Review Of Zealot by Reza Aslan

It was Freud who stated, “Every religion bears the imprint of the times in which it arose.” With the same understanding Aslan sets out to make the case that the orthodox Christian religion as we know it was mostly developed by Hellenized (Rome-assimilated) Jews who had radically reinterpreted and revised the words and stories told about Jesus of Nazareth to fit a spiritualized ideology that would give the disenfranchised and crushed Jews hope, while being more palatable to a Roman world-audience. The way Aslan sees it, Jesus was a man, a Jew, who began a resistance against Rome, but ultimately failed and was crucified; but his noble deeds, along with a grain of scandal about his resurrection, renewed the Jewish confidence in their religion enough to convince others like Paul that there was enough unrealized potential in the old ideas, assuming some editorial work, to inspire new generations.

It doesn’t matter how you piece the Bible puzzle together…there are plenty of extra/missing pieces either way. Aslan breaks apart the orthodox Christian jigsaw, reshuffles the pieces, and then reassembles following his new picture-on-the-box of Jesus as man and Jewish revolutionary. And he doesn’t do a bad job at all. There still seem to be pieces left over (like Jesus stating “my kingdom is not of this world”, Jn 18:36), which Aslan does his level-best at explaining away, but not nearly so many leftover pieces as would completely and utterly allay the concerns of evangelical Christians. The apologist William Lang Craig’s brazen flippancy may have betrayed more concern than he’d like to admit when he said that there was nothing new in Aslan’s work that hasn’t already been disproven long ago. Looks like someone told Craig one too many times that the other kids are ‘just jealous’.

The Author’s Note and Introduction in the book does a fantastic job of laying out the author’s basic claims, and will probably be satisfying to a person wondering what the big deal about this book is (of course, you have to see the video to really understand the author’s recent rise in notoriety: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt1cOnNrY5s). If a person is mildly open to his thesis, or insanely opposed enough to slurp his errors like blood, the rest of the book delivers the goods as well. At the end of his introduction Aslan even throws a bone to people of faith who can’t swallow his premise, “The quest for the historical Jesus is ultimately an internal quest.” That would have been nice, but then he goes on to say, somewhat contradictorily, “But in the end, [Jesus as man and revolutionary] is the only Jesus that we can access by historical means. Everything else is a matter of faith.” Sounds pretty, but it’s mildly patronizing when you really look at it. It’s tantamount to a ‘too-bad-so-sad’ sort of concession for his believing critics. I guess he figured they don’t like him anyway.

As a whole, it was good. I liked it. The first sentence of the book was killer. No, really. “The war with Rome begins not with a clang of swords but with the lick of a dagger drawn from an assassin’s cloak.” Yesssssss. Throughout the work Aslan employs compelling historical analysis, but he really drives his best points home with good storytelling. Here, in history, was a people faced with impossible odds, who courageously managed to keep their noses above water to survive the brutal conditions of human oppression at the hands of the ‘civilized’ Romans. In Aslan’s view, this brave struggle is too often eclipsed by Christianity’s concept of a Divine Messiah who can’t ‘really’ die and is actually God himself. He believes it dilutes the story of frail and mortal people bravely taking risks and hazarding their families, life, and welfare for principles like freedom and faith. Jesus as God is not a hero. He is, well, God. He can’t quite feel the despair that humans feel, no matter how theology tries to ‘save’ his humanity from his all-invading divinity. He can’t quite be overpowered as humans can, can’t experience self-doubt, can’t wrestle with personal guilt, and can’t quite waver on the fence between good and evil. Granted, by billions, the story of Jesus as God is important for its own obvious reasons, or how could it have swallowed whole this other failed Jewish messiah that was part of the end of an age? But you have to admit, Aslan has a point. No matter where you stand on the religious/irreligious spectrum, we all can admit that narratives of the painful groping of humankind to find the light, resist evil, act bravely, and love deeply need to be told out from under the shadow of a “God-fixes-all-our-problems” sort of a bully-theology (‘bully-ology’?).

One of the most important keys to understanding Aslan’s premise is really securing in your mind the chronology of events and zeitgeist as he presents them. Here they are, having been regurgitated by my brain with the most significant events and ideas as I understood them. 

Regarding the political history of the Jews:

1.       There were a lot of people claiming to be messiah back in the day. Jesus was only one of many. Palestine was awash in apocalyptic expectation and messianic fervor.

2.       Rome was constantly suppressing rebellions, and crucifying the movement’s leaders as an example. Jesus was a zealot who had admirable political aspirations, but whose courageous strategy to free Rome ultimately failed. He was known as a miracle worker (as were others), made himself out to be a political deliverer (the Messiah), but was crucified as state criminal in 30-33 CE.  Something happened (which the author doesn’t scrutinize) which caused the disciples to believe he had resurrected.

3.       In 66 A.D. the Jews, under the command of the temple captain Eleazar, revolted against Rome, and actually won Jerusalem back for a time (4 years!).

4.       Rome dispatched a band of soldiers, but it wasn’t large enough, so they were quickly defeated, which boosted Jewish morale.

5.       Nero sent Vespasian and his son Titus in 68 CE to overthrow the revolt once and for all. He quickly subdued surrounding areas and they surrounded Jerusalem with 60,000 men.

6.       News of Nero’s suicide reached Vespasian, who forthwith left with his army to lay claim to the throne.

7.       With Vespasian as the new emperor, he sent his son Titus to take Jerusalem.

8.       Jerusalem had been fighting amongst itself in a series of small civil wars with several leaders claiming to be the new messiah.

9.       Titus took his time, re-conquered surrounding areas that unhinged during the confusion between Roman emperors. He laid siege to Jerusalem and waited. People weakened and starved, died in the streets, and many resorted to cannibalism.

10.   Titus finally came in swiftly and burned Jerusalem to the bloody ground. Temple and everything. 3 years later the nearby fortress of Masada was finally taken. The Jews were made an example of for other cultures that contemplated rebellion. The point was not a victory of the Empire over a people, but a ‘victory over a god’. Jews were now the eternal enemy of Rome. By the year 135 CE, Jerusalem ceased to exist in all official Roman documents.

11.   The Jews did not blame God for their downfall, but they blamed their selfish leaders, the Zealots, Sicarii, so-called prophets and messiahs. “They were the ones responsible for the Roman onslaught. They were the ones God had abandoned. In the years to come, the Jews would begin to distance themselves as much as possible from the revolutionary idealism that had led to the war with Rome. They would not altogether abandon their apocalyptic expectations…[but they] would be compelled by circumstance and by fear of Roman reprisal to develop an interpretation of Judaism that eschewed nationalism. They would come to view the Holy Land in more transcendental terms, fostering a messianic theology that rejected overt political ambitions, as acts of piety and the study of the law took the place of Temple sacrifices in the life of the observant Jew” (69).

Regarding the ideological history of the Jews:

1.       After the death of Jesus the zealot, James and Paul had been busy at work building up the story of Jesus resurrection and establishing Christianity. James stayed closely to a high valuation of Jewish custom with the new ideas, while Paul preferred to leave behind most Jewish custom. James and the Jewish leaders/apostles butted heads with Paul, and seemed to dominate church growth…until the destruction of Jerusalem.

2.       Paul writes his first epistle, 48 CE.

3.       Stories of Jesus circulated until about 50 CE, when some may have been written down in what is referred to as ‘Q’ (German Quelle= “source”). There is no literal Q source, but it is a hypothetical document assembled in the minds of modern scholars who have gathered what they think are similar sounding passages in Matthew and Luke.

4.       First Gospel (Mark) isn’t actually written until 70-71 CE, after the deflating defeat of the Jewish revolt. Matthew and Luke written around 90-100 CE. Gospel of John isn’t written until 100-120 CE and is heavily influenced by St. Paul. All gospels scrub their stories of any notion of Jesus as political messiah. They reinterpret Jesus as spiritual messiah to make it more palatable for surviving, Hellenized Jews, and for the Roman Empire.

5.       The Council of Nicaea in 313 CE sanctions/declares orthodox Christian doctrines.

6.       Council of bishops in Hippo Regius (modern-day Algeria) declare in 398 CE what documents comprise the Christian New Testament cannon.

The message Aslan hammers into the reader’s skull: Jesus was a man. He was a Jewish freedom-fighter. The Jesus-as-God story came later as a survival tactic of many Jews trying to preserve and reinterpret their national identity for their new situation, and it thrived because it blended with Greek philosophical ideas. “It was only natural for the Gospel writers to distance themselves from the Jewish independence movement by erasing, as much as possible, any hint of radicalism or violence, revolution or zealotry, from the story of Jesus, and to adapt Jesus’ words and actions to the new political situation in which they found themselves.”

Aslan may have been right after all, though little he knew, in his throw-out at the end of the introduction. What a person chooses to believe is a matter of faith. Aslan may not have quite succeeded in banishing all doubt from the believers mind regarding the Pauline Christ, yet it was a landslide victory in terms of MAKING the believer use his faith. The Christian apologists who assert that their ideas are completely reasonable and ‘believe-easy’, thinking to make fools of their detractors and those who wrestle with intellectual difficulties regarding Biblical doctrines, have been served. Have they not read their own Bible? “The righteous shall live by their faith.”

Review of Notes From Underground by Dostoyevsky

 

No way around it—this character is a creep. No, worse, he’s a downright pizza-sheet (to him who has ears…). He’s one of the most pathetic characters in all of literature, right beside the all-time sorriest literary pukes like Shakespeare’s Parolles (“Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?), Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, and Tolkein’s Grima Wormtongue. He is an incredibly self-centered, insecure, desperate, conniving, passive-aggressive, socially impotent, lazy, blow-hard. He’s the guy you don’t want at a party, but he’s also the guy you don’t want spending too much time alone with his deep-rooted rancor, household cleaners, and a pinch of nitroglycerin.

Clinical psychologist Dr. Martha Stout claims in her book The Sociopath Next Door that 4% of the population are conscienceless sociopaths who have no empathy or affectionate feelings for humans or animals. Now, I don’t think this story’s character suffers from a genetic form of sociopathy, but his choices have narrowed his skills and boundaries of thought to the point that he is no longer able to swing out of the rut of his ill-timed and over-calculated social impulses. He no longer can sense the edge of etiquette and simple human courtesy. It’s like he’s watching himself in a movie, directing his moves, but unable to react to any direct stimulus without sending a signal back to the conscious ‘director’, which delays and hopelessly exaggerates any attempt at an appropriate response in conversation and interaction. Once you start falling behind in fashion, etiquette, and colloquial pleasantries; and once you lose the naturalness of relating to people—“losing the habit of living”—and becoming too strained and artificial, it’s hard to catch up. Once you’re out, you’re out.

The scary thing is that any analytical, self-aware person, especially introverts and those with a penchant for inner-dialogue, would recognize the meandering self-scrutiny and ‘affliction of options’ (“aporia”) that hamstrings this character. You, Mr. or Mrs. Nerd, reading this classic book review, might very well be able to identify characteristics which you share in common with the protagonist, and that is probably unsettling—which, I think, is Dostoyevsky’s point. Here’s a dude we all despise, but he definitely represents a path we could plausibly take. It’s getting easier to withdraw, develop and live on our private fantasies about who we are, and what we ‘look’ like to others. Social networking sites, comfort in our own homes, technology that enables us—for a certain amount of money—to reinvent an image we can maintain at a distance; all these things may exacerbate the unreality of self-image that may be developing along with our complimentary intellectual/spiritual regress and decreasing confidence in our neglected substance. “After all, we don’t even know where real life is lived nowadays, or what it is, what name it goes by…we are always striving to be some unprecedented kind of generalized human being.” And in our super-societies where we are one of several billion people in the world, this ‘generalized human being’ becomes a real possible distraction away from who I ACTUALLY am, to derive a sense of self from the rubric under which I appear on a census, or what accomplishments I list on my resume, or what value-community I subscribe to, or what profile photo I post on Facebook. “Soon we shall invent a method of being born from an idea” or, at the very least, drive sexy, blue alien bodies from the safety of our basements (that was a reference to Avatar, in case your geek-check failed to highlight it). It’s elementary really: there is the ‘authentic’ me, and there is the me I like others to think of me as. If the two meet, as they did in this story, the meltdown could be nuclear. And hilarious. And deadly. But hilarious.

It was obnoxious but absolutely hysterical how the anonymous character put on airs with his friends, threw temper tantrums to earn their respect, and then wanted to challenge them to duels for the slightest imagined sleight. But the verbal lashing he gave to a broken prostitute was absolutely unforgivable. She was as low as she could be, and he mocked her, rubbed her hopelessness in her face, and even lowered himself to painting a picture of her future un-mourned death. “There’ll be no tears or sighs or prayers for you,  and nobody, nobody at all in the whole world will ever come to your grave: your name will vanish from the face of the earth—just as if you had never existed, never been born! All in the mud and marsh, you can knock as much as you like on the coffin lid at night…” (aCOUGHsshole!!)Of course she cries, he feels bad, he admonishes her some more, feels bad again, offers her his address to come visit him, and then yells at her some more when she visits in hope that he can help her out of her situation. Yeah. He’s a scumbag.

Probably the biggest take-away is the lesson of the paralysis of intellectualism and inaction. It was Goethe who stated, “Thought expands, but lames; Action animates, but narrows.” Thinking brings new possibilities for action, but the longer one thinks, the less fit one is to act; while acting moves one along to new spheres of life, but the longer one moves without some hard-thought, the fewer options one has to choose between. The former was the proclivity of our ‘hero’. His life was all in his head, but his body and instincts had dilapidated. “A man of the 19^th century ought, indeed is morally bound, to be essentially without character; a man of character, a man who acts, is essentially limited.” Limited, but alive, as the character found out all too soon. He even admitted as much in his schizo-rants, “Too think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease.” You don’t say. The first half of the story portrays him taking us on a roller-coaster of his rationalizations which he uses to defuse any sense of his responsibility and urgency to act. He gets lost in what he thinks is the inability to classify everything perfectly in his mind, blaming it on the malapropic “many-sided sensitivity to sensations” of civilized people, and this advanced intellectual lopsidedness ends up turning men and women into rationale statues, stone-heavy and packed with generic information that can no longer move them or motivate them.

But let’s not declare this man insane and unfit for society just yet. There’s something to this. Matter of fact, I’m sure this form of reasoning and apparent logical determinism scared Dostoyevsky a bit. Where is individuality without desire? “If ever volition becomes completely identified with common sense, we shall of course reason, not want, purely because it is impossible to want what has no sense.”But then again, we do a lot of things that don’t make apparent sense. Matter of fact, life is ultimately beyond all logic in that life gives birth to logic, conditions it, and continues to ‘live on’ even despite apparent contradictions. “Man’s nature acts as one whole, with everything that is in it, conscious or unconscious, and although it is nonsensical, yet it lives.” Dostoyevsky is, in effect, arguing with himself. But, man, it is a joy to see the debate cut back and forth with excellent points on both sides that leave me dumbfounded. Who can argue with the sentiment so masterfully and beautifully expressed, “Ah, gentlemen, what will have become of our wills when everything is graphs and arithmetic, and nothing is valid but two and two make four?... Twice two is four is, in my opinion, nothing but impudence…it is like a cocky young devil standing across your path with arms akimbo and a defiant air. I agree that ‘two and two make four’ is an excellent thing; but to give everything its due, ‘two and two make five’ is also a very fine thing.” Thinking of a mathematical genius like Lewis Carroll creating brilliant nonsense stories like Alice In Wonderland really hits this point home. So, Dostoevsky has, in my opinion, successfully infected his readers with aporia to suspend our judgment just long enough for his schizo protagonist to go ballistic on his friends. Which is also fun to watch.

Was Dostoyevsky manifesting his own aporia and insecurities in this work, putting his internal dialogue on display? Yes, I think so. Was Dostoyevsky a madman? Maybe a little, but sometimes in a good way. Was he revealing himself to be more petty and full of self-doubt than most people? Definitely not…he was being more honest the most people. Did Dostoyevsky make a good point against the ‘rational egoists’ of the day who thought that reason alone could solve all world problems? Sure, why not. It was a veritable bat to the head of academic Utopia. Can I think of any more questions people might ask of the book that I haven’t already answered? Uhhhhh…

Review of Flow by Mihali Csikszentmihalyi

Every once in a while I read a book that I think some people I know might like or should read, and other times I read a book that I think everyone should read. This is one of those books. It can profoundly change or fortify the way you look at life and happiness…in a good way! I am SO impressed. I wasn’t two chapters in when I was buying a copy for my wife, starting a weekly video-chat with my brother as we read through it together, and telling other friends about it. It did not disappoint. I truly think everyone who is serious about living life to its fullest should read this book. However, that is not to say that I think everyone is ready to read this book, partly because it is slow-going in parts and one would probably need to be accustomed to reading in general just to get through it; or a person’s life may be too busy to really soak it in; or it may be outside the range of understanding until some other foundation is laid. It’s a relatively short book (about 230 pages), but it could take some time to assimilate the revolutionary concepts.

I can hear the question now, “What’s so revolutionary about it?” Well, wipe that sneer off your face (and the piece of brownie on your chin…a little lower…to the right…there…got it) and let me tell ya! It claims that we can be most happy when we encounter problems; that we are often unaware of how unfulfilled we are during our free time, or vice versa, how fulfilled we are when working; that we can enjoy ‘optimum experience’ in any employment at any pay rate; that we often miss out of fulfilling experiences because we don’t know how to identify and pursue opportunities for ‘flow’; and a meaningful life can be lived with satisfaction on a variety of levels, with potential for adjusting and redirecting goals/action at any moment.

Hear me when I say, this book really helps to clear up the notions of happiness, enjoyment, purpose, and meaning in life. It isn’t a tired self-help book or the latest insipid leadership bestseller. It’s ground-breaking in psychology and sociology, bringing new light to the meaning of work and suffering, and explaining why and how we can enjoy life as a result from—not merely in spite of—difficulty. “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

And, for what it’s worth to some, I found this to be an exquisitely phrased and very nicely illustrated response to the rise of relativistic inertia (aporia) in postmodern worldviews that some feel will inevitably bankrupt the morality of future generations. Csikszentmihalyi's (pronounced 'chick-sent-mee-hi') work would indicate that a life of meaning, happiness, and moral stability is possible with a postmodern mindset. What’s more, a person who is free from the constraints of antiquated rules and traditions that are no longer relevant or helpful in our world have more opportunities, not less, to enlarge her sense of meaning and happiness in the universe.

To begin with, the author uses the word “flow” to mean that state of naturally confident and euphoric being we sometimes describe as being “in the zone,” or enjoying a attitude of absolute positivity and a sense of accomplishment. It is where one feels like there is a strong and steady flow to the process of one’s experience of life that produces a sense of overall purpose and rightness. We all know that feeling. We sometimes describe it as feeling like we’re doing something that we were “born to do.” It’s the thrill of mastery over chaos, the moving of a mountain, or trailblazing a new territory which brings intense focus and elation. “Flow [is] the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.” It’s not the restful state of not-being-bothered, but exercising control and exerting oneself with positive results, including a new sense of order in one’s actions, and further, a sense of knowing one’s place in the universe.

To study people’s widely varying experiences of flow, the author and his research team at the University of Chicago tried something ingenious. They sent home beepers to thousands of people all over the world: aging women in Korea, adults in Thailand and India, teenagers in Tokyo, Navajo shepherds, farms in the Italian Alps, and workers on the assembly line in Chicago. The beepers went off at random times throughout the week, and participants had to stop what they were doing to journal a few things including what they were doing, what they were feeling, what they were thinking about, and what they would rather be doing.

What they found was a pattern of experiencing flow that was consistent with people in all places, occupations, and stages of life. The research team’s study found—as illustrated in the graph below where the x axis represents difficulty, and the y axis represents skills—that for most people if difficulty in tasks increased, but their skills did not increase, the result was anxiety; while increasing skills without increasing difficulty/challenges resulted in boredom.

Enjoyment, or “flow”, became evidenced as the vector between the two that revealed a balance of difficulty/skills that were continually increasing in complexity. The possibility of experiencing flow was pretty much, across the board, attainable by anyone in any situation. The research also concluded that flow might even be more often present in situations where a person may not have been conscious of the potential for flow, like at work or during an arduous task; while, ironically, they reported experiencing less flow during their vacation, weekends, or free time. Even so, the experience of flow appeared to be largely unacknowledged by participants in the study when it wasn’t anticipated, and they still reported a desire to be somewhere other than work even when experiencing flow, chasing that ever-elusive, difficulty-free pastime that would be thrilling and fulfilling with the least amount of work. This is explained by the author as a culturally ingrained expectation, a desire for some type of easy-Eden that appears in every culture’s mythos.

Evidently, enjoyment far outweighs pleasure in most people’s values. “Enjoyment occurs when a person has not only met some prior expectation or satisfied a need or a desire [pleasure]; but has gone beyond what he or she has been programmed to do and achieved something unexpected, perhaps something even unimagined before.” In this sense, enjoyment is a transcendent becoming of more than one was, an expansion of being; or what Nietzsche would describe as life “which must ever surpass itself.” The author lists and gives excellent treatment of the conditions and symptoms of this enjoyment, which are:

1.       Confronting achievable tasks

2.       Concentration

3.       Clear goals

4.       Immediate feedback

5.       Deep and effortless involvement that crowds out other worries

6.       Sense of control over actions/environment

7.       Loss of self-awareness, but stronger awareness after activity ends

8.       Loss of sense of time

But lest someone think that enjoyment sounds too strictly formulaic, we must keep in mind that enjoyment might indeed occur accidentally, but the author is mostly interested in helping people learn from, so as to repeat, their experiences of enjoyment in life, which enjoyment is always a possibility in any circumstance since everything we do is potentially a source of enjoyment. Not only can we find enjoyment in any situation, but the author concludes that the mind can be exercised as a ‘dissipative structure’, which is a system that actually feeds off chaotic or destructive energy and channels it in positive ways. “Without [dissipative capabilities] we would be constantly suffering through the random bombardment of stray psychological meteorites” calculated to reduce our focus and effectiveness. Enjoyment, then, is not only a creation of meaningful experiences (‘autotelic’—self purposing) from static factuality, but it can also be a transformation of negative energy into positive energy (‘dissipative’).

Order in the mind is something we take for granted. When the ideas inside our head about the world are ordered well, the world outside our head is better managed and adapted to. When disorder arises, so do frustration, confusion, anger, and fear. The author hits this emphasis of cognitive structure pretty hard. Order in the mind offers better choices and paths in the world, and helps to sort and sharpen our skills as difficulty increases. “Everything we experience—joy or pain, interest or boredom—is represented in the mind as information. If we are able to control this information, we can decide what our lives will be like.” Any professional without an accurate internal map of the world or sophisticated gear developed by an internal plan is not going to be as effective. Language, music, poetry, memory, internal dialogue, and creative games are all discussed by the author as ways to utilize our ability to encode the external world in a downloadable ‘binary’ of abstractions and symbols which help to order and evolve this inner world.

Games are given no trivial role here. Everything in life is a potential game-- as one philosopher put it, “everything that happens to us is a chance”—and every challenge can cultivate skills and increase complexity with regular feedback and rewards. I am reminded of Thoreau’s words, “Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport.” Small games incorporated into daily life are dubbed by the author ‘microflow’, small games which help us find enjoyment and create ‘play’ out of the mundane.  I especially loved the author’s comparison of culture with game. “The difference [between culture and game] is mainly one of scale…both consist of more or less arbitrary goals and rules that allow people to become involved in a process and act with a minimum of doubts and distractions…culture as a whole becomes a ‘great game’.” He sees religion, law, customs and traditions to be ways to set manageable, though perhaps sometimes narrow and abortive, parameters on an otherwise infinite host of options and information. “Cultures are defensive constructions against chaos…Cultures prescribe norms, evolve goals, build beliefs that help us tackle the challenges of existence. In so doing they must rule out many alternative goals and beliefs, and thereby limit possibilities; but this channeling of attention to a limited set of goals and means is what allows effortless action within self-created boundaries.”

Religion and custom even of the most primitive nature can optimize “life-space” (my words), exploring and exhausting the possibilities of a limited sphere of thought and existence, although it becomes quickly detrimental when cultural space is optimized but there is no growth towards increasing complexity or extending the boundaries outward. A checker’s game has only so many moves; new chess pieces and rules increase the possibilities and skills involved with the same board; a different board altogether allows for a larger variety of games and therefore skills developed. The goal of flow is enjoyment through optimized practice and growth, and this is facilitated by respecting the rules of culture and game, but also being willing to change the rules and even the game when the time comes.

The author bear-hugs some big topics for such a little book, including the nature of consciousness and the ‘meaning of meaning’, the latter actually being an excellent application of his ideas to the bigger questions of life. He breaks down the semantics of the word ‘meaning’ into three categories: 1) Meaning as a ultimate goal or purpose (“the meaning of food is give us energy”), 2) Meaning as personal intention and resolution (“he was meaning to take the trash out”), and 3) Meaning as a personal ordering of impersonal information, identities and events (“the sound of ambulance sirens means that someone is in need of medical attention”). He goes on to expound on these senses of meaning as applied to our desire to discover the meaning of life, and he actually does a fantastic job on the topic, even if the results may seem initially anticlimactic to theistic worldviews.

To the question, “How do we learn which goals are worthwhile to pursue with the antiquation of many traditional values and goals?” he answers by, “Through trial and error, through intense cultivation, we can straighten out the tangled skein of conflicting goals, and choose the one that will give purpose to our action.” Not as comforting as it may be true. Consciousness has brought some boons (though the author was a bit obscure on this point when he compared human consciousness with animal behavior which apparently is “always in a state of flow”) as far as more nuanced enjoyment and complexity of being through tackling more difficult goals and struggling towards the light of understanding and mastery; but there’s no denial that problems become more complex too, and often challenges and skills are out of balance for a time, inducing anxiety or boredom.

Now, to be fair, and I feel like someone should say it at this point, so it might as well be me, despite the overwhelmingly positive tenor of the book and the proposition that enjoyment is achievable by all people in all situations; still, some people’s lives suck, and that’s all there is to it. Take, for example, children exploited in forced labor, abuse, or neglect; people with mind-crippling illnesses or disabilities; or anyone in situations that endure unimaginable cruelty or agony emotionally, mentally, or physically. Granted, the author says that “stress exists only if we experience it; it takes the most extreme objective conditions to cause it directly”, but those extreme conditions do exist for some people, and the only way out is a cure and not merely a new way to look at the problem. But the author’s point is that extreme, volition-crippling circumstances and suffering are the exceptions, not the rule; and it would behoove us to prepare for what we can fix, not what we can’t fix. And, as a rule, we are able to experience enjoyment much more than we often tend to believe, as our dissipative, autotelic capabilities are much more vast and near to hand than we often assess them to be.

Overall, I found this author to be extremely reasonable and balanced in his approach, and I began to trust him the more I read. He used a multitude of real life vignettes, staying grounded in reality by widely varied anecdotes. He never drifted too far into theory before he snapped back to real life. It seemed very fair and considerate towards differing viewpoints, especially regarding the value of historical events and belief systems which have helped to shape humanity. He doesn’t claim to offer a final weltanschuuang—an answer to everything—but he does offer something…that works! So, there’s that. It seems that a universal practice—not a uniform, formally expressed praxis—has worked pretty well for people throughout all time and places to produce flow and enjoyment; and still seems to be, at bottom, what makes people most happy. At the very least this is a good fix until we find what we are looking for.

Well done, Csikszentmihalyi! Bravo!

Review of the article H.G. Wells, C.S. Lewis, And the Evolutionary Myth

I am currently reading the book "An Outline Of History" by H.G. Wells. I have been asked why I am reading a history of the world that was last updated in the 70's. My answer is that I'm not just reading it for historical fact-gleaning, but I'm reading it to better absorb and interact with the ideas of the brilliantly creative, and brave thinker H.G. Wells.

My brother recently finished The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, and reminded me that Lewis addressed and even caricatured many of Wells' ideas in these books, and I subsequently found the following article online about their contrasting views. This blog entry is purely a review and reaction to this article.

http://www.discovery.org/a/516

This was a very helpful article that brought to light things written by both Wells and Lewis that I didn't know before. I found some of Wells' ideas to be exhilarating and poetic, while other selections from his works sounded short-sighted and possibly draconian. Lewis, on the other hand, is always poetic, and very deeply persuaded of the primacy of the Christian worldview, which taints his every comment. The voice of Lewis is a breath of fresh air, if a little forceful at times though rousing; while Wells, it seems, expands one's vision and understanding of history, though his writing (non-fiction in particular) grows stale in spots and may be a little too zealous at times in his trust of science and political solutions.

There is no doubt that the author of the article is a Lewis-fan, and (this is an assumption, though I'm fairly confident in it) first and foremost a Christian committed to propagating the Christian worldview; and he has probably searched long and hard for Wells' incriminating statements. But he has indeed found some indictable passages nonetheless, though I have no doubt some have been wrenched out of context as they apparently contradict the spirit of most of Wells' writing. Unfortunately I could have predicted the outcome of the author's research into Well's ideas based on his theological bias alone, so that's not comforting; but that doesn't mean I can't learn from some of his findings.

The article revealed to me anew how much of Lewis' space trilogy deals with Wells' ideas. It appears that Wells was, at times, overcommitted to his understanding and persuasions about the future of humanity, and proposed some radical and perhaps racist measures to establish world peace and, more expressly, a World State. In his works I see a real concern for people and humanity, not, in my opinion, just in abstract as the article contends. He definitely believed our future was in our hands, and it was up to us to care for our kind in the absence of a manifest God. Maybe he became desperate and, like I said, overcommitted to his ideas and became a bit fanatical. Not sure the extent of his fanaticism was as bad as the article claims based on other things I read, including the Wikipedia article on Wells.

On the other hand, I really, really liked a lot of what Lewis is quoted as writing. He truly was brilliant, and I believe he was a good man, even if I disagree with him on some of his conclusions. He never disappoints, and I always carry something away with me when I have read a work of his.

Now, it seems to me that humanists were harshly criticized in the article for trusting in their man-made solutions, but it failed to mention, though it demonstrated, that theists don't offer any long-term solutions, only bow out the conversation with the copout "only God can make it all right in the end." Fine. But what are Christians doing in the meantime to bring God's will on earth? Are they not stewards responsible to help prepare the earth for his kingdom? And yet, they abdicate their role as caring people to make long-term plans because they are afraid of being labeled as proud know-it-all's by their fellow Christians? Granted, any human-conceived solution will ultimately be finite and short-sighted...but what kind of person uses that as an excuse to close their eyes to the evil around them, or JUST respond to the evil around and not plan for the reduction of long-term evil because such plans are humanistic and an abstraction of one's neighbor instead of the flesh-and-blood neighbor himself? And we should all be careful about our accusation of 'abstraction'--yes, 'humanity' is an abstraction, but so is the future, so is love, so is...the word abstraction!

What I really admire was that Wells was willing to get his hands dirty trying to care for his fellow human beings who were suffering in the world. Se non e vero, e ben trovato: it may not be true, but it is well-conceived. Is it fair to judge his ideas as "evil" because they're imperfect? While Christians stand and wait another few millennia for Christ to return? Now who's proud? Who's fanatical? Who's showing the most love?

My conclusion: I think Wells' humanism and Lewis' theism provided a nice balance, and one without the other would grow more proud and dangerously ineffective.

Review Of Intellectual Devotional

This book was great fun, and I went through it in a very particular way that I would highly suggest for anyone looking for a good time. I read it through with a friend of mine, and we made a pact to each try and comment via email on each day’s reading. That means we had 730+ emails exchanged by the time we were finished. Some topics of discussion grew into debates which lasted for a week or two (my friend and I are somewhat opinionated…but VERY brilliant). Throughout the year of this, we learned a lot about the world, about each other, about ourselves, about our threshold of tolerance for people who disagree with us, and about the depth of our compulsive “get-the-last-word” syndrome. Okay…maybe it was just me. Maybe not. But probably. I resent that.

It was a very probing experience which led to new and surprising avenues of growth. At one point, as a result of my interaction with my friend, I was compelled to read a book with articles about the nature of language and communication (see my review of “Exploring Language” at http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/617048659); and at another point, as a result of the sheer delight I found in learning so many new things, I decided to further repair and refill my brain-leak of world history by taking on the slightly outdated, but thoroughly illuminating “Outline Of History” by H.G. Wells. Sometimes I ache to think about how my time in school could have been better and more happily spent, from elementary to graduate, in the ecstasy of enlightenment; but unfortunately academia is so career driven that most kids are too focused on grades and performance, and not enough on the enjoyment and thrill of discovery. Plus, I was too lazy and hormonally distracted. There’s that too. But it’s never too late!

The book broke the information into different subjects for each day of the week: Monday is history, Tuesday is literature, Wednesday is visual arts, Thursday is science, Friday is music, Saturday is philosophy, and Sunday is religion. Each day’s entry is written by authors who specialize in that field, and everything was checked and edited by “scholars with advanced degrees.”  Which tacitly amounts to the professor closing his book with an, “…and if there are no questions…!” As for the areas I felt most familiar with, I think it was generally a fair treatment of most topics, with some exceptions of over-generalization, personal bias, and seemingly arbitrary or needless selections here and there which possibly nudged out more pertinent content (in my humble, un-advanced-degree opinion). But as a whole I felt it was very informative and did very well to fill in gaps in my education. And it was excellent as a starting point for conversation in each area. To be sure, there will be readings that will seem completely irrelevant or laborious to cover if it is not in your area of interest—like the bore that reading about classical music became for my friend and I, even though we are relatively interested in some classical music—but we have to remember that the authors and editors are trying to get us caught up to date, even if some ideas or subjects do not seem to be as significant to people now as they used to be. Some of the art and philosophical ideas may be deemed by the reader to be absolutely detestable and useless in his repertoire for getting at the meaning of life, the universe, and everything; but as a tool to better understand one’s culture and one’s world, and to have a better foundation for conversation with people who are different from you, it is all invaluable.  

If you are one of those people who has newly experienced an awakening to learning and reading, and are thirsty for more information about the wonder and beauty in the world, then pick this up immediately and take it piecemeal. And take a friend with you on the journey—you’re going to want to talk about it.

“Intellectual Devotional: Modern Culture”, here I come! After a little break of course.

Review Of Exploring Language

My good friend and I have been reading the Intellectual Devotional for a year together now, committed to communicating on each and every of the 365 entries, discussing and debating topics ranging from the history of the alphabet to Zoroastrianism. I would say the subject we have returned to most, and which has dominated and born down on so many ever-lengthening email exchanges, would be hands-down the subject of language and communication. We’ve learned many things about communication, and some things the hard way, which might be the best way. My fascination with the nature of language and communication was very fresh on my mind one night while trying to salvage good books from a local thrift store shelf (it’s a rare form of biblio-tarianism), when I came upon this beauty of some post-college kid’s academic purging. I skimmed its contents and discovered it tackled many of the points of language and communication that resisted my processing like thickening syrup in my mind.

This book contains chapters contributed by different authors from different backgrounds expanding on language in so many of its ramifications. It begins with essays on the origins and purposes of language, moves into specific expressions of communication like sign-language and multi-lingualism, circles back to methods in conversation and anomalies in personal/public communication, explores perspectives from well-known authors and speakers like Hellen Keller and Malcom X, and even dives into censorship, humor, and advertising. There are probably a few articles that could interest just about anybody, and none are too long to bore or lose a reader entirely. There is just enough of what you like to whet your appetite for more, but it is substantial nonetheless.

Reading this book helps to emphasize the devastatingly beautiful and intricate thing that human language is. I am reminded of a train-analogy Wittgenstein utilized when expressed the multivalent nature of words and their varying uses:

“[Language is] like looking into the cabin of a locomotive. We see handles all looking more or less alike.  (Naturally, since they are all supposed to be handled.) But one is the handle of a crank which can be moved continuously (it regulates the opening of a valve); another is the handle of a switch, which has only two effective positions, it is either off or on; a third is a brake-lever, the harder one pulls on it, the harder it brakes; a fourth, the handle of a pump: it has an effect only so long as it is moved to and fro” (Philosophical Investigations, 1162). Language is as complex and recalcitrant as thought itself, as it is an attempted externalization and crystallization of thought, which is denatured in its new environment. There is frustration in this unwieldy tool, but there is great power in it too, for which reason it is one of the elemental forces and growing momentum behind all of civilization.

My favorite articles in the book include:

• Language And Thought
• Homemade Education (Malcom X)
• A Word For Evertything (Hellen Keller)
• Women Talk Too Much (not what it sounds like)
• The Social Basis Of Talk

Because I, personally, found the article “The Social Basis Of Talk” by linguistics professor and author, Ronald Wardhaugh, I will also review this excerpt particularly. It is an awesome treatment of the kinds of assumptions and values everyone is bringing into a conversation, and discusses how to navigate 'talk'. It was amazing, and revolutionary for a person like me. He says something I've never been open to really. He alleges that there is so much assumption, referral and inferences to/from personal experience, and such a high amount of commonality and "trust" that is required to get through communication, that it would be impossible to communicate at all if we weren't willing to "assume the other person thinks and feels like we do on most issues", or act as if that were the case even when we can't honestly believe that. He says that if two communicators don't at the very least pretend that they think like each other for the most part, then communication will break down almost immediately as conversation is purely a cooperative undertaking and the need to not be offended is paramount. “Public life is possible only when the opportunities for being seriously offended are reduced to near zero. If the risks in an activity are great, you may be wise to refrain from that activity unless the potential gains are correspondingly great or you have no alternative.” He bases this primarily on the human need for consistency in the world and other people, and our threshold of tolerance for only small bits of new information to assimilate at a time. “Life would quickly become unbearable if it were not so ordered and predictable and consequently so unworthy of close and continuing attention.” And this is why James Bond has no friends.

He offers the caveat that some conversations are specifically designated to allow for more experiential nuance, value contrasts, and novel information; and that some personalities can operate on difference levels of commonality; but he stated that we often underestimate how much assumption, trust, and compromise is necessary for nearly all of our communication to work. Talking is not simply a matter of  information being transmitted successfully, but a social interaction that may be deemed successful regardless of what the ideological differences are. For this reason Wardhaugh states, “We are prepared to tolerate a remarkable amount of unclarity in what we are told” and even are willing to go to great lengths to be “parties to an [unspoken] agreement each to accept the other as the other wishes to appear” to maintain that trust and underlying sense of safety and connection.

At first I was skeptical that 'faking it' (as I call it) can really be all that beneficial in conversation. What about the pursuit of truth, about sharing our changes and discoveries with each other, about challenging each other to be diligent, honest, and careful about assumptions? But the more I read, the more I was convinced that I DO IT ALL THE TIME!!! His point about WHY we do that is truly riveting and actually quite cogent. Although I hope I am the type of person that will only compromise to a certain degree, I also realize now that I might not be conscious of all my aims in conversation that may be more apparent to others, even, than to my own self.

Sure, it is set up as a college course-book, but it is as interesting and illuminating, as it is broad and cursory. I don’t know when I decided I don’t like reading textbooks—even the word itself has a ‘thud’ to it—but this is one I don’t mind keeping on my shelf. It’s a great reference, and fun reading for anyone pondering on why they don’t seem to see eye-to-eye with some people, or for those travailing to express themselves so that they will be accepted, or for someone disillusioned with the use of language as a social-manipulation, or for someone  merely thirsty for increasing their understanding of how language triggers cognitive growth and power of adaptation in our accelerating networking culture.

Review Of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

Now here is a story about a really pathetic character, Antoine Roquentin, absolutely paralyzed and nauseated by his intellectual power and gravitas. My diagnosis: he played too much, then thought too much, then was too tired to take courageous steps in the best direction he knew. It was the epitome of the tension between thought and action illuminated by Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s famous line, “Thought expands, but paralyzes; action animates, but narrows.” I think it’s interesting that in Antoine’s attempt to squeeze out of the narrow confines of a simplistic worldview, he finds himself feeling suffocated and even violated by the close proximity of all existence, and even his own existence. The interconnectedness of all things, like “dough that gets longer and longer…everything looks so much alike that you wonder how people go the idea of inventing names, to make distinctions,” became to him an inescapable realization of his coextension with the universe by interpenetration with all adjacent objects, and therefore his own infinity. He wanted nothing more than to be a discrete, understandable, limited object that keeps fresh and accessible the meaning that his life may have had in the past, and that other people were still enjoying all around him. He is lost, has become immured in the entanglements and knots of his serpentine logic that is coiling in and constricting the life out of him. Reminds me of G.K. Chesterton’s great exhortation against too much of an emphasis on reason, “The madman is not the person who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

It’s actually sad, and a bit unnerving, to witness Antoine’s decline into delirium, and I won’t say I can’t relate to some of the symptoms. It’s a genius thang. This book begins with Antoine journaling his thoughts to try and lend resiliency and consistency to a growing abstraction in his ideas and sensations. He wants to hold on to his leaking life, crystallize his moments and finalize their meaning. He is very uncomfortable with his growing realization that the world isn’t just itself, but partly his own fluid invention. While listening to music, he compares his slippery attempts of holding onto, and defining, the moment as akin to trying to catch jazz notes in his hand, “I would like to hold them back, but I know if I succeeded in stopping one, it would remain between my fingers only as a raffish languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even will it.” This, then, mirrors his resignation not to stymie the flow of his seconds and minutes, or wish everything into a petrified past with no organic, infinitely extending present, "I cling to each instant with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplaceable, and yet I would not raise a finger to stop it from being annihilated.” But he, just having turned 30, is morbidly transfixed by the intractable, ‘unsluicable’, nature of the flow of life and time, to the point of being unable to get his bearings and…do something about it! He’s basically experiencing the cliché of a mid-life crisis and responding with rag-doll physics. He loathes his life, and loathes other people’s lives, and starts blaming life itself for his failures. His exciting travels are over; his love-interest is no longer in love with him; his only friend is a clingy, insecure, child-molester; he hates his job (writing history); he hates philosophies that are contrary to his own; he hates stupid, frivolous people; and apparently he can’t play jazz. But mostly, as I see it, he’s just lonely. There is one chance in the story where he saw a spark of hope to rekindle an old romance, and he actually became excited about it, but he loses the girl again, and falls back on his bitter-sweet companion, nausea.

To himself, he seems to want to frame his misery as the ultimate penalty for knowing secrets about life, society, and self that all the other poor schmucks can’t see, “They only see the thin film…I see beneath it! The veneer melts, the shining velvety scales…explode everywhere at my look, they split and gape.” But the real problem here is that Mr. Roquentin sees no purpose for his insight, except to lament that he is alone in his supreme intelligence looking down on the silly dummies all around him. But, those silly dummies are happy, sooo…. ? He is “alone and free”, in “exile” from others who do not think as he does, “…they are watching my back with surprise and disgust; they thought I was like them, that I was a man, and I deceived them. I suddenly lost the appearance of a man and they saw a crab running backwards out of this human room. Now the unmasked intruder has fled: the show goes on.” Not unlike the ugly bug in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Antoine’s feeling of alienation and rejection might just be a more significant factor in his self-loathing than merely an albatross of his genius. Which came first, societal rejection or self-loathing? Hard to tell.

This story, however disgusting an impression the character makes upon the reader, is not a meaningless story. It is about a void that is left in the place of the failure of logic and modern ideals to string personal meaning together out of impersonal data, which data, this story clearly illustrates, is not so easily culled and defined from the boiling porridge of reality that is essentially irreducible and ‘absurd’ apart from our distorted and deeply human categories. It is meant as a warning against modernist idealism, and as a call to action to think about what our response will be to this postmodern quagmire of antiquated values, traditions, and explanations of the meaning of life. Sartre, I don’t believe, was simply wallowing like his protagonist in the sulfuric atmosphere of self-pity and melancholy despair. I don’t believe this is what Sartre believed and felt in his finest hours, though he may have (and I would assume probably had) experienced these thoughts and feelings to some degree to have been able to so brilliantly capture that life-sick mindset. Sartre was sounding the alarm by painting a clear picture of the orphans of modernism, leaving nothing to the imagination as to the type of sticky mess of confusion and despondency that one’s existence becomes when one tries to live in the past, instead of moving bravely into the future with a better understanding who one is, and what one’s supposed to be doing in the universe. Does Sartre offer any answers here? No. But he poses a pretty damn good question that might inspire people to start the search. He makes attempts in other books to answer the question (try Existentialism Is a Humanism), but that’s not the point here. He’s nauseating us to prevent us from turning into the monster he wrote about.

It also is a warning to all erudites who think knowledge can ever bring happiness. Knowing is not living, and action must be taken so that love and happiness, which according to some psychologists “cannot be pursued, but must ensue”, will be a constant in a person’s life. And it is, again, so important to note that the overwhelming sense of one’s bloated and overly-magnified self in the center of an absurd universe will only grow more absorbing and involuted as a person withdraws from society and begins to brood upon their inadequacies. In other words, I wonder if a little bit of medicine and healthy friendships could have fixed a large part of Antoine’s problems. The other part, to be sure, may have been ideological malaise (which I assume is the primary motive for Sartre to write this story) but it’s hard for me to view that as the whole problem. I believe existential angst cannot be blamed squarely on one’s ideas, but this new brand of melancholia may be rather a hybrid of inefficacies in philosophy, relationships, biology, environment…maybe more. Who knows, it could just be a bad thyroid. Or an ‘underdone turnip’. I don’t know. What do you think I am? An ‘existential-angst-factor-calculator’ or something? Geeeesh.

Parallel first-person narratives of people who over-thought their life to the point of existential paralysis are Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From Underground” and Camus “The Stranger.” Similar affliction, similar attitudes.  To all the panty-wastes of these novels I say (with the authors’ concurrence I’m sure), “Well, my boy, it seems you have thought yourself into a really fine pickle. And don’t you love it, you wretch, you.” But really, I’m not sure the problem has been offered an absolutely satisfying solution, even in my time; so I hope to do everything I can not to end up comparably prostrate before my own sense of meaninglessness in the end. Sartre, your warning is duly noted, my friend. Duly noted.