For your enjoyment, a few quotes from Thomas Nagel, the philosopher of consciousness who famously asked “What’s it like to be a bat?”  (His answer:  we’ll never know.)

To my mind (as it were), Nagel is one of the most readable philosophers out there.

These are all from “The View From Nowhere.”

On death:

         — “I believe there is little to be said for it.”

         — “Each of us has been around for as long as he can remember. It seems like the natural condition of things.”

On truth:

 — “If truth is our aim, we must be resigned to achieving it to a very limited extent, and without certainty.”

— “If you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say.”

 On being human:

— “The human race has a strong disposition to adore itself, in spite of its record.”

— “Our constitutional self-absorption together with our capacity to recognize its excessiveness make us irreducibly absurd.”

 On philosophy:

   — “Philosophy is after eternal and non-local truth, even though we know that’s not what we’re going to get.”

   — “Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.”

And this:

— “I would rather live an absurd life engaged in the particular than a seamless transcendental life immersed in the universal.”

The tyranny of round numbers has me in its grip.  A decade birthday or a centennial seems to insist on comment, whether we are ready for it or not.   Usually not.

Today my ‘dashboard’ informs me that this is the one-hundredth post since I began The Accidental Theologist nine months ago (note how I even avoid typing in the number 100, with its two imposing ovals).  And I’m resisting the impulse to obey the round-number imperative and say something ultra ‘meaningful.’  Like a mission statement.

I am not into the missionary position.  ‘Mission statement’ is a term dreamed up by PR hacks trying to give corporations some sort of moral standing, as though they had a sacred mission in life – to make things better, to help you, to serve you – other than profit.  I find missionaries hard enough to take when they’re spreading old-fashioned religion;  when they’re spreading the religion of consumerism, I find them even harder to take.

The first thing I wrote here, Who is the AT?, might be the closest I’ll ever come to such a statement, so I went back and looked at it this morning,  and found to my delight that it said exactly what I’d say today.  “None of the comfort of received opinion, no claim to truth, let alone Truth… None of that astounding confidence (aka hubris) that cloaks ignorance and prejudice.”   That’s the aim, anyway, and many of you have done your best to hold me to it.

And if some are frustrated by my refusal to take a single, clearly defined ‘position’ – let alone the missionary one – I’m delighted.   It means (at least I hope it means) that so far, I’ve avoided the traps of smugness or righteousness or self-satisfaction – all signs that a mind has stopped working – let alone the illusion that I have a stranglehold on that impossible ideal known as ‘truth’ (as though it were something that could be wrestled to the ground, pinned down, and held in an armlock).

I do realize that most people like to know exactly where they and others stand, and that I might be considered peculiar in that I like to explore and – the inevitable companion of exploration — get lost (which is why some people dread hiking with me, and why one of my favorite books is Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost).   I find it exciting to not know exactly where I am.  The things that stay with me – an experience, a conversation, a scene, a small epiphany – often happen when I least expect them, when I’m not where I thought I was going.  And when I write, I often find out where I’m going only once I’ve gotten there, and sometimes I never get to any “there” at all.

So thanks to those who appreciate that we don’t all have to be on the same page (the same chapter is far more interesting, or just the same book).  To people with the patience and curiosity and openness of mind to explore instead of rushing to well-defined ‘positions.’  To those who think with their heads instead of their knees (the infamous kneejerk reaction).  Those who look, reflect, enthuse, even despair — who approach this whole, complex, often crazed subject of religion and politics and the larger one of our existence on this earth not as something to be ‘solved,’ but as an ongoing question.

Accidental theologists unite! — we have nothing to lose but the false consolation of consensus.

You’ll find none of the comfort of received opinion here. No claim to truth, let alone Truth (that capital T always makes me nervous).  None of that astounding confidence (aka hubris) that cloaks ignorance and prejudice.  The aim is to question, to explore, to keep my mind — and yours — open, raise some sparks, and see what happens.

I wrote that eight months ago by way of introducing myself in ‘Who is the AT?’   Perhaps you thought I didn’t really mean it.  If so, you’ll likely hit the Escape button in about one minute from now, because most of us, myself included, hate it when people challenge what we take for granted.  We have, each of us, established certain fundamental principles by which we live our lives or see the world (the word ‘fundamental’ used  deliberately), and these are our ‘last-ditch’ positions – our sacred principles, and sometimes our sacred cows.  They’re the base from which we sally forth to do battle in the ever-expanding world of ideas, even as we insist that it is not expanding, and that certain verities – truths – are universal or eternal.

I am talking about what we often call “the obvious.”  The big O, if you like.  Here and there, it has been making an appearance in comments posted on this blog, along with its close cousin, the big S – simplicity.  “It’s obvious that…” “It’s really quite simple…”   Such comments make me feel like I’m being preached at – always an excellent way to get me to stop listening – but my real problem with them is that they cling to simplistic certainties in a complex and uncertain world.   I am an advocate of uncertainty, of doubt, of inquiry — a lover of paradox and of the ironies that seem to me inherent in human existence.  Simplicity might be all very well as a life style, but as a mind style, I find it stifling.

The Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing, hero of the ‘anti-psychiatry’ or ‘existential psychiatry’ movement of the 1960s and 1970s, once said this about the obvious:

To state the obvious is to share with you what (in your view) my misconceptions might be.  The obvious can be dangerous.  The deluded man frequently finds his delusions so obvious that he can hardly credit the good faith of those who do not share them… The obvious is literally that which stands in one’s way.”

Or, he summed up,

“One man’s revolution is another man’s platitude.” *

I’m not sure if Laing meant it this way (you couldn’t always be sure of anything Laing said – I once interviewed him at his home near Hampstead Heath in London, and came away after a couple of hours none the wiser), but what I take from this is that the obvious is what prevents us from thinking.  It stands like a brick wall between what we already think and what we might think if we allowed ourselves to inquire further.   In other words, once we decide that something is obvious, we stop thinking about it.  We accept it as a given:   sometimes as a sacred given – “Torah from Sinai,” as they say in Hebrew – sometimes as a scientific one, sometimes simply as an unquestionable assertion.   We take it for granted, and lose patience with those who don’t.

That, I think, is what Laing meant by the obvious being dangerous.   While we see it as a matter of fact, it is in fact one of faith, which becomes clearer when you consider how deeply attached we are to it.  Fact requires no emotional investment;  faith does.

Though I lack it myself, I see great courage in faith.   My image of faith is of a person walking out on a limb – a real limb of a real tree, reaching far out into the air — in full awareness that the limb might break and that they might fall and break one of their own limbs, but in the faith – trusting — that this will not happen.

This kind of faith I admire.  It’s certainty that repels me.  Religious certainty, atheist certainty, scientific certainty, political certainty, moral certainty:   the absolute conviction that you are right and that “they” – fill in the blank for whichever “they” most concerns you right now – are wrong.

If we can let go of what increasingly seems to me the pernicious idea of the obvious – the idea that we are somehow in possession of “the” truth, that “we” are the enlightened ones while “they” are living in delusion and darkness – perhaps then we might begin to be able to move toward something that could honorably be called knowledge.

Just please, don’t ask me to walk out on the same limb with you.  We live in a huge forest of trees, and I’m more interested in the forest itself than in any particular tree, let alone any particular limb.  Besides, I discovered as a child that I was no good at climbing trees.   Either I’d get halfway up and get stuck, afraid to go higher and equally afraid to climb back down, or I’d fall.  And yes, I have the scars to show for it.

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* The Laing quotes are from a speech reprinted in The Dialectics of Liberation, ed. David Cooper, which also includes speeches given at the same event in 1967 by Gregory Bateson, Paul Goodman, Stokely Carmichael, and Herbert Marcuse.   The book is out of print.

The response to my TEDx Quran talk in the week since the video of it was released has been magnificent, and the comments here on the AT, on YouTube, and on many other sites, have been immensely moving, humbling, thought-provoking, and inspiring, sometimes all at the same time.

All of which means that I haven’t had much time for my usual reading.  So when I finally curled up late last night with last week’s New Yorker, I thought it would just be a relaxing break.   Instead, Jonah Lehrer’s densely argued article on scientific research called “The Truth Wears Off” had me sitting straight up in alert attention, and his conclusion left me kind of breathless:

We like to pretend that experiments define the truth for us.  But that’s often not the case.  Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved.  And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true.  When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

This article is dynamite.  I mean that almost literally, since Lehrer explodes the carefully nurtured image of scientific research as the ultimate arbiter of fact.  It demonstrates what he calls “the slipperiness of empiricism.”  And it challenges the faith in science – I use the word “faith” advisedly here – of “new atheists” like Sam Harris, Chris Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett (a foursome I think of H2D2 for short).

Lehrer focuses on what he calls “the decline effect” – the way much research across a wide range of fields, including psychology, ecology, biology, and medicine, fails the most basic scientific test, which is replicability.  If other researchers can produce the same results, then the research is valid;  if they cannot, it has to be assumed flawed.   And many, in some fields even most, cannot.  Results that initially seem ground-breaking often fade with each replication of the research, and sometimes even turn negative.

“It’s as if our facts were losing their truth,” says Lehrer.  As one somewhat depressed biologist told him:

We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some – perhaps many – cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their significance, and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs.

Citing the example of wildly divergent results for the efficacy of acupuncture in the Far East as opposed to Western Europe, for instance, Lehrer writes:

This wide discrepancy suggests that scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don’t want to see.  Our beliefs are a form of blindness.

It gets downright scary when he talks to a Stanford epidemiologist who looked at the 49 most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals.  “Of those that had been subject to replication, 41% had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.”   It gets even worse when the research is in a “fashionable” field like genetic differences in disease risk for men and women.  “Out of 432 claims, only a single one was consistently replicable.”

The Stanford epidemiologist suspects “significance chasing,” where “scientists are so eager to pass the magical test of statistical significance that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy.”   They don’t do this deliberately, but unconsciously.  “Knowing” that something has to be true, they find ways to make it seem so.

“The decline effect” may in fact be a decline of illusion, says Lehrer.  The problem being that it’s very hard to let go of illusions:

Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in textbooks and drive standard medical practice.  Why?  Because these ideas seem true.  Because they make sense.  Because we can’t bear to let them go.

Because, in short, scientists are as human as the rest of us.  And the very idea of truth — that absolute ideal of veracity — is as slippery and troubling as ever.

Here’s Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, the newly crowned Nobel literature laureate and a proud agnostic, talking about truth, lies, and fiction in a piece called “Is Fiction the Art of Living?“:

THE lies in novels are not gratuitous – they fill in the insufficiencies of life. Thus, when life seems full and absolute, and men, out of an all-consuming faith, are resigned to their destinies, novels perform no service at all.  Religious cultures produce poetry and theater, not novels.

Fiction is an art of societies in which faith is undergoing some sort of crisis, in which it’s necessary to believe in something, in which the unitarian, trusting and absolute vision has been supplanted by a shattered one and an uncertainty about the world we inhabit and the afterworld.

I’m not at all sure about that idea of novels providing a “service,” but this is nevertheless an excellent explanation of why totalitarian societies clamp down not only on civil rights and freedom of expression, but on that most essential and potentially most subversive of individual rights — freedom of imagination.

Now it’s time to catch up with Vargas Llosa.    Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter sounds like farcical fun, but this accidental theologist really has to start with The Storyteller, in which a saintly, disfigured student presents himself as the official storyteller for a rainforest tribe and the repository of its collective memory.

Long live stories!