There’s an urgency to love this
one mortal life. For my part when religions
claim paths to enlightenment, “unconditional” states, or afterlife heavens I understand
these to be consolations. Let’s think a bit about “consolation," about truth, tolerance, faith, and science too.
Consolations point to mortal
human needs. For some, hopes and faith in
what is unlike the daily drudgery provides both comfort and meaningful yearning. You suffer, you aspire to relieve
suffering. You want meaning, you look to
god. I’ve always been fascinated by how
people make their way through the world.
We humans survived for nearly a
million years before we had even a clue as to how we got here.
I wish Darwin and the implications
of Darwinism had been taught to me more thoroughly and honestly from
grade school through college. That absence
of appreciation might be my own fault but I don’t think so. I think our religious history and its
deeply abiding ethos have made learning the truths of evolution far more
difficult to learn. Darwin himself
withheld the theory of natural selection for twenty some years because he
understood the trauma it would cause himself socially and the ways in which it
subverted foundational religious assumptions.
Do we need a creator agency to explain life? What happens when we learn that nature
requires no design, no designer, and life needs no reason to exist? These questions upset lots of people, how
much more so if we conclude with true facts, as true as the speed of light?
Reason tells us that we have only
the explanations that imperfect and provisional methods of human learning create. Science is evidence-based and
conclusive because it asks for no more
proof than we can summon from the process itself. Our best understandings retain some sliver of
uncertainty, not because much doubt yet resides but rather because it’s a
requirement of progress to retain that provisionality. We know
things and the proof is in the puddin’: we’ve gone to the moon, fix broken
elbows, and predict the next eclipse. We’re
trying to understand what happens without appealing to forces outside our
understanding or over the horizon of our abilities.
This learning is a humbling
process, fraught as it is with the necessary recognition of human limitations
and the terms of conditionality. It’s
basic quantum physics that gets our cell phones to pass through walls, not the grace
of the gods ---unless we decide that the gods’ grace means science. We need not be averse to the metaphoric when
we’re happy to acknowledge a difference with facts. Facts shorten the distance between what we
believe and what we know. Myths are
meant to stretch, break, and intervene into that same space. Unfortunately, we still use the word “myth”
pejoratively as way of taking about misleading untruths. I mean “myth” to mean ways we penetrate emotionally to
reach facts and move from facts, but not without facts, to reveal further
suggestive meanings and tap more hidden complexities of our emotional reality.
We indulge feelings over
thinking, faith over reason, belief over evidence, make claims for consolation because we just want
to feel better. These are complex human strategies that can become a positive detriment to the alternative project
we might call “keeping it real.” Hume once told us that the dullest feeling out
strips the most lucid thought for its impact on our human experience. This means that we’re not only susceptible to
our feelings, we must take them seriously too.
We sometimes need to feel what we want to
be true because the facts--- because keeping it real--- provides too little hope,
too much hopelessness. We embrace our
fictions willfully, no matter what sort of truth we imagine them to possess. Some folks really need them. And why should we
deny people what they believe they need if those beliefs don’t deny us what we need?
Tolerance doesn’t demand that we agree.
Tolerance demands we indulge, that we
put aside our preferences to permit others’ theirs. Tolerance reminds us to take account of the
stakes. When an idea, a belief, or a
person’s values are deemed intrusive, injurious, or downright evil, then we will
not tolerant them. Just what we are
prepared to do about such offense is
another matter. But no one in their
right mind maintains the view that every opinion is as good or as sound as
another, even if we admit that people have
them. We might say that any belief is valid even if it is unsound in order to confer the dignity of being human. How seriously then do we take such beliefs?
We don’t need to contend with unsound beliefs if they don’t violate
our agreements about tolerance. People can
believe any sort of thing without
committing an offense against tolerance.
This means that we can easily indulge an offense against truth so long
as it’s not an offense that breaches the boundaries of our tolerance. What breaks
us?
Feelings, beliefs, consolations don’t need to withstand
every test of truth we use to inform our collective actions. But we do need to consider how tolerating
them will lead us to act. What happens
when a religious belief restricts women’s rights to control their bodies? Or when a feeling about vaccines sends
children to school unvaccinated and liable to spread disease? What are we willing to tolerate because we
all need to be consoled? That last question is as important as our commitment
to uncover, as best we can, what we now
know to be true. A consolation answers
to an emotional need no matter what status it possesses in world in which there
are true and false facts. There are no alternative facts. Those are lies. But there are alternative ways to live that
demand we consider the boundaries of tolerance.
So a second implication of “consolation”
might be worth a thought.
I've written much lately about
"false consolations," especially in religions (call them
"spirituality" if the word "religion" makes you too nervous). When we see the damage religious ideologies
can do ---say, the way climate change demands from us less faith and more
serious consideration of science---then I lean into more stridency. Modern day Atheism is strident for many of
the same reasons, that is, it views certain religious views as positive
detriments to the course of progress.
Dawkins, Hitchens, even Sam Harris have all written about how religion
gets in the way of progress. It’s
difficult to take exception to those instances in which these criticisms are
true: progress is often impeded by beliefs.
Once again, we must ask how much and what we will tolerate, as well as what
we are prepared to do about it.
But what the strident Atheists
mock too stridently are the emotional needs that fuel untrue beliefs (i.e.,
beliefs that fail the tests of argument and experiment). They sometimes trip over tolerance, which is
a necessary arbiter in the process of welcoming others unlike oneself into
civil society. It’s vitally imperative
to avoid the distasteful, unnecessary, and morally suspect outcomes of Otherness. Just because others don’t share beliefs or appreciate sound argument, evidence, and
truth doesn’t somehow disqualify them morally or from the processes that
invite us to create civil society. We
can be quite wrong in a factual sense and be quite morally fit for
conversation. This very argument I’m
making about facts, true and false, could be wrong but might well pass tests of
tolerance. What consolations do we
tolerate?
In this way it’s possible to talk
about false consolations to mean “such a belief is not what we know the world
is actually offering.” And still we can respect
people who harbor such beliefs. Your emotional needs are not necessarily
mine. We can decide what actions we
will tolerate because we’re left with having to live together. Good fences often make good neighbors.
When we come out of our inner fortresses of
the heart to meet others, we necessarily contend with ourselves. What we each need to make our way through the
world can intrude on others --- and sometimes must intervene if we deem the
other to be morally beyond the pale of our
tolerance. That is no simple
decision and it seems human to err on the side of tolerance if we are to live and
let live.
For my part, I prefer a more hard-bitten
version of reality that eschews as far as possible beliefs that wander too far
from tests of human verifiability. It’s a
lot easier to tolerate others when you understand better your own emotional
needs. But no consolation is “false” if
it meets your needs. I’ve come to
understand that I need to live in a
world in which there is less belief
and less hope for what has not yet
been achieved.
The disparity between the way the
world really is and what we wish it were is at the heart of all
religions, perhaps all politics and morality.
Keeping it real is neither pessimistic nor optimistic. In fact, I think it’s another kind of
spirituality, if by that we mean the feelings, opinions, and arguments we make
that get us through life, that speak to our emotional and intellectual
needs. For me the spiritual conversation
centers on a mortal fact: the way people are, the way the world is includes real differences that address the complexity of a shared
humanity. We don’t all want the same things, for better and for
worse. But no matter what, we will take
what we believe we need. YMMV. And that urban acronym invites us to more facts
and always to myths of our own making.
