Café Philos: an internet café

I pulled up an old article published on the web by Discover Magazine this morning and read, "Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser's new theory says evolution hardwired us to know right from wrong." Yet, that's not quite what Marc Hauser is saying.

Instead, it would be more correct to say, Hauser is asserting something along these lines: Our concept that there is such a thing as right and wrong is hardwired into us by our evolution. We have a sort of universal "moral grammar", but not a universal "moral language". For instance: The notion it is wrong to harm an innocent person is universal, but specific notions of who is innocent and who is not innocent are far from being universal.

Yet, most certainly, Hauser is not saying right and wrong exist independent of us. In Hauser's world, man is the measure of right and wrong -- not some metaphysical standard of right and wrong.

Oddly enough, saying "man is the measure of right and wrong" does not preclude a god having something to do with that measure. For, if I were religious, I could always say something like, "God inscribed a universal moral grammar upon the human heart."

Of course, were I both religious and uncomprehending, I could say something like, "God inscribed morality upon the human heart." But that implies there is only one true morality -- and implying that is just as silly as asserting there is only one true human language.

Another way of illustrating the distinction between moral grammar and moral language would be to say morality is hardwired into us much like tool use is hardwired into us. Humans naturally create and use tools. But the specific kinds of tools humans use can vary from culture to culture. And how tools are used can even vary from person to person. So, too, morality is hardwired into us on one level, yet is determined by our culture on another level, and on yet a third level is individual.

Some people believe that atheists should quit calling themselves "atheists".

Atheist means "non-theist", and many people feel it is no more appropriate to call oneself a "non-theist" than it is to call oneself a "non-astrologist" or a "non-UFO believer". Sam Harris, for instance, writes extensively about the issue here. Why should anyone define themselves by what they are not?

So, do you agree with Harris and others that it's silly for atheists to call themselves "atheists", or is there something Harris et al. are not seeing?

You cannot clip the wings of a falcon and still have a falcon.

That should be a lesson to lovers who would try to clip each other's wings. You can call a clipped falcon a falcon and say it's the same bird as before, but you are only deluding yourself. In truth, your flightless falcon is only similar to the bird it once was. Why don't we see this?

A large part of the answer is language. We think we have the same bird as before because we call the bird by the same name as before. We call it a falcon when it could fly, and we still call it a falcon when it cannot fly, so we think we have the same bird. Yet, the bird behaves differently, we interact with it differently, we experience it differently. If we went solely by what we actually observe -- and did not rely so much on language to tell us what we should observe -- we would concede that a clipped falcon is not the same bird as an unclipped falcon.

I have seen in my 50 years that many lovers try to clip each other's wings. Perhaps they think they can clip each others wings and still have the same person as before; the one they fell in love with. Yet, every so often, those lovers wake up one morning thinking, "He's changed. I don't love him anymore."

Over at Sea Blue Green, Patty has left an awesome post on the value of words in describing "the unknowable".

Yes, it has become necessary for Café Philos to break the law.

The law made by The Thinking Blog, that is. Specifically, their law that we are only to tag five other blogs for the Thinking Blog Award. That law must now be broken, smashed, trampled on, because Ali Eteraz is back in town.

Within hours of naming five blogs that provoke even me to thought, I discovered that Ali has started blogging again. As of yesterday, March 25, 2007.

Mark the date: Ali is not only a blogger but a mover and shaker. He is one of the internet's leading proponents of reforming Islam. He accomplishes more in a single year than most such reformers and activists accomplish in three years. And when this man can no longer make even me think, I will have passed on to the Great Weirdness.

Last November, Ali shut down his blog, Unwilling Self-Negation, in order to devote his time to launching Eteraz.Org: States of Islam. (Eteraz.Org is a strange combination of blog, forum and political organization that might, in some ways, represent the future of the internet -- or, at least one of its futures.) Yesterday, Ali restarted his old blog and so it has become absolutely necessary to tag him with the Thinking Blog Award, even though in doing so I become the sort of outlaw who would willingly violate an honor system. Oh well. I shall somehow survive the shame of it.

Late last night I was messing around with my new toy (i.e. this blog) when I noticed that Kathryn Petro-Harper had linked her blog to mine. Perhaps you can imagine my delight: For a brand new blogger, every link is a vote of confidence and encouragement. So, I headed over to Kathryn's blog, A Mindful Life, feeling very happy with this amazingly generous world, all who live in it, and especially Kathryn, who I admire anyway.

When I got there, I was not prepared to have my heart wrenched, but that's exactly what happened: My heart got wrenched.

Maybe I felt the wrenching so acutely because it was late at night and I was tired. When we're tired, we are usually more open to emotional shocks than when we're rested. But whatever the case, on Kathryn's blog I immediately came across a saddening, troubling story from her life that struck me poignantly.

I should caution you that it might not strike you quite as poignantly as it did me. A little while back, Kathryn posted her spiritual biography. I read it. Found some life similarities between us, and to some extent I can now empathize with her. Besides which, she strikes me as artistic, intelligent, spiritual and compassionate: Really, all useless qualities in today's world, but nonetheless charming. So, I wasn't prepared late last night when I showed up on her blog to read of how she had been violated and abused in an admittedly common -- but still outrageous -- way.

To really understand some kinds of common, trivial ways people are abused, we must step back and forget our familiarity with them. Familiarity can kill insight. So can the thought the abuse doesn't matter because it's so trivial. Life is more often about the trivial than the grand, and unless we understand the trivial, we cannot hope to understand life.

What happened to Kathryn was pretty simple. You can read about it here. A year ago she joined, in initial good faith, a poetry forum on which it turned out her work was continually subjected to hyper-criticism from other forum members and even from moderators.

Unfortunately for Kathryn, she seems to have made the mistake of respecting the expertise of those people, and of trying very hard to learn from them. Predictably, she could never satisfy the bastards --- for they were playing bastard games with her --- but her good faith effort to learn from them made her vulnerable to internalizing their hyper-critical view of her work.

If you have ever yourself written much poetry, you know what happened next. In Kathryn's own words, "When I write a poem now, I choke. I hear the critic before I even capture an image and taste the words. I can’t hear the music in them now." This comes from a very strong woman who has endured much and survived much in her life.

Poetry is something most of us write a bit of as teenagers and then give up when we become too self-conscious of what we're writing. The words and music have to flow from "the muses". The best poetry never comes from consciousness alone. Everyone knows that. The people who abused Kathryn knew it too. They were not playing their bastard games with her in deep ignorance of the harm they were causing by making her self-conscious and hyper-critical of her own gift. They knew, on some level, they were stifling her. And they didn't care.

Perhaps the saddest part of this story is that most of us know it's commonplace for petty people to "show their superiority" by vigorously criticizing others, but we don't always see such abusive behavior for the evil it is. It is too familiar to us. So familiar it has almost lost the power to offend, and so we are not outraged by the outrageous behavior of the petty bastards among us.

Yet, abuse is abuse is abuse. All abuse is at heart the same: An unnecessary oppression of someone. If we are going to fight abuse --- including much worse abuse than Kathryn suffered --- then we cannot allow ourselves to see any abuse of people as acceptable. For us to say that some abuse is acceptable because it is so common, or because it is so trivial, or because it only stifles the creation of a few poems here and there is akin to saying we should tolerate a sewer backing up into our living room so long as it doesn't get more than an inch deep.

Those were my thoughts and feelings late last night when I ran across Kathryn's post on her blog. Yet, there happens to be a twist to this story --- and it's a very good one.

Happily, the very next post I read on her blog last night was a beautiful poem. That is to say, Kathryn has risen above the petty jerks at the poetry forum and has started writing again (You can't keep a good woman down). She went to the beach yesterday and wrote the following, which is called, "A Visit With Mother", and I hope she doesn't mind my reproducing it in full here:

The ocean is a high contact sport. Expect to wrestle a wave.
Expect to be tackled, lifted up, tossed aside.
Waves sprint and jockey each other to the shore.
Cresting, they swap twelve-foot high fives.

Boys play tag with icy waves. Their cries of surprise
compete with seagulls. A toddler in pink totters toward
starlings holding their convention on the sand.
Her face beams as she waves to each bird.

You scuffle across dry sand and it pedicures your toes.
The wind is a penetrating caress.
It scrubs your face as its chill bleaches your mind.
Your eyes sting and weep in the salt air.

You do not come to the beach for tranquility and silence.
You do not come here for shelter.
You come to absorb ancient energy.
You come to feel the rhythm of waves in your blood.

You come to swing on the tidal pendulum.
You come to submit to the scrutiny of the baldly shining sun.
You come to gaze at the horizon melting into thousands
of miles of nothingness and possibility.

You come to release your illusions.

Anyone who can write verse like that has my admiration. I hope she continues to create beautiful poems.

The thought occurs to me --- a bit late --- that I don't actually know Kathryn, except from her blog, and that she might think me presumptuous to write so much about her. I certainly hope that is not the case if and when she reads this, but if it is, I shall willingly apologize and then delete this entry. So, if you read this one day and then find it gone the next, you'll know what happened and that it's my fault for having been intrusive.

"If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it."

Isadora Duncan

For the last five days, some folks have been hotly debating the nature and merits of "spirituality" over at PZ Meyers' blog, Pharyngula.

Meyers started the fist fight when he posted an entry titled, "Spirituality"? Another Word For Lies and Empty Noise. The ruckus has now reached 230 comment posts and still counting.

I gather from what I read of the debate that almost as many definitions of "spirituality"are in play as there are people debating the merits and nature of "spirituality". Everyone seems to have their own pet definition for the word, and is sticking with it. Consequently, the participants are in most cases talking pass each other.

Despite that, it's a good debate with a lot of sharp insights on both sides.

Most common words have more than one meaning and "spirituality" is no exception. Depending on who you are talking with, the word can be used to mean anything from a belief in ghosts and spirits --- to an emotional high --- and beyond that to a sense, feeling, or perception of connectedness to all things.

It is folly to insist that any one usage is somehow more correct than all the others, but we should be clear about what meaning we ourselves are using for the word.

Recently, Sam Harris has offered a new definition of the word in his book, The End of Faith. Harris uses to word to refer to anything having to do with the sort of awareness that comes about after a sudden end to subject/object perception occurs while the continuum of experience yet remains.

Whether one would personally use Harris' definition of "spirituality" or not, the man should get a medal for being the first in the long history of the word to give it a more or less operational meaning. Yet, Harris goes even further: He wants to put the study of spirituality (along with mysticism --- another confusing word) on a scientific footing.

Perhaps only an American can believe humans will someday fly, travel to the moon, or study spirituality scientifically. But that latter thing is exactly what Harris hopes to do.

More power to him. If Harris succeeds, then some fist fights over the nature and merits of spirituality might become a thing of the past.

More over, this is the 21st Century, and many people who have had spiritual experiences of the sort Harris describes feel it is high time for biologists like PZ Meyers (along with many other scientists and non-scientists alike) to recognize there is more to human nature than is dreamt of in their philosophies.

Can Harris succeed in placing the study of spirituality and mysticism on a scientific footing? What do you think?

Dear Anne,

As an undergraduate, your life currently revolves around words --- listening to words, writing words, speaking words, thinking in words. Have you ever considered what it would be like to go a couple of hours without even thinking in words, let alone speaking, reading or writing them?

That's exactly what Mystic Wing did the other day, and he writes beautifully about the experience here.

It might seem somewhat ironic to you, Anne, that a person would first experience a period of wordlessness and then compose such beautiful language to describe that experience, but then life is mostly ironic to begin with, isn't it?

Paul

Do you wonder why this blog is called "Café Philos"?

The reason is not complicated at all. In ancient Greek, the word "Philos" meant "love". Specifically, it meant certain kinds of love, such as the love of someone for their spouse, the love of a craftsman for his or her craft, the love one might have for horses, the love of brothers for each other, and so forth. When deciding on a name for this blog, the thought occurred to me that I might try writing as much as possible in the spirit of love, regardless of what I was discussing. Hence, the philos in the name.

Why a "café"? Well, because the range of topics for this blog is so broad as to resemble the range of topics one might expect to hear in a coffeehouse or café. That is, just about anything and everything having to do with life, the arts and sciences is fair game.

And that, in sum, is why the name, "Café Philos".

So, why is it that women say they "share" something about themselves, but men only say they "talk" about themselves?

[Certain] questions require illusions because they have no discernible answers.

Brendan McBride, Off the Beaten Path



Brendan is referring to at least some "meaning of life" questions, such as "what is death and where will it take me?" Many professional philosophers regard such questions as empty or meaningless since there is no sound method or procedure for answering them. That does not, however, stop us from asking them. In his article, Uncomfortable Questions, Brendan develops at length an hypothesis as to why we nevertheless seem compelled to ask such questions, despite their lack of meaning.

Dear Anne,

I've been thinking about what your poem Ranger Hall might mean about you as a poet and writter.

I think someday you will write as beautiful prose and poetry as you want to write. You have more talent, I think, than I had at your age. In fact, if we were the same age, we would not be equals --- you would be the better poet. I could never have written Ranger Hall at 18, which was your age when you wrote it. Nor could I have at that age written prose as well as you do.

I don't say those things to flatter you, but only to let you know why I believe in you.

I suspect you have real genius in you. But all sorts of things can go wrong with genius --- genius is only a first step. So, please allow yourself to be fair to yourself, and honestly recognize your talent and skills. It won't hurt you to do so, so long as you deeply realize that genius is but a first step.

Paul

A poem is a little death
Put into words.
A little frozen feeling.
A lifeless stone:

A Fragment broken
From a laughing rock
And laid aside.

You love word, Majel.
But in our land (less our land)
Word is cut
To boardfeet

To make ads,
Efficient love songs,

And your friends sing
Office poster slogans
To hear your dreams.