness of “undiluted death.” The awful truth of dying comes as a confrontation with an unfathomable mystery.

Tolstoy knew that fear and trembling remain supremely personal, that the discovery of death is made in utter solitude. Yet the sense of dereliction also comes with the awareness of a common destiny and a common humanity. Ivan Ilych is not a tragic figure. He is no King Lear; but in his illness, like Lear driven mad, he discovers that he too is not “ague-proof,” that the hand his courtiers used to kiss smells of mortality.

The crucial question for Tolstoy is how we face this revelation, what it tells us about the way we have lived. Ivan Ilych learns—the lesson may come too late—that emptiness, selfdeception, and false values have been at the core of his life, that in the process of living we all deny the truth of our human condition, that we lie to ourselves when we pretend to forget about death, and that this lie is intimately bound up with all the other lies that vitiate our moral being. It is a denunciation of a spiritual void.

Tolstoy first intended to narrate the progression of the terminal illness in the first person, in the form of a diary. He changed his mind and wrote his story as a third-person narrative, which allowed him to complicate the narrative process, to stand both inside and outside his character, to blend the objective and the subjective, and to universalize what was essentially an intense private experience. Had Tolstoy described the months of suffering from the exclusive point of view of the dying man, he would have isolated the case, limiting the range and impact of an experience that the reader could then all too easily attribute to one sick man’s fear and bitterness. The third-person narrative made it possible to transcend the individual experience, to translate it into a universal reality, to abolish all lines of demarcation between object and subject, and to link the disturbed reader (and writer) to Ivan Ilych’s distress.

For The Death of Ivan Ilych is not limited to an individual case. The mediation and transfer achieved by the third-person narration involve the narrator and the reader, both of whom participate as Ivan Ilych stares into the grim reality of It (in Russian the feminine pronoun Oná, “she,” because the word for death, smert’, is feminine). Once before, in a major work of Tolstoy’s, the lethal confrontation with It (Oná) occurs. It comes at the precise moment of Prince Andrey’s death in War and Peace, at the end of his long agony after being wounded at the Battle of Borodino: “Behind the door stood It. . . . Once more It was pressing on the door from without. . . . It comes in and it is death. And Prince Andrey died.” The epiphanic vision of death haunts Tolstoy. Only in The Death of Ivan Ilych the grim vision is artfully related to the temporal structure of the narrative. The story ends with death. It also begins with it: the newspaper announcement, the gossip in the law courts, the presence of the corpse in the house of mourning, the trivial and hypocritical decorum of the assembled mourners.

Tolstoy could have proceeded chronologically, telling us about Ivan Ilych’s childhood, adolescent pranks, early career moves, and settling into what was quickly to become a stale marriage. Instead, he begins his story just after Ivan Ilych’s death. This posthumous perspective creates an open-ended structure. It points to a future, if not for the protagonist, then at least for those who survive him in the story as well as for the reader.

The State of Denial

But first Tolstoy trivializes the immediate postmortem events, exposing the survivors’ sham. It is a judgment on the living, on the gossiping judges, on the assembled mourners at the funeral service. This judgment begins on a comic note: the rituals in the house of mourning, the empty words and gestures, the irritation and impatience of visitors who would rather be at their evening card game than listening to the church reader, looking at the reproachful expression on the dead man’s face, and having to smell the faint odor of carbolic acid. Even objects have a way of interfering with the comfort of visitors. A rebellious spring in the ottoman keeps poking at the posterior of a family friend off ering his condolences, while a supercilious dandy named Schwartz keeps toying nervously with his top hat, resentful not to be at his club or at some entertaining party. As for the widow, filled with affectations (she resorts to French to express her self-pity), her main concern is the cost of the plot in the cemetery and whether there is any way of persuading the government to increase the pension to which she is entitled.

In lonely contrast to these characters, Tolstoy offers us the refreshing peasant figure of Gerasim, the butler’s young assistant who served as a sick nurse to Ivan Ilych during his long illness, never fl inching from the most distasteful chores, attending to the most repelling ministrations willingly and cheerfully. One of the visitors is struck by the simplicity of his words as he refers to death in tones quite different from the stilted speech of the assembled mourners: “It’s God’s will. We shall all come to it some day.” Unlike the dandy Schwartz and all those who choose to think of themselves as being above it all, thus living in a state of denial, Gerasim accepts nature’s laws with a redemptive simplicity reminiscent of Montaigne’s peasant who faces death as an integral part of life. Tolstoy lays stress on Gerasim’s strong hands and on his sturdy teeth—“the even white teeth of a healthy peasant.” But the image of the teeth is ambivalent. Behind the symbol of vital forces there lurks the skeleton’s grin.

It is not the masked presence of this grin, however, that makes Ivan’s life so “ordinary” and “terrible”; it is the extent to which, oblivious to death and to the reality of the human condition, Ivan succeeds through ambition, automatic responses, and the illusion of power in dehumanizing his life as he climbs the professional ladder. He becomes a virtuoso in the art of never allowing human and official relations to mingle, extending even beyond the courtroom the theatricality of courtroom poses and gestures. The truth is that, past a certain point, there is no human relation to safeguard. Life itself has been devitalized and the individual conscience anesthetized. Even pleasures accessible to Ivan have been corrupted by vanity in the two senses of the word: inflated pride and emptiness. As for Ivan’s awareness of his judicial power to ruin anybody he wishes to ruin, Tolstoy sees this not only as a typical illusion of power but also as a generalized affliction spread well beyond the profession of magistrate.

The irony is that, when Ivan Ilych becomes sick, the corporation of doctors treats him exactly the way he used to treat the petitioners and the accused in the law courts. The medical luminaries give themselves important airs, proud of their diagnoses that turn out to be ludicrously inadequate and contradictory. They talk about chronic catarrh and a floating kidney and show themselves basically indifferent to his suffering. Ivan Ilych becomes the victim of his own game. While for him his illness is a matter of life or death, the doctors regard him as an interesting “case,” almost like an accused man on trial.

More terrible even than a grave illness is the disease of living. “Nothing is worse than life” (“Rien n’est pire que la vie”), writes Jacques Chardonne in his preface to a French edition of the story. When Ivan Ilych takes a leave of absence and during those long months of idleness can no longer avoid facing himself, he falls prey to a deep toská, the Russian word for ennui or melancholy. This toská cannot be dismissed as mere boredom. It is nothing short of tedium vitae: a weariness of life, a profound feeling of futility and disgust, leading to depression. In time, not even the habitual derivatives—his professional routine, his social life, his bridge games—are of any help.

Once again, one may wish to recall Pascal, who measured human misery in terms of the compulsion to seek escape and oblivion through divertissements, or distractions: “Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, humans have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.” (T. S. Eliot surely remembered Pascal’s denunciation of divertissements when, in “Four Quartets,” he described the dejected figures “distracted from distraction by distraction.”) In Tolstoy’s story toská and the misery of distractions are ultimately linked to Ivan’s need to condemn his own life and the life of those around him. This need comes to a head in the devastating scene in chapter in which Ivan Ilych, lying in bed—he now knows for sure that he is dying—watches his wife, his daughter, and her fiancé prepare to leave for an evening at the theater. His daughter’s décolleté and exposed flesh, her fiancé’s strong thighs and elegant gloves, his wife’s shallow remarks as she blabbers about Sarah Bernhardt, bring home the bodily appetites of the living, their selfishness and materialism, their impatience with the sick man, their deceptions and outright lies as they deal with the dying man. These lies grow more flagrant, from section to section, as Ivan’s illness progresses.

The Light from Below

This leads us to the story’s temporal symbolism, which may well hold the key to its multiple levels of meaning. The Death of Ivan Ilych is divided into twelve sections or minichapters. That number is traditionally significant: the twelve books of the minor prophets, the twelve tables of Roman law, the twelve disciples of Christ, the twelve victorious battles of King Arthur, Twelfth Night or the eve of Epiphany, and, more important to the structural organization of Tolstoy’s story, the twelve months of the year and the twelve hours on the face of the clock, both of which suggest a cyclic and recurrent pattern, a pattern of circularity, retrieval, and continuity that links the beginning to the end and the end to the beginning.

The image of the clock in indeed congruous. Time is running out. And, if we examine the story’s temporal scheme, it becomes clear that its crucial articulations correspond to the four cardinal points of the dial, namely, the numbers 3, 6, 9, and 12.

Chapter 3. Ivan Ilych believes that he has reached the height of success. He has been appointed to a rank two steps ahead of his former colleagues and is now receiving a salary of five thousand rubles. His ill humor has vanished, and he feels “completely happy.” This sense of happiness is illusory and short-lived. In the process of showing his upholsterer how he wants the hangings of the drawing-room curtain draped, he slips from a ladder and hits his side hard against the knob of the window frame. He will not recover from the injury. The clock is ticking inexorably.

Chapter 6. Ivan is now very sick and faces the reality of death. The first sentence puts it starkly: “Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair.” It is at this point that he remembers the schoolbook syllogism about Caius being a man and therefore mortal. Still he clings to the illusion of an irreplaceable self immune from Caius’s fate. Gustily, he recalls the little boy he was, the little Vanya busy with his toys, the smell of his striped leather ball, the touch of his mother’s hand, the rustle of her silk dress. In vain. It/Oná forces him to stare into the face of the unavoidable. There are no screens to protect him.

Chapter 9. Ivan has reached the bottom of despair. It is as though he had been thrust into a narrow, deep black sack. He weeps like a child and cries out his misery at being tormented and abandoned by God. The biblical echoes are unmistakable and are made even more striking because the transition from chapter 6 to chapter 9 closely parallels the transition from the sixth to the ninth hour of the Crucifixion as recounted by Saint Matthew (Matt. 27:46) and Saint Mark (Mark 15:34): “And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice eloi, eloi, lama sabachtani? ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’” This moment of Christ’s anguish and sense of utter abandonment at the ninth hour is also his most human moment, though the context of the Passion does not allow for despair. Resurrection is part of that story.

Chapter 12. This chapter corresponds to the last hour. The clock has come full circle. It is at this precise point that Ivan falls through the bottom of the black sack. But, instead of darkness, “at the bottom was a light.” And again: “In place of death there was light.” The twelfth hour is the moment of the Epiphany.

This final page shows Tolstoy at his best in creating a climate of doubt, if not undecidability. His tone is far from preachy. In describing the death vision of Ivan Ilych, Tolstoy shrewdly allowed for considerable ambivalence. A strictly clinical reading of these last moments could attribute the images in Ivan Ilych’s mind—the black sack, falling through its bottom, the encounter with the light from below—to incoherent feverish hallucinations. On the other hand, a symbolic reading of these fl ashes in the night just as easily translates the single instant into a changeless time, hinting at a last-minute revelatory in sight into the supernatural. The final page can stand as an encounter with nothingness or as a metaphor of revelation.

Tolstoy’s figurative patterns in the ultimate pages serve such a theme of revelation. The most significant of these patterns is a rhetoric of reversals, or inversions, as when Ivan surprisingly finds the light at the bottom of the dark sack. Normally, one assumes that the light comes from above. It is precisely this type of inversion that is already at work in chapter when Ivan, in despair, begins to question the kind of life he has led and indulges in self-indictment. He now sees that he has lived according to a tragic paradox: “It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined that I was going up.”

This principle of vertical inversion also works along a horizontal axis, by way of a train metaphor—a favored image of death in Tolstoy’s work (see Anna Karenina)—precisely when Ivan unexpectedly finds the light at the very bottom: “What had happened to him was like the sensation one sometimes experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is going backwards while one is really going forwards.”

These images of inversion or reversal, associated at the end with the discovery of a light, are especially meaningful because they imply a breakthrough. In his last moments Ivan desperately wants to force his way through an obstacle and cross a threshold. In his delirium, he has great difficulty articulating words clearly. Trying to talk to his wife so as to ask for her forgiveness (he feels sorry for both himself and her), wanting to say the word forgive (in Russian prostí), he mumbles instead propoostí—which means “let pass” but also “let go through.” Ralph E. Matlaw gives this as an illustration of Tolstoy’s great stylistic subtlety. But far more than stylistic subtlety is involved. The desire to forgive and the yearning to crash through the obstacle merge in the mystery of language, communication, and transcendence. Ivan Ilych is dimly aware of the mystery of his mispronounced words. He feels that he may not be understood by his wife and son, but he knows that this words will be understood by One who matters. (In Russian the reference to “the One” is not as heavy-handed as it is in the translation.) The mystery of speechlessness corresponds to the unnamable nature of “It” and of “the One.”

From self-love to pity and compassion—the trajectory is immense. Yet the ultimate flash of joy is experienced in a single instant, an Augenblick that is out of time and negates death: “In place of death there was light.” Ivan Ilych’s last words to himself before drawing his last breath are at the same time vague and explicit: “Death is finished . . . it is no more.”

These words also sound quite literary and faintly intertextual. The narrator (to varying degrees always distinct from the person of the author) does not let on that he is even dimly aware of a long tradition of denying nothingness and despair, of proclaiming the inefficacy of death. Certainly, Tolstoy was well acquainted with this tradition. Did he know John Donne’s sonnet “Death, Be Not Proud”? That final cry of victory over death would surely have had a deep resonance in a sensibility such as Tolstoy’s, a sensibility so haunted by the terror of dying: “Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!” Tolstoy, from behind the narrative voice, may well have remembered these or similar lines as he wrote the ultimate sentences of his story.

Victor Brombert is the Henry Putnam University Professor Emeritus of Romance and Comparative Literatures at Princeton University. He is the author of many books, including In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature, 1830–1980, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and the wartime memoir Trains of Thought.

* Reprinted with permission from Musings on Morality by Victor Brombert. Published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2013 by Victor Brombert. All rights reserved.

THE TWO MIND HYPOTHESIS

By John V. Wylie

Emotional Fossils: Mental Illness and Human Evolution (2020)

by John V. Wylie

True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness:

I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live.

–Albert Schweitzer

In an essay in the February issue of The Montréal Review, I discussed Duke psychologist Michael Tomasello’s Becoming Human (2019), in which he reviews studies comparing the minds of apes and developing children and concludes that collective intentionality (will) is unique to humans. He bases his conclusion on the predictable timing across cultures of the unfolding of 1) shared intentionality arising at nine months old (“Let’s both look at that pretty bird”) and 2) collective intentionality starting around three years old (“That’s the right way we ought to do it”). Tomasello assumes that collective intentionality was evolved for the benefits of collaborative foraging, and thus the unique refinement of teamwork has been the decisive human adaptation.

Most significantly, Tomasello claims that collective intentionality in humans represents a major biological transition comparable to the Cambrian Explosion of life. Just as individual cells assembled into multicellular organisms a half-billion years ago, individual apes assembled into organically functioning groups of humans. In both cases, biology crossed the Rubicon from cooperation, in which individual cells or apes co-opt benefits from each other in win-win transactions—to coordination in which the divided labor of individual cells and humans evolved to function harmoniously together as organisms. In this monumental transition, natural selection for the fitness of individuals was overtaken by natural selection for the productivity of relationships among individuals, and accordingly, intentionality shifted from individuals to the relationships among them.

Intentionality, which everyone intuitively understands, is derived from the verb intend, which is related to will or motivate; but these latter two verbs are transitive needing an object: you must will or motivate yourself to do something, whereas you are the subject that intends to act. Intentionality has two dimensions: 1) the capacity to initiate and be the ongoing source or agent of an intention (will or motivation) and 2) it must be directed at, or be about, someone or something. When I pick up a spoon, the source of intentionality is me, and it is directed at the spoon.

With the Cambrian Explosion, intentionality ceased being about individual cells strategically jockeying for their self-interest and began to be about regulatory connections among cells, and then further evolving into a neurological system that was about the organic coordination of all cells as single creatures. So too did intentionality cease being about the self-interest of individual apes and began to be about codes of conduct among humans, and then further evolving into language, which became the equivalent a neurological system in that it was about the organic coordination of human individuals as a single creature. The nature and experience of the unique language of our ancestral species can be teased out by probing the abiding mystery of the Acheulean hand ax.

Acheulean hand ax

The toolmaking capacities of our ancestral species differ qualitatively from toolmaking in animals and would not have arisen in the absence of collective intentionality. The manufacture of stone tools emerged with our genus Homo and evolved into the near universal use of the Acheulean hand ax, which remained essentially unchanged across continents for 1.5 million years, a time of unprecedented brain growth. Although part of the establishment of this early tool industry involved widely dispersed genetically mediated manual dexterity an opposable thumb, and hand-eye coordination, there can be no doubt that the knapping technique and teardrop shape of the hand ax were spread and maintained culturally—and there is the rub. We normally think of these kinds of cultural practices as spreading by imitation, causing their continuity over long distances and times to be fragile and subject to variation. Darwin’s challenge was to construct a theory that contained potential dynamic change over time within apparently unchanging species; but the challenge of the hand ax is quite the opposite—why such enduring stasis in usually rapidly changing cultural transmission?

To prevent territoriality from disrupting their adaptation for teamwork, the Homo peoples evolved to be hyper-migratory with constant mixing due to rapid climate fluctuations in the Pleistocene. In Fairweather Eden (1998), Michael Pitts and Mark Roberts in Boxgrove, England, deduced from the relative position of half-million-year-old knapped stone chips that they had been knapped off hand axes simultaneously in groups. I propose that a central function of knapping these tools, beyond butchering animals and other speculated uses, was as a bonding ritual that reflected and sustained their organic way of life. Hand ax construction was experienced as a restorative communion in which all immersed themselves into the authority of how it should be done. In my imagination, I can place myself into the experience of our ancestral species knapping essentially the same Acheulean hand ax for an astonishing 1.5 million years (from Emotional Fossils, 2020):

Crouching in a circle, we are all glancing back and forth, not merely imitating one another’s work, but watching for strokes made with the authority of how it should be and always had been done. We all instinctively know the familiar rectitude of wisdom flashing alternatively among us, making small adjustments with constant mutual recognition until general specifications are satisfied: the precise technique of striking, the proper size and shape.

Whether it be from one day, week, or century on into the next, the memory of what to do and when to do it was not stored in any individual brain. Rather, this knowledge was mixed into and among a given group—and all groups—in bits and pieces, which, when the moment arose, fell together in collective animation. Diffusing through time and space and linked by long repeating chains of unbroken mutual experience, this hallowed ritual, the emblem of a sacred tribe, scattered far and wide out into their diaspora from Africa out and across the vastness of Eurasia. Although individuals drifted from one group to another, small bands dissolved, and new ones reconstituted, these diurnal chains of communal functioning wove an unbroken fabric for 50 thousand generations across the expanse of entire continents.

Just as all the varied cells in our bodies have evolved a collective intentionality mediated by the neurological connections among them and protected by an immune system, so too did the collective intentionality of our ancestral species flow through the linguistic connections among them and protected by an immune system of refined instincts for justice.

Homo sapiens

From our violent factious world, it would appear absurd that we could have sprung from a collective form of life with advantages sufficient to transform the dominance competition of apes into a benign shared authority with evolved collective wisdom emanating from a virtual spiritual space. Clearly, the prior 50 million years of primate instincts to dominate did not simply evaporate, because they re-emerged with a vengeance in our own species. However, allow me to point out a popular alternative view of how collective intentionality evolved. In his wildly successful Sapiens (2015), Yuval Harari’s speculation is that 70 thousand years ago, a lucky genetic mutation galvanized a “cognitive revolution” in the brain from which collective intentionality emerged as a feckless parasitic genie inflicting “delusional” beliefs morphing into religions and ideologies like communism, capitalism, and fascism. Compared to the hypothesis of a biological transition which, as my prior essay described, ties together the major scientific findings in paleoanthropology, the idea that chance mutations in the brain suddenly enabled our unique capacities to immerse ourselves into our collective beliefs is not a serious proposal, and his narrative that follows is a paean to the prevailing reductionist paradigm of human nature.

In the prior essay, I offered a fraction of ubiquitously obvious evidence that the evolutionary equivalent of the biblical Fall in Eden was caused by the emergence in our own species of sexual selection. Darwin finally settled on the mechanism of sexual selection when he concluded that the useless beauty of the peacock’s tail is simply the result of the peahen’s taste for beauty, and he pointed out that the desire for an attractive trait and the trait itself can co-evolve without regard to the trait’s survival benefits. In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), Darwin considered human behaviors such as singing and dancing as sexual display, and I would most certainly include the earliest cave art in Europe and Island Southeast Asia.

Although sexual selection is clearly exemplified in our courting process in which we mutually sort through attractive “displays” many of which are aesthetic, the relentless drive for social approbation on the part of modern humans goes well beyond mere mating and is referred to as narcissism by psychoanalysts and vanity in biblical texts. I propose that the Homo sapiens desire for youthful beauty, such as selection for our slender (“gracile”) bodies and distinctive child-like skulls compared to forebear species, is mere “romantic baggage,” and that the central survival benefit of the broad social desire to be admired is to cohere tribes into ever larger intercommunicating populations.

Indeed, there is hard genetic evidence that ancient Homo sapiens families had larger mating networks (Sikora, 2017) than the more ingrown families of contemporary Neanderthals (Prüfer, 2017). The benefit of larger interconnected populations is that, at a threshold of broadly pooled knowledge, practical knowhow is maintained across generations and thereby can commence its own generative process of natural selection—which is the decisive achievement of our species. Although cultural evolution did not continuously take hold until about 40,000 years ago, the earliest Homo sapiens fossils are associated with elaborations of stone tools beyond the Acheulean hand ax (Reichter, et al., 2017).

And, yet, who among us would deny the truth in these lines from Ecclesiastes 2:11? “Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit.” Our own species is animated by a private and desiring willfulness emanating from individuals and directed at attracting the admiration of our groups and beyond, while the legacy from our ancestral species is animated by a public and prescribing willfulness emanating from a virtual relational space and directed at the proper functioning of our groups. And so, this evolutionary narrative simplifies an understanding of the human mind by revealing that we have been endowed with two interacting minds: each of us, at all times is both a new mind of the me and an old mind of the we.

What is a mind? Imagine a lifeless collection of amino acids first acquiring the rudiment of life, which is to replicate. In the process of replication, mutations are naturally selected for traits that enhance the survival of succeeding generations of this new little bit of life. Because these newly acquired traits all enhance the capacity of this burgeoning organism to survive, it is transformed into a subject with the intention to survive, and in the process has achieved the rudiments of mind. Now turning to the Cambrian Explosion: in contemplating the wholesale shift in natural selection from individual cells to groups of cells, it naturally followed that intentionality also shifted from cells to multi-cellular organisms producing a higher order mind. And, with the transition of apes into collective intentionality, humans leaped into a still higher order mind—which recently has evolved to interact with our new mind that is animated by vanity.

My day job as a psychiatrist was alleviating the suffering of patients living with mental illnesses, while at night, I contemplated the evolutionary meaning of their enigmatic symptoms. I gradually confirmed that the experiences of schizophrenia and the manic phase of bipolar disorder can be validly viewed as vivid emotional fossils that accurately magnify the quality and intentionality of our old mind and new mind respectively. Before examining these fossils of our two minds, some historical context is helpful.

Half-Century of Shifting Psychiatric Paradigms

Like many major therapies in medicine, the benefits of lithium, Thorazine and many others were discovered by astute serendipitous observations. Although my practice of psychiatry began in the 1970s in the waning years of the Freudian psychoanalytic paradigm, by the mid-1980s, the golden age of biological therapeutics had arrived, and mental illness became a “chemical imbalance” and “all in the genes.” However, now it is thirty-five years later, and thorough knowledge of the neurochemical effects of therapeutic drugs has not led to the discovery of root biological mechanisms in mental illness, so most recently a substantial search for genetic causes has been undertaken. After analyzing over a million genomes, Harvard’s multi-centered BrainSTORM consortium (2018) could not genetically discriminate risk factors for any of the major mental illnesses and concluded that their negative finding “underscores the need to refine psychiatric diagnostics.”

But the reason for difficulties in distinguishing the genetics of psychiatric diagnostic symptoms is that they reflect the normal emotional function that is disrupted in the psychic sphere and not the biological pathology, which diffusely overlaps among all the major mental illnesses. Our two minds break down into mental illness in the following manner: like sound, emotion varies in amplitude (volume), and a simple analogy of the experience of both schizophrenia and mania is the input-output feedback-screech of a microphone and a speaker, and this pathological mechanism occurs at the psychic level of our two interacting minds, while drug treatments attempt to regulate this pathological hyperactivity at the brain-level by “turning down the volume.”

The New Mind: MANIA

In manic illness, the sentient pleasure that normally motivates our new mind’s quest for social approbation pours out as if from a speaker in a feedback-screech, supercharging the careening roller-coaster-binge of euphoric manic behavior. One striking symptom in mania fixes the time-period in which this odd rage for adulation emerged in our evolutionary history.

There have been occasions when I have been temporarily drawn from my role as physician into stunned fascination by the linguistic performance of a patient in the throes of a manic illness. All manner of rhetorical flourishes and beautifully constructed phrases may pour out in a torrent. Often there is a magnetic quality to this verbal virtuosity, the meaning of which can constitute a brilliantly creative flight of ideas, all of which accurately corresponds in the natural world to sexual display like a peacock’s tail. In the biography by Sylvia Nasar of the mathematician John Nash, A Beautiful Mind (1998), a visitor relates the following incident at the McLean Hospital in Boston, where Nash was hospitalized for schizophrenia:

“Robert Lowell, the poet, walked in, manic as hell. He sees this very pregnant woman. He looks at her and starts quoting the begat sequences in the Bible. Then he started spinning quotes with the word “anointed.” He decided to lecture us on the meaning of “anointed” in all the ways it was used in the King James Version of the Bible. In the end I decided that every word in the English language was a personal friend of his.”

Vital to dating a fossil is careful evaluation of the surrounding geologic strata in which the fossil is embedded. The cognitively demanding, intricately complex structure (syntax) of this linguistic performance fixes our pursuit of vanity as having evolved very recently, within our own species. Moreover, a simple understanding of the process of modern human language is that the new mind of the me weaves attractive clauses for verbal “display” upon a loom of dynamically responsive rules deployed by the old mind of the we.

The Old Mind: SCHIZOPHRENIA

Anthropologists Nam C. Kim and Marc Kissel argue in Emergent Warfare in Our Evolutionary Past, 2018 that war has been in the process of slowly emerging during the entire 300,000-year span of our species with direct evidence for chronic war starting 12,000 years ago. Perhaps it was thousands of generations of Romeos and Juliets ratcheting up pressure on diverse tribes to amalgamate; but surely the same kinds of rivalries that devolved Cain and Able into hatred and violence did so too in the tribes of our species. Darwin understood that chronic war engenders natural selection for war-like dispositions in individuals, but this kind of group selection also co-opts what collective intentionality (authority) is about—from justice and the productivity of relationships—to the fitness of competing groups. As a result, we modern humans have acquired instincts to immerse ourselves (identify with) and submit to (believe in) the hierarchical authority of our contending tribes, such as the Republican Party or the scientific community. We have evolved a “social GPS” that unconsciously attunes us to the background messaging of authority that elicits loyalty (avid obedience) to the mores and prejudices of our nested groups; and it is this often-insidious process of identity that is disabled in schizophrenia, which is why people living with this disability are stigmatized as outcasts leading to lives of loneliness.

Just as mania is analogous to the feedback output of a screeching speaker, schizophrenia is analogous to the torrential input to the microphone. The emblematic symptoms of schizophrenia are delusions and hallucinations of thoughts and voices communicating to the patient from an external intentionality. Like mania, schizophrenia is caused in large part by the failure of modulating mechanisms at the neurochemical level (“broken brakes”), but the actual pathological mechanism occurs in the psychic sphere; our process of believing in our collective identities is thrown into a sustained pathological feedback screech that results in the experienced symptoms.

For example, in the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard shootings in 2013, everyone initially assumed that the perpetrator was a terrorist motivated by hostile group beliefs. It turned out he was living with schizophrenia. In an email recovered by the FBI, he expressed his motive: “Ultra-low frequency [microwave] attack is what I've been subject[ed] to for the last 3 months, and to be perfectly honest that is what has driven me to this.” In schizophrenia, the internal emotional mechanism, whereby the authority of groups normally communicate with their believers, collapses into an intense feedback screech.

Beyond an identity disorder, schizophrenia is a sickness of the sacred collective capacity that makes us human. With this understanding, the same experiences of schizophrenia that have been stigmatized through the ages (cf., the etymological source of “crazy”) become ancient beacons of an uplifting vision of who we are. Apart from hopes for more effective treatments, in my dreams I go to a time when the profound humanness of schizophrenia is felt and also honored.

***

In 1994, Sir Francis Crick captured the élan of our current bottom-up, reductionist paradigm in The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul: "A person's mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them." A paradigm shift is not produced by scientific findings, but by the power of an explanation to simplify complexity in the natural world: heliocentrism simplified celestial movements, natural selection simplified the diversity of species, and plate tectonics the complexity of geology. The object of the remainder of this essay is to show how a macro-biological evolutionary understanding of our two minds—amplified in mania and schizophrenia—can simplify the micro-biological complexity of not just mental illness, but also religion, self-awareness, and free will.

RELIGION

I will not review the literature on the brain physiology of religion but suffice it to say there have been no coherent mechanisms discovered. All religions have the elements of collective intentionality, but the Abrahamic religions are particularly associated with the authority of justice, which has been refined over six million years to permit the intimate engagement required for individuals to live and work immersed as a single being.

In the following passage by Robert Bellah from his Religion in Human Evolution (2011). Bellah compares the trajectory of Zeus in Greece and that of Yahweh in Israel:

“As a thought experiment, in what might have been we can think of the close connection of Zeus and justice (dikē) beginning, tentatively, in Homer, becoming quite explicit in and central in Hesiod, powerfully applied to his immediate situation by Solon, and reiterated once again in the tragedies of Aeschylus. But although the concern for justice remains central for those we call the Presocratics, the connection with Zeus loosens drastically. We saw in the case of Israel that Yahweh emerged gradually from being one of many other gods, even the greatest god, to the status of the one and only true God. Zeus never underwent that fate, even though the possibility was never entirely lost: witness the Hymn to Zeus of the early third century BCE Stoic Cleanthes.”

Last stanzas from Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus (translated by E. H. Blakeney):

O Thou most bounteous God that sittest throned

In clouds, the Lord of lightning, save mankind

From grievous ignorance!

Oh, scatter it

Far from their souls, and grant them to achieve

True knowledge, on whose might Thou dost rely

To govern all the world in righteousness;

That so, being honoured, we may Thee requite

With honour, chanting without pause Thy deeds,

As all men should: since greater guerdon ne'er

Befalls or man or god than evermore

Duly to praise the Universal Law.

SELF-AWARENESS AND FREE WILL

Efforts to understand brain mechanisms in self-awareness and free will have fared no better than far more extensive efforts in mental illness. Indeed, there is no agreement about what self-awareness is; for example, does the ability of chimpanzees to recognize themselves in a mirror qualify?

The idea that humans are separated from all other animals (our neurotic dogs don’t count) by a major transition to collective intentionality can both define and simplify an understanding of both self-awareness and free will. Awareness of our willfulness occurs when our private aspirations encounter the willfulness emanating from the authority of our social sphere, the deepest experience of which is our ancient collective core, our soul. At the instant of this encounter, private aspirations “go public” and become known to us in the collective social context.

Neuroscientist Benjamin Libet performed a classic experiment on free will titled “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action” (1985). He recorded the exact time at which subjects consciously made the decision to move a finger at a moment of their choosing. An electroencephalogram monitoring brain activity revealed unconscious activity, which Libet called “readiness potential,” an average of a half-second before participants were aware of their decision to move. In other words, before a person is aware of deciding to act, preparation for the action has already been initiated in the brain.

Because of its philosophical implications for free will, this experiment has been thoroughly debated and repeated over the years, but for our purposes I will accept Libet’s findings at face value and interpret them using the two mind hypothesis. This half-second delay is explained by the proposition that our 300,000-year-old Homo sapiens individual consciousness only becomes self-aware in the act of experiencing itself from the underlying platform of our six-million-year-old collective consciousness. The decision is made freely and instantaneously transmitted to the brain by the new mind but must await its conscious registration in the old mind before knowledge (awareness) of the conscious decision is attained and reported.

The difficulty for us moderns is that, when awareness is peeled off from the consciousness of our new mind, what’s left is naked physical reality imprisoned within the fleeting moment of our desires. Then this difficulty is compounded because the old mind is also inaccessible because it is the “background noise” of collective intentionality, within which we are immersed like fish unaware of the water in which we swim. As individuals our intimate engagement within this ubiquitous old mind experience is apparent to us in the act and feeling of becoming aware of knowing our private thoughts and motivations. In Eden, Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and so we are condemned to watch ourselves as individuals, not just from our factious groups, but mostly from the depths of our collective Soul wrought through the ages by our noble ancestors.

CURRENT REDUCTIONIST PARADIGM

- The mind can be understood by studying the brain.

- “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind.” (Darwin, Decent of Man, 1871)

- Exclusively human mental capacities are due to culture.

- Natural selection is always a Malthusian struggle, perhaps because Darwin struck on the idea while reading Malthus (recounted in his Autobiography, 1887).

- Natural selection acts only on individuals—and genes in blood relatives (kin selection).

- Collective intentionality is a cognitively assembled state evolved by recursive mind-reading capacity, i.e., “recognizing, recursively, how the partner is thinking about how she is thinking about his thinking, and so forth.” (Tomasello, Becoming Human, 2019)

Three Million Years Ago . . .

I become aware of a continuous chirping sound threading up from below while hiking on a promontory high above the East African savanna. After lying down with my binoculars to examine the vast plain beneath me, I am astonished by the sight of two groups of grass-eating apes, separated by roughly a quarter of a mile. I am charmed and fascinated to have discovered two herds, all harmlessly crouching and munching together. From the beginning, and steadily increasing, I have a profound sense that these creatures are unique. I finally see two of these three-to-four-foot-tall animals (presumably mates) stand up straight and walk over to the other group to join them, but that is the least of it. It is subtle at first, but once recognized, undeniable: I become aware that the individuals in each group as well as constantly vocalizing are all simultaneously gesturing to each other. They emit a continuous emotional intensity that causes within me a growing sense of foreboding—of fear. As peaceable and closely comfortable as they are with each other, the thought occurs to me that if they discover my presence, all that harmony might instantly merge, and they could become extremely dangerous to an outsider.

So fearing for my life while fatally drawn to them, I watch them from my lofty perch. For two days, I am tortured by my inability to pin down what it is about them that both terrifies and enthralls me. Gradually I focus on how intensely in tune they are with one another, without a hint of dominance or hierarchy. Each group will be doing different things, but not at the lazy pace of chimps in a zoo or the way ordinary herd animals often react simultaneously to the environment. Then it hits me like a thunderstone.[1] The individuals in these groups are not just cooperating with one another; the entire behavior in these two groups is coordinated as if emanating from a single creature.

John V. Wylie, MD is an evolutionary psychiatrist in Olney, MD.

PRIMO LEVI'S COSMOS

By Sam Magavern

PRIMO LEVI COULD be deceptively modest. Despite the fact that he published some twenty books, in just about every literary genre, he sometimes cultivated the image of a nonliterary author, a scrittore non scrittore, as he once phrased it: a writer-witness, a writer-scientist, or an accidental writer. He wrote in solitude, unaffiliated with any universities, literary establishments, circles, or movements. He worked for thirty years as a chemist and manager at a paint and varnish factory. His most famous work is nonfiction, and its subject matter—Auschwitz—is so overwhelming that one can miss its literary depth. He wrote in an age that prized the novel, but his two novels, The Monkey’s Wrench and If Not Now, When?, are not among his most important work.

Yet when we read all of Levi’s writings together, we find that he has woven a great and terrifying testament, one of the most vital bodies of work in modern literature. We find that his various writings combine to make a bildungsroman rivaling Proust’s. A bildungsroman, or “education novel,” follows the moral and psychological growth of its main character. In a minor bildungsroman, we watch a character adapt to an adult reality that we, the readers, already know. In a major bildungsroman, like Proust’s or Levi’s, we watch as the character finds and creates not only a self, but also a cosmos—a new interpretation of the world.

Levi’s main character is Primo Levi: a more or less factual version of himself created in a long series of memoirs, stories, essays, poems, and interviews. In Levi’s core work, he focuses on his youth: the classic age for the bildungsroman, the age of adventures. Levi’s youth included both adventure and tragedy; it did not end until his late twenties, when he returned from the war, married, and began working as an industrial chemist. But, as important as his youth was to him, Levi continued to grow and change—to re-work himself and his cosmos—until his death.

Levi’s central concern was what makes—and unmakes—a man. He pondered this insoluble riddle in diverse ways. He studied the biology of Darwin and the psychology of Freud. He looked to myths and legends, spinning variations on Adam and Eve, the Golem, Frankenstein, and other creation tales. He translated anthropological studies by Claude Levi-Strauss and Mary Douglas. Although not a believer, he studied religious texts, placing the book of Job first in his anthology of favorite works, The Search for Roots. Most important, though, he sifted through his own experiences: how his humanity was shaped by Auschwitz, his nine-month odyssey returning from the war,his misadventures as a chemist, his chronic depression, and the challenges of ordinary life. As Levi writes in The Truce, “everybody’s moral universe, suitably interpreted, comes to be identified with the sum of his former experiences, and so represents an abridged form of his biography.”

Levi combined a gift for the lyrical, introspective, and autobiographical with an equally potent gift for the scientific, exploratory, and essayistic. One has to look to Michel de Montaigne to find another writer who reports on his life in a way that encompasses so much of the world. Levi had the tragic misfortune to be present at a crucial event in world history, to suffer personally an epochal, radical evil; but he also had the genius to transmute that experience into enduring literature.

In literary style, Levi is sometimes viewed as a traditionalist. And yet Levi’s short stories are playful, ultramodern fables comparable to those of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. Some of his poems—such as “For Adolf Eichmann”—have a naked ferocity that could scarcely be called traditional. And Levi’s central prose works—If This is a Man, The Truce, The Periodic Table, and The Drowned and the Saved—are innovative hybrids of many genres, including autobiography, short story, novel, poetry, essay, history, and sociology. Levi viewed himself as a hybrid, someone not identical with himself; he was like the narrator of The Monkey’s Wrench, who says, “I felt as if I had two souls in my body, and that’s too many.”

Levi blurred the line between fact and fiction. While all his autobiographical narratives are more or less true, in some he keeps very close to the facts, changing only a name or a minor detail, but in others he takes considerable license. The results can be confusing. Many of his autobiographical essays, published in the United States in Moments of Reprieve, Other People’s Trades, The Mirror Maker, The Periodic Table, and A Tranquil Star, read exactly like the short stories with which they are intermingled. In Italy, If This Is a Man is read as a novel about Auschwitz; in the United States, it is published under the title Survival in Auschwitz and presented as historical testimony. One might call it a nonfiction novel, but that hardly does justice to its complex and unstable richness.

Photograph (detail) by Jillian Edelstein / Camera Press / Redux

Levi’s style—so lyrical and yet so polyvalent—responded perfectly to his literary and historical context. By the time he began writing, the era of the great realist novel had passed. It no longer seemed appropriate or original to write in the objective vein of the nineteenth-century masters, surveying society as if from a mountaintop. The focus had shifted to a more subjective account of consciousness: the memories, reflections, dreams, and nightmares of single, often isolated, individuals. As a result, modern literature often runs the risk of solipsism, a retreat into private worlds and languages—something Levi strenuously resisted. His challenge was to write about the world and the self, and their fluctuating, mysterious interactions, in a way that avoided false objectivity and yet remained coherent.

This literary challenge corresponds closely to a modern philosophical challenge: how to create a cosmos—a view of the world—that is systematic enough to be useful and yet open and self-critical enough to avoid hardening into dogma. Secular thinkers have struggled to construct a philosophy that does not rely on God and yet resists the temptation to put man (or history, or some other grand force) in God’s place. Scientists have crafted a periodic table (in Italian, il sistema periodico), which offers a comprehensive system of natural elements. But what table, what tablets, can give us a comprehensive system of humanity? Or, as Levi asks, “would it not be better to acknowledge one’s lack of a system?”

If the Ten Commandments are not divinely given, then it falls to individuals or groups to create their own ethics, their own decalogues. Benito Mussolini offered one response: his Fascist Decalogue, which included the commandment that Mussolini was always right. Levi offered his own ethos, but it included the commandment that he, like all sources, must always be doubted. He grappled with the question of whether we can judge good and evil confidently, and even authoritatively, without becoming authoritarian: whether we can create ourselves without dreaming of being supermen, transcending good and evil.

To respond to these literary and philosophical concerns required a modern Dante, a thinker who could combine stunning ambition with profound humility, bold innovation with “the search for roots.” It required someone committed to purity, clarity, and the light of reason, yet capable of celebrating impurity, incoherence, and doubt. Perhaps, to be thoroughly convincing, it required someone with the authority of a firsthand participant: someone who had gone to the edge of the world, the edge of humanity, and seen with his own eyes, suffered with his own body and soul, the demolition and painful re-creation of mankind.

Sam Magavern is a writer and public interest lawyer, currently teaching at the University at Buffalo Law School.  He is the author of Primo Levi's Universe. He has written in a wide variety of genres – poetry, fiction, film, scholarly essays, and comic books – and published in many of the nation’s leading literary magazines, including Poetry, The Antioch Review, and The Paris Review.

FOUR POEMS

By Sam Magavern

Ezekiel’s Wheels Within Wheels With William (2013) by Peter Aitkens

Greek Physics Primer

The fifth element is woe.

The gods don’t understand it;

see only four –

but we know the score – in

our bones – down below.

Electrons get sad, negative –

so tiny compared to protons,

it seems hard just to live.

I’m a particle and a wave.

I wave goodbye, goodbye.

Like a firefly I flit and glow.

Simple Simon’s Pie

Simple Simon is a stupid boy

with blackberry pie smeared

all over his shining face

and nothing at all in his belly

he never gets what he wants

so why

do his dark eyes blaze with joy

Ezekiel’s Lament

Ezekiel told so many people

about the wheel within a

wheel

it started to sound – in his

own ears – inauthentic, like

a salesman’s spiel.

The words that he

meant to reveal the gospel

now seemed to paper it over.

He could still see it in his mind’s

eye; he just couldn’t feel.

The Delphic Oracle

The fountain pen is mine

the black ink is all mine

the white paper is mine

kitchen table is also mine

but the poems belong to

Apollo

I am the shadow cast on

the page when he shines

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REHABILITATION OF THE HUMAN RACE THROUGH UNDERSTANDING THE HUMAN CONDITION

By Harry Prosen, M.D., M.Sc.

FREEDOM: THE END OF THE HUMAN CONDITION

By Jeremy Griffith

When the psychologist Maureen O’Hara said that humanity is either standing on the brink of “a quantum leap in human psychological capabilities or heading for a global nervous breakdown” she perfectly articulated our species’ predicament.

The fastest growing realization everywhere has to be that humanity can’t go on the way it is going. Indeed, the great fear is we’re entering endgame where we appear to have lost the race between self-destruction and self-understanding — the race to find the psychologically redeeming and healing understanding of our ‘good and evil’-stricken human condition that is needed to bring about O’Hara’s “quantum leap in human psychological capabilities”.

With 60 years of experience as a psychiatrist, often working with inter-generational issues in families, particularly empathy and empathic deficits, I know, first-hand, the now epidemic levels of distress and alienation in society, and the resulting urgent need for that holy grail of insights of the explanation for the human condition.

Certainly there are many different scientific theories for why we humans are the way we are, so competitive, aggressive and selfish that human life has become all but unbearable; I have spent my career studying and applying them. But what all that experience has taught me is that none of these theories plumb the great depths of the human psyche sufficiently to actually confront and solve the issue of our species’ psychologically troubled condition — except for the work of Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith.

I first became aware of Griffith’s treatise on the human condition in 2004 when, in my role as psychiatric consultant to the Bonobo Species Preservation Society, I was rehabilitating a very disturbed young bonobo named Brian at the Milwaukee County Zoo. One of Griffith’s many insights into the human condition is that it was our ape ancestors’ nurturing of their infants that created our species’ cooperative and loving moral instinctive self or ‘soul’, and this correlated with my observations of the nurturing origins of the extraordinarily empathic behavior of bonobos.

In his definitive presentation of his treatise, the masterpiece book that is Freedom: The End Of The Human Condition, Griffith stresses that only by solving the human condition — explaining why we are competitive, aggressive and selfish rather than all-loving and empathic — can we save our species from self-destruction; a world of wars, refugee crises, ecological devastation, polarized politics, mental illness and addiction, and family breakdown. “All the ailments the world suffers from are symptoms of the deeper issue of the human condition”, he writes.

Griffith begins his explanation of the human condition by arguing that while historically we have simply excused the darker aspect of our nature as a relic of a competitive and aggressive animal past, where the instinct to survive and reproduce genes dictated behavior, this is just a convenient excuse while we searched for the real reason for this divisiveness.

“The involvement of our fully conscious thinking mind demonstrates there is a psychological dimension to our behavior. We don’t suffer from a genetic-opportunism-driven ‘animal condition’”, writes Griffith, “we suffer from the psychologically troubled ‘human condition’.”

His key unlocking insight is remarkably straightforward. Like all living creatures, our species must once have been controlled by instinct, but then we evolved a conscious mind capable of understanding cause and effect. And from that moment on our conscious mind has been in a wrestling match with our original instinctive orientations for the control of our lives. It is this conflict, Griffith explains, that is the cause of our human condition.

“Our newer nerve-based, conscious mind began to act independently of our instincts; in effect, defy them. When our instincts resisted and gave conflicting instructions they, in effect, ‘criticized’ our conscious mind’s search for knowledge. The inevitable result was that we became psychologically defensive, angry and determined to prove our instincts’ ‘criticism’ was undeserved. The price we paid for heroically searching for knowledge was that we unavoidably became sufferers of the insecure state of the human condition.”

So rather than our condition being an immutable genetic state, the very good news is that our psychologically insecure condition can be healed with redeeming, compassionate understanding. So it’s understanding of ourselves that we needed to heal the pain in our brains. Certainly the human condition now presents itself in countless manifestations, and I have seen most varieties of psychosis during my career, but what Griffith has identified is the core insecurity that has given rise to such a tragic proliferation. As Griffith points out, “‘psychosis’ literally means ‘soul-illness’ and ‘psychiatry’ literally means ‘soul-healing’ (derived as they are from psyche meaning ‘soul’, osis meaning ‘abnormal state or condition’ and iatreia meaning ‘healing’), but we have never been able to truly ‘heal our soul’, explain to our original instinctive self or soul that our fully conscious thinking self is good and not bad and consequently reconcile and heal our split selves — but now at last we can.”

Like Darwin did with his theory of natural selection, Griffith puts forward a wide-ranging induction-derived synthesis. As Professor Scott Churchill, former Chair of Psychology at the University of Dallas, said in his review of Freedom, “Griffith’s perspective comes to us not as a simple opinion of one man, but rather as an inductive conclusion drawn from sifting through volumes of data representing what scientists have discovered.”

Dr. Churchill also recognized the importance of Griffith’s synthesis, concluding that “This is the book that all humans need to read for our collective wellbeing.” I certainly agree. In the twilight of my long career, I am thrilled to be able to say that I have no doubt Griffith’s explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race.

To quickly assess Griffith’s breakthrough treatise I recommend the interview with Griffith at HumanCondition.com where he summarizes his explanation. Even though it is only one hour long, this interview is proving so amazing in what it is able to make sense of that it is generating much excitement online.

Harry Prosen M.D., M.Sc., is an emeritus professor of psychiatry with over 50 years’ experience in the field, including chairing two departments of psychiatry and having been President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association. He is also a psychiatric consultant to the Bonobo Species Preservation Society.

BETWEEN UTOPIA AND ESCAPE

Fr. Alexander Schmemann

Lecture delivered in Greenville, Delaware on March 22, 1981.*

www.schmemann.org

***

Over the Desert by Jaroslaw Jasnikowski (Morpheus Fine Art)

***

What I would like to say tonight is certainly controversial, and I know it is and I am not quite sure if the line I am taking is the right one in all its details. However, one must try to understand something deeper than the surface of our age — and, my goodness, how many prophets we have explaining it to us! We are at a very exciting moment in the history of the United States. We do not know whether one philosophy, which replaces the old one, is valued or not, and we are all living in the same kind of anxiety. But, when we go deeper and try to understand what is going on, what continually comes into my mind is exactly this polarization, not only of our individual minds or our personal experiences, but of our entire culture, our entire situation between those two poles that I call; one, Utopia and the other, Escape. I am sure that there is at least something here which is worthy of being analyzed. Let me briefly explain what I mean by this polarization, what I mean by Utopia, and what I mean by Escape. Since all languages are symbolic by definition, we have to explain in what kind of symbolic framework we are using these terms.

Let me say immediately that these two attitudes — toward life, toward society, and toward culture — Utopia and Escape — of course existed before. We find them present in almost any society or any culture. There are always those who, being obsessed with one particular vision and being fanatically loyal to that vision, cut themselves off from the mainstream of culture. There are also, always, in every culture and every society, those who can be called the dropouts, those who for various reasons are trying to escape from the pressures of their society. What I think is new is that today this Utopia, on the one hand, and this Escape on the other hand, are no longer marginal phenomena.

We always had religion and sects and cults. In the Christian religion, in the history of the Church, we find that every century brings its own utopians and also its own escapees. For instance, in the second century, we find those Montanists. And yet these are precisely marginal phenomena. What I think is typical of our age, of the contemporary world, is that those two realities, attitudes, stands, experiences, —"Utopia," and "Escape," have become no longer marginal. They are inside. They are the moving forces of our society itself. I do not mean to say that every gas station attendant is either a utopian or an escapee; and yet the culture itself moves by those two identifications.

Now, what do I mean by Utopia? First of all, Utopia is a kind of a maximalistic projection towards the future. It is a promise, or an idea, that history as a whole, and human existence as personal destiny, moves towards perfection and fulfillment, towards an eminent — not only eminent, but also an imminent, victory over all kinds of dangers and deficiencies. We can see, for example, the political appeal of Utopia, not even speaking of such utopias as the Marxist utopia. (Now, the power of Marxism over human minds is in itself a paradox, something absolutely amazing! Why is it that this theory, which so far has never proven itself to be right in any detail or wholesale, why does it keep its power? To abandon the Marxist vision of time, of history, is a tremendous kind of "crucifixion" for some people.) But even if we disregard those utopias, like Marxism, which is not the fate of this country, we will find this utopian coefficient even in the political culture of our society today. It is not an accident that every four years during a new presidential election, there must be a vision like The Great Society, or A New Frontier... There is always something that is great, decisive, final, and built in to that vision is the faith that we are confident and capable of doing something radical.

No, the history of the world does not encourage us to think that way. All of the Napoleons failed and all their dreams ended on a great variety of St. Helens . . . And yet today this faith is essential. No politician would come and say, "We know that we are poor, limited, fallible human beings. We are living in darkness, we will try to do our best, but of course not much can be done..." Such a man would not go very far. He must have a kind of utopian charisma. He must lead us to what the French Marxist poet Arangon terms, "Les lendemains qui chantent" — "The tomorrows that sing," "Tomorrow must sing." Why must tomorrow sing? People will die; the cemeteries will grow, and so on. Politics today is fed by, if not necessarily lies, then, at least, utopian messages.

The search for Utopia is also prevalent in our daily lives. There is the Utopia, which I call, the Therapeutic Utopia.

Waiting for my train at Pennsylvania station, I went into the bookstore, and there was this tremendous shelf with many books (probably bought by someone, I don’t know, otherwise why would they be published?), books that promise and proclaim the possibility of total health, and books that judge all of life in terms of what is good for that kind of utopian state of health.

You know the latest discovery is that coffee is bad for us. We have already eliminated virtually all the foods — all the liquids, all the solids. Now it is coffee. And yet people jump on that, buy it all! Death, of course, is the greatest handicap on the way to Utopia, and it too is being treated today in a very peculiar manner. Believe me, very soon one great event, which the Christian faith proclaims, that Christ trampled down death by death, will be somehow naturalized and placed into a system — you know, like the miraculous health or diet systems... We will also have a death system, so that death will no longer be the devastating question mark over all Utopias.

There is also the tremendous success of all those mental therapies, which really take seriously the famous constitutional right (if not a prescription: I am afraid it will be a prescription soon) that we should pursue happiness as a self-evident goal of life. Now, I really do not know many cultures in the past that would so systematically preach that Happiness is possible and that it must be the only real objective of human existence.

All the old systems, even the most pessimistic, knew joy, but happiness was something quite different. To think that the goal of life is to simply be happy (and happy means to eat only the U.S.A.D. approved foods and abstain from such dangerous elements as water, bread, meat, coffee, tea, not to speak of tobacco and things like that) — did not enter the mind. Joy was found rather in the little infractions of all those things: have an extra drink, have an extra laugh, get wild from time to time, in those high seasons of the year... Very soon, we will have prescriptions, utopian prescriptions, of how to celebrate without harming ourselves, preserving that famous happiness. Utopia is a kind of all-pervasive thing. It is everywhere, although we are not quite there yet. We still pollute the air — tomorrow we will be more noble. We still, for some mysterious reason have toothaches from time to time. As you wait to see the dentist, read all the documents on the table. All our sufferings will disappear in the future: soon all medicine will be preventive. And the last word on Utopia is that if you refuse that happiness, refuse to preventively deal with your teeth, and still insist on drinking coffee, I am afraid, you may be even open to the pursuit, not of happiness, but of justice in the courts. We are being propelled into this kind of Utopia.

Everywhere, from the bloodiest Utopia to the most benign Utopias of our own post-industrial culture, there is this great promise by which we have to live, Les lendemains qui chantent — the tomorrows that sing.

Now as a strange counterpart to that, we have the second fundamental tendency of our time; that is Escape, a kind of counter-Utopia. Our world today is not only the world of those who energetically pursue utopian dreams, but also, to a degree unknown in the past, a world of dropouts — of all kinds, of all sexes, of all social positions. We all know this. We have lived the experience of the Sixties, when men felt, in a new and unprecedented way, the oppression of what was called The System and the desire to drop out of The System.

I am dean of a theological seminary. In the Fifties, I had those lads, young men, who would say Amen to almost anything I would put in their minds. Today, when students see: "9:00 to 11:00 – Dogmatic Theology," they somehow feel oppressed, even if attendance in the course is not obligatory. The very fact that it is published there, is an irritating reminder of The System.

There was a time when people thought, My goodness, I belong to a Church, which is very archaic liturgically and otherwise; they wanted to take those archaic rites out, to dissolve those rites. And today? Every couple that wishes to be married feels eligible to write their own marriage ceremony. They want to find their oun words. And you can try to explain to them that no one has ever invented such platitudes as they feel they are composing in their minds, it is still better than those oppressive systems. Escape begins with the mental attitude of dropouts and continues as a search for all kinds of spiritual experiences. You know, you cannot find God on Broadway in New York. You have to find Him on some blue mountains in India, in some ashram, in some techniques. And again, I am very well placed to know that, because, unfortunately, my religion, Eastern Orthodoxy, is very often identified as a provider of those kind of little mystical techniques which will satisfy the dropout's heart for personal bliss out of The System.

Then, there is a new cult of gurus, and an attitude that has always existed, but never in such form and intensity, and that is "hatred of the world."

Today, at Penn Station, a man whom I knew many years ago, approached me and said, "Hello, Father Schmemann." And I said, "Who are you?" because he was dressed in a kind of black robe and was nearly stepping on his beard. Everything about him was peculiar, from his hair, to his strange hat . . . He was probably playing a monk from Mt. Athos or something of that nature, but I knew he was born in Brooklyn. I know many converts to Orthodoxy who think that when they become Orthodox, they have to also become Russian monarchists, and think that the restoration of the Romanovs in Russia is the only condition for the world's salvation.

In Escape, anything goes, as long as it is outside of that horrifying System. We can joke about it, but behind the jokes there is a very serious reality. On the one hand, the idea of Utopia is increasingly growing in our consciousness, and on the other hand, there is this tremendous temptation to Escape.

In France today, they have coined an expression denouncing the way of life forced on us by the 20th century. They say life consists of "Metro, boulot, dodo," which means: the subway that takes you to work, the work itself, and sleeping. And that is all life is. So, let's drop out of it.

Very often today, Utopia speaks in terms of revolution. Have you ever heard of a single government in Africa for example that does not claim to be a revolutionary one? They are always a Front of the Revolution or Liberation of something. "Revolution" is the code word. Here, in the United States, it is "liberation," or "change," or "quality of life." The consensus between Utopia and Escape is that life, the way we are living right now, is impossible. It is absolutely intolerable. Why all the people here did not commit suicide last night is simply because they are somehow hypocrites. For, if they were normal they would either be right now throwing bombs in the revolutionary fervor, or escaping by following, someone like that monk whom I met at Pennsylvania Station today, already starting to grow beards and meditating on . . . Meditating on what? They never say what they are meditating on. Meditation has become an end in itself, a means of escape. Is it God that they are meditating on? Shush! We do not know — we are meditating.

What I have said, I have said half jokingly, but believe me this is not a joke at all. This is the first time in history when culture is denied on both sides. That it has no substance left. For utopians, culture is something to be overthrown, to be hated, to be judged. Only the Future will be glorious. For escapists, culture is to be fled from, it is something to be rejected, to be an object only of disgust and of nothing else.

And now, as everyone knows, we are facing a couple of problems in this world today. And how can we solve them, how can we even think about them, if it is this dualism that captures the imagination of the young, and the not so young also?

To this, we can add an analysis of modern art — which is also either utopian or escapist. It is no longer what it had been for centuries: a transforming acceptance, a kind of sacramental art of seeing something in reality. Today, be it Salvador Dali or even Picasso, it is first of all the experience of the whole thing as being broken. And then, through that brokenness, there is something that comes to us as a promise or as an escape.

Now, why I am saying all this? It is seems to me that if we can understand the nature of Utopia and Escape we can start thinking about how this relates to us. We need to understand how it appeared, when and why. And here I come to my first thesis, that both attitudes, Utopia and Escape — which we do not find so prevalent in any other organic cultural civilization of the past, — these two attitudes: fundamental attitudes, existential attitudes, and ideological attitudes, are what a French philosopher termed, "The Christian ideas gone mad." Both utopianism and escapism are rooted first of all in the Christian faith itself, in the Good News that some 2,000 years ago a group of people, that called themselves apostles, brought to the ends of the world. Both are rooted in what I would call the fundamental dualism of the Christian approach to the world. Not philosophical or ontological dualism. Existential dualism. Two quotations, just two quotations, and you will understand what I have in mind:

The first is from St. John's Gospel: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." (Jn. 3:16) What is important to me is the eternal music of these words: "God so loved the world." And this "God so loved the world" goes back to the very first chapter of Genesis in the Bible: "And it was evening and it was morning, the first day," and the second day; and the third day . . . and each day, "God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good." (Gen. 1:31) This is the divine world. In the writings of recent biblical scholars there are all kinds of reductions of the Bible. Some reduce it to a set of absurd statements, a scandal of particularities, as they put it. But if you read the Gospel without knowing the Biblical scholars — and there is no absolute necessity of knowing them — it is, first of all, a tremendous confession of God's glory in His world. "And God saw it was very good."

The second quotation is from St. John's epistle: "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world . . . For all that is in the world, [is] the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life . . ." (1 Jn. 2:16)

The light of God’s love for the world in the Gospel coexists with this apocalyptic, catastrophic fear, "When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?" (Lk. 18:8) and so on.

So, we have in Christianity these two fundamentally different, mutually exclusive approaches: One which consists constantly in saying Amen to God. "And God saw it was good. " Amen. "I bring you good tidings of great joy" — from the beginning of St. Luke (Lk. 2:10), and from the end of St. Luke: "And they . . . returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were always together in the temple, praising and blessing God. Amen" (Lk. 24:52-53). This central act of the Church's worship is called "Eucharist," thanksgiving. And the center of that thanksgiving is the Sanctus: Holy, holy, holy Lord God of Sabaoth, heaven and earth are full of Thy glory!.."

On the other hand, there is constantly, "Do not be tempted!" "Lust of the flesh and pride of man..." For centuries the Church kept these two together as two essential aspects of the same reality. But when it began to crack in the history of Christianity, human reason also began to crack — and people began to choose either the utopian way or the way of escape.

Now, when did it happen? In fact, very, very recently. It was in the Eighteenth century, the famous century of "enlightenment," that for the first time the foundations of Utopia were laid, as a reaction to the medieval, "pessimistic" idea of Christianity. Words like "reason," and "happiness," began to shape the human mind. After the Eighteenth century comes the Nineteenth century, the century when progress in history was discovered. Since history became Christianized, history stopped being understood as the circular movement of Hellenic time, but became a line leading us to the kingdom which is to come. We began to view history as being, from the very beginning — although it seems so anti-Christian, an oriented history. The idea of progress — bigger and better, bigger and better, bigger and better, les lendemains qui chantent, the tomorrows that sing — had already appeared then. All those Hegels and Schellings, and, finally, Marx and all those people who deified history, were in fact — without even knowing it - within this whole world of the Christian acclamation. Although they denied the transcendence and rejected God, for them history remained not simply movement, but movement toward the Absolute. One person may understand Absolute as the absence of a toothache, another sees it as equality and justice, a third, as world peace, a fourth, as whatever... But, the fact is that each one projects his Utopia into the future: a Christian idea that went mad.

The same thing can be said about sin. From the same Christian and biblical sources and intuition into evil comes the distorted utopian idea that evil is caused by an absence of knowledge. This idea is still preserved in the great mythology of American Public Education, that education will eradicate all evils. Start discussing sex with little girls of three, and they will not go through the horrible taboos and traumas that we experienced. Educate, educate, educate, educate, ad nauseam, and man will be free from sin.

But the Christian and biblical idea of evil is embodied in the description of Original Sin, and in the person of the devil. But the devil is not at all an ignoramus. Satan is not someone who hasn’t yet taken his Ph.D. exams, or else he would, of course, compromise with God and Christ, you know: a little bit of good, a little bit of evil... Not at all! The devil is the one who knows everything. He is the wisest, he is "Lucifer," the bearer of light. And possessing the entire knowledge of God, he still says No! There is a famous page in Dostoevsky's The Possessed, where the author criticizes this great western idea that, in the end, education will bring a happy existence. All the experts, all those people that know more and more about less and less, will finally combine their efforts and produce a scientifically proven society. Dostoevsky says: And then there will appear a man with a sarcastic smile who will look at this paradise and say: "Why don't we send all this to hell?" Knowing that all this progress is very convenient, aseptic, hygienic, efficient, preserving human rights, etc., he will say this simply because evil is irrational, because it is a rebellion, because it is hatred of light. And light is not in the books. God is light.

Escape is rooted in the idea that evil is absolute. With a mind set like this, you feel that you cannot live in a society that is fallen, evil. You simply have to free yourself from it! Leave! Don't get mixed up in this world! Put one little finger into the mechanics of that enslavement to evil, and your whole life will be destroyed…

Both Utopia and Escape are rooted in one unique religious experience, which we can call Judeo-Christian. Unfortunately, having agreed with the world on this duality of Utopia and Escapism, the Christian people — those who call themselves believers — have finally surrendered to either Utopia or to Escape. And this is where we come to the real tragedy, as I see it. I often think of that seminary in New England in which, in the glory of the utopianism of the Sixties, the faculty and students met and confessed to God the sin that they had spent too much time in chapels, in praising God, and in refining their hearts, thus neglecting that, which at that time was preached by men like Harvey Cox, — that we have to build cities and liberate the world and so on. And the faculty and those students unanimously decided to close the chapel. And the seminary became a kind of talkatorium, seminars, similar to what Paris experienced in May of 1968. I went to Paris shortly after that, and saw everywhere groups of people who discussed. Maybe it is a caricature of the great belief of the 20th century that discussion always leads somewhere... I think that it always leads nowhere - I mean this is my very personal view. Not only that, but also all those discussions create realities, which otherwise would have never existed. As a result, half of Christendom confessed the "sin" of having produced Saint Francis or the Mass of Bach, or the Messiah of Handel, or a symbolic system, in which one minute of time can be pregnant with the whole of eternity, where not happiness, not equality, but — joy, spiritual joy, the joy of seeing the light of the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor is the real human vocation. And instead half of Christendom went into what I call the "Me-Too" utopianism.

Quite recently, I was in Paris, and I went to my favorite theological bookstore and found books there titled something like this: A Marxist Reading of St. Matthew; A Freudian Reading of Genesis, and so on. Of course, this approach was being prepared over many centuries when it was thought that human reason, human scholarship, knowledge of late Syriac grammar would finally explain to us what Christ meant by the Kingdom of God. And before Dr. Schnuklemeukle wrote his authoritative three volumes on that subject, nobody ever understood what it was.

But today it is taken for granted: that Christianity is in need of utopianism. We have to repent — for what? For having preferred the transcendent to the immanent? For having thought of the Kingdom of God in terms of the Other World? And now we are obliged to mobilize ourselves and join every possible activism, whether it’s called "liberation theology" or "the theology of urbanism," or "the theology of the sexual fulfillment"… The word "theology" used to mean "words about God." Now it may also mean words about sex, or contraceptives… And, as a reaction to that development, Christians surrendered to the Me-Too utopianism.

At the same time, we have a fundamental resurrection of escapism, which takes on many forms in religion today. People turn their backs to the world and plunge into almost anything. As an Orthodox priest I can see the forms it takes in our Church: we have people who do not care what is going on in the world. They have discovered The Icon. Or, of course, one of the areas, into which one can endlessly escape, is a discussion of the high-church, low-church, and middle-church liturgical practices. Vestments... Modern or archaic... You can hear people saying, "But that isn’t right: in the third century in eastern Egypt..." — and you already feel that the Transfiguration has begun. The third century in Egypt, or in Mesopotamia, or wherever it is — as long as it is not in Chicago, New York, London or Paris. As long as this Epiphany or Theophany takes place somewhere in some impossible land! In Caesarea of Cappadocia... — that is music itself: Cappadocia, it already gives you the feeling that you are in the right religious school, you know. Introduce Chicago into that religion, and it spoils the whole dream, the whole sweetness, the whole thing.

So we have either Jesuits disguised as the professional unemployed walking the streets of Chicago, finished with all the Cappadocias at once, or we have people escaping — in orderly procession — to Cappadocia. And this is of course the tragedy of our Christian response to Utopia and to Escape. Now, then what?

Then what? What indeed is behind all this? I said that we are dealing with two sides of the same vision: God so loved the world, on the one hand; and on the other hand, Do not love the world or anything of the world. On the one hand, St. Paul says, "My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But for your sake there is greater need for me to stay on in the body." (Phil. 1:23-24) On the other hand, he says, "Nothing, neither death, nor life . . . can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Rom. 8:38-39)

Now, how did the Church keep these two visions together? How can the Church rejoice day after day in this God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, on the one hand, and on the other hand, how does the Church reconcile this with the affirmation, Do not love anything of this world. Escape! Do not store up for yourselves treasure on earth . . . Store up treasure in heaven . . . For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. How can these two be reconciled? People, like the great professor of theology Adolph Von Harnack, have tried to explain this without seeing the real truth about how they are related. Harnack says that there was a white Christianity and there was a black Christianity. There was a kind of joyful Christianity and a sad Christianity. Not true.

Christianity brings together three fundamental truths. First of all, the Bible and the Church both proclaim the truth of, what I would call, "the experience of Creation." Oh, I am not speaking now about how creation was revealed through seven days, through proteins, or exactly how old Adam was when he was created, things like that. Those things are absolutely not important. What is important — when we say "Creation," is revealed every evening when we sing Psalm 104, "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless His holy name..." This is the affirmation of the essential goodness of the world — the Divine Image in it. "The heavens proclaim Thy glory!" Maybe the authors of Bible had no traumatic experiences? Maybe they had never gone through psychological nervous breakdowns? Of course people in this world have always suffered. How then did that Book appear, which is one endless hymn of Doxology, of glorification?

This is the first affirmation: Everything is good. The Greek fathers say, "Don’t you ever dare to say the devil is bad. He is bad by behavior, but he is good by nature." Or else, you go back to the dualism of the extreme "good god/bad god." The devil is the most perfect creation of God. That is why he became so powerful and so bad, ontologically speaking.

Now, the second affirmation: This world is fallen. Not because of one little transgression — that famous apple. (Why apple? I don’t know who decided that the forbidden fruit was an apple. I have tried to find out, but I never could.) The world has rejected goodness, has rejected first of all, God, who is goodness. And, therefore, the whole world is fallen — not just some things in the world. Not, for instance, extramarital love as opposed to marital love, or cognac as opposed to tomato juice: the whole world is fallen. Marriage is fallen. And tomato juice is fallen, not only bourbon. Everything has become fallen. The best religion is first among the most fallen things of all! Because religion replaces joy about God with calculations: how many candles, how many dollars, how many rules, how many commandments, how many Fathers, how many sacraments, how many?... — "Numerical theology." So, everything is fallen. Everything has become darkened. And here the Orthodox Christian would immediately say: "Yes, the world is sick, mutilated, fundamentally mutilated by sin. But, it still sings the divine glory! It is still capable of God!"

And finally, the third affirmation: The world is redeemed. But it is redeemed not in order to guarantee success, even of the excellent fiscal policy of Dr. Stockman. It is redeemed not in order to assure that we will have "tomorrows that sing." The redemption occurs now, right now. This is Christian eschatology. It is not only an eschatology of the future. Yes, every day, many times a day, we say: "Thy Kingdom come." And it comes now. That famous French formula, Metro, boulot, dodo, is exactly what is being redeemed. Redemption does not mean the replacement of all those inevitable mundane things with meaningful jobs. What job is meaningful, by the way? Every job, which has had three Mondays in its history, already becomes meaningless, or at least to some extent oppressive. Redemption means exactly that of which St. John writes in his epistle: "That which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life — the eternal life which was made manifest to us." And this is the paradox, the antinomy, the message, which Christians could not endure because it was too much for them. It is much easier to have a little religion of the past, present and future, of commandments and prescriptions. Of saying that God did not love the world; He loved the good things in the world. He loved people who did go to church. He loved people who contributed (although it is tax-deductible, but still it is good that they contribute), and so on and so forth. Redemption means that the Kingdom which is to come has already come, it is in the midst of us.

The great drama of redemption takes place all the time. And this point of view, this eschatology, this doctrine, this faith in the ultimate is what the early church held together. The church was persecuted. She was denied. The Roman Empire said to Christians: "You cannot exist." But read the early Christian prayers, and you will see that they are cosmic, they are historic. Nero! My goodness, what a horrible guy he was! And at that time Paul writes to Timothy and says, "Pray first of all . . . for kings and for all that are in authority." (1 Tim. 2:2) He does not say, "Picket!" He does not say, "Go to—!" He says, "Pray for them." Why? Because the church is not a little forum for social reforms. It introduces, it reiterates the single fact that the history of the world’s redemption, for which we are responsible, takes place in our hearts, and that Kingdom, that light, which comes to us, is the only power left with us — the realized, inaugurated eschatology of the Kingdom and, at the same time, the real knowledge of the Kingdom. The knowledge that nothing is solved by recipes and therapies, but, when a man decides to know the truth of all things, he, like Saint Anthony of the Desert, the great father of monasticism, turns to God. Anthony went to the desert and asked God for the ability to see the devil always. Because the devil always takes the form of an angel of light. The devil is always one who says something sentimental, nice, good. And finally God gave Anthony the ability to see the devil. And then, while still within the dimensions of human existence, for the saint this world became the Kingdom.

This ultimate experience of the Kingdom holds together that, which I call the "triune intuition"— created, fallen, redeemed. Created: it means good. It means that the foundation of everything, which we question in our utopianism and our escapism, is good. However, everything can also be bad. Systems? Metro, boulot, dodo? But perhaps all systems are merely caricatures of that which truly is the fate of man? Someone would come to me and say: "I can’t take a meaningless life. The subways, the beds, the breakfasts, the venison, and so on and so forth..." And I would reply: Christ couldn’t take it either. He died on the cross. And Paul said: "Whether you eat, or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." (1 Cor. 10:31) The other day, I was preaching in Montreal, and one man came up to me and said: "Thank you for teaching me that I can read even the Wall Street Journal to the glory of God." Yes, of course you can. The glory of God is not only in Mr. Ralph Nader's office, believe me. It is wherever a man wants it to be.

There is this intuition of the created, and then — of the fallen world. Let’s be realistic. Let us not subscribe to the idea that just one more institute, one more think tank, one more discovery, one more therapy and finally evil will be taken care of. Evil is here, all around us. But, we don’t have to panic. We do not have to immediately go overboard and escape, no! I recall that little 16-year-old French boy who was playing ball, and some Jesuit came up and said: "You are playing ball! Suppose Christ were to come back today. What would you do?" And the boy answered: "Play ball." He did not think there was anything wrong with playing ball.

Sometimes, I feel like I joined a kind of metaphysical Peace Corps made out of Christianity. Very often in Geneva, when I used to go to ecumenical meetings, I heard the expression "churches, synagogues, and other agencies." I was not baptized into an agency. And I think that everyone is free not to be part of an agency. Keep me out of it.

And so, there is this vision of the created, fallen, and redeemed world. Until this triune vision broke apart, there was no way for our culture, which is rooted in the Gospel, to either go all the way into utopianism or all the way into escapism. And today, the real intellectual and spiritual work that we, Christians, face is not simply to choose either Utopia or Escape. It is not to sell religion as a little Valium, a holy Valium pill. Our real challenge is to recover that, which I call the fundamental Christian eschatology. Whatever the Other World is (and we know nothing about it) this Other World is first of all revealed to us here and now. Nowhere else, but here. If we do not know it today, we will never discover it. If we cannot find the Kingdom of God, I repeat again, in Chicago, Wilmington, Times square, and so on, we will never find it anywhere else. If you think we can find it somewhere in Transvaal, and you are rich enough, go there. And you will find that it is no different there from what it is here.

When my friend, the sociologist Peter Berger, recently criticized the modern idea that Paradise is always somewhere very far from Manhattan, from factories, but somehow it is always found in a commune in northern Vermont, where we bake our own bread and have children in common, — he said: "Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, when God speaks of the symbol for His Kingdom, that Kingdom is a city, not a little farm in Vermont." And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, descending from heaven. (Rev.21:2) And Jerusalem is of course a city.

The fundamental Christian eschatology has been destroyed by either the optimism leading to the Utopia, or by the pessimism leading to the Escape. If there are two heretical words in the Christian vocabulary, they would be "optimism" and "pessimism." These two things are utterly anti-biblical and anti-Christian.

It is for us, Christians, to reconstruct this unique faith, in which there are no illusions, no illusions at all, about the evil. We simply cannot afford a cheap faith that just requires from us to give up smoking and drinking, a small religion that promises that you just quit drinking coffee and tomorrow will start singing. Our faith is not based on anything except on these two fundamental revelations: God so loved the world, and: The fallen world has been secretly, mysteriously redeemed.

We are people of a certain tradition, of a certain culture. I do not speak about a specific religious heritage of our culture, the cathedrals of Chartres, of Notre Dame, or about great religious poetry. I am speaking about the unique culture, about the reality, and about the faith that produced people like Dante and Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, the faith in which all that I am trying to say is perfectly expressed: there is real evil, and there is real good. There is the world, which is loveable, and there is the world, which is hateful. There are vertical and horizontal dimensions of human life. Nothing is betrayed. Nothing is mutilated. When there is joy, that joy is full. When there is sadness, that sadness if full. Life cannot be reduced to those psychological gravies and all kinds of similar things. I really feel that the only true kind of religion is the religion, which is cosmic, religion, which does not deny the Fall. Religion, which bears witness to not only the belief in, but also the experience of the redemption that takes place here and now. And this belief and experience will condemn, as two heresies, both utopianism and escapism.

"When the Son of Man comes back, will He find faith on earth?"(Lk. 18:8) Maybe we are headed for a catastrophe. It is not for the Christian church to guarantee that everything will be bigger and better. This is utopianism. On the other hand, we have to also exclude escapism as a betrayal of God, who so loved the world. These two realities — the fallen world that was created good — must be kept together, antinomically. This is the conditio sine qua non, which the Christians always were able to find in the very acts by which the Church was defined. One was the proclamation of the Good News — evangelion. And the other one was the Sacrament of Thanksgiving. That great eucharistia, thanksgiving, which teaches us: You want to understand what something is? Of course, you can buy a dictionary, or you can buy an encyclopedia. You want to know what the human body is? Buy, of course, a book of anatomy, etc. But if you really want to know what anything in this world is, start by thanking God for it. Then you will not fall into the heresy of reducing: man — to economy and to sex, nature — to determinism. Then you will know that man became man, not because he invented the wheel, — important as it may have been. Not because he is the Homo Sapiens, or because he discovered the logic of Aristotle. But, he became man when he became Homo Adoratus, the man who gives thanks. The man who is not saying to God, I am entitled to it, it is my constitutional right to always have this or that. It is the man who, by thanking God, all of a sudden, exclaims: "Heaven and earth are full of Thy Glory." If only we will return — from our lapse, from our confession, from our morbidity, or from our cheap optimism — to the spiritual oxygen of that cosmical thanksgiving, which provides for us the terms of reference, the context of our existence, which transforms that famous Metro, boulot, dodo! If only we could recover that — and, my goodness, no resources are missing, — we would be not passive followers of that growing polarization: either Utopia or Escape (and by "we" I mean believers, for whom God is still a Reality). We would be active participants in the constant process of saving the world, the world, which God has created, the world, which has fallen, the world, which is being redeemed — by those who believe in redemption.

Transcribed from the tape by Martha Ruth Hoffmaster. Prepared for publication by Barbara W. Sokolov and published by Fr. Victor Sokolov in www.schmemann.org

PIETY AND VIRTUE IN EARLY ISLAM

Two Sermons by Imam Ali

By Tahera Qutbuddin

Image: Soroush Zargar (2018)

What is the relationship between virtue and piety? Grounded in the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad’s sayings, the teachings of Ali ibn Abi Talib (d. 661)—first Imam after the Prophet Muhammad according to the Shia, and fourth Caliph according to the Sunnis—contend that they are essentially linked. In this article, I analyze Ali’s sermons and sayings to demonstrate that in his vision virtue and piety go hand in hand such that each entails and informs the other: you cannot be truly pious if you are not truthful and kind and you cannot be truly virtuous if you do not humble yourself before your creator. In his conception, all virtue is contained in the idea of piety such that a description of piety is a description of virtue and a description of virtue is a description of piety. Underscoring the vital correlation, he preaches that the fundamental source for acquiring knowledge of virtue is divine revelation: we originally learned virtue, and continue to learn virtue, from the guidance of the prophets sent by God through the ages to teach humankind.

Most contemporary secular virtue ethicists have nothing to say about piety. But Islam, like most faith traditions, intrinsically connects the two, and its scriptures contain abundant examples of this association. The Qur’an links prayer with behavior, saying, «Ritual prayer restrains you from indecency and dissipation»,1 and it makes material charity one of the so-called pillars of the faith.2 Muhammad’s hadith tie the spiritual with the social aspect of human life, such as the hadith which says: “Those who believe in God and the last day should honor their neighbors.”3 Explaining and elaborating the nexus in rich detail, Ali’s teachings firmly link virtue with piety.

After brief contextualizing remarks on Ali’s life, teachings, and ethics of virtue, the article presents texts and analyses of two famous sermons that address the relationship between virtue and piety, namely, “The Four Pillars of Faith” and “Description of the Truly Pious.” (I treat piety and faith synonymously in several places in this paper, insofar as both focus on mindfulness of God, belief in him, and behavior based on his commands.) These sermons are among Ali’s most comprehensive presentations on the topic, but much of his oeuvre lends itself to the discussion at hand, and the section following highlights some of his notable teachings on brotherhood and pluralism. The final section brings Ali’s vision into sharper focus by comparing his ethics of virtue in general terms with certain types of self-oriented and ascetic Muslim approaches. Throughout the article, Ali’s sermons, epistles, and sayings are examined alongside historical reports regarding his character and practice. Referring to the umbrella topic of the present volume—that virtue orients us to self-transcendent goods—the concluding remarks cite a final text by Ali predicating human happiness on a combination of piety and virtue.

Ali’s Life: Courage and Conviction in Adversity

Ali is an eminent figure in Islamic history.4 The Prophet Muhammad’s cousin, ward, and son-in-law, he was the first male to accept Islam. The Shia believe him to be the Prophet’s legitimate successor in both his spiritual and temporal roles, while Sunnis regard him as the fourth historical Caliph. Both Shia and Sunni Muslims extol his deep personal loyalty to the Prophet, his valor in the early battles, and his profound piety, learning, and justice. They invoke benedictions upon him whenever they mention Ali’s name, such as “God’s blessings and peace upon him” (Shia), and “May God honor his face” (Sunni). They recount numerous sayings from the Prophet praising him, among the most famous of which are: “I am the city of knowledge and Ali is its gateway” ; “Ali is to me as Aaron was to Moses, except that there is no prophet after me” ; “You, Ali, are my brother in this world and the next.”5

Dedicated to preaching virtue and piety, Ali’s life was also a litany of fortitude. Born in Mecca around 600 AD, he was raised by his older cousin Muhammad. He was about 10 years old when Muhammad began the call to Islam, and 23 at the time of his migration to Medina. Shortly thereafter, he married Muhammad’s daughter Fatima, with whom he had two sons, Hasan and Husayn, and two daughters, Zaynab and Umm Kulthum. In Medina, he put his life on the line for his principles and played a leading role in establishing Islam, with a crucial part in the major Battles of Badr, Uhud, Khaybar, and The Trench against the Meccans and their allies. Muhammad’s death in 632 AD struck him hard, as he mourned a deeply revered leader and beloved benefactor. In the wake of Muhammad’s demise, and Fatima’s two months later, he conceded command to the first three Sunni caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman, though upholding his right to the succession. For the next twenty-five years, he lived a life of retirement from politics, dedicated to collecting the Qur’an and educating his children. Even after becoming caliph in 656 AD, he was faced by repeated uprisings from within. In the four years he ruled, he fought three pitched battles against dissenting Muslims: first, the Battle of the Camel against the Prophet’s widow A’isha, the Prophet’s companions Talha and Zubayr, and the people of Basra; then, the Battle of Siffin against Mu’awiya from the rival Umayyad clan and the people of Syria; and finally, the Battle of Nahrawan against the Seceders (Arabic: Kharijites) from his own Iraqi army. He migrated from Medina to Kufa to confront the insurgency of the Camel, and stayed there, using it as a base for the fight with Mu’awiya. Some of his closest associates and family members were killed at Siffin and in its aftermath. After the post-Siffin arbitration went against him, most of his supporters pulled back, and he spent the last few months of his life persuading them to resume the fight. Meanwhile, Mu’awiya was going from strength to strength, taking over Egypt, and sending raiding parties into the Arabian Peninsula and even Iraq itself, not far from Ali’s capital, Kufa. This state of affairs continued until in 661 AD, a Kharijite killed Ali while he was praying in the grand mosque in Kufa. The orations and epistles quoted in this article—which articulate his morality and conviction, and champion justice and charity—were mostly spoken and written during the turbulent years of his caliphate.

Ali’s Teachings: Piety, Philosophy, and Governance

Ali is the preeminent sage and orator of Islam. Hundreds of orations, epistles, and sayings are attributed to him, composed and initially transmitted orally, and compiled in tens of collections and thousands of pages of pithy, vivid, rhythmic prose.6 Major extant compilations include The Path of Eloquence (Nahj al-balāgha) compiled by the Twelver Shi’ite scholar Sharif Radi (d. 1041)7 and A Treasury of Virtues (Dustūr ma’ālim al-ḥikam) compiled by the Fatimid Shafi’i-Sunni judge Quda’i (d. 1062). Considered the epitome of Arabic eloquence by medieval and modern litterateurs and critics, Ali’s words are also deemed authoritative. For the Shia, they are second in stature only to the Qur’an and hadith, and the majority of Sunnis also deeply revere them. This broad-based veneration is a large part of the reason why the themes of Ali’s sermons have influenced the development of Muslim thought. Clearly, Ali’s teachings have had enormous currency through the ages and continue to resonate today. Moreover, his orations cover a wide array of both spiritual and material subjects. Learned philosopher, pious ascetic, governing caliph, warrior, and commander, Ali’s persona and words bring together disparate aspects of the human experience.8

Ali’s Ethics of Virtue

Ali’s orations are among Islam’s foundational texts for ideas of virtue and piety. After the Qur’an and the sayings of Muhammad, they form the most copious and significant early source for notions of virtue ethics in Islam. The texts attributed to Ali are mostly from his public preaching, and given their homiletic and persuasive function, it is to be expected that they do not offer a detailed theoretical analysis of virtue. But from the abundance of sermons, sayings, and epistles, we can distill some philosophical underpinnings. Broadly, Ali’s sermons preach worship of the creator, promote awareness of the transience of human life, and focus on the subsequently urgent need to prepare for the imminent and permanent hereafter. This multi-pronged umbrella theme of Ali’s philosophy connects directly with his ethics of virtue. Preparation for the hereafter, he says, is achieved not solely through prayer and fasting. He fully encourages devotion and ascetic practice but combines them with an uncompromising requirement of humanitarian good. (By “humanitarian” good, I mean as it relates to behavior among humans, which is seen by contemporary virtue ethicists as secular; in Ali’s view, “humanitarian” virtues are not different in category than “religious” virtues.) In order to worship God sincerely, Ali says, you must also be just, wise, and compassionate toward others. You must cultivate forbearance and gratitude. The rich among you must take responsibility for feeding the poor. You must perform good deeds and participate in building an equitable society, for all creatures are God’s own creation. In Ali’s vision, piety and virtue cohere, and together form the basis for true happiness. In this, he draws on Qur’anic and prophetic teachings, some of which I cited in my Introduction, where piety and virtue are also intrinsically linked. Moreover, and as I also mentioned at the outset, Ali’s linking of virtue and piety is based on the understanding that religious teachings are the primary source for acquiring awareness of virtues. How did humans first become differentiated from animals? How did we learn goodness? In Ali’s vision, we learned it through the example of God’s prophets and the teachings of his revealed books.

Sermon 1. “The Four Pillars of Faith”: Text and Analysis

It is reported that a man named Abbad ibn Qays asked Ali, “Commander of the Faithful, tell us: What is faith?” Ali replied with a homily, in which he presented faith as an edifice grounded in a number of fundamental religious and humanitarian virtues. Parsing faith into essential elements of forbearance, conviction, justice, and struggle against evil, he parsed each of the four further into sixteen supporting characteristics, intertwining the spiritual with the humanitarian. Binding the list of traits in a complex narrative sustained by the themes of rationality and societal engagement, he presented spiritual virtues as both the spur and the source of humanitarian ethics, while holding up the teachings of the prophets as the originating point for all virtue. This is the text of the sermon:9

Faith, Abbad, stands on four pillars: forbearance, conviction, justice, and struggle against evil.

Forbearance stands on four columns: Longing, fear, rejection of worldliness, and expectant waiting. Whoever longs for the garden is diverted from indulging desires. Whoever fears the fire retreats from forbidden things. Whoever rejects worldliness makes light of calamities. And whoever awaits death hastens to perform good deeds.

Conviction also stands on four columns: Perceptive sagacity, counsel offered by this world’s lessons, interpretation of God’s wisdom, and following the practice of the earlier prophets. Whoever perceives with sagacity interprets God’s wisdom. Whoever interprets God’s wisdom recognizes these lessons. Whoever recognizes these lessons also recognizes the path trodden [by earlier prophets]. And whoever recognizes the path trodden [by earlier prophets] is like someone who has lived with them and been guided to the steadfast faith.

Justice in its turn stands on four columns: Deep comprehension, abundant knowledge, blossoms of wisdom, and flowerbeds of restraint. Whoever comprehends understands particulars from the generalities of knowledge. Whoever knows the path of wondrous wisdoms is guided to the repositories of self-control and does not stray. And whoever possesses restraint eschews extremes in his affairs and lives among people respected and loved.

Struggle against evil stands on four columns: Enjoining good, forbidding evil, valor in battle, and abhorring the corrupt. Whoever commands good strengthens the believers’ resolve. Whoever forbids evil cuts off the hypocrites’ noses. Whoever is valorous in battle has discharged his duty. And whoever abhors the corrupt has been roused to anger for the sake of God—so God will be roused to anger on his behalf.

This is faith, Abbad, and its columns and pillars.

Table 1. The Four Pillars of Faith

The Four

Forbearance

Longing for the garden

Pillars of Faith

Fear of the fire

Rejection of worldliness

Expectant waiting for death

Conviction

Perceptive sagacity

Counsel offered by this world’s lessons

Interpretation of God’s wisdom

Following the practice of the earlier prophets

Justice

Deep comprehension

Abundant knowledge

Blossoms of wisdom

Flowerbeds of restraint

Struggle

Enjoining good

against evil

Forbidding evil

Valor in battle

Abhorring the corrupt

Abbad’s question is about the essence of faith (īmān), and Ali parses it as a conglomeration of religious and humanitarian virtues. He describes faith in terms of a metaphorical castle, with “pillars” and “columns” holding it up (see Table 1). He structures his answer using a mnemonic device called the “method of loci” (Latin: places) also called the “memory palace technique,” which involves filing new information under previously stored memories of space, physical or figurative;10 here, mapping new material within a predictable, structural, list-form. In this numerically framed sermon, we have four pillars and sixteen columns, twenty characteristics in all. They include both religious and ethical traits, forming a synergistic whole. Humanitarian virtues are explained on a religious plane, while religious concepts are parsed and presented in terms of humanitarian ethics.

Islam (literally: commitment to God’s will) has also been described from early times as an edifice with pillars, framed by its monotheistic doctrine, and constituted by its practice of ritual prayer, fasting, the alms-levy, and the Hajj pilgrimage. Īmān (literally: faith) on the other hand is widely seen as Islam’s internal manifestation, and Ali’s sermon presents a granular parsing of what faith translates into in terms of character and behavior.

The following is a summary of the sermon’s schema in which each pillar represents an elementary trait and each column denotes a supporting characteristic: The edifice of faith is constructed on the pillars of forbearance, conviction, justice, and struggle against evil (Arabic: ṣabr, yaqīn, ʿadl, and jihād). The pillar of forbearance is supported by the columns of longing, fear, rejection of worldliness, and expectant waiting. The pillar of conviction is supported by the columns of discernment, counsel offered by this world’s lessons, interpretation of God’s wisdom, and following the practice of the earlier prophets. The pillar of justice is supported by the columns of comprehension, knowledge, wisdom, and restraint. And the pillar of struggle against evil is supported by the columns of enjoining good, forbidding evil, valor in battle, and abhorring the corrupt. These characteristics—cast as the pillars and columns of faith—include both religious and ethical behaviors and characteristics.

For each pillar of faith, Ali explains how its columns work together to form a complex, interlinked whole. For the first pillar, forbearance, Ali lists supporting columns of longing, fear, rejection of worldliness, and expectant waiting. Then he explains the connection between the traits: “Whoever longs for the garden is diverted from indulging desires; whoever fears the fire retreats from the forbidden; whoever rejects worldliness makes light of calamities; and whoever awaits death hastens to perform good deeds.” Here, qualities of spirituality—fearing the fire, rejecting worldliness, and awaiting death—are presented as a spur to humanitarian ethics.

Another keystone of Ali’s philosophy of virtue is visible in the sermon’s presentation of religious teachings as the source of humanitarian ethics. This idea underpins the whole text, but is most clearly visible in the explanation of the second pillar of faith, conviction, where, alongside sagacity and world-lessons, God’s wisdom and his prophets’ teachings are held up as essential elements. After listing these four, Ali explains how one leads to the other, and how, through practicing them all together, one achieves conviction:

Whoever perceives with sagacity interprets God’s wisdom. Whoever interprets God’s wisdom recognizes these lessons. Whoever recognizes these lessons also recognizes the path (sunna) trodden by earlier prophets. And whoever recognizes the path trodden by earlier prophets is like someone who has lived with them and been guided to the steadfast faith.

In addition to the remarks he makes in this text, throughout his oeuvre Ali refers to the prophets as exemplars. In an oration denouncing the base character of this world, he lauds Muhammad, Moses and Jesus for their disengagement from materialism:11

An indication of the world’s lowliness is that God has by consideration and choice turned it away from his intimates and devotees, and presented it instead to his enemies as a test and a trial. He raised Muhammad above its lowliness, when he tied a tight belt around his waist from hunger. He protected his intimate and confidant Moses from it when Moses became so thin that the greenness of the plants he ate showed through the skin of his stomach. The day he took refuge in the shade, he did not ask God for anything except some food, because he was exhausted by hunger. … The Spirit and Word, Jesus, son of Mary, said: “My food is hunger, my garment fear of God, my clothing rough wool, my mount my own two feet, my night-lamp the moon, my heating in winter the rays of the sun, my fruit what the earth has grown for grazing animals. I go to sleep owning nothing, yet no-one is wealthier than I am.”

Next he praises Solomon for concentrating on prayer and God’s forgiveness. Then, referring to all the prophets collectively, he commends their rejection of the world’s corrupt aspects, “These, the prophets of God, his chosen and select, distanced themselves from the world, and rejected of it what God urged them to reject.” He ends the segment by explicitly stating that humans learned piety by walking the path shown to them by the prophets: “The pious learned from their example and followed in their footsteps. They focused their reflection and benefited from exemplary lessons.”

In this theme as in others, Ali’s teachings reiterate the Qur’an’s presentation of the verbal and exemplary guidance of the prophets for humankind. Among many other verses extolling the prophets collectively or individually, one oft-quoted Qur’anic verse about the Prophet Muhammad declares: “God’s messenger is a beautiful exemplar (Arabic: uswa ḥasana) for those who place their hopes in God and the last day and remember God unceasingly.”12 Another much-cited verse lauds Muhammad’s strong moral fiber, “Truly, you possess the noblest character traits.”13 It is clear that the Qur’an considers Muhammad an exemplar for humankind, and that virtue is among the most significant things he exemplifies—a doctrine that Ali echoes.

The third pillar of faith presented in this sermon is justice.14 Justice for the weak and downtrodden was not only a crucial refrain in Ali’s sermons, but also the hallmark of his rule. In a widely accepted hadith, Muhammad himself extolled Ali’s justice to his companions, “The most just (and/or: the best judge) among you is Ali.”15 As mentioned earlier, Ali was simultaneously a ruler, a commander, an ascetic, and a sage. In his capacity as ruler, he practiced the justice he preached. His letters to governors instructed them to be fair and compassionate in administering their subjects. When he appointed Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr as governor of Egypt, he urged him in the letter of appointment to be kind and evenhanded to the people he governed: “Lower your wing for them, offer them your softer side, show them your face, and give equal attention to all in glance and look.”16 Regarding his own governing practice, Ali said,

I would prefer to sleep on a bed of thorns and be dragged in iron fetters, rather than coming to my meeting with God and his messenger having oppressed any of God’s servants, or having usurped any part of someone’s property.17

Justice in Ali’s view is a primary virtue, while virtues such as generosity are secondary, being contingent on an absence of conflict with primary virtues. In this, he is going against the grain of the classical Arabic poetic tradition inherited from pre-Islamic bards, where generosity (alongside courage) is one of two principal virtues praised in any leader. Once Ali was asked, “Which is better, justice or generosity?” He replied, “Justice puts everything in its rightful place, while generosity takes things out of their proper sphere. Justice is a universal driver, while generosity is a particular aspect. Thus, justice is the nobler and better of the two.”18 You should practice both, but when one comes up against the other, you must give priority to justice. As university professors, we could take the familiar example of fairness in grading students’ work: If a teacher were to be “generous” with her grades, in the sense that she gave everybody an “A” whether their performance merited it or not, she would be unfair to the students who worked hard to earn that “A.” In this kind of situation, one must give precedence to justice over generosity.

Ali’s conception of justice and compassion was pluralistic. He enjoined his tax collectors, for example, to be gentle to all subjects of the realm. In one such letter, he wrote to them: “Do not block anyone from their needs. … do not whip anyone for silver. Do not appropriate the property of any one of the people, whether they pray the prayer of Islam (i.e., Muslims) or are protected through a covenant (i.e., Jews and Christians).” A large proportion of the people in Ali’s realms were Christians and Jews, and in Egypt the majority of the population was Coptic Christian. Among the Muslims in his realm, a large proportion of the people were not his Shia followers, yet he made no distinction between them in terms of rights in the state. Here too, his directions for just and kind government applied equally to all. All were accorded safety of life, honor, and property under Ali’s rule; his exhortations to equitable treatment did not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or gender. In his letter of appointment as governor for Malik al-Ashtar, Ali instructed him to be just, and explained why in this famous line, “They are either your brothers in faith or your peers in humanity.”19 It is important to remember that Ali preached this message from a position of power. He preached it because he believed it to be the right thing to do. Society is messy; Ali’s words and practice show that although he was not expecting that we can wave a magic wand and resolve all our differences, he believed we can and should learn to understand and respect each other’s beliefs. Indeed, Ali had his own strong faith convictions; in addition to making conviction one of the pillars of faith, he speaks of his own state in one text where he says, “I have not been separated from truth since the first time it was shown to me.”20 Elsewhere, he declares, “Removing the veil (of the body, at the time of death) will not increase my conviction.”21 But from this conviction sprang inclusivism, openness, and tolerance. In Ali’s rule, all in the state were accorded equal rights.

A companion of Ali named Dirar al-Nahshali described him in a celebrated passage that highlights his exemplary justice (among other virtues such as discernment and simplicity, two of Ali’s justice-supporting “columns”):22

Ali was farsighted and strong. When pronouncing judgment, he was discerning. When commanding, he was just. Knowledge gushed from his person. Wisdom spoke upon his tongue. He shied away from the ornaments of this world, taking solace in the lonely night. He wept copiously in prayer, thought deeply, and turned his hands one over the other, admonishing himself before admonishing others. He favored simple food and plain clothes. He lived among us as one of us, responding when asked, and answering when questioned. But despite our intimacy, we would approach him with reverent awe, hesitating to call him out for a casual conversation. He respected the pious and was kind to the poor. The powerful did not dare presume upon a favorable ruling and the weak never despaired of his justice.

Showcasing another fundamental aspect of Ali’s vision, three of the columns supporting the sermon’s pillar of justice—comprehension, knowledge, and wisdom—underscore the importance of learning and rationality; as do two of the columns supporting the pillar of conviction, viz., sagacity and world-lessons. A cornerstone of Ali’s teachings, learning and rationality are emphasized heavily throughout his oeuvre. A famous sermon addressed to his companion Kumayl begins with the assertion that “knowledge is better than wealth,”23 and it compares the two in very specific ways. Ali’s teachings on all aspects of spiritual and worldly life, on theology as well as practical matters, stress rationality. For Ali, faith is not blind faith; faith is only complete when based on logic and understanding.

The final pillar of faith in Ali’s sermon is struggle against evil. The Arabic term is well known—jihad. In our time, most people translate the term as holy war. In fact, Arabic has other, more specific terms for warfare, viz., ḥarb and qitāl, while the root meaning of the word jihad is “effort.” The connotation of the word in Ali’s sermon is based on its nuanced usage in the Qur’an and in Muhammad’s teachings.24 A report about Muhammad reinforces Ali’s combined humanitarian and religious presentation of jihad, and it also endorses my translation of the term as struggle against evil: Muhammad returned to Medina one day from a major battle against his Meccan enemies, and said to his followers, “We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad.” Surprised, they asked him what could be more challenging than the battle they had just fought, in which they had put their lives on the line to defend Islam. Muhammad said, “The greater jihad is the fight against your own immoral desires.”25 In Ali’s sermon, jihad is presented as an effort to combat evil in all its forms and in all ways possible, internal and external, on the level of the community and on the level of the individual. He parses jihad, as we have seen, as enjoining good, forbidding evil, valor in battle, and abhorring the corrupt, and he explains the contribution of each of these four traits to the fight against evil.

Sermon 2. “Description of the Truly Pious”: Text and Analysis

It is reported that a companion of Ali named Hammam said to him, “Commander of the Faithful, describe to me the truly pious such that I see them before my eyes.” In a succinct initial answer, Ali recited the Qurʾanic verse: “God is with those who are pious and perform good deeds.”26 Hammam asked for a fuller reply, and Ali responded with a lengthy sermon. He opened with theological lines setting up the discourse as a relationship between the divine being and the human being, in which he constructed the parameters of human piety vis-à-vis their obedience to God:27

God created the people when he created them not needing their obedience and untouched by their disobedience. The disobedience of those who disobey does not harm him, and the obedience of those who obey does not benefit him. He distributed sustenance among them, and placed them in various places on the earth.

Next, in the body of the sermon, he listed a large number of religious and humanitarian virtues side by side as essential components of true piety. Hammam’s question is about the qualities of the truly pious, and Ali’s response begins with the framing line, “The pious in this world are people of virtue.” Like the Qur’an verse he had cited initially, the line fundamentally connects piety and virtue, predicating one on the other, and offering them as equivalents. After the framing line, the bulk of Ali’s description of the pious takes the form of a list of approximately eighty virtuous behaviors. The catalog contains items we normally categorize under religious virtues and others we usually consider humanitarian virtues. Although items from both categories are juxtaposed at what seems initially to be an ad hoc system, the apparent random mixing is not random at all. In Ali’s vision, the distinction is moot because the text’s main takeaway is that there is no distinction: religious virtues are humanitarian and humanitarian virtues are religious, and together they form an intrinsic whole. This is the body of the sermon:

The pious in this world are people of virtue. Their speech is rational, their garments simple, and their walk the embodiment of humility. They lower their eyes avoiding things God has forbidden them to see, and dedicate their ears to hearing words of wisdom that bring them benefit. Their hearts are at peace in times of tribulation and in times of prosperity. If not for the lifespans decreed for them by God, their souls would not linger in their bodies the blink of an eye, but would instantly depart, yearning for God’s reward and fearing his punishment. The creator’s majesty in their hearts makes all else small in their eyes. Paradise is before their gaze—they see it as clearly as though they themselves were enjoying its blessings. Hellfire too is before their gaze—they see it as clearly as though they themselves were being tortured in it. Their hearts are sorrowful, their malice never feared, their bodies emaciated, their needs few, and their persons chaste. They patiently endure these few days here, awaiting the long comfort of the hereafter, and a profitable trade bestowed in ease and security by their lord. The world approached them but they turned away. It shackled them but they ransomed their souls and set them free.

In the night they stand in worship reciting sections of the Qurʾan, chanting it in sweet melody, moving their own hearts to tears and finding in it the cure for their illness. If they come across a verse that rouses yearning, they latch on to it hungrily and their hearts stretch out toward it in desire—its promised blessings are visible right in front of their eyes. If they come across a verse that stokes fear, they incline their hearts toward its warning—the hiss and crackle of the inferno fills the innermost parts of their ears. They bow their spine, laying their forehead, palms, knees, and toes on the earth, beseeching God to free their necks from the fire.

In the day they are kind, wise, good, and pious. Fear has emaciated them like arrow shafts. The observer thinks them ailing, but they are not ill. He says, “They are crazy!”, but they are crazed only by something immensely grave. They are not satisfied with a few good deeds, and they do not think their numerous endeavors too many. They constantly chide themselves and fear the consequence of their actions. If one of them is praised he is apprehensive, and replies: I know myself better than you know me, and my lord knows me even better. Lord, do not hold me to what they say about me, make me more virtuous than they estimate, and forgive those of my actions they do not know.

Their hallmark is strength in faith, resolve with gentleness, belief with conviction, voracity for knowledge, knowledge with maturity, temperance in affluence, humility in worship, forbearance in indigence, patience in hardship, seeking the licit, enthusiasm in following guidance, and aversion to greed. They perform good deeds while always being on guard. They spend the night thanking God and the morning praising him. They sleep vigilant and awake in joy, vigilant because they have been warned against neglect and joyful because they have gained blessings and mercy. If their ego bucks against doing something it dislikes, they do not allow it full rein in letting it do what it desires. Their joy is centered on things which bring lasting reward, while they care little for commodities which will not remain. They combine maturity with learning and words with action.

You will see this—their needs are few, their slips are rare, their hearts are humble, their souls are content, their fare is meager, their manner is easygoing, their faith is protected, their appetite is dead, and their rage is held in check. Their goodness is always anticipated, and their evil never dreaded. If they sit with the heedless they are still listed among the heedful, and if they sit with the heedful they are not listed among the heedless. They forgive those who oppress them, give to those who hold back from giving to them, and foster those who cut them off. Lewdness is far removed from them, gentleness imbues their words, and wrongdoing is absent from their actions. Their decency is ever present, their goodness always forthcoming, and their evil always distant and removed.

In calamities they remain calm and dignified, in catastrophes they remain patient, and in happy times they remain thankful. They never wrong an enemy or transgress to help loved ones. They acknowledge the dues they owe to another before testimony is given against them. They never squander something they have been given in trust. They never forget a thing of which they have been reminded. They never call others vile names. They never harm a neighbor. They never gloat at another’s misfortune. They never enter into wrongdoing and never leave the truth.

If they are silent their silence is not burdensome. If they laugh they are not raucous. If attacked in treachery they are patient—God himself avenges them. They weary themselves by constant chiding while never causing others unease. They push themselves to prepare for the hereafter and never cause others harm. Chaste and upright, they stay away from those who distance themselves. Kind and merciful, they draw near to those who seek to come close. Their detachment is not from arrogance or grandiosity, and their drawing near is not from cunning or trickery.

The Arabic term that I have rendered as “piety” is taqwā (in the plural active participle, muttaqūn), an encompassing characteristic that entails the possession of a comprehensive set of humanitarian virtues and religious merits. Taqwā is a fundamental concept in Islam, its verbal nouns and imperatives among the most visible lexemes of the Qurʾan and hadith. The early Islamic sermon too is permeated with injunctions to taqwā; the formula “I counsel you to piety” is a standard unit in orations,28 which also frequently cite the Qurʾanic verse, “Gather your provisions; the best provision is piety.”29 Faḍāʾil, translated in the present article as “virtues,” can also be rendered as “excellent qualities” (cf. Greek “arête”);30 yet, it is relatively unproblematic to translate—translating taqwā is more complicated. Often rendered imprecisely as “fear of God,” Muslims understand taqwā to mean something more than simple fear. As with many signifiers that are culture-specific, no English word or phrase exactly conveys its full range of implications, but its scope comes close to the English (Christian) usage of “godfearing,”31 or the biblical Mosaic command to “be holy” (Hebrew: qedoshim).32 In Islam, taqwā means desisting from evil deeds, fearing God’s retribution for any wrongs you may do, being aware that God sees and knows everything, and indeed, most importantly and paradoxically, being in awe of him while also taking comfort from his presence at all times.33 This attitude entails believing in God, being ever conscious of him, and thus always thinking and acting righteously. I typically render taqwā as “piety” or “consciousness of God.” Ali’s Description-of-the-Pious sermon itemizes the characteristics that are necessarily inherent in taqwā.

In Ali’s vision—as seen in this sermon and others—piety is what unifies the virtues, because all goodness stems from God. Virtues are not random acts of charity and decency, but rather, all are expressions of piety. God’s love serves as a kind of capstone which integrates all virtues—if you truly love God, you will wish to please him by emulating his attributes, and his attributes represent the virtues. For example, mercy is a divine attribute that is forcefully emphasized in the Qur’an; the opening of all but one of its chapters open with the line, “In the name of God, most merciful, ever merciful.” Imbibing virtues is to actually experience God’s presence: In ordinary acts for an individual, it means that I try my best not to be selfish. If I abide with God in my daily life, I self-orient to compassion, to virtue. Piety functions to energize and motivate. Consciousness of God alters my perception. It animates random little acts of kindness, in an expression of the intimacy I have with God. Turning the issue on its head, virtue is essential to piety. Only if I speak the truth, only if I am kind to others, am I achieving closeness to my creator and theirs.

In the following two lists—solely for the purpose of highlighting the strong presence of both in Ali’s description of piety—I separate the categories into religious and humanitarian virtues. Indeed, many virtues may potentially be listed under both headings; performing good deeds, avoiding evil deeds, and seeking knowledge, for example, could fall under both classifications.

Virtues in Ali’s sermon that we presently deem religious—which speak of God, of spiritual practices, and the hereafter— are the following, twenty-three in all (there is some overlap among the items within this list, and also within the next list of humanitarian virtues, but nuances and contexts differ):

1. Avoiding looking at things God has forbidden you to see

2. Dedicating ears to hearing only words of wisdom that bring benefit

3. Chastity

4. Praying through the night

5. Reciting the Qur’an

6. Taking the Qur’an’s words to heart

7. Fear of God’s punishment

8. Anticipation of the hereafter

9. Breaking free of worldliness

10. Strong faith

11. Thanking God and praising him

12. Bodily emaciation from fear of doing wrong

13. Belief with conviction

14. Humility in worship

15. Seeking the licit

16. Enthusiasm in following guidance

17. Good deeds

18. Vigilance against neglect

19. Joyfulness in God’s blessings and mercy

20. Centering joy on things which bring lasting reward

21. Caring little for commodities which will not remain

22. Mindfulness of the hereafter

23. Preparation for the hereafter

Virtues in Ali’s sermon that are usually deemed secular humanist—which relate particularly to humans’ behavior toward each other—are the following, fifty-seven in all:

1. Rationality in speech

2. Simplicity in dress

3. Humility in walk

4. Kindness

5. Patience

6. Contentment

7. Good deeds

8. Modesty regarding stature and achievements

9. Resolve with gentleness

10. Voracity for knowledge

11. Maturity in knowledge

12. Forbearance in indigence

13. Patience in hardship

14. Aversion to greed

15. Maturity with learning

16. Words with action

17. Needs few

18. Slips rare

19. Humble hearts

20. Meager fare

21. Easygoing manner

22. Full control of physical appetite

23. Holding rage in check

24. Reining in self from indulging base desires

25. Always doing good

26. Never doing evil

27. Forgiving those who oppress

28. Giving to those who hold back from giving

29. Fostering those who cut off ties.

30. No lewdness

31. Gentle words

32. Absence of wrongdoing

33. Decency ever present

34. Never causing others harm

35. Calm and dignity in calamities

36. Patience in catastrophes

37. Thankfulness in happy times

38. Never wronging an enemy

39. Never transgressing to help loved ones

40. Acknowledging dues owed to others

41. Never squandering something given in trust

42. Never forgetting lessons learned

43. Never calling others vile names

44. Never harming a neighbor

45. Never gloating at another’s misfortune

46. Never enter into wrongdoing

47. Never forsaking the truth

48. Their silence is not burdensome

49. Their laughter is not raucous

50. Patience when attacked in treachery

51. Constant self-chiding

52. Chastity and uprightness

53. Staying away from those who distance themselves

54. Never being arrogant or grandiose

55. Kindness and mercy

56. Drawing near to those who seek to come close

57. No cunning or trickery

Religious and humanitarian virtues are interwoven in the sermon’s narrative primarily by juxtaposition. For example, Ali talks in the same breath about “strength in faith, voracity for knowledge, temperance in affluence, humility in worship, forbearance in indigence, patience in hardship, seeking the licit, enthusiasm in following guidance, and aversion to greed”—here, both kinds of virtues—such as worship (religious) and temperance (humanitarian)—are placed side by side and fuse smoothly. In another example of the combination between religious and humanitarian, he says of the pious, “their needs are few, their slips are rare, their hearts are humble, their souls are content, their fare is meager, their manner is easygoing, their faith is protected, their appetite is dead, and their rage is held in check”—here too, both kinds of traits meld.

Virtues are not given in a list of single words, but rather, they are explained in real-life situations. An example is seen in the following line: “In calamities [the pious] remain calm and dignified, in catastrophes they remain patient, and in happy times they remain thankful.” Here, dignity, forbearance, and gratitude are enjoined within the contexts of calamity, catastrophe, and happiness. Additionally, traits are explained alongside real life actions. An example is seen in the following line: “Chaste and upright, [the pious] stay away from those who distance themselves. Kind and merciful, they draw near to those who seek to come close. Their detachment is not from arrogance or grandiosity, and their drawing near is not from cunning or trickery.” Here, chaste disinterest and merciful kindness are lauded within the context of fostering social relationships, and explained from the perspective of righteous motivation.

Like taqwā, another term in this sermon that needs to be understood in context is amal; commonly (and in this setting, incorrectly) translated as “hope,” amal is a flaw that is warned against in Ali’s sermons and in the early Arabic homiletic tradition more generally, and it customarily signifies denial of one’s own mortality, having “long (and false) hopes” that one will live forever and enjoy the pleasures of this earth without end.34 Ali is not criticizing hope in the positive meaning we commonly denote by the term. Here, he praises the pious, saying (in literal translation), “their hopes are near,” which I have rendered idiomatically as “their needs are few.” Contextualization is crucial to understanding this sermon and others. If we want to apprehend what virtues Ali espouses and what traits he warns against, we need to recognize the associations of the words and idioms he uses and translate sentence-by-sentence; direct word-to-word translation of a passage is frequently inadequate.35 To denote positive hope, Ali typically uses another word, rajāʾ. A virtue regularly associated with having faith in God, rajāʾ is used in another sermon by Ali in the line: “Place all your hopes (rajāʾ) in your lord.”36 Elsewhere, he applauds the virtue of positive hope without using either term, amal or rajāʾ, “The time remaining in a believer’s life is priceless,”37 meaning there is always hope—no matter what you did earlier, there is still time to turn over a new leaf, to be good, to do good. Similarly, though rajāʾ is not a term used in the present sermon, the virtue of hope permeates it entirely. The subtext of the piece is that pious and virtuous people are people of hope. They inculcate characteristics of piety and virtue, and perform acts of piety and virtue, because they hope for God’s pleasure and reward in this world and the next.

Teachings on Brotherhood and Pluralism

The hundred virtues listed in our two texts—twenty in “Pillars of Faith” and eighty in “Description of the Truly Pious”—are not the only virtues Ali emphasizes. There are a myriad of teachings underlining the sanctity of life and property, condemning oppression, and forbidding slander even of enemies. Others preach forgiveness and gentleness. The following is a sample of his sayings on these topics:

The true worth of a man is measured by the good he does.38

Gentle character is a sign of nobility.39

How you wish to be treated should be the measure of how you treat others.40

Do not let someone’s ingratitude stop you from doing good. The one who reaps no benefit from your generosity [i.e., God] thanks you.41

Believers are brothers: they should not cheat, slander, or hesitate to help one another.42

I dislike you slandering [our enemies]. It is better that you simply describe their deeds … and instead of name-calling, say: God, preserve our blood and their blood from being spilt, heal the relationship between us, and guide them out of their errant ways.43

Like Ali’s pluralistic conception of just governance, on the level of individual ethics we also find that he preaches brotherhood and affection among the human family. The tone is set for this stripe of preaching by a popular hadith of the Prophet Muhammad, “We are all children of God, and God loves best those who most benefit his children.”44 Morphing this idea with the Arabian reverence for illustrious genealogy, Ali is reported to have said in a verse of poetry, “All humans are peers and equals: Their father is Adam, their mother is Eve.”45 Moreover, although the majority of Ali’s sayings exhort personal piety and deeds, these transpose seamlessly into the public sphere. This is clear from the many sayings in which he connects individuals with society, and bridges a person’s personal traits into behavior with others. In a frequently quoted line, Ali says “Live among people in such a manner that while you live they long for your company, and when you die they weep over you.”46

In addition to his call for brotherhood among humans, Ali also exhorts his followers to be kind to birds, insects, and animals. Emphasizing that these animals are God’s own creation, he marvels at the physiognomy and living habits of the ant, the locust, the crow, the eagle, the pigeon, and the ostrich,47 and expresses amazement at the physical features of the bat and the peacock.48 Bringing this approach to bear on human virtue, he directs his followers, “Be gentle with your horses and camels. Do not keep them standing while loaded. Do not make them drink with their bits in their mouths. Do not load them beyond their capacity.”49

Comparison with Self-Oriented and Ascetic Approaches in Muslim Ethics

The study of virtue ethics in Islam has focused largely on the work of philosophers, theologians, jurists, and mystics;50 these draw directly on Ali’s ideas to some extent, or at least converge with them, while diverging from them in others. This is too large a topic to wrap our arms around adequately here, but a few cases of difference will serve as a foil to bring Ali’s ideas into sharper focus.

Ali’s conception of an ideal life, a life of happiness and meaning, is distinct from self-oriented approaches among certain Sufis. Sufism is not a monolith and not all Sufi individuals or groups are so minded;51 some even come close to Ali’s version. But the influential Sufis Junayd (d. 910) and Rabi’a al-Adawiyya (d. 801), for example, focus on a person’s love for God as an exclusive and personal phenomenon. Rabi’a’s ideas in particular could be construed as a rejection of the whole idea of living harmoniously and productively in human society.52 While in Ali’s conception as we have seen, we need to maintain a balance between striving for individual spiritual closeness with God, and between promoting a healthy, close-knit, and godfearing community. Similar to Aristotle’s promotion of the Golden Mean, Ali says, “Whoever leaves the middle road deviates,” and with echoes of the Greek philosopher’s concept of Eudaimonia, he advocates a life of engaged productivity. 53 Ali strongly encourages reflection and contemplation, but solitude for thought is different than leading a solitary life. Ali’s approach is also different from certain ascetically oriented presentations of Islam, which, in some ways, come close to the Buddhist advocacy of unequivocal detachment for the spiritual elite and monasticism54—such as the Sufi master Qushayri’s (d. 1074) approach which lauds hunger, poverty, and celibacy.55 In contrast, Ali advocates living a joyous life on earth with family and community, in accordance with God’s law and Islam’s moral code. One should enjoy and give thanks for God’s temporal and spiritual blessings, while all the time worshipping the creator and practicing virtue in action—thus, ultimately leading to a joyous life in the hereafter. In one celebrated sermon, he says,

The pious partake of the joys of this world and those of the next…In this world, they reside in the most splendid of residences and consume the finest of delicacies…Yet, when they depart, they leave with full provisions and a large profit.”56

In this, as in other ideas, Ali echoes the balance promulgated by the Qur’an, which directs, “Through the blessings that God has granted you, seek the abode of the hereafter; but do not forget to enjoy your share of this world.”57

To complicate things further, however, Ali preaches that for those who gain deep knowledge, the world progressively becomes anathema, even though, paradoxically, they are more and more at peace.58 Moreover, as noted earlier, Ali’s sermons contain strong criticisms of worldliness. But Ali himself is described in the historical reports as only engaging in ascetic practices—eating coarse grain, wearing patched garments, sleeping in the mosque—in the last few years of his life.59 During his early years with the Prophet, there are no reports of such austerities. Most importantly, even in his final years of strict self-denial, Ali was actively engaged in the community, governing the Islamic empire, commanding in various battles, engaging in trade, farming his land, caring for his family, and all the while preaching piety and virtue. Ali encourages detachment from temporal desires, yet, as we have seen, he simultaneously preaches positive social engagement for the spiritual novice as well as the spiritual adept. He strongly advocates responsibility of the individual for the well-being of family and community, for just and compassionate governance, for coming together in earthly living and communal worship; in other words, an appropriate balance between detachment and attachment.

Among present-day Muslims, there are some who choose to foreground one or the other, virtue or piety. Over the past decade, I have conversed anecdotally with individuals from practicing Muslim families who have said they want to focus on “just being good human beings.” The unspoken implication is, of course, that they no longer wish to commit to an organized faith denomination. Many continue to love and revere Muhammad, Ali, and other prominent and pious Muslim leaders as part of their traditional legacy, but they choose to deliberately let go, to a smaller or larger extent, the practice and laws they also inherited from their forebears. There are others on the further end of the spectrum who are steadfast practitioners, but whose focus on religious ritual downplays the importance of inculcating virtue. In Ali’s vision, this is a false dichotomy. As we have seen in the texts analyzed in this article, he advocates an inseparable combination of both piety and virtue as two indivisible sides of the same coin.

Concluding Remarks

Ali’s teachings have resonated with Muslims through the fourteen centuries since the coming of Islam, and they continue to hold immense consequence today. As a system of values, they have the potential to promote a just and compassionate vision of Islam. Especially in several strife-torn Muslim-majority countries, I believe they could unify Shia and Sunni in their common creed of Islam, and Muslims and people of other faiths in their common humanity. The divide between Shiism and Sunnism in Islam is largely based—to put the issue simplistically—on the perception of Ali’s role as first Imam vs. fourth Caliph. His own words and his example can and should be used not to create divisions between groups, but to heal, to bring people together.

Centered in a distinct Islamic and Qur’anic worldview, Ali’s ethics are also universal, applicable to the lives of humans in different times and places. At the heart of his teachings, we find the promotion of virtues such as justice and compassion, in conjunction with consciousness of the creator. In Ali’s vision, piety is not only about worship of God, but it is also about translating that worship into righteous behavior. Conversely, Ali also preaches that full virtue is only attained through consciousness of God, and that virtue, like piety, is learned through the divine guidance of his prophets. In short, true piety cannot be attained without virtue, and true virtue cannot be attained without piety.

In Ali’s vision, it is this combination of piety and virtue that generates meaning in life, and I close with a final quote. Offering his companion Nawf al-Bikali a simple yet profound formula for self-realization, Ali conjoins prayer with justice, devotion with detachment. He predicates on both, on piety and virtue, an individual’s path to happiness in this world and the next:60

Happy are those who reject worldliness and focus their desire on the hereafter. They take God’s earth for a carpet, its dust for a bed, its water for perfume, the Qurʾan as their garment, and prayer as their robe. They cut their bonds with the world in the manner of the Messiah, son of Mary. God revealed to his servant, the Messiah: “Command the children of Israel that they should not enter any of my houses except with pure hearts, eyes cast down, and unsullied hands. I do not answer the prayer of any who has rendered an injustice to one of my creatures.”

For Ali, ultimate happiness is in the next life with God. But in this world too, the pious and virtuous are always connected to God, and thus truly happy; as stated in the Qurʾanic verse he cited at the head of his “Description-of-the-Truly-Pious” sermon, “God is with those who are pious and perform good deeds.” As we have seen, Ali parses in the body of that sermon what it means to “be pious and perform good deeds” in a list of eighty religious and humanitarian virtues; to repeat a few here, it means being compassionate and generous, as well as performing good deeds, taking the teachings of the Qurʾan to heart, praying the ritual prayer, and supplicating God. In his “Pillars-of-Faith” sermon, Ali preaches a further twenty virtues—forbearance, conviction, justice, and struggle against evil, and many supporting character traits. In both the sermons we see that among the virtues one must acquire to become truly pious and faithful, virtues that transcend the self play a crucial role. To be sure, many also focus inward, but as in everything else, Ali advocates a balance; in addition to cultivating one’s individual betterment, worldly and spiritual, one must also do all one can to help others. If you are not just and compassionate, you are not truly pious. Just as virtue is incomplete without piety, piety is incomplete without self-transcendent virtue, and the combination of both leads to complete happiness. Taking the middle ground between secular humanism and insular faith, Ali propagates a holistic model for happiness, combining individual devotion and betterment with virtuous and dynamic social engagement.

Tahera Qutbuddin (Harvard University, PhD 1999) is an Indian American Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Chicago and winner of 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Arabic Culture in Other Languages cathegory. Her latest book is Arabic Oration: Art and Function (Brill, 2019).

This essay was originally published as: Tahera Qutbuddin (2018). Piety and Virtue in Early Islam: Two Sermons by Imam Ali. In J. Frey and C. Vogler (Eds.), Self-Transcendence and Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology in the series Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory (pp. 125-153). London, England, and New York, NY: Routledge.

OUR LONGSTANDING LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH VACCINES

By Michael Kinch

BETWEEN HOPE AND FEAR: A HISTORY OF VACCINES AND HUMAN IMMUNITY

By Michael Kinch (Pegasus Books, 2018)

When I sat down in early 2016 to begin writing a book about the history of vaccines, I realized that anti-vaccine movements always seemed to accompany each new scientific breakthrough. Indeed, an infectious disease colleague of mine managed, for a time at least, to convince me to not discuss this link. He argued that anti-vaccine sentiments had long since evaporated with the exposure that charlatans, such as Andrew Wakefield, had falsified data and were motivated solely by greed. Yet, I returned to the project on November 9, 2016, motivated by the fact that the United States had just elected its first anti-vaccine president.

Fast-forward a half decade and we find ourselves again confronting a substantial threat from the anti-vaccine movement.  A failure to achieve “herd immunity,” a scientific term reflecting whether a susceptible individual is likely to encounter an infectious spreader, could allow the ongoing pandemic to become perpetually endemic, ensuring inevitable future spikes in infections from new mutations and warranting a continued development of newer vaccines and therapeutics to counter these variants.

This concern raises many questions, but also opportunities.

The first and fundamental question centers upon why vaccines seem to elicit such powerful emotions. The answer, gleaned from researching the introduction of new vaccines for more than two centuries, seems to be that vaccines are administered to prevent a disease that the recipient may (or may not) encounter in the future. Stated another way, a patient will readily accept a risk of potential side-effects to alleviate a pre-existing disease. Yet the concept that one might encounter even short-term symptoms amidst preventing the possibility of future suffering proves to be a bridge too far for some.

Compounding this problem, many of us have largely forgotten the devastation wrought by invisible microbes – preferring to rationalize that past generations had conquered infectious diseases with the discovery of penicillin and other wonder cures (including ironically, vaccines). Presumably, the ongoing pandemic has placed such “objective” assumptions into proper perspective.

This presumption of an objective rationale is often betrayed by a closer look at anti-vaccine movements. The reasons for rejecting a vaccine have ranged from occasionally reasonable to the utterly absurd.  At one end of the spectrum, the first vaccine was a form of cowpox virus that protected against smallpox, one of the largest serial killers of our species ever to exist. Indeed, the word “vaccine,” from the Latin word for cow, vacca, reflects its bovine origin.  Yet early attempts to vaccinate the public in the 19th century were resisted with a presumption that a cow virus would cause vaccinated individuals to sprout horns and rampage like minotaurs.

Nearly as absurd was the response to a far more contemporary vaccine, that targeting human papillomavirus (HPV). This vaccine has the potential to prevent thousands of deaths from cervical, rectal, and head and neck cancers. HPV is often miscategorized as a sexually transmitted disease (the virus resides on the body from mid-thigh to just below the beltline and thus can be communicated even without direct sexual contact). Thus, many conservatives opposed the HPV vaccine based upon an argument that vaccination would cause innocent children, who might not have otherwise entertain such ideas, to initiate their own forms of rampage, this time sexual. Yet, the statistics do not indicate that HPV-vaccinated teenagers have partaken in a decadent frenzy just as cowpox-vaccinated individuals did not sprout horns or a tail.

Far more rational were legitimate concerns arising from the fact that part of the early rollout of the polio vaccine were marred by a manufacturing mistake in the 1950s. Known as the Cutter Incident, thousands of children in California were unknowingly injected with a dangerous virus; some died and others were left paralyzed. This situation was soon rectified, and public trust in vaccines soon regained; effectively eliminating polio as a threat to most nations today.

A similar concern seems to surround the COVID vaccines. In this case, the rationale is that the vaccines were simply developed too quickly (and must therefore be problematic). Although it is certainly the case that these vaccines were developed in record time, this justification for hesitance is not supported by findings from hundreds of millions of people, who have been vaccinated around the world.

Looking back at 2020, it seems paradoxical to state that we got lucky, arguably one of the few times that the odds favored humanity in that annus horribilis. The vaccines, which resulted from a focused and unparalleled cooperation amongst both the public and private sectors, have proven to be both amazingly efficacious and remarkably safe. Apart from a handful of high-profile exceptions (which are disproportionately captured by the headlines), the safety of the vaccines have exceeded all expectations.

The key to a brighter future is that we all must engage constructively with vaccine skeptics. These are generally not utterly irrational actors, but scared individuals. Their fears are generally well-intended, but like prior generations concerned by rampaging minotaurs or teenagers, are not based upon objective analyses of the data. The mission that each of us should undertake is to learn the facts about these vaccines from reputable sources such as the Canadian Public Health Agency or the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We can then convey these to our friends, neighbors and family members, who might have reservations about being vaccinated. Engaged conversations, not lectures, will undoubtedly yield positive results. Only through such constructive engagement can we reach herd immunity, not merely at the local level, but internationally.

Looking ahead, we must also recognize that pandemics are surprisingly common, arising every few decades. Historically, most pandemics arise from new and deadly influenza variants, the most famous being the Spanish Influenza outbreak just over a century ago. As I pointed out in A Prescription for Change, there is a direct causation linking the Spanish flu to the biotechnology revolution that began four decades later. It seems somehow fitting that the legacy of the Spanish flu provided the foundations for the mRNA and adenovirus vaccine technologies that are proving so effective today.

Yet, the same experiences and technologies that promise to end the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., mRNA or adenovirus-based vaccines) might come full circle and prevent a recurrence of a future Spanish influenza. These same technologies might provide an opportunity to develop so-called “universal influenza vaccines” with the ability to protect against all forms of the virus. The elimination of this threat could save countless lives and allow the ongoing pandemic to be viewed by future generations as the legacy left behind by COVID-19 and thus mark the beginning of a new era of improved public health.

Michael Kinch is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Between Hope and Fear (Pegasus Books), The End of the Beginning (Pegasus Books), The Price of Health (Pegasus Books), and A Prescription for Change (UNC Press). Beyond his current work documenting the sources of innovation responsible for new medicines, he has led cancer research activities at the biotechnology company MedImmune and the development of medicines to prevent pandemic virus outbreaks at Functional Genetics, Inc. He led drug discovery at Yale University before moving to St Louis.

THE INVISIBLE ENEMY: JAMES JONES AND THE POLITICS OF GRIEF

By J. A. Bernstein

The Thin Red Line by Tomer Hanuka

***

If we ask what it is that [Orwell] stands for, what he is the figure of, the answer is: the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence…

- Lionel Trilling, introduction, Homage to Catalonia, 1952

1.

In The Thin Red Line, his 1962 novel about WWII, James Jones, himself a wounded veteran of Guadalcanal, has his grizzled protagonist, Sergeant Welsh, mutter: “What’s it all about?... What remains? Property.” The line comes after Welsh has risked his life to inject morphine in a dying subordinate, a scene that’s well captured in Terrence Malick’s 1998 film remark, where Welsh, portrayed by Sean Penn, grumbles, “Whole fuckin’ thing’s about property.” Yet the film omits Welsh’s earlier revelations in the novel, particularly his internal musing that “property, in some form or other, was, in the end, what always made the watch tick.”

Tony Williams, the author of the definitive study, James Jones: The Limits of Eternity (2016), explained that “Jones never participated in any demonstrations or protests, he never followed any crowd of any description.” Although Jones was popular in his day, winning a National Book Award for From Here to Eternity (1951) and living for some years off his royalties in Paris—while nursing an addiction to drink—he never received much scholarly attention, a stigma that continues. “He’s not appreciated because he’s not a postmodernist, flamboyant writer,” Williams adds. “He’s writing about people’s everyday lives in a particular historical context, telling some very unpalatable home truths that many people don’t want to hear.” Unlike other acclaimed veteran-writers of WWII, namely Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jones rarely wrote about the war in grandiose style or sweeping terms. To the extent he decries the war’s aims in The Thin Red Line, he does so mainly through Welsh and almost solely through the lens of “property.” If The Thin Red Line is rarely read today, whereas Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969) remain perennial favorites, perhaps that’s at least partly the result of Jones’s comparatively subdued take on the origins and outlook of war.

Yet of all these novelists, and the many more writing on armed conflict, none of them resonates quite like James Jones. Why this is hard to say. He isn’t a brilliant stylist. His sentences often lag. And his characterization is frequently dull. Sergeant Welsh, for instance, goes in The Thin Red Line from realizing “property’s” force to exclaiming it aloud, while his foil, Captain Stein, goes from caring about his troops to overvaluing their safety, for which he is (predictably) relieved of command. The novel isn’t a work of artistic “genius,” as perhaps Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse Five might be. The best one might say for it, as Lionel Trilling famously did in his introduction to Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, is that it’s “true.” That is, it speaks to the revelations and feelings and torment of those who are conscripted to serve. And no other novel since then, I would argue, has so done as effectively, or proved nearly as prescient, as his.

2.

James Jones was not, by all accounts, a political author. “I don’t like politics,” he told the Paris Review bluntly in a 1958 interview. Then, in a line that sounds almost prophetic today: “Politics is like one of those annoying, and potentially dangerous (but generally just painful) chronic diseases that you just have to put up with in your life if you happen to have contracted it.”

One can only imagine his reaction to the news, 63 years later, that the United States, the wealthiest nation in history, decided to declare “war” on a pandemic by forcing its citizens to work, despite the deadly costs. According to a New York Times article of June 2020, for example, at least 735 workers were “reported for refusing to return to work” in Tennessee, where “the state labor commissioner announced that the fear of contracting the coronavirus was not a good enough excuse to not go back.” Similar reporting emerged in Oklahoma, Ohio, Alabama, Missouri, and South Carolina, among other states. The Times article quotes Rachel Bussett, an employment lawyer, who summarizes the workers’ choices: “‘Do I go back and risk my life, or say no and risk being kicked off unemployment and not be able to pay my bills?’”

My own state, Mississippi, has consistently endured one of the highest positivity rates in the U.S., with nearly all of its ICU’s at capacity during the peak months. The Governor, Tate Reeves, generally refused to shutter bars, restaurants, and casinos, all the while refusing to implement a statewide mandate for masks, which he himself refused to don on occasion. Thousands, mainly Blacks, have been left to languish in prisons, which even prior to the pandemic saw dozens of deaths in custody. Fewer than 1% of inmates were tested amidst the surge, and the state still refuses to disclose exactly how many have been infected. In July of 2020, Reeves even vetoed bipartisan legislation that would have made thousands of at-risk, nonviolent inmates eligible for parole.

Around the globe, as of July 1, 2021, an estimated four million people have died. In the U.S. alone, 605,000 have died, surpassing all 20th-century American war casualties. Given these grim figures, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that Donald Trump would label himself a “wartime President” and many, including him, directly invoked WWII as a point of comparison. “To this day, nobody has ever seen like it, what they were able to do during World War II,” Trump remarked at a briefing on March 8, 2020. “We must sacrifice together, because we are all in this together, and we will come through together. It’s the invisible enemy. That’s always the toughest enemy, the invisible enemy.”

Of course, one might ask how much sacrificing was required of a man who golfed almost daily during the pandemic and, upon becoming infected, received first-rate medical treatment of the sort he had long denied, and would continue to deny, others. But Trump was hardly alone in the war analogies, with Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic Governor of New York, remarking in April of 2020, for example, that “ventilators are to this war what bombs were to World War Two.” Of course, one might also ask why Cuomo, in the months leading up to the pandemic, proposed slashing $400 million for Medicaid and rejecting $6 billion in matching federal aid to promote a vision of austerity. Perhaps war does, as they say, make strange bedfellows.

“In every war,” Jones writes in From Here to Eternity, “there were two wars, the war of the officers and the war of the enlisted men. And all the beardless shavetails grew up to be either the Stern Disciplinarian, or else The One Beloved of All His Men Who Loved Them Like a Brother.” One can’t help but seeing the line exemplified in “Bugger Stein,” Jones’ softhearted and tragically doomed captain in The Thin Red Line. When tasked with leading a frontal assault, he tells his commander: “It’s suicide…I’ve lived with these men for two and a half years. I won’t order them all to their deaths.” Naturally, the top brass soon strip “Bugger Stein” of command, an incident that can only be compared to the US naval leadership’s insistence on admonishing Captain Brett Crozier, the commander of the USS Roosevelt, in April of 2020 after he sounded the alarm of the health risks aboard his carrier. “We are not at war,” Crozier wrote in a public letter. “Sailors do not need to die.” In Crozier’s case, one servicemember would later die, and over 1,100 would become infected.

“I thought it looked terrible,” Donald Trump said of the letter after reportedly pressing defense officials to relieve Crozier of command. Here one also thinks of the Division Commander in The Thin Red Line (likely based on Major General J. Lawton Collins), freshly arrived on the front and imploring the weary survivors, “We’re not gonna let these Japs whip us, are we boys?” to which one of them replies, “You go out there, General.”

3.

In January of 2020, I visited a friend, Pat Ehrlicher, who largely raised me as a child, at a senior care home in Chicago. The facility, a two-story complex off Fullerton, was called the Victory Center, and she lived there off public support. At 75, she didn’t look a day above sixty and was eager to show me her boyfriend, Charles, a spritely figure in his eighties, with whom she sang in a choir. She also accepted a copy of my first novel, which I had just published, and told me how proud she was. I explained that she had always inspired me to write, which brought a few tears to her eyes.

A couple months later, I called Pat to wish her a happy birthday. With the first cases emerging and news of who was at risk, particularly those in senior care, I remember thinking that this call could be important. We talked for about forty minutes—about what, I don’t recall; I have never been a phone person. But before hanging up, I told her I loved her, which are words I had rarely said. “I love you, too,” she replied. I remember standing by the dirt in a potter, alongside my yard in Mississippi, and eyeing its dusty, red clumps. What they could have meant, I didn’t know, though on some level, I think I was reminded of the scene in Malick’s film where Sergeant McCron, portrayed by John Savage, gathers the torn earth and lets it fall through his hands. Initially seen leading his men in prayer, he has now lost all of them to battle. “We’re just dirt,” he reflects, while above him mortars whistle and pop.

On April 20, 2020, my sister called and relayed the news that Pat had died from COVID. Evidently, about 3,700 senior care residents and staff died in Illinois from the virus, and about 470,000 seniors died nationally, or about 80% of all American deaths. No burial or service was planned.

My first reaction, of course, wasn’t grief but one of determining who could be to blame. Was it my own parents, for having employed a caregiver, as many others we knew had, without providing her substantive wages, or at least wages substantial enough that she could receive better care in later years? I remember that they paid her social security and benefits, which, I imagine, is all but unheard of today. Was I myself to blame for having spent our last dime on a second car, the cost of which could have easily covered Pat’s rent, or, worse, for having failed to come get her? I had no idea that she was sick, though my suspicions were aroused when she hadn’t returned an email in March.

Perhaps the root cause was much deeper and emblematic of the system in which we live. As Noam Chomsky pointed out in a 2020 interview, nursing homes today are mostly “reduced to minimal functioning” to boost the profits of the private-equity corporations that own them. Indeed, multiple reviews of the Victory Center from current and former staffers indicate that the facility was run on a shoestring, with one former nurse writing on Indeed.com in 2017: “This location was always low on staff, it was a stressful environment to work in and I definitely did not get paid well enough for the work I was doing.” Several others complained of racist treatment. As with most nursing homes—and places of employment in the U.S.—the staffers likely have no ability to stay home if they are sick for fearing of losing their wages, not to mention their health coverage, if they have it.

Or maybe the problem was Trump, a view evidently shared by many voters. Indeed, it has become clear that other nations, including Canada, fared much better in the crisis. Laos, which has a population twice the size of Chicago’s has recorded three deaths from COVID. One study, in fact, concluded that between 70% and 99% of all deaths in the U.S. could have been avoided had appropriate measures been enacted, including earlier lockdowns, as other countries imposed.

Or maybe the basic problem was me. Throughout the pandemic, my wife and I, like many young parents, faced a difficult choice, albeit one mainly limited to our social class. In spite of the risks, we continued—and continue—to send our youngest children to daycare, which is one of the few remaining ones in our state. I have no doubt that in supporting this operation, we are patronizing a venue that forces its employees to work despite the risks. The average hourly wage for a daycare worker in Mississippi: $8.45, which is less than a living wage for a single adult and a poverty wage for those with dependents, as most of the caregivers have. Indeed, almost none can afford care for their own children, which remains the case as I type, leading me to wonder whether I, like Donald Trump, am really in a position to criticize anyone.

Certainly, my wife and I have no other available support, nor family nearby. We both work full-time as academics and have had to homeschool our oldest child. And, of course, most evidence suggests that working in a daycare poses no elevated risks, particularly for those who are vaccinated. But I can’t escape the thought that I still value my convenience, for which I have risked others’ lives, and possibly my family’s, as well.

“It was strange how closely we returnees clung together,” James Jones writes in Whistle (1978), his unfinished, posthumous novel, which forms the third in his war trilogy.

We were like a family of orphaned children, split by an epidemic and sent to different care centers. That feeling of an epidemic disease persisted. The people treated us nicely, and cared for us tenderly, and then hurried to wash their hands after touching us.

Less explored these days is the stigma of having had COVID or, worse, in many cases, the stigma of having to work. Few people speak about the choices they’ve had to make—risk my life, or pay the bills?—and far fewer ask how we’ve gotten to this point, or how it is we’ve been conscripted to serve.

It’s possible James Jones doesn’t offer a direct answer. “Property” wouldn’t seem to describe Pat, though perhaps it does encapsulate the basic issue she faced: one of needing equitable care. Still, it’s hard not to find something prescient in Jones’ pages, something biting and apt, especially in lines like

Bell was content to throw himself prone, press his cheek to the earth, shut his eyes, and lie there. God, oh, God! Why am I here? Why am I here? After a moment’s thought, he decided he better change it to: why are we here. That way, no agency of retribution could exact payment from him for being selfish.

I begin to think of dirt now, these clumps in the pot, and realize I should pick up my kids.

A Chicago-native, J. A. Bernstein is the author of Rachel’s Tomb (New Issues, 2019), which won the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award Series Novel Prize and Hackney Novel Prize; Desert Castles (Southern Indiana Review, 2019), which won the Wilhelmus Prize; and Northern Cowboy (Green Rabbit, 2021), which won the Wilt Prize. His stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in about a hundred journals and anthologies, including CutBank, Kenyon Review Online, Shenandoah, Chicago Quarterly, Boston Review, Tin House Online, Washington Square, McSweeney's, and Notre Dame Review. He's also published academic articles on Joseph Conrad and won the Harkness Award from the Joseph Conrad Society of America. A former soldier in the Israeli Army and the fiction editor of Tikkun, he teaches in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and lives with his wife and three children in Hattiesburg.

IN THE STOMACH OF A TERMITE

By Chris Arthur

I’m in familiar territory, doing something I’ve done countless times before, when I’m overtaken by a sense of plummeting descent. It’s as if, unnoticed, right beside me, an abyss has opened up. It feels like I’ve stepped into it, quite oblivious, thinking it was just a continuation of the commonplace. When what I thought was solid ground opened without warning into unexpected space, I felt the shock of ambush. Despite the acceleration of falling, it’s an abyss so deep that I have time to look around and get my bearings, examine what’s rushing towards me from the depths.

Although such a sudden, vertiginous drop sounds perilous, in fact I’m safe enough. I’m being held, cradled by a rope that’s wound around me and being paid out smoothly, length by length, with no indication it will ever be exhausted; it’s threaded to a spool that’s always replenished, that never seems to end. My sense of uncontrolled falling is only an illusion created by the sheer distance that I’ve covered in so short a time, the incredible depth I’ve got to when, only moments ago, I was standing on the surface of the everyday, enmeshed in time’s usual minute-by-minute unfolding. Far from being in a doomed freefall towards death, I’m being lowered carefully. And I’m a willing partner in this jaw-dropping descent. I gladly let the rope be wound around me. There was no capture, no coercion; no push over the edge. This was a venture I embarked on of my own volition. However unnerving its destinations, this was a journey I was eager to make. In any case, I know I can return from it in an instant if I cast off the rope, or exchange it for one of many others that lie coiled within easy reach.

I’m searching for a way to picture and explore something I’m so used to doing it’s acquired an aura of invisibility. It’s one of those ordinary – but really far from ordinary – accustomed things that’s hidden in plain sight. I want to find an image that will arrest the mind, stop it from slipping into the automatic pilot of routine naming, assumption, and dismissal. Things done on a daily basis can lose their lustre, become tarnished by repeated use, so that however shimmering with wonder their nature is, it becomes dulled, letting us dismiss as unremarkable what’s really quite the opposite. Imagining myself lowered into a seemingly bottomless abyss on a kind of magic rope provides a way of looking afresh at what’s so familiar there’s a risk of not seeing it properly; of not appreciating the amazing thing it is.

Is this the best way to begin? Perhaps it would be better to abandon confusing talk of abysses and ropes in favour of a literal description, something like: “This morning I’ve been shown the stomach of a termite.”

But stop there for a moment. We should not let past our guard “a literal description” without a body search of what it carries. Such locutions are expert at smuggling contraband across the borders of our notice, in this case the unexamined assumption of authority. Like other masquerades of virtuous accuracy – “the facts of the matter,” “the plain truth” – I suspect “a literal description” is rarely what it claims to be. Far from telling it like it is, rather than cutting cleanly to the heart of the matter and presenting it unadorned and rawly beating, such things are loyal to the codes of convention and convenience, which are rarely attuned to truthful apprehension. Such codes are closer kin to a kind of blindfolding, a simplification verging on obfuscation, than to anything that offers insight into the real nature of the things around us. It was precisely to avoid the blinkering of a literal description that I started with my image of falling into an abyss. But lest this image paints too puzzling a picture, let me give some background, state plainly what occasioned it, and why the unlikely-sounding circumstance of being shown a termite’s innards was such an awakening experience.

I’ve been reading Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale. The subtitle he’s chosen describes the book as “A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life.” Even saying no more than this may create a strong current of distraction. To prevent it drawing attention away from the path I wish to follow, let me acknowledge that Dawkins’ name is often associated with the dispute between theists and atheists, but say at once that this is something that doesn’t concern me here. Whether the dawn of life was sparked by a creator deity, or, as Dawkins holds, by biochemical processes, is irrelevant to my purposes. I’ll adopt neither a theistic nor an atheistic position and offer no comment on either perspective.

Towards the end of his book, Dawkins focuses on Darwin’s termite (Mastotermes darwiniensis) in order to illustrate “the borrowing by greater creatures of the biochemical talents of lesser ones inside them.” These Australian termites rely on “a rich gut fauna of microbes” to produce the enzymes that enable them to digest the cellulose and lignin in the wood they eat – a task the termites cannot perform themselves. As Dawkins puts it, the microbes “have become tools” in the termites’ “biochemical toolkit.” Or, to put it in another way, Darwin’s termites “farm microorganisms in their gut” and depend on the harvests they create there as surely as we depend on the harvests of our agricultural systems. The microorganisms in their turn receive a safe environment and a regular supply of food.

Dawkins focuses on one microorganism in particular, Mixotricha paradoxa, “a large protozoan, half a millimetre long or more.” The gut of Darwin’s termite is the sole habitat this species of protozoan occupies; it is the only place on Earth they’re found. Just as the termites carry the unexpected cargo of Mixotricha paradoxa as an integral working part of their digestive system, so Mixotricha carries its own load of tiny essential life-forms. If you examine one, you’ll find it contains “hundreds of thousands of bacteria.” It depends on them for its survival just as much as the termites depend on Mixotricha. Some of these bacteria aid in the digestion of cellulose and lignin; others form tiny hairs that move together in such a coordinated manner that they provide their host protozoan with a means of propulsion via their synchronized movement.

In each termite’s stomach, therefore, there is what Dawkins calls “a triple-decker dependency.” The termites rely on microbes like Mixotricha to produce the enzymes they need to turn wood into a rich food source, whilst the Mixotricha in turn rely on their bacterial travelling companions for digestion and propulsion. In such cases, unsurprisingly, “it becomes quite tricky to draw the line between ‘own’ body and ‘alien’ body.”

The story of the “triple-decker dependency” in a termite’s stomach is amazing enough in itself. But what it points to is more amazing still. Namely the way in which, some two billion years ago, it’s thought the first eukaryote cells were formed. These are cells with a distinct nucleus that are larger and more complex than the simple, more ancient prokaryote cells which had been until then the only living things on this planet. The cellular revolution that birthed the eukaryotes happened when larger cells engulfed smaller ones and, in time, the smaller ones became organelles within the larger entity, in the manner of the termites and Mixotricha, and Mixotricha and its bacteria. Traces of this ancient symbiotic congress can be seen most clearly in chloroplasts and mitochondria, which contain small amounts of genetic material which is different from that of their hosts. Dawkins spells out the implications nicely:

All our cells are like individual Mixotrichs, stuffed with bacteria which have become so transformed by generations of cooperation with the host cell that their bacterial origins are almost lost to sight.

In other words, they have become part of us.

I find it astounding – a source of humbling wonderment – that the complex cellular life of which we are one expression began with this ancient process of engulfment and symbiosis, and that we still bear traces of it in the deep structure of our bodies. The mitochondria in our cells constitute a kind of evidential watermark. Written indelibly into every micro-page that’s bound together to make us there are subtle semaphore signals pointing back through the aeons to this fusing together; the revolutionary symbiosis that birthed us. Without it, life would not have unfolded in the manner that it has. “The sublime grandeur of the real world,” as Dawkins terms it, is truly awe-inspiring.

Given its grandeur, it’s understandable that delving into life’s ancient roots and contemporary manifestations can feel like plummeting into a vast abyss. In fact it would be odd not to feel the conceptual ground of the ordinary giving way beneath our feet when faced with a saga unfolding over billions of years and still echoing loudly in the cellular building blocks that make protozoans, termites, and humans. There are incredible storylines written in detailed, beautiful profusion on the walls of the abyss – that is, on the fabric of time and space that’s been colonized by life over such a stupendous period of years.

The Ancestor’s Tale ranges over a plethora of creatures in its exploration of how species come and go, continue and perish, as life flourishes on Earth. Fascinating though his subject is, what I want to focus on is not life’s origin and development but the means by which Dawkins documents it – the same means that anyone uses when they want to tell a story: language. It is language that constitutes the rope on which I’ve been lowered through the aeons into an insect’s innards. Without language I couldn’t have journeyed to the lives of all the other creatures that The Ancestor’s Tale examines.

The rope/language analogy first came to mind when I found myself taken into the gut of a Darwin’s termite and shown what was there. It was as if, through his expert diction, Dawkins had woven together a cord of words on which readers could be lowered into the depths he was exploring. Knotting sentences together, braiding them into paragraphs, pages, chapters, I came to picture The Ancestor’s Tale not as a thick book of 685 pages but as a strong rope of prose, down which I could slide into areas that would have been totally inaccessible to me without it.

Thinking of language as a rope provides a useful model by which to consider some of its functions. Like any model, it doesn’t fit what it models exactly – it would be useless if it did. Instead, the creative mismatch that it offers suggests various metaphorical lenses through which what language does comes into clearer focus.

We use language so regularly, it is so much a part of us, that it’s easy to forget how utterly remarkable it is. With very little effort, the sounds and shapes of words can be harnessed and made to carry incredible cargoes. Using only the 26 letters of the alphabet we can lasso any aspect of our experience and pull it towards the light of understanding. We can tie together disparate ideas to make new ones, rope together connections so that we’ve soon woven bridges across chasms of ignorance and incomprehension. We crack the whip of language and the world trots at its pace. Without the warp and weft of words I could not have led you here, nor could Dawkins have led me to the dawn of life. He in turn relied on the specialist discourse of scores of scientists talking to each other and recording their results. Language was the enabling factor for the portrait painted and shared in The Ancestor’s Tale. Thought’s propulsion relies on the cilia of ideas generated by scores of individuals, each rowing their coracle of understanding forward using the oars of words, each advance contributing to our progress.

Think of where language lets us go. Looking along the books on my shelves I could travel at a blink, just by turning a few pages, from the stomach of a termite to nineteenth century Japan and the world as pictured by artists like Hokusai and Hiroshige; from there I might go to a study of the elements in the periodic table, or a life of Leonardo da Vinci; from there I might choose a history of Ireland or an examination of Buddhist theories of causation; there are books on birds’ eggs; cave paintings; the secret life of trees; evolution; astronomy; geology; not to mention many works of poetry and fiction.

Sometimes now I think of every book as a coil of rope offering access to whatever subject it’s concerned with. Language provides us with a means of extending the topography of our experience beyond its immediate, individual environs; it takes us to summits and crevasses, lets us cross oceans and deserts that are not part of the territory we occupy. By its means we can travel enormous distances both in time and space. The rope it spools out is more umbilical cord than inert cable. Through it come the nutrients of information, insight, interest, and amusement that we need. It allows us to share our lives with others as it allows them to put before us their perspectives and concerns. It helps us mesh together as a social species. It allows us to enter deep time, before any of us existed, it takes us to places we could never visit in the flesh – the stomach of a termite being just one example – it lets us see aspects of the world we would be blind to without it.

Looking along my bookshelves, I imagine the covers between the separate volumes dissolving and the ropes that each contains being spliced together until there’s just a single massive line of corded words representing my whole reading life. It runs through the years, part nerve, part vein, part umbilical. The contours of sensibility it has created have done much to shape the landscape of the self. Without reading threaded through me, my life would have been significantly impoverished. And moving beyond the individual scale, where would we be as a species if all the words we’ve minted and exchanged were to be deleted from our cultural chromosomes and we fell silent again?

Do words provide the templates around which we weave our thoughts? Or do thoughts create the blueprints for the words we craft, so that we make them according to the invisibilities of intellection, thus giving public form to what is private, formless? Do thoughts crystallize around words, or words around thoughts? I suspect the two modalities are so intimately interlinked that to try to pull them apart would be to disfigure both and distort the way in which mind and language meld. The close connection between them is reminiscent of the symbiosis found within Mixotricha paradoxa, where it becomes hard to identify what is ‘own’ and what is ‘alien’ body. Given our reliance on it, language seems less a separate external presence than something that’s become part of us. The verbal and the cognitive seem intimately interdependent. As linguistic beings we are surely the outcome of as epochal a revolution, as much of a turning point, as when eukaryotic cells emerged. Language seems like an integral part of us, something we’ve engulfed along the way and made our own. What we’ve learned to do with words is astonishing. We can talk about the constituents of atoms, catch in our marks upon a page the intricacies of photosynthesis, write about the age and likely origin of our planet, store in our paragraphs the history, psychology and physiology of our species. Listen to us and you can hear a closeness of association, the symbolic become symbiotic, an intimate conjoining of life and language. Our course through history, indeed our very nature, is moulded by the sounds and shapes we daily forge in speech and writing.

Words allow us to navigate our way through life, but map is not territory. The ground we walk on is very different from our verbal accounts of it. It would be foolish to imagine there’s a one-to-one correspondence between language and landscape, word and world. Our diction simplifies, omits, distorts, and highlights. We talk and write in patterns that mirror the isobars dictated by the weather of our needs. Language is obedient to the imperatives of desire and hunger, greed and curiosity, love and hatred, rather than to any objective lexicon that offers a verbatim tracing of what’s there. But for all their limitations and distortions, words extend and enhance our cognitive reach, provide us with enzymes for understanding what, without them, we couldn’t digest. Language is a kind of micro-fauna of the mind, the essential tool in our cognitive toolkit. We farm it in our diction and rely on the harvests that it offers. For all its familiarity, it is as incredible as anything that happens in the stomach of a termite.

Note

All quotes are taken from Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London: 2004.

Chris Arthur is an Irish essayist currently based in Scotland. He is author of several essay collections, most recently Hummingbirds Between the Pages (2018), and has published in a range of journals. His awards include the Akegarasu Haya International Essay Prize, and the Sewanee Review’s Monroe K. Spears Essay Prize. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays and is often included in that series’ ‘Notable Essays’ lists. Further information about his writing can be found here: www.chrisarthur.org.

REINHOLD NIEBUHR AND THE SCANDAL OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

By C. Fred Alford

I. Reinhold Niebuhr And The Scandal Of The Twentieth Century

Around the middle of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr was the most prominent Protestant theologian in America.  He was on the cover of Time magazine (March 8, 1948).  More recently, Barack Obama called Niebuhr his favorite philosopher.   Niebuhr is author of the well-known serenity prayer.

God give us the grace to accept things that cannot be changed.

Courage to change the things that should be changed.

And the Wisdom to distinguish one from the other.

His daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, says that this is the real version of the prayer, noting the difference between "should be changed" and "can be changed," which is the version usually recited.  She thinks the usual version represents a dumbing down of the prayer, for in its original version it calls us to do the right thing, not what I can do, but what I should do (Lemert, Niebuhr Matters, 195-196).

The world as gift and idolatry

The difference between science and theology, as I understand it, is one over whether you see the world as a gift or not; and you cannot resolve this just by inspecting the thing, any more than you can deduce from examining a porcelain vase that it is a wedding present. (Crouter, Niebuhr, 133)

If one sees the world as gift, then humans were created: to savor life surely, but also to be responsible stewards of the gift, not only of one's own life, but also a world.  Everything is gift.  Humans are not just creators, but created.

From this perspective, idolatry becomes the gravest and most tempting sin, the worship of our own creations.  For Niebuhr, "communal idolatry" is the most common sin of our time, certainly the most damaging in scale and intensity.  For Niebuhr, sin, and with it idolatry, is an anxious attempt to hide our finitude, to make ourselves the center of life, and so take the place of God.  Each of us can imagine all manner of terrible things that might befall us.   And so, humans seek by an act of will, what Niebuhr calls the will-to-power, to overreach the limits of human creatureliness.  Since most people lack the ability to do this on their own, they join communities of self-justification and self-assertion.

Niebuhr was never very interested in the details of Christian doctrine.  For Niebuhr, original sin had little to do with desire.  Original sin stems from a person's fear at being alone and vulnerable in the world, leading him or her to worship the gods of the community, indeed the god that is the community.  Nationalism, money, success, fitting in—all this and more become our idols.

The Scandal

In Niebuhr's view, God is not victorious in history, for evil is not defeated.  Rather than imposing His goodness upon the world, God suffers the injustices of the powerful.  To be sure, Niebuhr holds that God would not allow evil to completely triumph over the face of this earth.  But human history is marked by the "scandal of the cross," the willing defeat of God in this world.

The perfect love which [Christ's] life and death exemplify is defeated, rather than triumphant, in the actual course of history.  Thus, according to the Christian belief, history remains morally ambiguous to the end. Suffering innocence, which reveals the problem of moral ambiguity in history, becomes in the Christian faith the answer to the problem at the point when it is seen as the revelation of a divine suffering. (Niebuhr, Faith and History, 135)

In the meantime, all we know, all we can know, is that there is a decisive difference between good and bad, right and wrong.  Historical outcomes are not merely relative or subjective.  History doesn't "just happen," as Richard Rorty puts it.  Consequently, we can know that it is worthwhile fighting for the good, and we need not become overly discouraged when we lose, as we often will.

Worthwhile means that fighting for the good is a meaningful (and not absurd) activity.  Neither is it simply an existential choice, receiving its value because I have chosen it.   Fighting for the good can be measured by, and receives its value from, a standard of infinite value.  We have been given a glimpse of this good and its standard, even if in practice this glimpse is indistinct.  The good's basic principles were laid down in the Hebrew and Greek Testaments.  Facing the scandal of the cross (Christ's weakness), as Niebuhr calls it, reflects a determination to be utterly realistic about the prevalence of evil in the world, while remaining committed to the belief that history is meaningful because it has been given meaning by the traces of God's presence.

Nonetheless, Niebuhr's theology raises a problem.  The knowledge of God in history is not known through the study of history.  It is grasped inwardly, by repentance and "the shattering of the self," placing one's trust in divine power and mercy (Gilkey, On Niebuhr, 193-194).  Niebuhr is referring to the type of knowledge often characterized in terms of revelation or faith.

Where Niebuhr’s Biblical understanding leads him astray

For Niebuhr, as for Bultmann, God wins by losing.

It is impossible to symbolize the divine goodness in history in any other way than by complete powerlessness, or rather by a consistent refusal to use power in the rivalries of history. (Nature and Destiny, 2, 72)

God stays neutral in the conflicts of history, recognizing that no side is without an ego invested in the outcome, that all conflict is rivalry, not good over evil.

Any participation by God in the rivalries of history . . . means the assertion of one ego interest against another. (Nature and Destiny, 2, 72)

But Niebuhr’s account of the “war of finites” makes no sense when talking about the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and the destruction of the Rohingya.  In the case of annihilatory power no rivalry is involved, only the slaughter of innocents.

If God can act in history, if his divine grace is occasionally present in history, as Niebuhr asserts, then God’s failure to act in the presence of the annihilation of innocents preserves no one’s freedom.  Does it really make a difference to say that God in Christ suffered for them?  Perhaps it minimizes the suffering of believers, but I doubt it, especially when one considers that God could have acted but chose not to.

Gilkey interprets Niebuhr correctly when the says that

There is the judgment of God in history, which limits and so controls within bounds the inevitable (though not necessary) misuse of these creative achievements. (On Niebuhr, 211)

If God’s limits are not reached with the deaths of millions of humans, some the result of “creative achievements” like Zyklon B, gas ovens, and hydrogen bombs, then it is hard to know what these limits are.

Human suffering does not testify to God’s suffering for us.  Human suffering becomes human sacrifice if we insist on a God who acts in history but chooses not to.  Christ’s suffering is an inspiration; it is not an invitation to suffer.  Niebuhr writes

Suffering innocence, which reveals the problem of moral ambiguity in history, becomes in the Christian faith the answer to the problem at that point when it is seen as a revelation of a divine suffering which bears and overcomes the sins of the world. (Faith and History, 135)

To see human history from the perspective of divine suffering is to view it at a great distance.  The twentieth-century, and the beginning of the twenty-first, is not just a history of war; it is the history of the annihilation of large groups of people by evil others.

A God who can but doesn't act in the presence of enormous evil is not a God whom I can understand.  The Book of Job concludes that Job will never understand God, and that's OK (42:1-6)  It is Job's path to acceptance.  I believe that divine justice must be comprehensible to humans, at least about the big things, or he can't be a God who humans worship.  The doctrine of process theology makes more sense.  God weeps but cannot act.  Not doesn't but can't.  That too is the message of the cross.  Jesus could have fled, but he stayed and suffered to convey this message, the infinite sadness of God when faced with human evil.

This is not Niebuhr's view.  It is not the view of any Christian denomination that I am aware of.  But it is a view that makes the most sense of the world we live in, and Niebuhr was always interested in that.

II. Making Sense of Original Sin with Reinhold Niebuhr

The doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith—Reinhold Niebuhr.

I never took the concept of sin seriously until I read Reinhold Niebuhr.  I think this is mostly because I didn't read Niebuhr until I was in my sixties, when I began to take a lot of things in life more seriously.  If so, then perhaps I should say that Niebuhr is a particularly good interpreter of a concept that hovered just out of range until now.

Communal idolatry

For Niebuhr, sin is most clearly seen and expressed in communal idolatry.  This is the context of the epigraph that opens this post.  We see sin every day in the actions of groups, and above all nations.  I discussed communal idolatry previously, so I won't spend much time on it here.

In sin, we worship the idols of the group.  And not just extremist groups or nations.  In the midst of World War Two, Niebuhr argued that the American idealization of liberty could itself degenerate into a form of idolatry.  As Andrew Bacevich puts it in his introduction to a new edition of The Irony of American History, Niebuhr

went so far as to describe the worship of democracy as “a less vicious version of the Nazi creed.” He cautioned that “no society, not even a democratic one, is great enough or good enough to make itself the final end of human existence.” (Irony, xii; Niebuhr, Light and Darkness, 133)

If even democracy is at risk of becoming an idol, then what does it take to avoid communal idolatry?  Niebuhr argues that only the belief in a providential God can save us.  "Modern man’s confidence in his power over historical destiny prompted the rejection of every older conception of an overruling providence in history." (Irony, 4)

Not exactly a providential God

Niebuhr's view of a providential God is a little complicated, for God acts not so much in history, as above it, judging our sins, and offering forgiveness.  God judges our sin, while Christ represents the mercy of this judgment, the forgiveness that makes the judgment bearable—that is, knowable and acceptable.  This is the gift of the cross to the world.

Justice alone does not move men to repentance.  The inner core of their rebellion is not touched until they behold the executor of judgment suffering with and for the victim of punishment . . . The fact that justice and mercy are one is symbolically expressed in the idea of the unity of Father and Son. (Essential Niebuhr, 29-30)

Any who still worry about the heresy of patripassionism, the belief that God suffers, should worry about something else.  The whole point of God the father and son is to say God suffers in the form of Jesus Christ.  Christ suffers not only the horror of the cross, but for a moment the doubt of almost all men and women about God's existence, expressed in His dying words according to two of the gospels, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me." (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34)  For a moment, God was forsaken by God, so that we might experience eternity.

It's not about divine omnipotence

For Niebuhr, God's participation in history has nothing to do with a divine omnipotence that enters into historical events.  God's participation takes the form of solidarity with suffering humanity.

The suffering servant does not impose goodness upon the world by his power. Rather, he suffers, being powerless, from the injustices of the powerful. He suffers most particularly from the sins of the righteous who do not understand how full of unrighteousness is all human righteousness. (Beyond Tragedy, 181)

Niebuhr calls this the scandal of the cross, God's strength made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Knowing this is enough to know that history has a meaning, and that we must never abandon our historical responsibility to fight evil where we find it, while remembering that we are not God's righteous avengers, but humans who have made a fallible decision about who and how to fight.  And knowing, too, that we might lose.  But still, we must fight.

When the good lose (or even when they win), millions suffer, but only in the short run.  History does not last forever.  Trouble is, for those who suffer, the short run can last an awfully long time.  The knowledge that Christ suffers with us has been a comfort to many, but to others it has been cold comfort.  Historical events such as Hiroshima and the Holocaust sometimes seem to mock Christ's presence among the suffering of innocents.

III. Niebuhr and The Things That are Not

For a period in the 1950's, it seems as almost half the State Department was quoting Reinhold Niebuhr.  But did they understand the man they were quoting?  They had reason to be influenced by Niebuhr.  His Irony of American History is generally considered among the most important books ever written on American foreign policy.  Arthur Schlesinger Jr. spoke for many agnostics in wondering whether Niebuhr's wisdom on human nature had anything to do with his Christian theology.

It's important to understand what Niebuhr's theology brings to his politics.  His theology not only adds; it is necessary.  Consider "The Things That Are and the Things That Are Not," which takes its title from Corinthians 1:28.  The King James Version that Niebuhr uses reads

Yea, and things which are not [hath God chosen], to put to nought things that are.

The NIV translation reads

God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things--and the things that are not--to nullify the things that are.

The NIV translation, as far as my weak Greek can tell, is better, for "things that are not" is in this context not a philosophical term, but a category under which is included things that are despised or contemptible.

Yet, perhaps we need both versions.  People are always imposing themselves on nature and others, and yet in the end it all comes to nothing.  But, this nothing is not just death and the annihilation of all earthly things in the course of time.  The oppressed, and as well as nature itself, resist imposition in ways that surprise and check our vanity.  Apparently steadfast regimes can disappear in the space of a few months.  People we love can disappear in a moment.

Every order of existence seeks to overcome its fear of insignificance by imposing itself on others.  The best remedy against this tendency is belonging to a community that allows us to know how much we need each other, and finds a place of respect for all its members.  Only such a community is capable of respecting the integrity of other communities.

That other unique community is the limit beyond which our ambitions must not run and the boundary beyond which our life must not expand. (Niebuhr, Irony, p 139)

Faith

Faith is the recognition that human logic and reason are nothing more than a contingent historical reality that thinks it is more.  Or rather, a reality that thinks it is all there is.  Some individuals are capable of faith, and communities of faith exist among us, many of which are no doubt self-righteous.  But Niebuhr seems correct that "it is not to be assumed that any nation or social order, any civilization or culture will ever be convicted by such a word [faith] so that it would cease from its pretensions." (Niebuhr, "Things That Are and Things that are Not," in Reinhold Niebuhr, Major Works on Religion and Politics, ed. Sifton, 108)

Why is it so important to remember that the things that are not will one day replace the things that are?  Because this is the only remedy for the belief that one's own way of life was destined to be because it is better, or because it just is, the only way things could possibly be.  Once one begins to believe that, idolatry cannot be far behind.

Plato and Christ?

Simone Weil sees a direct connection between the ancient Greek philosophers and Christ.

Plato describes how man, assisted by the power of grace, passes out of the cave of this world, but he doesn't say that a whole city can pass out of it.  On the contrary, he depicts the collectivity as something animal, which hinders the soul's salvation. (Roots, 128)

Plato received the gift of grace?  But the gift is only given to some?  Not only does this make no sense, but it gets history wrong.  Christianity arose out of Judaism; Judaism is Christianity's foundation, the Old Testament (as Christians call it) as important as the New.  But if Weil denies the Judaic origins of Christianity, substituting Plato for Moses, she has nonetheless identified the chief problem: the transformation of the state into an idol.

Idolatry

From Niebuhr to Simone Weil, there is shared recognition that idolatry is the sin of our age, more tempting, or at least more widespread, than in other ages, in which men and women knew themselves to be at the mercy of nature and the powerful.  There is something about modern life, its scientific and technological achievements, and the relative security available to more people than ever before (while still excluding the majority) that makes idolatry, the worship of one's own, more tempting than ever before.

Sometimes idolatry takes the form of nationalism, sometimes a worship of science and medicine, as though they could save us from suffering and death, while bringing us happiness.  Some people cradle their smart phones as though they were tiny golden calves.  But often idolatry is more subtle, people convinced that the beliefs they hold are necessary to existence itself.

Thus the “things that are” are persuaded into their vain defiance of the “things that are not.” The defiance is vain because God is the author of the things that are not. They reveal his creative power as both judgment and mercy upon the things that are.  ("Things that Are and Are Not," 108)

Without the things that are not, we would be stuck in an endless and static existence.

The things that are not should not be idealized either

And yet we should be careful of idealizing the things that are not.  Niebuhr is not careful enough.  I have listened to and watched hundreds of hours of testimony from Holocaust survivors.  For many, the smoke and smell from the crematoria were a constant reminder of the power of the things that are not, the power of annihilation.  Many still smelled the smoke of annihilation years later.  Some things that are, the values of life, are a condition of respect for all humanity in any era.

God shares these values not because he is humane, but because he is good.  However, if his goodness were completely incomprehensible in human terms, we could not worship him.

C. Fred Alford is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he taught ancient and medieval political philosophy for thirty-eight years. He has written eighteen books on diverse subjects: psychoanalysis and politics, natural law, trauma theory, and the legacy of the Holocaust. While not a professional theologian, Alford wrote a book on Emmanuel Levinas, one on natural law, and still another addressing the book of Job.

THE LONG FUTURE OF HUMANITY

By Jon Benner

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

--Albert Einstein

Introduction

We stand at a moment of increasing uncertainty and anxiety for our species.  We are destabilizing the very support systems which have enabled the rise of our global civilization over the past 10,000 years, and while we intellectually understand the harm we are causing, and we know what we need to do to change course, we seem unable to cooperatively act to avert disastrous climate change.  We have not learned from past smaller civilizational collapses on our planet, and we feel ourselves helplessly repeating their mistakes, like passengers in a car without brakes hurtling towards a cliff.

We may yet figure things out and work collectively to prevent disastrous climate change, but that prospect dims as nations retreat into tribal fiefdoms and tempers grow short on an increasingly crowded, hungry, and thirsty planet.  Darkness is rising in our collective mind – hatred and irritability swell, and increasingly our leaders encourage and foment bellicose thinking.  We fear where this will lead because we have seen it before, only now our tribes bristle with nuclear weapons, and the taboo against their use is eroding as memories of their horrors fade.

And we are all living in the shadow of the Holocaust.  No longer in Western civilization is Satan the touchstone of evil, but rather the gas chambers of the Nazis.  We tell each other never again, and we tell ourselves that we could never participate in such a horror, but these promises feel strained and uncertain.  We have seen what humanity is capable of, and we don’t understand, and our hearts darken.

But our hearts break, because we know the love we are capable of – the boundless love we have for our children, our love for friends and family, our capacity to love and shed tears for those we have never met on distant continents, our deep love and concern for our fellow animals and plants on this planet.  We are great goodness too, and it pains us to see darkness ascendant.

We desperately need leaders of light and wisdom to arise to bring forth the best in us and discourage the worst, to inspire us to act according to our better angels, to turn away from tribal hatred and violence – this is the best hope we have for avoiding catastrophe in the near term.  But such leaders, the Mahatma Gandhis and Martin Luther King Jrs of the world, are rare, and they don’t always come when they are most needed.

And it has been so long since a messiah has come, one of our true sages, to remind us of who can be, the goodness and light that we are.  Though their names are always on our lips, we forget them, and many of our loudest religious leaders urge the very intolerance and hatred that their messiahs gave their lives trying to overcome.

What comes next?

The coming century is likely to be fraught with peril and chaos as passions rise and the voices of our wiser, cooler minds are drowned out in the din.  While a pandemic may allow for a pause for us to take stock of our situation, and hopefully encourage cooperation to face our shared future together, it seems more likely that it will accelerate a retrenchment into tribal nation states as our globalized trade system atrophies (which bodes ill for peace, because trade between nations has been a proven and effective inhibitor of warfare).  Absent a major turning of the tide of our collective mind, a fall seems increasingly likely as climate change stresses our complex civilization beyond the breaking point.

There are some who yearn for such a fall, and hope for the destruction of our civilization and all of our cultural record as a solution to our modern malaise and discontent, and to give the planet time to heal from the destruction we have wrought.   But this is not a permanent solution to our predicament, because what comes next, over the following thousands of years?  If humanity should survive the fall, which I believe it likely will (although on a planet dramatically altered by warming climate), civilization will inevitably rise again even if the cultural record is somehow completely destroyed, given enough time, possibly many thousands of years.  Small agrarian settlements will eventually once more coalesce into towns and cities, and fungible money will once more arise because it is so useful.   Economies will grow more complex, and there will be advances in technology, driven by our innate curiosity and our drive to make our lives convenient and easier, and to develop better weaponry (which is sadly inevitable because the nature of our minds will remain unchanged).  Over long time, a technological global civilization will rise again.  So, a return to an idealized agrarian past is at best a short-term solution to our current predicament.

If we survive a coming crash to rebuild, will we repeat the same mistakes, with planetary civilizations rising and falling cyclically over the millennia, until our species finally blinks out on this rock spinning in space?  Or will we be wiser as we rebuild, having learned from our mistakes, and we will finally find a way to peace and living sustainably on our planet – no longer genocidal and warring, no longer ashamed of how we treat our fellow species on this planet, but truly wise women and men worthy of the name Homo sapiens?

We have made moral progress so far

To our credit as a species, we have already made progress over the past 10,000 years towards a wiser future.  The long arc of our species’ moral progress has been towards greater tolerance and wisdom:  we as a global society have come to the understanding that slavery is wrong, and we are fumbling our way towards a broader and more tolerant view of human sexuality.   We know that tribal hatred is our shame, and if we knew how to prevent another Holocaust, we would.  If the writings of our wisest survive the tumult to come, we can hope the thread of this halting progress will continue unbroken.

And we have made progress in understanding how to organize our large societies to prevent our worst tendencies from running amok.  We have tried to enshrine the best of us in our laws and systems, to safeguard the voices of the powerless and to guard against incompetent and selfish rule – from the wise judges of Israel, to our early Athenian and Roman democracies, to the Magna Carta, to the American Constitution.   We have experimented and learned from ways to organize our complex economies, from the failures of Marxism when practiced to the obvious harm caused by unfettered capitalism: from each iteration we learn.

This is the project of civilization.  We are used to thinking of progress as material prosperity and technological and medical advances, our booming cities and airplanes and gene therapy, but the true progress, the measure of our maturation as a species, is our moral progress.  All of the great advances of our civilization have been in how to keep the darkness in our hearts in check while encouraging and incentivizing the light and goodness.  Progress is not forests razed and the land tortured by coal mines to power our machines – progress is learning how not to do this, so that we are no longer ashamed of who we are and the destruction we cause.

But our best attempts always fail

But though we take these steps forward, there is always backsliding, and our best attempts at lasting stability and peace always seem to end, and darkness reasserts.  Wise and benevolent government lasts for a while but inevitably crumbles as those motivated by greed and selfishness rise to power.  Our best attempts to organize our societies economically so that all prosper always seem to slide into widening inequality, and then revolution results, and the cycle repeats.  Though our thinkers have tried for millennia to come up with a workable model for large societies that stably enshrines the best in us and guards against the worst, from Plato’s “Republic” onward, we have not yet come up with any truly good solution.

Further, large societies of humans have consistently failed to live within the bounds of their environment, from the Maya to Easter Island and now our current global civilization.  Unchecked population growth is the root of our current predicament as a species – billions of humans desiring comfort and food straining our planet’s soils, waters, and atmosphere – and we have failed to curb our global population growth to live within the carrying capacity of our planet.  Our current climate crisis has been brought about by our advanced technology, but past civilizations on this planet have proved no better at preventing themselves from soiling their own home, and so collapsing.

Will a future civilization be wiser?

If and when our current civilization does collapse and humans rebuild down the road, will a future civilization be wiser – what will we have learned from our mistakes?

We likely will have learned the planetary mindset – that humans are indeed capable of affecting and destroying our planetary support systems (climate, soils, fresh water, element cycles).  We are fumbling our way as a species towards this understanding, but we are too slow, and the high cost we will pay for that ignorance (our fall) is likely to persist in our collective memory, like the memory of the ancient flood shared by so many of today’s cultures.  Fresh water and soils will remain tainted by our industrial activities, ancient cities will stand flooded by the rising seas and marooned in barren deserts that were formerly arable – stark reminders of our past mistakes.  We are as a species like we are as individuals: we must be burned badly before we learn to change our ways.

We may also have learned the value of population control, and societies will be more willing to practice it.  Primitive societies in our past understood the need for and practiced population control, but as societies grow larger we lose this understanding.  Some individual nations have tried to regulate their population this past century, but as a global civilization we have failed.  We may do better the next time around.

But I believe there is no lasting political or economic solution to our human problems, because the root cause for all these failures spring from the human mind as it has evolved.  We cannot put our hope in government as a way to stably guard against human desire for wealth and power, because these spring eternal from our mind, and cannot be held in check by laws indefinitely.  Warfare will continue in future civilizations because we have evolved to be tribal and bellicose, and our minds will not have evolved to be any different in the mere span of thousands of years.  Attempts at a stable global government will likely fail for these reasons, as they have recently – humans rebel against global government because we are by nature tribal, and would-be leaders exploit this to gain power locally.  Attempts to cooperate across the planet to regulate our population size and tend to our planetary environment will struggle for these same reasons.

Our attention must turn to understanding our minds

Until we understand that the root cause of these failures is in our mind as it has evolved so far, we will forever be confused why peace never seems to last, and why those motivated by greed for money and power always take control and the poor and vulnerable suffer.

Our traditional explanation in the West for our failure to live peaceably and wisely has been that we are fallen creatures, weighed down by the knowledge we gained when Adam and Eve ate the apple in the Garden of Eden.  This story is still useful as a metaphor, but we now know so much more from our science about our origins and how our minds have evolved.   If we are to learn as a species and find a way to transition to a peaceful, sustainable future, we need have to a clear understanding of the weaknesses and strengths of our mind as it has evolved.

Rational thought is one of our two greatest assets, our right hand, and we will need to rely on it heavily if we are to plan and work cooperatively to avoid our destruction.  But we cannot jettison religion, because this is our other great asset, our left hand.  We as a species must arrive at a more mature understanding of what religion is: a cultural vehicle for preserving and passing on our species’ greatest insight to date:  that the mind can be released from its mistaken belief in its own separateness while we humans are alive in a body (whether we call it Enlightenment, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Elysian Fields, no matter).  So far the scientists have largely failed to appreciate this bright golden kernel at the core of every religion, and the religious have felt threatened as the advances of science chip away at their creation myths and their belief in the supernatural.  The two must merge: our science must advance to understand the mind and its release, and religion must mature to incorporate what we have learned from science, if we are to thread the needle into a wise and sustainable future.  Darwin and Jesus, Einstein and the Buddha, must walk hand in hand.

Now, on the eve of our civilization’s possible collapse, we must ask ourselves who we have been, and who we are capable of becoming.  Are we dark, violent, fallen creatures?  Or are we creatures of light, love, and wisdom?  And if both, can we chose the light in us over the dark?  Not just in our individual thoughts, words and actions, but also in what we aspire to as a species, and perhaps down the road in the directed evolution of our species’ mind.  I am concerned with the long future of our species, should we have one, and whether we are capable of transcending our inherited darkness or are condemned to inevitably destroy ourselves.

We are hamstrung by how our minds have evolved – tribalism and greed

Our great strengths as humans – our cleverness, our cooperation, and our strong pull to kindness and love – have given us perennial hope that we can build stable, peaceful societies that enshrine the best in us.  But time and again, these attempts to build lasting peace and prosperity are sabotaged by two evolved characteristics of our human minds: our tribalism and our greed.

Tribalism

From the dawn of our species millions of years ago, humans have lived in cooperative social groups, or tribes.  We are a social species; we work together cooperatively to build, to invent, to pass on stories, to create.  This is one of our great strengths – our ability to collaborate with other humans (including those who came before us, and those who will come after us, by leaving records of what we have done).  This cooperative nature has enabled us to build our planetary civilization, for without cooperation there can be no great cathedrals, no scientific advances over the centuries, no landings on the moon, no internet.  Cooperation has built our civilization.  And it is clear how evolution has selected for our minds to be cooperative: groups that cooperate thrive and outcompete groups that don’t cooperate, and so the individual members of the cooperative group thrive as well, and so pass on their cooperative genes.

The feeling of belonging to a group is a hallmark of being human.  We feel most at home with those who look like us, speak our language, share our religion and traditions – it is a rich and warm sense of belonging – oh, the pride of being Irish, with its green hills and thick brogue and pennywhistles!  Or the warm glow of generations as elders tell stories around the campfire to the extended clan, or the heady sense of brotherhood and limitless possibility among the young revolutionaries sharing songs and ideals in the beer hall, or the sacred belonging of reciting prayers in the temple with your fellow faithful.  We humans are most at home in our group, and we lose our bearings and feel ill at ease when our group borders fray and disintegrate.

The downside of this tribalism is obvious to us: we are distrustful and wary of other tribes, of people who are not like us.  Pride in our group all too easily curdles into mistrust and hatred for the other group.  It is all too easy for us to see members of the other tribe as other, as different – even, in the extreme, not human, which paves the road to murder and genocide, as we know all too well.  And so arise racism and xenophobia, and all manner of hatred towards those perceived as other.  And so countries are torn apart into tribal political parties, and civil wars result.  And so arise pogroms, the lynchings of the Ku Klux Klan, the Hutu-Tutsi massacre and the Holocaust.

But even though we as individuals and as a species are aware that we have this tendency and try to guard against it with cultural norms and laws, still, for us individual humans, it feels good and like home to be tribal, to indulge in hatred towards other groups, to rejoice in our tribe’s successes.  This is the very human happiness of the fervid fans cheering on their hometown football team and hating the opposing team from the next town over.

In our early evolutionary history, this tribalism caused problems and suffering that were local in scale – warring between tribes over territory, for example.  But as civilization developed, tribes developed into associations of tribes, and later city-states and nations, and the suffering became larger in scale – the wars became larger and the weaponry more powerful and devastating; whole peoples were enslaved.  We have seen the dangers of nationalism in the last century.

At this point in our civilization warfare has become almost unworkable because our weaponry is too powerful.  Not just nuclear weapons, but biological and chemical weapons as well are capable of killing many millions of people at the push of a button.  For the past seventy-five years we have agreed as a planet of nations not to use these weapons because of the terrible destruction that would result, but these agreements are weakening as taboos against their use fade and cooperation among nations frays, as new generations forget the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So our tribal thinking has not changed, even though our planetary civilization’s survival is threatened by it: we are still stuck with our human mind as it has evolved.

Are there ways to keep this tendency of our mind in check?  The best we have found are education and material prosperity.  With education, humans become more tolerant of those who are not like them, and we learn to guard against our inborn mental tendency towards hatred of other tribes.  And when people are well-fed and housed and living lives that are sufficiently meaningful, our tendency to tribal hatred is at low ebb.  But even with education, when people feel stressed, anxious and uncertain, and their daily lives have lost meaning – as is increasingly the case in our technological societies on this crowded, warming planet – our tribal nature reasserts, and overwhelms the tolerance and intellectual understanding we have gained from education.

Given the risk of nuclear conflagration and the need to cooperate to avert disastrous climate change, what is urgently needed is for people to begin thinking of humanity as their tribe, recognizing that the fates of all of our tribes are now intertwined on this small planet.  But our attempts at global governance are crumbling: the pendulum is swinging in the other direction, as people are anxious that their tribal identities are being diluted and lost in a global homogenization, and power-hungry humans are quick to exploit this anxiety to gain power and encourage a retreat back into nation states.  Perhaps if hostile aliens were to land on our shores, humans would have an other to hate who is not human and we would at last bind together as one tribe, but pinning our hopes on that is no solution to our predicament.

It is heartbreaking to watch this happen, because we all know that humans have the capacity for great cooperation and love, and we all long for peace.  We know that nuclear weapons are an abomination and should be eradicated, and we know what must be done to avert the worst of climate change.  What is desperately needed is for our leaders to call forth the best in us, not the worst.  It is like watching a man beat a hopeful and innocent puppy – in that puppy’s heart is the capacity for such trust and love, but what the man will bring forth is fear and aggression (though our bellicose leaders are not only cause, but symptom as well – they ride the wave of our collective anxiety and fear to power).

Greed

Our inborn greed is the other weakness of mind that is threatening the survival of our civilization and the survival of our species.  We are not alone in this; all organisms are driven by hunger, by a sense of lack.  We all crave comfort, food, shelter, sex – to be alive is to have this river of desire flowing through us.  When we seek to fulfill our desire we are often selfish, and we push out of our minds any suffering we may cause for other beings in pursuit of what we crave.

It is clear how this has evolved, in us and in all creatures – individuals who are selfish gain more resources (more food, more mates, more territory), and so are more likely to survive and pass on more copies of their genes than individuals who are selfless.  (This evolved tendency to selfishness, which is of benefit to the individual, is in direct conflict with our evolved tendency to cooperation and caring for members of our group – E.O. Wilson writes eloquently of this inborn conflict in our minds).

Because greed if left unchecked causes great harm to others and to our environment, it was kept in check by strong taboos in primitive and small societies: the group was harmed by selfish, greedy behavior, and so such behavior was not tolerated.  But as civilization developed and societies grew larger, this taboo eroded.  The rise of money and complex economies enabled people to hoard wealth, and inequality widened.  And as people moved into cities and complex trade relationships arose, the harm done by the individual to the environment supporting the society became less apparent, especially if the harm was being done somewhere else – no longer was it a small tribe living within the means of its local environment, in which overfishing or overharvesting of plants was clearly antisocial and so frowned upon.  (And so when European settlers arrived in North America and slaughtered all the buffalo for their tongues and hides, it was readily apparent to the Native Americans that the Europeans suffered from the “wendigo sickness” – greed was running unchecked in their minds, and this was the cause of their great destructiveness).

This is the paradox of capitalism: while it has led to astonishing innovation and advances that have arguably made life better for humanity (medical advances, education, comfort, entertainment), it has incentivized greed and elevated it as the organizing principle of society.  Whereas primitive societies did all they could to keep greed in check because they knew its destructive nature, our modern civilization has enshrined greed as a good, with predictable harmful consequences to our mental well-being and to the rest of life on this planet.

This greed is not just the cavernous need for wealth of the oil baron or the hedge fund titan, not just the rapacious greed of the tycoon (and how many of us know ourselves well enough to honestly say that we would turn down a five million dollar paycheck and a second home in the countryside?) – it is also the humble desire in each of us for comfort, for pleasure, for entertainment, for security.  The oil executive may be more directly responsible for our warming climate than the rest of us, but we all turn up the thermostat a few degrees more so that we can be comfortable on a mild winter’s day.  This is not wicked, this is human – but in the aggregate, when there are seven billion humans on the planet, the effect of this minor domestic greed is huge.

In large societies, the tendency towards excessive greed and selfishness can currently only be kept in check by human institutions – laws and government decree (I say currently, because one can imagine a large society in which the shared moral code frowns on greed and wealth accumulation).  In our modern societies, we have seen how this can work – we tax the wealthy at a higher rate to prevent them from hoarding all the wealth while the poor suffer, and we have written laws preventing individuals (often banded together as corporations) from fouling our waters, soils, and air, and from driving our fellow species on this planet extinct.  But for this to work, it requires wise and selfless leadership – a government that cares for the long-term health of its populace and the environment that supports it.  When the government is taken over by those in thrall to greed who are concerned only with short term gain, these laws erode, and the rich grow richer and our shared environment is polluted.

And indeed, most of our advances in understanding how to organize large societies politically have been aimed at keeping greed in check – to keep the wealthy from buying the politicians, and to keep those greedy for power over their fellow humans from seizing control and ruling absolutely.  We know as a species that societies of humans suffer when those motivated by hunger and selfishness rule to benefit themselves only, not their constituents.  Democracy has been our best attempt at preventing such people from rising to power and crowning themselves emperor for life, but all such governments eventually end, eroded by the power of greed.

And so our best attempts to create egalitarian societies in which all prosper, ruled by stable and wise and benevolent government, eventually crumble and fail, because greed, like water, always finds a way to flow.  Inequality always widens as humans hoard wealth, and the poor and vulnerable suffer as the power-hungry seize power.  Throughout our civilization’s history the result of this has been revolution, but the bright new dawn ushered in by those young idealistic revolutionaries always curdles over time into inequality and selfish rule, because greed springs eternal from the human mind – our utopias never last, because humans (and all beings) flow strong with hunger and need.  And so where does this lead – endless cycles of revolution and bloodshed, never learning, always hopeful?  We should be able to do better than this, to think on a broader scale, and we can if we understand that the root problem is in our mind as it has evolved.

If we survive a coming fall, and rebuild our civilization down the road (perhaps far down the road, if the fall is dramatic), we will need to rely on our two greatest strengths as human beings: rational thought, and the spiritual path – by which I mean cultivating the mind in pursuit our species’ greatest wisdom (I will explain further below).  With rational thought, we can plan for a future worthy of who we can be, but it will not come to pass if sabotaged by our tribalism and greed.  With the spiritual path, we can bring that worthy future to pass, because this is the way to cultivate altruism and kindness, and to transcend the evolved weaknesses of our mind.  These are the two arrows in our quiver, and we will need to use both together, as one, if we are to thread the needle into a wise and sustainable future.

Rational thought

We humans are unique on this planet as the species with the ability for abstract, complex thought.  We are constantly thinking, trapped in reveries and daydreams and plans, reliving past glories and failures, agonizing over social slights and possible future alliances, worrying about what might or might not come, scheming for future gain, hoping against hope for a bright future to come.

This capacity for rational thought has evolved relatively recently in our evolutionary line.  Millions of years ago, when our pre-human ancestors first controlled fire and began to live in permanent settlements from which they foraged for food, the volume of our brain tissue began to expand dramatically.  Driving this dramatic increase in processing capacity of our nervous system were the complex social interactions that arose from living in stable settlements with other humans – we became masters at social relationships, constantly evaluating where we stood in relation to other humans in our social group.  These intricate social interactions formed the glue that enabled the group to work cooperatively for their common good – and so when the group thrived, the individual group members thrived too, and passed on their genes.  Further, this mental capacity enabled us to plan and mitigate for future problems (such as food shortages), and to innovate and invent tools to make life easier and more stable, which is of clear evolutionary benefit.

(As an aside, rational thought can be the cause of our greatest personal suffering, our anxiety and worry and gloomy mental maunderings – caught in a labyrinth of endless thinking about ourselves and our perceived shortcomings, of worrying about possible dark futures and agonizing over past failures, we can sink into despair, and in the extreme, kill ourselves).

In our cultural evolution, rational thought first rose to prominence in the heady days of ancient Greece, when bold thinkers from Parmenides to Pythagoras to Plato had faith that they could use their minds to understand and explain the world they found themselves in: the world was not unknowable, not at the arbitrary whims of deities in the sky.  For the first time we had confidence that we can use our intellect to untangle all the mysteries of the universe.  It was not until the Enlightenment two thousand years later when we regained this confidence and optimism that we could figure out everything, that nothing was off limits.  But this confidence has waned once more as knowledge has proliferated and disciplines of thought have splintered, and we now view science, philosophy, art and religion all as separate disciplines, each with their own experts and passionate believers.

Our capacity for rational thought, along with our ability to cooperate as a social species, has enabled the rise of our current global civilization.  All of our technological and scientific advances, from the bow and arrow to the hydrogen bomb, from cuneiform tablets to the printing press to the internet, and all of our medical advances, are due to rational thought.

Further, rational thought has enabled us to learn about who we are, our place in the Universe.  Only two thousand years ago we thought our planet was the center of everything and the stars were fixed in a sphere that encased us; now we know we are living on a minor planet orbiting an ordinary star in a backwater arm of one galaxy among billions.  Not long ago we were clueless of our origins and relied on ancient creation myths to understand where we came from; through our study of the fossil record we now know where we stand in the grand pageant of the evolution of life on this planet over the past four billion years.

And rational thought provides us the tools to think about our current predicament, to understand how we are affecting our planetary environment and how we could change course, and to try and peer into the future and discern if there is a way for us to mitigate for or overcome the evolved limitations of our mind, as I am doing now.  Without rational thought we are hamstrung, and cannot envision and work toward a future built around our better angels.

But it is clear that rational thought alone is not sufficient, and can lead to great darkness when not guided and tempered by wisdom and love – we do things like invent nuclear weapons, and we stand on the verge of cloning human beings.  It is our cleverness that has gotten us into our current predicament: we strive, invent, and create, but we are not good at thinking ahead of time whether we should, whether it would be wise to do so, whether it will lead to greater peace and well-being for us and all other species on our planet.

And rational thought loses to the passions every time in a head-to-head match.  Cool-headed rational planning for the future can easily be swamped by greed, anger, and fear.  Even in placid and prosperous times rational thought has only a tenuous hold on our collective mind: we are not currently burning witches at the stake and living in fear of demonic possession because our science has rendered these ideas ludicrous, but how easily we can backslide.  It is easy to envision a repeat of the Salem witch trials, even in our current civilized nations, if enough people become stressed and fearful and public faith in science continues to erode.  Education is our greatest tool for strengthening rational thought in the human population, but beneath the veneer of education and civilized cooperation lie the snarling passions of the mind, just waiting to be poked and prodded into action.

And further, rational thought and the scientific worldview it has birthed do not provide our lives with the rich meaning and understanding we yearn for.  We can intellectually understand that we evolved by chance over billions of years, and at any point in our past we could have been obliterated by a meteor or some other catastrophe, and it’s just luck that we happen to be here today as the dominant species on this planet.  We can intellectually understand that we are the product of our genes, which have been selected for by the cold logic of Darwinian evolution.  We can intellectually understand that our mind arises (somehow!) from the tangle of neurons and synapses and the stew of neurochemicals in our brains.  And we can intellectually understand that we are adrift on a rock in a vast and cold and perhaps infinite universe, and that there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of a personal and loving God watching over us and saving us from pestilence and suffering.

But at the same time our minds cry: and yet!  And yet!   We ache and yearn for more – this does not feel like the complete picture.  What of the yearning for freedom, the wild breathlessness of the new frontier, our love and yearning for wild places, the time-stopping heights of sex, the bottomless pool of soul we see when we look into our children’s eyes?  What of the mystical depths I pour into when I listen to Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony?  What of the sense we all have deep inside that there is somewhere over the rainbow?  What of altruism and selflessness and pure love, what of the wild promises of the prophets?  What of the feeling we all have that surely death is not final, it can’t be, but just a doorway to something beyond?  Surely Jesus and the Buddha weren’t babbling madmen – surely this cold and clinical worldview of science is missing something?  Surely that moment I had when I was a child and the world fell away, and I stood bathed in the glory of God’s light, isn’t simply delusion, the misfiring of chemicals, a faulty memory?  The Romantic poets rebelled against this scientific worldview, and we create art to give voice to this nameless yearning.  Even the most rational scientist yearns for something more – she may seek it in pushing the frontier of our knowledge, shining a light into the dark areas of our understanding, but like all of us she knows the sense that there is something more, somewhere, somehow, just beyond…

And so, while the capacity for rational thought that has evolved in our mind is one of our two great strengths, our right arm, and vital to our future if we are to have one, it is not enough: if we are to understand who we are, and who we can be, we must somehow incorporate our spirituality into our understanding.  Our science has so far failed in this task.

The spiritual path (faith, or religion)

Many will balk at the following discussion or reject it out of hand because it is incongruous with their experience or orthodoxy, but I can only ask them to pause and give what I have to say the benefit of reflection and consideration.  The next step for humanity is to build a bridge between science and religion, because they must be joined if we are to progress as a species in our cultural and biological evolution: this is our next Enlightenment, whether it comes soon or after a long intervening dark age: and this writing is a step in that direction.

***

We humans have been religious as far back as the archaeological record goes, and no doubt further – we find burials from tens of thousands of years ago with valuable offerings for the afterlife.  Our early gods were gods of the elements, of fertility, and we sacrificed and prayed to them to appease them, to gain their blessings for our harvest.  We invoked their supernatural powers to explain things we didn’t understand – why the rains didn’t come and the crops failed, the appearance of a comet or a supernova, why a plague killed nearly everyone.  With the advent of Judaism, and later Christianity and Islam, the gods condensed into one God, but he was still viewed as a supernatural entity outside the natural laws that we understand, who can be petitioned through prayer and who directs and ordains the affairs of humanity (or at least, his faithful).  Our science has obviated the need to invoke the gods (or God, singular) to explain the weather and pestilence, but we still invoke a supernatural God to explain what our science has not yet understood, be it the existence of dark matter or what came before the Big Bang.

This is the conception of God that most adherents of religion have today, whether Eastern or Western religion – for the Eastern religions, even if the devout ascribe to different views of the afterlife, gods, and saints, most still hold a belief in something supernatural and powerful.  And this is what most people mean when they use the word faith.

People have this faith in a supernatural God because they sense deeply that there is something beyond, something vast and good and infinite, but beyond that, the rational mind cannot go – and they have inherited from our predecessors this notion of an all-powerful and supernatural God who responds to our prayers.  And so, even when our prayers seem to fall on deaf ears, and God seems to callously decline to intervene to prevent terrible suffering and injustice on the surface of our planet, we chalk it up to God’s mysterious ways, or we say that God is testing us, and so our faith is not dented (or we despair of his existence, and become apostates).  How we struggle to explain the mysterious ways of God when a pandemic sweeps the planet!  How many poor priests over the centuries have struggled to explain to grieving parents why a loving God would allow their child to die!

When atheists and scientists argue against the existence of God, they are arguing against this conception of God as a supernatural power outside of the natural laws of the universe, who perhaps directs and ordains human affairs, or intercedes on our behalf when we petition in prayer – a personal God who watches over our lives.  Scientists are disdainful of such a notion because there is no evidence for it, and they are disdainful of such a faith because it requires tossing aside rational thought – it flies in the face of the Enlightenment confidence that we humans can figure everything out using rational thought.  They rightly say, if we abandon rational thought and science, we humans end up burning witches at the stake and sacrificing goats in trembling fear whenever a new comet appears in the sky, or perhaps worse, denying the science of climate change and so failing to avert it.  And of course, these critics rightly balk at how religion becomes just another tribe for humanity (a most powerfully felt one), just another excuse for us to slaughter those who are different from us.

But both of these people, the faithful with their all-powerful God and the scientists who disdain this possibility, feel the same yearning and wonder and awe that courses through all humans (if only we remember how to let ourselves feel it!) – the same inborn sense that there is something beyond that we cannot understand with our rational minds, something we cannot describe.  This wonder, this hope, this intuitive faith that there is somehow a freedom that lies beyond, is what drives and inspires the poet and the artist, the mountain climber and the explorer, the scientist and the philosopher, the musician in the throes of rapture, and the devout supplicant in the temple, on her knees and praying to the power and freedom she has sensed always, that golden wispy dream that has always danced just beyond the edge of her consciousness, that has called her onward since earliest childhood memory, promising her fulfillment and peace at last.

All of us know this yearning, and some of us have had a direct experience of the vast open frontier at some point in our lives, a time when the monolithic prison walls of the mind cracked open and light from what lies beyond flooded in.  In that moment we stood awash in light and beauty and stillness, and the pressing concerns of our life crumbled away into irrelevance, and all was well, all was so very well, and we knew there is nothing to fear, not even death.  It came unbidden, perhaps when we were a child sitting alone on a river bank skipping stones, or during sex with our first true love, or on the morning subway commute, or when floating on a surfboard beyond the breaking waves, or in those weary weeks as a new mother nursing our firstborn in the dead of the night: and it left just as it came.  But such experiences are so hard to understand, and so hard to incorporate into our worldly lives, these lives of heartache and bills and joyful children and sick parents and roofs that need to be patched against the winter rains.  We wonder, what was that place, and how do I get back there?  We can call it God – but will he ever come back?

And so, our understanding of what God is must mature if we are to advance as a species.  We as a species must understand what religion is – a vehicle for the cultural transmission of our species’ greatest insight to date: that we are not separate from the rest of the Universe, but rather are knit of it, and it is possible, in the eighty-odd years we are alive in these mortal bodies, through the path of contemplative prayer (meditation) and moral action, to free our minds from this delusion that we are separate.  This framing of the insight first arose in ancient India, and is most explicitly laid out in the teachings of the Buddha – but all of our species’ true sages (the true saints) have taught this path, from the Buddha to Jesus onward: this state of the mind freed is the Kingdom of Heaven, enlightenment.  It is the vast open beyond we all sense and yearn for, and that pulls us humans onward in hope and wonder – this is what we call God.  The delusion that we are separate we can call the self.

What is the self, and how has it evolved?

When we humans are born into this world, separated from our mothers in the rather traumatic and terrifying event of birth, we quickly begin to learn that we are separate, a body alone in a cold and uncertain and sometimes painful world.  (We never really get over this trauma, and spend the rest of our lives yearning to return to the womb – oh, how hard it is to get out from under the warm and safe covers of our beds each morning!  And how popular is mother-son themed pornography on the internet).  Our minds come pre-programmed to learn that we are separate, and this learning is strong and persists throughout our lives.  We quickly learn to believe that we are our bodies, and that “me” ends at the borders of my body, and that things outside our body can hurt us.  Most frightening of all, we learn that “I” will end when the physical body dies, and so death looms as a terrifying cliff edge that we are inexorably sliding towards, and beyond that the terrible void of nonexistence.

This sense of self is a story that our mind weaves throughout our life.  It is the strong feeling that “I” am the one thinking, “I” am the one feeling and doing and getting hurt and trying to avoid being killed.  And it is from this sense of being separate and cut off from everything else that desire arises – the strong current of desire that flows through all of our minds (desire for money, power, sex, food, etc.).

And it seems clear that this propensity of our minds to coalesce around a sense of self, a feeling that we are separate and cut off from the rest of the universe, has evolved over the long course of the evolution of life on this planet, or is a fundamental attribute of life.  It is of clear evolutionary benefit to believe that you are your body and separate from everything else – fearful of injury and death, you seek safety, and so live another day; alone and cut off and yearning for connection, you seek companionship and sex and so pass on your genes; craving and in need and fearful of the vast cold beyond your skin, you seek food and warmth and hoard against the winter to come.  A species with a mind not trapped in a sense of self would not last long, for if you don’t fear death and are freed from constant craving, how likely are you to pass on your genes, and so persist as a species?

We humans are not alone in this delusion of our own separateness – it is clear that the sense of self is the norm across the animal kingdom.  We can readily see this in the animals with which we are most familiar; cats and dogs are much like us in their fear, their desire, their yearning.  It is clear that they identify with their bodies, and so fear the end of their bodies: all animals fear injury and death.  Certainly species whose nervous systems have evolved to a minimum complexity experience this as fear, and have emotions much like ours.  I cannot speak for how a more primitive animal, such as a sea sponge, experiences mind, and whether they feel separate and so course with desire, but at the minimum their nervous system is programmed the same way as more complex animals: to seek food, to avoid injury and death.

This persistent belief in our own separateness is a prison our minds yearn to escape from, and we intuitively feel that such an escape is possible, even if we don’t know this in conscious awareness and need to be told by someone like Jesus or the Buddha that escape is indeed possible.  We sense that there is a vast beyond that is infinite and good, and to many of us it feels holy and sacred and worthy of veneration, and we call it God.

All of our hunger and greed, all of our fear and hatred, and all of our confusion springs from this innate belief that we are cut off and marooned in these bodies – and once we have freed our mind from this mistaken belief, we are no longer beholden to greed and hatred: the shackles have been loosed, and the mind is free.

We humans can intellectually understand that we are not separate from the rest of the universe.  Take our bodies: we are constantly sloughing off skin cells, losing hair in the shower, occasionally losing limbs in accidents.  When these parts of our bodies are shed, do they remain “me”, such that we are constantly splintering into countless selves that litter the surface of our planet?  When we defecate each day, and send feces and body cells and billions of bacteria who use to call our guts home down the plumbing of the toilet, are we losing parts of “me”?  When we exhale, are those carbon atoms in our outbreath little parts of “me” that disperse into the atmosphere, such that we are mixed by the wind and clouds and spread all over the world, and creatures the world over are breathing “me” in?  Our bodies are shared with the rest of the universe.

But perhaps then we say, “me” is the core chunk of the body (the torso, the head).  After all, this is what it feels like.  But then, our cells are constantly dying and being replaced, and the food we take in from the world outside is providing the building blocks for the new “me”.  There is no constant, stable body: these bodies are constantly in flux, exchanging material and energy with everything that lies beyond our skin.  So we can understand that drawing a line where our skin ends and calling this body “me” doesn’t really make sense.

What of our minds – can we intellectually understand that they are not separate from everything else?  This is difficult to understand using rational thought, and so has been a stumbling block for our philosophers and scientists since the ancient Greeks.  We can understand that mind somehow arises from or is received by the complex tissue of our nervous system, but beyond that, we stumble.  Clearly, it doesn’t make much sense to consider our minds to be confined to these two-meter long bodies, trapped within the thin barrier of our skin and extending no further than that.  When we dissect and rummage through these bodies, we can find no “self”, no thoughts, no memories, no yearning.  No doubt there are patterns of neurons and synapses firing and neurochemicals that give rise to this persistent sense of self, and no doubt over the long course of the spiritual path there are changes in our nervous system that lead to (or accompany) freeing the mind from the self, and this is where our science should head.

Fortunately, to free our minds from the self does not require an intellectual understanding of what mind is and how it relates to matter.  Neither the Buddha nor Jesus gave energy to thinking about these questions in their teachings because they are not needed for the spiritual path.  I only consider them here because I am trying to build a bridge between science and religion, between rational thought and intuitive awareness.   I am trying to speak to those who have concluded that religion has nothing to offer humanity, whether because they disdain the notion of a supernatural all-powerful entity at odds with the Enlightenment project of figuring this world out using rational thought, or because they have been turned off by religions’ dogmatic insistence on disproven creation myths.  I am trying to speak to those who feel spiritual longing but aren’t quite so sure how to express it or what it means.  And I am trying to speak to the devout religious who do hold a conception of God as a supernatural father of mother somewhere in the sky: their faith is true and good, but they may benefit from realizing that there is a path to freeing their mind and so reaching their God in their lifetimes.  I am trying to take a step towards the maturation of our understanding of what religion is, because only then will we be able to use it as an asset on our march towards a wise and peaceable future.

We have evolved to the point where we have the ability to free our minds from the self

We humans seem to be unique on this planet as the species that has evolved the capacity to free the mind from the self through sustained and concerted effort (though it is of course difficult to know whether there are enlightened elephants or dolphins).  How have we evolved to this point – what separates us from the other species on this planet?  The two attributes which separate humans from other species, and so enable us liberate our minds, are our capacity for rational thought and our ability to use awareness to untangle the knots in our mind (I will explain the latter below).

Because of the large processing power of our nervous systems (which has evolved via Darwinian selection, as discussed above), we are able to use rational thought to reflect on and ponder our situation as mortal beings.  This is the critical foundation for seeking liberation.  Using rational thought, we peer into the future and see that we and everybody we love are sliding towards an inevitable death, which we fear and don’t understand.  We ask ourselves, what happens to the mind when the body dies?  Using rational thought, we reflect on our lives: what has brought me fulfillment?  Why do I spend my life seeking pleasure, which never brings lasting fulfillment?  Why do I accumulate wealth, if I can’t take it with me when I die?  What is this bottomless yearning I feel when I listen to soulful music, or when I stand on a mountaintop and the wind blows so strong and cold, this freedom dancing just beyond the limits of my consciousness?  And then the critical question may arise in rational thought: what is this feeling of “I” that attaches to all of my thoughts, emotions, desires, and memories, and does it have any independent existence, or is it just something that feels so real, and keeps me painfully separate from everything else?

This capacity for abstract thought and reflection about ourselves is, as far as we know, unique to humans and a relatively recent development in the evolution of life on this planet.  Without it, we would not be able to reflect on our predicament as organisms that will die, and so would not be able to choose to embark on the path of cultivating our minds to set them free.  But rational thought alone is not sufficient for freeing our minds.

The other capacity we humans have that enables us to free our minds from the self is the ability to tune into awareness.  What is awareness?  It is receptive openness to what is happening in the present moment, something we all practice all the time.  While the default mode for our minds is to be stuck in self-based thought – for example, thinking about what groceries we want to buy, or worrying about how we will pay the rent this month – we readily and often switch mental channels to receive stimuli impinging on our consciousness, like an antenna receiving radio waves.  This is what happens when a sudden painful sensation in the body barges into our consciousness: the mind drops what we were thinking and switches mental channels to feel and receive that pain in our minds.  In that moment, our mind is resting in receptive awareness.  Then, our mind might quickly switch channels back to self-based thought (“Oh no, maybe it’s stomach cancer, should I go to the doctor?”), but for a moment our mind was in receptive awareness of the sensation in our body.

Another way to describe receptive awareness is what happens in the first moment you step through the door into a crowded room.  In that instant, your mind is open and receiving the room – feeling the mood, taking in the visual and auditory cues, sensing if there are any threats or if the room is safe.  This is the capacity of mind that will save our life if there happens to be a tiger in that room, crouched and ready to pounce – our minds will receive the threat and respond to it before self-based thought even has a chance to start contemplating the tiger and weighing the danger it poses.

It is this capacity for awareness that we humans use to untangle the dense knot of the self over the long years of the spiritual path.  In contemplative prayer, we learn to tune into mind (consciousness) without the contorting and warping filter of self-bound thinking, and we feel our way in the body to where the knots and tangles and blockages are.  When they are held in awareness, they slowly untangle, unfurl, like a tight flower bud opening in the morning sun.

This capacity for awareness is not unique to humans; it is shared across the animal kingdom among the more complex animals (again, I cannot speak for the mind of a sea sponge).  It is highly useful from an evolutionary point of view – it is simply the state of mind that takes in our environment.  Watch a cat who has just heard a sudden noise and stands taut and alert – this cat is resting in receptive awareness, not lost in a tangle of thoughts about what might have made the noise.

But what is unique to humans is our ability to choose to use this faculty of mind to untangle the knots in our minds.  We can choose to turn towards the goodness and freedom that we have always sensed and away from the cramped confines of greed and hatred, away from the delusion that we are cut off and marooned in a gangling sack of skin, bones and viscera.

Why does a human choose to do this?  For two reasons: one, through rational thought, she has pondered the philosophical questions above, and concluded that the bright open frontier she has always longed for can’t be found in this material, time-bound world.  Two, she has realized that it is possible to turn towards that frontier, whether she calls it God or liberation or something else, and perhaps reach it within her lifetime.

She reaches this second realization when she hears the exhortations of the ones who have come before and succeeded in freeing their minds.  We humans hear the words of Jesus, we hear the words of the Buddha, and those of us with ears for the teaching say, “I knew it was possible!  Me too, here I come!”.  This is the true meaning of the word faith: not a culturally inherited belief in an all-powerful bearded man in the sky watching over his human charges, but a turning towards what lies beyond the prison walls of the self.

In summary: because of how our nervous systems have evolved to be complex, we humans are now at the point in our evolutionary history where we can use rational thought to evaluate our predicament as beings trapped in mortal bodies, to realize that our minds are saddled with a strong and deluded belief in our own separateness, and to choose to work to free our minds from this belief, and so reach freedom.  For this we use awareness, which is not unique to humans, but rather seems to be the default state of mind shared across the animal kingdom.

It does not seem that this human ability to free our minds from the self has been selected for by Darwinian evolution.  It is of no clear adaptive value and seems likely to decrease an individual’s fitness (enlightened people are not interested in reproducing, and no longer fear death).  Rather, it seems this ability is an outgrowth, or “unintended” consequence, of the large processing power (and perhaps strong energy flows) of our nervous systems.

Humans have reached this step only recently.  The first word of it comes to us from the time of Zoroaster, though there were likely earlier enlightened humans and our cultural record simply does not go back that far.  We have put just one toe across the threshold.

The problem is that it is very hard for humans to reach liberation

Though we have evolved to the point where we are capable of freeing the mind, it remains very difficult to do so.  These teachings have been in plain sight and revered for thousands of years, and yet how few understand them, and even fewer have succeeded in walking the path to completion.  Why is that?

It is not the failure of our teachers; they have been good:  it is hard to imagine improving upon the teachings of the Buddha, for those who want a clear path laid out and can follow his path of meditation (for those of us with roiled, unstable minds, it is not so easy, even if we know the light).  For others, Jesus’ teachings will get you there – an ecstatic path of faith, of taking the leap, reassured and held in his loving hands as you move towards the edge and prepare to let go.  And there are other paths too, good ones, that work for minds of different karma and life situation; I am simply less familiar with them because of the idiosyncrasies of my life path.  It is difficult to imagine a future messiah substantially improving on the teachings we have already been given.  Humans have been effectively taught, we just have a hard time hearing and following through.

The reason for this is that it is so hard for us humans to conceive of liberation – our minds cannot go there, it is too frightening, the walls of the self seem too solid and real, and what is beyond them feels too terrifying in its cold emptiness.  We are the dwellers in Plato’s cave, living by dim and flickering shadows on the cave wall – when someone comes into our cave and tells us of the blinding clear light outside, and exhorts us to follow him out of the cave into the light, many of us laugh at his madness, because we know with certainty that the darkness of the cave is all there is.  The cave is the prison of believing in our own separateness; the bright clear light outside is the mind freed from this delusion.

And so it seems to me that these sages and their heirs have been shouting into the wind for thousands of years, giving their lives to passionately, fervently, and with great love and concern exhort the flock of humanity to follow them, many of whom cock an ear and say “Hey, yeah, that sounds right to me, I don’t really get it but it stirs something deep and good in me, I’m on board,” but find themselves too mired in the muck, too busy trying to survive, too pressed with the urgencies and realities of their worldly lives, to start out on the true path of self-sacrifice and letting go.

And as the generations since their coming pass, Jesus and the Buddha become godlike, and the heights they reached unattainable as mythology and miracles spring up around their life stories – and soon enough we humans find ourselves petitioning them as deities to intercede in our worldly lives, and wondering why they don’t do more to stop suffering here on the surface of our beleaguered planet.

We need another messiah to come, to remind us of the goodness that we are, to renew our faith in the spiritual path, especially at this critical juncture in our history – but even then, as time elapses, she too will fade into the mists of the past and become a deity in her own right.

This model is not working for getting humans to walk the path to the light en masse.  The teachings are good and right and true, but they are not reaching people, they cannot penetrate most everyone’s mind, they are too frightening and alien, and the path so difficult.

It has been good to have the few who do make it reminding us of who we are and who we can be, but I fear this is no longer enough – we have reached a point in our species’ history where it has become urgent to get more humans embarking on the path to the light.  How do we do this, before we end ourselves through nuclear warfare, irrevocably messing up our planetary support systems, annihilation by the smart machines we have invented, or something else we don’t yet recognize or anticipate?

How can we get more of us to make it to enlightenment?

We might ask: if our minds have evolved on their own to the point where individual humans are capable of reaching enlightenment, might the trend continue, given time, and evolution will naturally guide our minds to be more and more susceptible to enlightenment, until we transition en masse?    And if evolution selects for both the good (kindness, cooperation, empathy, love) and the bad (violence, tribalism, hatred, greed), is there a chance that natural selection alone will guide our species closer to the light, and we will evolve to be kinder and less violent, and so capable of living peaceably and wisely on this planet?

This seems unlikely, because we have as yet discovered no selective force that would select for light without the dark, the love without the selfishness, the cooperation without the violence, the trust without the fear.  And we do not have a good understanding of how civilized life has changed the selective forces that have shaped us for millions of years.  But evolution works over long time, and it seems unlikely that the human minds that we are born with now are substantially different than they were at the dawn of civilization 10,000 years ago – we have only been living in these paved technological cities for a short time.  If this complex civilization falls and times of trial and hunger and warfare return, the selective forces will be reset to how they have been for the vast majority of human history – the strong, the violent, and the cooperative will survive (our post-apocalyptic film and television has been effective in showing us this dark vision).  So I do not think we can put our faith in natural selection to guide our species to enlightenment – we will likely destroy ourselves first.  Our hope, then, must be in our cultural evolution.

Is it possible that we can create conditions in a future society favorable to more humans successfully walking the path to enlightenment?  Certainly some societies throughout our civilization’s history have proved more able than others at producing enlightened people – when a society prizes the true teachings and establishes monasteries, supports alms mendicants, and venerates the wise, enlightened masters appear.  An example is the Forest tradition of 20th century Thailand, in which there were several enlightened Buddhist masters , or the long series of wise monks and nuns produced by the monasteries of Europe from the 13th through 16th centuries, even in times of great societal hardship and intolerance (for example, the bubonic plague and the Spanish Inquisition).  And enlightened people often come in clusters – one sage begets another, as we see in the clusters of enlightened around the Buddha and Jesus, and in pairs like St. John of the Cross and St. Theresa of Avila.

In contrast, recent Western civilization, with its materialist mindset and dearth of monasteries or alms mendicants, has produced very few wise people.  So, a society which treasures and supports those who dedicate their lives to walking the religious path can indeed be a help, and although this has never yet succeeded in transitioning humans in large numbers, it is possible a future society will do a better job.  I can envision the schoolchildren of a future civilization learning about the days of we ancients, who were forever confused about why peace never lasted because they did not understand their own minds.

Science and religion must merge to help

But there is a new possibility looming on the horizon: that we may figure out through our science and technology how to more easily transition an average human being to enlightenment, no matter if they have ears for the teaching, and without the long years of mental cultivation through meditation and prayer.  This is the natural outgrowth of a merging of our two capacities of mind: reason and faith.  If we can scientifically understand the nervous system/energetic changes leading to liberation, then could we, down the road, engineer an individual’s mind to achieve liberation?

This would be directed evolution of our minds.  We have already been directing the evolution of other species for millennia – note our friendly pet dogs and our corn crops with their swollen kernels.  And now, having cracked the genetic code, we stand on the verge of engineering the genetic material not just of other species, but our own.  We now have the power to tinker with our own species’ evolution, and it seems likely (if unfortunate, given the lack of species-wide debate on the implications of this) that we will take the step of engineering humans with traits we view as desirable.

And we are already familiar with using rational thought to mitigate against problematic tendencies of these minds we have inherited: we have invented contraception to decouple reproduction from the lust we can’t help but act on.

But our efforts to understand liberation and the physical and energetic changes that occur with it are still in their infancy for two main reasons: first, the simple reason discussed above – we as a species still have an immature view of what religion is.  Most of humanity does not understand that liberation is possible in a human lifetime; we view heaven as something that happens only after you die.  In particular, scientists are those among us most likely to reject religion in favor of a materialist worldview, and so have been unlikely to research these questions.

The second reason we have made little progress on this front is because we don’t really know what to measure, or even if we have the tools to measure what needs to be measured.  We have a crude understanding of mind, both philosophically and scientifically – how does matter relate to mind?  Does matter produce mind, or receive it like a transistor radio?  Or are mind and matter not different, and there is only one thing, call it energy, and then there is also the possibility of being aware of that one thing?  If this is true, then there is the sole and one fabric of the universe, and then there is awareness of that, but they are not different: awareness is to this sole energy as fuzziness is to a sweater.

We have already made much progress on understanding the human nervous system and how energy flows through it (we measure these energy flows as electrical impulses), and we have also made progress in understanding the cellular and molecular building blocks and mechanisms that comprise our nervous systems.  We can measure electromagnetic fields, and we have a nascent understanding of gravity.  We may need all of these in the future to measure and understand mind.

I suspect we already have the tools to make much progress on understanding what changes occur in a human being on the path to enlightenment, both in terms of matter and electrical activity.  And there are clearly humans whom it would be valuable to study: those among us who have experiences of freedom from the self, so called “mystical experiences” – not only those on the path of prayer, but also those who experience epilepsy, mania, psychosis, strokes that only affect one hemisphere of the brain, and in some cases those who take psychedelic substances.  These can all open the cracks in the darkness to let the light of the beyond shine though, to have a vision of release from the self, the vision of divine love.  I suspect from my own path that these experiences have much to do with enhanced (possibly unfettered) communication between the right and left hemispheres of the brain/nervous system.  The sense of self – the analytic, rational, timebound self – is constructed from fear, and I imagine hemispheric lopsidedness has much to do with this.

A few scientists have begun to think along these lines already, and have attempted to investigate what is happening in the brain during mystical experiences, but they have made little progress – in part because they are approaching the problem from self-bound thought, but also because mystical experiences are rare and cannot be conjured at will in a laboratory setting at this point.

Of course, the ideal way to study this would be to follow one of those rare individuals from the start of her path as a fearful (yet hopeful) self-bound human all the way, over the long years of spiritual practice, to her final emergence into the light of freedom, studying the changes in her nervous system along the way.  But this is difficult, given the rarity of such people and the challenge of identifying such a person early on in their path.

And so, it might be possible down the road to engineer a human mind to be freed from the limitations of the self.  But will a person liberated in this manner have the same wisdom as a human who spent the long years cultivating her mind through contemplation, moral action, and meditation?  I expect yes, though such a person would not be very good at teaching other humans how to reach liberation via the traditional, long spiritual path, and might not be very wise about how and why other humans struggle and suffer along the way.  There are many examples of humans who have had the vision of God, of freedom from the self, by chance (for example, many teachers of Advaita-Vedanta; those who have had near-death experiences) – and while they are good at urging others to seek the light, they struggle to meet other humans where they are and teach them the gradual steps of the path.

Is this a solution to our problems?

So we may succeed in transitioning more humans to enlightenment by creating societal conditions that are favorable to following the path, or we may figure out how to transition more humans via our technology and science.  Either way, the question follows: if this is the solution to our current predicament, is it enough for simply a larger share of humanity to transition, or must the whole species transition?  If the latter, how would that be done?

Is it enough to have simply more humans be enlightened?

How would it help if more were enlightened, or at least had the experience of transcending the self (the vision of God, or “stream entry” in the Buddhist tradition)?  This is Plato’s “the Good” – his notion that the vision of the Good would ensure that leaders are wise.  But like humans ever since, Plato struggled to come up with a workable mechanism for ensuring such leaders remain in power successively – humans ruled by darkness inevitably claw their way into power, even though wise and competent rule can conceivably last for centuries.

Historically, enlightened people have not involved themselves in running worldly affairs.  They teach the path to free the mind, and tell those they teach to set their minds not on worldly affairs, but on reaching freedom.  Jesus certainly stepped right back into the messiness of the world once he reached the light, but even as he did so he did not reflect much on practical affairs of the world and society – he taught going beyond the world, seeking the Kingdom of Heaven.

In the Buddha’s tradition, once enlightened the sage returns to the marketplace, the world, to help others find their way to the light, much like Plato’s former cave dweller who returns to the cave to tell the others of the blinding light outside – but again, the focus is on reaching the light.  The wise do not struggle to right the messiness of the world, perhaps because they see it cannot be righted, and there is no workable and lasting solution given the shortcomings of our minds as they currently are, and given that nothing lasts anyway, save the one thing that has no beginning and no end.  So instead, perhaps they see with clear eyes that the only thing worthy of their effort is point out to others that there is a way out, and this is the only thing worth doing with our time in these mortal bodies.

And so it has fallen to those still on this side of the veil, those with clearer eyes than most but who have not yet stumbled into the eye-blinking light of liberation, to ruminate on the practical matters of how we humans can govern our societies to keep the dark parts of mind in check while fostering and enshrining the light and good parts of our mind in worthy institutions: democracy, a fair legal system, freedom of speech and religion, egalitarian distribution of wealth (for example, Plato, Locke, Marx).

But at this juncture in the history of our species, can the wise still afford to recuse themselves from the messiness of the world?  What does it mean to teach others to seek the light if humanity runs the increasing risk of driving itself extinct?   We have not yet had a true sage come in this time of anxiety and concern that we may destroy ourselves.  I am not enlightened, and so I still concern myself with worldly affairs and the fate of our species, and maybe that is just lack of wisdom – after all, everything eventually ends, humanity included.  And because they are worldly phenomena, all civilizations rise, grow senescent, and then crumble – and so is it wise to worry about how to forestall the inevitable collapse of a future civilization?

And yet, enlightened people overbrim with love for humanity and for all of life.  They give their lives to help other beings, all too often literally.  In a world in which humans are killing life on this planet and themselves, would enlightened men and women feel an obligation to use their wisdom to help us govern ourselves wisely?   I picture an enlightened council keeping our planet on a wise and good track, not unlike the Jedi Knights of the “Star Wars” films.

But there are practical problems with this.  These sages would then be the ones who hold the power, and the billions of unenlightened humans would still be prone to all the usual weaknesses of our mind – the tribalism, the fear, the violence.  We crucify our sages even when they don’t hold worldly power – how much more likely would we be to kill them when they are perceived as our overseers, our powerful governors?  And enlightened humans eschew violence – could this council of sages keep the billions of unenlightened humans from fighting without needing a military to help keep order?

While there are clearly practical difficulties, and I do not yet see how this would work in practice, I believe this is our best hope: to have a larger share of our species bathed in the light of wisdom, to guide and encourage our species on its path forward.  The Buddha said in one of his suttas that his knowledge was like all the leaves in the forest, but what he taught was only one leaf: the path to liberating the mind.  If he were to come now, would he broaden his teachings for the sake of averting the destruction of life – not just human extinction, but the extinction of so many other innocent species on our planet?  Would he take a more active role in worldly affairs?

The good news is that a human does not have to reach the end of the spiritual path to grow in wisdom and love, and to weaken the hold that greed and hatred have on her mind.  Even simply recognizing that tribal hatred and greed are evolved attributes of the mind, and recognizing that they need to be transcended, and can be transcended, is a gigantic step towards a wiser future, both for us as individuals and as a species.

Can the whole species become enlightened?

Even if we figure out through our science how to transition individuals to enlightenment in large numbers, it is unclear how this could be implemented species-wide.  There would be strong resistance from the vast majority who don’t understand what it means to free the mind, who understandably wouldn’t want to give up their humanity (the passion, the art, the clans, the feasts, the music, the battles!).  And I am sympathetic to this – our tribal belonging, our romance, our art, our terrible longing, our violence – this is the very fabric of being human.  Would humanity still exist if the whole species liberated their minds?

There would be also be the problem of who would be empowered to implement the transition in a species such as ours, and again there would be resistance to those in power.  And new humans would continue to be born who hadn’t been transitioned – how would each new generation be transitioned, and again, who would implement this?

Further, if we succeeded somehow in transitioning en masse, there would be problems with reproducing the species.  The sex drive is born of our belief in our separateness – we desire and lust for things (other peoples’ bodies, money, power) only because we feel incomplete and cut off.  When individuals have freed their mind, they are no longer plagued by this gnawing feeling of a vacuum inside that needs to be filled, and so they no longer lust, and no longer have sex.  A civilization of enlightened beings, reproducing in test tube laboratories because they have all transcended the sex drive?  This is a sterile and odd vision, and it’s hard to imagine why an enlightened species would do this – what drive would there be to perpetuate the species?

Perhaps the fundamental shift that happens over the long course of the evolution of mind is from organisms driven by need and lack to organisms pulled onward by love: with the baggage of natural selection transcended, with the sex drive transcended (and so with it the inherent drive to restlessly create and explore), an enlightened species would choose to continue living and reproducing itself for wise stewardship of all other beings (much as Adam and Eve were tasked with in the Garden of Eden – though how sadly we have failed in our species’ assigned task, with entire species blinking out of existence on our planet due to our carelessness!  With compassion and care for other life swamped by our greed and fear, we have been poor stewards indeed, though within each of us is the potential for perfect, wise and loving stewardship.  But at least now we are learning to blame natural selection for our fallen nature instead of an innocent snake).

The question “can a species ever fully transition to enlightenment?” might also be the wrong question, only asked because I am stuck in the rut of tribal thinking – in this case, the tribe being my species.  The concept of species is an artificial one, one we have devised to try and make sense of this world we process visually.  There are no clear borders to many species, with interbreeding and gradation common.  We are used to thinking of humanity as one species with no truly close relatives we can interbreed with, but that’s only because we likely killed them off in the not-so-distant past (the Neanderthals, the Denisovans) – the genetic data shows that we used to interbreed with them.

We can picture life like a tree flowing through time, with the constantly splitting branches being evolutionary lines.  We, at the tip of the great ape branch, have reached the point where individual members are succeeding in freeing their minds, though rarely.  The concept of humans as a species, then, is not so helpful – we are simply part of a river of mind flowing through matter over time.

And so perhaps this tribal thinking is why I am struggling so much with this question of whether a species can reach enlightenment, and the only real question is whether life can reach enlightenment: whether life can evolve to the point where individual knots of energy, such as a human, can realize that mind is not tied to their bodies, is not tied to matter at all, and so be set free.  Perhaps this is the end trajectory of the evolution of life – individual organisms, no matter the species, freeing their minds, and so joining the vast sea they were part of before they were born, and will be part of long after the death of their mortal bodies.

And if this is so, then perhaps our species cannot escape the fate of destroying ourselves, but we will have already reached the end goal, of life freed, because the best among us have already done so.

Should we leave the planet to colonize among the stars?

There has been much discussion over the past century of whether we could leave our increasingly crowded and polluted planet to colonize other planets.  There are grave technical problems with this – at this point we can only travel to our moon and nearby planets and at best set up primitive outposts there, and we don’t yet understand if interstellar travel is even possible.

But we know from our telescope surveys that potentially habitable planets abound in our galaxy, planets that might have atmospheres and climates suitable for humans.  We don’t know if there is life on those planets, though there is in all likelihood life scattered throughout this universe – and there is growing evidence that some of that life may be visiting us even now.  The question arises: if down the road we still haven’t learned, and continue to foul our own planet and prove unable to keep our population at sustainable levels, caught on a mad cycle of boom and bust on millennial time scales, should we try to leave this planet and colonize others?  The bright dreamers and visionaries among us already look to the stars and dream of finding a new home for us among them, lebensraum for our booming populations, fresh resources to support us, escape from a spoiled planet.

And we yearn for a new frontier.  We have become crowded on this planet, and we yearn for space.  The frontier has died on Earth – there are no more blank areas on the maps, no more terra incognita, nowhere left to explore, and even the dream of retreating into the wilderness as an unknown hermit is dying as satellites monitor every square foot of the planet’s surface and roads cut across our deepest wilderness.   Our hearts, then, yearn for the vast unknown of the night sky, the next frontier we see, the wide open space above us.

As is typical for our species, we have been mostly concerned with the question of whether we could travel to other habitable planets and colonize them, instead of asking whether we should.  But we need to ask this question now: who are we as a species, and who do we want to be?  Shouldn’t we figure out how to live sustainably and peaceably on our own planet before sailing forth to conquer and despoil others, especially if there is life on those planets?

This is already our violent and shameful history on Earth.   We always set off as brave explorers, heading off into uncharted territory, and this is noble and praiseworthy – but when we arrive, we bring diseases, we send the military, and then we conquer, displace, slaughter and enslave whoever we find living there.  This is not unique to Western civilization; human societies throughout history have done this – this is the human way.  And if we treat other forms of life on our own planet with such barbarism and cruelty (even those so closely related to us – a cattle feed lot, glue traps for mice, hunting for trophies), I shudder to think what we might do to alien life forms, as scared and repulsed by them as we will likely be.

I very much hope we humans learn wisdom, kindness and sustainable living before we leave this planet to live elsewhere in the universe, especially if there is life on other planets.  The last thing we want to be is an interstellar scourge, a virus that trashes planet after planet in an ever-expanding and shameful radius.  It would be a credit to us as a species to figure out how to manage and transcend the darkness in our own minds before imposing it on other worlds in the universe.  Let’s get our own act together before we export our darkness farther afield – if we are to become interstellar voyagers, let us be the ones who arrive in wisdom and light, not in darkness and hunger.

How can we preserve the cultural record?

It is vital to preserve the cultural record if we are to make progress on our species’ march to the light.  Communication across the generations enables the project of civilization – if we don’t leave durable records of what we have understood and discovered, future generations cannot learn from us.  The words of Jesus and Darwin must be passed on, as must the knowledge of DNA and vaccination.  We can try to leave out the blueprints for the hydrogen bomb and the recipe for sarin gas, and this is good: but even without this knowledge surviving we will create new weapons.  We must steer towards the light, and keep on marching in that direction.

We have been lucky to find such things as the ancient Sumerian tablets and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and to have the few ancient Greek texts that were preserved via the Arab culture and those enterprising Irish monks who copied and treasured them.  How can we ensure humans thousands of years from now will be similarly lucky, and even luckier?  How do we guarantee the preservation of our insights to date against a future totalitarian regime bent on eradicating knowledge and wisdom, bent on the ignorance of the governed?  How can we guard against the book burnings to come?

I worry about our civilization’s increasing reliance on electronic storage of data, and I know I am not alone.  If there is any break in the continuity of our technology – even just a few decades due to some global catastrophe – we would lose huge amounts due to the instability of electronic storage.  We should be creating durable, printed or etched Libraries of Alexandria containing our most important thoughts and discoveries, much as we are for plant seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.  Perhaps we are, at least haphazardly, but to forego archiving the written word would be foolish.

Some visionaries are storing our data in quartz and sending it to orbit our planet in satellites.  Caching our cultural record on the geologically stable surface of our moon would also be good, though with both of these approaches future humans will have to be technologically capable of accessing these off-Earth records.

And it is good to think even longer term, many millions of years, perhaps long past our extinction.  Life will persist on this planet even if there is a catastrophic extinction event (perhaps wrought by us), as we have learned from the fossil record.  Complex life will rise again, and quite likely intelligent, civilization-building life (maybe the social species such as ants and termites are waiting in the wings, as we mammals were at the time of the dinosaurs).  It is good to think of those future civilized ants, seventy million years from now, retrieving our data from satellites or the moon and learning all about our rise and fall, our triumphs and mistakes – and perhaps learning from us, and not making the same mistakes themselves.

Then, we would be participating in life’s grand arc towards wisdom over long time, a cultural evolution that spans species, even though we ourselves are long since extinct.

Conclusion

We humans grow increasingly anxious on this crowded planet.  Great instability looms – should we continue to flounder in our efforts to address climate change, cities will flood, crops will fail, and tempers will flare among nations as mass migrations of people increase.  There is a chance still that the tribes will band together in the coming decades in a large-scale cooperative effort to mitigate the effects of climate change, but the current trend is towards less cooperation, not more.  The outlook for our civilization is not good on this small planet of increasingly irascible tribes armed with weapons of mass destruction.

The words of our past messiahs fade – their names are on our lips, but they feel stale and distant, and our religions become just one more tribe, one more reason to slaughter one another.  Our science has provided us with answers about how we’ve come to be, but not meaning, and we grope to understand our place in the universe.  We need another messiah to come, to remind us of who we are and who we can be, to light the spark of hope and love in our hearts once more, but messiahs are few and far between.  A great fall seems increasingly likely, but most of us have not thought much past that, and wondered how we will fare long into the future.

Many of our best thinkers peer into the future and see humanity merging with machines, our clever thinking and communication enhanced by machine circuitry.  But this is no solution to the problems we face – our hope lies in our morality and our capacity for love, and the machines we create will at best be reflections of us, and at worst will accentuate and empower our dark passions.

I do not have clear answers for our human predicament.  It is clear that just as our clever minds and the technology they have invented have gotten us into this mess, they are our best hope for our future.  But rational thought alone will not be sufficient to save us, because cleverness without love always leads to destruction, and our passions always erode our best attempts at peace and cooperation.  And the religious insight alone cannot save us, because so few of us understand it, and even fewer of us ever succeed into putting it into practice and freeing our minds.

Maybe our best hope, then, is the inevitable next step, our next Enlightenment – the merging of science with religion.  We have been fumbling towards it for millennia in our art and science, and now we grow close to its blossoming, even as our civilization lurches towards a fall.  Just as we are on the verge of directing the evolution of these physical bodies, having cracked the genetic code, there is hope that we will be able to direct the evolution of our minds, and so inoculate ourselves against the self-destructive passions which have been our great shame and difficulty.  I do not yet understand how this would be implemented, as I see grave practical difficulties, but I believe it is possible.

And the good news is that individual humans need not walk the path to completion to grow in wisdom, love and kindness.  Even partially transcending our evolved Achilles heels, weakening the hold of tribal hatred and greed on our minds, enables us to choose to act contrary to their dictates.  If we can succeed in getting a large share of humanity to recognize the need to transcend our evolved mental baggage, and so embark on the spiritual path, this might be enough to create sufficient wisdom in our societies to pull us back from the brink of self-destruction.

If religion and science remain separate, and we make no further strides towards directing the evolution of our mind to transcend our evolved self-destructive tendencies (whether culturally by getting more humans to recognize and embark on the spiritual path, or through our technology), I suspect we will remain stuck wondering why we can’t achieve lasting peace, endlessly dreaming of utopias that are doomed to fail, and forever being ashamed of our murderous and destructive ways, our planetary civilizations rising and falling on the scale of tens of thousands of years until we finally go extinct.

Perhaps wise aliens will arrive on our shores and teach us how to thread the needle into the future we long for.  Or perhaps our minds will remain as they are and yet we will somehow survive long enough to develop the technology to colonize other planets, and repeat our history of conquest and genocide, but this time among the stars.

But my sincerest hope for our species is that one day we will be worthy of the name we have given ourselves, Homo sapiens, and we will be the aliens who arrive in light from a distant star thousands of years into the future, bringing solutions to a young alien civilization soaked in anxiety and despair, teetering on the brink of a sickening fall.  I believe this is possible.

Jon Benner is a former Buddhist monk with a Ph.D in ecology and evolutionary biology from Stanford University.

IN OUR WESTERN WORLD, NOTHING NEW

Paul-John Ramos

The 100th anniversary of Armistice Day occurred three Novembers ago, which pulled back our attention to the mass killing and ruin that has since been overshadowed by an even larger second war.  Intent on outdoing itself, mankind rapidly advanced through the 1920s, 30s, and 40s to racial extermination on a grand scale and nuclear armament that could someday erase us from this planet altogether.

Human folly’s exponential growth from 1918 to 1945 and beyond actually pushed the first war, which left a comparable mountain of dead bodies, filth, and wreckage, somewhat into the background.  The heinousness and outrage on one’s sensibilities that took place in World War II are so much greater and more impressing that they have to be absorbed on their own, with minimal interference from any other conflict.

The Great War, however, is part of a lesson for our current and future generations, if they choose to learn it.  The period from 1918 to Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 made it obvious that the first go-around fell largely on deaf ears and blind eyes, as national leaders and the populations who left them in charge failed to prevent a second huge mistake from happening.  Understanding why these two Great Mistakes happened and, in general, why wars can happen like they do, is part of our only hope to prevent another, especially one in which those with a shared cultural heritage are turned against each other.

Besides academic studies, the Great War’s message has been conveyed in a rich literature of novels, stories, poetry, plays, and memoirs that exploded several years after its fighting had ended.  In the case of aspiring writers like Erich Maria Remarque, who was conscripted into the German army at 18 years of age and wounded on five occasions, such men were treated to life-or-death struggles before getting any kind of footholds in their educations, careers, or private lives.  Those who managed to return home had seen friends die for what appeared to be the vanity of political zealots while countless survivors dealt with permanent physical damage and mental illness.  The soldiers who came back, many of whom were already handicapped by the after-effects of battle, often found it impossible to reintegrate into society.  Many could not return to work or school and the existing social services did not have a ready means for helping numbers so large.  Family life also suffered from the years of a soldier’s absence and relationships were often damaged beyond repair.

Although taking place during the war, Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues)was written as a response to these post-war struggles faced by an average soldier.  First published as a book in 1929, it remains the pinnacle of literature to come out of World War I and has enjoyed a success that novels of any genre have seldom seen.  The book has been wildly popular amongst both critics and the public since its initial release; it is thought to have sold at least 50 million copies in more than fifty languages and is a usual entry on school reading lists.  At least two film adaptations have been made in English, including the Lewis Milestone-directed version that won an Oscar for Best Picture in 1930.

It should go without saying that All Quiet has not merely capitalized on a subject left untouched by other authors.  The field of Great War literature is considerable and made up of figures ranging from Nobel Prize winners to common men and women who went on a single venture into writing for the purpose of telling their stories.  Many types of writers were compelled to address the war from its very onset and voices even found their ways out of the trenches – the wave of British poets that included Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Isaac Rosenberg come to mind immediately when thinking of literary creation at the front.  But compared to during the war and those years immediately following the Armistice – when perhaps there was a need for gestation by both survivors of battle and those at home – the subgenre flowered around the time that Remarque began writing his novel.

When the novel first appeared, Remarque had his ‘competitors,’ as the term might be used from a viewpoint of publishing companies and agents.  Ernest Hemingway, who served as an ambulance driver in Italy, published A Farewell to Arms in the same year.  Less-remembered but still considerable names like Germans Arnold Zweig (who wrote a six-part cycle, The Great War of the White Men) and Ludwig Renn, the Frenchman Henri Barbusse (whose Le Feu was written as a soldier), and Portsmouth native Richard Aldington dotted the field of novelists and had some kind of audience established by the time that Remarque set about his work.  But in the months and years after its release, All Quiet on the Western Front took on a life of its own, surpassing all other war novels in enduring critical and popular appeal.  A Farewell to Arms and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind may be All Quiet’s only sizeable competition.  Classics like Tolstoy’s War and Peace are, by comparison, impermeable tomes for mainstream readers and the prolificacy of novels like Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, both undoubtedly fine works,seems to have faded after they initially reached best-seller lists.

The fact that All Quiet became wildly successful at a time when the public was lifting its veil from the Great War soldier’s experience led some critics to reject it as a work of pure opportunism.  And the fact that its author fared so well to begin with – Remarque received $90,000 in royalties just from American sales at the beginning of 1930 – gave detractors cause for suspicion even before considering the subject matter.  A number of critics who wouldn’t buy into All Quiet’s initial swoon rolled out the well-used argument that true literature couldn’t possibly sell hundreds of thousands of copies.  There were also several who cited Remarque for lack of authenticity in writing about the wartime soldier’s plights, others generally disliked his writing style, and still others in the German nationalist camp (foreshadowing later Nazi policy) considered the book an insult to their people’s true heroism.

Any of these opinions, no matter how reasoned or obtuse, tend to ignore the deliberate elements that make Remarque’s novel so effective.  Indeed, All Quiet benefited from amounts of luck but could only have done so with the right premise, technique, and sentiment that so many have come to appreciate over the last ninety years.  For a book of such urgency, Remarque achieves what is most important: a total readability and empathy.  It tells its story in a voice that virtually anyone can understand and relate to in some way.  Adolescents can listen to the narrator Paul Bäumer’s story while not feeling intellectually bullied yet holding some relation to his feelings at what should be the normal crossroads of one’s late teens.  Full adults, meanwhile, simply have to be moved by the thoughts of a young man whose psyche has rapidly developed in battle but who is still, in essence, a brittle and naïve figure.

Bäumer’s world is also filled with supporting characters who evoke strong reactions.  Away from the front are his close but ailing mother, vaguely present father, and warm eldest sister whose absences he is still struggling to cope with.  He is able to visit them on furlough but still feels emotionally distanced while at home.  On the front lines and in battle, Paul learns about the spirit of military comradeship and how these new connections must largely supplant the old, though most are destined not to last.  His support base becomes men like Katczinsky, their unit’s elder statesman, a clever and resourceful man at forty years of age; Tjaden, a locksmith with a big stomach for food and a lot of good fortune; Detering, a farmer whose constant thoughts of life in the meadows cause him to lose his head and run back towards Germany after seeing cherry blossom; and most agonizingly, Kemmerich, who slowly dies of infection in hospice despite his leg amputation, leaving behind a highly-strung mother who has ached for his return.

The relationships formed between Bäumer and these other men are beyond mere camaraderie in the off-hours.  They are a means of survival, a way of keeping as sane as possible and an added set of brains, eyes, and ears to guard one’s back during the horrendous series of experiences.  The soldiers’ tribulations are not necessarily supplied by an enemy; the chaos launched by opposing armies is more than enough to deal with but these men also have to face the twisted ways of their own superiors and live with the betrayals of those in everyday life who got them there.  The men presiding over Bäumer and his friends range from nondescript to addicts of schadenfreude: Corporal Himmelstoss, a smallish postman obsessed with drills and looking for every excuse to humiliate the men he’s training; doctors in the hospices who are jaded and lacking in compassion or gleefully digging instruments into soldiers’ wounds to see their reactions; and the Kaiser even makes his cameo appearance at a review of men during which Bäumer and his comrades fail to see the earth move – leaving them to wonder what all of the fuss is about.  German social structures inside of which Bäumer was raised are also put under bright light, particularly the system of education.  Bäumer’s school class was pressed by Kantorek, their headmaster, to volunteer for the war but the older man did not join himself.  He is later drafted into the army and humiliated by a higher-ranking former student in one of the novel’s darkly comical moments.

It is apt that the German Expressionist playwright Ernst Toller, who served on the Western Front for 13 months before having a nervous breakdown, praised All Quiet in a well-known review.  “No modern writer,” he wrote, “has more magnificently evoked a battle, a gas-attack, hand-to-hand fighting, a visit home on leave.”  All Quiet, while appearing painfully simple, is a highly expressionistic work whose first person vantage point (usually in present tense) makes the novel.  Though Remarque had several options, using anything other than the ‘I’ form might have resulted in just another war book.  Had he written in third person, the immediacy and tension felt in Bäumer’s narrative would have been lost or at least considerably reduced, not to mention that a narrator with no direct part in the war could have unintentionally drenched All Quiet in self-parody.  Another possibility was the epistolary form (comparisons of the novel have actually been made to Goethe’s Werther) but one could argue that the only difference between this and the existing All Quiet would have been a few dates and notations usually seen in letters.  This would achieve little, except possibly diffusing its intensity by giving us reminders of these events happening in the past.

The directness, unadorned syntax, and use of the first person present allowed Remarque to straddle a fine line between literature and popular fiction.  It is along this line that only a few writers have achieved deep-seated literary and financial success.  In the case of All Quiet, its phenomenon after initial release was hardly an accident; the book was heavily marketed by Remarque’s publisher, Ullstein, including serialization in its own newspaper before appearing in hardcover, as the firm could sense likely impact.  Yet letters from and interviews with Remarque – the latter of which were rare despite his flamboyant lifestyle – show that he was more concerned about an understanding of the Great War soldier’s tribulations and failures to reintegrate into society than adding to his bank account.  Remarque commented just after the book’s release that he was “suffering fairly of attacks of despair” at the point he began writing All Quiet in 1928.  Determining that his war experiences were at the heart of this anguish, Remarque’s novel became something of a catharsis.

All Quiet became a cathartic vehicle for Remarque’s contemporaries and remains as such for the generations that have followed.  Those who have experienced the ordeals of battle and survived to remember them can use his novel as a channel of mutual understanding.  For those who have never set foot in the military, it allows us to live these ordeals through the character of Bäumer and, in coming back safely from the nightmare, perhaps offers some slight consolation against the guilt of living as bystanders while thousands of others have become real-life casualties.

The success of All Quiet had more than enough drawbacks for a man who, despite living amongst celebrities that included girlfriends Marlene Dietrich and Hedy Lamarr and eventual wife Paulette Goddard, gave few interviews and preferred to stay in the background of press coverage.  The novel sold close to one million copies in Germany during its first year of release but became part, along with his follow-up novel The Road Back, of the infamous Nazi book-burning demonstration in May 1933.  Remarque’s depiction of war made him a reviled figure to the German fascist government and nationalists of other shades, who called for ruggedness and valour to restore their country.  Already living in Switzerland, he immigrated to the United States in 1939 with his first wife Jutta Winkellhoff, from whom he was divorced but remarried in order to avoid her being sent back to Germany.  In December 1943, his sister Elfriede was arrested and beheaded by the Nazis, largely because of Remarque’s perceived sins.

After the phenomenon of All Quiet, Remarque went on to write another ten novels, five plays, and numerous poems, essays, and magazine articles before his death in 1970.  As often happens to authors who experience fame early in their careers, he never attained the same heights again; perhaps the novel Arch of Triumph, which led to a film with Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and Charles Laughton, came vaguely close.  Remarque always had an audience and continued to write best-sellers but never to the degree of his first.  He once said himself, “there is nothing worse for an author than that his first book should become an international success.”  After All Quiet, his career was likely to head in one direction.

For all of its social examination, All Quiet is a very unpolitical book, with specifics of government and its leaders hardly being touched upon.  Remarque added to his enigma by staying away from political forums and lines of discussion, choosing to serve as an observer of his epoch rather than an activist.  Even when granting a rare interview after World War II, he preferred not to voice opinions on leaders of the day, considering himself unqualified for such matters.  He went as far as to refrain from criticizing Hitler, though he addressed the Nazi regime’s impact in books like Spark of Life, which follows a concentration camp prisoner in the final months before liberation.  This silence led to additional detractors who felt that he was not backing up his work when it counted most.

Remarque’s novel profited from its topic and time of release but would not have done so without considerable literary merit and the fact that its author, along with millions of other young men, endured agony in his formative years to make All Quiet’s content possible.  Today, war still slogs along in the Middle East and appears to be on the doorsteps of Asia and Latin America, the latter particularly in Venezuela.  The former Soviet republics still have gaping wounds from their issues with Moscow.  The United States, involved seemingly everywhere, are maintaining a delicate balancing act with Iran and North Korea and briefly reopened their contact with Cuba before again shutting it down.  The technologies to wage war have advanced and the names of current and potential participants have changed but the fears, sufferings, and awful resolve of those sent into battle are as unchanged as any other human emotion.

Arthur Wesley Wheen, the first translator of Remarque’s novels into English and himself an Australian veteran, is whom we owe for the title All Quiet on the Western Front, that single sentence contained in a German army report on the day when Paul Bäumer died.  The original title of Im Westen nichts Neues, however, literally translates as In the West, Nothing New, which better reflects an intended irony.  Our Western World had sent an entire generation through the filth of World War I, after which its survivors returned home and found themselves physically, mentally, and socially denied paths to a normal life and career.  The leaders and their populations who allowed them to take power learned nothing from the first war, making all of the mistakes that led to another; this was becoming obvious when Remarque began writing his novel in the late 1920s.

While conscription has gone out of fashion in some parts of the world and wars haven’t been waged on quite the same scale, atomic missiles now point in all directions and massive armies continue to drill for the apocalyptic battle that their generals anticipate.  This agitation looks as familiar as ever and Remarque has already conveyed to us what will be in store for all who are handed the means of battle and self-destruction.

Paul-John Ramos is an essayist, poet, and short story writer.  His work has recently appeared in Trajectory, Adelaide, Serial, and Chest Journal (American College of Chest Physicians).

INTERVIEW WITH JOEL BURCAT, AUTHOR OF 2021 ENVIRONMENTAL THRILLER AMID RAGE

ABOUT AMID RAGE:

A psychotic coal mine operator and cynical neighbors with an anti-mining agenda fight out a strip mine permit battle. Mike Jacobs, a 29-year old environmental prosecutor with Pennsylvania's environmental agency, DEP, is caught between the warring factions, but is ordered to "babysit" the case. All Mike wants to do is to protect the environment and neighbors from certain harm as a result of the proposed mining. Sid Feldman, the Philadelphia lawyer for the mine operator, who oozes power and privilege, offers Mike a job midway through the proceedings. Miranda Clymer, the lawyer for the neighbors, pulls out all the stops to win Mike's affection and assistance. Mike's nearest and dearest friend, Nicky Kane is by his side as his paralegal. Mike must use all of his talents as a lawyer and rely on his discretion and courage to do what is right and not anger the political bosses for whom he works. In the cataclysmic ending, someone will die, but who?

***

Is Amid Rage based on a real case or realistic scenario?

Amid Rage is based on scenarios both real and imagined. There have been incidents where DEP lawyers and their families and inspectors have been terrorized by people associated with the industries that they inspected or were regulating. To my knowledge, thankfully no one has died, but for fictional and dramatic purposes, I took a different tack.

I am aware of cases in which people have been killed and injured by “flyrock” leaving a blasting area. While blasters are very cautious people, there are times that accidents happen. Also, catastrophic accidents have occurred at strip and deep mines. These are very dangerous activities and from time to time serious accidents occur.

Mike’s cross-examination of Rinati was my dream cross-exam of a witness. I’ve examined witnesses who looked like they wanted to put their hands around my neck, witnesses who lost it and began yelling, and, once, a witness who bolted and ran out of the room (in a deposition). Also, all trial lawyers have been in trials where the judge starts asking questions to the witness. Sometimes it’s just one or two questions, but sometimes the judge seems to be actively helping a lawyer who wasn’t doing his or her job. Most trial lawyers have “war stories” either where the stars lined up and everything went right or where everything went wrong. Mike’s cross of Rinati was a combination of all of those great experiences and a few would-have/should-have moments.

Are coal and strip mining still important as sources of energy and revenue in the U.S.?

Yes. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), in 2018, coal accounted for 21% of Pennsylvania’s net electricity generation (the fastest growing share is from natural gas electricity generation, which was 36% and growing). Nationwide, in the U.S. coal still accounts for 15% of electricity generation (says EIA).

Coal is declining in importance both nationwide and in Pa., but it still accounts for a substantial proportion of electricity generation.

In 2018, according to Pa. DEP, Pennsylvania produced 51.8 million tons of bituminous coal. Of that, 86.2% came from underground mines, 6.6% from strip mines, and 7.2% from coal refuse reprocessing operations.

How do you create your characters? You are a former environmental lawyer yourself, is Mike Jacobs based on you?

My characters are fictional characters. I develop a bio for my main characters and have a mental picture of them, but they are creations of my imagination. That said, incidents from my life, from the lives of others, and from the media may find their way into my characters’ personas. My characters have DNA from a lot of sources, again, mostly fictional, but real-life events, too.

As an example, I know a lawyer who, like Mike Jacobs, went to rabbinical school for a year, then continued at a secular college. That interesting tidbit found its way into Mike’s bio, but that lawyer is not Mike and Mike is not like that lawyer. Events from my career found their way into Mike’s bio, but I am not Mike Jacobs. I’d say Mike is a close friend of mine. Interestingly, I’ve had three lawyers ask me if they were the inspiration for Mike (one woman suggested she was the inspiration for Sherry)! Sorry folks, they are fictional.

If any lawyer has interesting war stories, tidbits, or facts they wouldn’t mind me using, I’d love to hear them. I promise to keep their identities secret.

Even though climate change and environmental conservation have been widespread topics for decades, the "environmental thriller" genre that this novel falls into is still fairly sparse. Why do you think that is? Do you think we will see more books of this genre in the future?

Part of the problem with writing a real environmental thriller or environmental legal thriller is that writing one requires a detailed knowledge of environmental issues, environmental law, and environmental agencies. John Grisham has written 3 environmental legal thrillers (The Appeal, The Pelican Brief, and Gray’s Mountain). Readers are expecting a certain degree of authenticity in these stories. That requires a lot of research and background knowledge. Many writers have very successfully written about the military and law enforcement agencies for which they never worked (think of all the stories about the FBI, CIA, NYPD, DCPD, Navy SEALs, etc.). Most were not written by former spies, cops, or SEALs. The best of those books were written by writers who did a lot of homework.

I think we will see more and more environmental thrillers, because readers want to read about these issues. These books provide a great way of introducing complicated environmental issues in a way that readers will enjoy.

SHORT STORY: INVAIATURA

By Joel Burcat

Art by David Foldvari from the book Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption

***

Jules was like a father to me, and despite how much I detested him, you can imagine my shock and grief when I received word that he was dead.

I had been sweating over a stock sale agreement-he taught me how to draft them-when the phone rang. I let it ring twice before I even looked at the caller ID, which read "unknown." Thanks to Jules I had been under investigation by the SEC, and I wasn't in the mood to talk with anyone about that. Also my marriage to Constance was nearly dead, and I was fighting all the time with her, so there really was no one with whom I wanted to talk. After four rings I reached over, prepared to yell at whomever was on the line.

"Hello? May I please speak with Signore Schiff?" the caller said in an Italian accent.

"Signore Schiff? This is Mr. Schiff. Harry Schiff."

"Si, Mr. Schiff. My name is Luigi Montecaldo. I am a lawyer with Vitelli and Montecaldo in Rome."

"Yes," I said slowly, hoping that maybe this Italian lawyer had some kind of business deal in the U.S. on which he wanted me to work.

"I'm very sorry that I have a sad duty. I must report to you the untimely death of Jules Endern. Do you know him?"

I heard the words but they didn't register. I must have taken a while to respond. "Mr."-it came out Meester -"Schiff, are you still there?"

"Yes. Jules is dead. How? How did he die?"

Odd, if you think about it, when one asks that question. As if it matters.

"Natural causes," Montecaldo replied. Then he added, "Perhaps with a smile on his face. He was with the signorina, Roberta Cambiare. Do you know her?"

"Know? No, I have only heard him talk about her. He was crazy about her."

"Crazy? Well, as best as I can tell, he was very happy."

Jules had been under investigation by the SEC for about three months when he met Roberta. She seemed to change him, give him a reason to be happy. She also ruined his marriage, his family. Maybe six months before the call, he came back from a vacation to Siena in Tuscany, and all he could do was talk about the land, the people, the wine, and Roberta. The guy was twenty-five years older than I, and I knew his family, his wife, his kids. He would come into my office in the afternoon, shut my door, and tell me he had spoken with her; he seemed so in love. At times he was giddy. I would sit with a smile on my face, not knowing what to say-it was beyond awkward. Imagine what you would do if your mentor, your father figure, blathered to you about his twenty-something girlfriend. Considering the trouble he was in, I found it hard to believe he allowed himself to be so distracted.

Maybe a month later he claimed he had a real estate deal in Rome and had to go back to Italy. I always doubted that was the case. All of his deals were in Philly, South Jersey, never even out of the region, let alone in Rome. When he returned-after two weeks-he was transformed. He told me he was leaving his wife, kids, practice, even me. Jules announced he was moving to Tuscany to be with Roberta.

I was shocked. I told him that he would not escape a government investigation or charges merely by running to Italy. He told me that he didn't care. He was giving his wife the house, his Audi, the 401(k), and half of everything else.

Over the next couple of weeks he transferred his cases to several of the lawyers in the firm. Little did we know that on his way to Tuscany, the prick had met with the Feds and implicated the firm and me in his shady deal. I had never billed a minute on it and had no involvement with it, but he decided to direct the investigators toward me to get the Feds off his back. I suppose he knew that ultimately I would get out of it, but I can't begin to tell you how much I despised him for that.

"Signore Schiff, the authorities need you to come to Siena to identify the body. Can you do that?" the lawyer said.

"I'm not particularly interested. Why me?"

"Someone close to him has to identify the body, and he left instructions that it had to be you. He was estranged from his family, and you are the most reliable witness. It is a matter of Italian law. The tickets have been arranged."

I had no desire to help out Jules, alive or dead, but the lawyer implored me to do so. Finally I gave in-actually I thought it might do me good to get out of the country for a few days to get away from the investigation and Constance. As it was, leaving on short notice was relatively easy, as my wife and I never had any kids, even though I desperately wanted them, and she didn't seem to care that I was taking off so suddenly. I was on a flight to Rome the next morning.

I'd never been to Italy, and as the BMW limousine left Rome and began driving to Tuscany, I began to understand why Jules had fallen in love with the country. We followed the A-1 highway and quickly were in the hills. All around were vineyards, olive trees, small villages, and this tan, orange, green, and yellow countryside. The driver stopped the car on a hilltop outside of Siena so I could stretch, and my lungs filled with an intoxicating blend of chamomile and fresh hay.

When we got to Siena, I found I was booked into the Grand Hotel Continental. The hotel room, like the flight, was first class. The next morning, as I prepared to leave to identify the body, I found a note under the door. I opened it and it read, "Harry, whatever happens, be sure to tell the coroner that the body is mine. Please do not let on otherwise. It's O.K., I'll explain it all later." It was unsigned but I know Jules' handwriting like my own. My head felt like it might explode.

Arriving at the coroner's office, I finally met Roberta. She was about twenty-five with curly hair the color of night and dark, suntanned skin. I noticed the men in the coroner's office pause and turn their heads when she walked by. She was accompanied by a man she said was her brother, but no brother and sister were ever as intimate as Roberta and Daniele.

We were shown into a room and found a body lying under a white sheet on a metal gurney. The coroner's assistant pulled back the sheet, revealing a man I had never seen before. Roberta dabbed her eyes with a tissue and then hugged her brother.

"Signore, can you identify the body?" the assistant asked.

"Yes, it's him," I lied.

He waited a good five seconds, then asked, "Are you sure?"

Now I was confused. I thought this was a done deal. I glanced at Roberta, who nodded her head ever so slightly. I cleared my throat and said, "Yes, that's Jules. I'd know him anywhere."

The coroner's assistant rolled his eyes, then pulled the sheet over the body. Finally he asked me to sign papers. I returned to my hotel feeling nauseous and was handed a note by the front desk clerk, which I opened in my room. It read, "Leave immediately. The driver will take you to San Marino."

As we drove I asked the driver in what part of Italy San Marino was located and, much to my surprise, learned that it wasn't technically a part of Italy at all; it was its own tiny country, surrounded by Italy. So there I was, sitting in another lawyer's office in San Marino, wondering what the hell was going on. The lawyer from San Marino sat across from me and oddly said, "Have no fear, soon you will be comforted. Now, please excuse me." The lawyer quickly left the conference room.

A moment later the door opened again, and I thought it would be the lawyer, but in walked Jules. After a moment of shock, surprisingly we hugged warmly.

"I'm very sorry to have done this to you, but I had no choice," Jules said, looking relaxed, tanned, and fit. He was wearing casual clothing, something I had rarely seen him wear in my ten years of working for him.

"Let me tell you what I can tell you. The Feds were crawling up my ass when I took that first trip to Italy. I really did fall in love, not with Roberta, but with the notion of my freedom. There's a word that the winemakers here use, it's 'invaiatura'-the moment when the grapes change color, they stop growing and begin ripening. I had my own personal moment when it occurred to me that I had to grab for happiness while I still had the chance, before I stopped ripening and began to rot. After that I began setting up my escape. I pretended to be in love with a young woman. Everyone bought this-you, my wife, especially the Feds. I've always told you that a lawyer must have a Plan B. Well, over the years, I had transferred cash, lots of it, through several blind accounts until they ended up in this delightful little tax haven. When we split my wife got half of whatever she thought I owned in the U.S. It cost me a bundle, but now I have total freedom."

"And what about the gentleman on the table? The man in the morgue?" I asked coldly.

Jules smiled warmly, then said, "A sad case, homeless, and died of very natural causes, I assure you. Only Roberta and you know. And the lawyer-well, the one here. He cannot reveal anything due to confidentiality. Roberta has been well taken care of and that will continue so long as she keeps our little secret. In any event, if she ever changes her mind, I'll be long gone."

"What about me? You screwed me back in Philly, and I'm still getting myself out of that mess. There might be fraud here. In fact I'm certain you committed fraud in at least two countries, plus who knows how many other crimes. Why shouldn't I turn you in? I might get a plea bargain."

Jules smiled at me. "I knew you would ask. You always were the most ethical and honest young man with whom I ever worked. These are two of the reasons I love you like a son." He smiled at me affectionately, but I thought that a decent man would never do this to his child. "Harry, the Feds will figure out soon enough that you had nothing to do with my antics-you'll be okay. And look, I may have deceived that bitch I was married to, but she is well taken care of. The government? I suppose, technically, but what good is that? They might get some tax revenue, fines, and I would spend my declining years in a federal penitentiary. But is that what you want for me? I am too far down this road. Would you hurt me like that.son?"

He was right. I knew if I turned him in, he would end up as nothing more than a pelt on some U.S. Attorney's wall.

"It's the perfect crime, I suppose. No one is hurt and you have completely severed your ties with everything you've left behind," I said. "You have total freedom and no connection to anything."

Jules shrugged.

A thought occurred to me and I asked him, "Do you have enough to get by? I mean this has cost you plenty."

Jules grinned broadly. "More than you can imagine." He paused and said, "Why don't you spend the night in this town and think it over. I suspect you will find it as charming and life-altering as did I."

His lips curled into a smile. "There's one additional factor to consider."

Jules handed me a slip of paper with numbers on it.

"Take this to the Private Bank of San Marino, it's just down the street, and show this to the manager." Jules stood and hugged me. His embrace was long and fatherly, like a man saying goodbye to his son whom he will never see again. He left the room without another word and shut the door. I stood for a minute or so, hoping he would return. Everything happened so fast that I never had the chance to tell that bastard how much I loathed him for what he had done.

Eventually I walked back to the reception area and was told that the lawyer had left for the day and Jules was gone. I found my way to the bank and handed the slip to the manager.

"Scuzi," he said as he turned his back to me and began typing on his keyboard.

Finally he said, "Signore Schiff, I have your account on my screen, and I need to verify only one thing. Your password, per favore." He looked at me, expecting an answer.

Jules hadn't mentioned any password. I thought, my wife's name? The name of my law school? The kind of car I drive? Or maybe I should get up and run from that place while I still had the time, before anything further changed. After a few minutes the manager cleared his throat, and I could feel sweat erupting on my face.

"Invaiatura," I whispered.

The manager nodded and typed on his keypad, then hit "enter" with a decisive click. He looked at the screen and shook his head, making something I've learned is an "Italian" expression.

I waited. A moment later he turned the screen my way, and in the center of the screen I read a number: 250.000.

I stared and then leaned forward. "Is that two hundred fifty thousand dollars?"

"No, Signore. Euros. Approximately three hundred twenty-five thousand dollars. Is everything in order?"

I paused a long while, thinking that was a lot of money, my tip-not enough to retire, but a tidy amount to buy my silence. The whole notion disgusted me and propelled me to my next phase. "Yes, quite."

I never told my ex-wife about the account, my plans, or Jules. As it was I saw Jules only one more time again, many months later. We met in his house, where you and I now live, and I forced the bastard to give me his Italian account numbers before I stuck a knife in his chest. I already knew his password. I buried him under the Sangiovese grapevines, right here. It was then that I became Jules Invaiatura.

I looked down at the woman, ten years my junior, whose hair was the color of the tawny Tuscan landscape with a smile as bright as the noon sun. She rested her head on my stomach as we lay on a blanket, eating figs in the vineyard at my villa only ten kilometers from Siena.

I asked, "Angela, do you understand what I just said?"

She smiled at me and said nothing.

Then I said, "Angela, hai capito quello che ho detto?"

She laughed and replied, "Non capisco una parola di inglese."

She doesn't understand a word of English.

"Ti amo, Angela," I said.

"Il mio amore, Jules," she replied, kissing me warmly.

Smiling, she sat up and placed my hand on her bulging belly so I could feel our baby kicking.

"Bambino Jules," she said, continuing to smile.

"Invaiatura, indeed," I said, patting his grave, and Angela laughed.

Joel Burcat is a writer and an environmental lawyer in a private practice in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

ALEXSANDR SOLZHENITSYN: NOBEL LECTURE IN LITERATURE 1970

1

Just as that puzzled savage who has picked up – a strange cast-up from the ocean? – something unearthed from the sands? – or an obscure object fallen down from the sky? – intricate in curves, it gleams first dully and then with a bright thrust of light. Just as he turns it this way and that, turns it over, trying to discover what to do with it, trying to discover some mundane function within his own grasp, never dreaming of its higher function.

So also we, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters; boldly we direct it, we renew, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement – right down to popular songs and night-clubs, and at another – grabbing the nearest weapon, cork or cudgel – for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives to us a part of its secret inner light.

But shall we ever grasp the whole of that light? Who will dare to say that he has DEFINED Art, enumerated all its facets? Perhaps once upon a time someone understood and told us, but we could not remain satisfied with that for long; we listened, and neglected, and threw it out there and then, hurrying as always to exchange even the very best – if only for something new! And when we are told again the old truth, we shall not even remember that we once possessed it.

One artist sees himself as the creator of an independent spiritual world; he hoists onto his shoulders the task of creating this world, of peopling it and of bearing the all-embracing responsibility for it; but he crumples beneath it, for a mortal genius is not capable of bearing such a burden. Just as man in general, having declared himself the centre of existence, has not succeeded in creating a balanced spiritual system. And if misfortune overtakes him, he casts the blame upon the age-long disharmony of the world, upon the complexity of today’s ruptured soul, or upon the stupidity of the public.

Another artist, recognizing a higher power above, gladly works as a humble apprentice beneath God’s heaven; then, however, his responsibility for everything that is written or drawn, for the souls which perceive his work, is more exacting than ever. But, in return, it is not he who has created this world, not he who directs it, there is no doubt as to its foundations; the artist has merely to be more keenly aware than others of the harmony of the world, of the beauty and ugliness of the human contribution to it, and to communicate this acutely to his fellow-men. And in misfortune, and even at the depths of existence – in destitution, in prison, in sickness – his sense of stable harmony never deserts him.

But all the irrationality of art, its dazzling turns, its unpredictable discoveries, its shattering influence on human beings – they are too full of magic to be exhausted by this artist’s vision of the world, by his artistic conception or by the work of his unworthy fingers.

Archaeologists have not discovered stages of human existence so early that they were without art. Right back in the early morning twilights of mankind we received it from Hands which we were too slow to discern. And we were too slow to ask: FOR WHAT PURPOSE have we been given this gift? What are we to do with it?

And they were mistaken, and will always be mistaken, who prophesy that art will disintegrate, that it will outlive its forms and die. It is we who shall die – art will remain. And shall we comprehend, even on the day of our destruction, all its facets and all its possibilities?

Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited – dimly, briefly – by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking.

Like that little looking-glass from the fairy-tales: look into it and you will see – not yourself – but for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man fly. And only the soul gives a groan …

2

One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world”. What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes – but whom has it saved?

There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what distorted, will not immediately become obvious.

Then a contradictory speech, article, program, a differently constructed philosophy rallies in opposition – and all just as elegant and smooth, and once again it works. Which is why such things are both trusted and mistrusted.

In vain to reiterate what does not reach the heart.

But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force – they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.

So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through – then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three?

In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world”, was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all HE was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.

And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today?

It is the small insight which, over the years, I have succeeded in gaining into this matter that I shall attempt to lay before you here today.

3

In order to mount this platform from which the Nobel lecture is read, a platform offered to far from every writer and only once in a lifetime, I have climbed not three or four makeshift steps, but hundreds and even thousands of them; unyielding, precipitous, frozen steps, leading out of the darkness and cold where it was my fate to survive, while others – perhaps with a greater gift and stronger than I – have perished. Of them, I myself met but a few on the Archipelago of GULAG1, shattered into its fractionary multitude of islands; and beneath the millstone of shadowing and mistrust I did not talk to them all, of some I only heard, of others still I only guessed. Those who fell into that abyss already bearing a literary name are at least known, but how many were never recognized, never once mentioned in public? And virtually no one managed to return. A whole national literature remained there, cast into oblivion not only without a grave, but without even underclothes, naked, with a number tagged on to its toe. Russian literature did not cease for a moment, but from the outside it appeared a wasteland! Where a peaceful forest could have grown, there remained, after all the felling, two or three trees overlooked by chance.

And as I stand here today, accompanied by the shadows of the fallen, with bowed head allowing others who were worthy before to pass ahead of me to this place, as I stand here, how am I to divine and to express what THEY would have wished to say?

This obligation has long weighed upon us, and we have understood it. In the words of Vladimir Solov’ev:

Even in chains we ourselves must complete

That circle which the gods have mapped out for us.

Frequently, in painful camp seethings, in a column of prisoners, when chains of lanterns pierced the gloom of the evening frosts, there would well up inside us the words that we should like to cry out to the whole world, if the whole world could hear one of us. Then it seemed so clear: what our successful ambassador would say, and how the world would immediately respond with its comment. Our horizon embraced quite distinctly both physical things and spiritual movements, and it saw no lop-sidedness in the indivisible world. These ideas did not come from books, neither were they imported for the sake of coherence. They were formed in conversations with people now dead, in prison cells and by forest fires, they were tested against THAT life, they grew out of THAT existence.

When at last the outer pressure grew a little weaker, my and our horizon broadened and gradually, albeit through a minute chink, we saw and knew “the whole world”. And to our amazement the whole world was not at all as we had expected, as we had hoped; that is to say a world living “not by that”, a world leading “not there”, a world which could exclaim at the sight of a muddy swamp, “what a delightful little puddle!”, at concrete neck stocks, “what an exquisite necklace!”; but instead a world where some weep inconsolate tears and others dance to a light-hearted musical.

How could this happen? Why the yawning gap? Were we insensitive? Was the world insensitive? Or is it due to language differences? Why is it that people are not able to hear each other’s every distinct utterance? Words cease to sound and run away like water – without taste, colour, smell. Without trace.

As I have come to understand this, so through the years has changed and changed again the structure, content and tone of my potential speech. The speech I give today.

And it has little in common with its original plan, conceived on frosty camp evenings.

4

From time immemorial man has been made in such a way that his vision of the world, so long as it has not been instilled under hypnosis, his motivations and scale of values, his actions and intentions are determined by his personal and group experience of life. As the Russian saying goes, “Do not believe your brother, believe your own crooked eye.” And that is the most sound basis for an understanding of the world around us and of human conduct in it. And during the long epochs when our world lay spread out in mystery and wilderness, before it became encroached by common lines of communication, before it was transformed into a single, convulsively pulsating lump – men, relying on experience, ruled without mishap within their limited areas, within their communities, within their societies, and finally on their national territories. At that time it was possible for individual human beings to perceive and accept a general scale of values, to distinguish between what is considered normal, what incredible; what is cruel and what lies beyond the boundaries of wickedness; what is honesty, what deceit. And although the scattered peoples led extremely different lives and their social values were often strikingly at odds, just as their systems of weights and measures did not agree, still these discrepancies surprised only occasional travellers, were reported in journals under the name of wonders, and bore no danger to mankind which was not yet one.

But now during the past few decades, imperceptibly, suddenly, mankind has become one – hopefully one and dangerously one – so that the concussions and inflammations of one of its parts are almost instantaneously passed on to others, sometimes lacking in any kind of necessary immunity. Mankind has become one, but not steadfastly one as communities or even nations used to be; not united through years of mutual experience, neither through possession of a single eye, affectionately called crooked, nor yet through a common native language, but, surpassing all barriers, through international broadcasting and print. An avalanche of events descends upon us – in one minute half the world hears of their splash. But the yardstick by which to measure those events and to evaluate them in accordance with the laws of unfamiliar parts of the world – this is not and cannot be conveyed via soundwaves and in newspaper columns. For these yardsticks were matured and assimilated over too many years of too specific conditions in individual countries and societies; they cannot be exchanged in mid-air. In the various parts of the world men apply their own hard-earned values to events, and they judge stubbornly, confidently, only according to their own scales of values and never according to any others.

And if there are not many such different scales of values in the world, there are at least several; one for evaluating events near at hand, another for events far away; aging societies possess one, young societies another; unsuccessful people one, successful people another. The divergent scales of values scream in discordance, they dazzle and daze us, and in order that it might not be painful we steer clear of all other values, as though from insanity, as though from illusion, and we confidently judge the whole world according to our own home values. Which is why we take for the greater, more painful and less bearable disaster not that which is in fact greater, more painful and less bearable, but that which lies closest to us. Everything which is further away, which does not threaten this very day to invade our threshold – with all its groans, its stifled cries, its destroyed lives, even if it involves millions of victims – this we consider on the whole to be perfectly bearable and of tolerable proportions.

In one part of the world, not so long ago, under persecutions not inferior to those of the ancient Romans’, hundreds of thousands of silent Christians gave up their lives for their belief in God. In the other hemisphere a certain madman, (and no doubt he is not alone), speeds across the ocean to DELIVER us from religion – with a thrust of steel into the high priest! He has calculated for each and every one of us according to his personal scale of values!

That which from a distance, according to one scale of values, appears as enviable and flourishing freedom, at close quarters, and according to other values, is felt to be infuriating constraint calling for buses to be overthrown. That which in one part of the world might represent a dream of incredible prosperity, in another has the exasperating effect of wild exploitation demanding immediate strike. There are different scales of values for natural catastrophes: a flood craving two hundred thousand lives seems less significant than our local accident. There are different scales of values for personal insults: sometimes even an ironic smile or a dismissive gesture is humiliating, while for others cruel beatings are forgiven as an unfortunate joke. There are different scales of values for punishment and wickedness: according to one, a month’s arrest, banishment to the country, or an isolation-cell where one is fed on white rolls and milk, shatters the imagination and fills the newspaper columns with rage. While according to another, prison sentences of twenty-five years, isolation-cells where the walls are covered with ice and the prisoners stripped to their underclothes, lunatic asylums for the sane, and countless unreasonable people who for some reason will keep running away, shot on the frontiers – all this is common and accepted. While the mind is especially at peace concerning that exotic part of the world about which we know virtually nothing, from which we do not even receive news of events, but only the trivial, out-of-date guesses of a few correspondents.

Yet we cannot reproach human vision for this duality, for this dumbfounded incomprehension of another man’s distant grief, man is just made that way. But for the whole of mankind, compressed into a single lump, such mutual incomprehension presents the threat of imminent and violent destruction. One world, one mankind cannot exist in the face of six, four or even two scales of values: we shall be torn apart by this disparity of rhythm, this disparity of vibrations.

A man with two hearts is not for this world, neither shall we be able to live side by side on one Earth.

5

But who will co-ordinate these value scales, and how? Who will create for mankind one system of interpretation, valid for good and evil deeds, for the unbearable and the bearable, as they are differentiated today? Who will make clear to mankind what is really heavy and intolerable and what only grazes the skin locally? Who will direct the anger to that which is most terrible and not to that which is nearer? Who might succeed in transferring such an understanding beyond the limits of his own human experience? Who might succeed in impressing upon a bigoted, stubborn human creature the distant joy and grief of others, an understanding of dimensions and deceptions which he himself has never experienced? Propaganda, constraint, scientific proof – all are useless. But fortunately there does exist such a means in our world! That means is art. That means is literature.

They can perform a miracle: they can overcome man’s detrimental peculiarity of learning only from personal experience so that the experience of other people passes him by in vain. From man to man, as he completes his brief spell on Earth, art transfers the whole weight of an unfamiliar, lifelong experience with all its burdens, its colours, its sap of life; it recreates in the flesh an unknown experience and allows us to possess it as our own.

And even more, much more than that; both countries and whole continents repeat each other’s mistakes with time lapses which can amount to centuries. Then, one would think, it would all be so obvious! But no; that which some nations have already experienced, considered and rejected, is suddenly discovered by others to be the latest word. And here again, the only substitute for an experience we ourselves have never lived through is art, literature. They possess a wonderful ability: beyond distinctions of language, custom, social structure, they can convey the life experience of one whole nation to another. To an inexperienced nation they can convey a harsh national trial lasting many decades, at best sparing an entire nation from a superfluous, or mistaken, or even disastrous course, thereby curtailing the meanderings of human history.

It is this great and noble property of art that I urgently recall to you today from the Nobel tribune.

And literature conveys irrefutable condensed experience in yet another invaluable direction; namely, from generation to generation. Thus it becomes the living memory of the nation. Thus it preserves and kindles within itself the flame of her spent history, in a form which is safe from deformation and slander. In this way literature, together with language, protects the soul of the nation.

(In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.)

But woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against “freedom of print”, it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another. Silent generations grow old and die without ever having talked about themselves, either to each other or to their descendants. When writers such as Achmatova and Zamjatin – interred alive throughout their lives – are condemned to create in silence until they die, never hearing the echo of their written words, then that is not only their personal tragedy, but a sorrow to the whole nation, a danger to the whole nation.

In some cases moreover – when as a result of such a silence the whole of history ceases to be understood in its entirety – it is a danger to the whole of mankind.

6

At various times and in various countries there have arisen heated, angry and exquisite debates as to whether art and the artist should be free to live for themselves, or whether they should be for ever mindful of their duty towards society and serve it albeit in an unprejudiced way. For me there is no dilemma, but I shall refrain from raising once again the train of arguments. One of the most brilliant addresses on this subject was actually Albert Camus’ Nobel speech, and I would happily subscribe to his conclusions. Indeed, Russian literature has for several decades manifested an inclination not to become too lost in contemplation of itself, not to flutter about too frivolously. I am not ashamed to continue this tradition to the best of my ability. Russian literature has long been familiar with the notions that a writer can do much within his society, and that it is his duty to do so.

Let us not violate the RIGHT of the artist to express exclusively his own experiences and introspections, disregarding everything that happens in the world beyond. Let us not DEMAND of the artist, but – reproach, beg, urge and entice him – that we may be allowed to do. After all, only in part does he himself develop his talent; the greater part of it is blown into him at birth as a finished product, and the gift of talent imposes responsibility on his free will. Let us assume that the artist does not OWE anybody anything: nevertheless, it is painful to see how, by retiring into his self-made worlds or the spaces of his subjective whims, he CAN surrender the real world into the hands of men who are mercenary, if not worthless, if not insane.

Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant. Therefore the rule – always do what’s most profitable to your party. Any professional group no sooner sees a convenient opportunity to BREAK OFF A PIECE, even if it be unearned, even if it be superfluous, than it breaks it off there and then and no matter if the whole of society comes tumbling down. As seen from the outside, the amplitude of the tossings of western society is approaching that point beyond which the system becomes metastable and must fall. Violence, less and less embarrassed by the limits imposed by centuries of lawfulness, is brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world, unconcerned that its infertility has been demonstrated and proved many times in history. What is more, it is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification. The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing. Dostoevsky’s DEVILS – apparently a provincial nightmare fantasy of the last century – are crawling across the whole world in front of our very eyes, infesting countries where they could not have been dreamed of; and by means of the hijackings, kidnappings, explosions and fires of recent years they are announcing their determination to shake and destroy civilization! And they may well succeed. The young, at an age when they have not yet any experience other than sexual, when they do not yet have years of personal suffering and personal understanding behind them, are jubilantly repeating our depraved Russian blunders of the Nineteenth Century, under the impression that they are discovering something new. They acclaim the latest wretched degradation on the part of the Chinese Red Guards as a joyous example. In shallow lack of understanding of the age-old essence of mankind, in the naive confidence of inexperienced hearts they cry: let us drive away THOSE cruel, greedy oppressors, governments, and the new ones (we!), having laid aside grenades and rifles, will be just and understanding. Far from it! . . . But of those who have lived more and understand, those who could oppose these young – many do not dare oppose, they even suck up, anything not to appear “conservative”. Another Russian phenomenon of the Nineteenth Century which Dostoevsky called SLAVERY TO PROGRESSIVE QUIRKS.

The spirit of Munich has by no means retreated into the past; it was not merely a brief episode. I even venture to say that the spirit of Munich prevails in the Twentieth Century. The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is a sickness of the will of successful people, it is the daily condition of those who have given themselves up to the thirst after prosperity at any price, to material well-being as the chief goal of earthly existence. Such people – and there are many in today’s world – elect passivity and retreat, just so as their accustomed life might drag on a bit longer, just so as not to step over the threshold of hardship today – and tomorrow, you’ll see, it will all be all right. (But it will never be all right! The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.)

And on top of this we are threatened by destruction in the fact that the physically compressed, strained world is not allowed to blend spiritually; the molecules of knowledge and sympathy are not allowed to jump over from one half to the other. This presents a rampant danger: THE SUPPRESSION OF INFORMATION between the parts of the planet. Contemporary science knows that suppression of information leads to entropy and total destruction. Suppression of information renders international signatures and agreements illusory; within a muffled zone it costs nothing to reinterpret any agreement, even simpler – to forget it, as though it had never really existed. (Orwell understood this supremely.) A muffled zone is, as it were, populated not by inhabitants of the Earth, but by an expeditionary corps from Mars; the people know nothing intelligent about the rest of the Earth and are prepared to go and trample it down in the holy conviction that they come as “liberators”.

A quarter of a century ago, in the great hopes of mankind, the United Nations Organization was born. Alas, in an immoral world, this too grew up to be immoral. It is not a United Nations Organization but a United Governments Organization where all governments stand equal; those which are freely elected, those imposed forcibly, and those which have seized power with weapons. Relying on the mercenary partiality of the majority UNO jealously guards the freedom of some nations and neglects the freedom of others. As a result of an obedient vote it declined to undertake the investigation of private appeals – the groans, screams and beseechings of humble individual PLAIN PEOPLE – not large enough a catch for such a great organization. UNO made no effort to make the Declaration of Human Rights, its best document in twenty-five years, into an OBLIGATORY condition of membership confronting the governments. Thus it betrayed those humble people into the will of the governments which they had not chosen.

It would seem that the appearance of the contemporary world rests solely in the hands of the scientists; all mankind’s technical steps are determined by them. It would seem that it is precisely on the international goodwill of scientists, and not of politicians, that the direction of the world should depend. All the more so since the example of the few shows how much could be achieved were they all to pull together. But no; scientists have not manifested any clear attempt to become an important, independently active force of mankind. They spend entire congresses in renouncing the sufferings of others; better to stay safely within the precincts of science. That same spirit of Munich has spread above them its enfeebling wings.

What then is the place and role of the writer in this cruel, dynamic, split world on the brink of its ten destructions? After all we have nothing to do with letting off rockets, we do not even push the lowliest of hand-carts, we are quite scorned by those who respect only material power. Is it not natural for us too to step back, to lose faith in the steadfastness of goodness, in the indivisibility of truth, and to just impart to the world our bitter, detached observations: how mankind has become hopelessly corrupt, how men have degenerated, and how difficult it is for the few beautiful and refined souls to live amongst them?

But we have not even recourse to this flight. Anyone who has once taken up the WORD can never again evade it; a writer is not the detached judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his native land or by his countrymen. And if the tanks of his fatherland have flooded the asphalt of a foreign capital with blood, then the brown spots have slapped against the face of the writer forever. And if one fatal night they suffocated his sleeping, trusting Friend, then the palms of the writer bear the bruises from that rope. And if his young fellow citizens breezily declare the superiority of depravity over honest work, if they give themselves over to drugs or seize hostages, then their stink mingles with the breath of the writer.

Shall we have the temerity to declare that we are not responsible for the sores of the present-day world?

7

However, I am cheered by a vital awareness of WORLD LITERATURE as of a single huge heart, beating out the cares and troubles of our world, albeit presented and perceived differently in each of its corners.

Apart from age-old national literatures there existed, even in past ages, the conception of world literature as an anthology skirting the heights of the national literatures, and as the sum total of mutual literary influences. But there occurred a lapse in time: readers and writers became acquainted with writers of other tongues only after a time lapse, sometimes lasting centuries, so that mutual influences were also delayed and the anthology of national literary heights was revealed only in the eyes of descendants, not of contemporaries.

But today, between the writers of one country and the writers and readers of another, there is a reciprocity if not instantaneous then almost so. I experience this with myself. Those of my books which, alas, have not been printed in my own country have soon found a responsive, worldwide audience, despite hurried and often bad translations. Such distinguished western writers as Heinrich Böll have undertaken critical analysis of them. All these last years, when my work and freedom have not come crashing down, when contrary to the laws of gravity they have hung suspended as though on air, as though on NOTHING – on the invisible dumb tension of a sympathetic public membrane; then it was with grateful warmth, and quite unexpectedly for myself, that I learnt of the further support of the international brotherhood of writers. On my fiftieth birthday I was astonished to receive congratulations from well-known western writers. No pressure on me came to pass by unnoticed. During my dangerous weeks of exclusion from the Writers’ Union the WALL OF DEFENCE advanced by the world’s prominent writers protected me from worse persecutions; and Norwegian writers and artists hospitably prepared a roof for me, in the event of my threatened exile being put into effect. Finally even the advancement of my name for the Nobel Prize was raised not in the country where I live and write, but by Francois Mauriac and his colleagues. And later still entire national writers’ unions have expressed their support for me.

Thus I have understood and felt that world literature is no longer an abstract anthology, nor a generalization invented by literary historians; it is rather a certain common body and a common spirit, a living heartfelt unity reflecting the growing unity of mankind. State frontiers still turn crimson, heated by electric wire and bursts of machine fire; and various ministries of internal affairs still think that literature too is an “internal affair” falling under their jurisdiction; newspaper headlines still display: “No right to interfere in our internal affairs!” Whereas there are no INTERNAL AFFAIRS left on our crowded Earth! And mankind’s sole salvation lies in everyone making everything his business; in the people of the East being vitally concerned with what is thought in the West, the people of the West vitally concerned with what goes on in the East. And literature, as one of the most sensitive, responsive instruments possessed by the human creature, has been one of the first to adopt, to assimilate, to catch hold of this feeling of a growing unity of mankind. And so I turn with confidence to the world literature of today – to hundreds of friends whom I have never met in the flesh and whom I may never see.

Friends! Let us try to help if we are worth anything at all! Who from time immemorial has constituted the uniting, not the dividing, strength in your countries, lacerated by discordant parties, movements, castes and groups? There in its essence is the position of writers: expressers of their native language – the chief binding force of the nation, of the very earth its people occupy, and at best of its national spirit.

I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrinations of prejudiced people and parties. World literature has it in its power to convey condensed experience from one land to another so that we might cease to be split and dazzled, that the different scales of values might be made to agree, and one nation learn correctly and concisely the true history of another with such strength of recognition and painful awareness as it had itself experienced the same, and thus might it be spared from repeating the same cruel mistakes. And perhaps under such conditions we artists will be able to cultivate within ourselves a field of vision to embrace the WHOLE WORLD: in the centre observing like any other human being that which lies nearby, at the edges we shall begin to draw in that which is happening in the rest of the world. And we shall correlate, and we shall observe world proportions.

And who, if not writers, are to pass judgement – not only on their unsuccessful governments, (in some states this is the easiest way to earn one’s bread, the occupation of any man who is not lazy), but also on the people themselves, in their cowardly humiliation or self-satisfied weakness? Who is to pass judgement on the light-weight sprints of youth, and on the young pirates brandishing their knives?

We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.

And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT enter the world, let it even reign in the world – but not with my help. But writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art.

And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness – and violence, decrepit, will fall.

That is why, my friends, I believe that we are able to help the world in its white-hot hour. Not by making the excuse of possessing no weapons, and not by giving ourselves over to a frivolous life – but by going to war!

Proverbs about truth are well-loved in Russian. They give steady and sometimes striking expression to the not inconsiderable harsh national experience:

ONE WORD OF TRUTH SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD.

And it is here, on an imaginary fantasy, a breach of the principle of the conservation of mass and energy, that I base both my own activity and my appeal to the writers of the whole world.

Notes

[←1]

Acheulean hand axes were called thunderstones in the middle ages. They were thought to have dropped from the sky, having been somehow produced by thunder and lightning.

Table of Contents

TOLSTOY: “CAIUS IS MORTAL”

THE TWO MIND HYPOTHESIS

PRIMO LEVI'S COSMOS

FOUR POEMS

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REHABILITATION OF THE HUMAN RACE THROUGH UNDERSTANDING THE HUMAN CONDITION

BETWEEN UTOPIA AND ESCAPE

PIETY AND VIRTUE IN EARLY ISLAM

OUR LONGSTANDING LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH VACCINES

THE INVISIBLE ENEMY: JAMES JONES AND THE POLITICS OF GRIEF

IN THE STOMACH OF A TERMITE

REINHOLD NIEBUHR AND THE SCANDAL OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

THE LONG FUTURE OF HUMANITY

IN OUR WESTERN WORLD, NOTHING NEW

INTERVIEW WITH JOEL BURCAT, AUTHOR OF 2021 ENVIRONMENTAL THRILLER AMID RAGE

SHORT STORY: INVAIATURA

ALEXSANDR SOLZHENITSYN: NOBEL LECTURE IN LITERATURE 1970