Oliver Sacks Science Paper

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Body and Soul
A doctor’s view
Oliver Sacks, the brain and God
Published: September 10, 2015 12.11pm CEST
Richard Gunderman
Chancellor’s Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy, IUPUI
Mysteries of the mind. Brain via www.shutterstock.com.
Oliver Sacks, the celebrated neurologic storyteller who died at the end of August at age 82, once
We himself
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Sacks could write sensitively about religion, including a recent article on the role of the Sabbath in his
own life, but in writing about mystical experiences, he typically repaired to his professional lexicon,
referring to them as hallucinations – seemingly authentic visual and auditory experiences traceable
not to any external reality, but only to the brain itself. Sacks had witnessed in many of his patients the
depths of human longing, including a deep hunger for God, but to him they revealed truths only about
our own psyches.
Oliver Sacks. Steve Jurvetson/Flickr, CC BY
The notion that God represents but a chimera, a projection of inner human needs, goes back at least
to the 19th-century philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who wrote that our longing for God reveals
nothing more than a desire to make gods of ourselves.
More recently, some philosophers and scientists have suggested that belief in God is nothing more
than a delusion that springs from our need to discern patterns and even intentions in otherwise
purposeless events taking place around us. Belief in God, they say, offers a refuge from the world’s
cold incomprehensibility.
In a 2012 article in the Atlantic, “Seeing God in the Third Millennium,” Sacks prefaces his discussion
of religious epiphanies with accounts of two epileptic patients. The first, the great Russian novelist
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, describes in his own words how, in the aura of a seizure:
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I felt the heaven was going down upon the earth and that it engulfed me. I have really
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touched God… . I don’t know if this felicity lasts for seconds, hours, or months, but believe
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me, for all the joys that life may bring, I would not exchange this one.
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The second patient Sacks describes is a bus conductor who, at the onset of a seizure:
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“was suddenly overcome with a feeling of bliss. He felt that he was literally in heaven. He
collected the fares correctly, telling his passengers at the same time how pleased he was to be
in heaven… . He remained in this state of exaltation, hearing divining and angelic voices, for
two days.”
Three years later, however, the man experienced a series of three seizures on successive days, during
which his mind cleared. “During this episode,” Sacks reports, “he lost his faith.”
To Sacks as to others, the fact that such experiences are associated with unusual electrical activity in
the brain constitutes powerful evidence that epiphanies are grounded in neurological physiology.
Experiences of God are not useless, because they can tell us a great deal about how the mind works.
But they are, at least scientifically speaking, false. This and similar assertions have been advanced in
the form of claims that subjects who don a “God helmet,” a device that produces low-level stimulation
of the brain’s temporal lobe, experience similarly uncanny sensations.
While in no way directly refuting this line of argument, it is worth noting that the tradition of mystical
experience is a remarkably rich and venerable one. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is reported to have
been told by an angel that the Holy Spirit was upon her, and Francis of Assisi described a mystical
experience of brotherhood with earthly creatures, extending even to the sun and moon. More recently,
Mother Teresa wrote of the experience of “sharing in the passion of Jesus,” and Thomas Merton
described his sudden realization one day on the streets of Louisville that “I loved all those people.”
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The Annunciation,
Paolo de Matteis. Saint Louis Art Museum via Wikimedia Commons
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When we encounter mystical experiences, we come to a fork in the road. One path, the one toward
which Sacks points, is to explain them away in neurological or even psychopathological terms.
What the mystic experiences is an unusual pattern of neuronal discharge, a peculiar imbalance in
neurotransmitters, or the expression of a deep unmet longing for purpose in life. When it comes to
God and experiences of the transcendent, the higher must be understood in terms of the lower, and all
real explanations must finally come to rest in our neurologic equipment.
The other path leads in a radically different direction. We could, to paraphrase William James, insist
that the harmonic reveries of a Bach or Mozart represent nothing more than the dragging of catgut
across horses’ hairs, but doing so fails to respect something strikingly real and moving in the
experience of such works. Admittedly, such sublime experiences depend on the drawing of a bow or
the striking of a key, but even once the acoustic and neurologic explanations have been fully rendered,
there is a residuum – the experience of the transcendent – that has not been adequately accounted
for.
Which is more likely – that everything we experience can be fully explained in terms of the
apparatuses of perception, feeling, and intellection, or that there are realities around us that we do not
fully grasp? The mystics in our midst might remind us that we are an infinitesimally small part of a
planet that makes up an infinitesimally small part of a solar system that makes up an infinitesimally
small part of a galaxy that makes up an infinitesimally small part of a universe that may itself be an
infinitesimally small part of an infinite number of multiverses.
From a mystic’s point of view, even our own bodies might appear complex beyond our imagining.
Each adult human being consists of some 70 trillion cells, each one of which contains about 10,000
times as many molecules as the Milky Way has stars, and whose atoms in total number approximately
100 trillion. Even the most fundamental biochemical reaction in the body, the splitting of glucose to
yield molecules of water, carbon dioxide and energy, occurs no fewer than septillions (10 followed by
24 zeroes) of times over the course of a single day.
Whether the mind is diseased or healthy, it seems exceedingly likely that there is more going on in the
world, and even inside our own minds, than we are aware of. It is not unreasonable to predict that
some aspects of it will forever exceed our grasp.
In telling the stories of patients whose afflictions reveal a glimpse of this complexity, Oliver Sacks was
a master at evoking a sense of wonder. How strange, then, that this exceptionally imaginative human
being
seems
to have eschewed all nonscientific explanations of the transcendent phenomena he so
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October 8, 2015 The universe’s most miraculous molecule
*’ **CENGAGE I
T HE N EW
H UMANITIES
READER
Richard E. Miller ❖ Kurt Spellmeyer
The New Humanities Reader
The New Humanities Reader
SIX TH E D ITIO N
RICHARD E. MILLER
Rutgers University
KURT SPELLMEYER
Rutgers University
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Richard E. Miller and
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Contents
Reading and Writing About the New Humanities
xv
K AREN A RMSTRONG, Homo religiosus 1
Is God a father? Is heaven a place? Do we have immortal souls?
None of these questions, Armstrong maintains, were important to
religion in the past. Instead, for tens of thousands of years, religion
was seen as an art of consciousness designed to restore our natural
sense of connection to the world.
T A -N EHISI C OATES, The First White President 24
Supporters and detractors alike regard Donald Trump as
unprecedented: combative, independent, indifferent to customs and
rules. But for journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, these qualities are beside
the point. What matters about Trump is the explicitly racialized
appeal that carried him from reality TV to the White House. And
his racism, Coates insists, is really nothing new. Trump has broken
with precedent only by displaying so openly attitudes that his
predecessors kept behind closed doors.
C ATHY D AVIDSON, Project Classroom Makeover 44
The Internet has transformed publishing, the music industry and
other forms of entertainment, but what about education?
Combining responsiveness to personal needs with a capacity for
collaboration, Web-based education might be poised to produce a
renaissance of learning. Or is it?
CONTENTS
S USAN FALUDI, The Naked Citadel
69
A reporter describes the legal battle— and the cultural meltdown—
that ensues when The Citadel, an all-male military academy, admits
its first female recruit.
FRANKLIN FOER, Mark Zuckerberg’s War on Free Will
102
Facebook and other online platforms track every call we make,
every product we buy and every Google search we undertake
24 hours a day. With this knowledge, they anticipate our every
wish, and that would appear to make the Web into the perfect
servant. But who is the servant and who is the master here? Foer
wants us to notice how subtly our platforms impose limits on our
free will. If we are the sum of our choices in life, what happens
when the Internet decides in advance?
BARBARA FREDRICKSON, Selections from Love 2.0: How Our
Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do,
and Become 117
W hen we think of love, we often use words like “romantic,”
“selfless,” and “unchanging.” O r we think of love as sexual and
sensuous, sweeping us off our feet. But what if we have been
fundamentally confused about the real nature of love? New
scientific research suggests that our “supreme emotion” is not what
we believe.
DANIEL G ILBERT, Immune to Reality
141
Despite the tens of thousands of hours we spend pursuing the
American Dream, recent research in psychology demonstrates that
we often prove surprisingly inept when we try to predict what will
make us happy. Is fulfillment just an accident?
K AREN H O, Biographies of Hegemony
160
Education in the twentieth century was the great equalizer,
offering upward mobility to millions of Americans. But what
happens to the university when Wall Street arrives on Ivy League
campuses? In the age of Wall Street, does higher education still
create opportunity, or does it help to reinforce the power of those
already at the top?
S TEVEN J OHNSON, The Myth of the Ant Queen
187
Do complex systems like ant colonies and megacities have a
collective intelligence greater than the intelligence of their
individual members? If the answer is “Yes,” then can we ever
know where our systems are taking us?
CONTENTS
NAOMI K LEIN, Hot Money
vii
205
Everybody wants to save the planet, it seems. But why is so little
getting done? Environmental scientists have been sounding the
alarm for almost a century, while engineers have rushed to create
eco-friendly technologies. Even politicians have sometimes cleared
the way for a new green way of life. But the oil and gas industries
have stymied it all with global treaties designed to guarantee that
“free trade” overrules the environment.
J ONATHAN L ETHEM, The Ecstasy of Influence:
A Plagiarism
231
W ho owns ideas and how they get expressed? W hen we look
carefully at writers, visual artists and musicians, we find they
constantly cross the line between borrowing and outright theft. Is
plagiarism good for culture? Are all of us in debt to others for what
we say, write, and even think?
M ICHAEL M OSS, The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk
Food
256
When we decide on what to eat, do we really make free choices?
Consumers face a staggering variety at the store, and no one is
holding a gun to our heads when we stuff our faces with cheese
puffs. But food companies spend millions on research designed to
create nearly unbreakable addictions.
A ZAR NAFISI, Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran:
A Memoir in Books
276
Can art be more powerful than a dictatorship? This is the question
posed by an account of a women’s reading group in the days
following the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
M AGGIE N ELSON, Great to Watch
297
The violence we find today in popular culture— television, movies,
advertising, and the new media—has its roots in the artistic avantgarde, which continues to define the cutting edge. How can our
society back away from violence when sadism has become so
thoroughly interwoven with the ways we feel, think, and imagine?
T IM O ‘ BRIEN, How to Tell a True War Story
312
W hen applied to the reality of war, words like honor, valor, courage,
and sacrifice may be profoundly dishonest. O ’Brien’s short story asks
its readers to take another look at a subject that no one can claim
to understand fully, not even those who have found themselves in
the thick of battle.
vili
CONTENTS
RICHARD O. PRUM, Darwin’s Really Dangerous Idea
325
If we learned nothing else from our biology class, we came away
convinced that evolution means “natural selection,” a term coined
by the great Charles Darwin. We might also remember that
environments “select” for the traits that benefit the animals that live
to reproduce. But as ornithologist Richard O. Prum argues, natural
selection is only half the story. Later in his life, Darwin identified a
second mechanism—mate choice—that depends on an animal’s
ability to attract members of the opposite sex. And how do animals
attract future mates? By becoming beautiful.
C HARLES S IEBERT, An Elephant Crackup?
345
The phenomenon known as Human-Elephant Conflict—as
measured by events where elephants destroy villages and crops,
attacking and killing humans—is on the rise. Elephants, who travel
in herds and mourn their dead, are profoundly social creatures. The
collapse of elephant culture, brought on by predation, stress, and
trauma, may point to what lies ahead for human culture.
A NDREW S OLOMON, Son
362
Once couples decide to have children of their own, they expect
their offspring to become the adults they imagine. But the
development of identity is unpredictable, and children’s relations to
parents are always complicated. Part of who we are is an accident
of birth; another part we create for ourselves by discovering new
possibilities.
J OSEPH E. S TIGLITZ, Rent Seeking and the Making of an Unequal
Society
387
In America today, economic inequality has never been more
extreme. The latest figures show the top 1% controls almost half of
the nation’s wealth. Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz blames the
widening gap on rent seeking—forms of investment that do not
produce good jobs but only increase paper wealth.
MARTHA STOUT, When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was
Friday
413
The term divided consciousness refers to those times when we
withdraw mentally from the world around us. Daydreams and
other forms of subjective escape often help us to keep our mental
balance by shutting out events when they threaten to overwhelm
us. But when does our power to shut things out begin to close the
door on sanity itself?
CONTENTS
ix
ROBERT T HURMAN, Wisdom 434
Losing one’s sense of self or having an empty self is typically
imagined to be a fate worse than death. But Robert Thurman, an
expert on the Buddhism of Tibet, argues that we have misjudged
the experience of “no self,” which is not a dark corridor to
oblivion, but the road to what he calls “infinite life.”
S HERRY T URKLE, Selections from Alone Together: Why We
Expect More from Technology and Less from Each
Other 451
As technology increasingly blurs the Une between machines and
organic life, are we humanizing our inventions, or have we allowed
those inventions to make us more like machines? Will our naivety
about technology—which is never simply a tool—train us to look
in the wrong places for friendship and intimacy?
J EAN T WENGE, An Army of One: Me 480
What it means to have a self has changed over the course of the
past thirty years. While Baby Boomers set out to transform the
world, Generation Me seeks out fun as the highest value and
promotes self-esteem as the greatest good. Drawing on data taken
from 1.3 million young people, Twenge argues that this obsessive
focus on the self is not just bad for society, it’s also bad for the
individual.
R ICK W ARTZMAN, The New Face of Capitalism 506
Everybody likes to get a good deal. And Walmart offers the best
deals of all—with prices that nobody can rival. Yet Walmart drives
down wages by forcing manufacturers to move overseas in order to
reduce their costs. Journalist Rick Wartzman makes the case that
higher wages, not lower prices, hold the key to a healthy economy.
And he insists that unions are indispensable if we want to halt our
race to the bottom.
ETHAN W ATTERS, The Mega-Marketing of Depression in
Japan
523
As the American way of life spreads across the world, so do our
ideas about mental health. Even though we think of mental illness
as a scientific fact, the big pharmaceutical companies know that
selling antidepressants in Japan starts with the effort to export our
model of the mind. Has pharmacology become a form a cultural
imperialism?
Author and Title Index
545
Thematic Contents
Love, Relationships, and Sexuality
SUSAN FALUDI, The Naked Citadel
69
BARBARA FREDRICKSON, Selections front Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion
Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become 117
R ICHARD O. P RUM , Darwin’s Really Dangerous Idea
ANDREW SOLOMON, Son
325
362
SHERRY T URKLE, Selections from Alone Together: Why We Expect More from
Technology and Less from Each Other 451
Technology and Its Consequences
C ATHY D AVIDSON, Project Classroom Makeover
44
FRANKLIN FOER, Mark Zuckerberg’s War on Free Will
102
STEVEN J OHNSON, The Myth of the Ant Queen 187
M ICHAEL M OSS, The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food
256
SHERRY T URKLE, Selections from Alone Together: Why We Expect More from
Technology and Less from Each Other 451
E THAN W ATTERS, The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan
523
Economics and Inequality
T A-N EHISI C OATES, The First White President
KAREN Ho, Biographies of Hegemony
24
160
STEVEN J OHNSON, The Myth of the Ant Queen
187
M ICHAEL M OSS, The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food 256
J OSEPH E. STIGLITZ, Rent Seeking and the Making of an Unequal Society
387
xii
THEMATIC CONTENTS
R ICK W ARTZMAN, The New Face of Capitalism
506
ETHAN W ATTERS, The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan
523
Art, the Media, and Consciousness
CATHY D AVIDSON, Project Classroom Makeover
44
FRANKLIN FOER, Mark Zuckerberg’s War on Free Will
102
J ONATHAN LETHEM, The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism
231
AZAR N AFISI, Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
M AGGIE N ELSON, Great to Watch
276
297
T IM O ’BRIEN, How to Tell a True War Story
312
Making Sense of Violence
T A-N EHISI C OATES, The First White President
M AGGIE N ELSON, Great to Watch
24
297
T IM O ’BRIEN, H OW to Tell a True War Story
312
R ICHARD O. PRUM , Darwin’s Really Dangerous Idea
C HARLES SIEBERT, An Elephant Crackup?
325
345
MARTHA STOUT, W hen I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday
413
Education: Institutions and Experience
C ATHY D AVIDSON, Project Classroom Makeover
SUSAN FALUDI, The Naked Citadel
44
69
KAREN H O , Biographies of Hegemony
160
AZAR N AFISI, Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
SHERRY T URKLE, Selections from Alone Together: Why We Expect More from
Technology and Less from Each Other 451
J EAN T WENGE, An Army of One: Me
480
Identity and Community
T A-N EHISI C OATES, The First White President
SUSAN FALUDI, The Naked Citadel
24
69
R ICHARD O. PRUM , Darwin’s Really Dangerous Idea
ANDREW SOLOMON, Son
325
362
J EAN T WENGE, An Army of One: Me
480
Nature and Culture
KAREN ARMSTRONG, Homo religiosus
1
BARBARA FREDRICKSON, Selections from Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion
Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become 117
276
xiii
THEMATIC CONTENTS
141
D ANIEL G ILBERT, Immune to Reality
STEVEN J OHNSON, The Myth of the Ant Queen
187
205
N AOMI KLEIN, Hot Money
R ICHARD O. P RUM, Darwin’s Really Dangerous Idea
325
345
C HARLES SIEBERT, An Elephant Crackup?
Religion and Secularity
KAREN ARMSTRONG, Homo religiosus
1
141
D ANIEL G ILBERT, Immune to Reality
276
AZAR N AFISI, Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
ANDREW SOLOMON, Son
362
R OBERT T HURMAN, Wisdom
434
The Mind
FRANKLIN FOER, Mark Zuckerberg’s War on Free Will
102
BARBARA FREDRICKSON, Selections from Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion
Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become 117
141
D ANIEL G ILBERT, Immune to Reality
R ICHARD O. P RUM, Darwin’s Really Dangerous Idea
325
E THAN W ATTERS, The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan
523
Politics and Culture
T A-N EHISI C OATES, The First White President
SUSAN FALUDÍ, The Naked Citadel
24
69
FRANKLIN FOER, Mark Zuckerberg’s War on Free Will
KAREN Ho, Biographies of Hegemony
STEVEN J OHNSON, The Myth of the Ant Queen
N AOMI KLEIN, Hot Money
102
160
187
205
J OSEPH E. STIGLITZ, Rent Seeking and the Making of an Unequal Society
387
Reading and Writing About
the New Humanities
his book probably differs from many you have encountered, at least those
that you have encountered in school. Generally, the books taught in school
tell students how or what to think, but ours has a different purpose. We wanted
to put in your hands a book that would let you think for yourself, and do so
while you read and write about some of the most important issues of our time.
Environmental breakdown, rapid cultural change, the effects of electronic media
on our ways of interacting—these are just a few of the issues we address.
The articles and essays collected here touch on subjects as diverse as the psy­
chology of elephants and the practice of Tibetan meditation, but these subjects in
and of themselves aren’t the real point of the book. The real point is thinking,
and we believe that thinking in our time needs to assume a new and more
appropriate form. In the last 100 years our world has seen change more rapid
and profound than it witnessed in the previous thousand. From the media, we
get daily reports on subjects our great-grandparents might have found absolutely
incomprehensible: breakthroughs in nanotechnology; mergers of U.S. firms with
partners overseas; the covert spread of weapons that could destroy humanity
many times over; a new account of the universe in the first few seconds after
the Big Bang; melting polar icecaps and rising seas; and a growing gap between
the poor and mega-rich, while the middle class slowly withers away. Such events
are truly without precedent.
We need a new kind of thinking because we live in a world defined by
possibilities, and possibilities go hand in hand with risk and unintended conse­
quences. The globalized economy could lead to a future where poverty will
become a distant memory, or the whole planet could be transformed into a
sweatshop run by a One Percent indifferent to the suffering of ordinary people.
The Web could produce a Renaissance of learning, or it could degrade all forms
T
xvi
READING AND WRITING ABOUT THE NEW HUMANITIES
of communication, ushering in a new Dark Age of vulgarity and mass ignorance.
Cultures long divided by geography might greet one another with open arms, or
we could see a clash of civilizations that would unleash the worst instincts of
everyone. Unlike the problems from your textbooks in school, the questions
arising from events in our time don’t have answers hidden in the teacher’s edi­
tion. The best educated, most experienced people still can’t predict with cer­
tainty how the next century will turn out. And even expertise is not good
enough because the questions we face now are more complex than people any­
where have ever faced before. Globalization, to take one good example, is not
just the concern of economists, or historians, or anthropologists. Instead, it is an
issue for all of them together—and for everybody else as well. The degradation
of the biosphere is not exclusively the concern of environmental science, but also
a matter for political theory, sociology, and economics. The complexity and
open-endedness of the big problems of our time require us to work hard to
devise new understandings of ourselves and of the world. One purpose of this
book is to provide a forum for these understandings to emerge.
Perhaps it may seem strange that we would entertain such lofty goals in a
course designed for undergraduates. Surely the experts are better equipped than
students just beginning their careers at college or the university. But this assump­
tion might be unjustified. While the forms of expertise available today clearly
have enormous value, most of the current academic disciplines were created
more than a century ago, and the divisions of knowledge on which they are
based reflect the needs of a very different day. In 1900, gas-powered cars were
a new technology, while airplanes and radios had yet to be invented. Scientists
still wrestled with the structure of the atom. The British Empire dominated
three-fourths of the globe, and “culture” meant the traditions of Western Europe’s
elite, never more than one-tenth of one percent of the population of that region.
In a certain sense, the current generation of college students and teachers needs to
reinvent the university itself, not by replacing one department with another, but
by forging broad connections across areas of knowledge that still remain in relative
isolation. Forging these connections is the “new way of thinking” that we had in
mind when we created this book.
NEW H U M A N IT IE S FOR NEW T IM E S :
THE SEARCH FOR CO HERENCE
Probably some readers will be surprised by the absence of material from the tra­
ditional humanities: poems and plays, photographs of paintings and statues,
excerpts from great works of philosophy such as Plato’s Republic and Descartes’s
Discourse on Method. Clearly, no one should leave Aristotle, Shakespeare, or Toni
Morrison unread. And anyone unfamiliar with Leonardo da Vinci, Frida Kahlo,
Thelonious Monk, and Georgia O ’Keeffe has missed a priceless opportunity. Yet
this book grows out of our belief that the humanities today must reach further
READING AND WRITING ABOUT THE NEW HUMANITIES
xvii
than in centuries past. Without consciously intending to, humanists might have
contributed to the decline of their own influence. One could even argue their
devotion to the past led them to neglect the future. Humanists have often been
quite willing to leave real-world concerns to other fields, devoting themselves
primarily to passive contemplation, aesthetic pleasure, and the production of crit­
icism few people ever read. Consequently, outside the university many people
see the humanities as entertainment or pretentiousness while putting business
and technology on a pedestal as the only real truth.
If the humanities are going to survive, they must be understood in a new
way: not as a particular area of knowledge but as the human dimension of all
knowledge. Robotics and artificial intelligence may lie outside the boundaries
of the old humanities, but they enter the purview of the New Humanities
when we stop to ponder, as Sherry Turkle does, the cultural consequences of
technologies that seemed tremendously exciting at first but now appear to
make us more like our machines. Once we define the humanities this way—as
the human dimension of all knowledge— it may come as a surprise to observe
that some of today’s foremost humanists work in disciplines quite far removed
from English, History, and Philosophy. Richard O. Prum, one of the writers in
this collection, is a world-renowned ornithologist who has revived Darwin’s
neglected ideas about the way animals choose their mates. And Prum has prod­
ded fellow scientists to recognize the central evolutionary role played by
aesthetics—beauty—which some would call the most important concern of the
arts and humanities.
The New Humanities, as represented by this book, enlarge the arena of
human inquiry in other ways as well. They invite us to take academic knowl­
edge beyond the confines of the university. In a certain sense, this operation
requires that we all become our own teachers: we have to find in our own
lives— our problems, values, dreams, goals, and commitments— an organizing
principle that cannot be found in the curriculum. The great, unspoken secret
of higher education is that the curriculum has no center: specialization makes
sure of that. Historians write primarily for historians; literary critics for other
critics. As we shuttle back and forth between these specialized disciplines, the
only coherence we will ever find is the coherence we construct for ourselves.
Under these conditions, the New Humanities can teach us a different way of
using knowledge, a way of thinking that connects many different fields of
study.
Specialized learning in the disciplines typically deals with the “how,” but it
often leaves unanswered the “why.” There has never been a course called “Life
101,” and given the persistence of specialization, such a course will probably
never exist. But something important will be missing if we leave the “why”
questions unexplored. Should we continue to pursue a technological utopia?
Does modem science mean the end of religion? Is social inequality an acceptable
price to pay for economic growth? Any attempt to answer these questions
requires specialized knowledge, yet knowledge alone is not enough. Because a
cogent, well-informed case can be made on either side of almost every issue,
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READING AND WRITING ABOUT THE NEW HUMANITIES
the source of our ultimate commitments has to be found in our own Eves. The
“why” questions shape these commitments because they address our most basic
relations to other people and the world. In different ways, these questions ask us
how we ourselves will choose to think and act. No expert can choose on our
behalf, because no expert can live our lives for us or define what our experience
should mean.
The coherence missing from the curriculum is not a quality of knowledge in
itself. When it emerges, that coherence comes instead from our own creative
activity. Again and again, we need to make connections that bridge the gaps
between areas of knowledge, linking the formal learning we acquire to our per­
sonal experience. But even after we have created this coherence, it will still be
incomplete because there is always something more to learn that remains uncon­
nected. We might think of coherence, then, not as a goal we can finally reach
but as an ideal worth pursuing throughout the course of our lives. Needless to
say, cynicism and fragmentation are always options, too, and they require no
special effort. One could easily live as though nothing and no one mattered,
but in such a case, learning and living become exercises in futility. The New
Humanities offer a better path.
K N O W L E D G E IN DEPTH A N D K N O W L E D G E
OF THE W O R LD
As everybody understands, formal education has been carefully designed to keep
the disciplines separate. In economics classes, we typically read economics; in his­
tory classes, we read history. This approach allows information to be conveyed in
small, efficiently managed packages. We can divide, say, biology from chemistry,
and then we can divide biology into vertebrate and invertebrate, and chemistry
into organic and inorganic. We start with the general and move to the particular.
Ideally, we leam in depth, with increasing mastery of details that become more
and more refined. At the end of the semester, if everything goes well, we can
distinguish between an ecosystem and a niche, a polymer and a plastic, a neo­
Kantian and a neo-Hegelian. We can contrast Hawthorne’s treatment of the
outsider with Salinger’s, or we can explain the debate about whether slavery or
states’ rights actually caused the Civil War.
Knowledge in depth is indispensable. But it can also produce a sense of dis­
connection, the impression that education is an empty ritual without real-world
consequences beyond getting a grade or fulfilling a requirement. In the class­
room, we leam to calculate sine and cosine without ever discovering how these
calculations might be used and why they were invented. Searching for symbols
in a poem or a short story becomes a mental exercise on par with doing a cross­
word puzzle. Instead of reflecting on why events have happened and how they
get remembered and recorded, we refine our ability to recapitulate strings of
dates and names. At its worst, learning in depth can produce a strange
READING AND WRITING ABOUT THE NEW HUMANITIES
xix
disconnect: the purpose of learning becomes learning itself, while activity in the
real world seems increasingly remote. As students reach the final years of high
school, they may grasp vaguely that they should have read Hamlet, be able to
identify The Declaration of Independence, and explain how photosynthesis has influ­
enced the shape of leaves, but in response to an actual tragedy—an environmen­
tal disaster or a war—they might feel unqualified to speak and completely at a
loss about what to do.
College-level learning can offer an escape from this predicament by giving
students greater freedom to choose what they will study, and in many cases the
subjects they choose are closely related to their real-world goals. But even with
this newfound freedom, the problem of disconnection crops up in other ways.
After years of hard work, a student who has mastered electrical engineering
may still leave college poorly informed about the global economy in which
most engineers now do their work. Students well versed in Renaissance
drama or the history of World War I could understand the past quite well
but find the events of their own time impossible to explain. For some people,
this problem of disconnection may arise long before they graduate. The student
who sets out to memorize facts from, say, a social psychology text might find
that these facts grow increasingly stale. Easily memorized one day, they are
quickly forgotten the next. The risk of knowledge in depth is that we lose
our sense of the larger world and we forget that a field like psychology, for
all its current sophistication, began with tentative and somewhat clumsy ques­
tions about how the mind might work. Ironically, the more we treat an area of
knowledge as a reality in itself, the less we may be able to understand and use
what we have supposedly learned.
There is another kind of knowledge we create when we ask ourselves how
our learning applies to the world outside the classroom. This fine of questioning
is more complex than it might seem initially because the larger world is never
simply waiting there for us. All knowledge starts with parts and fragments, even
our knowledge of the private fives we know in most detail. To each of us, our
private life may seem complete, just as a field like psychology can seem to
explain everything once we are immersed in its methods and facts. But this
sense of completeness is an illusion produced by the limits of our perspective.
Beyond the reach of what we know here and now, nothing seems to matter.
We begin to get a glimpse of the larger world only when we shift our focus
from one reality to another: only then can we become aware of the holes in
our prior certainties, and only then are we able to think in new and revealing
ways. This movement from the known to the unknown is the essence of all
learning; indeed, the most successful learners are generally those who have devel­
oped the highest tolerance for not knowing—those who continue to question
and explore issues beyond their own areas of specialization, entertaining alterna­
tives that others might find unimaginable.
Knowledge itself can be defined in many ways: as a quantity of information,
as technical expertise, as cultivated taste, as a special kind of self-awareness. Vari­
ous as these definitions might appear, they share an underlying commonality.
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READING AND WRITING ABOUT THE NEW HUMANITIES
Whatever form knowledge eventually takes, it always emerges from a process we
might describe as connecting. The eighteenth-century English scientist Sir Isaac
Newton, who first understood the relations between force, mass, and accelera­
tion, might have been inspired in his scientific work by his deeply held religious
convictions about the rational perfection of God and His Creation. Many other
notable thinkers have also found inspiration through connection. Roughly 200
years after Newton’s discoveries sparked a scientific revolution, a young lawyer
bom in India, Mohandas K. Gandhi, drew on Henry David Thoreau’s Civil
Disobedience, written in support of abolitionists just before the Civil War, to launch
a campaign of passive resistance against the racist government of South Africa.
Two years before Gandhi spent his first term in jail as a political prisoner, a French
artist and intellectual, Marcel Duchamp, shocked the art world with a painting—
Nude Descending a Staircase—inspired by scientific photographs of athletes in
motion. Whether we are talking about physics or political systems, epidemiology
or art, knowledge by its very nature brings together disparate worlds of thought
and action.
Creative Reading I: The Prospective View
The selections in this book are intended for creative reading. Our assumption is
that the humanities should do more than preserve the past or let professors flaunt
their brilliance. After all, studies have consistently shown that people retain little
of what they are taught unless they put that knowledge to use. At its best, higher
learning can offer beginners the chance to practice the same activities that more
accomplished thinkers engage in: beyond receiving knowledge, beginners too
should have a hand in its creation. The articles and book chapters collected
here offer many occasions of that kind. It’s true that the selections pose
challenges—sometimes because they are long and complex, sometimes because
they draw on specialized fields, and sometimes because they open up unusual
perspectives. But those challenges are also opportunities: they ask the reader to
become an active co-creator with the writer.
The phrase “creative reading” might sound strange. Almost every college
and university has a program in creative writing, but creative reading programs
don’t exist. It’s not hard to understand why: many people think of reading as
nothing more than passively internalizing words on a page. Yet reading is always
more complex than the common sense view would suggest. Like a conversation
or dialogue, reading requires us to engage in an active back-and-forth that calls
on our attentiveness, imagination, patience, and receptivity. Just as the partici­
pants in a conversation have to imagine what the other people think, what
they expect to hear, and what they might say next, so readers need to see them­
selves as involved in a kind of dialogue, moving back and forth from textual
details to a sense of the larger whole. And just as we can’t know where a con­
versation is going until it’s actually over, so reading transports us to a place we
can never entirely predict.
READING AND WRITING ABOUT THE NEW HUMANITIES
xxi
When we try to understand a difficult text like the ones collected here, we
won’t get far by following along, word by word and detail by detail. As we read
we also need to ask ourselves what the writer’s larger point might be and how
each small step contributes to the unfolding of the entire argument. When
Karen Armstrong starts “Homo religiosus” with a description of the way it feels
to descend into the caverns of Lascaux, few of us might be able to foresee the
direction her ideas will take. But we can begin with a prospective view, a guess
at the argument that might He ahead. Reading further we could be surprised to
find that the cave paintings of Lascaux get left behind as we move from Stone
Age shamanism to the rise of the world religions we are familiar with today.
Actually, a dramatic shift fike this—from cave paintings to theology—is quite
typical of complex thought, and skillful readers are the ones who know how to
keep revising their prospective views as they move ahead. Working with a com­
plex text means continuing the dialogue until we reach an understanding that
seems to include everything we’ve learned.
One way to test your understanding of a text after you have finished reading
is to look for key words or ideas and ask how they fit with everything else. Here
for example is a question we ask in the “Questions for Making Connections
within the Reading” that follow the Armstrong selection:
Re-read the chapter and carefully note the many differences between
religion then and religion now. Next go back and look for the conti­
nuities. In spite of the differences, would you say that much of the
PaleoHthic legacy survives to this day? Can we conclude that religion
has become more mature and sophisticated, or is it possible that we have
lost touch with what rehgion actually represents?
A question like this is designed to find out how well you have managed to create
a comprehensive understanding of the text. Unless you test your understanding
in this way, you might assume that simply having read the words automatically
confers a working knowledge when in reality what you really know might be
quite Hmited. Each time you extend your prospective view by looking carefully
at a text’s details, you draw closer to the kind of mastery that accompfished read­
ers can achieve.
Creative Reading II: Interpretation and the Retrospective View
The fact that reading goes on all the time should not lead us to overlook just
how compHcated it can get. The act of reading starts with nothing more than
ink marks on a page, and those marks cannot tell us anything in and of them­
selves. But when you read with a prospective view, you are actually creating a
text that exists only after you have done the work. The reader’s job, however,
does not end there. Even after reading with a prospective view has created a
coherent text, the meaning of that text still remains unclear because what we
call “meaning” actually depends on the connections we make within the text or
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READING AND WRITING ABOUT THE NEW HUMANITIES
between one text and another. Meaning is a product of interpretation, and inter­
pretation demands from us another form of creative reading: the search for a
retrospective view. If “prospective” means “looking forward,” “retrospective”
means “looking back.” The most basic form of interpretation starts when we
isolate one part of the text—even if it’s only a sentence— and use it as a frame
or window through which we can take a second, retrospective look at the entire
document.
Consider, for example, the first sentence of Jonathan Lethem’s controversial
essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” That first sentence is not
Lethem’s at all. Instead, he identifies it as the work of the poet and Anglican
preacher John Donne, writing in the seventeenth century: “All mankind is of
one author, and is one volume.” Everything that follows in Lethem’s argument
can be interpreted in the fight of Donne’s claim that mankind is indeed “one
volume,” not many isolated individuals whose creations belong exclusively to
them. Bob Dylan’s “thefts” from popular movies, Shakespeare, and F. Scott
Fitzgerald; episodes of The Simpsons that draw on The Flintstones and The Honey­
mooners; Walt Disney’s earliest Mickey Mouse cartoon, which borrows from actor/
director Buster Keaton’s classic silent film Steamboat Bill—all of these examples can
be used to support the truth of Donne’s observation.
If we try to explain what Lethem meant by writing “The Ecstasy of
Influence,” we could simply say that he wanted to show that creative people
often borrow from each other. But his examples push that insight much farther.
Not only do creative people borrow, but they also appear to steal in ways that
often seem to violate conventional morality. And yet, what if Donne is right and
all of us are ultimately “one volume”? Wouldn’t that mean that we are free to
use everybody’s work as our own? If we reread Lethem’s essay in the light of the
Donne quotation, we might see the stories Lethem tells in a more positive
fashion: less as examples of stealing and more as evidence of a generosity implicit
in all human relations. If we really are all one, then the work of every individual
becomes a kind of gift to everybody else. Using Donne for our retrospective
view, we might conclude that creativity always involves what universities con­
demn as plagiarism. Far from trying to stamp out intellectual dishonesty, we
could see the persistence of “theft” as proof we are interconnected in a way
that makes private property impossible when it comes to the life of the mind.
Explicitly, Lethem ventures no such claim, but we could use the passage from
Donne to maintain that plagiarism is a creative act when we use the words of
others to say something new.
Creative Reading III: Connective Thinking and the Search
for a Shared Horizon
The simplest form of interpretation links one part of the text to other parts—
linking the Donne passage, for example, to Bob Dylan’s lyrics. But what about
connections to other texts? These connections are especially important because
READING AND WRITING ABOUT THE NEW HUMANITIES
xxiii
no one’s world is entirely defined by the perspective or “horizon” of any single
text alone. Indeed, there is far more to creativity than Lethem’s essay can fully
express, however complex and many-layered it might be. Because no one lives
in a one-text world, the truths we learn from “The Ecstasy of Influence” cannot
be confined to the pages of that essay. As soon as we read something in another
class, or we engage in conversations with our friends, all sorts of new connec­
tions will begin to compete for our attention. The different texts we encounter
might come from worlds of experience far removed from ours, but once they
have entered into our own lives, we need to bring them together in a way that
creates a shared horizon, a greater, more inclusive coherence.
One great tragedy of formal education is that it often works against this
shared horizon by promoting imitative thinking: we learn to reproduce informa­
tion made and organized by someone else. Imitative thinking presupposes the
sufficiency of knowledge in its present state, and it preserves the separateness of
different texts and differing realities. But this separateness cannot be maintained
except at the cost of a greater incoherence. Maybe the lecture in English today
contradicted a point made yesterday in anthropology class. Or perhaps an article
you are asked to read describes an aspect of the social world in a way that you
consider incomplete, biased, or flatly incorrect. On occasions like these, when
we come face-to-face with the limitations of knowledge, imitative thinking can­
not help us. Instead we are obliged to think connectively—to think across texts
rather than thinking only from inside them.
Connective thinking calls for another kind of interpretation. Instead of start­
ing with one part of a text and using it as a window to review the rest, we can
use it as a window to begin a retrospective reading of another writer’s work. We
might start again with the Donne passage Lethem quotes: “All mankind is of one
author, and is one volume.” Then, with this sentence, we could take a second
look at Joseph Stiglitz’s argument in “R ent Seeking and the Making of an
Unequal Society.” At first glance these two texts might appear as completely
unrelated as any two could be. The first deals with uses that creative people
make of work done by others, the second with the growth of inequality in the
United States. And yet when we start to read retrospectively, a shared horizon
can emerge. The easiest way to search for that horizon would be to find a pas­
sage from Stiglitz that makes a point central to his argument. One passage
describes the failure of our current political system to redistribute the nation’s
wealth to benefit the whole society:
We have a political system that gives inordinate power to those at the
top, and they have used that power not only to limit the extent of
redistribution but also to shape the rules of the game in their favor and
to extract from the public large “gifts.” Economists have a word for
these activities: they call them rent seeking, getting income not as a
reward [for] creating wealth but by grabbing a larger share of the wealth
that would otherwise have been produced without their effort….
Those at the top have learned how to suck out money from the rest
in ways the rest are hardly aware of.
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READING AND WRITING ABOUT THE NEW HUMANITIES
Clearly, this passage has nothing to do with Bob Dylan’s lyrics or The Simpsons.
But it still says something important about our obligations to other human beings.
Although Stiglitz never suggests, as Donne does, that everything we do belongs to
everyone else, he still seems to argue that the good o f each person depends in
some manner on the good of all. Lethem’s argument for the “cultural commons”
has no explicit parallel in Stiglitz’s argument, yet Stiglitz’s argument still implies
that wealth belongs to the whole society, and that inequality is basically unjust
because it overlooks this fact. Lethem never uses the word “redistribution,” a
key term in Stiglitz’s analysis, yet “The Ecstasy o f Influence” might be read as a
call for the continuous redistribution o f words, images, and ideas. If Stiglitz wants
both a free market and a strong government to save working Americans from
ruin, Lethem also argues for a “market” as well as a “gift economy.”
These connections between Lethem and Stiglitz certainly do not exhaust the
possibilities, and we will find many more connections by rereading other passages.
Eventually, as we work through these new connections, we might begin to dis­
cover that a larger point has begun to emerge— such as the conclusion that free
markets depend on high levels o f equality. An overarching point like this one sel­
dom arises right away. For a nerve-wracking interval, the individual connections
might appear disjointed, even contradictory, but then, suddenly, a larger view may
present itself—like the pattern in a Persian carpet we unroll a few inches at a time.
O f course some passages in Stiglitz might not connect in a fruitful way to
Lethem. Initially, a connection might look promising, but then we could
discover that it leads to a dead end. It’s possible to spend many frustrating hours
following connections that go nowhere. But this is precisely what thinking
involves: forging new connections where none exist now. Imitation means letting
others do that work and sitting back to admire the results; creativity means taking
risks. Some o f the risks we take will truly surprise us with their spectacular results,
while others may prove quite disappointing. Both risk and failure, on occasion, are
the price o f creative reading— the price o f discovery.
Some people are convinced that creativity cannot be taught at all, but we
believe that it can be taught and learned by asking readers to make connections
between texts that might appear unrelated at first glance. Many o f the questions
you will find in this book seem to push hard in that direction. O ne question, for
example, asks you to work out the connections between Charles Siebert’s report
on the fate o f elephants in Africa and Barbara Fredrickson’s discussion o f the
complex biology that underlies our experience o f love. Attempts by preserva­
tionists to rescue a species may seem worlds away from the science behind our
intimate fives, but we are asking you to undertake what all creativity involves—
venturing beyond the familiar.
Prospective Writing
Imitative thinking goes hand in hand with writing to tell— writing for the pur­
pose o f demonstrating a command of existing knowledge. In American schools,
the classic example o f writing to tell is the venerable book report. Like imitative
READING AND WRITING ABOUT THE NEW HUMANITIES
XXV
thinking, writing to tell has its appropriate place. Connective thinking calls,
however, for a different approach that might be described as prospective writing.
Just as you can read prospectively, looking for a larger coherence behind all the
individual details, so you can write without knowing from the start where your
ideas will lead. A good example o f this kind o f writing is Maggie Nelson’s essay
“Great to W atch.” Unlike authors who adopt a pose of absolute certainty, Nelson
takes many conceptual risks as she struggles to make sense o f our collective attach­
ment to violence. She begins with the admission that knowledge alone is unlikely
to improve the situation—since we already know that violence is “bad” but still
behave the same way. So Nelson adopts a different approach by exploring our
consumption of violence when we feel anxious, isolated or bored, or when we
want to become more aware, more creative and more free. And these explorations
take Nelson in directions no one could foresee— from Stephen King’s novel The
Running Man to the reality TV show “To Catch a Predator” to the Texas Virtual
Borderwatch Program (http://blueservo.com /), which asks its viewers to help
patrol that state’s border with Mexico. From the Borderwatch Program, Nelson
turns to the H ub’s Witness Project (https://witness.org/), where activists can post
videos of atrocities that might go unnoticed by the world. And this example leads
her in turn to filmmaker Errol Morris’s documentary “Standard Operating Proce­
dure,” an exposé o f the prisoners tortured by American soldiers—who took photos
of themselves in the act— during our invasion of Iraq.
As these examples pile up, the task o f making sense o f them becomes so
difficult that Nelson looks to thinkers who have wrestled with similar dilemmas
in the past— philosophers like Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag and Jacques R an­
cière, as well as the musician John Cage and the essayist Annie Dillard. Using
their insights to support and complicate her own investigation, Nelson finally
gets to a place where she recognizes that no single approach can account for
the violence in our society. R ather than keep looking for a single cause, or a
single solution, she realizes that the more perspectives she takes in, the more
complete will be her grasp of the problem. And she suggests that the more we
know, the more alternatives we have— if we trust the process o f questioning.
In order for an author like Nelson to become a resource for our writing, we
should start with a question her work leaves unresolved. W hy, for example, does
she conclude that after we have viewed Ryan Trecartin’s video I-Be Area, we will
feel less overwhelmed and can start to “swim” freely in the “sea of multiplicity”?
Nelson makes this claim, but she never explains how or why the change will hap­
pen. And what does it mean to “swim” in this “sea”? In order to fill the spaces she
leaves blank, we will need to do exactly what Nelson does, starting with one ten­
tative answer but then following ideas wherever they might lead. Like Nelson
herself, we may not know where exactly we are headed, but our multiple per­
spectives will finally bring us to a fuller understanding. And in order to extend
that understanding even more, we might draw on an essay like Jonathan Lethem’s
“Ecstasy o f Influence,” which argues that creative people always borrow from the
achievements o f others. If Lethem is correct, then swimming in the sea of multi­
plicity might mean using Trecartin’s video to support an argument o f our own.
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READING AND WRITING ABOUT THE NEW HUMANITIES
Developing a Thesis: From Prospective to Retrospective Writing
A thesis is not exactly an argument in the ordinary sense o f the word. In everyday
speech, the term argument suggests an adversarial stance: with great vehemence we
might argue for, or against, online education o f the kind that Cathy Davidson
describes. “Making an argument” tends to mean deciding ahead o f time what
you think and then looking for “support” to back up your points. There is, how ­
ever, another way. Instead of simply taking sides in an existing controversy, each of
us can move beyond such debates, which are often hackneyed and overly simplis­
tic, in order to say something genuinely new. To do so is to imagine ourselves in a
different light, not as combatants but as engaged participants in a conversation.
Even if we read a writer with distaste, what matters most are the questions raised,
not the answers given. Precisely because the search for a thesis starts with some
degree o f uncertainty, it demands a willingness on our part to suspend judgm ent
and pursue ideas wherever they might lead. Remember, however, that this pursuit
does not require our complete assent or unwavering commitment. W e can always
entertain and explore ideas we will eventually reject.
The writing process closely parallels the process o f reading. Once readers
create an understanding o f the text through prospective reading, they can go
on to view it retrospectively in the search for meaning. M uch the same holds
true for writing in its different stages. W e m ight consider the first few drafts to
be essentially prospective. As we explore possible connections and see how
they unfold, we will notice that the process has carried us in unforeseen direc­
tions, some highly productive and some cul-de-sacs. But a later stage in the
process requires that we move from a preliminary draft, replete w ith loose
ends and promising connections, to become the interpreter o f the work
w e’ve done. Retrospective writing is interpretive because it tries to tease out
the implicit meaning, which it develops further and refines. If the first drafts
are exploratory, the final draft is m eant to present the w riter’s discoveries in a
way that will conform to the reader’s expectations. A thesis statement, logical
organization, transitions, and well-structured paragraphs are all tools at our dis­
posal for an effective public presentation.
Let’s suppose we start writing with the idea that Fredrickson’s “positivity res­
onance,” the sense o f rapport two people sometimes feel in each other’s company,
is an experience we can always trust. But when we turn to Michael Moss’s
account o f the way the food industry has used psychological research to manipu­
late our behavior, our initial trust in resonance might begin to seem less persuasive
than it did. And then we face a question we may not have foreseen, one that
Fredrickson never entertains: when does resonance cross the line into something
like addiction? Instead o f treating this change in our position as a failure or a lapse,
we should appreciate its value as a genuine discovery, which we could achieve
only after a great deal o f hard work. W hen revising we should not try to conceal
the evidence o f such a redirection in our thinking. By trying to erase the steps that
led us to confusion, we can fail to show our audience the great discovery we have
actually made. The strongest writing doesn’t simply argue a point but also leads the
reader through a thinking process.
READING AND WRITING ABOUT THE NEW HUMANITIES
xxvii
The genre most familiar to students starting college is the “five paragraph
essay” they learn to compose throughout their high school years. The first para­
graph should present the main idea. Three body paragraphs should elaborate, and
the final paragraph should sum up the main idea yet again. This format was
designed to give beginners some control over a process that can become over­
whelming with its sheer complexity. But this virtue is also the greatest defect of
the five paragraph model. None of the selections in The New Humanities Reader
look remotely like the kind of essay students write while they are in high school.
N ot only do most of the selections connect with many areas of knowledge at
once, but they also offer thinking far more layered and nuanced than the high
school format could allow. Instead of pounding home a single idea, they guide
the reader through a journey of the mind that typically has many twists and
turns, that takes two steps forward and one step back, that entertains alternative
possibilities and, at times, answers criticisms. Instead of suppressing complexity,
the writers here embrace it as the source of a deeper understanding. In your
own writing you can leam to do the same.
T H E S P IR IT O F T H E N EW H U M A N IT IE S
Because we can leam from everything, no one should fear making mistakes. We
should never forget that the greatest thinkers of every age have often been
refuted later, whereas ordinary people have sometimes lived more wisely than
they were given credit for. Not so long ago, the best-educated Europeans
believed that all celestial bodies beyond the moon were eternal and changeless.
Scholars taught that matter in every form could be reduced to the basic elements
of earth, air, fire, and water. Medical experts sternly warned against the perils of
regular bathing and eating whole grains. In sexual reproduction, men were sup­
posed to contribute the blueprint, while women provided the raw material. One
could spend a lifetime enumerating the follies that have passed for knowledge.
And when we pause to consider such a checkered history, we might decide
that education is itself a folly.
But maybe not. Instead of expecting knowledge to be true once and for all,
we might try to see it as pragmatic and provisional, always subject to revision
given further evidence or new circumstances. In our society today, the sciences
may offer the best example of this experimentalist attitude, but some philoso­
phers and artists of every generation have also refused the twin consolations of
dogmatism and disillusionment. In the years ahead, our society will face many
challenges— environmental, social, cultural, economic and political—that are
sure to seem overwhelming. Given the high level of uncertainty that has become
a constant feature of our lives, people may be drawn to ideologies that promise
truths exempt from all revision and insulated from the challenges of diversity. If
this book does nothing else, we hope that it will offer an alternative more com­
patible with the values espoused by the readings we have chosen: trust in the
world and trust in ourselves.
xxviii
READING AND WRITING ABOUT THE NEW HUMANITIES
Q U E S T IO N S FOR R E A D IN G
1.
“Reading and Writing About the New Humanities” makes this claim on the
very first page: “We need a new kind of thinking because we live in a world
defined by possibilities, and possibilities go hand in hand with risk and unin­
tended consequences.” How do “possibilities” define the life of our times,
and what role does “possibility” play in these detailed accounts of reading and
writing? As you reread each section, ask yourself about the place of possibility
in teaching and learning. How does an approach that stresses possibility differ
from one that privileges strict rules, fixed methods, and pre-ordained answers?
2. Reading and writing are often taught as highly predictable activities. Sup­
posedly, when we read, we follow word by word until we have transferred
the writer’s thoughts from his or her mind to ours. When we write, we
should have a clear argument that we ought to outline before we compose.
But “Reading and Writing About the New Humanities” takes a different
view. It represents reading and writing as complex activities. Readers are not
passive receivers, after all, but actively help to create what they read. And
writing is a process of discovery that can lead to insights we seldom have
when we first sit down to write. Not only are reading and writing more
complex than many people assume but both involve moments of real
uncertainty. Using this introduction as your guide, consider the role that
uncertainty plays in the acts of reading and writing. Should we try to avoid
uncertainty, or is the experience somehow liberating? What is the relation
between uncertainty and the learning process?
3. When people write, they often have in mind what is called an “implied
reader.” The implied reader for the Harry Potter books might be someone
who likes fantasy, mystery, and adventure. The implied reader for the
Financial Times is probably an investor. Using specific evidence from
“Reading and Writing About the New Humanities,” create a detailed por­
trait of the implied reader of this book. Does this implied reader coincide
with the normal image of “the student”? Does it coincide with what we
ordinarily think of as a “consumer,” “an informed citizen,” an “individual­
ist”? Feel free to choose the term that best describes the implied reader of
this book, and then explain how you have reached that conclusion.
Q U E S T IO N S FOR W R IT IN G
1.
The term creative writing seldom gets applied to the prose that students are
required to grind out for their high school essays on Great Expectations or for
term papers about the Civil War. Creative writing is usually reserved for the
poems, plays, and fiction students read and sometimes write outside of class,
far from the judgments of teachers and the pressure to get good grades. This
READING AND WRITING ABOUT THE NEW HUMANITIES
xxix
way of thinking is not inaccurate. It reflects a cultural commonplace: the
humanities supposedly provide a time-out for the freedom o f imagination,
while the other disciplines deal with difficult real-world concerns. The prob­
lem with this way of thinking is that it implicitly assumes creative writing
cannot be factual or conceptually dense. And it assumes that writing about the
real world has to be a boring, empty routine. In what ways does “Reading
and Writing About the New Humanities” reject the conventional division
between the creative and the real world? In what ways does it challenge the
idea that creativity is spontaneous, subjective, and disconnected from reality?
2.
W e invite you to use this introduction to frame the first essay you read in
the course. Whichever selection your instructor assigns, write an essay that
explores moments where you see the essay’s author engaged in creative
reading and/or connective thinking. Are there other kinds o f reading and
thinking evident in the selected essay, kinds deserving o f other adjectives?
H ow do you know when creative reading has occurred? Is the evidence
there on the page or is it in the eye o f the beholder?
3.
W e make much of the limits of the five-paragraph essay in our introduction. It’s a
pretty easy target, actually, and none of the essays collected here fit that mold.
Consider the organization of the first essay you’ve been assigned. How is its
organization connected to the meaning o f the piece? Which organizational
decision would you say is the most important one made by the author?
KAREN ARMSTRONG
IN 1981, KAREN ARMSTRONG published Through the Narrow Gate, a controver­
sial account of her experience as a Sister of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus,
a Roman Catholic order. Armstrong left the convent and the Church in 1972,
“wearied by religion” and “worn out by years of struggle,” and then spent the
intervening years pursuing a doctorate in literature and teaching at an English
girls’ school. Although her first book was a milestone, Armstrong has described
her life’s real turning point as a series of trips she made to Jerusalem beginning
in 1982. Shocked by Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and also by the Palestinians’
intifada, Armstrong found herself questioning just how accurately most
Westerners—herself included—understood the lives and beliefs of Muslims in
the Middle East.
Convinced that the West was “posing as a tolerant and compassionate
society and yet passing judgments from a position of extreme ignorance and irra­
tionality,” Armstrong set out to help rectify cross-cultural misperceptions and
religious misunderstandings. She has written a number of books that explore
relations among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, including Holy War: The
Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World (1991); Mohammed: A Biography of
the Prophet (1992); and Islam: A Short History (2000). She has also written a bio­
graphy, Buddha (2001), and The Battle for God (2000), an account of the rise of
fundamentalism in modem societies.
The selection that follows comes from The Case for God (2009), in which
Armstrong, a self-described “freelance monotheist,” responds to the writings of
New Atheists Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, Victor J. Stenger,
and Christopher Hitchens. Armstrong makes the case that their view of religion
has been shaped by the very fundamentalism they reject. Dawkins, for example,
assumes that religion rests on faith in “a superhuman, supernatural intelligence
who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it.” Today
this view of God is accepted by hundreds of millions of believers, yet Armstrong
argues that in earlier times, religion was understood quite differendy—as mythos, a
Excerpt from THE CASE FO R GOD by Karen Armstrong, copyright © 2009 by Karen Armstrong. Used by permis­
sion of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint o f the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division o f Random House LLC, and
Curtis Brown, Ltd. All rights reserved. Any third party use o f this material, outside o f this publication, is prohibited.
Interested parties must apply directly to Random House LLC for permission.
Biographical information and opening quotations are taken from http://www.islamfortoday.com/karenarmstrong.htm;
the middle quotation is from www.washington-report.org/backissues/0293/9302038.htm. The quotation from Richard
Dawkins appears on p. 304 o f The Case for God. The final quotation is drawn from http://speakingoffaith.publicradio
.org/programs/armstrong/transcript.shtml.
1
2
KAREN ARMSTRONG
symbolic language meant to transform our consciousness and our ways of being.
As she told an interviewer in 2008, she sees religion as “poetry”:
Now a poet spends a great deal of time listening to his unconscious, and
slowly calling up a poem word by word, phrase by phrase, until some­
thing beautiful is brought forth, we hope, into the world that changes
people’s perceptions. And we respond to a poem emotionally. And I
think we should take as great a care when we write our theology as we
would if we were writing such a poem … because I do see religion as a
kind of art form.
♦♦♦———————————————————-
Homo religiosus
When the guide switches off his flashlight in the underground caverns of Lascaux
in the Dordogne, the effect is overwhelming. “The senses suddenly are wiped
out,” one visitor recalled, “the millennia drop away … You were never in darker
darkness in your life. It was—I don’t know, just a complete knockout. You don’t
know whether you are looking north, south, east, or west. All orientation is gone,
and you are in a darkness that never saw the sun.” Normal daylight consciousness
extinguished, you feel a “timeless dissociation from every concern and requirement
of the upper world that you have left behind.”1 Before reaching the first of the
caves decorated by our Palaeolithic ancestors in the Stone Age, seventeen thousand
years ago, visitors have to stumble for some eighty feet down a sloping tunnel,
sixty-five feet below ground level, penetrating ever more deeply into the bowels
of the earth. Then the guide suddenly turns the beam of his flashlight onto the
ceiling, and the painted animals seem to emerge from the depths of the rock.
A strange beast with gravid belly and long pointed horns walks behind a line of
wild cattle, horses, deer, and bulls that seem simultaneously in motion and at rest.
In all there are about six hundred frescoes and fifteen hundred engravings in
the Lascaux labyrinth. There is a powerful bellowing black stag, a leaping cow,
and a procession of horses moving in the opposite direction. At the entrance to
another long passage known as the Nave, a frieze of elegant deer has been
painted above a rocky ledge so that they appear to be swimming. We see these
images far more clearly than the Palaeolithic artists did, since they had to work
by the light of small flickering lamps, perched precariously on scaffolding that
has left holes in the surface of the wall. They often painted new pictures over
old images, even though there was ample space nearby. It seems that location
was crucial and that, for reasons we cannot fathom, some places were deemed
HOMO RELIGIOSOS
3
m ore suitable than others. The subject m atter was also governed by rules that
we can never hope to understand. The artists selected only a few o f the species
know n to them , and there are no pictures o f the reindeer on which they relied
for food. 2 Animals are consistently paired— oxen and bison with horses, bison
w ith mammoths— in combinations that w ould not occur in real life.3 Lascaux
is not unique. There are about three hundred decorated caves in this region o f
southern France and northern Spain. In some the artwork is more elementary,
but in all these caverns the imagery and layout are basically the same. The earliest
site, at Grotte Chauvet, dates from about 30,000 BCE, a time when Homo sapiens
seems to have undergone an abrupt evolutionary change in this locality. There
was a dramatic rise in population, which may have resulted in social tension.
Some historians believe that the cave art records a “corpus of socially constructed
rituals … for conflict control … pictorially encoded for storage and transmission
through generations.”4 But the paintings also express an intensely aesthetic appre­
ciation o f the natural world. Here we have the earliest known evidence o f an
ideological system, which remained in place for some twenty thousand years,
after which the caves fell into disuse in about 9000 BCE.5
It is now generally agreed that these labyrinths were sacred places for the
performance o f some kind o f ritual. Some historians have argued that their purpose
was purely pragmatic, but their upkeep alone would have required an immense
amount of unproductive labor. Some o f these sites were so deep that it took
hours to reach their innermost core. Visiting the caves was dangerous, exhausting,
uneconomical, and time-consuming. The general consensus is that the caves were
sanctuaries and that, as in any temple, their iconography reflected a vision that was
radically different from that o f the outside world.6 W e do not build temples like
this in the m odem West. O ur worldview is predominandy rational, and we think
more easily in concepts than images. W e find it hard enough to decode the sym­
bolism o f a medieval cathedral such as the one in Chartres, so these Palaeolithic
shrines offer an almost insurmountable challenge.
But there are a few clues to aid our understanding. A remarkable picture,
dated to about 12,000 BCE, in a cave at Lascaux known as the Crypt because it
is even deeper than the other caverns, depicts a large bison that has been
eviscerated by a spear thrust through its hindquarters. Lying in front of
the wounded beast is a man, drawn in a far more rudimentary style than the ani­
mals, with arms outstretched, phallus erect, and wearing what seems to be a bird
mask; his staff, which lies on the ground nearby, is also topped by a bird’s head.
This seems to be an illustration of a well-known legend and could have been the
founding myth o f the sanctuary. The same scene appears on an engraved reindeer
hom at nearby Villars and on a sculpted block in a cliff shelter at R oc de Sers near
Limoges, which is five thousand years older than the Lascaux painting.7 Fifty-five
similar images in the other caves and three more Palaeolithic rock drawings in
Africa have been found, all showing men confronting animals in a state of trance
with upraised arms.8 They are probably shamans.
W e know that shamanism developed in Africa and Europe during the
Palaeolithic period and that it spread to Siberia and thence to America and
Australia, where the shaman is still the chief religious practitioner among the
4
KAREN ARMSTRONG
indigenous hunting peoples. Even though they have inevitably been influenced
by neighboring civilizations, many of the original structures of these societies,
which were arrested at a stage similar to that of the Palaeolithic, remained intact
until the late nineteenth century.9 Today there is a remarkable continuity in the
descriptions of the shaman’s ecstatic flight all the way from Siberia, through the
Americas to Tierra del Fuego:10 he swoons during a public stance and believes
that he flies through the air to consult the gods about the location of game. In
these traditional societies, hunters do not feel that the species are distinct or per­
manent categories: men can become animals and animals human. Shamans have
bird and animal guardians and can converse with the beasts that are revered as
messengers of higher powers.11 The shaman’s vision gives meaning to the hunt­
ing and killing of animals on which these societies depend.
The hunters feel profoundly uneasy about slaughtering the beasts, who are
their friends and patrons, and to assuage this anxiety, they surround the hunt
with taboos and prohibitions. They say that long ago the animals made a cove­
nant with humankind and now a god known as the Animal Master regularly
sends flocks from the lower world to be killed on the hunting plains, because the
hunters promised to perform the rites that will give them posthumous life. Hunters
often abstain from sex before an expedition, hunt in a state of ritual purity, and
feel a deep empathy with their prey. In the Kalahari Desert, where wood is scarce,
the Bushmen have to rely on light weapons that can only graze the skin, so they
anoint their arrows with a lethal poison that kills the animal very slowly. A tribes­
man has to remain with his victim, crying when it cries and participating symboli­
cally in its death throes. Other tribes identify with their prey by donning animal
costumes. After stripping the meat from the bones, some reconstruct their kill by
laying out its skeleton and pelt; others bury these inedible remains, symbolically
restoring the beast to the netherworld from which it came.12
The hunters of the Palaeolithic age may have had a similar worldview. Some
of the myths and rites they devised appear to have survived in the traditions of
later, literate cultures. Animal sacrifice, for example, the central rite of nearly
every religious system in antiquity, preserved prehistoric hunting ceremonies
and continued to honor a beast that gave its life for the sake of humankind.13
One of the functions of ritual is to evoke an anxiety in such a way that the
community is forced to confront and control it. From the very beginning, it
seems, religious life was rooted in acknowledgment of the tragic fact that life
depends upon the destruction of other creatures.
The Palaeolithic caves may have been the scene of similar rites. Some of the
paintings include dancing men dressed as animals. The Bushmen say that their
own rock paintings depict “the world behind this one that we see with our
eyes,” which the shamans visit during their mystical flights.14 They smear the
walls of the caves with the blood, excrement, and fat of their kill in order to
restore it, symbolically, to the earth; animal blood and fat were ingredients of the
Palaeolithic paints, and the act of painting itself could have been a ritual of resto­
ration.15 The images may depict the eternal, archetypal animals that take tempo­
rary physical form in the upper world.16 All ancient religion was based on what
has been called the perennial philosophy, because it was present in some form in
HOMO RELIGIOSOS
5
so many premodem cultures. It sees every single person, object, or experience as a
replica of a reality in a sacred world that is more effective and enduring than our
own.17 When an Australian Aborigine hunts his prey, he feels wholly at one with
First Hunter, caught up in a richer and more potent reality that makes him feel
fully alive and complete.18 Maybe the hunters of Lascaux re-enacted the archetypal
hunt in the caves amid these paintings of the eternal hunting ground before they
left their tribe to embark on the perilous quest for food.19
We can, of course, only speculate. Some scholars believe that these caverns
were likely to have been used for the initiation ceremonies that marked the ado­
lescent boy’s rite of passage from childhood to maturity. This type of initiation
was crucial in ancient religion and is still practiced in traditional societies today.20
When they reach puberty, boys are taken from their mothers and put through
frightening ordeals that transform them into men. The tribe cannot afford the
luxury of allowing an adolescent to “find himself’ Western-style; he has to relin­
quish the dependency of infancy and assume the burdens of adulthood over­
night. To this end, boys are incarcerated in tombs, buried in the earth,
informed that they are about to be eaten by a monster, flogged, circumcised,
and tattooed. If the initiation is properly conducted, a youth will be forced to
reach for inner resources that he did not know he possessed. Psychologists tell
us that the terror of such an experience causes a regressive disorganization of
the personality that, if skillfully handled, can lead to a constructive reorganization
of the young man’s powers. He has faced death, come out the other side, and is
now psychologically prepared to risk his life for his people.
But the purpose of the ritual is not simply to turn him into an efficient kill­
ing machine; rather, it is to train him to kill in the sacred manner. A boy is usu­
ally introduced to the more esoteric mythology of his tribe during his initiation.
He first hears about the Animal Master, the covenant, the magnanimity of the
beasts, and the rituals that will restore his Efe while he is undergoing these
traumatic rites. In these extraordinary circumstances, separated from everything
familiar, he is pushed into a new state of consciousness that enables him to
appreciate the profound bond that links hunter and prey in their common strug­
gle for survival. This is not the kind of knowledge we acquire by purely logical
deliberations, but is akin to the understanding derived from art. A poem, a play,
or, indeed, a great painting has the power to change our perception in ways that
we may not be able to explain logically but that seem incontestably true. We
find that things that appear distinct to the rational eye are in some way pro­
foundly connected or that a perfecdy commonplace object—a chair, a sunflower,
or a pair of boots—has numinous significance. Art involves our emotions, but if
it is to be more than a superficial epiphany, this new insight must go deeper than
feelings that are, by their very nature, ephemeral.
If the historians are right about the function of the Lascaux caves, religion
and art were inseparable from the very beginning. Like art, religion is an attempt
to construct meaning in the face of the relentless pain and injustice of life. As
meaning-seeking creatures, men and women fall very easily into despair. They
have created religions and works of art to help them find value in their lives,
despite all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary. The initiation experience
6
KAREN ARMSTRONG
also shows that a myth, like that of the Animal Master, derives much of its
meaning from the ritualized context in which it is imparted.21 It may not be
empirically true, it may defy the laws of logic, but a good myth will tell us some­
thing valuable about the human predicament. Like any work of art, a myth will
make no sense unless we open ourselves to it wholeheartedly and allow it to
change us. If we hold ourselves aloof, it will remain opaque, incomprehensible,
and even ridiculous.
Religion is hard work. Its insights are not self-evident and have to be culti­
vated in the same way as an appreciation of art, music, or poetry must be devel­
oped. The intense effort required is especially evident in the underground
labyrinth of Trois Frères at Ariège in the Pyrenees. Doctor Herbert Kuhn, who
visited the site in 1926, twelve years after its discovery, described the frightening
experience of crawling through the tunnel—scarcely a foot high in some
places—that leads to the heart of this magnificent Palaeolithic sanctuary. “I felt
as though I were creeping through a coffin,” he recalled. “My heart is pounding
and it is difficult to breathe. It is terrible to have the roof so close to one’s head.”
He could hear the other members of his party groaning as they struggled through
the darkness, and when they finally arrived in the vast underground hall, it felt
“like a redemption.”22 They found themselves gazing at a wall covered in spec­
tacular engravings: mammoths, bison, wild horses, wolverines, and musk oxen;
darts flying everywhere; blood spurting from the mouths of the bears; and a
human figure clad in animal skin playing a flute. Dominating the scene was a
large painted figure, half man, half beast, who fixed his huge, penetrating eyes
on the visitors. Was this the Animal Master? Or did this hybrid creature symbol­
ize the underlying unity of animal and human, natural and divine?
A boy would not be expected to “believe” in the Animal Master before he
entered the caves. But at the culmination of his ordeal, this image would have
made a powerful impression; for hours he had, perhaps, fought his way through
nearly a mile of convoluted passages to the accompaniment of “songs, cries,
noises or mysterious objects thrown from no one knows where,” special effects
that would have been “easy to arrange in such a place.”23 In archaic thinking,
there is no concept of the supernatural, no huge gulf separating human and
divine. If a priest donned the sacred regalia of an animal pelt to impersonate the
Animal Master, he became a temporary manifestation of that divine power.24
These rituals were not the expression of a “belief ’ that had to be accepted in
blind faith. As the German scholar Walter Burkert explains, it is pointless to look
for an idea or doctrine behind a rite. In the premodem world, ritual was not the
product of religious ideas; on the contrary, these ideas were the product of ritual.25
Homo religiosus is pragmatic in this sense only; if a ritual no longer evokes a pro­
found conviction of life’s ultimate value, he simply abandons it. But for twenty
thousand years, the hunters of the region continued to thread their way through
the dangerous pathways of Trois Frères in order to bring their mythology—
whatever it was—to life. They must have found the effort worthwhile or they
would, without a backward glance, have given it up.
Religion was not something tacked on to the human condition, an optional
extra imposed on people by unscrupulous priests. The desire to cultivate a sense
HOMO RELIGIOSUS
7
of the transcendent may be the defining human characteristic. In about 9000 BCE,
when human beings developed agriculture and were no longer dependent on
animal meat, the old hunting rites lost some of their appeal and people ceased
to visit the caves. But they did not discard religion altogether. Instead they devel­
oped a new set of myths and rituals based on the fecundity of the soil that filled
the men and women of the Neolithic age with religious awe.26 Tilling the fields
became a ritual that replaced the hunt, and the nurturing Earth took the place of
the Animal Master. Before the modem period, most men and women were nat­
urally inclined to religion and they were prepared to work at it. Today many of
us are no longer willing to make this effort, so the old myths seem arbitrary,
remote, and incredible.
Like art, the truths of religion require the disciplined cultivation of a differ­
ent mode of consciousness. The cave experience always began with the disorien­
tation of utter darkness, which annihilated normal habits of mind. Human beings
are so constituted that periodically they seek out ekstasis, a “stepping outside” the
norm. Today people who no longer find it in a religious setting resort to other
outlets: music, dance, art, sex, drugs, or sport. We make a point of seeking out
these experiences that touch us deeply within and lift us momentarily beyond
ourselves. At such times, we feel that we inhabit our humanity more fully than
usual and experience an enhancement of being.
Lascaux may seem impossibly distant from modem religious practice, but we
cannot understand either the nature of the religious quest or our current religious
predicament unless we appreciate the spirituality that emerged quite early in the
history of Homo religiosus and continued to animate the major confessional traditions
until the early modem period, when an entirely different kind of religiosity
emerged in the West during the seventeenth century. To do that we must examine
a number of core principles that will be of fundamental importance to our story.
The first concerns the nature of the ultimate reality—later called God,
Nirvana, Brahman, or Dao. In a rocky overhang at Laussel, near Lascaux, there
is a small stone relief that is seventeen thousand years old and was created at
about the same time as the earliest of the nearby cave paintings. It depicts a
woman holding a curved bison’s horn above her head so that it immediately
suggests the rising, crescent moon; her right hand lies on her pregnancy. By
this time, people had begun to observe the phases of the moon for practical pur­
poses, but their religion had little or nothing to do with this protoscientific
observation of the physical cosmos.27 Instead, material reality was symbolic of
an unseen dimension of existence. The little Venus of Laussel already suggests
an association between the moon, the female cycle, and human reproduction.
In many parts of the world, the moon was linked symbolically with a number
of apparently unrelated phenomena: women, water, vegetation, serpents, and
fertility. What they all have in common is the regenerative power of life that is
continually able to renew itself. Everything could so easily lapse into nothingness,
yet each year after the death of winter, trees sprout new leaves, the moon wanes
but always waxes brilliantly once more, and the serpent, a universal symbol of
initiation, sloughs off its old withered skin and comes forth gleaming and fresh.28
The female also manifested this inexhaustible power. Ancient hunters revered a
8
KAREN ARMSTRONG
goddess known as the Great Mother. In large stone reliefs at Qatalhuyiik in
Turkey, she is shown giving birth, flanked by boars’ skulls and bulls’ horns—
relics o f a successful hunt. While hunters and animals died in the grim struggle for
survival, the female was endlessly productive o f new life.29
Perhaps these ancient societies were trying to express their sense of what the
German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1899—1976) called “Being,” a fundamental
energy that supports and animates everything that exists. Being is transcendent. You
could not see, touch, or hear it but could only watch it at work in the people,
objects, and natural forces around you. From the documents o f later Neolithic
and pastoral societies, we know that Being rather than a being was revered as the
ultimate sacred power. It was impossible to define or describe because Being is allencompassing and our minds are only equipped to deal with particular beings,
which can merely participate in it in a restricted manner. But certain objects
became eloquent symbols of the power o f Being, which sustained and shone
through them with particular clarity. A stone or a rock (frequent symbols of the
sacred) expressed the stability and durability o f Being; the moon, its power o f end­
less renewal; the sky, its towering transcendence, ubiquity, and universality.30 None
of these symbols was worshipped for and in itself. People did not bow down and
worship a rock tout court; the rock was simply a focus that directed their attention to
the mysterious essence o f life. Being bound all things together; humans, animals,
plants, insects, stars, and birds all shared the divine life that sustained the entire cos­
mos. W e know, for example, that the ancient Aryan tribes, who had lived on the
Caucasian steppes since about 4500 BCE, revered an invisible, impersonal force
within themselves and all other natural phenomena. Everything was a manifestation
of this all-pervading “Spirit” (Sanskrit: manya)31
There was, therefore, no belief in a single supreme being in the ancient
world. Any such creature could only be a being— bigger and better than any­
thing else, perhaps, but still a finite, incomplete reality. People felt it natural to
imagine a race o f spiritual beings o f a higher nature than themselves that they
called “gods.” There were, after all, many unseen forces at work in the
world— wind, heat, emotion, and air— that were often identified with the vari­
ous deities. The Aryan god Agni, for example, was the fire that had transformed
human life, and as a personalized god symbolized the deep affinity people felt
with these sacred forces. The Aryans called their gods “the shining ones” (devas)
because Spirit shone through them more brightly than through mortal creatures,
but these gods had no control over the world: they were not omniscient and
were obliged, Eke everything else, to submit to the transcendent order that
kept everything in existence, set the stars on their courses, made the seasons fol­
low each other, and compelled the seas to remain within bounds.32
By the tenth century BCE, w hen some o f the Aryans had settled in the
Indian subcontinent, they gave a new name to the ultimate reahty. Brahman
was the unseen principle that enabled all things to grow and flourish. It was a
power that was higher, deeper, and more fundamental than the gods. Because
it transcended the limitations o f personality, it would be entirely inappropriate
to pray to Brahman or expect it to answer your prayers. Brahman was the sacred
energy that held all the disparate elements o f the world together and prevented it
HOMO RELIGIOSUS
9
from falling apart. Brahman had an infinitely greater degree o f reality than mortal
creatures, whose lives were limited by ignorance, sickness, pain, and death.33
You could never define Brahman because language refers only to individual
beings and Brahman was “the All”; it was everything that existed, as well as the
inner meaning o f all existence.
Even though human beings could not think about the Brahman, they had
intimations o f it in the hymns o f the R ig Veda, the most important o f the Aryan
scriptures. Unlike the hunters o f Lascaux, the Aryans do not seem to have thought
readily in images. One o f their chief symbols o f the divine was sound, whose
power and intangible quality seemed a particularly apt embodiment o f the allpervasive Brahman. W hen the priest chanted the Vedic hymns, the music filled
the air and entered the consciousness o f the congregation so that they felt sur­
rounded by and infused with divinity. These hymns, revealed to ancient “seers”
(rishis), did not speak o f doctrines that the faithful were obliged to believe, but
referred to the old myths in an allusive, riddling fashion because the truth they
were trying to convey could not be contained in a neatly logical presentation.
Their beauty shocked the audience into a state of awe, wonder, fear, and delight.
They had to puzzle out the underlying significance of these paradoxical poems that
yoked together apparently unrelated things, just as the hidden Brahman pulled the
disparate elements o f the universe into a coherent whole.34
During the tenth century, the Brahmin priests developed the Brahmodya com­
petition, which would become a model of authentic religious discourse.35 The con­
testants began by going on a retreat in the forest, where they performed spiritual
exercises, such as fasting and breath control, that concentrated their minds and
induced a different type o f consciousness. Then the contest could begin. Its goal
was to find a verbal formula to define the Brahman, in the process pushing lan­
guage as far as it could go, until it finally broke down and people became vividly
aware o f the ineffable, the other. The challenger asked an enigmatic question, and
his op…