Lust for Life

"For each thing you do, stop and ask yourself if death is to be feared because it deprives you of this."

Back 'in the day' I used to be quite the adrenaline junkie. Nothing too extreme, but the ordinary ways of passing time were little too... Well, let's just say I itched for something more. Thrill, risk, danger, etc. The other night I was watching a documentary film on extreme skiing. While softly swearing under my breath, I was simultaneously wondering where my own hurl-through-the-air, jump-out-of-a-perfectly-good-plane adrenaline junkie had gone. (She messed up her ankle during the landing on her first (solo) jump. Perhaps this taught her to respect the fact that man was not meant to throw himself at the surface of his tiny piece of the galaxy from several thousand feet above it. Then again, perhaps it just taught her that you can't always blindly trust the guy on the ground with the signal sticks.)

Now jump ahead a few days to me doing a lot of walking and reflecting on death. The above quote has doggedly attached itself as a filter to my conscious stream of thought. I sometimes wish that I had a clarity of vision about all of my activities that enabled me to say 'Yes! I don't want to be deprived of this!'. I suspect though that such is not the lot of humankind, nor perhaps should it be. But I realize that I can say 'Yes!' to at least two things, and this brings a clarity of its own.

And while I may have lost the desire to recklessly court danger, I dare say that I have not lost my lust for life. In my cold, tired, caffeine-deprived state, this makes me very happy.

"It's not my time, I'm not going.
There's a fear in me but its not showing...
...There's a will in me and now I know that.
This could be the end of me
And everything I know.
Ooohh but I won't go."

The Mystery of Grace

Today a strange thing happened to me.
I saw you as the enemy.
I saw what you could do to me
And you became the enemy.
I saw how you could limit me
And then you were the enemy.

Today a strange thing happened to me.
I felt your hostility.
I saw that you were not free.
You saw me as the enemy.
How did this come to be?
Has fear made us enemies?

Today a strange thing happened to me.
I had a vision that we were free.
We had lost our enmity.
I trusted you and you trusted me.
But what it took awhile to see
was that it was trust that had set us free.

Man for Himself (Pt II)

"Keep your own advantage in mind, act according to what's best for you; by so doing you will also be acting for the greatest advantage of others."

Sometimes I think I'm too suspicious and cynical to be a good humanist. After all, isn't one of the basic tenets of humanism faith in humankind? Yet I have blindspots of possibly-irrational distrust of/in human nature. Like when it comes to having work done on my car.

I'm writing this right now in part so that I can't spend the time thinking of all the ways I could be getting screwed over right now by the people who have my car. (I've had some really bad experiences with car repair. They've made me more than a little suspicious of the entire automotive repair industry.)

I don't generally think that the profit motive is an entirely bad thing. But we're talking about that gray area just beyond the profit motive where the desire for more money causes one to exaggerate the actual need for, or cost of, an item in an attempt to exploit the customer. This area is generally referred to as Greed, and perceived to be a bad thing. These days special attention is paid to Corporate Greed as an especially destructive form of Greed.

It's fair to say that I'm more suspicious of a larger institutional imperative to make money at my expense than I am of the intentions of any single individual. (My regular mechanic is unavailable. My car is currently with a 'larger institution'.) An institution lacks the vulnerability of a single individual when it comes to trust-based transactions. Yet an institution is comprised of nothing but individuals. So how does the behavior of the collective come to reflect attributes that most individuals are sufficiently reluctant to own?

Here we could digress into a discussion on the diffusion of responsibility in situations where "underlings claim that they were just following orders and supervisors claim that they were just issuing directives and not doing the deeds." But as I am looking for reasons to be hopeful (about my car repair, and humanity in general), I'll pass along this instead.

Here is the short version of the "Hippocratic oath for managers" taken by "around half of this year’s graduating class" of Harvard MBAs.

"THE MBA OATH

As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can create alone. Therefore I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term. I recognize my decisions can have far-reaching consequences that affect the well-being of individuals inside and outside my enterprise, today and in the future. As I reconcile the interests of different constituencies, I will face choices that are not easy for me and others.

Therefore I promise:

I will act with utmost integrity and pursue my work in an ethical manner.

I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate.

I will manage my enterprise in good faith, guarding against decisions and behavior that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the societies it serves.

I will understand and uphold, both in letter and in spirit, the laws and contracts governing my own conduct and that of my enterprise.

I will take responsibility for my actions, and I will represent the performance and risks of my enterprise accurately and honestly.

I will develop both myself and other managers under my supervision so that the profession continues to grow and contribute to the well-being of society.

I will strive to create sustainable economic, social, and environmental prosperity worldwide.

I will be accountable to my peers and they will be accountable to me for living by this oath.

This oath I make freely, and upon my honor." (from mbaoath.org, longer version here)

Now the real question - Would I feel better about my car repair situation if I knew that one or more of the managers had taken this oath?

Maybe.

All for One, and One for All

(donning feathered hat)
(unsheathing pen)

Ladies and Gentlemen, I beg your pardon for this bit of unpleasantness, but some things should not go unchallenged...

Madame, as a duly sworn Defender of Knowledge, I really must insist that you unhand that stolen library book. I hate to have to draw pen on you, but as you have failed to listen to my spoken words, I'm afraid you leave me no choice. Your possession of that purloined book is an affront to our Right to Knowledge and I mean to liberate that book and set an example that will discourage others from committing similar misdeeds.

Ah! You thought I was going to accuse you of theft. A wicked thing, theft, but that is not the aspect of your action that galls me most. I see you are puzzled. It's understandable; few have heard of the Right to Knowledge. Allow me...

"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know..." - John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)

While this may seem like a trivial statement to you, I assure you that the right to knowledge is recognized as a critical aspect in ensuring and preserving other universal human rights.

Libraries are a sacred trust between people to ensure and enhance this right to knowledge. We fund them, and we use them, though perhaps not in equal portion. We work together to create a collection of knowledge greater than that which most of us could possess on our own, and this collection is governed by the principle All for One, and One for All. All of the material in the collection is available for any one user, and any one piece of knowledge is available for all users.

Madame, your actions violate that sacred trust. I am not persuaded to stand down by your passion for this tome. Truly, it is a wonderful book. But that only makes its loss to the collective that much more painful. Nor I am persuaded to back down from my condemnation of your action by your protests that the you paid for the book after declaring it 'lost'. Many such 'lost' items are never replaced - indeed, cannot be replaced - because they are out of print. Which is, no doubt, why you did not simply find a copy elsewhere and purchase it.

Having been thwarted more than once in my own quest for knowledge by the 'lost' status of similarly scarce items, I am particularly prone to reacting harshly to the joy you evince in your possession of this particular volume. Perhaps I am also remembering of all the times that I was similarly tempted by an enticing find, but refrained. And so I am not without some measure of sympathy. I believe that you really do find inspiration and joy in that illicitly-acquired opus, and that you want to share that inspiration. But I cannot conclude that you do service to this receptacle of knowledge, its contents, or the Right to Knowledge, above and beyond what would have been accomplished by letting it remain freely accessible to other library patrons.

And now, again, I really must insist that you unhand that book and return it to its rightful place.

All for One, but more importantly, One for All!

Man for Himself (Pt I)

"Having realized his own self as the Self, a person becomes selfless. This is the highest mystery."

This week has been filled with interesting meditations on the nature of Self. I'll spare you the self-portrait I had to draw, but if you keep reading you will have to listen to me hash out some of these other thoughts.

Much of what it means to be human comes from the fact that we have such a pervasive sense of self as an independent, autonomous awareness. 'I am me, and you are not. I am different and separate from you, and you cannot know what it is like to be me.'

But what am 'I'? Where does my sense of self come from? And while we may commonly confuse the two, are sense of self and sense of identity really the same thing? (Though the terms are commonly interchanged, I'm going to try to define them as two different things.) Think about the following example... If my physical body is altered or enhanced with a piece of technology, how and to what degree does that piece of technology become part of my sense of self and identity? There is evidence that my brain can easily incorporate it into its map of how 'I' interact with the outside world, but does my sense of identity incorporate the change so easily, or do I persist in identifying it as foreign to 'me' long after my brain has actually learned to function with it?

I suppose I'm trying out the argument that a sense of self (separateness) is a necessary precursor to a sense of identity (relationships and relatedness). I must first know/feel that I am separate from you before I can begin to identify how I relate to you. If this is so, then a sense of self might be seen as a more primitive, basic construct - perhaps the defining feature of conscious experience [1] - while a sense of identity involves higher-order cognitive processing and understanding of relationships. Acquiring a sense of identity is a natural response to perceiving oneself as separate from another, but our sense of identity is a much more fluid construct than our fairly-resilient sense of being separate from others.

Our sense of identity is acquired from our experiences, and continuously modified. It seems reasonable to say that our sense of identity gives us our basis for moral reasoning, as the acquisition of a more complex sense of identity is often paralleled an accompanying increase in capacity for moral reasoning. In a very real way, identity drives morality. A person's social identity - as defined by the groups to which she belongs - will largely determine the values that she is taught, and which she internalizes and chooses to express through actions. There is already evidence that we choose actions that calibrate our sense of moral identity with regard to social norms, which is arguably identity driving morality. Only to a limited extent can a person choose to alter her social identity to bring it in line with her sense of morality.

Many of our definitions of what is morally correct come from our perceptions about the appropriate balance of self-interest against the needs of others. All theories of morality are predicated on the idea that one person is separate from another, yet can have a significant impact upon another. More specific notions of what is right and wrong are subsequently derived from our ideas about how a particular person is related to another (identity).

When it comes to an individual sense of identity, what is acquired via experience is incorporated as changes to a physical structure (the brain). Science is reaching a level where it has become possible to discuss altering various aspects of the brain to create a 'better' personal identity. (Still waiting to get my hands on the full paper.) In reading this abstract though, it occurred to me to ask - If what is 'moral' has previously been defined largely by one's sense of identity, then what are the implications of allowing morality to define identity?

(h/t Trans-Spirit)



[1] Though it is possible for the sense of identity to expand to include other people and objects, as described in mystical experience, one can argue that there must persist something apart from the experience which is able to note the change and reflect upon it.

Fingerprints of God

"And it will be interesting also to keep an eye on the functioning of the human mind, or brain, and its valiant and often pathetic efforts to comprehend the nature of things."

It's ironic that I became aware of Fingerprints of God (Barbara Bradley Hagerty, 2009) by reading a physicist's snark about it. Had said physicist actually read the book, he might have come away not with "convincing empirical evidence for the soul's existence", but with an enhanced appreciation for how simple fluctuations in brain activity can dramatically alter our perceptions of what is 'real'.

I'm going to quote the next bit out of context because I think it illustrates the point...

"When the prefrontal cortex malfunctions, you have a sense of calm, serenity, peace, joy, and painlessness. When the primary motor cortex malfunctions, you can't move. When the postcentral gyrus malfunctions, you can't perceive touch or sensation. When the parietal cortex malfunctions, you can't perceive where your body ends and the universe begins, making you feel at one with the universe. When the angular gyrus malfunctions, together with muscle spindles, you can believe you are moving or flying." (p. 224)

Fingerprints of God examines everything from peyote to the God helmet in a quest for answers about the journalist-author's own mystical/spiritual experiences, evoking memories of an earlier book - Rational Mysticism (John Horgan, 2003). What is striking about Fingerprints of God is that the author weaves in her own honest questioning (not outright dismissal) of her Christian Science upbringing/beliefs.

While atheists may be tempted to bypass this book because it does not present its data as an outright refutation of the existence of God, I think that would be a mistake, as the scientific data itself is thorough and worth the read. The author does present (and subsequently question) the idea that God may have designed our brains to be able to communicate with Him. That idea is problematic for at least two reasons. First, it suggests that God has somehow chosen/favored those among us who have more of these mystical/spiritual mental experiences. This seems incompatible with most ideas about a God who loves all of His children/creations. The idea that one/some is/are 'chosen' generally leads to painful social division, rather than promoting social harmony, which also seems incompatible with a loving God.

Second, it ignores the fact that there are many similar types of experiences (hallucinations, etc) , which no one (except possibly the percipient) would argue are from God, and which result not in positive and pro-social attitudes and behaviors but in the exact opposite. Where does one type of experience stop and the other begin, and how can we tell the difference? Perhaps it is best to simply judge the worth of such experiences by the actions that they produce.

I see the data presented in this book as being relevant to humanism in the following ways...

• What we experience as humans is fairly constant most of the time, but it is possible to go beyond our ordinary range of spacetime-limited experience in ways that produce meaningful and dramatic physical and psychological changes, and therefore our definition of what it means to be 'human' must accommodate those types of experiences.
• When we can pinpoint with such accuracy how deviations in brain activity can give rise to life-altering and belief-shifting experiences, it becomes necessary to consider the ethics of permitting or withholding such experiences, both in terms of individual rights and larger social impact.

And as to any spirituality to which such experiences might speak, I think that such a spirituality should be defined by questions rather than answers. What am I really? What is really out there? Such a spirituality is a journey rather than a destination. Where a destination says 'I am here and you are not', a journey will say 'Share with me what you know. Walk with me awhile.' A destination implies that one can stop, but a journey is ongoing. A destination implies territory that must be defined and defended, but a journey is a group of companions that changes as one moves along. Such a spirituality embraces inquiry and rejects dogma. It is a state of being, not a doctrine.

“Now, when I say this, you could accuse me of being a mystic. And I am, but of a very ordinary kind. I don’t doubt that some people throughout history, and some living today, have heard voices and seen visions. But my mysticism involves no access to other realms, only the deeper experience of this one. Mine is the mysticism of everyday life, of the heaped laundry and the bruised toe, of overcooked broccoli and dew-spangled leaves, of sunrise and sorrow, laughter and linguine, music and mold. This every day mysticism requires no special powers, only imagination, a doting and practiced attention to the ordinary and a willingness to be surprised by grace.”

For the Love of Life

The core beliefs of humanism center around valuing human life and promoting the betterment of the human condition. Many of the ethical dilemmas we try to solve with reason revolve around certain ideas about life. Let's start with these three ideas...

Life is finite. It has a beginning and an ending. We tend to view the taking of human life as the most abhorrent of acts, and much of our social structure is designed to prevent violence against each other and the ending of human life. But we are not so well-structured as a society when it comes to how we value the beginning of human life.

Life is imperfect. Life is wonderfully complex, and each living creature is unique. To expect perfection of any living creature - whether it be genetically or behaviorally - is to set oneself up for disappointment. Yet we are growing more intolerant of imperfections as we design new ways to anticipate and treat them.

Life exists on a continuum. We tend to value human life above animal and plant life. And, right or wrong, we have succeeded in extending the idea of a continuum into our definitions of human life. We suggest that the rights that we give to an individual be proportionate to the degree of self-awareness and cognitive capacity that the individual possesses. This becomes problematic, however, when the potential for self-awareness and full cognitive capacity is denied.

The point of this blog is to figure out what I believe, not to tell you what to believe, so examine what follows for yourself to determine what you agree or disagree with, and why. Understand that this is a beginning, that this subject is complex, and that thinking (mine and yours) will evolve and change with experience and exposure to new ideas and ways of thinking.

For now my gut reaction starts here...We cannot fully value human life if we do not value the process by which it begins, and life begins at conception. I would not be here today if you had removed any moment of my spatiotemporal existence up to and including the moment of my conception. It does not matter that, while a fetus, zygote, or embryo, I was not a physically or cognitively mature human being. What matters is that these states are necessary precursor states to my being here now. I have a hard time understanding why, if you would not kill me now, you would feel it okay to kill me while I was a zygote, fetus, or embryo. I am not now, and never have been, your property.

If this is what I truly believe, then my actions must reflect it. I must make responsible decisions about sex and birth control, and if I fail to take reasonable precautions against creating a life, then I bear the responsibility for the life that has been created. As there is almost always the possibility that sex can create a life, I've found it easier to make responsible decisions about sex when I ask the following question... Would I be proud to say that I am carrying that man's child? (Yes, this invokes social factors associated with relationship status, and suggests that the father is relevant and necessary to the identity of the child. These should be important considerations.)

But what if I were raped and became pregnant? What would I do then? Fortunately I have never been in that position, and I wouldn't presume to dictate to any woman what she should do if she found herself in that situation. Years ago I was a proponent of a one-choice model - If you made the choice to have sex, then you don't get to make the choice to end the life you created; if you didn't make the choice to have sex, then you still have a choice in dealing with what resulted from that act. One person should never be forced to give her life, in full or in part, for another. Perhaps if the rape resulted in conception, and that pregnancy were voluntarily terminated, the rapist should be accountable for something more than rape and closer to murder, as he forced the creation and subsequent termination of a life.

If I have chosen to create a life, or have failed to take reasonable precautions against creating a life, am I obligated to accept whatever life results from that act of creation? Am I obligated to accept a child who may have genetic differences so severe as to make raising her a significantly more expensive and time-consuming proposition? Am I obligated to accept a child, the time and expense of whose care would significantly detract from that which I am able to provide to my other children?

I would suggest that the resolution to those questions comes not from how we define the zygote/embryo/fetus as life (or not), but from a broader examination of the ethics of valuing human life. What sacrifice can one person reasonably be expected to make for another? What obligations does a parent have to a child? What right or responsibility do we have to ensure that another does not suffer, even if it means ending their life prematurely to stop future suffering? What about groups of people who might face eugenic elimination as our technology advances our ability to predict certain outcomes? What obligation to we have to ensure that the full range of human diversity is allowed expression?

Obviously none of this will be solved in a single blog (or a single post). But it's worthwhile to engage yourself in a dialogue that challenges you to identify and defend your values.

"You could respond that all of this is hypothetical or contingent, but I would suggest that we should think deeply about such decisions before we are ever in a position to make them (or to influence others who might make them). Emerging technologies may put much greater power into the hands of individuals, so it’s not unreasonable for you to imagine what you would do in certain situations and carefully consider the ethics you might apply." (q)