Image Credit: Nasa/Swift/Aurore Simonnet
Is there a moral order in the universe? If so, does it come from a god, or some other force? If there is a moral order, is it something we should try to align ourselves with?
I think about that a lot, when I walk outside, look at the stars, hike, swim in the sea, walk along the strand. I also think about that whenever I read about comparative religion, and wonder how people could deduce a moral order from ancient scripture, and sometimes I wish I could as well. That it would be good to have that kind of faith, even though the scriptures themselves, at least to me, are anything but moral.
They contain moments of wisdom, beauty, and poetry, but are offset by too much brutality ordered from above. I need a different kind of moral order than that, one that extends beyond the limitations of any one religion, encompasses all of them, all things, all beings, across all time and space. One that needs no special designation or special invitation. One that never tries to convert you with promises of eternal life or threats of eternal punishment. I can't believe in anything short of that. Anything short of complete openness to the All.
There is something truly awe-inspiring about Nature, the way it's ordered, the way things work so well together. Cycles. Circles. Flow. Not perfectly. If you think about a lot of the aspects of the various animals, plants, insects, and humans, you begin to see flaws, baffling elements, things that just don't make any sense. But despite all of that, it somehow coheres. It somehow does what Ezra Pound said his Cantos failed to do.
I've never understood the concept of a god needing to be worshiped. Always thought that if there were such things, they wouldn't really need that kind of personal reaffirmation. That they would be a bit beyond that sort of thing. The act of worship was always for humans, for their benefit. To make them feel like they were carrying on a dialogue of some sort. To make them feel they weren't alone, that something, some omniscient being, had them in mind at all times. That said, I do think it makes sense to want to be one with whatever idea a person has of the divine, or the moral order, or the Way. I do think it makes sense for us to try to live our lives in such a way that we truly flow with Nature, in the same way that animals do, in the same way that trees bend in the wind. To use a very much overused metaphor: catching a wave, riding it all the way into the shore. Not fighting against anything. Making your mind and body conform to the wave and the power of the wave, its motion, its speed, its crossing of time and space.
Robert Wright, in his book, The Evolution of God, talks about our inability to really conceive of the ground of being, or god, or the divine, in any clear cut way:
It’s a bedrock idea of modern physics that, even if you define “ultimate reality” as the ultimate scientific reality—the most fundamental truths of physics—ultimate reality isn’t something you can clearly conceive.
Think of an electron, a little particle that spins around another little particle. Wrong! True, physicists sometimes find it useful to think of electrons as particles, but sometimes it’s more useful to think of them as waves. Conceiving of them as either is incomplete, yet conceiving of them as both is … well, inconceivable. (Try it!) And electrons are just the tip of the iceberg. In general, the quantum world—the world of subatomic reality—behaves in ways that don’t make sense to minds like ours. Various aspects of quantum physics evince the property that the late physicist Heinz Pagels called quantum weirdness.
The bad news for the religiously inclined, then, is that maybe they should abandon hope of figuring out what God is. (If we can’t conceive of an electron accurately, what are our chances of getting God right?) The good news is that the hopelessness of figuring out exactly what something is doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Apparently some things are just inconceivable—and yet are things nonetheless.
Though he doesn't talk about this in the book, his example of the electron got me to think about the way mystics sometimes achieve oneness with the ultimate reality. They contemplate paradox. They meditate on the seemingly impossible. They continue to meditate of those impossibilities, on a kind of harmony of opposites, long enough, with enough concentration, to move into another state of being altogether. It's not a grunting and groaning concentration, though. That would destroy the moment. It's yet another kind of riding the wave into the shore. And scientists, when they study the brainwaves of people doing this, see explosions, beautiful, wonderful explosions. Stars. A kind of internal moral order no doubt.
Back in the days of Meander, I contemplated the Four Miracles: existence (why, there’s something rather than nothing!), life (matter of organization, ongoing), consciousness (self-awareness, agency), and society (other-awareness, communication, culture, etc), the last two more loosely defined (yet none of them tightly: e.g. existence being both matter and energy, even dark, and quantum mechanical to boot). Each emerges from its predecessor (again, in the case of existence, nothing) and is contingent upon developmental histories as well. I don’t believe that morality can be separated from the fourth level. The problem I have with mysticism is similar to that I have with fundamentalism of whatever stripe, in privileging the third level, consciousness, displaced into The One. (Part of it is understandable as privileged access to one’s self, but that is incomplete and unreliable.) My own view is agnostic, pragmatic: there’s a lot we can’t know in principle, but so much more that we can’t know in practice, and it’s the latter we can do something about. Even if it means going against the flow.
Good break down of things, Dave. There is a paradox in freeing the self. It takes a focus on the self, oftentimes to the exclusion of others and society at large. Ridding the self, becoming selfless, in the mystical sense, pretty much requires a sort of exclusionary process of the world around us. Exceptions, of course. But there aren’t too many mystics who dove headlong into society, embraced crowds, embraced the world, etc. The ethical and the moral means bringing back lessons. So that mystical revelation without connection with the world of humans and nature .… seems ultimately rather devoid of that ethical and moral component. “Personal salvation” via Christianity or other religions of that kind have the same conundrum. I’ve spoken with believers who say that nothing is as important to them as their relationship with their savior. Not family, not kids, not friends. Nothing. As one of those old secular humanists, I can’t understand that, really. I try to walk in their moccasins, but I slip and fall a lot.
A counterpoint: Moral Chaos:
http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2009/07/when-reading-roger-scruton-one-can-always-be-sure-that-the-ideas-and-sentiments-expressed-are-being-offered-with-utter-since.html
What a great picture.It looks like a grand cosmic fireworks show.It brings to mind the only time I saw the Northern Lights.It was the summer of 1975 and we were driving back from a friends cottage in the Finger Lakes to surburban Rochester in top down Buick Electra convertible when we spotted the lights.Had to be around 2 a.m. and it was beautiful cruising a country road seeing this cosmic show.Don’t know why the Northern Lights showed up that far south that night but it has stayed in my mind.
Thanks, John, for the story. It is a beautiful picture. I hope some day to see the Northern Lights meself. Would be spectacular. The Great Painter in the sky has a marvelous way with colors, light, shadows, motion. Goethe said colors were the deeds of light. But I think Van Gogh was the painter at the beginning of time, before time, all time. He invented the deeds of light and the Northern Lights from his perch in Saint Rémy de Provence.
Stumbled on this, on poetic vs philosophic perspectives, and a mote in the eye of the beamholder:
Heine recalling his meeting with Hegel in Berlin. Heine, expressing his appreciation of the night-sky, was met with this response from Hegel:
‘The stars, harrumph, the stars are only a gleaming leprosy on the sky.’ – quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, p. 119.
http://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/see-you-next-week/#comments
Strange, coming from someone like Hegel, who thought there was a Telos, a meaning and goal for history. That he should have missed the beauty in the stars, the strange paradox of their distance and possible death while we see their light, along with their incredible distance from each other. Or, maybe it does make sense. I think Pascal was the greater, deeper thinker. Stars made him feel a lot more than bah, humbug!! Hegel had plenty of time to learn from the likes of Pascal. He missed it all by light years.