musings on a dark, rainy fall morning

Back to the task. Kimmie returns to work today. The mornings are dark a long time now after 5:30, when our alarm goes off. I hear the distant jingling of our front-door chimes buffeted in the predawn autumn wind.

My project, my story, is morphing out from under me. As I learn more, throw open more doors to the vaults of the deep past, my world enlarges and changes the journey of my heroes. Not fundamentally--I'm in far too deep to make a radical story-change now. But it's more like discovering things that were already here: connections, meanings, possibilities. I feel I have the opportunity to replace certain arbitrary elements, which I'm never very happy about, with elements that reflect the growing meaning of my story. In this way a controlling idea very gradually emerges, like a shipwreck being floated gingerly from the bottom of the ocean.

My reading about the cults of the Roman Empire--the exotic religions brought into it by its foreign traders and captives--is throwing tremendous new light on the way I see that world. I sometimes wonder (and worry) about the fact that I'm coming across this information so late in my journey, but in general I trust the timing of the arrival of information. This trust seems to be borne out time and again by the coincidental arrival of complementary information from different sources. I read about the Egyptian religion of Isis, which became widespread in the Roman world, in a book devoted to her cult, only to open a chapter of Toynbee's A Study of History to find him discussing Isis and Osiris (he conjectures that this brother-sister, husband-wife, mother-son duo represents a transformation of the more ancient cult of Ishtar and Tammuz in Sumer). These simultaneous linkages between widely different sources happen a lot for me, and tend to confirm the path I'm on, and the way I'm traveling it. It's like just-in-time delivery of manufacturing parts, except the parts here are ideas or pieces of knowledge.

If my "building blocks" are arriving just in time, that must mean I'm assembling things at the right pace--painfully slow though that seems to me. (I find it embarrassing to be asked about the progress of my work, since its progress is almost imperceptible, even to me. Pluto seems to orbit the Sun faster.)

Even in Chalmers Johnson's latest book, Nemesis, about the disintegration of the American republic, I have a very good short summary of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, which also dovetails with my other research, even though I'm reading it to learn more about current events and not for my project. The parallels between Rome and the U.S. are striking, and give me a feeling of relevance in what I'm doing.

Supposedly Harry Truman said that the only news is the history you don't know. I'm sure that's true. History is made generally by the ignorant and purblind, those who believe they're acting in an original way but who are in fact merely duplicating the actions of others taken long before, most often with disastrous results. It's a truism to say that history repeats itself, and it never actually does, quite. But the hallmark of intelligence is the ability to see a pattern where the less intelligent see only chaos.

Mind you, that's also the hallmark of paranoia.

One of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, I think it was Live and Let Die, had as an epigraph this little saying:

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

According to Toynbee, since the beginning of civilization societies have evolved according to one overarching pattern: growth; stagnation into a "time of troubles"; the rise of a pacifying "universal state"; and a final rupture and disintegration due to the combined agitation of a disenfranchised "internal proletariat" and a hostile and opportunistic "external proletariat" of barbarians beyond the civilization's frontier. Although I have not yet finished reading his Study of History, Toynbee so far reckons that our own civilization (which he calls Western Christendom) entered its "time of troubles" in the 16th century with the bitter and fratricidal European Wars of Religion. Since the 20th century was even more disastrous and bloodthirsty, it seems safe to say we're not out of the time of troubles yet. Indeed, they have to get so bad, in Toynbee's view, that people are generally relieved to acquiesce in living under the aegis of a universal state, like Rome under the Empire.

We don't seem to be there yet, which means that things are set to get continually worse. The U.S. administrations since World War 2 have set their sights on becoming the next universal state. But their chances of success are, in my opinion, poor. I expect this century to be worse than the 20th century in terms of human suffering, and that much of it will be linked to catastrophic environmental change. If Toynbee's historical cycle is still functioning after we go through that wringer, it's anyone's guess who might be strong and coherent enough to provide a peaceful universal state for the survivors to recuperate in.

Whew, this morning's even darker than I thought.

thinking before acting

I continue to make my way through The Varieties of Religious Experience, the landmark book based on a series of lectures that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901-02, as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion. The approach he decided on was to examine the psychology of personal religious experience: what are the feelings, thoughts, and acts that we call "religious", and what is their value?

With such a topic, everything depends on the qualities of the teacher. What are his own beliefs or prejudices? How tolerant and open-minded is he? What is the caliber of his intellect? For his thoughts to have any lasting value, he must not be pushing any private religious belief of his own; he must be wide open and tolerant of others' beliefs; and he must have a mind that is deep, subtle, sharp, and sympathetic.

William James is all of the above, in maximum degree. Hence this book, published in 1902, is still valuable and relevant today. Indeed, like any classic, it has the freshness of the present moment.

Two days ago I was reading lecture 18, "Philosophy", in which James, having covered much ground in earlier lectures on conversion, saintliness, and mysticism, addresses the conceptual content of religion: the power and value of religious ideas. With breathtaking brevity and assurance he sums up scholastic philosophy about God, then, as a tool to gauge the value of the ideas, he introduces the philosophical method known as pragmatism, first formulated in the 19th century by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. James encapsulates Peirce's idea as follows:

Thought in movement has for its only conceivable motive the attainment of belief, or thought at rest. Only when our thought about a subject has found its rest in belief can our action on the subject firmly and safely begin. Beliefs, in short, are rules for action; the whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of active habits. If there were any part of a thought that made no difference in the thought’s practical consequences, then that part would be no proper element of the thought’s significance. To develop a thought’s meaning we need therefore only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its sole significance. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, we need then only consider what sensations, immediate or remote, we are conceivably to expect from it, and what conduct we must prepare in case the object be true.

As I read this paragraph, highlighter in hand, sitting in my soft leather occasional chair, I felt that I was arriving at a major station in my thinking career.

I had been exposed to the philosophy of pragmatism before. Indeed, my introduction to William James was via this philosophy, and the first book of his that I bought and read was Pragmatism, based on lectures given a few years after this series in Edinburgh. But this compressed summary of the philosophy, given as a preliminary to examining other ideas, struck me: it sank home.

Beliefs are rules for action. The whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of active habits.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say that I've spent my whole life thinking. Thinking and studying. Thinking is "thought in movement". I have been searching for beliefs, or "thought at rest". Without firm beliefs you can't take action. What would you do?

But it makes a huge difference what one believes. It's useless to have beliefs that lead us into mistaken or even catastrophic action. As Bertrand Russell said, "I don't want to die for my beliefs; I might be wrong." The personal convictions of George Bush an Tony Blair have not led them to take worthwhile actions, in my opinion--quite the opposite. History is a train-wreck of actions undertaken by people with strong but mistaken convictions.

So my lifelong "analysis paralysis" may not be a bad thing. The Hinayana view of Buddhism, as well as the Hippocratic oath, say it well: "First, do no harm." At least if you're sitting on a meditation cushion, anxious and confused about life, you're not making things any worse for your fellow beings.

Of course, I'm a living being and I do take action all the time--every moment of every day. But my action tends to be, more often than not, retreating to my soft chair, highlighter in hand, and opening another book...