Michael Prescott's Blog

Commit to the process, detach from the outcome

I am no expert in Hinduism or any other Eastern religion. So far, my sole investigation of Hinduism has consisted of reading the Bhagavad Gita, a poem that contains the core teachings of the Hindu faith. Copies of the Gita are said to be found in hotel rooms throughout India, much as the King James Version of the Bible is frequently found in US hotels.

The Gita's date of composition is unknown and may be anywhere from the fifth century BC to the second century AD. It is apparently a later addition to a very long poem, the Mahabharata. One Web site summarizes the Gita this way:

The BHAGAVAD GITA is primarily a dialog between Arjuna, the third Pandava brother, and his charioteer, Krishna. Remaining neutral, Krishna allowed one side to use his vassals in battle, while the other side could have him as a charioteer although he would not fight himself. The old blind King Dhritarashtra declined a great sage's offer to give him sight for the battle, because he did not want to see the bloodshed. Instead the great sage gave Sanjaya the ability to perceive at a distance everything that was going on, and he describes the events for the King.

In the GITA Krishna, who is the uncle and friend of the Pandavas, gives Arjuna teachings on yoga, which means union and implies union with God. Krishna is considered by Hindus to be an incarnation of the god Vishnu, the preserver.

I will admit that much of the Gita went over my head. Like any religious text, it requires extensive (and intensive) study for full understanding. A casual reading will provide only superficial rewards. Nevertheless, there was one lesson taught by the Gita that I have found highly useful in my own life. The lesson is:

Commit to the process, detach from the outcome.

Now, what does this mean? Let's take a simple example. Say you're going on a diet. Your goal (the desired outcome) is to lose ten pounds. The method (or process) is to cut back on fattening foods.

There are two ways you could carry out your diet. You could weigh yourself daily, looking for any sign of weight loss. You could become frustrated because the weight is not coming off fast enough. You could then try starving yourself to get quicker results. Most likely, the starvation approach will lead only to anxiety and discomfort, and before long you will be off the diet altogether.

That's committing to the outcome, not the process. It doesn't work.

Here's the other approach. You don't weigh yourself at all. You forget all about your goal of losing ten pounds. Ten pounds, after all, is a somewhat arbitrary number; it could be nine pounds or eleven pounds; what matters is that you get healthier. The way to get healthier is to eat better - so you focus on that. You avoid snacks and desserts, eat smaller portions of more nutritious food, and enjoy the process of adapting to a fitter lifestyle. At the end of a month or two, you get on the scale - and find that you have lost at least some of the weight.

This is committing to the process and detaching from the outcome. And it works.

Examples could be multiplied indefinitely. Stuck in slow-moving traffic? If you commit to the outcome (getting to your destination), you will become more and more frustrated and may eventually be a nervous wreck or a candidate for road rage. If you commit to the process (the trip itself) and forget about the outcome (you'll get there when you get there), then you can relax, listen to the radio, watch the scenery, and arrive - eventually - in a calm, collected state of mind.

Writing a novel? Commit to the outcome (a finished book), and you will be frustrated by the number of pages left to go. Writing the book will become a chore, a dull slog through hundreds of pages with only a distant goal to keep you motivated. But commit to the process (the challenge of writing each chapter, or page, or paragraph), and you will enjoy the work, do a better job, and still get to your goal sooner or later.

Why does this method work? Because, for all our obsession with control, we cannot really control the outcome of anything we do. There is no guarantee we will reach our destination on time, or at all. We could get in a car accident and never arrive. There is no guarantee we will finish the book we're writing; we might die of a heart attack when we're halfway through (and if we are frustrated and upset all the time, the odds of cardiac arrest probably go up).

We cannot control what happens. We can control only what we do, how we approach the situation. We can't control outside events. We can control only our own mindset and response.

So ... commit to the process (which we can control) and detach from the outcome (over which we have no control).

One more example may make this principle clearer. You're going in for a job interview, and you really want to be hired. Should you commit to the outcome? In that case, your focus is on impressing the interviewer and trying to do so well in the interview that he can't help but hire you. In fact, however, you have no control over his hiring decision. Maybe he is going to hire his nephew for the position no matter how great a candidate you are. Maybe he will be irrationally prejudiced against you, or will just be in a bad mood on the day you see him. You cannot control him. And at some level you know this. But you feel that you must control him - somehow. You must find a way to attain the outcome you desire.

Result? You are agitated, self-conscious, under tremendous inner pressure. Your nervousness and desperation come across. You try to hide it, and end up only seeming that much more desperate. When you leave the interview, worn out and feeling sick to your stomach from stress, you know you didn't handle the interview well. You were too wound up to relax and be yourself.

But suppose you commit to the process and detach from the outcome ...

Then you go into the interview knowing that there is nothing you can do to compel anyone to hire you. It is out of your hands. If you are hired, fine. If not, then that's the way it goes. Whatever will be, will be. Your only priority is to do the best you can, without worrying about the result, which you can't control, anyway.

You focus on the meeting itself, not on the prospect of a hiring decision to be made later. You are in the moment. Because you have let go of your need to control and impress the other person, you can be at ease, relaxed and confident and articulate. When the meeting ends, you leave feeling fine, and put the interview out of your mind, knowing that you can do nothing further to affect the course of events.

Which strategy is more likely to get you the job? More important, which strategy is more likely to save you from needless stress, fear, inner conflict, frustration, anger, and feelings of helplessness and depression?

So this is the advice of the Bhagavad Gita, advice I recommend to anyone:

Commit to the process, detach from the outcome.

Try it. It works.

The Bible and reincarnation

Every now and then someone makes the claim that reincarnation, an idea usually associated with Eastern religions, was actually part of the worldview of Biblical writers, as well. Supposedly this idea was later suppressed, but survives in certain isolated passages. Three passages from the New Testament are routinely cited as proof.

In one case, we hear that people wondering about Jesus' identity thought he was either John the Baptist returned from the dead or the prophet Elijah or some other ancient prophet "who has arisen" (Luke 9:7-8). Now, Jesus and John the Baptist were contemporaries, so Jesus could hardly be understood as the reincarnation of John. The idea seems to be that some people thought John, who was beheaded by Herod, had been resurrected ("raised from the dead," in the passage) and was now calling himself Jesus.

As for Elijah, he occupies a unique place in Hebrew folklore. The Bible never actually says that he dies, merely that he is taken up to heaven. (2 Kings 2:11) As a result, the legend developed that Elijah was able to shuttle back and forth between heaven and earth. Whenever a new prophet arose, there was always the hope that he was Elijah in a new guise. Reincarnation is not the issue here, simply the special status of an exalted prophet who had been granted unique mobility between two worlds.

What about the third possibility - that "one of the ancient prophets has arisen"? The text note for NET Bible reads:

The phrase had risen could be understood to mean "had been resurrected," but this is only a possible option, not a necessary one, since the phrase could merely mean that a figure had appeared on the scene who mirrored an earlier historical figure.

If the words mean "resurrected," then we are not talking about reincarnation but the reanimation of the dead prophet's body. If instead they mean that Jesus "mirrored an earlier historical figure," then we still aren't speaking of reincarnation. In this period (and later) there was a widespread tendency to view earlier figures and events as "types" on which later figures and events would be modeled.

A second passage often cited is the famous conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus in the Gospel of John, in which Jesus says that it's necessary for a person to be born twice. (John 3:3) But this statement also has nothing to do with reincarnation. In fact, when Nicodemus takes the statement literally and asks how it's possible for a man to pass out of his mother's womb a second time, Jesus ridicules him, saying in effect: You don't get what I'm saying and you still pass yourself off as a teacher?

The exact meaning of being born twice or born again -- born of the spirit -- is ambiguous, especially since the Hebrew word ruah can mean both breath and spirit (or Spirit); in Greek, the word pneuma has the same double meaning. But it's clear that some kind of mystical or spiritual rebirth is intended, not a physical rebirth. In fact, an alternate translation of the text is "born from above," which more clearly expresses the idea of spiritual transformation.

The final passage involves a man blind from birth. People ask Jesus whether this man's blindness is a result of his parents' sin or of his own sin. (John 9:1-3) Since the man was born blind, some commentators argue, his own sin could be responsible only if he had sinned while still in the womb. As this is "obviously" impossible, people must have believed that his sin took place in an earlier lifetime.

But what is obvious to us today may not have been obvious to people in the ancient world. In fact, it was a common belief at the time that a child could sin while still in the womb. This belief had nothing to do with the doctrine of original sin, which was developed by Augustine centuries later. It was simply an item of folklore, hard for us to understand but taken for granted in those days. In any case, Jesus rejects both explanations -- the child's sin and the parents' -- and says that the man's blindness serves an altogether different purpose.

There is, then, no indication that a belief in reincarnation was held among Jews or early Christians. This line of argument is - no pun intended - a dead end.

Personally I've never seen the appeal of reincarnation anyway. Who wants to go through high school again?

Just one more little thing about Rand ...

... and then I'll quit talking about her, I swear!

I just wanted to say that I've had second thoughts about a post I published in March, titled Was Ayn Rand Evil? In the post I raised the possibility that Rand might fit the textbook description of a sociopath. I now think it was unfair and wrong of me to make that suggestion.

Why the change of heart? I was talking with a politically liberal friend who was telling me that George W. Bush matches up with the definition of a sociopath. And it occurred to me that just as liberals say this about Bush, conservatives were saying similar things about Bill Clinton when he was president. Reason magazine even published an article by Edith Efron titled "Can the President Think?", arguing that Clinton was pathologically incapable of setting priorities or reaching decisions.

It seems that our tendency today is to psychoanalyze anyone we dislike. It's not enough to say we disagree with Clinton or Bush - or Rand. We have to demonize them. "Sociopath" is the modern equivalent of "warlock" or "witch" - a subhuman category to which we consign our enemies.

The truth, as I see it, is that neither Clinton nor Bush is anywhere even close to a sociopath. Both men have strengths and weaknesses. Personally I am more comfortable with Bush's style of leadership and core values. But Clinton has his good points, as well; his handling of the Bosnian war, for instance, was efficient and praiseworthy. And Bush has certainly made mistakes - like reiterating the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction even after the evidence began to clearly show that there were none.  And, let's face it, anyone who aspires to the presidency is going to have a strong ego and an ability to rub some people the wrong way.

My point is, it's not helpful to caricature one's opponents. In suggesting that Ayn Rand was "evil" or a "sociopath," I was engaging in unnecessarily heated and provocative rhetoric. I certainly do not recommend trying to live by her philosophy, and I think that in the real world an architect as unyielding as Howard Roark in The Fountainhead would be unemployed, but I do have a grudging respect for Rand's tenacious pursuit of her literary career and her refusal to be cowed by opposition or criticism (even if much of the criticism was justified). She had her flaws, and they became more pronounced in her later years; she damaged many of the people around her and many of the people who followed her; but none of them had a gun held to their head. They could have left her ranks at any time. And whatever damage she did to others, she probably inflicted at least equal harm on herself.

Besides, name-calling is one of the things I criticize Rand's followers for doing. It's hardly consistent of me to be doing the same thing myself.

And now - really - I'm ready to move on.

My last anti-Ayn Rand rant

I never wanted to turn my blog into an Ayn-Rand-bashing site, but it seems to have worked out that way. Today I decided to get it all out of my system and then move on to other, more constructive topics.

The inspiration for this post was some email correspondence I've been having with a friend of mine who seems to still accept a good deal of Rand's Objectivist philosophy. In this debate I found myself getting a little frustrated, and finally figured out why. It wasn't just the specific questions under discussion; it was the whole idea of having to take Ayn Rand seriously again.

I then unloaded on Rand, her philosophy, and her movement in a perhaps ill-advised but nonetheless immensely satisfying blast of emailed invective. And having inflicted this tirade on my pal, I opt now to share it (slightly edited for clarity and brevity) with the world, or whatever small portion of it happens to drop by this blog.

After this, I promise to desist in all things anti-Rand, and think only happy thoughts.  : )

My friend had asked why I insisted on bringing the discussion back to Rand when we ought to focus on the specifics of our intellectual disagreement. This was a perfectly valid question, and in considering it, I came up with this answer:

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Here is one reason why I tend to revert to talking about Rand. Somehow our whole discussion puts me back into the world of the Ayn Rand discussion group we both belonged to in the 1980s. At the time, as I began to have doubts about Objectivism (Rand's philosophy and movement), I thought of myself as somewhat "peculiar" because I wasn't accepting the ideas that were being put forward so self-confidently all around me.

But when I look back on those ideas, here is what I see:

Atlas Shrugged is great literature. Selfishness is good, altruism and self-sacrifice are evil. There is no God or anything miraculous or supernatural. Unregulated capitalism is the ideal. Ayn Rand was the greatest thinker since Aristotle. The heroes of Rand's novels are realistic role models. A person should never have an irrational emotion. Faith is evil. America is headed toward a Nazi-style dictatorship. Kant is the most evil man in history. Popular culture is uniformly without merit. A couple should have children only if they have the proper, rational reasons to do so. The environmental movement is anti-life. Ronald Reagan was a terrible president because he was religious. We should drop nuclear bombs preemptively on our enemies (a position reiterated a year or two ago by Rand's heir, Leonard Peikoff, on The O'Reilly Factor, prompting O'Reilly, no pacifist, to blurt out, "Who are you - Dr. Strangelove?!"), the 19th century was a Golden Age, all drugs should be legalized, all roads should be privately owned, Social Security and Medicare should be abolished, the FDA is immoral, taxation should be ended and the government should rely on voluntary contributions, health inspections at restaurants are a violation of individual rights ...

This was the intellectual atmosphere I breathed, back in the '80s. And unlike Bill Clinton, I inhaled!

There's not a single one of the above ideas that strikes me as valid today, and most strike me as downright perverse. And I think the great majority of my fellow humans would agree in finding most or all of the above notions perverse and wrong. Of course, truth is not a matter of opinion surveys, but when I look back, I wonder how I could possibly have regarded myself as "strange" or "weird" for finding fault with doctrines that would be rejected by 90% of  my fellow men and women.

And the answer is: Objectivism is a cult. And when a person is in a cult, the cult's dogmas start to seem self-evident and obvious, because the dogmas are perpetually reinforced. It becomes nearly impossible to break out. And when a member does start to break free, he feels guilty - because he is abandoning the only worldview he knows.

I've done some reading on cults since I left Objectivism, and the shoe fits. Indeed, how could any well-educated person believe all or most of the above ideas, and others like them, without being psychologically manipulated to some degree?

So this is my roundabout way of saying that if I keep referring to Rand and her ideas, it's because this conversation tends to provoke "flashbacks" in me - flashbacks to those days when Rand's ideas were my intellectual environment.

And I must admit, I grow weary of reliving my years as an Objectivist. Those were, I think, largely wasted years, as any years in a cult must be. The reason I attack Rand in my blog and on my Web site, even though it is probably not in my economic interest to do so, is that I would like to prevent at least a few people from making the mistakes I made. Like those who have gotten out of Scientology and then create Web sites to criticize it, I'm trying to get across the message (in my own small way) that Ayn Rand can be hazardous to one's health - or at least to one's intellectual, emotional, and personal growth.

No doubt there are some Objectivist propositions that can be defended, just as there are probably some propositions advanced by Scientology or est or the Unification Church that can be defended. But I look at the total package, not isolated tidbits. And I look at what this movement does to people - mostly young people. People like Ellen Plasil, sexually abused by her Objectivist psychiatrist (she wrote about it in her book Therapist). People like a young Objectivist I knew who had a college education and an obviously high IQ and was working as a dishwasher in a diner because, well, what could he hope to accomplish in this "irrational society"? People who were put "on trial" in Ayn Rand's apartment back in the '60s, or who broke with their familes because Objectivism convinced them that their relatives were "evil."

I remember once arguing with a devout Objectivist and being highly critical of Leonard Peikoff. The Objectivist became very upset and sputtered that I had to stop saying bad things about Peikoff because ... because ... "It's just bad stuff!"

That's how I view Objectivism now. It's just bad stuff.

I wish I could be more dispassionate about it, but at some point I think of Ayn Rand reducing a young girl to tears because of some alleged "irrationality" she had commited, and the next day the girl, a promising ballerina, gave up her career in shame (a story recounted in Jeff Walker's The Ayn Rand Cult) ... and whoops, there goes my dispasionate analysis, and I am back to thinking of Ayn Rand as a sociopath or a sadist or a borderline personality (the kindest diagnosis), and her megalomaniacal pseudo-philosophy as a patchwork of rationalizations constructed to con the young by using their own idealism against them.

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Okay. That's what I wrote. And that, my friends, is that.

Time to come up with new and pleasant posts about, oh, I don't know, kittens and puppies and rainbows.

From atheism to theism

A friend of mine recently asked me how I had come to change from being an atheist to a theist, a conversion he found unusual. This is a big subject but, I think, an interesting one, so I thought I would outline some of my reasons here. Please note that I am in no way saying that the points enumerated below constitute any sort of proof of God. I doubt there is any such proof, in the absolute sense, and even if there is, it would take far more than a few sentences to supply it.

Also, I might note that switching from atheism to theism is probably not that unusual at all. In fact, I would venture to say that many people go through a process of development something like this: As a child, the person believes unquestioningly in God because all the adults around him tell him that he should. Then as he becomes a teenager, he starts to doubt the adults and, in time, decides that God is just another scam like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Later, as an adult, he begins to consider the possibility that his childish conception of God was simply inadequate, and that a more mature conception may have merit. Eventually, for a variety of reasons, he finds himself a "believer" again, but not at all the kind of believer he was in his childhood.

I suspect that this course of development is very common, though I don't know of any studies that would prove it.

I also note that even a philosophically committed atheist can change his mind - as did Anthony Flew, the world's most famous atheistic philosopher, who not long ago announced that he had been persuaded to adopt theism, albeit reluctantly. Flew's reasons match some of my own, as you will see. Incidentally, I found it very courageous of Flew to make this announcement, when it would have been far easier for him to keep silent.

Okay, my reasons, in no particular order, and without much elaboration:

1. The anthropic principle and cosmic coincidences. It is now a commonplace of astrophyics and cosmology that our universe appears to be "fine-tuned" to be orderly and habitable. Either the universe is a product of design (the God hypothesis), or there are trillions upon trillions of universes (the "multiverse" hypothesis), and by chance one of them turned out just right. Either explanation requires a leap of faith, since neither God nor these parallel universes can be directly perceived. I go with God as the simpler and more elegant solution.

2. The origin of life. The old idea that the first living cell came together spontaneously by pure chance is no longer seriously argued, now that scanning electron microscopy has shown us the fantastic complexity of even the "simplest" cell. Some scientists speculate that a "self-organizing principle" was responsible, but no one has found evidence of such a principle, except in oversimplified computer models that bear little relationship to real chemical activity. Further, the origin of life involves the origin of information, since life is based on DNA, and DNA is essentially a means of encoding instructions on how to build and deploy proteins. Information is a qualitatively different thing from mere repetitive order (e.g., a DNA molecule is different in kind from a snowflake), and it is unclear how information could emerge spontaneously out of disorder or mere repetitive order. A Mind that supplied both the information and the structure necessary for the first living cell seems like a better bet than any purely naturalistic scenario.

(Points 1 and 2 are the ones that apparently persuaded Anthony Flew.) 

3. All attempts to ground morality in naturalistic laws or brute physical facts have (in my opinion) failed, leaving us with two choices: either moral values are subjective and arbitrary, or they are objective but grounded in something outside nature. A world of purely arbitrary moral laws is one in which no one could condemn murder or the Holocaust as evil.  I find such a condition intolerable, so I opt for ethical nonnaturalism (even though I concede that this position, too, is tricky to defend).

4. Materialism, the view that the physical world is all that exists and that mind is, at best, only an epiphenomenon (i.e., trivial side effect) of matter, leads to a debased view of human beings, who are seen as mere animals, machines, robots, or vehicles for genetic reproduction. The dignity of man is incompatible with philosophical materialism.

5. On a personal level, I feel that life simply has no meaning if "this is all there is." You live, work, suffer setbacks and occasional triumphs, then die and cease to exist. All the people who knew you will be dead soon, too, and you will be entirely forgotten. What difference did it make whether you lived or not? What's the point? For me personally, I do not see any way to find meaning in existence if human life is a mere accident and the cosmos has no higher purpose. I realize that other people are apparently able to find meaning on these terms, but I cannot. And I suspect I am not alone, as witness the "lives of quiet desperation" led by so many in our society today, despite the advantages of a very high standard of living, wide political freedom, and unlimited opportunities for leisure and recreation.

6. In studying history, I became aware of the very large contribution to human happiness, well-being, and moral advancement made by religion. Since I have read mostly about Western history, I focused on the effects of Christianity. Yes, I know about the Crusades, the Inquisition, Galileo's house arrest, the witch burnings, etc. - although all of these things have been exaggerated or misrepresented to some degree. But as bad as these events were, they need to be weighed in the balance with Christianity's positive contributions: greatly improved treatment of children, and an end to the practic of infanticide; greater rights for wives and widows, who were often helpless in the pagan world; much better treatment of slaves, and the eventual abolition of slavery worldwide (most abolitionist movements were religiously inspired); the end of the Roman "games" in which people were hacked to pieces in gladiatorial bouts or torn apart by wild beasts for the entertainment of the mob; a view of nature as stable and orderly, running according to natural laws enforced by God, which opened the door to modern science; the idea of an immortal, personal soul, which granted dignity to even the lowliest person; and on and on. (For more, see my essay, "Why I'm Not a Skeptic."

7. Finally, after being an extreme skeptic with regard to paranormal phenomena, I began to study the field and found that much of the evidence was unexpectedly strong. This includes evidence for life after death, such as near-death experiences and the better-documented cases of apparitions, deathbed visions, and mediumship. Of course, this topic is too large to go into here. Suffice it to say that I think there is sufficient empirical evidence to strongly suggest (though not conclusively prove) that our individual consciousness survives death. An afterlife does not necessitate the existence of God, but it certainly implies the existence of a supernatural realm. Various essays of mine on the paranormal can be read at www.michaelprescott.net/essays.htm .

So that's the Cliff's Notes version of my intellectual odyssey (which is, I must add, ongoing). There were other elements, as well. Reading about quantum physics convinced me that the "mystical" view of fundamental reality is probably closer to the truth than the mechanistic view. My observation of atheists indicated that many of them seem angry or at least perpetually disgruntled, while more religious or spiritually inclined people often seem calm and contented. (There are, of course, many exceptions to both rules.) I noticed that the worst mass murderers of the 20th Century were either atheists (Stalin, Mao) or pagan occultists (Hitler and his gang). I began to think that the ego is at the root of many human problems, and religion generally teaches us to overcome the ego and see life from a wider perspective. I could go on, but you get the idea. As my worldview changed, more and more things began to fall into place for me.

Again, I don't claim that this brief summary proves anything. I'm just setting out the broad outline of how my thinking changed. I imagine that many others have gone through a similar process - or will someday, even if they don't know it yet!

Ayn Rand and "is-ought"

In a recent post I argued that moral values cannot be logically derived from facts, and I made a passing reference to the notworthy attempt by Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand to prove otherwise. I say that Rand equivocates - that is, she uses the same term to mean two different things. The term in question is "life," which she takes as the standard for all moral values. Early in her argument "life" means "biological survival," but later (when applied to humans) it suddenly means "the life proper to a rational being." She has smuggled in the concept of what is "proper," what "ought" to be, when all she is entitled to talk about is what "is."

Now, it could be maintained that Rand is not equivocating because, when talking about humans, she established that reason is the way - in fact, the only way - for humans to survive. Thus a life "proper to a rational  being" would be the only possible way for such a being to live at all.

Objectivists do, in fact, make this argument. Ayn Rand, they say, proved that reason is man's only means of survival.

I take issue with this. Ayn Rand did not prove any such thing; she merely asserted it. Her assertion, though accompanied by much rhetorical hand-waving, is not backed by any empirical evidence. Indeed, it is contradicted at many other points in Rand's writings. For instance, she often inveighs against the irrationality of "savages" (her term). Yet "savages," however irrational they may be, manage to survive and even sometimes to flourish. In certain circumstances, such as being stranded on a desert island, a "savage" would have a much better chance of surviving than his "civilized" counterpart. If "savages" can survive while being irrational, then rationality, however desirable it may be, is not essential to survival.

Or take an example closer to home. I would be considered irrational by Objectivists, since I hold many anti-Objectivist ideas and, even worse, am a former Objectivist who is now an apostate to the faith. Nevertheless, I am able to survive -- and in fact earn a comfortable living at a job that gives me great creative satisfaction. If I am irrational, and if Rand's assertion is correct, then how can I survive, much less flourish?

Indeed, how can anybody? How did humans ever make it through the Stone Age, or the Dark Ages, or other periods characterized by "irrationality," at least in Objectivist terms? Given that Rand described even modern-day American society as "irrational," presumably none of us should be surviving -- yet we enjoy the highest standard of living in history.

Rand is apparently aware of this problem. She tries to solve it (or, I would say, evade it) by insisting that she is not advocating "survival at any price," but only a worthwhile kind of survival, a survival that allows humans to achieve their creative and intellectual potential. This sounds persuasive, since most of us want to do more than just survive; we want to thrive.

But merely stating what we want to do is not equivalent to a reasoned argument - and Rand is not logically entitled to make this particular jump. She has previously argued that biological survival -- survival of the fittest, which can mean nothing but "survival at any price" -- is the standard for all living things. To be consistent, she must hold that "survival at any price" is the standard for humans as well. To switch to a different standard in midargument is unjustified, no matter how much polemical firepower she employs.

What Rand might have said is that reasoning is among the various modes of survival available to humans, and that in some (not all) circumstances it is the most useful mode. But this more nuanced approach is foreign to her absolutism.

In short, Rand did not prove that reason is man's only means of survival, nor could she have proven it, since the proposition, as stated, is false.

What she did was to assert that reason is man's only means of survival, and then proceed to incorporate, under the rubric of "reason," a selection of attributes she personally approved of: honesty, productivity, pride, integrity, etc. To put it more baldly, she implicitly defined rationality as "agreement with Ayn Rand" -- an approach emulated, I'm afraid, by her more ardent followers even today.

Ayn Rand is admirably clear on what "ought" to be -- but she has not derived it, by any logical proof, from what "is."

The worldview of St. Paul

St. Paul is in some ways a mystifying figure, a man whose letters combine passionate bursts of emotion with densely argued and highly technical theology. I don't think I'm the first person to have trouble getting a handle on Paul. Indeed, people have been wrestling with his words for centuries and coming to varied and often contradictory conclusions. For a while it was even fashionable to view Paul as a pagan thinker, phrasing his thoughts in terms of Mithraism and bull sacrifices, having left his pharisaical past behind. Some, like Hyam Maccoby, went so far as to declare that Paul lied about being a Pharisee and was, in fact, a Gentile! (Maccoby further speculates that Paul stole money out of the collection for the Jewish Temple in order to buy his Roman citizenship. Maccoby, it is safe to say, is not a big fan of Paul.)

This viewpoint still occasionally surfaces in popular works about Paul, such as A. N. Wilson's recent biography, but it has been discarded by almost all serious scholars, who instead have devoted themselves to finding and explicating the characteristically Jewish elements in Paul's thought. I have read several of these analyses, but found it hard to really get a handle on Paul's worldview. Last night, however, I read a remarkable passage in The New Testament and the People of God, by N. T. Wright, which cogently and concisely sums up Paul's outlook in the clearest terms I've seen. It's a little long for a block quote, but I'll quote it anyway, with a few cuts, and with key footnotes retained in brackets.

Within all [Paul's] letters, though particularly in Romans and Galatians, we discover a larger implicit narrative.... Like his own story, this larger narrative is the Jewish story, but with a subversive twist at almost every point....

The story begins with the creation of the world by the one god, a good and wise god ... though Paul does not say, as 4 Ezra would later, that the world was made for the sake of Israel. It continues ... with the creation and fall of Adam and Eve, as the eponymous parents of all humankind. Skipping over Noah, Paul's story highlights Abraham, whom he sees, in company with Jewish tradition, as the beginning of the divine answer to the problem of Adam. Unlike Jewish tradition, however, Paul insists that the covenant promises to Abraham held out to him not just the land of Israel but the entire kosmos, the world. [Romans 4.13] Abraham's child and grandchild, Isaac and Jacob, become the carriers of the promise, while Ishmael and Esau are left behind; again Paul subverts the normal Jewish telling of the story, since he insists that this process of narrowing down the promise-bearing family continues on beyond Jacob. [Romans 9.14ff] Israel's god then calls his people out of Egypt under the leadership of Moses, giving them the Torah. For an Orthodox Jew, then as now, Torah was the great gift which signaled Israel's special status and vocation. For Paul this remains true, but with a dark twist: the special status and vocation is that Torah should convict Israel of sin, so that Israel should be cast away in order that the world might be redeemed. [Romans 9.14 -- 29] All that Torah does within Israel, even to the best of its adherents, is to convict them of their sharing in Adam's sin, so that the highest they can attain to is the level... of the best of the pagan philosophers. [Romans 7.7 -- 21; Wright's footnote: "Paul in Rom. 7 has so analyzed the effect of Torah on Israel as to show that Israel, striving after the law of her god, attains specifically to the level of the wise but puzzled pagan. Cp. also Gal. 5.17f."]

Torah holds out to Israel life and death, prosperity and exile, and then (in Deuteronomy 30) speaks of new life the other side of that exile/death. Israel chooses exile/death; the prophets warned that this would happen, and happen it did.... But again [Paul] subverts the Jewish story from within. The end of this exile, and the real 'return', are not now future events to be experienced in terms of a cleansed Land, a rebuilt Temple, and intensified Torah. The exile came to its cataclysmic end when Jesus, Israel's representative Messiah, died outside the walls of Jerusalem, bearing the curse, which consisted of exile at the hands of the pagans, to its utmost limit. The return from exile began when Jesus, again as the representative Messiah, emerged from the tomb three days later. As a result, the whole complex of Jewish expectations as to what would happen when the exile finished had come tumbling out in a rush. Israel's god had poured out his own spirit on all flesh; his word was going out to the nations; he had called into being a new people composed of all races and classes, and both sexes, without distinction....

Clearly, there remained a fulfillment yet to come.... 1 Cor. 15 is the fullest version we have of [Paul's] retelling of the still-future part of the Jewish story. It is a redrawn apocalypse, which again only makes sense in terms of the story of Israel  ... now seen in a new light. The same could be said of the 'apocalyptic' passage in the Romans (8.18 -- 27). The narrative needs an ending, and Paul hints at it in these and other passages: the creation as a whole will be set free from its bondage to decay. The exodus of Israel was a model for the death and resurrection of Jesus, and both of these events point forward to a greater exodus to come, when the whole cosmos will be liberated from its Egypt, its present state of futility. (pp. 405 -- 407)

This is, of course, hardly the last word on St. Paul -- but it is, for me, a remarkably clarifying exposition which ties together the seemingly disparate threads of Paul's thought into a single unified tapestry.

Thus ends today's sermon.    : )

Switching over

After using the Blogger service for the past three months, I am switching to TypePad. Blogger simply was not reliable enough. The servers were always down, and there were chronic glitches that resulted in a lot of wasted time and effort.

I'm hoping things will be better here. If you want to look at my old posts, they can be found at www.authormichaelprescott.blogspot.com .

"Is" and "ought" and the third way

Can we derive an "ought" from an "is"? And if not, what are the implications for morality?

Many years ago the philosopher David Hume took a clear-eyed look at the many attempts to develop an objective, scientific ethics, divorced from supernaturalism. He observed a peculiar thing.

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. (Quoted here.)

The transition from the way the world is to the way it ought to be struck Hume as totally unwarranted. Ever since, the chief topic in meta-ethics (the study of how ethics is rooted in reality) has been the "is-ought question" – is it possible to derive a value from a fact, an "ought" from an "is"?

After more than two centuries of debate, no one has been able to solve the is-ought problem, and it doesn’t appear likely that anyone ever will. Facts and values are qualitatively different things, and there is no logical argument that will get us from one to the other.* If this is so, then there are only two basic ways of looking at ethics: either 1) morality is subjective and therefore arbitrary, or 2) morality is objective but grounded in what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called the "noumenal" dimension, i.e., a realm outside of the natural world.

There is, however, a third way, and it is very popular among humanists and others who want to eschew supernaturalism without losing objective morality. This third way says morality is a system of values that evolved because it is socially or biologically useful, i.e., because it "works."

This third view is often grounded in anthropological or evolutionary thinking. From this perspective, to say "helping others is good" is equivalent to saying "helping others increases the chance that others will help me, and therefore is in my own interest, because it furthers my chances of survival." In this approach, morality is simply a system that developed because it offered survival advantages to those who used it. Morality, then, is not subjective, since it is objectively true that these particular values will improve the survival chances of those who practice them. But it is also not supernatural, since it is based on the pragmatic needs of human beings in their struggle for existence.

At first glance this is a pretty strong argument. Does it have any weaknesses?

I would say there are two major drawbacks. First, it is by no means clear that moral values actually do enhance our chances of survival. A ruthless dictator may never be helpful to anyone, yet he may be very successful in surviving and procreating. He may well be more successful than his kinder, gentler enemies, whom he kills, along with their children. We see this sort of thing in nature all the time. The alpha male in a tribe of gorillas fights off any challenger and maintains his harem, not by being kind and considerate, but by exhibiting ferocity, strength, and brutality. Are things that much different in human society?

The claim, then, that moral values are simply an efficient survival strategy appears to be false. One could argue with at least as much plausibility that moral values are irrelevant to survival – or even detrimental to survival – and that the ruthlessly amoral person is the real survivor.

The other drawback is that this "third way," which we can call position # 3, would seem to boil down pretty quickly to position #1 (morality is subjective and arbitrary). After all, who is to say that our continued survival is good? Who is to say that our self-interest is good? Who is to say that the perpetuation of our genes or of our society is good? We may believe these things, but we can't prove them. Thus, "helping others is good" becomes equivalent to saying that "helping others may increase my own survival chances, and I want to survive." But "I want" is not equal to "It is objectively good." To say that our survival is objectively good – to say that we ought to survive – would be to smuggle an "ought" into our argument, precisely what Hume warned against. So in this case we are back to merely asserting that certain things are good, without having any way to establish that they actually are.

If, upon analysis, position #3 reduces to position #1, then it turns out that the "third way" is an illusion. There really are only two basic alternatives: either morality is subjective and arbitrary, or it is grounded in the noumenal.

In other words, if we are to have real values at all, as opposed to meaningless and arbitrary values, then we must have the noumenal or supernatural realm.

Or as Dostoevsky famously put it, "If there is no God, then everything is permitted."

When we look at the society around us today, can we say that Dostoevsky was wrong?

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*For instance, Ayn Rand claimed to have solved the problem in her essay "The Objectivist Ethics," which appears in her book The Virtue of Selfishness. But critics have found major fallacies in her argument. For a detailed rebuttal of Rand's meta-ethical position, go here.