Category Archives: Philosophy/Ideas

There are no innocent beliefs

Conspiracy Theories, Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Ethics, Health, Philosophy/Ideas, Pluralism, reason, Skeptical Philosophy, Social Democracy and Trust, Sociology of Knowledge, Trust and Distrust, Vaccines

 

According to Professor Arthur  Schafer, if we are credulous people then we can easily believe the Christian story, or the Muslim story, or the Jewish story.  Or we can believe as the Mennonite woman interviewed by the CBC believed that eating flowers was as effective at defeating the measles virus as vaccines.

 

If we are credulous, we can believe anything because it makes us feel good. Then we can believe horoscopes because that makes us feel good, even though there is absolutely no evidence to support such beliefs. Even reputable newspapers publish horoscopes. It makes their readers feel good. Then they are more inclined to purchase the newspapers.

If we are credulous people, we can believe that Bill Gates implanted tiny chips into vaccines so that he could control the world, or kill millions of people, without any evidence at all. If we are credulous people our political leaders can make us believe that an election they lost was stolen by the opposition, even in the complete absence of any evidence.

If we are credulous people, we can believe that ivermectin can kill the coronavirus just because it is very effective at killing parasites in livestock even though we have no evidence to support that belief at all. If we are credulous people we will believe anything at all,  just because our political leader who has virtually no scientific knowledge at all, tells us to believe it. Credulity is a very dangerous thing. Not just for individuals, but for society. Society does not work well unless we believe our leaders when belief is rationally justified and do not believe them when the evidence does not support their claims. We cannot afford credulity.

The fact is, according to Arthur Schafer, that our society which many of us think of as secular, is actually “impregnated with a lot of irrational superstitions.”

Today almost no one agrees with William Kingdon Clifford, says Schafer. Schafer says instead, people believe things just because authority figures, such as Presidents, or mothers, or church leaders tell us to believe them. They are willing to accept all manner of irrational beliefs. According to Schafer, many people believe what they have been told to believe by their parents as they grew up, without challenging those beliefs at all. They require no evidence to support them.  As a result, children born and raised in a Muslim home usually become adherents of Islam. Children born and raised in a Christian home usually become adherents of Christianity. Parents want their children to believe them, even when they give no good reasons for doing so.

As a result, Schafer argues that people are entitled to believe what they want to believe, but are not allowed to enforce those views on other. This is called tolerance. In a pluralistic society, we must tolerate diverse views provided they don’t hurt others. To get along with others we must learn to respect their diverse views and must reject their harmful views, that are unsupported by evidence,  but in such a way that we can still tolerate each other. We have to learn to live together. Sometimes that is not easy.

This is the attitude of tolerance. This is a liberal good—a very important  good at that. We tolerate the fact that others have irrational beliefs. We tolerate that they believe any kind of superstition no matter how nonsensical as long as they don’t try to impose it on us.

But Clifford goes farther than that. Clifford is different. He doesn’t believe that your belief in horoscopes is innocent. According to Clifford, says “there are no innocent beliefs.”  All beliefs have consequences.  Many liberals hold that I have the right to believe whatever I want, so long as I don’t harm anyone else. Clifford says that by believing irrational things we are exposing ourselves and the societies in which we live, to serious potential harms. As long as we would harm only ourselves that might be acceptable. But by our actions we are actually exposing many others to serious harms as well through our credulity. That we are not entitled to do. That is morally wrong, he says. Credulity is a harm that we must work hard to suppress. Tolerating irrational beliefs is a sure way to encourage such harms.

 

Credulity is Bad

Conspiracy Theories, Critical thinking, Epidemics/Pandemics, Morality, Philosophy/Ideas, reason, religion, Skeptical Philosophy, The Sleep of Reason, Trust and Distrust

 

 

The philosopher William Kingdon Clifford argued, that to believe anything because it comforts you, or makes you feel good, or sustains you in life, or makes life a little less intolerable, is not just epistemically wrong, not just intellectually wrong, but morally wrong. In fact, if the decision that needs to be made is serious enough, such as whether or not to send people to war, or whether or not to cut health benefits to millions of people to raise money to give tax breaks to wealthy people, or whether or not to encourage  vaccines to fight serious diseases or encourage eating wild flowers instead, the decision could amount to one of the worst crimes that you can commit. That’s a pretty drastic statement. According to Clifford  It is a travesty and has some horrible consequences.  We will get to those later. In any event, according to Clifford this is a morally wrong. I think it is hard to argue with that. Serious decisions must be made on the basis of serious evidence, analysis, and scrutiny before they are made and innocent people suffer.

 

Arthur Schafer, a wonderful philosopher and ethicist from the University of Manitoba, and the first philosopher I ever heard speak in person, is a fan of Clifford’s reasoning. According to Schafer, Clifford sees our reliance   on illusion on false pictures of the universe, as amounting to creating in us a walking time bomb. As Schafer said at talk to a talk given to the Winnipeg Humanists, Atheists, and Skeptics, Society,  “to put it a little less dramatically, when we believe things because they make us feel good, rather than because we have good evidence for them, as Clifford argues, we make ourselves credulous people.” That Clifford says is wicked. Schafer agrees with that conclusion. So do I.

 

Again, we are talking only about serious important issues here. We are not talking about a decision to pick a red jelly bean rather than a white jelly bean from a cup. For those decisions we are completely free to make them on the basis of a whim, or an inkling, or an instinct or even on a guess.  But we can’t justify decisions that seriously affect the health or welfare of other people on such a basis.

 

If we are credulous people we can easily believe, as the Mennonite woman interviewed by the CBC radio did, that eating wild flowers to combat measles is better than taking vaccines. If we have been conditioned by our parents to be credulous, they are partly responsible. Credulity can be dangerous—to ourselves and others. That is why Clifford and Schafer said encouraging credulity is dangerous for society. Not just for the believer, for society.

We can believe whatever we want but we should be careful about helping to create a credulous society. As we are now seeing everywhere, that can cause a lot of harm.

The Big Ideas

Books, civilization, Classic Books, Philosophy/Ideas, Religious Quest in the Modern Age, Truth Seeking

 

The Brothers Karamazov is often called a book of ideas.  In some respect that is an apt description.

In the novel The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky asks big questions.  Does God exist?  If not, can we do whatever we want? And Ivan asks Alyosha the question that is so vital to him, does Alyosha love life more than the meaning of life? Alyosha’s answer is surprising but clear. “love should come before logic…Only then will man be able to understand the meaning of life.” So he tells his brother he should “bring back to life those dead of yours.” He was referring to the great thinkers and artists. And that brings him back to civilization and the eternal verities. The big questions, the big ideas that drive Ivan.

Ivan loves life and loves ideas. He is passionate about both, though usually we see only his love of ideas. Ideas excite him. Ideas drive his life. He doesn’t just want to chase  wine, women and song, but the big ideas, what he calls “the eternal verities.”

Ivan realizes that his younger brother Alyosha, is also driven by ideas, the spiritual ideas, for he too is on a religious quest. That is why he went to the monastery. That is why he has made Elder Zosima his mentor.  He wants to find the spiritual path. As Ivan says, “we callow youths, we have first of all to settle the eternal verities.” Usually, it is often thought, the big ideas must be settled by wise old men, but Ivan disagrees.

What are these big ideas?  He tells Alyosha

“those eternal verities such as the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. And those who do not believe in God will bring in socialism, anarchy, and the reorganization of society according to a new scheme…But it really boils down to the same damned thing—they’re all the same old questions, they’re just approached from a different angle. And there are many, many extremely original boys who spend their whole time nowadays debating these eternal questions.”

 

And Alyosha admits to Ivan that these are the most important problems, especially for Russians. But Ivan says what really surprises him is not that they say if God does not exist, they would have to invent God, which is what Voltaire said, but rather that such an idea would have ever occurred to “a vicious wild animal like man. For that concept is so holy, so touching, and so wise that it does man too much honour. For my part I’ve long since stopped worrying about who invented whom—-God  man or man God.” There’s a big question for you.

There is a lot to be passionate about in these ideas. And the Karmazov brothers, are passionate about those ideas and that makes for fascinating reading. And a fascinating life.

 

Chief Seattle: An Old Attitude to nature can provide a New Attitude to Nature

Affinity, expansive religion, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature, Philosophy/Ideas, religion

 

A few years ago, in New Zealand I purchased a poster containing the complete text of the response by Chief Seattle to the President of United States to his offer to purchase land from his tribe, which I posted about yesterday.  I had only read part of it before.  It was one of the most eloquent statements I have ever heard about a genuine approach to nature that was, to some extent, the position of  many North American indigenous people.  It was radically different from the approach of the arriving Europeans.

I recognize that there is controversy over the extent to which this version or any other version accurately records what Chief Seattle said to the President, but I believe the general tenor of the letter records a profound philosophy which I am content to ascribe to Chief Seattle as I don’t know who better deserves the credit for it. I certainly think the thoughts deserve our attention.

The renowned English philosopher A. N. Whitehead once said, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” I think the same things can be said about Chief Seattle. At least as far as environmental philosophy goes. And to think I learned absolutely nothing of it in 4 years of university studying philosophy, proving how deficient my education was at that time, nearly 50 years ago.

Chief Seattle was a Suquamish and Duwamish chief in what we now call western North America. The city of Seattle, in the U.S. state of Washington, was named after him.

As Chief Seattle said,

 

“We are part of the earth and it is part of us.

The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers.

The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man—all belong to the same family.”

 

Another way of saying is to say we are all kin. All people and all creatures of the natural world are kin. This basic premise has profound philosophical consequences. For if we recognize that we are all kin we ought to treat each other, and other creatures too, with respect.  I will get to Darwin later, for he gave the scientific basis for this view. I cherish the idea that indigenous philosophy and western science are deeply interwoven. Realizing that also has profound consequences.

To many of the First Nations of North America, they saw themselves as a part of their world.  Their philosophies vary from tribe to tribe, but a common thread, is the recognition that the Earth is our Mother and we are all together. We are all connected. We are all part of Mother Earth. Earth is not separate and apart from us. We are woven together.  This is profound fellow feeling. This philosophy recognizes that what we do to nature we do to ourselves. That is what I call affinity.

 

This idea also has profound significance in the history of religious thought.  The Indo-European word “religio” , which is the root of the word religion, means “linkage” or “connection” and is in my view the basis of all major religions. In fact, it is the core of all religions. More on this later.

I never learned any indigenous philosophy while I pursued a 4 year Honours Arts program in philosophy and English literature. I never even heard of indigenous philosophy. I did not even think such a thing was possible.

This philosophy echoes or even sums up much of what I have learned over the years, starting with German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world.  Only Chief Seattle was much more clear and easier to understand, without being any less profound than Martin Heidegger.  The natives of North America often felt a deep connection to the land.  They felt that they were a part of it.  To the Europeans on the other hand, nature was a resource ready to be exploited.  And from these two disparate attitudes springs much that is wrong with western society.

This is an old attitude to nature, which I am proposing as a new attitude to nature. It owuld be a worthy replacement for the old western attitude,.

Chief Seattle’s statement is a stunning statement about humans and nature, and all the more amazing because a “savage” (as he was wrongly called made it in 1854. Who was the savage?

 

Pursuing Truth and Beauty

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Arizona Photos, art, exotic flowers, Philosophy/Ideas, photography, Poetry

 

When I saw this cactus in Green Valley Arizona, south of Tucson and near the Mexican border I thought it might be the most beautiful cactus I had ever seen. I was on a church yard, so I thought I could walk and photograph it without fear of being shot.

 

When I first retired I said I wanted to stop spending my time in order to make a living and feed my family, I wanted now to pursue “truth and beauty” as John Keats said. I have done that. And it has been great fun.

When I went to university, in my first English literature course, taught by Jack Woodbury, one of the best professors I ever had, the first poet we studied was John Keats. English poet. He published only 54 poems before he died at the age of 25.  That is 54 more than I have published. And many of them were great poems.

John Keats was an English Romantic poet, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and others. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when in 1821 he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. Talk about brief beauty!

 

One of the poems we read was “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”  This might have been the 3rd or 4th poem I studied in university. The poem describes an urn with an image of  a young shepherd pursuing a beautiful young woman who he wants to kiss. But of course, in the image he never catches her. She is forever, a “still unravished bride of quietness.” She never speaks. Their love is never consummated, but their love never turns stale either. It is a love that never withers. The shepherd is also a piper whose song is never heard.  But this too is fine. As Keats says in the poem, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.”

The last two lines of that poem go as follows:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

 

There has been much critical debate about what those words mean. Many, including me, have puzzled over the meaning of those words. I think they make sense in the context of the whole poem. In a way it is a summation of the poet’s thinking expressed by the previous 48 lines.

By beauty I think he means beauty in a wide sense. Beauty basically is art. And art is true or it is not art. So beauty is truth and truth is beauty. Some cactuses bloom only for a day. What a dreadful pity.

So a beautiful cactus flower, caught in a silent moment by a camera, is a work of art (beauty)  that never withers. It  is an eternal thing of beauty. If is it good, it is good forever.  It never changes. That is truth which also is truth forever.

 

 

Thoughtlessness

American Fascism, Death of Democracy, Death of Truth, Ethics, Extremism, Morality, Philosophy/Ideas, Populism, reason, The Sleep of Reason, True Believer, Trump, Trumpism, Tyranny and Fascism

 Hannah Arendt also wrote a book about the trial of Adolf Eichmann. She used that famous expression “the banality of evil” to describe him and his kind.  He was a man who facilitated horrid acts of violence against the Jews.  But Arendt said what set him apart was his “thoughtlessness.” To her he looked and acted like a boring accountant.

She had been shocked by how glib he was in court. He talked about exterminating millions of Jews as if it was nothing. What was there for him to admit to, he asked. He suggested, as did Himmler, that they could be reconciled with the Jews.  They had a sense of elation when they considered this possibility. But the feelings were not real. It was, in Arendt’s phrase, “an outrageous cliché.”  She said, “it was a self-fabricated stock phrase, as devoid of reality as those clichés by which people had lived for twelve years.”  As Carol Brightman said, “Clichés and conventional sentiments functioned as armor blocking the consciousness of the accused at just those painful junctures where painful intrusions of reality threatened.” These are some of the enemies of thought. In fact, during the trial Arendt had noticed how Eichmann was not perturbed by his starling contradictions. He was certainly not engaged in thinking. He was not stupid. He was just completely thoughtless.

Arendt was stunned that such horrific crimes could be committed without consciousness. She said she disagreed with Kant, who, according to her believed that stupidity was caused by a wicked heart. She contended instead that “absence of thought is not stupidity, it can be found in highly intelligent people, and a wicked heart is not its cause, it is probably the other way around, that wickedness may be caused by absence of thought.”

According to her teaching assistant Kohn, Arendt believed, as I believe, that “thinking conditions people to resist evildoing.”  Most ethicists do not accept this, but I find it profoundly compelling. I believe, like the American novelist Henry James, that ethics is high reason. Where there is no reason there is no ethics. this is what the sleep of reason is all about.

Arendt was clear when she said that everyone could think. Of course, that does not mean that everyone will think. You didn’t have to have an education to think. She was not elitist.

Arendt got mad when Jews accused her of being self-hating and anti-Jewish as a result of her book on Eichmann. She said that all she wanted to do was to think about what he had done. She wanted to understand him and that was not the same as forgiving him or being soft on the Nazis. It was her job as a philosopher to think about these things. And she thought that was very important. In the film about her, Arendt summed up her thinking this way,

“Trying to understand is not the same as forgiveness. It is my responsibility to try to understand. It is the responsibility of anyone who tries to put pen to paper on this subject. Since Socrates and Plato we have understood thinking to be a silent dialogue between me and myself. In refusing to be a person Eichmann utterly surrendered that single most defining human quality, that of being able to think. And consequently he was no longer capable of making moral judgments. This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which one had never seen before. It is true I have considered these questions in a philosophical way. The manifestation of the mind of thought is not knowledge, but the ability to tell right from wrong; beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.  ”

 

For Hannah Arendt, what thinking meant was to train the mind to go wandering.  I love that concept. It brings me back to my concept of meandering.  I love to meander–physically and mentally. That is the essence of free thinking (and there is really no other kind) to meander through thoughts without regard to preconceived ideas, ideologies, or prejudices. Only the free mind can think. I said that. But that is a concept directly inspired by Arendt.

Arendt’s first major book was On the Origins of Totalitarianism. She thought there was something new or modern about totalitarianism. It was not like anything we had seen before. It presented profound change from everything that preceded it. It was much more than tyranny or dictatorship. It cut at individual will. It cut at our individual identity. In fact, according to one of Arendt’s most profound insights, totalitarianism cuts at our capacity to think.

As always, I ask myself how this is relevant to our times. There are not many totalitarian regimes around right now, but there are movements—various forms of populist movements—that tend in the same direction. I think often of the American near fascists—i.e. the Trumpsters, the insurrectionists on Capitol Hill that were looking to hang Mike Pence only because their leader told them that he had been betrayed by Pence.  That was enough to set off ordinary people looking to hang the vice-president of their country! Had they lost the capacity to think? To me it seemed that way.

Toxic Masculinity; Toxic Femininity

art, Male Dominance, Movies, Philosophy/Ideas, Social Issues, violence

 

 

 

When  recently I was frantically trying to see all 10 movies that had been nominated for best Picture, I never realized that the Oscars ceremony would so closely mirror the films and life. After they award show was over where Will Smith walked up to Chris Rock who was  introducing an award and made a poor joke about his wife I was amazed. It is amazing how much we can learn about life from art and about art from life.

 

I had noticed from the stunning film The Power of the Dog how masculinity could be toxic. Phil one of the two brothers in that film shows himself as a vessel of toxic masculinity when he mocks the “art” of Rose’ son Peter who he clearly sees as effeminate and weak. Later he comes to change his views, perhaps because of his own latent homosexuality. Then Peter is driven to extreme measures to protect his mother, much like Will Smith at the Oscars was driven to extremes to defend his wife from a perceived insult. This may have been brought on by the fact that  at a young age Smith saw his father beat his mother and always considered himself a coward for not defending her. At the Oscars he tried to be more manly and do better. Did he succeed or cruelly flop again?

I noticed that when at first Smith heard the poor joke about his wife that he was laughing and enjoying it. Then the camera switched to his wife who started laughing but quickly switched  to disapproval when she realized what was being said.  Did she communicate her disappointment to her husband? Did she goad him to act? That was not shown, but it was remarkable how quickly Smith’s manner change from jocularity to menace. It is also remarkable how quickly men can stoop to violence to defend the honour of their women. Do women like that?  Do they want their men to get violent in their defence? Sometimes it seems so. I was surprised to read 2 New York Times female writers  presumably, weak kneed liberals, say they thought Smith did the right thing?

I had just the day before watched the film The Tragedy of Macbeth. The tragedy was that Macbeth’s  wife goaded him into killing the king  and in doing so mocked his lack of courage. If that is not toxic femininity what is? When Macbeth hesitates to do the dirty deed she urges him to do it. This is part of what she said,

 

“When you durst do it, then you were a man;

…I have given suck, and know

How tender it is to love the babe that milks me:

I would, while  it was smiling in my face

Have pluck’d my nipple from his toothless gums,

And dash’d the brains out, had I sworn as you

Have done to this”

 

Then after he kills the king but still has doubts,  she mocks him and finishes hiding the evidence for him.

 

I realize that this entire Oscar  incident was coloured by the ugliness of a black man defending his insulted wife. Many a black man has been cruelly emasculated by such actions. Violence is deeply engrained in American and Canadian societies. This is true even in societies where black men react violently against other black men.  This is one product of centuries of oppression. Deep and persistent hatred has led to deep and persistent self-hatred. After all they learned it from their masters. What can be more cruel than that?

 

But to deny this painful and ugly fact, as we are urged to do by white supremacist pundits today, is to drive the hatred and resentment deeper where it can do even more perverted harm. Ugly truths must be faced. Denying them is not the way out. It just makes things worse.

 

What really bothered me about this incident at the Oscars was that about an hour or less later, when Will Smith won the award for best actor, and he stumbled through a tearful speech that included an apology to the Academy and fellow actors, but notably not Chris Rock, the audience erupted with applause.  What are the rest of us (including children who witnessed it) to think? Are we to think that violence is the answer to insults? That after all is the American way (with Canadians not far behind). Is this not how cycles of violence perpetuate themselves harming no one more than the victims turned aggressors?

 

Art can help us understand such questions, but it offer few clear and definitive answers.

 

The Mind’s Sweet Shipwreck

Philosophy/Ideas, Poetry, Religious Quest in the Modern Age, Truth and Beauty

 

The American philosopher Jeff Sharlet described an encounter with Cornel West in his own office. West told him that many people read and took spiritual nourishment from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.  There is nothing wrong with  that he said but people should go deeper than that. He thought Steinbeck let the reader off too easy. I admit I loved that book, but he made an interesting point.  Did he let us off too easy? I don’t think so but maybe I need to reread that classic? West  recommended instead the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, a 19th century Italian poet-philosopher revered in Italy but little read in the U.S—“he starts with what he calls, ‘The mind’s sweet shipwreck.’ To which West added, “ Ain’t that a beautiful phrase?” Sharlet told how in West’s office West was digging through his books to make a point about Leopardi and finally found the book he was looking for. This is how Sharlet told the story:

“Leopardi should be the poet of our times… West prescribes Brother Leopardi for “deep-sea diving of the soul,” a process’s not just personal but essential to understanding “the paradox of human freedom”: that we must summon the strength to resist and endure oppression even as we acknowledge that we are ultimately weak in the face of death and despair. “We are organisms of desire.” West defines the human condition, “whose first day of birth makes us old enough to die.”

 

“Now, this, this is the greatest one,” West says, getting a page of Leopardi’s poems and looking at me with giant poem eyes as if to communicate the gravity of the words in his hand, the necessity of their immediate recitation.  He resumes rocking and reading:

That man has a truly noble nature
Who, without flinching, still can face
Our common plight, tell the truth
With an honest tongue,
Admit the evil lot we’ve been given
And the abject, impotent condition we’re in;
Who shows himself great and full of grace
Under pressure.…

 

West closes his book and stands still. His head shakes back and forth with admiration. That’s too polite a word for the emotion flooding over him: it’s relief, gratitude.”

“To know the wretchedness of who we are,” he says. “Yet the fact that we know it, is itself a noble thing, because that kind of knowledge means we can know a whole lot of other things.”

 

The minds may be ship-wrecked but it can achieve knowledge. Sacred knowledge of truth.  That truth can set one free. It won’t be easy but will be free. I call that tragic vision. That is what the religious quest is all about. Seeking truth when it is hard.

 

Prophetic Pragmatism and the Problem of Evil

expansive religion, Philosophy/Ideas, religion, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

Brother West had a unique answer to the problem of evil. The problem of evil for those who are not familiar with the argument goes something like this:

 

  1. God is all-knowing
  2. God is all- powerful
  3. God is all- loving
  4. Evil Exists
  5. Therefore God does not exist

 

I first heard of the problem of evil when I was 17 years old in 1967. It was an incredible year in my life. I finished high school. I travelled with 4 buddies to Expo 67 in Montreal with my summer wages that were intended to put me through first year of University (most of which disappeared on that memorable trip) and I went to University. My life changed forever.

1967 started with a trip to the University of Manitoba courtesy of our High School. It was part of an introduction to the university offered by the University of Manitoba to all grade 12 students who had an interest in it. I did and I went.

I went to 2 classes. One of them I have entirely forgotten. The other one I remember vividly to this day.  We were “taught” the problem by Professor Arthur Schafer who had recently returned to Manitoba from Oxford University. He said he would prove to us that God did not exist.  Then he presented the argument brilliantly and then fended off all counter arguments from the mostly horrified grade 12 students. It was scintillating. I was mesmerized. I was hooked. I wanted to study philosophy and could hardly wait to graduate.

The best version of that argument that  I have read or heard since was presented by Dostoevsky in the wonderful novel Brothers Karamazov. I intend to go there on a future part of my religious quest in the modern age. West too dealt with the problem of evil.

 

Brother West is a Christian.  But he does not deny evil. Nor does he shrink from it.  We must accept that there is evil in the world and it is real and must be faced. That is fundamental West philosophy though it has not shattered his faith. In fact, it has deepened his faith. Faith that does not acknowledge evil to West is unreal faith. It is fake faith. It is at best comforting illusion and West wants no part of illusions. He wants the hard task of confronting evil. Just like he wants to confront death and says the most important thing to learn is to learn how to die. That is what he wants to teach to his students—how to die.

Brother West is a man of many parts.  A Renaissance man in other words. He is part philosopher, part theologian, or professor, or bluesman. Sometimes he calls himself a “cultural critic” By that he means a man “who tries to explain America to itself.” He has also called that American theodicy an odd expression but by that he means a man concerned about a “central obsession, the problem of evil.  If God exists, why does he or she permit evil? One of West’s mentors, James H. Cone, said that this idea was the fundamental concept in West’s own spiritual quest. According to Cone, West explores the problem of theodicy not in the abstract of heaven nor in the abstract of philosophical debate, but rather in the concrete here and now of the world around him.  He asks: “How do you really struggle against suffering in a loving way, to leave a legacy in which people would be able to accent their own loving possibility in the midst of so much evil?”

As I said earlier, West calls his philosophy prophetic  pragmatic. West does not consider the problem of evil from the perspective of trying to prove that God does not exist. Rather he tries to figure out how do we live in a world with evil and yet maintain not just our faith, but our obligations to others?

Learning how to Die

Philosophy/Ideas, Religious Quest in the Modern Age, Social Justice

 

Cornel West is also a University  Professor. He teaches religion and philosophy.  He says he tells his students the first day of each year that he is there to teach them how to die. Can you imagine a professor saying that?  I would have been blown away.

 

In America our life is based on a sentimental denial of death. So many Americans (and of course Canadians are just as guilty) are unable to face uncomfortable truths.  Whether it is race or oppression people don’t want to know the uncomfortable truths. And it is exactly the uncomfortable truths that we need the most West said,

“I teach students how to die. The first time students come to my class I tell them you are here to learn how to die. Plato talks about philosophy as wisdom being learning how to die. When you have dogma there is no growth—that is death. There is no shift in your attention from the superficial to the substantial without death. Only that way can you avoid the mainstream which suffers from so much spiritual malnutrition. In the mainstream you end up well adjusted to injustice. No matter how many toys you have. No matter how big your house you end up well adapted to indifference.”

 

 

According to West, the essence of wisdom speaking is having the courage to know how to die by questioning your presuppositions. Every time you let a presupposition go that is a form of death because it allows you to be reborn. It allows you to grow. It allows you to develop. It allows you to mature.

 

West says that there are many ways to die.

 

“One is what he calls civic death—being part of a civil society but not its public life. That is what happened to blacks with Jim and Jane Crow. You can work for us, you can entertain us, you can titillate us, but you cannot be part of the civic body.

Or it could be psychic death as when our sisters are subject to male domination or gays and lesbians are subject to tyranny: dehumanized, dishonoured and devalued. The same is for the working classes. They are also dehumanized. Reduced to costs and calculations as your job goes to China. Who cares about your humanity? You are only useful to the degree to which you can make us money.

And then there is spiritual death where you just give up. Make your way to the crack house. Or sell your soul for a mess of porridge.”

 

According to West, trying to live a safe life can be one way to die. West argues like Martin Heidegger did:

“Human” comes from “Humando” which means burial. We are beings-toward-death. The journey from Mama’s womb to tomb is fast.  The question is what sort of human being will you be in that short time from Mama’s womb to tomb in a predatory capitalism civilization …that gives titillation and instant gratification as opposed to deep caring and nurturing…people want to live in some safe and secure suburb instead of what Samuel Beckett called “the mess” which is life.”

 

 

West asks us to consider this: What are they going to say about that person in the coffin? What will they say about you when you are in that coffin?  That is what it means to be human. Blacks in America have learned to look unflinchingly at death, he says. 242 years of social death without any social standing will do that. Just like the American constitution which refers to aboriginal people as “savages,” in order for the mainstream to feel good about itself. That is a form of social death too. “You don’t come to any intimate terms with what it means to be human unless you are on intimate terms with death.”

You have to wrestle with it the way Jacob wrestled with the angel of death.”  to learn to die you have to learn to deal with such questions West claims. For him the religious quest is a quest for death, or perhaps, a quest for the good death.