Dervish Wisdom: The Parable of the Greedy Sons

From Three Parable of the Greedy Sons, p. 144-45, Tales of the Dervishes by Idries Shah (Octagon Press, 1967):

There was once a hard-working and generous farmer who had several idle and greedy sons. On his deathbed he told them that they would find his treasure if they were to dig in a certain field. As soon as the old man was dead, the sons hurried to the fields, which they dug up from one end to another, and with increasing desperation and concentration when they did not find the gold in the place indicated.

But they found no gold. Realizing that in his generosity their father had given his gold away during his lifetime, they abandoned the search. Finally, it occurred to them that, since the land had been prepared, they might as well now sow a crop. [...] They sold this crop and prospered that year.

After the harvest was in, the sons thought again about the bare possibility that they might have missed the buried gold, so they dug up their fields, with the same result.

After several years they became accustomed to labour, and to the cycle of the seasons, something which they had not understood before. Now they understood the reason for their father's method of training them, and they became honest and contented farmers. Ultimately they found themselves possessed of sufficient wealth no longer to wonder about the hidden hoard.

Thus it is with the teaching of the understanding of human destiny and the meaning of life. The teacher, faced with impatience, confusion and covetousness on the part of the students, must direct them to an activity which is known by him to be constructive and beneficial to them, but whose true function and aim is often hidden from them by their own rawness.

Editor’s commentary:

This story, underlining the claim that a person may develop certain faculties in spite of his attempts to develop others, is unusually widely known. This may be because it carries the preface, "Those who repeat it will gain more than they know."

It was published both by the Franciscan, Roger Bacon (who quotes the Sufi philosophy and taught at Oxford, from which he was expelled by order of the Pope) and the seventeenth century chemist Boerhaave.

This version is attributed to the Sufi, Hasan of Basra, who lived nearly twelve hundred years ago.

Walden, Globalized, or, Life Paths in the World’s Language Woods

I once created a word in French they had never heard, never used, and yet they understood me. I was speaking a language, quite my own, but not quite. My word had fit the situation in the phrases that needed to be said. They heard their language as their language, even though my voice was foreign. In learning French, like in learning any language through cultural contact and contextual experience, I have altered my mind in learning to speak, speaking to learn in a new language world or home.

This is the strangeness of life in the language world.

A bit over five years ago I was anti-learning-languages. I spoke only English and that seemed, pretentiously, good enough. I have since changed my mind—in the sense of this changed decision and in the sense that my ideas can now flow-out through a foreign tongue. I’m writing in French, here, even though the words are coming out in English. I hardly speak English. I’m all in French in reading, talking, feeling and processing the world. I’m writing in English in this moment even though my feelings come out worded in French. Four years ago, I started learning French, naively and stubbornly. A few months later, I went to Paris, France and started really learning English. I forced my English-languaged thoughts bluntly, like hammers to nails, through a French vocabulary.

After this first, few-month experience abroad where I had my first conversations and first friends all in Englishy French, I went home already nostalgic. I wanted to go back. I had to finish this voice. I had to make myself understood. I finished what had to be finished, and a year later, I was back in Europe and eventually France. My suitcases finally landed in Strasbourg, France—a city not quite French, yet completely; not at all Alsatian, but completely fiers d’être.

I slowly lost English-speaking friends and found myself communicating in English rather than speaking it. I started teaching English to french high school students, which entailed mostly trying to trick my students into participating in what I was proposing. The deck was loaded against me. They hardly learned anything from me. I learned a lot of French from their grumblings. In the process, my English had been changing. I was adjusting to the audience. My words were searching to meet their understanding. And even though all of my words were mostly in English, I was speaking English as if it was French.

This is the translating space of communication across half-languages—my half-way French and their no-way English. I learned enough French to stop really caring. If they didn’t want to speak English, we spoke in French. Or, when I was ambitious, I directed a completely orchestrated conversation. Through a well-directed tableau noir of vocabulary and questions, certain pictures, hint words, and an already dialogued context made a conversation possible, in French-English.

I’m still speaking English from time to time, but it often entails some version of this basic formulation of this Frenchified English. Calling home is strange. Being called home is even stranger.

I have taken a couple French classes since this adventure began, but mostly I read and read, read and read, have read and read—a strangely written word that only tells us its tense by a voiced context. In the beginning, the going was tough as the easiest of newspapers was still foreign. I had lived in a world of the known of my born language. Everything had been relatively clear, even in the English-language biggest pushers, a James Joyce, a Hemingway or a T.S. Eliot. French was rather opaque in the beginning as I held on to my old notions. I kept stumbling forward through books, administrative tasks, and situational conversations. I always moved onward, even when I couldn’t instantly clarify the opaque as such and had to continue forward in a guessed-up clarity or forced wording.

My French was admittedly rough. It’s understandable considering what I initially knew and understood was limited to a few hundred words, mal prononcés. I still made jokes—that’s a French mistake—told jokes. Do and make are killers for French learners who generally only have one word for English’s two. I probably had dozens of similar mistakes I never noticed, I probably couldn’t have noticed when I first started speaking French. I perhaps still make certain mistakes, and people are just too nice to speak up. I keep wanting to add “s’s” to my plural “certain’s.” But, I kept on repeating what I knew and adding words, like vinyl records, to my jukebox-like language games. I kept on repeating and mixing together anew. I spoke and spoke, but in the beginning, I couldn’t avoid staggering linguistically through situations like the drunken homeless.

I was homeless. I was homeless in a language that is now my home.

I now have two languages, two homes, from which I speak. Even though I’m not really bilingual, as other language learners might remark, I speak French better in some situations and some conversations than some French people. I can debate and challenge any French speaker and their ideas if the situation is comfortable enough for my voice to be shared and if the context is familiar enough. If I know the pathways, I can walk with any French through any conversation however uncharted. Through the nexus of my French language world, I make up words that are French even though they weren’t before. And my French interlocuteurs followed.

As soon as you feel these once foreign words expressing themselves and furnishing a certain language living room for yourself and others, that language has become a home for you and your feeling language community. The moment native speakers take your words as their own, that language world is equally their home too. French is, strangely, mine and our home.

In Walden, or Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau recounts his two years living and studying living in a semi-isolated cabin. In relation to his isolating reflections about life in his solitary space and about life in the “Village,” Thoreau writes:

Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs. As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie-dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor's to gossip. I went there frequently to observe their habits.

Thoreau wanders about the woods in order to better understand what it means to wander about in any world, civilized or otherwise. He is calmly confused in the village and the circulating paths of its gossip. He describes some vagabondish folk waiting about who were “the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely digested or cracked up before it is emptied into finer and more delicate hoppers within doors.” Whatever the nature of his visits to the village, Thoreau inevitably returned to his forest haven next to the pond, even in the most difficult of circumstances:

It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from some bright village parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or Indian meal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods, having made all tight without and withdrawn under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm when it was plain sailing. I had many a genial thought by the cabin fire "as I sailed." I was never cast away nor distressed in any weather, though I encountered some severe storms. It is darker in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose. I frequently had to look up at the opening between the trees above the path in order to learn my route, and, where there was no cart-path, to feel with my feet the faint track which I had worn, or steer by the known relation of particular trees which I felt with my hands, passing between two pines for instance, not more than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods, invariably, in the darkest night. Sometimes, after coming home thus late in a dark and muggy night, when my feet felt the path which my eyes could not see, dreaming and absent-minded all the way, until I was aroused by having to raise my hand to lift the latch, I have not been able to recall a single step of my walk, and I have thought that perhaps my body would find its way home if its master should forsake it, as the hand finds its way to the mouth without assistance.

Thoreau traced a path through the unknown by a bodily force and knowledge he was hardly conscious of in the walking.

These literal paths back and forth, to and from town and his remote enclave portray the metaphorical bridge or pathway between all differing worlds, between country and town languages and behaviors, between one language-home and another and their habitual mnotions.

For Thoreau, as it is for us, being lost is at the heart of these sometimes barely traceable paths:

It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in a snow-storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round- for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost- do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as be awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction.

Thoreau’s profound lesson is that:

Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

Being lost is a nasty experience, Thoreau knows this; we know this as language learners and as world travelers. Sometimes we do lose the world in the same way that we lose a word. But this state of being lost in place and in language is a necessary experience all the same for all of us, because the lostness makes us return to something once traced though we had forgotten its markings; it makes us accept certain limits that are unavoidably there in our languaged, perceptual experience and description of the world. We cannot know beyond our positioning in location and in words, in situating in relation to another place, familiar or otherwise, and to another word, felt, foreign or otherwise.

Wittgenstein’s “The limits of language are the limits of my world” is strangely true and not quite totally true. Our world is not terribly limited by language, perhaps not at all, because these desiring words can go so far, so much farther than their simply presence on a page or in a speech. We speak and write out the unexpected, the inattendu through words. Yet we can only see as far as our eyes and our data, we can only write, speak and describe in terms and in language already there in our language community well before our personal language-speaking birth. If Chomsky is right, then these secondary languages are still filtered through our native language and the universal grammar. Chomsky can admit one’s being lost in a foreign tongue, but for him, we would never be lost in our own native language nor would we be able to say something unsayable in our native speech as well as some word or phrasing yet unsaid before in our new language-home. We do these things when we speak through foreign tongues and when we live through strangely habitual language-homes.

At home and abroad, in our native and our foreign tongues, we are always trying to trace out, as our own, the always already traced. We often do say things never before said, yet this newness doesn’t change its commonness. Across communities and borders, language-homes are inhabited, unihabited and reinhabited by the former, the present, and the to come. The French language is mine, is ours, and yet it was already, once before, theirs and, in the same way, it will some day be some else’s—to speak, hear and read through an intertwining linguistic nexus.

Though often lost and always searching, we trace paths. These finding and losing paths are at the heart of our being. When we are at home, we hardly notice them; when we are abroad, we are continually trying to formulate them; and when we are lost as these goings and comings go, we are repeatedly searching the shadows for a fixable trace and the still turning stars for a reliable compass.

We all speak languages strangely all our own.

Weekly Links, May 30, 2008

In roughly three months, I’ll be on my way to China. The shock has yet to really hit me. My life in France has reached a pleasant culmination as work, studies and social life s’équlibre, balance themselves out harmoniously. I’m not sure how my life will be in China in terms of this sacred balance I achieved in France, but there is little doubt that my time here in peaceful living has changed me forever. The French work less than most, if not all, other countries, yet they remain one of the most powerful and efficient economies in the world. As the rest of the world continues to aim at expanding their productive power in order to improve their economic well-being, a healthy pause, lunch-break, or vacation, French-style, is worth promoting and integrating into the vision of any modern, industrial country.

Here’s some of my favorite articles from this week. Happy Reading!

1.) France is a country run on nuclear power. While much of the liberal world, in particular the United States, as well as supposedly ecologically savvy people are vocally against the promotion and use of nuclear power, France has slowly but surely positioned itself as one of, if not the world leader in nuclear research, technology and application. In a great article, Parlez-vous nucléaire?, exploring the cross-cultural opinions between the French and Americans over nuclear power, it is clear US policy-makers have much to learn from its Romantic counterpart.

2.) Tense Liars, Serene Exaggerators. We often think of exaggeration as simply an extension of lying, but, in fact, as Benedict Cary points out in I’m Not Lying, I’m Telling a Future Truth. Really, “Touching up scenes or past performances induces none of the anxiety that lying or keeping secrets does, these studies find; and embroiderers often work to live up to the enhanced self-images they project.” While people who are lying or holding a “guilty knowledge” or secret show signs of stress (increased heart rate, sweating, etc.), people who are exaggerating do not show these signs and, in fact, are more composed and calm than those who are not exaggerating but simply telling the truth.

In a study published in Emotion, looking at students exaggerating their grades:

The researchers had 62 Northeastern University students fill out a computerized form asking, among other things, for cumulative grade point average. The students were then interviewed while hooked up to an array of sensitive electrodes measuring nervous system activation. The scripted interview covered academic history, goals and grades.

The researchers then pulled the students’ records, with permission, and found that almost half had exaggerated their average by as much as six-tenths of a point. Yet the electrode readings showed that oddly enough, the exaggerators became significantly more relaxed while discussing their grades.

Moreover, the videotaped interviews were in turn reviewed and rated by independant observers, who found that, in fact, “The ones who exaggerated the most appeared the most calm and confident.” Their conclusion was that exaggeration does not function as an attempt to deceive but instead as a kind of projection of overconfidence and of future aspirations.

3.) How does language affect perception? This question has continually plagued epistemology, because if language affects our perception and understanding of the phenomenon around us, then understanding languages, specifically our native languages, strongly influences our understand as such. In When Language Can Hold the Answer, Christine Kenneally explores some of these tensions. In one experiment, children were asked to identify the difference between two alien groups; but while one group attempted to understand the difference between the groups without group labels, another group was “suggested” certain labels. Even though

All the participants eventually learned the difference between the aliens, but the group using labels learned much faster. Naming, Dr. Lupyan concluded, helps to create mental categories.

Things get hairier:

The traditional subject of the tug of war over language and perception is color. Because languages divide the spectrum differently, researchers have asked whether language affected how people see color. English, for example, distinguishes blue from green. Most other languages do not make that distinction. Is it possible that only English speakers really see those colors as different?

Past investigations have had mixed results. Some experiments suggested that color terms influenced people in the moment of perception. Others suggested that the language effect kicked in only after some basic perception occurred.

The consensus was that different ways to label color probably did not affect the perception of color in any systematic way.

Last year, Lera Boroditsky and colleagues published a study in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that language could significantly affect how quickly perceptions of color are categorized. Russian and English speakers were asked look at three blocks of color and say which two were the same.

Russian speakers must distinguish between lighter blues, or goluboy, and darker blues, siniy, while English speakers do not have to, using only “blue” for any shade. If the Russians were shown three blue squares with two goluboy and one siniy, or the other way around, they picked the two matching colors faster than if all three squares were shades from one blue group. English makes no fundamental distinction between shades of blue, and English speakers fared the same no matter the mix of shades.

In two different tests, subjects were asked to perform a nonverbal task at the same time as the color-matching task. When the Russians simultaneously carried out a nonverbal task, they kept their color-matching advantage. But when they had to perform a verbal task at the same time as color-matching, their advantage began to disappear. The slowdown suggested that the speed of their reactions did not result just from a learned difference but that language was actively involved in identifying colors as the test was happening. Two other recent studies also demonstrated an effect of language on color perception and provided a clue as to why previous experimental results have been inconclusive. In The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Paul Kay of the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley and colleagues hypothesized that if language is dominant on the left side of the brain, it should affect color perception in the right visual field. (The right visual field is connected to the left side of the brain, and vice versa.)

English-speaking subjects were shown a ring of 12 small squares that were all the same color except an odd one on the left or the right. If the odd square was shown to the right visual field and it was from a completely different color category in English, like a green square compared to the ring of blue squares, then subjects were quick to identify it as different. If the odd square shown to the right visual field was the same basic color as the ring of squares, perhaps just being a different shade of blue, subjects were not as fast to recognize the difference. If the odd square was shown to the left visual field, it didn’t matter if it was a different color or only a different shade.

The extent to which language affected color perception depended on the side of the brain being used.

Video and Statistics of the Week:

Gapminder.com is a site directed at better contextualizing health and economic data concerning the status of countries around the world. While in 1950, as the data concerning infant mortality and income shows, the world could be classified in terms of the Industrialized West and the Developing World (or simply, as We and Them), today in 2008 the world no longer transcribes to this dated myths. In the 1950s and 60s, the poorer countries were characterized by large families (more than 5) and short lives, but since then we have seen a global trend towards smaller families and longer lives.

As Hans Rosling, a Swedish expert in worldwide, public health, brings to light through several videos, the world today, excluding the marked example of Sub-Saharan Africa, has seen an amazing progression in improving health and life conditions around the world. The United States and Western Europe are the first countries to see family size decrease, infant mortality shrink, and life expectancy rise. But they are not the only, particularly if we look at Northern Asia (including China), Southern Asia (including India), North Africa and the Middle-East, and South America. Even these regions, which we continue to wrongly view as “developing,” display a strong correlation today (in terms of health and income) with that of the US and Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s.

Although Africa continues to lag behind tremendously with the rest of the world, the evolution of this data from 1950 to today cannot help but leave us hopeful and optimistic in terms of global improvement.

Hans Rosling TED Video (Feb 2006):
Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen

While promoting an increased availability and a bringing together of data sources, this video critiques our long-held notions of the “developing world.” Equally important is the way that regional tendencies (for example, that Asia is relatively poor yet developing) are concretely contextualized (namely, that certain Asian countries like South Korea have a much greater improvement than other countries). Hans also critiques the idea that it is developing countries who contribute most to the creation of carbon. In fact, all countries—industrialized and industrializing or developing—have contributed to the increase of CO2 in the world. Improved health and living conditions leads inevitably to carbon production.

Equally important to debunk is the myth of where poverty exists. Specifically, poverty is a phenomenon that goes across certain continents:

Hans Rosling TED Video (Mar 2007 ):
New insights on poverty and life around the world

This video is a sequel of the first, which includes certain goals for the development. For Rosling, development is not simply a question of economic growth and wealth, but instead these are the means towards different goals of development, namely human rights (I would say human dignity in order to avoid this Euro-centric notion) and culture.

An interesting example is the movement of China from 1960 to today:

Sociétés de contrôle, par Gilles Deleuze

Nous sommes dans une crise généralisée de tous les milieux d’enfermement, prison, hôpital, usine, école, famille. La famille est un « intérieur », en crise comme tout autre intérieur, scolaire, professionnel, etc. Les ministres compétents n’ont cessé d’annoncer des réformes supposées nécessaires. Réformer l’école, réformer l’industrie, l’hôpital, l’armée, la prison ; mais chacun sait que ces institutions sont finis, à plus ou moins longue échéance. Il s’agit seulement de gérer leur agonie et d’occuper les gens, jusqu’à l’instillation de nouvelles forces qui frappent à la porte. Ce sont les sociétés de contrôle qui sont en train de remplacer les sociétés disciplinaires. « Contrôle », c’est le nom que Burroughs propose pour désigner le nouveau monstre, et que Foucault reconnaît comme notre proche avenir. Paul Virilio aussi ne cesse d’analyser les formes ulta-rapides de contrôle à l’air libre, qui remplacent les vieilles disciplines opérant dans la durée d’un système clos. Il n’y a pas lieu d’invoquer des productions pharmaceutiques extraordinaires, des formations nucléaire, des manipulations génétiques, bien qu’elles soient destinées à intervenir dans le nouveau processus. Il n’y a pas lieu de demander quel est le régime le plus dur, ou le plus tolérable, car c’est en chacun d’eux que s’affrontent les libérations et les asservissements. Par exemple dans la crise de l’hôpital comme milieu d’enferment, la sectorisation, les hôpitaux de jour, les soins à domicile ont pu marquer d’abord de nouvelles libertés, mais participer aussi à des mécanismes de contrôle qui rivalisent avec les plus durs enfermement. Il n’y a pas lieu de craindre ou d’espérer, mais de chercher de nouvelles armes.

Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers. Éd. Minuit, 1990, pp. 241-242.

Carnivals…

Several carnivals have recently included my piece Vengeful Paths to Truth: The Carnival of the Godless #91 at State of Protest, The Humanist Symposium #19 at Letters from A Broad, and The Catholic Carnival #170.

My favorite pieces included…
1.) Aliens, Mummies, and The Visit at Tales of an Ordinary Girl recounts how during family visits she has to set certain rules for herself including:

1. No swearing
2. No drinking (except around my sister)
3. No talking
about science or politics
4. No talking about religion
5. When my parents
ask me questions or make judgmental comments about my lifestyle I must be
evasive and quickly change the subject.
6. Do not get dragged into a
conversation about: government conspiracies, the end of days, Christian
persecution, or anything scientific.

Admittedly, as she writes and as I’ve had to do myself, these rules are meant to avoid “controversy.” There are consequences to such rules, particularly in the nature of our relations to our relatives. She writes:

But in the process I have put a lot of distance between me and my family. I
visit, but I'm uncomfortable the entire time I'm there because I'm like a
mindless automaton… In my case I suspect I've already lost any kind of
meaningful relationship with my family by becoming so distant. I just don't know
what else to do other than sit in mummified silence. So maybe a little
experiment is due this weekend. I'll let you know how it goes.

.) In a two-part piece, The Difference between Secular and Religious Faith and Why Religious Faith is Irrational, Greta Christina attempts to slice through the semantic and logical web of what “faith” means in secular and religious contexts.

Secular Faith: In everyday speech, we often say: I have faith in someone; I have
faith in democracy; or I have faith in myself; etc., which, for Christina,
equates to a nexus of words tied to “secular faith,” namely: “Trust. Reliance.
Confidence. Conviction. Hope.” Moreover, secular faith means a reasonable
belief.

Religious Faith (for more details, see entire list of quotations),
Christina summarizes, as:
believing in God. (Or gods, or the World-Soul, or
the immortal spirit, or whatever. For the sake of brevity, let's say God for
now.) And it means believing in God no matter what. It means an unshakeable
belief in God. It doesn't necessarily mean an unquestioning belief in God --
again, many believers do ask questions, and hard questions at that -- but it
means a belief in God that survives those questions, and any questions. It means
having belief in God, not as a hypothesis that so far has stood up to the
evidence but might not always do so, but as an axiom. A presupposition.

While there are clear connections between secular and religious faith, it must be stated that “not one of these synonyms for secular faith implies a willingness to maintain that faith in contradiction of any possible evidence that might arise.” Secular and religious faith diverge radically when it comes to believing something in spite of or in the face of “overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” In fact, such beliefs in spite or against evidence is not really faith, but rather, in her words: "pigheadedness" or "blindness," "willful ignorance" or "delusion." Religious belief in its strongest, pigheaded form means that your faith trumps reality. Even though belief in the impossible, unlikely, irrational and extreme is common amongst humans, that doesn’t mean your faith changes the world nor the reality as such.


Thanks to all of the organizers and contributors of these carnivals.
If you’re someone who blogs about humanistic ethics and atheist thinking and want to participate in a blog carnival, check out the submission forms and guidelines for the Humanist Symposium and the Carnival of the Godless. Keep reading! And, of course, keep blogging!

Definitions of (Religious) Faith

In her article The Difference between Secular and Religious Faith, Greta Christina provides a list of some religious definitions of faith, meriting reflection.

• "Divine faith, then, is that form of knowledge which is derived from Divine authority, and which consequently begets absolute certitude in the mind of the recipient." (Catholic Encyclopedia, www.newadvent.org)


• "...since faith is supernatural assent to Divine truths upon Divine authority, the ultimate or remote rule of faith must be the truthfulness of God in revealing Himself." (catholic.org)


• "Faith therefore is to believe that which you do not see, truth is to see what you have believed." (St. Augustine")


• "'Faith' involves a growing recognition of who Jesus is... It is much more like an intuitive perception -- a kind of 'sixth sense' -- about this person Jesus: an inner prompting which compels us to go after him, to engage with his words and character, to 'relate' to him... But 'faith' is also not just about the intuition to seek. 'Faith' consists in taking Jesus at his word. This story illustrates clearly that 'faith' is characterised by a willingness to grasp what is being offered in the encounter with Jesus... 'Faith' in this story is not primarily some settled and serene conclusion reached at the end of a chain of philosophical reasoning. No, faith is rather the readiness and eagerness to receive what is offered to us in Jesus Christ. It is the hand that grasps the gift of God in Jesus and makes it our own. This is biblical faith." (Revd Dr Paul Weston, ely.anglican.org; emphasis mine)


• "Assent to the truth is of the essence of faith, and the ultimate ground on which our assent to any revealed truth rests is the veracity of God." (Christiananswers.com)


• "The dictionary definition of faith is, 'the theological virtue defined as secure belief in God and a trusting acceptance of God's will.' For a Christian, this definition is not just words on a page it is a way of life. Faith is acceptance of what we cannot see but feel deep within our hearts. Faith is a belief that one-day we will stand before our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ." (Allaboutreligion.org; emphasis mine.)


• "Biblical faith, however, is specific and unique. It describes the person who chooses to believe, trust, and obey God. This principle is vital -- the object of faith determines its value. Thus, it is very important that what we believe, what we have faith in, is really the truth!" (Herbert E. Douglass, The Faith of Jesus: Saying Yes to God's Love)


• "Faith means an individual's personal, existential connection with the reality and power of God. Faith is not a 'thing' that is possessed or an 'idea' that is pondered, but rather a relationship that infuses divine power and creates an attitude and a vision for living and acting." (Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew)


• "Faith is not a power or faculty in itself which “moves” or “compels” God. It is an attitude of confidence in God Himself. It always points to the One in whom it is placed." (inchristalone.org)


• "Faith, then, is like the soul of an experience. It is an inner acknowledgment of the relationship between God and man." (John Powell, A Reason to Live! A Reason to Die)
  "Faith saves our souls alive by giving us a universe of the taken-for-granted." (Rose Wilder Lane, The Ghost in the Little House)


• "Reason is an action of the mind; knowledge is a possession of the mind; but faith is an attitude of the person. It means you are prepared to stake yourself on something being so." (Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1961–74)


• "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." (Hebrews 11:1)

An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong

As my readings on Frans de Waal increase (in hopes of some sort of writings and reflections to come), I came across an article on a recent book by Marc Hauser (Moral Minds, HarperCollins 2006), which merits citation in full (as well as hopefully reading the book in whole).

An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong
New York Times
October 31, 2006

By NICHOLAS WADE

Who doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong? Yet that essential knowledge, generally assumed to come from parental teaching or religious or legal instruction, could turn out to have a quite different origin.

Primatologists like Frans de Waal have long argued that the roots of human morality are evident in social animals like apes and monkeys. The animals’ feelings of empathy and expectations of reciprocity are essential behaviors for mammalian group living and can be regarded as a counterpart of human morality.

Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard biologist, has built on this idea to propose that people are born with a moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by evolution. In a new book, “Moral Minds” (HarperCollins 2006), he argues that the grammar generates instant moral judgments which, in part because of the quick decisions that must be made in life-or-death situations, are inaccessible to the conscious mind.

People are generally unaware of this process because the mind is adept at coming up with plausible rationalizations for why it arrived at a decision generated subconsciously.
Dr. Hauser presents his argument as a hypothesis to be proved, not as an established fact. But it is an idea that he roots in solid ground, including his own and others’ work with primates and in empirical results derived by moral philosophers.

The proposal, if true, would have far-reaching consequences. It implies that parents and teachers are not teaching children the rules of correct behavior from scratch but are, at best, giving shape to an innate behavior. And it suggests that religions are not the source of moral codes but, rather, social enforcers of instinctive moral behavior.

Both atheists and people belonging to a wide range of faiths make the same moral judgments, Dr. Hauser writes, implying “that the system that unconsciously generates moral judgments is immune to religious doctrine.” Dr. Hauser argues that the moral grammar operates in much the same way as the universal grammar proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky as the innate neural machinery for language. The universal grammar is a system of rules for generating syntax and vocabulary but does not specify any particular language. That is supplied by the culture in which a child grows up.

The moral grammar too, in Dr. Hauser’s view, is a system for generating moral behavior and not a list of specific rules. It constrains human behavior so tightly that many rules are in fact the same or very similar in every society — do as you would be done by; care for children and the weak; don’t kill; avoid adultery and incest; don’t cheat, steal or lie.

But it also allows for variations, since cultures can assign different weights to the elements of the grammar’s calculations. Thus one society may ban abortion, another may see infanticide as a moral duty in certain circumstances. Or as Kipling observed, “The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Katmandu, and the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.”

Matters of right and wrong have long been the province of moral philosophers and ethicists. Dr. Hauser’s proposal is an attempt to claim the subject for science, in particular for evolutionary biology. The moral grammar evolved, he believes, because restraints on behavior are required for social living and have been favored by natural selection because of their survival value.

Much of the present evidence for the moral grammar is indirect. Some of it comes from psychological tests of children, showing that they have an innate sense of fairness that starts to unfold at age 4. Some comes from ingenious dilemmas devised to show a subconscious moral judgment generator at work. These are known by the moral philosophers who developed them as “trolley problems.”

Suppose you are standing by a railroad track. Ahead, in a deep cutting from which no escape is possible, five people are walking on the track. You hear a train approaching. Beside you is a lever with which you can switch the train to a sidetrack. One person is walking on the sidetrack. Is it O.K. to pull the lever and save the five people, though one will die?

Most people say it is.

Assume now you are on a bridge overlooking the track. Ahead, five people on the track are at risk. You can save them by throwing down a heavy object into the path of the approaching train. One is available beside you, in the form of a fat man. Is it O.K. to push him to save the five?

Most people say no, although lives saved and lost are the same as in the first problem.

Why does the moral grammar generate such different judgments in apparently similar situations? It makes a distinction, Dr. Hauser writes, between a foreseen harm (the train killing the person on the track) and an intended harm (throwing the person in front of the train), despite the fact that the consequences are the same in either case. It also rates killing an animal as more acceptable than killing a person.

Many people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, Dr. Hauser says, a sign that it is being made at inaccessible levels of the mind. This inability challenges the general belief that moral behavior is learned. For if people cannot articulate the foreseen/intended distinction, how can they teach it?

Dr. Hauser began his research career in animal communication, working with vervet monkeys in Kenya and with birds. He is the author of a standard textbook on the subject, “The Evolution of Communication.” He began to take an interest in the human animal in 1992 after psychologists devised experiments that allowed one to infer what babies are thinking. He found he could repeat many of these experiments in cotton-top tamarins, allowing the cognitive capacities of infants to be set in an evolutionary framework.

His proposal of a moral grammar emerges from a collaboration with Dr. Chomsky, who had taken an interest in Dr. Hauser’s ideas about animal communication. In 2002 they wrote, with Dr. Tecumseh Fitch, an unusual article arguing that the faculty of language must have developed as an adaptation of some neural system possessed by animals, perhaps one used in navigation.

From this interaction Dr. Hauser developed the idea that moral behavior, like language behavior, is acquired with the help of an innate set of rules that unfolds early in a child’s development.
Social animals, he believes, possess the rudiments of a moral system in that they can recognize cheating or deviations from expected behavior. But they generally lack the psychological mechanisms on which the pervasive reciprocity of human society is based, like the ability to remember bad behavior, quantify its costs, recall prior interactions with an individual and punish offenders. “Lions cooperate on the hunt, but there is no punishment for laggards,” Dr. Hauser said.

The moral grammar now universal among people presumably evolved to its final shape during the hunter-gatherer phase of the human past, before the dispersal from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa some 50,000 years ago. This may be why events before our eyes carry far greater moral weight than happenings far away, Dr. Hauser believes, since in those days one never had to care about people remote from one’s environment.

Dr. Hauser believes that the moral grammar may have evolved through the evolutionary mechanism known as group selection. A group bound by altruism toward its members and rigorous discouragement of cheaters would be more likely to prevail over a less cohesive society, so genes for moral grammar would become more common.

Many evolutionary biologists frown on the idea of group selection, noting that genes cannot become more frequent unless they benefit the individual who carries them, and a person who contributes altruistically to people not related to him will reduce his own fitness and leave fewer offspring.

But though group selection has not been proved to occur in animals, Dr. Hauser believes that it may have operated in people because of their greater social conformity and willingness to punish or ostracize those who disobey moral codes.

“That permits strong group cohesion you don’t see in other animals, which may make for group selection,” he said.

His proposal for an innate moral grammar, if people pay attention to it, could ruffle many feathers. His fellow biologists may raise eyebrows at proposing such a big idea when much of the supporting evidence has yet to be acquired. Moral philosophers may not welcome a biologist’s bid to annex their turf, despite Dr. Hauser’s expressed desire to collaborate with them.
Nevertheless, researchers’ idea of a good hypothesis is one that generates interesting and testable predictions. By this criterion, the proposal of an innate moral grammar seems unlikely to disappoint.