The Past Imperfect

            There was an item in the news earlier this month that two of the world’s most powerful telescopes, the Hubble and the Spitzer, are operating in tandem to gather images of the universe in its relative infancy, by focusing on galaxies more than 12 billion light-years away (and hence, sending images to us more than 12 billion years old, in a universe that is currently estimated to be about 13.7 billion years old), and that there are plans for another telescope to gather even older images in 2018, corresponding to events that occurred a mere hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang.

This is just the most recent example of an interesting phenomenon that occurs as our civilization continues to evolve: we develop greater and greater capabilities for recapturing our past.  In 1993, moviegoers were entertained by Jurassic Park, about an enterprising group of scientists who were able to resurrect extinct dinosaurs through DNA sequencing and cloning technology, and in the years since, there has been serious discussion about doing exactly that – at least with more recent species lost to extinction, such as the woolly mammoth.  And DNA sequencing has allowed us to better understand both how species have evolved and how our own human ancestors diversified and migrated, forming the races, tribes, and nations of modern times.

Even in our personal lives, modernity has been giving us an increasing capability to retain and capture our earliest past.  The field of psychiatry known as psychoanalysis, when it came into vogue at the end of the Victorian era, suggested that we might resolve our most serious psychological issues and lead more productive, happy lives if we delve deeply enough and far enough back into our life histories, unearthing and resolving conflicts involving our relationships as young children with our parents, and its practitioners engaged in techniques that made it possible for us to do so.  Technology has certainly helped us to preserve more of our personal and social history, with the evolution of photography, sound recording, and now, both sound and video recording with the simple use of a smart phone.  The capability for recording, and storing, records of our individual and collective lives has increased immensely in just the past generation.

Why is it, as we mature and move forward in time, that we have a growing desire to recapture the past?  The desire to preserve can certainly become pathological, as currently illustrated in the American television program Hoarders, about persons who retain nearly everything, and throw little if anything away.  They seem to be desperate to hold onto anything that has ever come into their lives.  I must confess that when I hear of stories like this, I look at my own life and say “There but for the Grace of God go I,” because there are some things that I have been very reluctant to throw away.  It has been almost impossible for me to let go of any book that I have ever owned, and so I find myself having to put an additional bookshelf into my home about once every five years.  (Perhaps Kindle will now save me from eventually walling myself in with bookshelves, while at the same time making it even easier for me to retain every book that I have ever read.) 

In many, if not most, cases, I think that the physical objects we hold onto provide tangible counterparts to important events in our lives.  Clearly this is the case with wedding rings, or college diplomas, or birth certificates of children.  They give our memories of these events substance: something that we can look at, and reach out and touch, so that they are not just merely thoughts in our minds – thoughts which will pass away when we pass away.  Of course, the meaningfulness of these physical objects is far from universal, and their value is often completely lost on others, even those close to us.  (Hence the ordeal of having to sit through a presentation of somebody else’s stack of vacation photographs.)  Many years ago, during an unhappy period of my life, I was driving one morning to a workshop that I had to attend, and stopped at a fast food restaurant for breakfast.  The restaurant happened to be giving away stuffed animals as part of a promotion for a new movie, and so I took one before resuming my trip.  And because it was right around that time that the circumstances of my life improved rather dramatically, the stuffed animal came to be permanently linked with a happy memory for me.  So to this day, the tiny, smiling “lucky Simba” sits on a shelf in my bedroom.  It will probably still be there on the day that I die, and when the “junk” in my home is committed to the flames, like the “Rosebud” sled in Citizen Kane, the stuffed toy will be cast away without the slightest suspicion that it meant anything to anybody.  When I was a boy, attending with my parents a holiday party at my grandfather’s house, I noticed a large Bible sitting in a prominent place on a shelf in his living room.  It just so happened that I had embarked on an ambitious project that year to read the Bible from cover to cover, and so, in order to impress my grandfather, I asked him if I could pick it up and read it.  To my shock (as well as that of my parents, and the others in attendance), he angrily shouted at me not to touch it.  A while later, it was explained that this Bible had been a prized possession of my grandmother, who had recently passed away, and my grief-stricken grandfather had never wanted it moved from the place where she had kept it.  Of course I didn’t understand his feelings then . . . but I do now.

What then, is it that compels us to capture more of the past, and to retain it, through material objects?  I think that we are always endeavoring to give our individual and collective pasts a more enduring existence that we hope will survive us, somehow, after the ephemeral imprints of our memories fade away.  And, by capturing more of our pasts, we hope to compile a meaningful story of our existence, with a beginning, middle, and end, which will endow it with a significance that will transcend the transitory nature of our time on earth.  Individually, and collectively, as nations and as a species, we want to believe that we are part of a drama that has an ultimate purpose – a destiny to be fulfilled, and by better understanding the most distant reaches of our past, we hope to be better able to trace out the trajectory of that drama.

In the Japanese film After Life, recently deceased persons are directed to find a single happy memory, which they will then be able to re-experience for eternity.  Is that what a real heaven might be: to collect a sort of “greatest hits” compilation of our memories, and be able to relive them for eternity?  For the German philosopher Nietzsche, such a prospect, “eternal recurrence”, presented an ongoing challenge to live a meaningful life:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' [The Gay Science, §341]

In the same vein, might we be forced to undergo a sort of trial in the afterlife, as in the American film Defending Your Life, and learn through this that the real secret of fulfillment had been to overcome one’s fears, and live life to the fullest?  Will we have second, third, and multiple chances to do so, as in the movie Groundhog Day?

Perhaps, with the continuing advance of technology, we will someday be able to memorialize everything that passed through our minds in a more permanent, substantial way.  And then it will be possible for others to recall each and every one of our lives, and review and examine them completely.  But even if this comes about, what would compel anyone to do so?  The sheer number of individual human existences seems to undermine the special value of what each of them had lived and experienced.  Still, there is something precious about every human existence, and perhaps when the capability is realized to see each one in their fullest, then future lives will be enriched by reviewing them, examining them, and drawing tangible lessons about how they spent their limited spans of time on this planet.  Maybe, in this manner, future human beings will find the blueprint for living lives that are truly worth preserving in memory, and even reliving, over and over and over again.

Three Books

Recently, I had the opportunity to see again the 1960 film version of H.G. Wells’ classic science fiction work, The Time Machine. The film starred Rod Taylor as the time traveler, H. George Wells, and in the final scene, after George disappears from his home and returns to an era in the distant future where he had discovered that civilization had lapsed, one of his friends who he left behind discovers that he has taken three books with him. It is unclear which books he has chosen, and the friend wonders aloud to his housekeeper which three books they would have selected, had the choice been theirs to make.

It is an interesting question, not unlike the one that I posed in my very first blog entry one year ago, when I wondered what lessons our own civilization might like to leave behind to some other civilization in the distant future – one perhaps coming out of a dark age, having either just a dim memory, or no recollection at all, of this one that preceded it.

As I watched that concluding scene of The Time Machine, I couldn’t resist wondering what three books I might have chosen, to serve as a legacy and a lesson to some people where civilization had lapsed. It brought to mind a life project that I embarked upon as a young man when, while in college, I came across a list of the two hundred greatest philosophy books ever written. I kept that list, and set for myself the goal of reading those books during the course of my remaining life, believing that if anything came close to comprising the collected wisdom of our civilization, then this must be it.

I must confess that, in the decades since setting that goal, I have fallen far short of it, having only read fifty-one of the two hundred books on that list. And I also have to confess that I don’t think that the ones that I have read have made me a better, or even a wiser, person than anyone who may have never read a philosophy book in his or her entire life. Still, the experience, at times, was an exhilarating one, and I’ve come to the conclusion that a really great work of philosophy is one that quickens the mind of the reader, enticing it to consider new and different ways of looking at the world, and existence, and of one’s role and place in the universe. Sadly, only a small number of the books that I encountered had this effect, while many had the opposite effect, with their pedantry actually dulling the mind, rather than exciting it. But the good ones made the entire venture worthwhile, and I have never regretted the time that I devoted to it.

Of the great ones that I encountered – the ones that quickened the mind, and opened entirely new vistas – I would include the following: Plato’s Republic, in which the legendary Socrates attempts to make a case for why a person should act justly, rather than otherwise, which is not based on fear of divine or human punishment. Although he was not completely successful in this attempt, the questions that he poses (in classic Socratic fashion) to his youthful audience, and the stories that he weaves, are profound and enlightening. The Republic also touched on the issue of how a society and government should be ordered, and Aristotle, in his Politics, addresses this issue as well, in a more systematic, but equally illuminating, manner. The works of Plato and Aristotle really do constitute a golden age of philosophy, and I have never come across any by these authors that is not worth reading and contemplating. It seems that, in the centuries following theirs, philosophy descended into a sort of dark ages of its own, with writers engaging in tendentious debates about inconsequential things, until its revival in the Age of Enlightenment. This renaissance began with writers like Hume and Berkeley, but to me it is the works of Rene Descartes – his Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy – that kick-started philosophy in the modern age in a very exciting and refreshing way, as he attempted to resurrect the search for ultimate truth from the ground up, relying upon first principles derived from reason and simple, direct introspection. The rebirth of philosophy in the modern age found its greatest light, however, in the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, a man who has been called – and very deservedly so, I think – the greatest philosopher since Aristotle. In the debate that had been raging in his time over whether ultimate reality rested in mind (idealism) or matter (materialism), Kant’s unique and revolutionary insight – in his Critique of Pure Reason – was that while there might be an ultimate “something” out there, we can never know what that “something” is, since our minds play an active role in mediating how external reality is presented to us and becomes a part of our perceived awareness. Reading Kant’s Critique was a dizzying experience: I – like most readers of it, I suspect, in my time as well as his – was not able to completely comprehend it, but still had a sense on every single page that something very profound, very important, and very exciting was being presented. Someone once said that all philosophy is a commentary to Plato: it seems to me that all philosophy in the past two centuries has been a commentary to Kant. Building on Kant’s insights, Arthur Schopenhauer, in his World as Will and Idea, attempted to build a bridge between these and the wisdom of Eastern schools of thought. Schopenhauer is often branded as a philosopher of pessimism, but his pessimism is really no different than that embraced in the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths: that in existence there is suffering.

Sadly, it seems that since that second golden age of the nineteenth century, philosophy has been descending again into pedantic, arid controversies that dull the mind rather than quicken it, but there are a few lights in the twentieth century that were a joy to read, or at least inspired awe. One such awe-inspiring work was Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality, which represented a herculean attempt, and perhaps a successful one (as with Kant’s Critique, I have to admit that my capacity for understanding the work was limited), to create a systematic, holistic model of existence that incorporated the most important insights of all of the great philosophers who preceded him. A more accessible, but equally inspiring, writer of the twentieth century was the French philosopher Albert Camus, who in such works as The Rebel, The Stranger, The Plague, and the Myth of Sisyphus (it was the first of these which had been on the list, but all are worthy rivals for a place on it), addressed the challenge, the burden, and the tragedy of contending with existential freedom. And, finally, the most recent of the works that made it on that list of two hundred, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, presented a novel approach to designing a just society, by envisioning a thought experiment in which its architects, while crafting its rules, were unaware of what their stations in life (rich, poor, male, female, etc.) would be after the project was completed. A book that did not make the list, but which constitutes an ingenious critique of and counterpoint to Rawls’ conclusions, is Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The two should really be read together. I am glad that I did. (And I believe that Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations really deserved a place on the list of two hundred as well. Its final section, on the meaning of life, is one of the most insightful, profound, and provocative treatments of that subject that I have ever read.)

These are just some of the more memorable works that I encountered, as I worked my way through the list, randomly selecting titles, and I am sure that there are many others, which I may someday read, or may never get to, that have the same potential to awe and to enlighten. But would any of these be included among the three books that I would select, to be preserved after the memory of this civilization has faded?

There are other books that would be of more practical value. As an extreme case, I think of the many books that have been written to provide advice on personal success. I have a shelf full of these, such as Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Robert Collier’s The Secret of the Ages. Most of these books begin with the promise that by following the insights and principles contained within them, one can transform one’s life, and find success in both the personal and professional sphere. But I cannot think of a single one of them that affected my life in a profound, transformational, and permanent way, with perhaps one exception. This was a little book entitled The Richest Man in Babylon, by George Clason. Written in the form of an extended parable, it contains some very simple maxims on how to manage one’s money. I took them to heart, and put them into practice, and have always appreciated the wisdom embodied in them. Still, I couldn’t possibly imagine including even this book as one of the three written legacies to be left behind by this civilization to serve as a guiding light to another.

There are so many other types of works to consider – great novels, romances, poetry, works of religion – which might serve as a testament to our civilization, and provide an echo of its greatest moments. But in the end, my choices were still guided by pragmatism, more than anything else. What, I asked myself, would be of most practical benefit to some future age, where our own civilization had been forgotten?

My first selection would be a book on general science that contains the foundational principles and discoveries of biology and physics, and, ideally, some rudimentary mathematics as well. Now I am cheating here a bit, since I don’t actually have such a book, and so wouldn’t be able to take it off of my shelf, if, like George Wells in the movie, I was about to embark on my final one-way trip to the distant future in a time machine. I believe I still have my college physics textbook, which was pretty comprehensive in scope, so in a pinch I would probably take that. But a quick search on Amazon.com tells me that I could buy a book on general science and have it delivered to me in three days, so only a moderate delay would be required to have this book available.

My second selection would be a one-volume edition of world history, because in my opinion one of the most important legacies to be left behind by any civilization is a complete record of both its triumphs and its failures. There is much truth, I believe, in the familiar quotation that those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it. Here, I would be better prepared, as in my personal collection I have at least two one-volume histories of the world: one that was published in 1906 (which I referred to in my last blog entry, “Time’s Arrow”), and a Columbia History of the World published in 1981, which, while more recent, is by now also a little dated. I even have a book conveniently titled The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant, but it is rather short in length, and therefore light on actual history. And so here, too, I might be tempted to delay my selection of an actual book until I can find one that brings the story of world history a little more up to date.

My third and final selection, and one that I actually have in my possession, is a one-volume collection of the complete works of Plato. This would seem to be the least practical of my three choices, and, for that reason, might appear to be the weakest. But I believe that there is a need for philosophy in civilization, and that it is essential that certain fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of our existence be asked. Plato, and in Plato’s works, Socrates, raised the most important of these questions, and addressed each of them with a depth of insight and lack of prejudice that continues to be unrivaled by any other great thinker before or since. And because of the foundational nature of the questions addressed, a study of Plato, in some distant future civilization, would provide fertile soil for the growth of other great ideas, germinating in future great minds, perhaps rivaling or even surpassing those that had graced our own civilization.

One book that many – at least many living in the western hemisphere – might find to be conspicuous in its absence is the Bible. I know that others would consider this to be an essential – perhaps the most essential – book to be included as part of our legacy to the future. I disagree. And I won’t defend my omission by resorting to the charge made by many agnostics and atheists: that religion has done more harm than good in the world, or that, at the very least, it has been responsible for much of the mischief (wars, pogroms, repressions, and resistance to scientific advances) that has permeated our history. Rather, I contend that the search for God, and for a relationship with God, is one that is dynamic, and defined by the person, or the culture, that is engaged in it. If our Bible, and the other great religious works that have appeared among the extant and recorded civilizations of our planet, truly represent the inspired word of God, then I have to believe that any future civilization, with no memory of ours, will have their own prophets and channels for receiving God’s inspired words. And these words will be expressed in their language, and in the context of their own unique history, culture, and development. It will speak to them in ways that our own never possibly could. Similarly, if the great poems, dramas, romances, songs, and collective dreams of our people must someday be forgotten, we can take some consolation in the fact that if there is a future age, then it will produce great poets, dramatists, composers, dreamers, and prophets that will move and inspire their audiences in ways that our own works perhaps never could.

It would be a great consolation to know that we will leave at least some of our words as a legacy for that future age, but whatever words we leave behind for the inhabitants of that civilization, I have every confidence that they will be able to provide the music, at least as unique, as inspired, and as beautiful, as any that we ever produced.

Time's Arrow

During this, the week of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, I would like to talk about something that I have been feeling thankful for. It is that the world is getting better.

Now that seems like a rather shocking – or at least very naïve – thing to believe, given the many terrible things and disturbing trends occurring in the world today, and I am the first to admit that I run the great risk of having this read by someone at some distant future time, wondering what could have possibly made me believe it. If so, this would not be the first time that great optimism for the future would be shown to have been unwarranted in the worst possible way.

When I was young – perhaps still a child – my mother bought a book on world history for me from a rummage sale. The book was very old, with a tattered cover, and sat on my shelf for years, unread, though I kept it with me through the years, promising myself that I would get to it someday. When I finally did get around to reading it, and reached the final chapter (this was about sixteen years ago), I was intrigued by some statements by the author which represented his appraisal of the destiny of the world in the coming decades. “Throughout the last century,” it says, “the sentiment of the brotherhood of man has been greatly deepened and strengthened. This new moral sentiment constitutes a force which is working irresistibly in the interest of a world union based on international amity and good will.

“It is most significant,” the passage continues, “that at the same time these movements towards world unity have characterized progress in the political and moral realms, wonderful discoveries and inventions in the physical domain – the steam railway, the steamship, the telegraph, the telephone, wireless telegraphy, and a hundred others – have brought the isolated nations close alongside one another and have made easily possible, in truth made necessary, the formation of the world union.”

This passage – and the book that contained it – was published in 1906.

What a sad irony that within a decade of this book’s printing, the advanced nations of the world descended into the bloodiest and most devastating war in the history of civilization, and that this was followed by an even more devastating war in the very next generation. Alongside these wars, atrocities and mass murders were committed upon millions of persons by their own governments, including in nations that had been considered among the most enlightened and civilized in the world. And by the end of the century, weapons of war had been developed capable of destroying the entire planet, with the growing danger that fanatics just crazy enough to use them might someday acquire access to them.

But we must not be too quick to judge the faulty vision of that writer in 1906: after all, many events in the century preceding that book had occurred which would inspire one to optimism, including the universal abolishment of slavery, the growth of woman’s suffrage movements, and a dizzying array of new inventions and technologies that had been unimaginable just a hundred years earlier, such as the telephone, the horseless carriage, the electric light bulb, the phonograph, and the heavier-than-air flying machine. The growing “brotherhood of man”, in addition to manifesting itself in temperance movements and other social welfare initiatives, was also evidenced by the growth of international trade, linking the advanced economies of the world so tightly that it seemed that a war of any kind would be so self-destructive as to not be warranted for any reason.

Given the blood-stained record of the twentieth century in retrospect, can we really afford to be optimistic, or bold enough to say that things, in general, have gotten better? I believe that we can.

I believe this, because in the midst of all of the calamities, tragedies, and outrages of our civilization, there seem to be real marks of forward progress, and not just in the area of scientific invention and technological advancement. The history of blacks in the U.S. exemplifies this very well. Many if not most of them lived as slaves in the early decades of the country’s history, until the institution was abolished with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, after the Civil War. But freedom did not bring equal treatment under the law. Voting rights were routinely denied to blacks in many states. In the two World Wars, units of American black soldiers were segregated from white soldiers, and the U.S. armed forces were not integrated until 1948. Black soldiers in these wars justifiably might have wondered what they were fighting for, since many of their relatives back home were being excluded from a decent education, banned from certain establishments, and forced to drink from separate drinking fountains and to use separate bathrooms. Civil rights would finally come after decades of domestic struggle, and in 1989, Americans would see General Colin Powell rise to become the first black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Two decades after that, America elected its first black President.

I have seen other, dramatic signs of progress and change within my lifetime. I remember a story that my mother told me of how, when she was a child, living in a suburb of Chicago, she used to walk past a country club which had a prominent sign that read “No Jews or dogs allowed”. Such a thing would be unthinkable today. I remember, too, in my own childhood, living in a culture that believed that women were incapable of working in many of the professional occupations held by men. A popular riddle exemplified these prejudices: A man and his child are in an automobile accident; the man dies, and the child, alive but seriously injured, is rushed to the hospital. The attending doctor in the emergency room that evening takes one look at the victim and says, “I can’t operate on this child – he’s my son.” Very few persons back then were capable of arriving at the solution to this riddle, which seems so obvious today: that the doctor was the child’s mother. And I remember the racial and ethnic derogatory words that were so casually and regularly used by persons of all ages – words which are now rarely heard, if ever at all.

Similar tales could be told in Europe, and Asia, and Latin America: of the growth of liberality, and breaking down of old barriers based upon gender, racial, and ethnic prejudices. And it does seem that these developments are just the latest in what has been a long and sometimes halting progression which has been a central feature of the story of human civilization. But the progression has had disturbing undercurrents.

One undercurrent is that not all of the gains are necessarily permanent ones: there is always the risk of a retrogression. I remember well a striking example of this back in 2001. A news program recounted the shameful treatment of Japanese-Americans after the U.S. entry into World War II, as many families at that time were resettled into detainment camps. The program condemned this policy, of course, and its narrator wondered how such a thing had ever been possible, even by a government and citizenry shocked and terrified by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The conclusion seemed to be that the persons of that generation were simply more bigoted and prone to racial paranoia than we are now, in this more enlightened age. And then, a short time after this documentary aired, the twin towers of the World Trade Center were brought down on September 11. Panic ensued, radical airport security measures were introduced, and when it was revealed that racial profiling was now being used in security screenings, with particular attention being paid to persons who appeared to be of Arab descent, the policy was roundly applauded by a frightened and insecure populace.

Another undercurrent is that, alongside the gains of progress, there is a countervailing, dangerous trend that increasingly threatens to undermine all of these gains. Schools are no longer segregated, but now many have metal detectors at their entrances, to protect the students from being knifed or shot. The Chicago of the nineteenth century was one in which members of any particular white immigrant ethnic group – German, Polish, Irish, and Italian – dare not venture into a neighborhood belonging to one of their rival ethnics, for fear of being beaten up or killed. Now, anyone can venture into any neighborhood of downtown Chicago or its adjacent suburbs without any fear of reprisal, and the only ethnic markers, if they exist at all, are the food and drink specialties exhibited in the neighborhood restaurants and pubs. The ethnic differences - both personal and geographic - have blurred beyond distinction, and a typical native Chicagoan numbers among his ancestors representatives of several ethnic groups. And yet, today, a little further south, among the poorer, predominantly black neighborhoods of the Chicago suburbs, murders due to gangland violence – with even children numbered among the victims – are at epidemic proportions. The Prohibition-era gangs of Chicago and other large cities are a thing of the past, but modern gangs deal in drugs that are much more dangerous and addictive than alcohol. Every mark of progress seems to be accompanied by an underlying countercurrent of violence and barbarism.

The evolution of Halloween as it is celebrated in the U.S. provides a very telling example of this strange phenomenon of forward and backward movements occurring together. According to folk history, the celebration of the holiday had its roots in a sort of ritualized extortion practiced by marginally delinquent youths upon potential adult victims, as the youths threatened vandalism to their property unless the youths were given some sort of reward, as exemplified in the demand: “Trick or treat”. But this evolved into the harmless holiday ritual – the one that I remember in my own youth – of groups of children going from door to door in store-bought costumes, knocking on the doors of neighbors, and getting little treats of candy from the amused homeowners – most of whom had their own children also roaming the neighborhoods in costume. Today, the ritual survives, but hardly any children now roam the neighborhood without their parents in tow, standing nervously nearby, terrified that if their children were left to do this unaccompanied, the children could be abducted or otherwise molested by adult predators.

It is a strange paradox, that as the world – or at least the more civilized nations of the world – seems to become progressively more enlightened, it also becomes progressively more dangerous, to the same degree. Slavery – at least state-sanctioned slavery – is universally abolished, but human trafficking is now a world-wide epidemic. And while democracy seems to be on the rise, so, it seems, is extremism among larger and more increasingly armed groups of people, fueled by religious fanaticism, anger at perceived slights or injuries suffered at the hands of others, or simply the desire to subvert the regional balance of power by any means necessary. Our modern economies are capable of providing more things to more people more efficiently than ever before in the history of our civilization, but the gulf between rich and poor is growing menacingly large. Technology continues to produce dazzling new miracles on many fronts, but with industrial and technological progress has come negative environmental consequences that risk the sustainability of the world’s entire ecosystem.

It would be Pollyannaish to downplay these negative undercurrents which pervade the march of civilization, or to not acknowledge the fact that a severe economic crisis, terrorist act, large-scale war, or effective demagogue playing upon lingering resentments and prejudices could send the edifices of our civilization crashing down, at least for a time. We have fallen down many times over the centuries, and every nation has chapters within its own history that represent shameful episodes that it must contend with: episodes that it would like to blot out of its collective memory, but knows that, to truly continue on any kind of forward march to progress, it must never blot out. And yet, in the face of all of this, it seems that after every time we pick ourselves up, we are a little better, and a little wiser, and there is an enduring, permanent improvement to our collective ethos that we retain. It is this that leaves me feeling grateful, and hopeful – that no matter how dangerous the challenges we face in the future, we have a better, broader, more resilient character that will enable us to deal with them more effectively, and more wisely, than those before us were ever capable of doing.

Let There Be Light

I thought it might be fitting, on Halloween, to describe a personal experience that I once had of Hell:

It happened when I was a young man, of twenty-one or twenty-two years of age. This was a period of my life when I was experimenting with drugs. I think that it is safe for me to admit this, given that decades have now since passed, and also because even U.S. Presidential candidates have admitted to using drugs in the days of their youth. And for me, at that time, “experimenting” is the appropriate phrase to use. I was never addicted to any particular drug, but was fascinated by the effects that drugs had upon the mind. Some affected mood, others bolstered self-confidence and induced more spontaneous, self-expressive behavior, while others seemed to alter perception itself, tempting the user to believe that he or she was encountering profound, enlightening insights. And, given my propensity for an analytical frame of mind, I actually recorded, in a notebook, the various effects of different drugs upon me. I did not do this dispassionately: In my youth I suffered from a painful shyness, which persisted into adulthood, and, even though I had passed out of my teens, the lingering effects of adolescence only magnified the angst that I felt because of it. I wondered if there was some perfect combination of drugs that might make me more comfortably assertive, spontaneous, and expressive. It really was a sort of “Jekyll and Hyde” experiment that I was engaging in: a “personality dialectic”, in which I hoped to release those elements of my personality which had been suppressed, and which only emerged intermittently, generally as the result of a unique combination of social circumstances and/or mood-altering substances.

After several trials, with several different drugs, I finally decided upon a specific “cocktail” of drugs: a combination which I felt would produce the desired effect. My plan was to ingest these at home, and then travel to a nightclub which was about a half hour’s drive from my home. All went according to plan, at least up to the point where I arrived at the club. I sat down at the bar and waited, excitedly, for the drugs to take full effect.

But then something horribly wrong began to happen. I noticed it first when I realized that the music playing in the background no longer seemed to have any rhythm or recognizable, coherent melody. And a bartender who was speaking to me was completely incomprehensible, as if he were speaking in a foreign language. Then I noticed that the bottle of beer that I had ordered was lying horizontally on the bar. I managed to set the bottle upright (I think), but immediately retreated outside to the parking lot, and headed back to the van that I had driven to get there.

What happened next almost defies description. There was blackness, just blackness. Only gradually did I become aware of the fact that I even existed. But I had no idea where I was. I could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing. Even worse, I had no idea what I was. I was this entity, in the middle of nowhere, that didn’t know who it was, what it looked like, what its history was, or how to even find answers to any of these questions. In this empty void, I tried to convince myself that there was something out there beside myself, although there was no evidence to support this belief. I cried out, in a language without words, to this “thing”, begging it to make itself known, and to tell me who – or at least what – I was. But there was only silence, and the void. Words cannot convey the terror that I felt, and the lonely isolation. I was a being with no identity, no history, no belonging, and no connection.

I don’t know how long I was in this state, because there was no standard by which to judge the passage of time. In desperation, I tried to conjure up a memory: if not of myself, then at least of some other being that had known me, and had interacted with me. I reasoned that if I could remember such a being, than through that being’s reactions, I could surmise who or what I was. Finally, a recognizable image appeared in my mind. It was the image of my mother. And, seeing what she looked like, I began to piece together what I might look like: a human being, with a face, two arms, and two legs. The images of friends then began to follow, and memories soon returned in their wake. I remembered the name that I had been called by these others, and soon was able to reconstruct, in my mind, a complete image of myself, and a history of what I had been.

Not long after this restoration of identity had been completed, I was able to restore my sense of perception as well, and locate myself within my van, within the parking lot of that nightclub. After another stretch of time, I found the strength and willpower to position myself on the driver’s seat, start the van, drive back home, and get into bed.

It took me a couple of weeks before I was completely back to normal (during that time I experienced difficulties with both sleeping and “taking in” the world around me), but eventually was able to restore a normal sense of equilibrium to my life. The irony was that I really had succeeded in what I had set out to do that night: I had managed to destroy the personality that seemed so awkward and ill-suited to me at the time, but in its absence there was apparently nothing left to replace it with.

And the experience also left me with a revelation of what a real “hell” would be like: a state of existence that is completely separate and unconnected from anything or anyone else. Hell, I realized, is separation –total isolation; no communion with any other sentient being.

As I have reflected on this nightmarish experience, in the many years since it happened, I have occasionally wondered: isn’t this the supposed goal of many “enlightened” spiritual practices - to annihilate the self? But upon further reflection, I realized that this is not, in fact, what had happened to me. It was not the “self” that was annihilated, but rather any and all connections that this self had with any external reality. It was left completely and utterly alone and isolated, without even the consolation of memories of connectedness to ground its being. Enlightenment traditions, on the other hand, seem to counsel a sort of dissolution of the self, along with a merging with some greater reality. In my own personal experiences of meditation, when I have managed to quiet the mind, and attain a quiescent state in which distracting trains of thought subside, leaving only a sort of empty, non-reflective awareness of the world, the ensuing feeling of peaceful bliss does not arise from having severed my connections with everyone and everything around me. Rather, it stems from feeling more grounded and connected, with everything, and less wedded to an abstract concept of the self. And yet, no matter how far into this meditative state I have gone, I have never lost a sense of who I was, or of my own personal history, or of where I was at the moment. And so I can only conclude that what I experienced, during that altered, drug-induced state so many years ago, was a sort of anti-enlightenment: the opposite of what it is that so many spiritual, meditative disciplines exhort us to attain.

But I have also wondered: wouldn’t God have experienced something like what I had during that great stretch of time (an eternity, in fact), before the universe was created: a sense of being an entity in a void, with no identity, no past, and no connection with anything else? And during this infinite stretch of complete, empty solitude, how would an entity know that it even had the power to change this situation? After all, if things had been this way for an eternity, what evidence would there be that anything different was even possible? To me, such an existence would not only be unbearably lonely, but unbearably terrifying as well. I recently put this question to a friend of mine, and he replied that such a scenario would not present a problem or a difficulty to God, since God is perfect. Now, such an answer is rather trite, but I have to confess that there is a certain logic in it. After all, any being that perceived a sense of lack in its existence could surely not be perfect.

And yet, there was – according to so many religious traditions – a moment when a perfect, supreme being willed the universe into existence, a moment when the Creator declared, in the words of the Old Testament, “Let there be light”. It seems unthinkable that such an act would occur without an underlying need or desire to perform it, but “need” or “desire” are verbs that would be entirely incongruent with an uncaused First Cause, or unmoved Prime Mover. One can understand, when confronting this puzzle, why the Gnostics believed that the “god” that created this universe, and who identified himself as the “creator”, was in fact created by some higher, more sublime Being. Perhaps the Kabbalists are closer to the truth with their theory that Godhood manifests itself through a series of emanations, called “sefirot”, which arise from a primordial source know as “Ein Sof”, a word which has been interpreted to mean “nothingness”, but also “without end or limit”.

In the year preceding the one during which I performed my terrifying experiment, I had written the following poem, which I titled “In the Beginning. . .”:

In the beginning there was Change.
God created Change in his
own image . . .

And yet God remained a static
force during an eternity before
Change.

There was no change of time
nor change of place
No change of mind
nor change of face

In Change there was a
Beginning.

I suppose that it is unthinkable – maybe even blasphemous – to imagine that a Supreme Being once experienced the horrifying loneliness of being an isolated entity with no history, and no self-concept, as I did during that bad drug experience. All that I can conclude is that such an experience, if permanent, would truly be an unimaginable hell for any ordinary conscious being. And, as an ordinary, conscious being, I am now permanently grateful that I am not alone in this huge universe, and will leave the question of how this existence came about to greater minds than my own.

The Great Divide

I had the great privilege of attending a ceremony recently in Washington, D.C. at which Olympia Snowe was given the 2013 Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government. (The late Paul H. Douglas, a man of strong moral convictions, a liberal who championed fiscal conservatism, and an ardent crusader for civil rights in the mid-twentieth century, was once described by the Rev. Martin Luther King as “the greatest of all the Senators”.) Senator Snowe had a long and distinguished career, serving in both houses of the U.S. Congress. As I listened to the speeches of some of her peers in government, along with her own acceptance speech, I could perceive a common theme that emerged among them. This was that Senator Snowe, and others like her, were able to achieve great things in government because they were willing to work with members of the opposite political party to achieve important goals. “Compromise” was a word that came up more than once during the ceremony, and it was not used in a pejorative sense. Rather, it described the ability of Snowe and other legislators to make small sacrifices in return for significant gains: pieces of legislation that – while not entirely satisfying the original objectives of either party –nevertheless represented tangible and important contributions to the nation that could find support in both parties.

How different things seem now, in a Congress where “compromise” has become a dirty word. Factions regularly prefer to hold the entire government hostage through their intransigence in such important matters as long-term national debt reduction, rather than work with elements in both parties to affect a workable compromise. In a recent marathon 21-hour speech, a senator dredged up the name of Neville Chamberlain, suggesting that to compromise with his political opposition on a budget bill was comparable to that British prime minister’s policy of appeasement with Adolph Hitler.

When did “compromise” become such an ugly word in politics? It has certainly been an element of the U.S. political tradition, going back to the drafting of the Constitution itself. That was an instance where the perfect was recognized as the enemy of the good, and the founders – after several weeks of intensive, old-fashioned “horse-trading” – produced an instrument of government that merely succeeded in satisfying, rather than impressing, most of them. As Benjamin Franklin put it, shortly after the document was completed:

I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them: For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. . . .

I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the Builders of Babel; and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another's throats. Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best. . . .

On the whole, Sir, I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility -- and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.

Sadly, the wisdom of a Benjamin Franklin – or a Paul H. Douglas or Olympia Snowe – seems to be in increasingly short supply in the U.S. Congress, which is now become that confounding Babel of discordant, uncompromising selfish interests, some of whom are driven by simple self-aggrandizement, others by an almost fanatical devotion to ideology, and others by a craven timidity, fearing that any overture to compromise will prematurely end their political careers.

Meanwhile, the country continues to careen toward disaster, with an unsustainable growth in national debt, an underemployed youth that cannot afford a decent college education without throwing themselves into a hopeless mountain of debt, a crumbling infrastructure, and a shrinking middle class that is leaving in its wake a growing divide between the very rich and the very poor.

We can only hope that a growing number of our political representatives will learn – and learn quickly – that brinkmanship is not statesmanship, that compromise in politics is not the same as compromise with a dictator, terrorist, or foreign enemy, and that the higher ground is only reached when we are able to understand and work with others who are not like us, who do not share all of our particular views, but who nevertheless want to bring about a future that is better for all of us.

The Wedding Toast

In 1998, I had the honor of being the best man at my youngest brother’s wedding.  It was a great privilege to do it, but added to the prestige of doing so was something else: it was a chance for me to vindicate myself after having had this honor once before in my life and falling down on the job.  That was on the occasion of my best friend’s wedding, a couple of decades earlier.  I was completely oblivious to what my roles and responsibilities were as a best man, including making a wedding toast, and so did not perform them at all.  In my defense, both my best friend and I were still just teenagers at the time.  I think that we were both confronted with roles and responsibilities that most men don’t have to contend with until they are at a more mature age.  Still, after my friend’s wedding, I developed the growing realization that I had really stumbled rather badly in my role as his best man, and it bothered me.  In fact, for years afterward, I was like one of those restless, roving spirits, cursed to wander the earth because of some terrible wrong that was committed during its lifetime, perpetually re-enacting the critical event in the vain hope that it might be rectified or set right.  In my case, I became a sort of “wedding crasher”: not because I went to weddings uninvited, but because, after the official best man made his toast, I would wander (or rather stagger, because I would usually pretend that I was drunk) up to the wedding party’s table and offer up a toast of my own, using jokes mainly memorized from a book that I had found called 2000 Insults for All Occasions.   My wedding “roast” was generally met with peals of laughter from the audience, though I always felt guilty when I looked over at the best man and invariably saw a downcast expression on his face, because he now clearly felt that his own toast had come up short by comparison.  But now, finally, I had an opportunity to genuinely set things right, with this second chance to be a legitimate best man myself.

And yet, with my brother’s wedding only days away, I found that I had no idea what to say in my speech.  Could it really be that, after all those years of successfully making toasts at weddings where I had not been the best man, that I would fall down, again, when I legitimately had the role?

I desperately searched about for something to say – something to speak about.  Aside from the salutary jokes (I still had the book that had served me so well in all those other weddings), what could I offer that was more genuine, and more substantial?  Was there something from my own life experiences that I could share?

As it happened, there was something which occurred very recently that had left a very profound impact upon me.  It came about as the result of an inspirational tape series that I had been listening to during that year, which prescribed a series of exercises that one should undertake to get in touch with one’s spirituality.  One of these exercises was to go away on a personal retreat, away from other people, with nothing brought along that might keep one engaged with and bound to the usual day-to-day activities: no phones, no pagers, no homework from the office, and nothing to disturb the mind, like alcohol or caffeine.  For my personal retreat, I rented a small, simple oak cabin in the southern part of the state of Michigan, in a heavily wooded area called the Dunes (so named because of the very tall sand dunes that are scattered about not far from the beaches of Lake Michigan).

Now I hardly expected anything genuinely profound or life-changing to happen.  After all, I was really not that far from civilization at all, and my stay was very short: just three days and two nights.  This was a far cry from the extended seclusion undertaken by a solitary monk, yogi, or shaman, and was even just a minute fraction of the time that Henry David Thoreau had spent in his cabin on Walden Pond.  I nearly laughed at the idea that I would get anything out of this.  Still, I decided to keep an open mind, and go ahead with the experiment.  I quickly found, after the first day or so, that I really was enjoying this solitude.  It had turned out to be a perfect time to do this: in early September, when the days are still warm, but the nights are cool, and, since the regular camping season had drawn to a close, the area was nearly completely desolate.  As the second full day drew to a close, I resigned myself to the fact that, while the experience had not and probably would not produce any profound – let alone life-changing – insights, it had still been a satisfying one, and a happy one.  Of course, it is exactly at that point, when one genuinely expects nothing, that one is often rewarded.  And it was my final experience at this retreat that I decided to share at my brother’s wedding.

On that second and final night of my retreat, I was sitting outside of my cabin, silently looking up at the sky.  While gazing at the stars, I recalled reading as a child that the sun is also a star, no different than any of these others that dotted the night sky.  In fact, it was explained that the sun is really undistinguished when it comes to stars, in terms of its size, age, and brightness.  The sun’s brilliance to us is merely an illusion, the result of its greater proximity.  The night was getting cold and very dark, and so I retreated back into my cabin to go to sleep.

But then I woke up in the very early morning hours.  It was still very dark outside, and cold, but I felt a compulsion to leave my cabin and go out for a walk.  I returned to a very tall dune that I had visited earlier in my trip.  It was easy to find, even in the dark, because of the pathway of white sand that led up vertically along one of its faces.  I had scaled the face along this path a day or so earlier, and it had been no easy undertaking, because of the steepness of the climb.  After advancing each couple of meters, I would find myself short of breath and feeling a tightness in the chest that compelled me to rest for a few minutes before continuing on for the next leg of the climb.  But after several of these halting advances, I had managed to reach the top, which afforded a comfortable flat place to sit and to take in a view of the surrounding woods.  Now, in the cold darkness, I repeated this climb, with the same halting, labored advance upwards, until I was finally at the top.  I looked around from my perch, but there was only blackness, and a deathly silence.  For a long stretch of time I sat there, feeling the chill of the air, hearing nothing, and seeing nothing.

Suddenly, the sky began to brighten in the distance, and turned purple.  The enveloping darkness began to disappear, even before the orb of the sun started to arise on the horizon, and as it did so, the world around me began to change.  I could hear sounds: first the random chirping of a solitary bird, which quickly grew to a chorus of songs from many birds.  There was movement, as many of these birds began to take wing.  It was as if the whole world was coming to life.  I began to see brilliant colors where there had only been shades of grey before.  An entire panorama of deep surrounding valleys and tall majestic trees around me became visible.  I realized that each tree had grown tall in a mutual competition to get closer to the sun, and that in fact every single leaf of every tree had oriented itself in the best way to catch the life-sustaining rays of sunlight.  And this experience awakened me to a profound insight: the magnificence of the sun was no illusion at all – it was in fact the source of light and life to a world full of variety and beauty, and this set it apart from most, if not all, of the other stars in the heavens.  And as I reflected upon this, I realized that this truth could be applied to human beings.  While there are many ways that human beings are measured – in terms of intelligence, or physical attributes, or personal wealth – the true measure of a man or a woman is in how many lives they touch, how many people they reach as a source of love and inspiration.  And, while there are many ways to touch people in this way, such as by being a counselor or a teacher, one of the most natural and immediate ways is through marriage.  Because through marriage, one becomes a source of love, comfort, and inspiration to another, and, if children are produced, both partners become such a source to them and, eventually, to the extended family that develops.  After I recounted this story at the wedding, I finished by asking that God bless my brother and his wife in their marriage, and invited the audience to join me in a toast.

And so I had finally vindicated myself as a best man.  But the lesson that I had shared on that night came back to me in a very personal, intense, and immediate way eleven years later, in 2009, when a serious accident landed me in the hospital.  As I lay there, virtually helpless, I was completely dependent on the goodwill of others.  And my angel of mercy came in a most unusual form.  She was a woman who looked like someone who had been raised in a very bad neighborhood, someone who had to fight for everything that she had.  She was rather stout in build, and had a hard, cold countenance that seemed to say “Stay away”.  Had I seen a woman like this during my regular daily travels on the subway, I would have made a point of avoiding her – not out of condescension, but because I would be genuinely afraid to get too close to her.  But this was the woman who – on many if not most of my days that I was in the hospital – cared for me each morning: bathing me, attending to my wounds, and dressing me afterwards.  She did it with a stoic dedication, but also with a gentleness and compassion that I sorely craved at that time, when I felt so damaged, helpless, and lonely.

I was in that hospital for two and half weeks, and one would think that after such an experience, a former patient would want to never return there.  But for me, at least, the opposite was true.  I loved returning to that hospital for follow-up visits: it was like taking a nostalgic visit to a college that one has graduated from.  The time at that institution might have been grueling, and stressful, but the happy outcome bathed all of these memories in a pleasant, nostalgic hue.

I think that I saw her during my very first return visit.  Since it had been only a short time since my release, she recognized me as well.  (I’m sure that it becomes progressively more difficult for hospital caregivers to remember their former charges over time, given the sheer volume of them that they must tend to.)  My face erupted into a spontaneous grin, which she answered in kind, and then, after I rushed up to her, we embraced each other.  I think that tears even welled up in my eyes as I held her close to me.

Were I to see this woman on a subway now, I might still feel hesitant about sitting next to her, but only because now I might feel that I would be unworthy, taking a place alongside one of God’s own elect, an earth angel, a human sun unselfishly radiating love, warmth, and compassion on those who need such sustaining rays the most.

May the Force Breed with You

In my last entry (“Rational Religion”), I shared my conviction that our civilization needs to find a new path to spirituality, which is purged of myth, superstition, empty rituals, and intellectual chicanery, but is not, as a consequence of this purging, sterile, artificial, or dryly intellectual.  The new path, I believe, would have to inspire, and provide higher guidance to one’s life whenever reason comes up short (and perhaps even overrule reason).  What would such a religion look like?  What would its adherents be like, and, perhaps even more importantly, what would be the qualities possessed by its holy men and women?

Every religion, every culture, and every tribe seems to have its holy people, whether these be saints, priests, mystics, spiritual teachers, medicine men, shamans, or witch doctors.  Usually, these are people who have simply answered a personal call to a higher vocation, although in some cases they do seem to possess unusual abilities as well, either as the result of some form of disciplined practice, or simply because they were endowed with special gifts from birth.  Occasionally, as with the Levites of the Old Testament, there is an entire priestly tribe.  In fiction – particularly science fiction – this idea of a race of spiritual adepts appears often, in the form of persons who have psychic abilities because they come from a family line along which these abilities were passed down, from generation to generation.

When I was in my twenties, I began to wonder if it might be possible to create such a priestly tribe.  Could a colony of people set up the conditions under which they not only cultivated a high level of spiritual advancement through natural means (disciplined study and practice), but also augmented this through hereditary means, by ensuring that their descendents had a greater inherent capacity for developing and exercising spiritual proclivities?  The idea fascinated me, and, as only a young and naïve idealist can do, I set about crafting a design for making it possible.

First there was the natural cultivation.  For me, this would simply mean that my colony (or “cult”, or “intentional community”) would dedicate themselves to discovering genuine means for elevating one’s consciousness, and do so both by studying the existing religious and mystical traditions of the world, with a critical eye, distilling truth from fable and empty ritual, and also through independent, open-minded exploration.  I suspect that the most fertile sources for this project from existing traditions would come from Zen, Yoga, and elements of the mystical traditions among each of the major religions, but that is just my own personal bias.  This tribe would have no autocratic spiritual head – no “pope” – and it would have no sacred book, either.  Instead, ideas and practices that had the most merit would survive naturally, as future generations continued to preserve the inspirations and discoveries of certain luminaries among them simply because of their demonstrated merit and effectiveness.

And what of hereditary cultivation?  How did I plan to create a tribe of wizards?  To make this possible, I envisioned a sort of benign eugenics that involved two things: polygamy and sexual selection.  The idea boiled down to these two precepts: every man and woman would be allowed to produce no more than one child of his or her own gender, and every man would be entitled to have more than one wife.

Here’s how it would work in practice:  Suppose each man in the community has three wives.  (Whether this is a rigid ratio, or simply an average among the colony, is immaterial.)  Each wife would be entitled to have one daughter.  The man would similarly be entitled to produce a son, but here is where the eugenics comes in.  Prior to deciding which of his wives will bear the man’s son, each of them must be tested for their “psychic” abilities.  (What this means in practice I’m not really sure:  Telepathy?  Telekinesis?  Clairvoyance?  A combination, with perhaps different weightings assigned to each ability?  Such things would have to be determined by the tribe beforehand, along with suitable tests for measurement, and the appropriate definition might change over the generations, as different abilities were eventually determined to be more relevant, and more important, for the fundamental project of the colony.)  The wife who scored the highest on this test would bear the man’s son, in addition to the daughter that she had already been allowed to conceive with him.  Now since the son in turn will be able to take three wives in the next generation, it becomes clear that his mother, who was the most psychically gifted among his father’s three wives, will be distributing her genetic “footprint” among a much larger posterity than her husband’s two other wives.  This is so because her son will father four children (including a son for the succeeding generation), her daughter will bear either one or two children, while the other two wives’ daughters will each only bear one or two children.  So her genetic posterity passed on to the next generation of the tribe will be at a minimum 25% higher than that of her husband’s two other wives combined, or as much as 3 times higher than theirs collectively.

There are of course some practical complications with this plan, which might cause persons some discomfort to consider.  What of polygamy, for example?  Is this really consistent with a group of people committed to a communal spiritual life?  The idea didn’t bother me at the time (especially if I would one day be one of the founding members of this tribe), because of course there is at least one religion that did practice polygamy in America for an extended period of time, and it didn’t seem to interfere with the fundamental practice of the religion.  And I remembered reading a quote from a woman who had lived under such an arrangement, who said (perhaps jokingly) that she found it was much easier to live with a man when he had to divide his time among two other women.  And so I convinced myself that polygamy would not interfere with the success of my colony.  The other potentially discomforting feature of this plan is sexual selection, as it brings to mind the terrible practice of female infanticide that is so common these days in third world countries.  It is little consolation to say that in my model there would be many more females than males, if any sort of abortion or infanticide is still required.  At the time that I was conducting this little thought experiment, though, I happened to read somewhere that there are certain conditions (whether involving timing, or food intake, or something else, I can’t remember) that make a woman more likely to conceive a child of one particular gender rather than another.  And so again I satisfied myself that my tribe would be able to work this little technicality out without having to resort to brute measures.  (Still another complication might be that the policy of one son per father, and one daughter per mother, would prevent the colony from expanding, because the reproductive rate would not be high enough.  But this policy is not essential to make the general hereditary scheme work.  The only essential part of the mechanism is that the right to produce male offspring is conferred upon specific mothers, based on the criteria established by the tribe.)

Having worked out this model, while on a summer break from college, I decided to run a simulation on my new personal computer (a novelty back in the 1980s), to see how fast my colony would develop the desired traits that would enhance their psychic abilities.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that the trait would become widespread among the tribe within a matter of just a few generations – not only if the trait existed on one particular gene, but even if more than one gene located on separate chromosomes had to appear simultaneously in a single person before the gift could manifest itself.  Overjoyed at this discovery, I was ready to go out and fulfill my duty of becoming one of the founding patriarchs of this new priestly tribe, and seek out several women who might be willing to join me in my noble and holy endeavor.  (I fancied that for my own little “harem”, I would try to choose a woman from each of the major races of peoples, so that the tribe would suitably represent, from the very start, a representative cross section of humanity.)

There were of course some technicalities to attend to.  The commune, or intentional community, would have to have certain codes and rules to abide by, to ensure that the primary mission of spiritual development was being carried out, and these would have to include some form of governance structure.  To prevent inbreeding over time, and excessive isolation from society at large, converts would always be accepted (and of course members would be allowed to leave the community), though as a condition of entry any prospective convert would have to demonstrate a commitment to abide by the rules, demands, and practices of the community.  (This in itself would constitute a form of natural selection, as converts willing to abide by these potentially demanding codes would probably have a greater innate capacity to engage in committed study and intellectual/spiritual development.)  And, in order for the hereditary plan to succeed, it would be prudent to only extend the right of polygamy to males who were born within the tribe, while male converts would be limited to having only a single wife.  As the community grew and expanded over succeeding generations, it would invariably have to branch out and form separate communities, and a level of autonomy would have to be accepted among these, yet some form of productive interaction and exchange (of both people and ideas) between them would have to be encouraged and fostered.  But these details, I imagined, could easily be worked out as the community (or communities) took shape.

Still, as I contemplated the outcome of this project more carefully, I began to realize that potentially serious problems could emerge.  A society in which women outnumbered men by three to one might produce a pernicious “peacock” mentality among the men: an excessive sense of self-worth and entitlement that could engender some unpleasant behavioral characteristics.  And the selective breeding program could result in unintended consequences in the form of genetic traits that are rare in the general population, such as six fingers on each hand, or other mental and physical abnormalities, or a greater susceptibility to certain genetic diseases.  If the program produced a people with abilities that were significantly superior to those of the general population, this could tempt them to develop an unduly exalted sense of themselves, manifesting itself in some form of racism.  Conversely, rather than revering this priestly tribe, and relying upon them for spiritual guidance and counseling, the general population might come to distrust them and fear them because of their special abilities, and even wish to destroy them, like the mutants in the X-Men movies.  And, too, there would always be the risk of a particularly gifted member “going rogue”, and embarking on a malicious path of self-aggrandizement and personal hegemony, like the evil Emperor and Darth Vader characters in the Star Wars movies.

            But ultimately, I realized that there was a much more fundamental flaw in my plan, and that is that it simply couldn’t work.  The program of selective breeding would not produce the results that I intended.  Here is why – I call it the “paradox of the psychic rabbit”:

            Suppose, in nature, that a rabbit was born with innate psychic abilities along the lines that I hoped to select for in my tribe.  It had a “sixth sense” that allowed it to sense when a predator was nearby, and would therefore remain in its burrow, until its intuition told it that the danger had passed.  Now by the conventional laws of natural selection, such a rabbit would invariably have a survival advantage over other rabbits, and would be much more likely to live long enough to produce several offspring.  Within a few generations, this particular trait, with its immense survival advantage, would become widespread among all rabbits.  Consequently, any natural predators in the food chain that depended upon these rabbits to survive would die out, and rabbits would be left with no natural enemies (and probably ultimately die out themselves as a consequence, when overpopulation stripped them of their own food supply).  Of course, if one of the predators came to be endowed with the same psychic trait, it might neutralize the advantage held by its prey.  Then, for the same reason that the trait became widespread in the rabbits, it would become widespread in the predators as well.  Each and every day, a sort of psychic game of potential move and countermove would play out in the minds of these creatures – both predator and prey – before they ever stepped out of their burrows or dens.  We would have an entire animal kingdom of clairvoyants, telepaths, and possibly even creatures with psychokinetic powers, because any of these abilities would confer an immense survival advantage upon the bearer, and hence would become widespread in just a few generations.  Now, anecdotal stories about animals fleeing the site of an earthquake or other natural disaster on the eve of the event notwithstanding, I think it is safe to say that we do not see evidence of widespread psychic powers among the animal kingdom.  And if such a trait would confer an immense survival advantage on a wild animal, it would have certainly done at least as much for any human being so endowed in our prehistoric past, and so, if it was a heritable trait, we all would have been heavily gifted with these abilities by now.

            Sadly, I was forced to concede that psychic abilities cannot possibly exist as a heritable trait which can be passed on genetically, else it would already have happened long ago.  This means that if they do genuinely occur among human beings, then it must be the result of some spiritual practice or discipline, or else a consequence of some external set of circumstances that galvanized an ability which actually is innate within all of us.  Or, as professional magicians and illusionists have been contending for centuries, these abilities have never genuinely existed, and those who claim to have possessed them have invariably been quacks, frauds, confidence men, or lunatics.

            Ah, the shattered dreams of youth.  Having faced these sobering facts during that particular summer, so many years ago, I solemnly put away my hopes of being the patriarch of a modern Levite tribe, and resigned myself to the fact that I would have to return to college and my (more earth-bound) studies when the new term commenced.  My belief in the need for a new, rational religion has survived the decades, but any fantasies about a priestly tribe perished with that psychic rabbit.