Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 3 August 2021

 

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

This is a history of rational methods of dealing with uncertainty. It treats, therefore, methods devised in law, science, commerce, philosophy, and logic to get at the truth in all cases in which certainty is not attainable.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Chinese law thereafter [Confucious] changed little until the impact of Western forms of thought in the nineteenth century. Confession was regarded as almost always necessary, and torture was ordered when guilt was already certain and clear but the accused refused to confess. Early Portuguese visitors to China found torture routinely used on suspects against whom there was the least evidence and on witnesses who disagreed with one another. There was no space in Chinese law for a legal profession, and hence for any formal science of law, and so for a forum for discussion of legal questions like the strength of evidence.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

“Even if someone should happen to be almost right, he could never be sure, for dokos is upon all things.” The Greek word dokos means “seeming” as opposed to really being: The One is; the Many merely seem to be. This doctrine is substantially the same as the Hindu doctrine of ma-ya- [maya], which similarly holds that since only the One is real, the Many must be a kind of seeming. This is the point where Xenophanes has seemed to some Western thinkers to have contradicted himself.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

Just as the evidence has inexorably accumulated over the years supporting the observation that LCHF/ketogenic diets make us healthier, the evidence supporting the idea that saturated fat is deadly and that we should all eat low-fat diets has been fading, despite the best efforts of the orthodoxy to prop it up. The more research that’s been done, the less compelling it becomes. This is always a bad sign in science and a persuasive reason to believe that a theory or a belief is simply wrong. Outside mathematics, it’s impossible to prove anything definitively one way or the other. Evidence always exists to support reasonable hypotheses (and even some unreasonable ones), because studies will always be done that get the wrong answer or that are interpreted incorrectly. That’s why I suggest we follow the trends.

Personal Knowledge

Michael Polanyi

The Viennese-born Karl Popper rejected the legitimacy of empirical verification as the right way to establish scientific hypothesis and theory. Instead, despite the Duhem-Quine thesis and other objections, Popper insisted on the criterion of falsifiability, or the necessity for a hypothesis to withstand tests that could decisively disprove it, as a basis for theory choice. Further, Popper argued that falsifiability is the best criterion for demarcating true science from pseudoscience. [From the Forward by Mary Jo Nye.]

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Arendt further distinguished totalitarianism from pragmatism. “Totalitarianism is distinguished from pragmatism in that it no longer believes that reality as such can teach anything and, consequently, has lost the earlier Marxist respect for facts. Pragmatism, even in the Leninist version, still assumes with the tradition of occidental thought that reality reveals truth to man, although it asserts that not contemplation, but action is the proper truth-revealing attitude.… Pragmatism always assumes the validity of experience and ‘acts’ accordingly; totalitarianism assumes only the validity of the law of a moving History or Nature. Whoever acts in accordance with this law no longer needs particular experiences.” [From a note by Jerome Kohn.]

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

For was not American politics liberal at birth and democratic soon after? As we are seeing, that is at best a half-truth. American conservatism was strong from the beginning. It was liberal in some ways, not in others. American conservatives, to schematize, were economically laissez-faire but dubious about the liberal faith in open-ended progress. They did not believe in equality, doubted people’s capacity for self-government, and opposed direct, unfiltered democracy. In religious terms, American conservatism tended to an Augustinian, not a Pelagian, view of humankind as flawed and, in this world, unredeemable.

The Secret Body: Erotic & Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions by Jeffrey Kriipal

Something's happenin' here, what it is ain't exactly clear

This book continues my reading of Jeffrey Kripal, whose insights and speculations I find intriguing. This is my fourth book by Kripal that I've read, and each one has intrigued me. The Secret Body (2019) is unique because it serves as a summary of his work to date. It consists of a series of diverse essays with commentary about this personal and scholarly journey. As I mentioned in my review of The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind & the Future of Knowledge, Kripal grew-up in a small town in southeast Nebraska, which is the middle nowhere by most people's reckoning. I grew up in southwest Iowa, on the other side of the Missouri River, which is a fraction less of a nowhere than southeast Nebraska. (But, of course, in growing-up, one thinks of one's home turf as the Middle Earth, the Center of the Known Universe.) Anyway, that someone from such a bland background could go on to have such adventures (of the mind) as Kripal has serves as a reminder of what we are capable of in our capacities to grow and experience the larger world. Indeed, another particularly personal source of enjoyment in reading The Secret Body comes from reading about Kripal's Catholic boyhood and upbringing. I'm about nine years older than Kripal, and I grew up (in part) in the pre-Vatican II Church, an even more exotic experience than Kripal's post-Vatican II experience. Vatican II "Protestantized" the Ameican Catholic Church in many ways. (For a spot-on account of the pre-Vatican II American Catholic experience see Garry Wills's Bare-Ruined Choirs (1972).) So although Kripal missed out on what I might label "the full Catholic experience," his faith nevertheless provided a formative experience that set him on his way to his intellectual adventures. Finally, also in a personal vein, Kripal describes his visits to his home town and family in Nebraska as an adult, academic scholar of religions. These visits constitute a trip to an outwardly familiar but also alien world, almost as alien (or exotic) as his experiences with Hindu culture and religion and his investigations of paranormal experience. Kripal recognizes both the goodness of the folks who live there and their stubborn insularity that has allowed politicians--and especially the Great Orange Menace (my term, not Kripal's)--to act to the detriment of those good folks. Again, Kripal's experience resonates with me. One needn't be a wild-eyed radical (I'm certainly not) to see that many of the attitudes held by these folks "are neither [as] pure, nor wise, nor good" as they would believe, and their attitudes and decisions also hurt those of us who share this planet with them. Kripal is justly blunt but loving in his critique. 

Kripal's scholarly journey provides the backbone of his book, and while it may seem an esoteric topic--well, it is. During the time that Kripal spent as a monk, he underwent Freudian psychoanalysis to deal with anorexia (disguised as ascetic holiness), and he came to the realization that the monastery was in some sense a gay institution, although homosexuality was officially condemned by the Church. Kripal describes his transformation after his successful psychoanalysis and his insight into the monastic life: 

By the end of that year, the analyst, the buxom women, and I had cured the anorexia. 

 And I was really hungry. I ate everything in sight. I gained about seventy pounds over the next few months. I was a new man at twenty-two. Suddenly, I was also a sexual being.  

The seminary community was a hotbed of psychosocial exploration, but which I do not mean anything explicitly sexual, much less genital. I mean that those years constituted a four-year initiation in the sexual roots of the spiritual life and the spiritual roots of the sexual life. The basic point is this; I came into my early psychological awakening and intellectual calling as a confused and repressed straight man in what was, more or less (mostly more), a gay religious community.

Kripal goes on to ponder the implications of all this, and he recognizes (among many things) the deep debt he owes to both Jesus and Freud for coming to a greater understanding of his world. Indeed, these insights into sexuality became the basis of Kripal's early scholarly work, which he pursued via a doctorate in comparative religions at the University of Chicago and that he parlayed into a successful academic career (he's been at Rice University of many years now). Each of Kripal's first three books deals with mysticism and sexuality. (I've read The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (2008) and it's a duzzy--perhaps my excuse for not having reviewed it yet.) As you may imagine, some people don't like to think about the sexuality of Jesus or of the nineteenth-century Hindu mystic Ramakrishna, and Kripal has drawn the wrath of fundamentalists in both the U.S. and India for his explorations and explications. And, of course, it's all fascinating. 

After becoming a persona non grata to Hindu fundamentalists, Kripal turned closer to home to explore what is often described as the "paranormal," and what he  has come to term the "super natural." This takes him into the world of Esalen (the counter-culture capital on the Big Sur), comic books, and UFOs, among other topics. And if you think that these topics are far from religion, then you haven't read enough Jeffrey Kripal. With each new topic, Kripal further explores and refines his thoughts as "the human as two." In fact, he develops twenty theses that he labels "gnomons," which Kripal describes as "a short aphorism and maxim . . . that [are] "gnostic" in nature," along with other enticing associations, including gnomes, those little creatures of the earth whose statues populate our gardens with their pointy hats. These brief statements provide a series of stations or markers that provide some conclusions or working hypotheses that Kripal has arrived at during the course of his investigations. He reveals each gnomon as his account progresses. But to be clear: this is not an intellectual biography as such. While Kripal includes aspects of his personal and scholarly biography along with way, he also includes a number of short scholarly articles he's written on various topics that highlight and explore his scholarly inquires. This interspacing of reminisces with articles written along his scholarly journal works well, each perspective casts further light on the other. 

As I reflect on this work, I'm struck by what a fun and exciting read this book provides. Perhaps Kripal's a little crazy, but perhaps not; perhaps his ideas are too out there; but perhaps not. I'm not sure if Kripal is chasing phantoms, and I suspect he'd be the first to suggest that the line between phantoms and "reality" is a thin, permeable line, which we can only intuit by extraordinary glances. In Kripal's persuasive view, we are "the human as two," with a whole lot going on that we as a species have been trying to understand and appreciate for our entire history. And it seems we're just getting going. 

Riots in Jaipur, Kerala, and Throughout India: A Sad & Frightening Story

NYTIMES.COM

Protests Spread Across India Over Divisive Citizenship Law

Several people have been killed as the unrest spreads to new corners of the country, and security forces have cracked down.

I'm deeply saddened to read about the new anti-Muslim law in #India and the resulting violence. Both #Jaipur and the state of #Kerala--where C & I lived about a year-each during our two years in India--reported violence and deaths. In Dehli, where we spent a fair amount of time, the report suggests a police riot (and I suspect other places as well, although some held higher expectations of the #Dehli police). India has, I believe, the second-highest population of Muslims in the world (behind Indonesia), but Indian Muslims have been subject to a great deal of discrimination and mistreatment--including violence. When we were in Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum), Kerala, in 2014, Modi was elected prime minister, and I, and many others, thought his election didn't bode well for India and the fraught issue of religious tolerance. Where we lived in Thiruvananthapuram, we had a mosque, a surprising variety of Christian churches, and Hindu temples within a short walking distance of our apartment. And they seemed to play well together. (Of Jaipur, firmly in the center of the solidly Hindu-dominant north but near Muslim areas, I'm less surprised.)

The leadership of Gandhi, Nehru, and Ambedkar (the least known & under-appreciated of this founding triumvirate) attempted to form a religiously-tolerate nation-state, but that has been difficult, as it has been in the U.S. And as the U.S. still suffers the original sin of slavery, so India from its caste system. It's sad but not surprising that these troubles exist and that the BJP under #Modi would attempt to fan and exploit divisions. At one point Modi was barred from traveling to the U.S. because of his perceived role in anti-Muslin riots in #Gujarat in the early 1990s. So again, no surprise.

"A widespread belief is that the Indian government will use both these measures — the citizenship tests and the new citizenship law — to render millions of Muslims who have been living in India for generations stateless." (From the article below.) The words "render . . . stateless" should send a chill through anyone who's read Hannah Arendt or #TimothySnyder, among others. Such moves pave the way for genocide and less lethal forms of discrimination and horror. It's a very sad & alarming story to wake-up to.

Several people have been killed as the unrest spreads to new corners of the country, and security forces have cracked down.

The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind & the Future of Knowledge by Jeffrey J. Kripal

Look at a photo of Jeffrey Kripal, and you’ll see a pleasant, teddy-bear- looking fellow (or the winner of a Karl Rove look-alike contest). He looks pleasant and friendly, and I suspect he is both. But behind this pleasant facade and seemingly easy-going demeanor is an intellectual daredevil. Let me provide a little background of what I know about this Clark Kent of scholars. 

Kripal was raised in a small town in southeast Nebraska and raised a Catholic. As he reached his teen years, instead of pursuing a the common family pursuit of athleticism, he marked himself off by becoming very thin via religiously-motivated--or so he thought--fasting. And after graduation from high school, he went off to a monastery in Missouri. There, his fellow monks worried about his appearance (thin), and they put him in psychoanalysis with a Benedictine monk. Kripal gained a great deal from this, not the least of which was weight. What he discovered in this process was that he has issues with sexuality that he was suppressing and that he was suffering (as he describes it) from anorexia. With this life-altering and intriguing knowledge, Kripal left that seminary and went to pursue a degree in comparative religion at the University of Chicago. Apparently not one to take the easy course, he concentrated in the Hindu tradition, studying under an acclaimed expert in that tradition, Wendy Doniger. (Surely he learned some Latin and Greek during his time in the Church and in a monastery.) But like Doniger, Kripal’s writings about Hindusim--especially about the sexuality of some Hindu gods and adepts--drew the wrath of militant Hindus, and this eventually drove him from the field. (It seems that writing about the sexuality of religious figures in an established tradition can yield death threats for such perceived transgressions. The same thing happened to Doniger while we lived in India, and her book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, was supposed to be pulled from shelves in India by her publishers--although I found it in Trivandrum, I’m happy to report.)  (Most of this information comes from a Youtube interview of Kripal conducted by science journalist John Horgan, which is well worth watching to get an overview of where Kripal is coming from and what he's up to.)

Karl Rove? No? Well, different thoughts, I'm sure, the likeness notwithstanding

So Kripal took his professional life in a new and no less provocative direction by inquiring into the “paranormal”--all the weird, seemingly impossible things that people report have happened both within and outside of established religions. What’s going on with reports of telepathy, precognition, near-death experiences, levitation, UFO abductions, conversing with spirits, and so on? Needless to say, this broad topic is fraught with challenges and skeptics from both religious and secular perspectives. Nevertheless, he persists, and happily so.

Flip is Kripal’s most recent venture into this field, and I think it serves as a summary of where he’s gone and what (often tentative) conclusions he’s reached so far. (In this, I’m speculating, because I’ve read only one of his earlier works in full, The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (2006), but Flip certainly seems like a weigh station on his journey). In any event, Kripal provides a useful summary of his conclusions to date and how his thinking along these lines might continue. In the book, he addresses individuals and their “flip” experiences, and ideas about how weird reality might be made more comprehensible through contemporary thinking based on quantum physics and scientifically-informed philosophy. I should note that philosophy is called on in part because it is one the humanities (as opposed to a field in the natural sciences). In short, the humanities deal with the mind or consciousness. As Kripal notes, “Consciousness is the fundamental ground of all we know, or ever will know” (46) and the humanities involve “the study of consciousness coded in culture” (45). Later in the book Kripal reminds us again of the importance of the mind (consciousness) to scientific as endeavors as well as those of the  humanities: 

Mind or consciousness is the locus of all scientific practice and knowledge; that science, at the end of the day, is a function of human subjectivity and consciousness and not, as often assumed, a simple photographic record of the world of things and objects "out there." (15).

Kripal buttresses his arguments via quantum theory, drawing upon, for instance, international relations theorist-turned-quantum social science proponent, Alexander Wendt, along with others. He also draws upon contemporary philosophers such as Philip Goff and Bernardo Kastrup. But the most compelling aspect of the book isn’t the theory (interesting as it is), but in his choice of witnesses to the paranormal. For his testimonials, he draws upon scientists, physicians, a philosopher, and a rationalist--not a “religious” figure among them. A couple of his exemplars I found especially surprising: A.J. Ayer, the famed logical positivist philosopher and Barbara Ehrenreich, a cell biologist and journalist concerned about women’s issues and poverty. But she’s also the author of Living With a Wild God: An Unbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything (2014) that details a “flip” experience of her own that occurred in her youth. Another witness (as it were) is Eben Alexander III, a physician who suffered a near-death experience and an extended coma that flipped his perspective on "reality." I trust you get Kripal’s point: this isn’t the group of loonies that you might expect. (For a parody of those whom many would associate with paranormal events, see the SNL skits with Kate McKinnon as the renegade UFO subject whose reports aren’t sweetness and light but instead hilarious sexual shenanigans.) 

This book and Kripal’s project as a whole to inspect what’s under the hood of the paranormal or “super natural” is a careful and thoughtful--and needed--investigation into these undeniable phenomena. He’s fun to read and can hold the reader's attention much as we’d be held in thrall by a . . . well, a ghost story.