This documentary is almost certainly as close as you will ever get to exploring the Chauvet Cave in southern France, home to the earliest known cave art, and Werner Herzog provides an excellent vicarious visit. The cave was discovered in 1994 and speedily locked up to protect its prehistoric treasure, a multitude of paintings of wild animals roughly twice as old as any previously known. The cave was evidently visited by humans in two different periods: the Aurignacian, roughly 30,000 to 32,000 years ago, and the Gravettian, roughly 25,000 to 27,000 years ago. Most of the art is from the earlier period; an enigmatic footprint left by a young boy, paired with the tracks of a wolf, are among the fewer remnants of the later period. About 20,000 years ago, a rock slide covered the entrance to the cave, which lay undisturbed until 1994. I groped for an analogy; it is as if some future beings in the year 29,000 by our current calendar found an iPad amongst the debris at the lowest levels of the city of Troy, perhaps.
Herzog does these beautiful images justice; he filmed them in 3D under fairly restricted conditions (access to the cave is very limited). The result takes full advantage of the light of moving flashlights, the looming shadows of the film crew and scientists, and the billows and depressions in the stone walls, which the creators themselves exploited to present their visions of their animal cohort. The film also shows some footage of the world outside the cave, including the Ardèche River and a natural stone bridge called the Pont d’Arc. Although one of the messages of the film, underscored by its title, is that the past is in many ways lost to us, this view of the paintings was evocative of the conditions under which they were created. For all our distance in time from these anonymous artists, it was easy to think that you could sense something of their world.
Herzog spends lots of times on the paintings themselves, noting their proto-cinematic aspects (a bison drawn with eight legs, for example, in an attempt to portray movement). There are some satisfyingly long slow pans over the images in all their mysterious beauty: a series of four overlapping horses, a rhinoceros with an exaggerated horn, a pair of rhinos apparently locked in combat, and many more. (The soundtrack gets a little intrusive in spots; silence would have been a fine alternative to what struck me as generic shapeless mystical music.) He also interviews some of the people who study the caves, a passionate and sometimes eccentric bunch. Jean-Michel Geneste, the Chauvet Cave Research Project’s director, describes the rich fauna of the time:
“You have to imagine lions, bears, leopards, wolves, foxes, in very large numbers, and among all these carnivores and predators—humans!”
Archaeologist Wulf Hein, talking about what we can learn of other arts at the time from other sites, appears wearing a rough fur garment of some sort and holding a replica of a tiny bone flute. He gestures at the German valley behind him and speaks as if he were an eyewitness setting the scene for a story:
“In the valley down there, reindeer and mammoth were passing, and it was very cold.”
Another researcher discusses the sounds we can imagine from the paintings, for example, the open mouths of horses suggesting their whinnies. These interviews support another message of the film, that although we can never reconstruct the past fully, we can represent it (and in fact we seem compelled to do so).
One of the most poignant signs of these early humans, to me anyway, was a series of red handprints they left behind. I am always moved by the sight of prehistoric handprints; they are one of the most vivid reminders of the humanity of these long-lost people (“I was here!” they seem to be saying). In this case, one of the people who left handprints had a crooked little finger, so his path through the cave can be traced by the recognizable handprints he left behind. The shadow of the unknown in which so many people once lived makes it particularly astonishing when we can identify a specific individual among those many, many anonymous generations.
In addition to its human traces, the caves contain things left behind by other animals: bones, some of them gnawed, perhaps by cave bears; bones of the bears themselves, including a skull that has since been encased in glittering calcite; scratches the bears made on the walls, some under the paintings and some over them. Most of the stalactites and rippling curtains of stone evidently formed after the rock slide that sealed the cave, so the painters would not have seen them. They emphasize the vast amount of time that has passed since its earlier users left it.
All in all, I highly recommend this film, particularly if you are fascinated by what we can understand of the lives of prehistoric humans or by the way scientists investigate these early ancestors. It is a dazzling visit to a mostly vanished world.
On the Thinking Meat Project Facebook page, I recently posted this quote from The Country of Language by Scott Russell Sanders: “And I knew that my impulse to write is bound up with my desire to salvage worthy moments from the river of time. Maybe all art is a hedge against loss.” Ever since I posted this quote, I’ve been thinking about writing and memory.
It’s always been a challenge to me to know what to put in and what to leave out when I write. When I was in probably fourth or fifth grade, I was given an assignment to write about my spring vacation from school, which I think consisted of a long weekend around Easter. We were supposed to hand this in the morning after the vacation ended. I’m sure the teacher wanted just a page or two summing up the key events—an Easter egg hunt, a family dinner—but I started writing on the first evening of the break, all about coming home from school that day and what Mom said to me and what we had for dinner and what my brothers and sister and I did when we played in the yard that evening. I did the same thing the next day, in what must have been excruciatingly tedious detail.
The experience now reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s fictional map with a scale of one mile to the mile. It was the first time I thought about the writer’s problem of when to summarize and when to zoom into the details. (I seem to remember that about ten pages into the thing, it started to drive my mother nuts, and I was fairly frustrated too.) So “worthy moments” is a key part of the Sanders quote. You can’t possibly capture all the moments, and you wouldn’t really want to. It’s taken me longer to realize (or admit) that you can’t even capture all the worthy moments.
The other thing that occurs to me is that I also try to save worthy moments in the form of physical objects. I have a folder full of expired museum passes and train ticket stubs and similar ephemera from a trip to Paris this summer, not to mention some Euro coins in a small bowl. Handling these things again reminds me that those magical two weeks were real, and helps me focus my energies on getting back there someday. This is all well and good; that trip was just under six months ago. However, I have taken enough trips and lived through enough noteworthy events that I don’t have room for every bit of memorabilia from every one of them. My house is small, and life is short. Storing and looking at things from past experiences crowds out the space and time needed for new ones.
This leads back to writing, because sometimes writing about a particular place or time or event can be enough to preserve it in my mind, and I can jettison the physical reminders. This past spring I finally threw away an old set of bookshelves, the first I ever bought. They were made of particleboard and showing their years, but I clung to them because for someone who has as many books as I do, bookshelves are more than just another piece of furniture. I bought this set when I was 15, using money I had won in a creative writing contest. I painted them myself. They weren’t just bookshelves; they expressed the optimism and pride of my 15-year-old self. But they were in fact a set of slowly crumbling old bookshelves that were falling apart unevenly and no longer stood up straight. It helped to write down my memories of them and let the bookshelves themselves go. A small file on the hard drive is much easier to find room for than the shelves themselves, but it still allows me to bolster my identity by hanging onto the feelings of that younger self.
In the much longer run, however, even the small file will have to go. One of the ideas about which I feel most passionately is the value of the written word to the human species. Forty-six years after I got my first library card, it is still sometimes a wonder to me that we can enter the minds of people long gone, let them transmit their thoughts to us, perhaps discuss those thoughts with others, and maybe even send a few down the pipeline ourselves to future minds. It is one of the most magical things that apes do. However, the amount of human wisdom and experience that has been preserved, as vast as it is, is only a fraction of the knowledge and thought and sheer human personality and wit that have been produced through the ages. And, if I am honest with myself, I realize that the amount of it that I will be able to comprehend, even if I live into my 80s or 90s, is the merest crumb. What I leave behind will probably be no more than the wake of the boats I saw passing on the Seine this summer, an evanescent ripple that blends quickly into the countless other agitations that move across the water.
This thought used to distress me, but I’ve cleaned out enough closets and hauled enough stuff to the curb or to Goodwill that I am content to realize that old things have to go, and someday I will be an old thing whose time has come. Even this realization, however, I would mark in words. The following poem is by Carl Sandburg; it’s from a collection called Smoke and Steel. Because the entire book is available for free from Google Books, I don’t think I’m taking anything away from Sandburg’s estate by posting this poem here.
Stars, Songs, Faces
Gather the stars if you wish it so.
Gather the songs and keep them.
Gather the faces of women.
Gather for keeping years and years.
And then . . .
Loosen your hands, let go and say goodby.
Let the stars and songs go.
Let the faces and years go.
Loosen your hands and say goodbye.
To honor the memory of Carl Sagan on his birthday, I thought I’d share some of my favorite quotes from his work. Enjoy!
If you spend any time spinning hypotheses, checking to see whether they make sense, whether they conform to what else we know, thinking of tests you can pose to substantiate or deflate your hypotheses, you will find yourself doing science. And as you come to practice this habit of thought more and more you will get better and better at it. To penetrate into the heart of the thing—even a little thing, a blade of grass, as Walt Whitman said—is to experience a kind of exhilaration that, it may be, only human beings of all the beings on this planet can feel. We are an intelligent species and the use of our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure. In this respect the brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good. Understanding is a kind of ecstasy. (From Broca’s Brain)
And reading itself is an amazing activity: You glance at a thin, flat object made from a tree, as you are doing at this moment, and the voice of the author begins to speak inside your head. (Hello!) (From The Dragons of Eden)
It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it. (From The Pale Blue Dot)
I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed. I think this search does not lead to a complacent satisfaction that we know the answer, not an arrogant sense that the answer is before us and we need do only one more experiment to find it out. It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us. (From The Varieties of Scientific Experience)
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant”? Instead they say, “No, no no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. (From The Pale Blue Dot)
Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries. (From Cosmos)
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. (From The Demon-Haunted World)
Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don’t have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen — or indeed a citizen of any nation, the more so to the degree that such rights remain unprotected. If we can’t think for ourselves, if we’re unwilling to question authority, then we’re just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness. (From The Demon-Haunted World)
A final quote, from The Pale Blue Dot, is best heard in Sagan’s own voice (for some reason, the video won’t embed, but the link will take you there).
Next week, noted linguist and cognitive scientist Ray Jackendoff will be visiting Indiana University as a Patten lecturer. I’m really looking forward to hearing his talks. Here’s the schedule:
The first Patten lecture is The Cognitive Structure of Baseball, on Tuesday, November 8, 7:30–9:00 p.m. in Rawles Hall Rm. 100, IU Bloomington.
He is also giving a guest lecture at the Jacobs School of Music, which as far as I can tell is open to the public: Parallels and Non-Parallels between Language and Music, Wednesday, November 9, 4:00 p.m., Ford-Crawford Hall, IU Bloomington. Ford-Crawford Hall is on the second floor of the Simon Music Center, 200 S. Jordan Ave. (the building with the fountain in front).
His second Patten lecture will cover some of the material in his new book, A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning, which is not out yet but is available for pre-order.
I enjoy seeing images and reading descriptions of how people perceived the potential of the near future. For example, I recently saw an illustration from the 1900s that showed a room full of people in the year 2000 wearing full Edwardian dress and sitting around a radium fireplace. What is often amusing about these forecasts is that certain areas of life seem so set in stone that no one can imagine them changing. Clothing and hairstyles are certainly one good example. Gender roles are even more interesting: A 1967 vision of the future features a home computer that mom will use to shop for clothes and dad will use to pay the bills and see how much he owes in taxes. The technology is expected to develop, but the people are seen as fairly static.
The theme of Cordelia Fine’s latest book is that these unexamined assumptions help create the reality we study when we examine human behavior and also influence our interpretation of what we see. The first section of the book examines the way our assumptions about gender influence the very behavior we study when we look for inherent gender differences. For example, spatial reasoning is generally taken to be a particularly male skill. Fine cites a study where women outperformed men on a mental rotation task when it was presented in terms of stereotypically female activities (interior decorating, for example), but men did better than women when it was presented in terms of stereotypically male activities (nuclear propulsion engineering, say). This is just one example of many studies that revealed how responsive we are to social cues—even something as subtle as checking a box to indicate our gender before starting a test. Fine covers other aspects of how expectations color the ways that we perceive other people’s behavior, such as different reactions to more or less the same behavior in men and women in leadership positions.
To me, the chapter on stereotype threat seemed simultaneously the saddest and the most promising part of this section. Stereotype threat is what you’re under when you are performing a task that a social group you belong to is believed to be bad at, and it often has a negative effect on progress or performance. Fine writes, “It’s disconcerting to think that those who belong to negatively stereotyped groups might be pervasively hampered by stereotype threat effects in their academic life.” It seems like such a waste to me that thousands of capable brains, especially young brains, are not performing up to their potential because they are stressed by false beliefs along the lines of “Girls can’t do math” or “Guys are not good with words” (or beliefs about what people of your ethnicity are capable of or good at, for that matter). On the other hand, this does indicate that the human race has reserves of untapped, or inadequately tapped, potential on which to draw.
The second section is about the ways in which new results in neuroscience are often interpreted in terms of the same old gender stereotypes. It was surprising to me how many of the things that I thought I knew about gender differences are in fact not really well established. For example, you may have heard about (shoot, I may have written about) articles investigating the influence of fetal testosterone, which is supposedly the basis of some gender differences. I learned that no one has found a good correlation between any of the measurements made so far and any of the various supposedly masculine skills or behaviors that have been examined. (Fine makes an excellent point in the context of this discussion: Men are sometimes said to be better at science, but we haven’t even identified precisely which cognitive abilities make for a successful career in science, so it’s a bit premature to begin trying to identify the prenatal influences that produce the scientifically minded brain.) Another example: Females are said to have a larger corpus callosum, the band of nerve fibers connecting the brain’s hemispheres, but this finding is not cast in stone; in fact, it was rejected in a 2008 review article.
Furthermore, Fine makes the point that even when gender differences in brain activity are truly identified, they don’t necessarily represent something hardwired. We’re learning to understand the brain as a fairly plastic thing, and the effects of socialization surely show up there (where else would they appear?). She quotes neurophysiologist Ruth Bleier to the effect that “Biology can be said to define possibilities but not determine them; it is never irrelevant but it is also not determinant.” It almost seems to me that we are flexible creatures who for some reason really like to see each other in terms of fixed, either-or categories. Anyway, if you have read much in the way of popular science regarding gender differences in the brain, this section of the book may give you some surprises; it certainly provides a lot of valuable information. Chapter 14, “Brain Scams,” is particularly useful as a corrective to some of the pop psychology takes on gender differences.
The third section goes into how socialization occurs, and in particular how parents pass their beliefs about gender on to their children. For example, she has a fascinating discussion of gender-neutral child-rearing. This much-lauded concept is extremely hard to realize in practice; she describes the efforts one couple made to provide a truly gender-neutral background for their children, and it was a Herculean undertaking. People tend to overlook the many influences at work and attribute their children’s choices to genetics if they do not match what the parent is overtly promoting. (If I give a little girl toy trucks and a chemistry set but she wants dolls and a makeup set instead, it must be her hardwired femininity coming out, not all the advertising she sees, the trips down the toy aisle at the store, the television shows and books and movies that promote gender stereotypes, my own unconscious beliefs and behaviors, or the way her friends behave.)
It was almost amusing to read about some of the studies of supposedly gendered preferences measured in very young children. Six-month-old babies acted more interested in a pink doll or a blue truck depending on whether they were female or male, respectively, which is taken to indicate innate gender-based preferences. Has evolution really had time to teach human babies much about trucks (or the color blue, for that matter)? The people who care for them, on the other hand, have had time to teach them plenty, even at six months. (By the way, one interesting fact I picked up is that the current color-coding scheme using pink and blue is fairly recent; in fact, through the end of the 19th century, babies and young children of both genders generally wore white dresses, and when colors began to be used, pink was originally the color for boys.)
Fine has many other amusing but pointed observations about parent-child interactions. For example, even parents who want to stretch the gender boundaries for their daughters will be much more rigid about maintaining them in their sons. She quotes a mother whose son kept asking for a Barbie, so she and her husband “compromised” by getting him a NASCAR Barbie. (There are negative words for women that have no male equivalents—think of “slut,” for example, and words of that ilk—but males get the short end of the stick on this one: the word “tomboy” is, at least these days, attractive in a way that the rough male equivalent, “sissie,” is not.)
I highly recommend the book. The science of human behavior acquires various encrustations of half-baked or misunderstood sorta-facts as it works its way into the popular consciousness; aspects are emphasized or ignored for political or social reasons, and in some cases, the studies are over-interpreted or poorly done to begin with. Gender roles are one of the more touchy areas where science is easily misinterpreted or influenced by biases, although as Fine points out, “to those interested in gender equality there is nothing at all frightening about good science. It is only carelessly done science, or poorly interpreted science, or the neurosexism it feeds, that creates cause for concern.” Regarding that untapped potential I mentioned earlier in this review, Fine has this to say in the epilogue:
When a woman persists with a high-level math course or runs as a presidential candidate, or a father leaves work early to pick up the children from school, they are altering, little by little, the implicit patterns of the minds around them. As society slowly changes, so too do the differences between male and female selves, abilities, emotion, values, interests, hormones, and brains—because each is inextricably intimate with the social context in which it develops and functions.
For more on color-coded children’s clothing, see this Smithsonian Magazine article. Check out the slide show, which features Franklin Roosevelt as a little boy. Coincidentally, This Is Not Porn just posted a photo of a very young Ernest Hemingway.
Here’s another interesting event at Indiana University: The Stone Age Institute is presenting a day-long Origins Symposium featuring IU faculty talking about their research into the origins and evolution of the universe, the human brain, and various things in between (see the online schedule). The event is free and open to the public.
Where: IU Bloomington, Whittenberger Auditorium in the Indiana Memorial Union When: Sunday, October 23, 9 am to 5 pm
One point of all the rambling in my last post was essentially that learning the full story about the context in which we find ourselves and how we came to be here, as we have discovered it so far through science, can be mind-opening, inspiring, and profoundly positive. I think this knowledge is the birthright of every child. David Christian is one of the proponents of big history, which is a synthesis of our knowledge of events at diverse timescales and across disciplines (e.g., cosmological, geological, evolutionary, and human history). He recently presented a TED talk that gives an exhilarating glimpse of big history and makes a plug for teaching it to young people.
Christian gave an inspiring talk here at Indiana University a few years ago about the concept of big history. One of the things he talked about was the challenges of developing a curriculum that fits all this information into a single semester, and about his justifiable pride in managing to go from the Big Bang to the present day in the course he was teaching. However, his wife, who is a story-teller, did even better, creating a story that I think he said took about 45 minutes to tell and covered the same turf. I wonder if they worked together to create that presentation.
Last week I wrote that science enriches rather than impoverishes my worldview. I thought it might be useful to describe more precisely what I mean by this. It’s easy to speak broadly about science, meaning, and beauty, but it’s not always very clear exactly what these words mean in terms of the real-life story of how someone came to adopt a particular philosophy of life. I hope you will excuse me for a longish digression into the personal.
There’s a joke about Catholicism that everything is forbidden unless it’s compulsory. I grew up in a devoutly Catholic home in which life was hedged about by prohibitions ranging from the absurd to the devastating. The thing that bothers me the most, looking back, is that these prohibitions were never questioned, even if human well-being or thriving had to be sacrificed to them. God had set up the rules long ago, and the chain of command ran from him to the pope to the priest to my parents. Don’t ask why. (I mean, come on: we were primates! Healthy young primates are born to wonder why, and “The pope said so” is not a very good answer. If humans are lucky, they make a lifetime habit of asking questions.)
Religion felt to me like a constant presence nudging me to examine everything I did, said, or thought and check for wrong-doing. The classic complaint of ex-Catholics is the church’s attitude toward many normal desires, and that was certainly part of the problem, but it went way beyond that. For example, before church on Sundays, we were supposed to fast for an hour before taking communion. That’s not that big a deal, once you get past the mental contortions required of the trusting young mind when beloved elders present utterly bizarre beliefs about eating god. The silly thing about it was that we were also supposed to remember to brush our teeth at least an hour in advance, lest we accidentally swallow some of the toothpaste and thus break the required fast. It’s easy enough to laugh at it now, but given all the other things I was taught (that god could visibly leave the host and shame the intended recipient if he were offended, for example), which I was unfortunately unable to question when I was a kid, this prohibition was yet another source of existential dread, a way that you might be offending an all-powerful, irritable force without even realizing it, on grounds that seemed hazy at best. (OCD, anyone?)
As I was growing up, I didn’t learn all that much about science. I read randomly here and there, particularly in astronomy, but still, my science education was incomplete enough that I did not have to confront the discrepancies between my belief in the Biblical story about the creation of the world and the things we had learned about that topic since the Iron Age. Frankly, my memories of exactly how my youthful brain dealt with this subject are a blur, but I do remember that my conception of the history of humans, the earth, and the universe was constrained by the story told by the Bible and the Catholic church.
My scientific ignorance didn’t matter all that much, though, because there was plainly no chance of being a scientist. Dream as I might about observing the stars, it seemed that women weren’t really cut out for science anyway, or even any job other than motherhood, teaching grade school, or nursing. Not to knock any of those jobs, but that’s a limited set of opportunities. (It may sound like I’m 90 years old and talking about the prejudices of a bygone era, but I was born in 1961, so my era is not quite as bygone as all that, and I’m sure this sort of approach to young women’s potential is alive and well in fundamentalist churches today.)
My problem wasn’t just that I needed to learn to disagree with my parents about the meaning of women’s lives and find my own place in the world. With the best of intentions, they described my role in life and the possibilities open to me in terms of obedience to the will of a strict, all-powerful being who had little truck with women’s liberation and evidently little use for me except as a potential mother (unless I wanted to enter a convent and worship him unceasingly all my life, of course). Their claim to have god on their side distorted the power balance and the ordinary course of human generational differences. (This is why I am utterly opposed to any distortion of normal human interactions that arises from one side claiming to be speaking for a deity of any type. Sorry, no dice. We’re all just primates, and we speak for ourselves.)
I married and had children very young. The marriage had some wonderful moments, and my sons are an enduring source of joy. However, it was not a happy marriage. As it ended, quite predictably, after a few years, I began to think about going back to school. I took a correspondence course in astronomy and felt my mind boggle at the scale and complexity of the universe that I began to learn about. Once I removed the narrow framework of the story I was taught as a child, the cosmos seemed to expand in a heady rush.
I did the classic thing of walking around a lamp with a globe and a ball to figure out how the seasons and the phases of the moon worked (it’s embarrassing to admit that I was 21 before I learned that). I saw a partial solar eclipse, went out and looked at a new comet I had learned about in the pages of Astronomy magazine, and caught a few episodes of Cosmos on TV. I learned about the Big Bang and the synthesis of chemical elements heavier than hydrogen in stars and the dispersal of those elements throughout surrounding space when stars died. It’s a cliche by now to say that we and everything we know are star stuff, but grasping the truth of this was a powerful, permanently mind-altering experience. I learned enough to understand, at least in the most rudimentary outline, how life had evolved on this planet, and to begin to comprehend, as well as a short-lived creature can, the astonishingly long time periods involved.
My sense of both the timeline on which humans appeared and the vast space in which we found ourselves shifted dramatically. It was one of the most liberating experiences of my life. Before the huge panorama of space and time that unfolded before my delighted, awestruck eyes, the constricting walls of thou-shalt and thou-shalt-not were reduced to a manageable, even ignorable, size. Faced with the vast and intricate story of the universe as we know it so far, the stories I had been told of guilt and sin and redemption, stories that justified all the limitations enforced by worry and fear, began to look faded, childish, parochial, and distant. It was the most tremendous relief. I felt a dark weight rolling away from my mind, which became more and more free to move about in a much larger and more brightly lit space.
One thing I remember vividly about this time period after the divorce was spending summer evenings sitting outside and looking at the stars. I borrowed a small cheap telescope and looked at the moon, whatever planets were out, and various star clusters and nebulae. Late in the evening, I would put the telescope aside and simply watch the sky. If you sit long enough, you get a wonderful sense of the earth’s rotation. At that time of year, the Milky Way slowly crosses the sky; the spring constellations that were low in the west at sunset give way to the stars of summer, and eventually fall stars creep into view over the eastern horizon in the small hours before dawn.
I remember sitting out there one night and feeling a light breeze pass by as I watched the face of the night sky wheel by overhead. I found a deep pleasure in understanding, in rough terms anyway, the source of the wind (ultimately, the sun, which heats the earth unevenly), and knowing enough about what I was seeing in the night sky to feel like I was part of a fascinating universe and was able to comprehend it. The wind moved my hair, and it moved the leaves on a small tree nearby. I felt a sense of communion with the living world around me and the cosmos from which it had arisen. (It was eerily perfect, a couple of years later, to run across Kenneth Rexroth’s beautiful description of a similar experience in his poem The Heart of Herakles.)
More importantly, I felt like I had a right to be there. I was just another carbon-based life form, just like the tree. Far from feeling reduced in rank by realizing that I was an animal, I found it glorious to realize that I was not born sinful and flawed; I did not have to justify my existence by living up to someone else’s standards for perfection, masquerading as the divine will. I did not even need to bother any more about the censorious words of busybodies at church. Whatever kind of person I was, whatever my needs and interests and desires were, I needed to honor and fulfill those without hurting anyone else. That’s it. I felt like I had a place in the world that I could occupy without apology.
I don’t mean to make it sound like I was transformed overnight; I wasn’t. It took years to unravel the worst of the knots in my mind, and doubtless the people close to me can identify places still in need of work. (One of my sons said to me recently that a fundamentalist religious upbringing is a good way to create atheists and freethinkers, and this is true, but I think there must be easier and more humane ways to do it.) But the knowledge that the true story of the universe was vastly more intricate and wonderful than I had been taught, and the feeling of being part of a beautiful, totally natural universe that we can explore using science, is priceless to me and remains at the core of my belief system today.
Well, it’s spring (in the northern hemisphere, anyway) and new life is bursting out everywhere you look, but again I’m going to talk to you about mortality.
Specifically, I’m going to talk about a recent paper that looked at the way that thoughts of death affect people’s beliefs about science. Like the paper I discussed in a recent post about tolerance, and mindfulness, this one uses terror management theory to frame an investigation into how people react to an existential threat. According to this theory, contemplating our own deaths produces anxiety that we ward off by various psychological defenses. Among these defenses is a stronger belief in worldviews that provide meaning, order, and perhaps a promise of immortality in some form or another.
Three researchers examined how thoughts of death affect people’s acceptance or rejection of evolutionary theory, the foundation of biological science, and intelligent design (ID), which is often couched in scientific language but in fact is not well founded in science. Evolutionary theory is obviously incompatible with belief in a literal instantaneous creation by a deity and arguably with any form of belief in an orderly world created with some purpose. Unfortunately, many people also see evolutionary theory as draining the meaning and purpose from human life. ID is essentially a response to this perception, and as such it offers a more obvious and more traditional sense of meaning.
In a series of studies, the researchers asked participants to write about either their own death or dental pain (which also arouses negative emotions but presumably does not tap into existential anxiety). Then the participants read brief selections from Michael Behe, arguing for ID, and/or Richard Dawkins, arguing for evolutionary theory, and answered questions about how they rated the author’s expertise and how much they agreed with what he was saying. In three studies with a range of participants (some undergrads, some older people from a variety of backgrounds), the authors found that by and large those who had written about death were more likely to agree with Behe than with Dawkins. This was pretty much what they had expected; they figured that ID bolsters the psychological defenses that people tend to draw on when confronted with thoughts of their own death.
The really fascinating stuff comes in the fourth and fifth studies. In the fourth, some of the participants were also given a brief reading from Carl Sagan in which he describes science as providing not just knowledge but meaning and comes down squarely on the side of being courageous enough to accept the universe as it really is, to the best of our current knowledge, and to make our own meaning. The fifth study used only the Behe and Dawkins readings; participants were all college students in the natural sciences. In both, the participants did not tend to accept ID or reject evolutionary theory even if they had written about their own deaths; in fact, they were more likely to reject ID.
I thought these were exciting results, particularly the study that included the Carl Sagan reading. I think our ability to use reason and careful observation to understand the world around us, and to be, as Sagan put it, courageous enough to accept the truths we find, is one of the greatest things about us as a species. The rejection of not just scientific findings but also the values that underlie scientific research is deeply troubling for a number of reasons. I don’t think that accepting science leads to an impoverished worldview; in fact, for me it’s exactly the opposite. Presenting science in a way that is unflinchingly honest about the situation in which we find ourselves and its implications for traditional religious beliefs and at the same time nurtures the deep sense of meaning that people hunger for is crucial. When I read the passage from Sagan that was used in this study, I was impressed at how well he did this. The fact that his words can change the way people react to an existential threat is heartening. A current debate in the online atheist community centers around whether unvarnished, honest rejection of the supernatural is compatible with (a) changing people’s minds or (b) persuading people of the beauty and meaning to be found in science. Although this study involves only a snapshot of people’s reactions to various readings, I think it suggests that science can be presented both honestly and compellingly. Now we need to understand and apply the best techniques that people have found for doing this.
A few weeks ago, I posted about a study that looked at how mindfulness affected people’s reactions to thoughts of their own deaths. Thanks to a good-hearted reader, I now have a copy of the paper itself, which provides a lot more information than the news article I was using.
The research was done in the context of something called terror management theory, which suggests that humans are motivated strongly by the fear of death. Past research has shown that after being reminded of their own mortality, people tend to become more biased and judgmental (favoring their own group over others, choosing harsher punishments for various offenses). The idea, very roughly, is that people defend themselves against uneasiness about death by clinging more strongly to the things in their worldview that provide identity and meaning. The paper looks at how mindfulness influences this behavior.
One thing I wondered about was what measure was used to determine how mindful the participants were. It turns out that their degree of mindfulness was assessed using the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS). (The MAAS is described in this paper, which notes that it “is focused on the presence or absence of attention to and awareness of what is occurring in the present”; it suggests that the degree of mindfulness can be increased with practice, and describes some findings that indicated various correlations between MAAS results and the Big Five personality traits. Those two things together strike me as quite intriguing because they seem to me to be saying that perhaps some personality traits can, at least to some degree, be altered.)
Anyway, the paper about mindfulness and fear of death covered seven different studies that looked at a variety of interlinked questions. The general outline was that participants wrote about either what they imagined their own death would be like, or what watching television is like, and then answered a questionnaire that examined their attitudes or reactions (e.g., the degree to which they favored something written by a foreign, pro-US author versus something by a foreign, anti-US author). One thing that struck me was that in four of the seven studies, the participants were undergrads in their late teens and early twenties. In two of them, the age extended upward to the mid-thirties, and in one of them it extended up to the mid-sixties (the paper didn’t give a breakdown by age). I wonder how age differences might affect the results.
I personally have felt fairly anxious when thinking about my own death; being dead poses no terrors for me, because I think my consciousness will be extinguished when my brain dies. What bothers me is the moment of death and the knowledge that my time has run out: that there are no second chances left, that all of the things I haven’t been able to do or experience will remain forever undone. I have wondered how really old people, who realistically must know that their time on earth is mostly behind them and that death will come sooner rather than later, deal with what that must feel like. I can only assume that if I am fortunate enough to make it into my 80s or 90s, I will have found a way to cope. (I hope I’ll be cheerful enough that I can make jokes about not buying green bananas.) It would be interesting to know how more or less mindful people of different ages compared with each other in these sorts of studies (or if there’s any difference in younger people who have been in a life-threatening situation).
The latest from Symphony of Science episode is all about the brain; it includes some wonderfully poetic words about the experience of consciousness from Jill Bolte Taylor. Enjoy.
Since we’ve had some interesting discussions about slippery and often hotly debated concepts such as “god” and “spiritual,” I think it’s time for a look at another complicated concept that maybe isn’t quite as much of a hot button. Take a look at What is Consciousness? at Information is Beautiful. It gives you an array of capsule descriptions and cool graphics to choose from as you define what you think consciousness is. (You can also provide a smidgen of demographic data and sign up to receive information via email about aggregated response data.) I’m a functionalistic emergent dualistic higher order theorist, but I’d put the emphasis on functionalism. What are you?
H/t Tom.
P.S. If you want to delve into the complexities of what consciousness is, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on consciousness is one good starting place.
In a recent post, I talked about the adaptation of various Eastern spiritual practices by Westerners, and how in the process these practices became more or less belief-free techniques for living a better life within the limitations of being thinking meat. This story from Science Daily is a good example of what I was talking about.
Past research has suggested that when people contemplate their own mortality, they tend to become more biased and judgmental. The idea is that when people feel uneasy about facing death, they are more strongly inclined to defend the beliefs that give them some feeling of stability. However, new research has found that more mindful people were more tolerant of different world views than less mindful people after being reminded of their mortality (specifically, they had to write about what would happen to their bodies after they died). (The Science Daily story and the abstract of the paper don’t say how they determined who was more mindful, and the paper is not available for free, so I can’t find out; I’m guessing they chose people who regularly practiced mindfulness meditation.) Mindfulness involves a calm acceptance of reality that might help people face even the threat of death more open-mindedly.
I wonder if, by extension, people who regularly practice mindfulness might be less inclined to give the expected knee-jerk response when faced with political rhetoric designed to push people’s fear buttons. My own attempts at mindfulness are quite amateurish, but my understanding of the concept is that it can give you an instant of decision before you fall heedlessly into your typical reaction to something, which can be useful if your typical reaction is not helpful. That little bit of freedom to choose a response might make quite a difference. Christopher Hitchens described us as “partly rational animals with adrenal glands that are too big and prefrontal lobes that are too small.” Maybe mindfulness helps us give the prefrontal lobes an edge over the adrenal glands?
Just a quick note: David Weisman has written an opinion piece at Seed about how some (not all) of the tenets of Buddhism match up with what neuroscience is teaching us about the brain. It’s at least somewhat relevant to some of the discussion here lately, particularly because he talks a bit about the differences between Eastern and Western religious thought.
I mentioned that I’m reading Philip Goldberg’s American Veda. I’m noticing some interesting things about the ways that Westerners think about the Eastern spiritual ideas they adopt (and adapt).
For example, a chapter about several high-profile guru scandals concludes with some thoughts on how these scandals, painful as they were for many of the people involved, helped spiritual seekers become more savvy. Despite the continuing presence of “dewy-eyed zeal” around gurus, Goldberg says that Westerners looking to Eastern spiritualities for guidance have become “more autonomous” and “less vulnerable to flawed gurus and oppressive institutions.” One reason for this, he suggests, is the ability to look at gurus as practitioners of a science of consciousness rather than as religious figures, so “their teachings can be viewed not as divine truths but as hypotheses to be tested” (and presumably rejected if they are found wanting).
What I am curious about is whether it is something intrinsic to Eastern spirituality that enables Westerners to view its teachings as hypotheses to be tested, or whether this is possible because most Westerners were not raised to view its teachings, practices, and leaders as sacred or in touch with the divine. (I suppose it might be some of both.) The Catholic sex scandals come to mind here; people who demand that the pope be called before an international court for his part in the cover-up are denounced by some as disrespectful, but it’s hard to see on what possible grounds the pope could have earned the right not to be held responsible other than simply by being a religious figure that people have been taught not to question. What would it take for a culture-wide shift, in the more religious parts of the West, to the belief that Western religious teachings and leaders should be evaluated by the same standards of agreement with physical reality and decent behavior as other beliefs and people?
Another interesting example is the Western attitude toward meditation and yoga. The mainstream scientific establishment has focused on the health benefits of these practices, both physical and mental (reducing the stress response, lowering blood pressure, increasing the ability to focus, etc.). For many Westerners, “yoga” means only the postures, whereas in its homeland, the postures are only one part of the practice of yoga. Some yoga advocates and meditators don’t approve of this stripping away of the spiritual qualities of these practices. (The description of this in the book reminded me a bit of the Christians who complain about the largely secular meaning of Christmas to many people.) To me, though, this development strikes me as being positive overall. For those who seek transcendence, I can’t imagine it’s hard to find someone who will offer to help you get there. For those who don’t, narrowing the focus to the physical and mental effects is a way to understand and apply some useful things the species has learned about how to live well in a human body with a human mind, while dropping (or relegating to the status of myths) the parts that contradict what we know about how the world works. And again, I wonder if it’s easier to follow this process, which in my opinion is beneficial on the whole, with a religion that you were not raised in.
Later this weekend I’ll continue the science/spirituality/religion thread, but for now I just wanted to note an interesting finding about sleep. This article from Science News Daily uses the lovely phrase “sleep fragility” to describe the unlovely phenomenon of sleep that is vulnerable to disruption.
Researchers examined subtle changes in the brain’s alpha rhythm and found that these changes are a good indicator of times when sleep is more likely to be interrupted by noises or other stimuli from the outside world. Alpha waves appear in electroencephalograms (EEGs) or magnetoencephalograms (MEGs) and are typically associated with wakeful relaxation. However, they also occur during sleep, although they aren’t visible to the eye in an EEG but must be revealed by mathematical analysis. In the study described in Science News Daily, sleeping volunteers were exposed to typical background sounds that can interrupt sleep; the sounds were repeated at increasing volume until their sleep was disrupted, as indicated by their EEGs. When alpha wave activity was stronger, their sleep was disturbed by quieter sounds. In other words, the alpha wave activity was correlated with more fragile sleep.
Sometimes I’m apt to drift up to the surface of sleep; it feels just like that, like something in my mind is too light and restless to stay submerged, and I keep floating to the surface. It’s not a whole lot of fun, but I like knowing a little more about what electrical activity is likely to be going on in my brain when it happens. (I wish I knew why, though!) And the researchers who have done this work say that it could be the first step toward finding ways to apply sleeping medications or other treatments that would kick in only when sleep is most fragile, rather than knocking the brain out entirely for the whole night. (I like the word “sledgehammer” that one of the scientists uses to describe sleeping pills; that’s one reason I’m generally reluctant to use them, because I don’t like to sedate my brain to that degree.)
Although I do not believe in any of the gods proposed by the world’s religions, I do have feelings of wonder, awe, connectedness, and transcendence that might reasonably be described as “spiritual.” However, describing and sharing these feelings in the absence of belief in a deity can be difficult. For one thing, as soon as you use the word “spiritual” to describe yourself, the word “supernatural” comes to many minds. And in my experience, there is some reason for this: the word “spiritual” is too often connected with some kind of belief in the supernatural, AKA woo (or in the longer but in my opinion more descriptive version, mumbo-jumbo). It’s enough to make an atheistic primate wonder whether it’s time to stop using the word “spiritual” altogether.
I’ve long been interested in certain Eastern ideas of spirituality, which often seem to offer practical advice for living well without a lot of dogma (at least as they have been presented in the West). As a bonus, some of these approaches also treat the body gently, as something to be cherished, rather than as an enemy to be conquered or disciplined. (The word for this in the Catholicism of my girlhood was “mortified,” as in “the mortification of the flesh.” Ugh.) The problem is that you can generally only get so far into any reading on Buddhism or yoga before bumping up painfully against woo (reincarnation, karma as a true causative agent, levitation) or a renunciatory spirit (celibacy, avoiding alcohol) that is one of the more unfortunate aspects of religion, IMO. If enlightenment is attainable only on the mountaintop away from real life, it has little value for me. (I have found a few non-mumbo-jumbo books about Buddhism and mindfulness; see the list at the bottom of this post.)
So I was very interested in Philip Goldberg’s American Veda, which chronicles the spread of Eastern spiritual concepts in America, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to today. (He specifically investigates only the broader spiritual concepts of what he refers to as Vedanta-Yoga—e.g., “one truth, many paths”—rather than religious ceremonies, deities, and such.) I may have more to say on the book as a whole later. For now, I’m going to focus a couple of things that struck me for what they say about how science is related to Eastern spiritual ideas.
In a chapter on the founding of the Esalen Institute, the famed retreat center that explores humanistic spirituality, Goldberg quoted Jeffry Kripal as saying that Esalen offers
“a kind of secular mysticism that is deeply conversant with democracy, religious pluralism, and modern science.”
Sounds good, especially when compared to fundamentalist versions of Christianity and Islam, which are often opposed to religious pluralism and/or modern science. There are echoes elsewhere in the book of this suggestion that Eastern spirituality is suitable for a modern secular society. However, a little later, in a chapter on the influence of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (guru to the stars, most notably the Beatles), Goldberg quotes Harry Oldmeadow, a theorist of religion:
“The interest in Eastern spirituality met some deep yearning for a vision of reality deeper, richer, more adequate, more attuned to the fullness of human experience, than the impoverished world view offered by a scientifically-grounded humanism.”
I initially interpreted the first quote as implying that people were actively seeking a spirituality that was compatible with other things they valued, e.g., science and democracy. The second quote seemed contradictory: it seemed almost to imply that even if people accept science and humanism, despite the relatively shallow, less adequate world view they offer, they remain hungry for something more. I’ve encountered this attitude before, and I still find it discouraging. Some of my most powerful feelings of wonder, and some of the deepest, richest, most mind-opening thoughts I know, are profoundly connected with our scientific understanding of the world. To me, the quest for an adequate spirituality is about finding a way to make room in my life for those feelings and nurture the experiences that give rise to them (not getting too caught up in the daily round of work and chores) and trying to share them with others. It is not about supplementing the inadequacies of a scientific-humanist world view because I don’t find that world view inadequate.
Goldberg’s book is not specifically about science and Eastern spirituality (although he does have a chapter about that topic, which I’m just about to read), and he certainly doesn’t delve very deeply into what “compatibility with science” might really mean. The people and events he describes often seem to involve a fair amount of woo (e.g., after making a hit with transcendental meditation, the Maharishi went on in the 1970s to try to train people to levitate). The picture overall is fascinating but definitely not one of a mumbo-jumbo-free spirituality, and reading this book is leading me once again to question my use of the word “spiritual” in connection with myself. I’d love to hear what others think. Do you describe yourself as spiritual or as “spiritual but not religious”? Do you think it makes sense for atheists/agnostics to describe themselves as spiritual? I’d be especially interested in hearing from anyone who grew up with the original ideas behind Eastern spirituality and religion in these ideas’ native habitat.
Here are the non-mumbo-jumbo books on Eastern spirituality:
I mentioned yesterday that I’m interested in some of the mental constructs that thinking meat has created, like science or art or religion. I’m particularly interested in areas where these things intersect: what science has to say about how and why we create and enjoy art, for example, and, on the other hand, art that is based on scientific ideas or scientific data. Another particularly exciting intersection these days is the relationship between the world views and approaches of science and religion. In the past, I haven’t exactly hidden the fact that I’m an atheist, but I haven’t been explicit about it either. Consider me fully out of the closet (see that nice red atheist “A” over in the sidebar?).
By “atheist” I mean that I see no reason to believe in any of the deities proposed by the world’s religions, and that I believe that the physical world is all there is: we do not have supernatural souls that predate or outlive the body, and every phenomenon we experience, from hunger to love to lust to transcendence, is based firmly in the physical world. I’m not unsympathetic to metaphorical uses of the word “god” in the sense Einstein used it, as a description of the sum total of the universe and its laws, but overall I tend to avoid such use myself. The main reason for this is that I believe it can foster confusion. Also, in my own case, I found myself using it that way to try to build a bridge between myself and people who believe in a more traditional god. This eventually began to strike me as a dishonest attempt to gloss over a deep difference in world view, and it became important to me to articulate my views more clearly.
The decision to be direct about my views on this topic coincides with a gradual realization that in order to understand each other and live together well, humans should be able to respectfully and honestly discuss religious ideas with the same rigor and intellectual standards we bring to discussions of any other aspect of the world or of human behavior. We can’t leave a large chunk of human behavior outside of the realm of rational discussion. I’d also say that as a species, we would be much more successful at getting along with each other and not trashing our planet if our actions and decisions were evidence-based and concerned solely with what we know about the physical world here and now (which of course includes the emotional world of human interactions and relationships).
Tomorrow: Spiritual but not religious: what does that mean?
, which is not out yet but is available for pre-order.
by Cordelia Fine
. I’m noticing some interesting things about the ways that Westerners think about the Eastern spiritual ideas they adopt (and adapt).
