Recently, the Florida-based Dove World Outreach Center has been appearing in the news for their campaign, “Islam is of the Devil”, a title shared by the recent book authored by the church’s pastor, Dr. Terry Jones.

The group feels that simply educating the public is insufficient, as they have declared September 11, 2010 “International Burn a Quran Day”, a rather self-explanatory event. Churchmember Wayne Sapp has even posted videos of a “warm-up” burning on Youtube, rallying the troops with convincing arguments such as, “Christ appeared to destroy the works of the devil,” and, “To call yourself Christian, you should be burning the Quran.”

Meanwhile, over on the Islam is of the Devil website, Pastor Jones offers his own pep rally, informing us that “the desire of all Muslims is to replace the Constitution of the United States with Sharia law.” Ridiculous, sweeping statements aside, I suspect Pastor Jones’ real fear is that he could be forbidden from marketing his truly American, fifteen dollar, Islam is of the Devil coffee mugs and T-shirts.

When asked in a CNN interview why he would want to burn the sacred book of 1.5 billion people, Jones responded, “Well, for one thing, to us, the book is not sacred.” This almost unfathomably egocentric statement begins to uncover what I think is often at the heart of fanaticism: a complete and utter lack of understanding and respect for any view or practice that is not one’s own. One shudders to think of the type of exposition that fills the pages of Islam is of the Devil.

Unfortunately, this casual and ill-informed disregard appears often within the Gaudiya community and, oddly, is mostly directed toward other Gaudiya groups. To illustrate, we can simply rephrase the above interview: “Why would you want to insult the teacher of x number of people?” and wait for the answer, “Well, for one thing, to us, he is not a bona fide teacher.” Such a discussion, especially online, hardly makes a stir; it has come to be expected and maybe even considered normal, a sign of just how bad the situation really is.

Like Jones, fanatics who deride the faith of others often claim to be doing so in hopes of helping the misguided who are on the receiving end of their inspired vomit. Despite this approach being an ill-reasoned one, it is not even the true motive of its perpetrators. The incessant drive to convert (especially to convert via attack) only reveals the rickety faith of the converter coupled with the oft-subscribed, subconscious misconception that the conversion of others will make one’s own adherence more substantial. Daniel Schultz of The Revealer describes the other purpose usually served in these scenarios in relation to Dove World’s Islam campaign: “If there is to be a conversion, then, it will be a movement of ‘weak’ Christians to ‘strong’ ones, believers who burn with the spirit of over-againstness.” And this is the fruit of such outreach: superficially strong devotees whose strength only exists when there is an opposing force to hold it up, an enemy to denigrate and feel superior to. Lucky for them (and unfortunate for those who are trained otherwise), the potential enemies all too often bear the same negative sentiments, ensuring the mutual propping up of each others’ faith for generations to come.

In the end, it is selfishness and the concomitant ego-assertion that are “of the devil.” To the extent that any religious or other group become vessels for these tendencies, we can consider them legitimate enemies. In which case, if we engage them at all, we are to do so in an appropriate way, knowing full well that we can expect to see little fruition, but also that such critiques will call our own progress, and not in the illusory way that fanatical tirades do.

Therefore I say, Dr. Jones, heal thyself.

Many, many people, particularly those whose faith he held, could speak volumes about the glories of Aindra prabhu and possibly give us glimpses into the internal life he cultivated. I will not pretend to know much about him. But I, like many, had a few interactions with him, held some appreciation for his convictions, and feel that his passing is a great loss for the Vaisnava community.

My first encounter with Aindra was through his Vrindavana Mellows tapes in the early 90s. In our brahmacari asrama we would listen to them often and learn many of the melodies. In 1995, ’96, and ‘98, while in Vrindavana, I was able to participate in several of his kirtanas and associate with some of his kirtana crew. Visiting his room was like stepping into some medieval babaji’s cave: walls plastered with cow dung, a maha-prasad Tamal tree from the courtyard of the mandira, uncountable salagram silas… And then there was the twenty-first century recording equipment with which he expertly demonstrated yukta-vairagya, working his magic to engineer transcendent sound. I fondly remember gathering with his gang on the veranda outside his room as they belted out a chorus response for his latest recording Prayers to the Dust of Vraja. In that room, the life, the kirtana-rasa, the bhava I had heard in those recordings came alive before my eyes. There were the instruments—the bells that you hear ringing in Mellows recordings, swarmandala, and the ankle bells he wore on his feet as he would pound out rhythm while simultaneously playing harmonium and bellowing forth commanding kirtana… While residing in that tiny little corner of Vraja-dhama, he was broadcasting its environment all over the world.

As a kid I used to sing and play music in punk bands. The art of music is in expressing the passion of the soul. I had an attraction to kirtana because it was the highest, most complete form of self-expression. Aindra’s kirtanas always made me feel self-expressed, feeling the mood of saranagati to Sri Krishna in the form of Sri Nama prabhu. I’ve always felt that just as we consider the consciousness of the chef entering the food that he or she prepares, the mood of the kirtaniya is manifest in their presentation of kirtana. Kirtana with Aindra in Vrindavana was always focused, absorbing, and emotionally rich. You never felt inattentive because his fervor for the name kept you present. He was a master of rhythm and synchronicity. He would bark commands of his intentions in changing the flow. Often he would give a soul-piercing stare, looking like a madman. He wanted you there, in Nama, in congregation. Never for a minute did I feel pratistha in his kirtana.

As I consider what influence he had on my life, I think that what I appreciate the most about Aindra prabhu was his contribution to the diversity of Iskcon. His eccentric nature, unkempt look, crazy brown cloth, his frustration with the status quo, and his nature to periodically boil over and without restraint speak in such a way as to be censured by authority. He was anything but a generic Hare Krishna devotee. He was someone who was prodding his associates, his community, and his gurudeva’s mission to move, progress, advance! Can’t you hear him yelling now?! His “settle for nothing less” sense of urgency was contagious. It is most unfortunate that Iskcon has many times been unable to appreciate or accomodate such diversity, particularly in those fortunate souls like Aindra prabhu who develop an attraction and pursuit of raga-marga and who desire to assist their brethren by sharing their realization. I have it on good authority that Aindra had recently published a book of his realizations. After making an offering at Srila Prabhupada’s tirobhava mahotsava last year, he was once again rebuked and told that if his book was published he would have to leave Iskcon and give up his most cherished sankirtana service. Although he did publish at least one for himself, I have heard that in desiring to keep this service, his thought was that his book would have to wait until after his death to be available to the masses.

It is most tragic that the spiritual progress of an influential person could be seen as a management problem rather than an opportunity for reassessing, re-evaluating and re-prioritizing the purpose of Srila Prabhupada’s mission. Aindra prabhu certainly had some biting words to say in this regard. While some may not agree with his philosophy or his style of presentation, the silencing of dissent, either through threat of excommunication or through the unfortunate demise of the dissenter is most disappointing to those who yearn for truth. Spiritual progress is by nature a highly individualized affair, and its presentation in a worldwide society of varying degrees of adhikara is most definitely a challenge. However, I hope that before facing more of these unfortunate circumstances, Iskcon can learn to at least accomodate, but better yet, to advocate, for the individual development of its membership, considering the accompanying management dilemma only secondarily.

“Humility implies perfect submission to the truth and no sympathy for untruth. A person who entertains any partiality for untruth is unfit to chant the kirtana of Hari.” – Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Thakur Prabhupada

All glories to Hari-kirtan-rasacarya Sripad Aindra prabhu!

Aindra Prabhu – Govardhana puja 2005 (kartika)

By Phillip Goldberg

Religion comes into conflict with science when it is defined by unprovable claims that can be dismissed as superstitions, and when it treats as historical facts stories that read like legends and myths to non-believers. Other aspects of religion — what I would consider the deeper and more significant elements — are not only compatible with science but enrich its findings. The best evidence of this is science’s response to the religions of the East over the course of the last 200 years. As the French Nobel laureate Romain Rolland said early in the 20th century, “Religious faith in the case of the Hindus has never been allowed to run counter to scientific laws.” The same can be said for Buddhism, which derives from the same Vedic roots.

Most of the Hindu gurus, Yoga masters, Buddhist monks and other Asian teachers who came to the West framed their traditions in a science-friendly way. Emphasizing the experiential dimension of spirituality, with its demonstrable influence on individual lives, they presented their teachings as a science of consciousness with a theoretical component and a set of practical applications for applying and testing those theories. Most of the teachers were educated in both their own traditions and the Western canon; they respected science, had actively studied it, and dialogued with Western scientists, many of whom were inspired to study Eastern concepts for both personal and professional reasons.

As early as the 1890s, Swami Vivekananda spent time with scientific luminaries such as Lord Kelvin, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Nikola Tesla. “Mr. Tesla thinks he can demonstrate mathematically that force and matter are reducible to potential energy,” the swami wrote in a letter to a friend. “I am working a good deal now upon the cosmology and eschatology of Vedanta. I clearly see their perfect unison with modern science.” Had Vivekananda lived three years longer, he would have rejoiced in Einstein’s discovery of E = mc², which united matter and energy forever.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the great sage and Indian independence leader Sri Aurobindo, who had studied in England, blended East and West by extending Darwinian concepts to the evolution of consciousness and the cosmos. In 1920, Paramahansa Yogananda set a precedent by calling his first lecture in the West “The Science of Religion.” He befriended a number of scientists, growing so close to the great botanist Luther Burbank that he dedicated his Autobiography of a Yogi to him. Later, Swami Satchidananda, whose own teacher, Swami Sivananda, had been a successful physician before becoming a monk, encouraged the scientific study of Yoga; one of his early students was Dr. Dean Ornish, whose groundbreaking research sprang directly from Satchidananda’s teachings. And Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, even before he became famous as the Beatles’ guru, prodded scientists into studying the physiology of meditation, setting in motion an enterprise that has now produced over a thousand studies.

The interaction of Eastern spirituality and Western science has expanded methods of stress reduction, treatment of chronic disease, psychotherapy and other areas. But that is only part of the story. Hindu and Buddhist descriptions of higher stages of consciousness have expanded psychology’s understanding of human development and inspired the formation of provocative new theories of consciousness itself. Their ancient philosophies have also influenced physicists, among them Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who read from the Bhagavad Gita at a memorial service for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his landmark TV series Cosmos, Carl Sagan called Hinduism the only religion whose time-scale for the universe matches the billions of years documented by modern science. Sagan filmed that segment in a Hindu temple featuring a statue of the god Shiva as the cosmic dancer, an image that now stands in the plaza of the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva.

The relationship between science and Eastern spiritual traditions — which many prefer to think of as psychologies — is still in its infancy. In recent years, the Dalai Lama has carried the ball forward, hosting conferences and encouraging research. Western religions would do well to emulate this history. Their historical and faith-based claims conflict with empirical science and probably always will; but to the extent that their practices directly impact human life, they can be treated as testable hypotheses.

This article originally appeared on huffingtonpost.com

“I’m spiritual but not religious.”

It’s a trendy phrase people often use to describe their belief that they don’t need organized religion to live a life of faith.

But for Jesuit priest James Martin, the phrase also hints at something else: egotism.

“Being spiritual but not religious can lead to complacency and self-centeredness,” says Martin, an editor at America, a national Catholic magazine based in New York City. “If it’s just you and God in your room, and a religious community makes no demands on you, why help the poor?”

Religious debates erupt over everything from doctrine to fashion. Martin has jumped into a running debate over the “I’m spiritual but not religious” phrase.

The “I’m spiritual but not religious” community is growing so much that one pastor compared it to a movement. In a 2009 survey by the research firm LifeWay Christian Resources, 72 percent of millennials (18- to 29-year-olds) said they’re “more spiritual than religious.” The phrase is now so commonplace that it’s spawned its own acronym (“I’m SBNR”) and Facebook page: SBNR.org.

But what exactly does being “spiritual but not religious” mean, and could there be hidden dangers in living such a life?

Did you choose “Burger King Spirituality”?

Heather Cariou, a New York City-based author who calls herself spiritual instead of religious, doesn’t think so. She’s adopted a spirituality that blends Buddhism, Judaism and other beliefs.

“I don’t need to define myself to any community by putting myself in a box labeled Baptist, or Catholic, or Muslim,” she says. “When I die, I believe all my accounting will be done to God, and that when I enter the eternal realm, I will not walk though a door with a label on it.”

BJ Gallagher, a Huffington Post blogger who writes about spirituality, says she’s SBNR because organized religion inevitably degenerates into tussles over power, ego and money.

Gallagher tells a parable to illustrate her point:

“God and the devil were walking down a path one day when God spotted something sparkling by the side of the path. He picked it up and held it in the palm of his hand.

“Ah, Truth,” he said.

“Here, give it to me,” the devil said. “I’ll organize it.”

Gallagher says there’s nothing wrong with people blending insights from different faith traditions to create what she calls a “Burger King Spirituality — have it your way.”

She disputes the notion that spiritual people shun being accountable to a community.

“Twelve-step people have a brilliant spiritual community that avoids all the pitfalls of organized religion,” says Gallagher, author of “The Best Way Out is Always Through.”

“Each recovering addict has a ‘god of our own understanding,’ and there are no priests or intermediaries between you and your god. It’s a spiritual community that works.”

Nazli Ekim, who works in public relations in New York City, says calling herself spiritual instead of religious is her way of taking responsibility for herself.

Ekim was born in a Muslim family and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. She prayed to Allah every night, until she was 13 and had to take religion classes in high school.Then one day, she says she had to take charge of her own beliefs.

“I had this revelation that I bow to no one, and I’ve been spiritually a much happier person,” says Ekim, who describers herself now as a Taoist, a religious practice from ancient China that emphasizes the unity of humanity and the universe.

“I make my own mistakes and take responsibility for them. I’ve lied, cheated, hurt people — sometimes on purpose. Did I ever think I will burn in hell for all eternity? I didn’t. Did I feel bad and made up for my mistakes? I certainly did, but not out of fear of God.”

Going on a spiritual walkabout

The debate over being spiritual rather than religious is not just about semantics. It’s about survival.

Numerous surveys show the number of Americans who do not identify themselves as religious has been increasing and likely will continue to grow.

A 2008 survey conducted by Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, dubbed these Americans who don’t identify with any religion as “Nones.”

Seminaries, churches, mosques and other institutions will struggle for survival if they don’t somehow convince future generations that being religious isn’t so bad after all, religion scholars warn.

Jennifer Walters, dean of religious life at Smith College in Massachusetts, says there’s a lot of good in old-time religion.

Religious communities excel at caring for members in difficult times, encouraging members to serve others and teaching religious practices that have been tested and wrestled with for centuries, Walters says.

“Hymn-singing, forms of prayer and worship, teachings about social justice and forgiveness — all these things are valuable elements of religious wisdom,” Walters says. “Piecing it together by yourself can be done, but with great difficulty.”

Being a spiritual Lone Ranger fits the tenor of our times, says June-Ann Greeley, a theology and philosophy professor.

“Religion demands that we accord to human existence some absolutes and eternal truths, and in a post-modern culture, that becomes all but impossible,” says Greeley, who teaches at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut.

It’s much easier for “spiritual” people to go on “spiritual walkabouts,” Greeley says.

“People seem not to have the time nor the energy or interest to delve deeply into any one faith or religious tradition,” Greeley says. “So they move through, collecting ideas and practices and tenets that most appeal to the self, but making no connections to groups or communities.”

Being spiritual instead of religious may sound sophisticated, but the choice may ultimately come down to egotism, says Martin, the Jesuit priest, who writes about the phrase in his book, “The Jesuit Guide to (Almost Everything).”

“Religion is hard,” he says. “Sometimes it’s just too much work. People don’t feel like it. I have better things to do with my time. It’s plain old laziness.”

By Wilfred M. McCray

Humility is generally seen to be a virtue, then. But it is a peculiar kind of virtue. For one thing, it requires for its realization that we constantly do battle with, and insistently defeat, some of our strongest and deepest inclinations. This requirement would appear to run athwart the usual assumption that human virtues are forms of excellence which express the fullest flourishing of human nature. The great cardinal virtues – justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude – are all clearly of that variety, refinements and intensifications of qualities of character that seem to arise naturally in reasonably well-reared individuals, and are clearly complementary to their natural endowments. Not so humility, which sets itself against many of our most fundamental impulses, clips our wings, and negates our desires – working, in a sense, against nature itself. Which may be precisely why Aristotle declined to regard humility as a virtue, and instead exalted “greatness of soul” (megalopsychia) as the convergence of the moral virtues – a mean, as all the virtues were for Aristotle, between the extremes of vanity and pusillanimity. Whatever else one might say about the megalopsychos, the great-souled man, he was not humble.

It is not for nothing that the word humility is so close to the word humiliation. Humility may require of us acts of passivity or self-limitation in response even to the basest affronts, affronts that may border on being degrading or shameful, acts to which the most natural reaction of (as we might put it) “any self-respecting person” would be to fight back, and feel entirely justified in doing so. Who can read the story of Jesus’s arrest, trial, and crucifixion, and not feel the impulse to ask: Why his utter passivity? Why doesn’t he escape? Why doesn’t he use his divine powers? There is a magnificence in Jesus’s selfless obedience, but it is also troubling, and it should be. The “natural person” in us cries out in amazement and horror at the sight of a humility that goes beyond all bounds and defies our comprehension, willing to be the “sheep led to the slaughter.”

There is an additional peculiarity to humility. It is a virtue that is constantly in danger of subverting itself and turning into its own opposite. As a result, what appears to be humility may very easily be, or become, something radically different from humility.

The paradox is easily explained. As we become more accomplished in something, we tend to take pride in our advances and see our growing mastery, particularly when accompanied by the pleasure or approval of others, as a spur to further improvements. A pianist likes to show off her skill in playing a Beethoven sonata; an apprentice cabinetmaker feels quiet satisfaction in the work of his hands; a dancer delights in knowing the pleasure her movements bring to another. But humility is, by definition, a virtue which systematically denies us these satisfactions. It is the virtue in which we should never take pride, whether that pride is generated entirely by ourselves or fed by the approval of others.

Indeed, one could argue that the more deeply we commit ourselves to a way of thinking and being that accords with the voracious standard of humility, the greater the danger that we will succumb to precisely the vice of pride – and in particular the insidious variant called spiritual pride – against which the virtue of humility struggles most continuously. Such a conundrum has its comic side, best expressed in what might be called the Mac Davis Syndrome. “Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble,” crooned country-boy Davis in his 1980 hit song, “when you’re perfect in every way.” The line is refreshingly funny because it is rooted in the truth about the peculiar insufferableness of a certain kind of self-satisfied humility. But the joke is on us. Every “improvement” we make in ourselves when pursuing the virtue of humility also presents us with the danger that, in recognizing it as an improvement and giving ourselves credit for that, we will begin to see ourselves as better than we are. Gradually, imperceptibly but surely, we will begin to be proud of nothing so much as our ever more perfect humility. Then it really will be hard to be humble.

Think, by way of comparison, of more uncomplicated virtues such as courage, or fortitude, or faith. The more one possesses such a virtue, the more credible is one’s possession of it in the eyes of others. The man who does increasingly courageous things is more and more evidently a courageous man. And the more he grows in the possession and manifestation of courage, the more confidently he can be identified, and he can identify himself, as a man firmly rooted in the virtue of courage. He does not detract from his courageousness by acknowledging it; nor does he enhance it by refusing to accept accolades, medals, and the like. He does not run the risk of somehow becoming a coward, or falling under suspicion of being one, or of being labeled one, by performing too many acts of courage, or becoming too pleased with himself on that count. Nor, thinking of other virtues in a similar way, can one’s display of unending perseverance, or profound faithfulness, put one instantly into danger of a descent into flakiness or infidelity.

In other words, humility is a uniquely anti-reflexive virtue. By this, I mean that it is, by its very nature, resistant to self-evaluation and self-appreciation, not to speak of self-scoring; the minute one begins to undertake those judgments, one has fatally violated the ground rules and undone the whole effort. There is a kind of Heisenberg principle at work, meaning that, while one can make judgments about the humility of others, there is no mirror into which one can gaze to discover the uncomplicated truth about one’s own “progress” in humility. Small wonder that so many religious and philosophical traditions understand humility as a process of self-emptying and self-forgetting, a rigorous discipline that involves a relentless training of the eyes of one’s soul to gaze upon the things outside oneself. It seems that one can have humility or a Proustian self-awareness, but one cannot aspire to both.

And, as if that were not enough, there is yet another twist to the conundrum. There has long been a tension in the way we think about the utility of the virtues, a tension that has fascinated and preoccupied modern political and social philosophers and moralists from Machiavelli to Benjamin Franklin to Tocqueville to Weber, to mention only a few. It is the tension between appearance and reality, and it boils down to one question. Which is more important: having the appearance of virtue, or having the virtue itself? Which is more important, seeming or being? For Aristotle, there could be no doubt about the matter. But the moderns were less certain. And with good reason, for it is a serious and open question. In a free and fluid commercial society, where the fortunes of individuals are changing constantly and where one has to know how to appeal directly to individuals one does not know, the art of impression management becomes essential. What good, after all, does it do a political leader to be courageous or judicious if no one knows that he is? He can have the personal satisfaction of possessing that virtue. But it will matter very little if his constituents believe him to be something other than what he is; then all the virtue in the world will not be proof against political disaster.

Ideally, then, the virtuous leader should also take care to be known to be virtuous. And there is nothing wrong with that. But it is a very short step from such a realization to the more ominous and corrosive belief that impression management is all that matters, and that seeming not only matters more than being, but is the only thing that matters at all. Every virtue is subject to this tension. But under the conditions of modern life, with its ubiquitous emphasis upon the production of pleasing appearances and effective forms of self-presentation, crafted by various public relations professionals for promulgation in the organs of mass publicity, the powers that be can easily cooperate (or conspire) to create an utterly false simulacrum of reality and convince the public of its truthfulness, making the situation far more perilous than it has ever been before. It is not impossible that someone should actually possess the virtues that others are induced to see him as possessing. It does happen, and perhaps it does so less rarely than the passage of camels through needles’ eyes. But we are all too accustomed by now to the idea that this feat is far from automatic, and that the intricate manipulations involved in presenting a “seeming” virtue convincingly may, in fact, require talents that are at the opposite end of the spectrum from the virtue itself.

With the virtue of humility, however, the disjunction between seeming and being is near absolute, to an extent that would not be possible for most of the other virtues. Once again, the anti-reflexive character of humility provides the explanation. To strive to appear to be humble, for whatever purposes, is an instant disqualifier for anyone who actually wants to be humble. The two things are intrinsically contradictory, as is vividly illustrated in the person of Charles Dickens’s famous character Uriah Heep, whose name has become a byword for cloying and manipulative insincerity parading in the guise of humility. Jesus pointed to the same disjuncture in the nature of humility in his stinging rebuke of those who ostentatiously pray in public, so that they can be seen to pray, or who fast in conspicuous ways that advertise their virtuous self-denial. Those who would pray, he counseled, should do so in the utmost privacy, without any thought of a public effect; and those who fast should, if anything, try their utmost to conceal it, so as to avoid the pitfall of seeking men’s approval rather than God’s.

This excerpt originally appeared in In Character with the title

By Carl Pope

Humility is one of the virtues most heavily stressed, and least practiced, by all great ethical traditions. My biblical concordat contains ninety references to variations on the theme of “walk humbly in the eyes of the Lord.” “Pride cometh before a fall” is the proverb that captures this message.

But humility is just not part of primate nature. Chimpanzees, baboons, and gorillas are very different from each other, but none are humble. Humility is work.

As a practical doctrine, environmentalism most often collides with our current way of doing business and living our lives over exactly this issue of hubris – the assumption that we understand and can calculate the results of our actions when we have only the vaguest awareness of the extent of the interconnections they affect.

So it should not be surprising that science itself is deeply riven over this virtue. In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humankind. This makes him a hero to those scientists who pride themselves on their ability to transform and “conquer” nature, and who consider the natural world the rightful laboratory for their experiments. The apotheosis of Promethean science was the atomic bomb, which once again stole the gods’ fire for mortal use, but the Promethean scientific tradition goes back at least as far as the thirteenth century, to Roger Bacon. Bacon embedded his radical new notion of the control of nature through science in a thoroughly religious context, but over the centuries the modest religious injunction to humility that tethered Bacon atrophied in a progressively secular world.

The first cautionary note against Promethean science – the first hint that humility needed to get back in the picture – came with the atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the manager of the Manhattan Project, greeted the first successful nuclear test with a sobering quote from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the great destroyer.” Most of the scientists involved in the development of the bomb subsequently pleaded with political leaders for deeper and more restrictive limitations on nuclear technology. But they lost, and the minority, led by Edward Teller, the model for Dr. Strangelove, prevailed. Instead of using nuclear weapons as a cautionary parable and model for a more humble scientific endeavor, the U.S. government offered hallucinatory promises of “electricity too cheap to meter” in the guise of a bold – but utterly arrogant – “Atoms for Peace” program. (Atoms for Peace is still creating mischief, as we hear every day in the news about the Iranian claims to their right to control the nuclear fuel cycle, and the West’s lament that in this case, what they really want is a weapon. Both, of course, are right – that is the fatal flaw in the Promethean perspective.)

But science has a powerful, competing tradition. In medieval times the scientific enterprise was rescued from stagnation in alchemy by measurement, not conquest. Bacon’s great successor, Newton, didn’t engineer new tools for controlling the natural world. He studied the cosmos. Advances in optics and navigational instruments helped launch the age of discovery and helped astronomers understand and explain the universe, particularly the movement of heavenly bodies. Copernicus, who established that Earth revolves around the sun, is the archetype for this approach to science.

The Copernican tradition seeks to explain and understand – not necessarily change – the world. Through observation, Copernicans are continually reminded how complex the world is, and how little of it they comprehend. Consequently, there is a certain humility in their enterprise – although that quality is not, of course, exclusive to any group.

Science is a stochastic process involving both observation and intervention. The ability to observe and understand natural processes rests on the foundation of instruments and technologies that emerge from experimental interventions; even Copernicus needed better glass grinding technology to explore the cosmos. So while the Promethean and Copernican approaches relate to the value of humility in importantly different ways, both are key to the scientific endeavor. Indeed, a fundamental question might be framed, “How do we get the Prometheans to listen to the Copernicans?”

Rachel Carson, for example, was perhaps the most famous recent Copernican. A marine biologist by training, she sounded the alarm about the dangers of chlorinated organic pesticides, particularly DDT, in her groundbreaking bookSilent Spring. Humility was explicitly a core value in Carson’s worldview: “It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know of wonder and humility.” But the Promethean chemical engineers of Carson’s era blasted – and continue to blast – her as not a true scientist, because she is too humble about science.

Carson’s work helped launch the modern environmental movement. At its heart, environmentalism wove the insights of science into the precepts of traditional ethics, so that “thou shalt not kill” applied not only to a wielded ax or a hurled spear, but to mercury emissions from a coal-fired power plant. The capacity to measure consequences – and the scale of the industrial endeavor that created quite significant consequences – set Copernican and Promethean perspectives at war.

The clash between humility and arrogance, Prometheus and Copernicus, lies not only in the methods of discovery. Today the clash has come to a head over the fate of the climate. The overwhelming data gathered by scientists who measure the world – the Copernicans – strongly suggests that the fossil fuel and chemical revolutions unleashed by the Prometheans are eroding the climatic stabilizers upon which human civilization rests. For twenty years, calls for a little humility – often expressed in the language of buying insurance – have been rejected by the political, economic, and scientific elites of the industrial world.

This response illustrates just how deep the human aversion to humility runs. Faced with measurements showing that unlimited consumption of fossil fuels was destabilizing the climate, the scientists and engineers aligned with the exploitation of nature simply allowed themselves to be corrupted into cooking the books.

With increasing boldness, industry began to fund researchers to parrot its views on topics like global warming and clean air. These Promethean contrarians offer the promise of profligate energy use and industrial expansion with no negative consequences. They rarely published in peer-reviewed scientific literature and sometimes showed a cavalier disregard for basic scientific norms. Thus the Promethean view on global warming is laid out not in scientific journals but in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. The scientists who float these ideas know that the threat from climate change is not just the warming, but the disruption of an anomalous 10,000-year period of climactic stability that enabled humans to develop civilizations.

When political and public pressure for action built, the Prometheans responded with the concept of “geo-engineering,” the idea that perhaps by sending massive quantities of sulfuric acid droplets into the atmosphere, seeding the ocean with iron, or spewing thousands of tiny mirrors into space we could undo the “warming” caused by massive buildups of carbon dioxide.

Scientists – of either variety – have a difficult time when their roles morph from doing science to informing the public. They are not by temperament communicators. They are truth finders, but the habits that make truth tellersare different. Galileo, with his putative “nonetheless it moves” sotto vocecomment, is the first recorded example of this squirming. The awkward conversations among climate scientists about how to explain to the public that we really ought to be doing something about climate change even if the computer models show substantial uncertainty are the most recent. But the Copernicans have a disadvantage – unlike the Prometheans they have no “gee whiz” technology – think fire – to bring to the party – they are more purely judged by their evaluations. By and large the public is too impatient to listen carefully, which can easily lead the scientific community into telling people what they think they need to hear, instead of what the science says. The recent leaks of climate science memos in which some of the climate scientists urged squelching awkward data points is one example – and an earlier and far more consequential one was the decision by the nuclear fraternity after World War II to pretend that radiation was almost a friendly neighbor to human beings, to avoid a public panic about the nuclear deterrence strategy.

The geo-engineering debate brings into harsh contrast just how addictive the concept of “mastery” is for primates. While some geo-engineering projects might, in theory, lower mean temperatures, none would curb the continual unraveling of the micro-climates on which individual agricultures or urban societies depend. (The sulfuric acid project, for example, would greatly accelerate the alarming acidification of the ocean that terrifies Rachel Carson’s successors in the field of marine biology.) So geo-engineering can’t solve the problem it proposes to, but how seductive it is to play with the idea of intentionally – as opposed to merely accidentally – controlling the shape of our planet.

Climate scientists warn us that time to reverse course and display humility is short. The strong and arrogant “try it out” traditions of chemistry, engineering, biotechnology, and nuclear physics have the bit in their mouths and are not prepared to be reined in. In recent decades, however, technological innovation has shifted to the fields of electronics and genetics. While these advances have given the Prometheans vast and potentially destructive new powers, they may ultimately prove more useful to the watchful Copernicans. Computer technology, modern optics, and advances in cellular biology have dramatically increased scientists’ ability to monitor the global atmosphere, map genetic differences among closely related species, and detect the buildup of dangerous hormone-mimicking chemicals in human tissues, to name a few. As a result of their new powers of observation, many scientists are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with what their instruments are telling them, and increasingly worried about what the Prometheans have wrought.

By Mark Vernon

I was at a conference just recently, where we told tales of vampire bats that share their blood, bacteria that work together, and monkeys that ease group tensions by making love. It set me thinking about the evolution of morality, for there is one story of it that’s often told, and it begins with a problem. Natural selection favors the best-adapted individual: it’s called survival of fittest. It explains why we feel fear or lust. But how can this ‘selfish’ account of natural selection explain moral emotions like altruism that might lead the individual to abandon their self-interest in favor of others, even to the point of self-sacrifice?

The problem is resolved by pointing out that it’s only the gene that is ‘selfish.’ That take allows for circumstances in which the survival of the individual may not best serve the transmission of the gene. For example, the interests of the gene may be better served if the individual is sacrificed for the sake of the group, when the group is composed of kin—other carriers of the gene. That’d explain why parents will surrender all for the benefit of their children. Alternatively, the gene may be best served if the individual is prepared to form cooperative relationships with others, on the basis that if I scratch your back, you might scratch mine.

Blessed Mistakes

Now, this story accounts for many instances of kin and reciprocal altruism in the natural world. However, it comes unstuck with humans. We look odd from an evolutionary perspective because we will sacrifice ourselves for individuals with whom we don’t share our genes, and when there’s no prospect of the favor being returned. Call it our Good Samaritan tendency.

In order to explain these anomalies, some biologists have appealed to Darwinian “misfirings.” Richard Dawkins, for one, refers to altruism and the like not just as misfirings but “blessed mistakes.” They single humans out as alone being able to “rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators,” as he famously put it at the end of The Selfish Gene. Thank evolution’s oversight for that.

However, if this argument is offered to save appearances when it comes to human morality, it is withdrawn when it comes to religion. Religion too is a misfiring for Dawkins—but not a blessed one. Instead it is “an unfortunate byproduct of an underlying psychological propensity.” Perhaps our ancestors developed an instinct to believe in godlike authority as a result of the survival benefits of obeying parents without question; and for an imaginative child, it’s a small move from believing in an irreproachable earthly father to believing in a divine one. And also a ghastly mistake. Homo religious is like the moth that flies into the candle flame. Before candles, light was a means of navigation; in a world with candles, the instinct causes death. Similarly, following religious instincts leads to death—your own or that of others, often on a massive scale. Modern people, Dawkins implores, must exercise their reason and override the misfiring.

It’s All About Trust

But is that story right? Might the selfish account of evolution itself be a misfiring of Darwin’s theory? And if so, could evolutionary theory lead not to opposition, but to a renewed interest in religion—perhaps even respect for it? It’s a possibility suggested by the work of David Sloan Wilson, the champion of a different account of morality. The selfish story, he says, is a product of the “age of individualism” in evolutionary theory, an age that is both aberrant and, he believes, will prove to be short-lived.

Wilson’s work incorporates group selection into evolutionary theory: evolution might pick a trait not because it’s good for the individual, but because it’s good for the group. (For this reason, it’s known as multi-level selection.) The reason for doing so is that with the trait, members of the group survive better.

Charles Darwin himself expressed something like this view. In The Descent of Man, he writes:

There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possession in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.

To put it another way, Darwin questions the exclusively selfish foundations of morality. As he also wrote, “the moral sense is fundamentally identical with the social instincts.”

So the Good Samaritan is not misfiring but behaving perfectly naturally. Moreover, Wilson believes that human beings are so successful, compared with our nearest evolutionary cousins, precisely for this reason. Chimps are pretty intelligent, but they operate on the basis of mistrust. Early humans, though, learned to trust their fellows. That proved to be extraordinarily beneficial since human intelligence could then develop cooperatively. We’re not always nice to each other. But we are bonded socially, and that, working in tandem with our intelligence, leads to a highly developed morality.

Religion as the Key to Humankind’s Success?

This move changes things dramatically for the evolutionary assessment of religion. It’s not just that religion provides beliefs that bind people together, much as the sociologist of religion, Émile Durkheim, proposed. Further, multi-level selection means that groups can come to behave as if they were single organisms: religion converts human groups into an “organism-equivalent.” In fact, those religions that best encourage people to feel they belong to one another, tend to be the ones that last and grow. Far from being a mistake, religion may provide the best evolutionary explanation for humankind’s success.

Of course, accounting for the origins of something proves nothing about its worth—philosophers call that the genetic fallacy. There are also reasons to question Wilson’s evolutionary theory. Further, as with our moral instincts, so with our religious instincts: we are not always nice to each other. But if our cooperative capacities have led to us having the most developed moral sense of all the animals, perhaps also with our religious sense too. Moreover, it can be valued as such.

What is the real cost of shipping a container load of toys from Hong Kong to Los Angeles? Or a case of apples grown in New Zealand to markets in North America? And what is the true cost of that fridge humming in your kitchen, that car purring on the road or that steak sizzling on the grill? Practically every one of the products we buy in the global marketplace is undervalued because the environmental costs haven’t been taken into account. As a result, every one of the billions of purchases we make every day pushes the world a little deeper into the cosmic red.

But what if we were to implement this simple idea: true cost?

We calculate the hidden costs associated with products – what the economists nonchalantly refer to as “externalities” – and incorporate them. We force the price of every product in the global marketplace to tell the ecological truth.

We start with the little things: plastic bags, coffee cups, paper napkins. Economists calculate these eco costs – say it’s five cents per plastic bag, ten cents per cup and one cent per napkin – then we just tack that on. We’re already doing that with the various eco-fees and eco-taxes included in the price of tires, cans of paint and other products. But now we abandon the concept of ancillary fees and taxes and implement straight true-cost pricing.

Then, over a ten-year period, we phase in true-cost eating. We raise the price of avocados from Mexico and shrimp from China to reflect the true cost of transporting them long distances. And we estimate and add on all the hidden costs of our industrial farming and food processing systems. That burger at McDonald’s will cost you more, so will most meats, produce and processed foods. You can eat whatever you want, but you’ll have to pay the true cost. Inevitably, your palate will submit to your wallet. Processed, mega-farmed and imported foods become more expensive as the cost of organic and locally produced food goes down. Bit by bit, purchase by purchase, the global food system heaves toward sustainability.

Then we phase in the true cost of driving. We add on the environmental cost of the carbon our cars emit, the cost of building and maintaining roads, the medical costs of accidents, the noise and the aesthetic degradation caused by urban sprawl and maybe even the military cost of protecting those crucial oil fields and oil tanker supply lines. Your private automobile will cost you around $100,000 and a tank of gas $250. You’re still free to drive all you want, but instead of passing the costs on to future generations, you pay upfront. This would force us to reinvent the way we get around. Demand for monorails, bullet trains, subways and streetcars would surge. We would demand more bike lanes and pedestrian paths and car-free urban centers. And gradually a paradigm shift in urban planning would transform urban life.

True-cost pricing is fraught with daunting, seemingly insurmountable problems. For conventional economists, it’s a frightening concept that would slow growth, reduce the flow of world trade and curb consumption. It would force us to rethink just about every economic axiom we’ve taken for granted since the dawn of the industrial age. It could turn out to be one of the most traumatic economic/social/cultural projects that humanity has ever undertaken. And yet … and yet … the idea of a global marketplace in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth has a simple, almost magical ring to it. It makes sense, it feels right, and it’s totally nonpolitical. It’s the one big idea that – if we are able to agree on it, implement it and muster the collective self-discipline to sustain it – could pull us out of the ecological tailspin we’re in and nudge this failing experiment of ours on Planet Earth back onto the rails.
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This article originally appeared in Adbusters #85.

By John Appleby

If there are two threads which bind all varieties of humanism together they must surely be a rejection of deities in any form and the claim that humans are unique in some meaningful manner. But how secure and, more importantly, how ethically sound are both these claims?

Consider Richard Dawkins. As a prominent supporter of non-religious causes his humanist credentials are impeccable. In his most recent book The Greatest Show on Earth he elegantly gathers together all the current (overwhelming) evidence that evolution is a far more reliable account of the genesis of humanity than any form of supernaturalism. He discusses how species are born; detailing the way in which most species have more in common with each other than many suppose, and how the boundaries between species are blurred rather than fixed (this is known as “biological continuism”). While such an account strengthens the first humanist thread in providing an alternative to biblical explanations of origins, it simultaneously weakens the second one, in that it undermines the idea that humans are somehow unique, let alone “superior” to other species.

This erosion of the argument for human uniqueness has not gone unnoticed and has led to a new spate of attacks upon humanism, not so much from the religiously minded but from those who are interested in the welfare of animals, and in establishing a properly ethical relationship between humans and other beasts.

For decades proponents of animal rights have used the scientific evidence of biological continuism to advocate a complete rethinking of our relationship to, and treatment of, other species. The term “speciesism”, coined by psychologist Richard Ryder in 1971 and popularised in Peter Singer’s 1975 book Animal Liberation, was used by animal rights advocates to describe what they denounce as an immoral form of radical anthropocentrism. For them, assuming the superiority of the human, and owning and using animals for labour or entertainment, amounts to a form of prejudice akin to racism.

Human uniqueness is also under attack from a quite different perspective. The so-called Transhumanists argue that humans have now become such advanced creatures that they are able to direct their own evolution by technological means. They are excited about the possibilities of genetic manipulation, digital interfacing (like the downloading of consciousness into computers) and especially the image of the ultimate synthesis of human and machine, the cyborg. Transhumanism is critical of humanism because it doesn’t go far enough. Since humans are so special and there is no God, why not follow through by developing a “better” person through technology?

A third, more complex stream of anti-humanism derives from the poststructuralism and postmodernism of the 1980s and ’90s. Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida launched a sustained attack upon the humanism embodied in the tradition of the Enlightenment and particularly in the ideas of Immanuel Kant. In Kant’s theory of human subjectivity we are the only creatures who think and feel the way we do. But the way in which we do this is the same for every individual. In other words, we are exceptional as a species, but fundamentally identical as members of that species. Poststructuralism, inspired in part by the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (who called Kant a “moral fanatic” and refuted his universalism), denies the existence of this universal human subject and is thus “anti-humanist”.

There is now an even newer critique of humanism, which combines elements of these three versions of anti-humanism. It comes complete with a new disciplinary name, Posthumanities, and a book series of the same name edited by Cary Wolfe, Professor of English at Rice University, Texas. This version of posthumanism relies upon the latest findings in animal behavior to challenge previous assumptions about the “different” character of animal consciousness and behavior. It aims to produce a theory which would displace humanism altogether and substitute a sound ethical theory upon which to base human interactions with other species. How well do its products match its ambitions?

In Cary Wolfe’s book What is Posthumanism? we find the following definition: “Posthumanism in my sense isn’t posthuman at all – in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has been transcended – but is only posthumanist in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy inherited from humanism itself.” Confused? Happily Wolfe provides a diagram to clarify matters. In this he distinguishes between “external relations” (what individual theorists say about the world) and “internal disciplinarity” (the way they go about saying it). So, for example, Peter Singer can be said to have a posthumanist attitude to the world (because he thinks animals are akin to humans in morally significant ways), but chooses a humanist way of expressing it through the language of philosophical utilitarianism and animal rights. For Wolfe, this makes Singer a good guy for what he says, but a bad guy for how he says it. Interestingly, this schema would appear to make Richard Dawkins, who is definitely a bad guy as far as Wolfe is concerned, a proponent of humanist posthumanism as well: his biological continuism stops him completely separating humans from other animals, but his reliance on science makes him express this in a humanist way because, as Wolfe is quick to point out, the supposedly disinterested nature of scientific enquiry is generally nothing of the sort.
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Read the entire article here.