I've been sorting through recent posts on The Mull, in search of a common thread or two. I've had the feeling that something was beginning to gel, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it until today.
It has to do with spirituality.
I won't insist on the word—part of me would like to call it something else, just to avoid any connection to all of that "praise for quantum mechanics and...criticism of ignorant materialistic atheist types" that Jason Rosenhouse talks about. But I'll use it for this post, at least, and I'm open to suggestions.
For the record, I do find quantum mechanics quite wonderful, but not for reasons I would call spiritual, and, while I have known many atheists, and may well be one, I've only met one atheist ever who was ignorant.
I do like the word spirituality, though, for several reasons which have nothing to do with quantum mechanics, or supernatural phenomena, or magic.
I like it partly because I haven't been able to come up with another word which better fits what I mean when I use it. I also like it for personal reasons that have to do with my own journey through a religious world-view and out the other side.
In my previous post on the subject I defended a common and reasonable use of the word "spiritual": as in the sentence "I'm not religious, but I am spiritual." My point was that people who talk this way are very rarely interested in quantum physics or the ridicule of atheists. Rather, they are defending themselves from a two-pronged attack.
On the one hand, religion has quite successfully (by rhetorical standards) laid claim to goodness, meaning, love, and all that makes life meaningful. On the other hand, science has pretty effectively undermined one after another of religion's claims to truth and objectivity.
The result is that the average person on the street is caught between going with religion and appearing gullible, or going with science and appearing to live a life devoid of goodness, meaning, and love.
The claim to be "spiritual" but not religious is a kind of rhetorical move—in the realm of self-definition. It's a way of saying, "I'm not superstitious, but I still have values and a meaningful life."
I think this is a good sign, and I think it points the way to some serious work that needs to be done.
We live in three worlds.
- The external, physical, world which modern science investigates so successfully, and which we experience directly through our senses. This is the world where heat burns, flowers smell good, food nourishes, thorns prick, etc.
- Our internal, spiritual, world which each of us only knows for ourself. This world is the world of our thoughts, our worries, our dreams, and our emotions.
- Our cultural world, which consists of the set of customs, concepts, mores, values, and worldview which belong to the particular set of people we associate with.
The distinctions above may seem immediately obvious to some, and not at all obvious to others. There's good reason for that. The three worlds overlap in countless ways. For example, anthropologists and psychologists use scientific methods to study culture and emotion. The scientific community has it's own distinctive culture, as well. And scientists, even atheistic ones, have an internal, emotional life, which motivates and interprets their research.
But studying sadness—or, rather, evidence of sadness in experimental subjects—is not the same thing as being sad. Fairies—which are an important part of some cultures—do not appear to be part of the physical world. Knowing that my culture disapproves of something may or may not make me feel guilty when I do it.
Science describes a world that is fascinating and impressive, even awe-inspiring. But the world it describes is an unconscious one. It's inhabitants don't, for example, feel pain so much as they behave in ways that we associate with pain. No matter how carefully we describe a neuron, or a pattern of firings of neurons, we will not have described a thought. The best we can hope is to correlate the two, and we are doing an increasingly good job of that.
The reason for this is simple enough, and no insult to science: empiricism means looking at things from the outside in. It means that the thing being studied is the observed—and not the observer. But it is only as observers that we experience consciousness.
Culture is essential to science and to human existence, but it, too, has its limitations—particularly in this time of transition. Our culture has not kept up with science, with our growing sense of freedom as individuals, or, in many ways, with itself. We live in a world where ideas rooted in monarchy are fighting for control of democracy.
In the midst of this, the individual person must integrate these three worlds. Each of us has to find a way to live that meshes our understanding of the physical world, our participation in the cultural world, and our private existence in our own internal world, with integrity, so that we can achieve a measure of dignity, of joy, and of peace in our daily existence.
Whatever science or art, whatever discipline or practice, whatever insights or knowledge that nurture or assist this process is what I have been calling spirituality.
When I was still in religious circles, I used to tell my fellow Christians that what spirituality was about, in all religious traditions, was "how to go about being human".
It includes such things as sorting through issues of personal morality, learning how to distinguish between what I know and what I've only been taught, integrating scientific knowledge into my worldview, and sifting through the mixed bag of tradition. It includes getting to know myself better. It includes learning how to be there for others, and when and how not to be. It includes all the topics that might come under the heading of wisdom, or integrity, or emotional maturity.
Now that I'm no longer religious, I still think we need to address that subject, not so much because we aren't, instinctively, equipped to do it, as because twelve thousand years of monarchy has created cultures which make us forget how to do it.
And none of us is completely immune to that element of culture—not even materialistic atheists.
At least, that's what I think today.
