The Peripatetic Philosopher on the Power of Belief:

 What we can learn from Hinduism.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 28, 2018

The Power of Belief 

“Amish and the Jews have it right," Klaus writes, “everybody can believe what they want to believe, and they make no effort to convert.”  The Hindus have it better.

The Amish population is around a quarter million while the world Jewish population is about 15 million with 6.8 million of that total in Israel.  By contrast, Hinduism is practiced by a billion souls, most of them in India, while Confucianism which is not actually a religion, but an ethical discipline is practiced by a billion with most of them in China.  Christianity is the world’s largest population with nearly 3 billion souls with Islam the next most populous religion with more than 1.5 billion practicing the faith.  That said, Hinduism appears to be the least contentious and polarizing faith on the planet for reason. 

Hindus, like Confucians, do not believe in God.  They believe in hundreds of thousands of gods with every sect, or sub sect of Hinduism worshiping its own God, Goddess, or holy creature. 

With Hinduism, you can pay your respects to some beliefs and not to others or you can believe in none at all.  You can be vegetarian or eat meat.  You can pray or not pray.  None of these choices determines whether you are a Hindu.  There is no apostasy or heresy because there is no core set of beliefs, doctrine or commandments.  Nothing is required.  Nothing is forbidden.

Sir Monier-William (1819 – 1899) captures the essence of this in Hinduism (1877):

Hinduism is all tolerant . . . It has its spiritual and its material aspect, its esoteric and exoteric, its subjective and objective, its rational and irrational, its pure and impure.  It may be compared to a polygon  . . . It has one side for the practical, another for the severely moral, another for the devotional and imaginative, another for the sensuous and sensual, and another for the philosophical and speculative.  Those who rest in ceremonial observances find it all-sufficient; those who deny the efficacy of works, and make faith the one requisite, need not wander from its pale; those who are addicted to sensual objects may have their tastes gratified; those who delight in meditating on the nature of God and Man, the relation of matter and spirit, the mystery of separate existence, and the origin of evil, may here indulge their love of speculation.  And this capacity for almost endless expansion causes almost endless sectarian divisions even among the followers of any particular line of doctrine.     

Incidentally, the absorptive power of Hinduism is illustrated by its impact on Buddhism.  Buddha was Indian, and Buddhism was founded in India, but it has been essentially absorbed into Hinduism in India today.  That is not the case with Islam in India.  But it is a fact that no Al Qaeda terrorist so affiliated has been found in India.  On the other hand, India is a Hindu country that was ruled for 400 years by Muslin dynasties so its history of tension with Islam is real. 

While India is an emerging economic, political and technological power with more than a billion souls in the largest democracy in the world, the Hindu caste hierarchy and its cultural beliefs and practices make this something of a daunting task.  British historian, Paul Kennedy (born 1973) writes:

The sheer rigidity of Hindus religious taboos militated against modernization: rodents and insects could not be killed, so vast amounts of foodstuff were lost; social mores about handling refuse and excreta led to permanently insanitary conditions; a breeding ground for bubonic plagues; the cast system throttled initiative, instilled ritual, and the influence wielded over local rulers by the Brahman priests that this obscurantism was effective at the highest level (The Rise & Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Random House, 1987, p. 13).

Acquiring Independence from Great Britain in 1947, only 71 years ago, it is now a nuclear power, burgeoning economic market with an emerging professional class of engineers, technicians and scientists, Kenney adds:

Here were social checks of the deepest sort to any attempt at radical change.  Small wonder that many Britons, having first plundered and then tried to govern India in accordance with Utilitarian principles, finally left with the feeling that the country was still a mystery to them.

That is because Hinduism is not a religion in the conventional sense, but a loose philosophy, one that has no answers but many open questions with its only guiding principle that of ambiguity.  Still, it is a misnomer to consider India a “Third World” county as it is a do something society comfortable in contradiction and obscurantism, while not obsessing with its history or mountainous climb out of once pervasive poverty.   Then there is the United States of Anxiety.

The American sickness that won’t seem to go away.

The United States has a history of anxiety despite its legendary accomplishments worrying about losing its competitive edge and hegemony. The country retreated back into complacency after the successful conclusion of WWII in 1945, only to be stunned with the Soviet Union’s successful launching of the Sputnik satellite into space in the late 1950s.  The American Space Program followed with the push for new math and science in schools.  

The US went through a similar anxious period when OPEC in the 1970s cut off oil supply, and the economy tanked with double digit inflation and double digit unemployment.  Forty years later oil exploration in Alaska and off the coastlines of the nation has put ecological sentiments on hold.  

The economic boom of the 1960s following WWII did not prepare the nation for the emergence of Japan, Inc. as a competitive threat in the 1970s and 1980s.  Once sacrosanct American industries -- the automotive industry, and manufacturers of machine tools, electronics, glass products, and household appliances -- felt the economic presence of Japan, Inc. shaving away market share with higher quality less expensive products, panic set in.  Pandemonium followed.  While America slept, Japan, Inc. suddenly appeared to be the economic superpower of the future.  

That proved not to be the case, but as we moved into the 21^st century, commercial American airliners filled to capacity with passengers were commandeered by Al Qaeda terrorists and flown into the Twin Towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC on September 1, 2001.  The Twin Towers were destroyed taking the lives of 3,000 citizens and the Pentagon severely damaged. 

What now appears in hindsight a monumental miscalculation, perhaps even a watershed moment was the preemptive invasion of Iraq with the suspect intelligence from the CIA that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.  American political scientist Fareed Zakaria (born 1964) puts this in some perspective by referencing Great Britain’s descent:

(In the Boer War of 1899 in South Africa) the British commanders resorted to brutal tactics – burning down villages, herding civilians into concentration camps (the world’s first), sending more and more troops.  Eventually, Britain had 450,000 troops in southern Africa fighting a (Afrikaner) militia of 45,000.  The Boers could not hold Britain back forever, and in 1902 they surrendered.  But in a larger sense, Britain lost the war . . .

Fast forward to today.  Another all-powerful superpower . . .  takes on what is sure will be another simple battle, this one against Saddam Hussein’s isolated regime in Iraq.  The result a quick initial military victory followed by a long, arduous struggle, filled with political and military blunders and met with intense international opposition.  The analogy is obvious, the United States is Britain, the Iraq War is the Boer War – and by extension, America’s future looks bleak (Post-American World, W.W. Norton & Co., 2008, pp. 172-173).   

A common sentiment to Great Britain’s decline from international dominance is “if only it had avoided the Boer War,” while others are saying “if only the United States had avoided the Iraq War.”   

In any case, five years after the start of the Iraq War, there was the economic crash of 2008 demonstrating self-indulgent America was to pay for its consumer mania along with the prohibitive costs of that war.  The Federal Government came to “bail out” General Motors and Chrysler from their bankruptcy status with the rationale “they were too big to fail.”  The era of behavioral politics without consequences continued.

*     *     *

It would be comforting if some learning took hold from these episodes, but there is little evidence that is the case.  Wall Street in 2018 is again unhinged.  People are spending like there is no tomorrow and the American political system has lost its ability to compromise; its ability to bite the bullet and endure the pain of correction, putting that off for another day. 

Meanwhile, across the length and breadth of the nation, America has become a contentious and polarized society with no one seemingly in charge or manning a highly dysfunctional political system with the nation's constituency in complete denial of its complicit role in this state of affairs. 

America’s high anxiety status is not new and has been going on at least since the “panic of 1837” which found the United States in financial crisis.  Then as now an overly rigid political system became captive to money, special interests, a sensational media, and adversarial ideological groups in Washington, DC and across the nation. 

Author Fareed Zakaria writes:

A “can do” country is now saddled with a “do nothing” political process, designed for partisan battle rather than problem solving.  By every measure -- the growth of special interests, lobbies, pork barrel spending – the political process has become far more partisan and ineffective over the last three decades (The Post-American World, 2008, p. 212).

Today there are few moderate Democrats and Republicans in Congress or in either party with the result gridlock.

If the American people could only loosen the screws a single turn, take themselves less seriously, retreat from the debilitating myth of “American exceptionalism” and embrace the world as it is, not as they would like it to be; if the American people and its political leaders could learn something from the opposite end of the cultural spectrum, such as that of Hinduism, perhaps it is not too late for America to regain its momentum, not only for the United States, but for the world at large.   

The Peripatetic Philosopher on The Problem of Talking Past Each Other:

 The Implicit Problem with Conversing 

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 27, 2018

Listen to politicians answering the media, professional managers and athletes responding to beat sports reporters, college presidents and department heads explaining poor student retention and academic performance, then consider ourselves in conversation with each other.  

What do we have in common?  We find ourselves talking past each other.  We answer a question without answering it going on some tangent, talking about a different subject while believing we are talking about the same thing. 

This is not new.  The idiomatic allusion to interaction was on display in a conversation between Thrasymachus and Socrates on the subject of “justice” in Plato’s Republic.  If you read the dialogue, you will see that neither man addressed any of the issues raised by the other.  Two different concepts in the exchange need not have been disputed but are confused, however, as the two participants become carried away with the idea of what is strong (and weak) in terms of justice. 

This fallacy occurred to me when comparing M's response a Klaus dictum, stating her belief in God and in the authority of the Bible, quoting it for confirmation, then leveling the charge that Klaus “must have an inferiority complex.”  This was the exchange:

Klaus writes:

Belief in a God or not makes humans feel more significant since the universe is so large and the earth is infinitely small speck in comparison.  We want to feel special which we are not and thinking that a God made humans makes many feel less insignificant.

My response:

Being neither a scholar nor a theologian, I hesitate to even offer a layman’s views of how I perceive certain issues . . . The author(s) of Ecclesiastes 1: 1-18 said it all.  In reality, what has really changed except for ourselves, who are only what we THINK we are.  Either Klaus has an inferiority complex or I am an egotist, but never felt insignificant and I like me. 

Klaus again:

I find M’s comment fascinating. The comment I made about people needing a god has nothing to do with having an inferiority complex or being an egotist. I once owned a book that listed over 2,000 gods. These gods initially served the purpose for explaining the world about which early humans had absolutely no concept. The earth has gone through five extinctions. If the last one had not occurred when a large meteor hit the earth and eliminated all the dinosaurs, we would probably not even be here.

There are still many people on this earth who believe the biblical story of how it all began as factual. They think the universe is only a little over 6,000 years old. I don’t care if they believe that, but some of these people are obsessed with making everyone on the planet believe that.

There are Christians who are that way and currently Muslims who are also determined that we all think as they do. My comment about people still determined to believe in a god has to do with the fact that they cannot accept the reality of the universe, the five extinctions that happened on this planet and the mystery about how it all came about.

So they believe that a god created them which I assume makes them feel special. We are not special any more than all the living things that existed before us. As I said before that does not bother me, but the turmoil they want to create because they can’t stand anyone not believing as they do which indicate that they are insecure.

My Response:

Yuval Noah Harari covers in nearly a thousand pages the fact that we are an animal and have been around since Pleistocene Epoch or about 2.5 million years with the last period of extinction, the fifth, occurring some 66 million years ago and called the “Cretaceous Period.”

The disappearance of the dinosaurs and the emergence of Homo Sapiens is still at the conjecture stage despite all the results, but has little to do with this exchange.

Ecclesiastes was written between 450 – 200 Before the Christian Era (BCE), which in terms of Homo erectus (man standing upright and walking) is only an instant in the history of the species, Homo Sapiens.

So, M and Klaus are talking past each other.

Now, the question of our being “significant” or “insignificant” has less to do with these data other than the fact that our Christian culture tells us we are special, and our American culture tells us we are “exceptional," which are subjective premises and have little to do with the indisputable fact that we are an animal like all other animals, and should treat other animals as we would expect our own species to be treated.

Klaus has a problem with religion and belief in God, which we know because he protests too much, while implicit in his rationale as is true in M’s is the duality of belief/disbelief in the soul.  Blame Plato.

 Plato divided the soul into three parts: “reason,” “spirit” and “appetite.” The latter he called “thymos,” or what motivates the best and worst in us. “Thymos” is a desire for a desire making it the psychological seat of the desire for recognition as well as the psychological origin of political action.  Remember, St. Paul was Greek and schooled in Plato and Socratic thought.

Our idiosyncratic nature is such that:

We all love ourselves; we are born egotists, and since our egos are fragile, we will do about anything to protect them. This makes meaningful exchange difficult.

We are all more interested in ourselves than in anyone else in the world. We attempt to turn the conversation around to what we think, feel and value. Failing that, we become bored, stop listening, or excuse ourselves from the conversation.

Every person you meet wants to feel important. Treat people with respect, whatever their station in life, and it will be returned tenfold. Be condescending and they will see you as an adversary; show them that you care, and the balance falls in your direction.

We each crave the approval of others, so that we may in turn approve of ourselves. The hardest person in the world to make friends with is ourselves. Everyone suffers this handicap, and everyone is grateful when relieved of this by complimenting them in some manner. Thus we arouse attributes of their positive side. The barriers of suspicion vanish making productive conversation possible.

Western Civilization was built on the "thymos" of this imaginative and subjective foundation, mainly by the Roman Catholic Church up through the early 16th century and then subsequently by the Protestant Reformation with the Industrial Revolution, Scientific Revolution and now the Technology Revolution to follow up to our day.

Klaus doesn’t say anything that cannot be verified historically, and M is right that she has been energized by her religion, which has given her a sense of self-worth and dignity, what Plato would say is her “thymos.” But, of course, this is buried in the exchange with them talking past each other.

PS Francis Fukuyama explores Plato's thymos in some detail in "The End of History and The Last Man" (1992), as does Yuval Noah Harari in "Homo Sapiens" (2015) and "Homo Deus" (2017).

The Peripatetic Philosopher on Importance of Having a Point of View:

Crossing the treacherous waters of differences

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 24, 2018

M writes (reference: Klaus: October 23, 2018)

Being neither a scholar nor a theologian, I hesitated to even offer a layman's views of how I perceive certain issues which have been thoroughly scrutinized, analyzed, researched, reviewed, discussed, assessed, studied, critiqued for hundreds of years and which, to date, have never been successfully resolved. The author(s) of Ecclesiastes I: 1-18 said it all. In reality, what has really changed except for ourselves, who are only what we THINK we are.

Either Klaus has an inferiority complex or I am an egotist, but I have never felt insignificant and I like me.

Dr. Fisher responds:

Dear M,

What is apparent is that you and Klaus have differing points of view. Part of this, no doubt, is due to differing cultural experience.

You are a poet and, incidentally, Klaus is an artist. You grew up in the Midwest as did I during the Second Word War. Klaus grew up in Europe partly during that war coming to America as a young man, serving in the United States Army as an officer, subsequently pursuing an education and becoming an educator.

You both have active and curious minds, looking at the same things differently. I can relate to that.  I was trained to believe as you do while questioning those beliefs, including belief in God, as does Klaus.

Were you to take a peek at my library you would see that I have read scholars who support and question the myths of our Christian/Judaic culture, and belief system. 

It is not only Friedrich Hegel who claimed we invented God with the supportive narrative of the Old and New Testament, but many other scholars have as well. As you point out, this will no doubt continue as long as man is man.

Nietzsche wrote that “God is dead!” That was anti-climactic since God had departed from the central focus of Western man long before the close of the 19th century. What Nietzsche was alluding to was that secular society was steamrolling into the 20th century with the sacred and profane being left behind.  Nietzsche died in 1900 and is often quoted but seldom read.

Atheism and agnosticism became popular alternatives to Christianity and Judaism in the 20th century. In fact, many Christian scholars whom I have read appear closer to those beliefs than to Christianity, alas, that includes many in the Christian hierarchy.

Roman Catholics clerics were once the only literate class in Western Civilization schooled in Latin, keeping the records and books, collecting the taxes, and managing the kingdoms of royalty, who preferred oral to written reports, as many could not read. That Catholic dominance began to unravel with the Protestant Reformation.

In my personal naiveté, I grew up believing Christianity was about theology and that Roman Catholicism was about its mission, only to find in my long life and traveling through several continents that Christianity is predominantly political and has never lost its taste for power and influence. To state it another way, Christianity has failed to adjust with the times.

Now, having said that, we have to look no farther than the Americas to see what Catholic inculcation has done to South America while the United States unshackled from that yoke with the Protestant Work Ethic has prospered in a liberal democracy. At the same time, this is not without problems for America. The “God of Plenty” which has little to do with religion has taken on a life of its own. 

In the lap of material prosperity and industrial efficiency, America has accepted something of a Faustian bargain, compromising its moral worth buying into the myth of “American exceptionalism.” 

While you and Klaus have differing views on God, there is a general unwillingness of our consumer society to sacrifice some material certainty for the sake of our spiritual integrity. Religion is on the sidelines unable to change much less influence this status. We make moral compromises daily and lie to ourselves in support of the idea of “self-realization” and personal growth. The irony is that this has weaken our resolve and made us more pliable to societal manipulators, including the new gods of science, information technology, media moguls and so-called experts. 

I applaud you and Klaus for resisting these mind managers to think for yourself, and be willing to share this with others. 

 

Be always well,

Jim

  

The Peripatetic Philosopher : Has America become one giant Jerry Springer show?

A TUTORIAL OF IDEAS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 23, 2018

Reference:

People write to me via e-mail on a regular basis with comments or criticisms or explanations soliciting my response, not necessarily to convince them one way or the other about their reflections but to use me as a sounding board for their ideas. 

When I’m in a writing project, I fail to respond but I do not delete their offerings.  I am currently between books and thought this would be a good time to launch this little forum. 

We are in a dramatic time, a time that those in power would prefer to deny, but nonetheless are being marginalized by, for and because of it.  True, they still hold the power even though they do not control the source of power, which is knowledge amazingly distributed throughout the populace.  

Those in power have successfully created a passive responsive society, successfully carrying it through the 20^th century and into the 21^st century, manipulating and managing to support their egregious self-interests, but alas, they can no longer afford the luxury of this style or support its demands.  In short, they are not in charge, but who is?  The answer: no one is.

Modern leaders do not rule.  They react, manage and steer, taking the least controversial action leaving the situation to fester, the people to remain confused, and the chaos to mount while precariously maintaining their power.

The conundrum is that the reality of the imagination and the imagination of reality has hit a wall.  As a consequence, all the aberrancy of behavior and false striving are expressions of the “Present Ridiculous.”  

A Facebook blogger summarized the present with this lament:

 Am I the only one who thinks that America has become one giant Jerry Springer show?

Into the void with no one in charge, people are becoming their own doctors by surfacing the Internet for the causes of their maladies.  They are reading books by so-called experts and finding them not only wanting but failing to compute with their life experiences. 

People are painting, making furniture, sculpting and writing poetry, not to realize acclaim but to give spiritual expression to the wonder within.  

It is the “Age of the Amateur,” as it was some 500 years ago when monks and priests and other clerics secretly pursued science at the risk of losing their lives to the Roman Catholic Inquisition for going against Church doctrine, while ultimately changing the world. 

We are now jammed up with managers who are atavistic, professionals trained for anachronistic functions, leaders who actually thought leading was separate from following, which has given rise to leaderless leadership, as there are no leaders anymore only pretenders in these roles. 

People at the top thought that they stirred the drink of contemporary life, but they were wrong.  Change comes from the bottom of the social structure, seldom from the top.  With that as introduction, let the tutorial begin.

BELIEF IN GOD

Jim,

This occurred to me today. The belief in a God makes humans feel more significant since the universe is so large and the earth is infinitely small speck in comparison. We want to feel special which we are not and thinking that a God made humans makes many feel less insignificant.

Klaus

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Klaus,

Whether you are a believer in God or not, most people would admit that Klaus has a point. Why do so many of us believe in God?  

He also has a point in implying that believing gives the believer comfort in his consciousness to the fact that he, alone, is a conscience animal on this hostile planet,  This first gave birth to the shaman, then the tribal chief, then the king as God’s anointed, and then to religions of all sorts ultimately crystallizing for Western Man in Christianity some 2,000 years ago.

St. Paul, the architect of Christianity, successfully posited the Christian myth that human freedom was not to be found on earth, but only in the Kingdom of Heaven.  He successfully preached this message to the Gentiles, leaving James, the brother of Jesus, to remain isolated in Judea unable to support much less fathom the ambitions of Paul.  

German philosopher Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831) claims Christianity had the right concept of freedom but managed to seduce the faithful with the idea that freedom was not to be found in this life.  They failed to realize that God did not create man, but rather that man created God; that man created God as a projection of the idea of freedom.

Meanwhile, from Hegel's philosophical point of view, Christianity became a faith of enslavement, of conformity and alienation, and would lead ultimately to the "divided self" of Western Man, with man often acting against himself.

Christians of every description would challenge this while in many ways personifying this assessment. That said, Christianity has been the life force of Western Civilization, and without that spiritual commitment over the centuries there would be no forum for this exchange.

PS If this forum is to have any viability, readers will invariably be exposed to ideas perhaps in conflict with their own.  We are in a secular age, but millenniums of religious faith have given us the world we find ourselves living in. 

Peripatetic Philosopher announces publication of NEAR JOURNEY'S END:

NEAR JOURNEY'S END -- CAN THE PLANET EARTH SURVIVE SELF-INDULGENT AMERICA?

BOOK DESCRIPTION:

NEAR JOURNEY’S END traces man’s history, mainly in the Christian era, from “Past Imperfect” to “Present Ridiculous,” to ultimately be stalled in America’s current quest for “Future Perfect” reality, by its “cut & control” practices, only to inadvertently entertain man’s possible extinction. It is the 11th hour and America’s course can be corrected by putting the same energy into responsible stewardship now haplessly ensnared in self-indulgent cultural narcissism. To do otherwise, social psychologist James R. Fisher, Jr. contends, man’s fate may be on course to a fait accompli.

Imagine the symbolic essence of America’s identity, the Statue of Liberty, literally sinking out-of-sight into the New York Harbor.   If so, what then?

NEAR JOURNEY'S END -- paperback price: $29.95

                                             e-Book price: $9.99

Amazon.com Kindle Library

Publishing date: October 16, 2018

                                             

Contents

Acknowledgements Foreword PREFACE PART ONE: "PAST IMPERFECT" PART TWO: "PRESENT RIDICULOUS" PART THREE: "FUTURE PERFECT" AFTERWORD TWO BOOK REVIEWS -- SAPIENS & HOMO DEUS BIBLIOGRAPHY ENDNOTES ABOUT THE AUTHOR INDEX