British broadcast journalist Jon Snow of TV4 has run a poll to have Britons vote on a modern restatement of the 10 commandments. The new list seems to run to 20 and includes try your best, be honest, be true to yourself, enjoy life, nothing in excess, live within your means, appreciate what you have, never be violent, never kill, be true to your god, enjoy life (sex, drugs, chocolate??) and protect the environment (put the toilet seat down, flush/don’t flush???). Although they sound bland, it isn’t a bad set of moral principles, if we knew what they all really meant. There is a marked underemphasis on worship and fidelity to belief, and some emphasis on being nice. Sweet waffles for principles.
Category: Sharp Stick
Healing Energy
A story from the Guardian about the practitioners of energy medicine and faith healing questions studies that claim to show this stuff works. The writer treats New Age therapies like Reiki, some forms of Asian traditional medicine, and prayer as different versions of faith healing and that’s a reasonable approach. They all “work” by mysterious mechanisms.
Truth
This is a book review I wrote and published for Blogcritics. The book is True to Life, Why Truth Matters by Michael P. Lynch ( ISBN 0262122677). It’s not in the Library in Winnipeg, and it’s one of the few books I’ve bought lately. Michael P. Lynch teaches philosophy at the University of Connecticut. True to Life, Why Truth Matters is informed by his work as an academic philosopher, short (at 181 pages before endnotes) and clear. [I added a link to his Wikipedia entry in 2022 when I reviewed this old post].
Truth is objective. It is good to believe what is true. Truth is a worthy goal of inquiry. Truth is worth caring about for its own sake.
These are simple statements but they don’t express the principles that most of us follow in our private lives. They aren’t followed in culture and politics, and have been unpopular in the history of philosophy. Few people are constantly, absolutely painfully truthful. Many people are careless with the truth in many of their words and deeds. Most people don’t trust politicians, advertisers, friends, and lovers to be truthful all the time. There are several lines of philosophical theory that have been skeptical of the possibility of knowing the truth, or cynical about the value of knowing the truth. These academic notions have penetrated popular culture and affect the way people act and talk. Many of the people who have had the benefit of a modern education have adopted post-modern theories that postulate that truth is simply an aspect of a story or theory (a narrative or meta-narrative), and that truth only exists if you choose to live within such a story.
Lynch, like the popular Simon Blackburn, is a capable writer who can translate the densities of original work into accessible language without watering down an argument. I don’t claim to know enough to evaluate the originality of his work, but he seems to deal with his subject in a way that addresses current streams of thought.
He organizes this presentation around the four key points which I listed at the top. He responds to theories that suggest that truth is not objective, or that true beliefs are not important etc. In doing this, he touches on the role of truth in various major bodies of theory in the history of philosophy but he does it cleanly and without digressions.
His arguments are nuanced. He writes clearly but he deals with large topics, and his arguments need to be savoured and re-read. While he dismisses relativism, he also dismisses the religious and secular sanctimony of popular writers like William P. Bennett. He does not think that truth is necessarily self-evident, and he does think that people understand the truth differently, based on their perceptive powers, knowledge and culture. He takes a pluralist approach to political theory.
His discussions of why truth is important for its own sake is very good. He bases his argument on ideas of how people cooperate and live together. In discussing lies, he looks at how people identify and tolerate mild falsehoods and entertaining fictions – literature, gossip and bullshit. He looks at how a lie works, and how it exploits the fact that people trust other people to tell the truth in a direct and simple communication. Lies exploit our basic trust in other people. He also looks at the fact that people, no matter what their religious and political system, and regardless of repression, are alienated by falsehood. He ties this in to the question of whether truth can be defined by a powerful government (using the example of Orwell’s 1984) or a social consensus – challenging much of the post-modern canon. He makes a powerful argument for the idea that truth is an important social value and that people value it in spite of the conventional wisdom and in spite of propaganda.
I found this book to be interesting and readable on its own, and a useful resource in thinking about ethical, political and religious questions.
Cardiff Weirdos
Good for giggles. I found this link to a Travel section article in the Guardian online.
“Perhaps I just don’t have a soul. But then, I’m from Cardiff where we don’t have New Agers. Or, if we do, we call them by their other name: weirdos. And although I am almost too perfectly the target demographic – thirtysomething, female, single (marketing-speak for credulous, desperate and liable to spend money on any old rubbish) – I’ve never really got the whole spa thing. Yes, it makes your skin all shiny, but then what’s a loofah for?”
Values & Discernment
I read a short religious book called “Discernment” (“Discernment, The Art of Choosing Well” by Pierre Wolff, 2003, Liguiri/Triumph, Liguiri Publications, ISBN 0-7648-0989-X) this summer. It tries to present the methods of decision-making taught by St. Ignatius in 1533 in a modern context. The issue St. Ignatius faced was how to make decisions that favour salvation when God is not actually personally talking to you or to anyone you know. His answer was to avoid hasty and impulsive decisions, to follow a systematic process of discernment, to understand your beliefs, emotionally and intellectually, and to base decisions on fundamental principles.
Self-Help Books
Self-Help books on psychology, personal growth, and spirituality must be profitable for publishers and booksellers, because there are thousands of them. They vary in quality, and they don’t come with any consumer warnings or ratings.
Connerie
“Une connerie” is a French term, and it’s pronounced like the famous Scottish actor’s name. It’s a vulgar term for an idiotic idea. It also translates as crap or dogshit, or a term for a stupid, possibly dirty, joke.
Pierre Trudeau caused a stir when he used the word publicly to comment on the idea of special status for Quebec during a press conference in 1967. It was considered to have been vulgar and inappropriately colorful for his role as Justice Minister, the process of constitutional debate, the issue, and the times. It was a deliberate slap at the pretentious Quebec intellectuals who were promoting the idea and a strategic response to the infamous insult offered to Canada in its Centennial year by General DeGaulle when he saluted “Vive le Quebec Libre.” It marked Trudeau as committed to his own rational ideas, and prepared to defend his ideas passionately as well as rationally. It was a scandalous remark because the English speaking media were convinced that he had used the word in its scatological sense or that there was a connection between the word “connerie” and the word “con” which made it impossible to translate the remark for a polite readership. “Con” means imbecile, but it is also translated as a vulgarity. (As far as I can tell, connerie does not have that overtone although the English media were frightened of the term).
Ideas turn up in the news and the arts, and are uncritically adopted and perpetuated by commentators. These ideas start with a dubious theory – or a deliberate lie – and they stay around because a lot of people adopt the theory and its terminology as if it had become a proven truth. They are incorporated into movies and drama, and packaged artfully and powerfully. More and more people use the ideas and the language in their own talking and thinking, without any clear idea of what the words mean. Myths, metaphors and legends grow and dominate people’s perceptions and judgments.
Sleeping with Aliens – More
I spent a long time reading, summarizing and reviewing Sleeping with Aliens. I posted a review on the Blogcritics site, and a long commentary on this site. It isn’t kind to the New Age.
Sleeping with Aliens
Wendy Kaminer’s book, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials, The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety is interesting. She says that her objective is to write against irrationalism but I see her book more as an examination of how the New Age is becoming, in effect, a minority religion in America.
(On July 19, 2004 I posted a review of this book at the Blogcritics site. This post is a longer and more detailed version of the review).
Snapping
The first edition of Snapping was published in 1978, which was the year of mass suicide of cultists at Jonestown, Guyana. While authors Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman did not predict such an event, their book was on the shelves at the right time.
Snapping, America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change was not about cults as such, but it made Conway and Siegelman into instant cult experts. At one point, they were sued by Scientology for labeling that movement/religion as a cult. They continue to serve with anti-cult groups like the Rick Ross Institute.
The book was actually supposed to introduce and explain a theory of personality change based on communication and information storage theory. The theory is speculative, but the book is worthwhile for its careful journalism of the experiences of ex-cult members and their families and its careful exposition of the cultural factors that led to the greatly increased popularity of cults and cult-like movements in the second half of the 20th century.