The white-bearded red herring…or YES, I’m talking to YOU, Lisa Miller
The world is full of ignorant nonsense, and that’s okay. Well, it’s not okay, but it seems to be part of the unavoidable deal, what with unequal access to education and a thousand other things. What I’ve had quite enough of is ignorant nonsense from people who really have no excuse.
Newsweek Religion Editor Lisa Miller (who interviewed me for a Beliefwatch column in July 2007) set me off with a recent column ( “Arguing Against the Atheists,” October 6) regarding her irritation with “the new generation of professional atheists.”
She begins with a variation on the ad populum fallacy (“If 90-odd percent of Americans say they believe in God, it’s unhelpful to dismiss them as silly”), but it’s her second “argument” that had me shaking my head in frustration at the confident sloppiness of someone with the chops to know better:
When they check that “believe in God” box, a great many people are not talking about the God the atheists rail against—a supernatural being who intervenes in human affairs, who lays down inexplicable laws about sex and diet, punishes violators with the stinking fires of hell and raises the fleshly bodies of the dead.
Generally phrased as “I don’t believe in a white-bearded man in the sky either,” this shameful dodge is the current favorite of religious moderates. It neatly sidesteps all challenges by saying, “Sorry, wrong number” and thereby avoiding the messy business of meeting those challenges. One small detail: Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and the rest of those whose persistence Miller dislikes have all made it achingly clear that their critiques are NOT limited to literalists. But even aching clarity must be read to be understood. At best, Miller must have skimmed this passage from The God Delusion:
This is as good a moment as any to forestall an inevitable retort to the book, one that would otherwise—as sure as night follows day—turn up in a review: ‘The God that Dawkins doesn’t believe in is a God that I don’t believe in either. I don‘t believe in an old man in the sky with a long white beard.’ That old man is an irrelevant distraction and his beard is as tedious as it is long. Indeed, the distraction is worse than irrelevant. Its very silliness is calculated to distract attention from the fact that what the speaker really believes is not a whole lot less silly. I know you don’t believe in an old bearded man sitting on a cloud, so let’s not waste any more time on that. I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented. (p. 36)
A good effort, Richard, but I’m afraid Lisa Miller only read the dustcover.
Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett have also gone out of their way, again and again, in writing and in interviews, to make it abundantly clear that they are talking to moderates as well, Lisa. Harris built it right into the opening pages of The End of Faith and, when that was ignored, Letter to a Christian Nation. They all voice two different but related critiques for moderates and extremists. They think religious belief itself, in however attenuated a form, is unworthy, undesirable, even harmful. They further suggest that moderates, by offering blanket endorsements of “faith” as a concept and practice, provide ongoing cover and succor to malignant fundamentalism. These authors offer not just the statement of these opinion, but reams of evidence and argument.
Mustn’t look too closely at that, though.
After placing moderate religion safely out of harm’s way, Miller offers a thought that demonstrates precisely the confident nonsense Dawkins, et al. are concerned about among moderates and literalists alike:
Submitting faith to proof is absurd. Reason defines one kind of reality (what we know); faith defines another (what we don’t know). Reasonable believers can live with both at once.
If there’s a single thrust and focus of the “professional atheists,” it is challenging the unsupported declaration that faith “defines a reality” and yet is immune to the requirements of proof. She couldn’t have created a better encapsulation of the dangerous nonsense of faith if she had tried. That the nonsense itself occurs in the process of simply saying “nuh-uhhh” to the arguments against it is as ironic and unworthy a retort as I can imagine.
You may legitimately disagree with Dawkins and the rest, Ms. Miller. But they’ve worked ever-so-hard to frame clear and concise arguments. Would it be okay if we all read them, then discuss those arguments on their actual merits instead of pretending they are talking to someone else about something else?
Thinking sideways
It’s parent-teacher conference time, which I love. There always seems to be a moment in these conferences when I’m reminded that my kids think sideways.
Present any one of them with a question or problem and they tend to choose the least conventional solution that’s still a solution.
Mr. H, Delaney’s first grade teacher, showed us an assignment in which the kids were asked what superpower they would want to have. Informal web polls tend toward mind-reading, flight, super-strength, super-speed, invisibility, and the rest of the Marvel Comics arsenal. Mr. H said the other kids had generally chosen from that traditional list.
Not Delaney. “If I could have any supper power,” she wrote, “I would want the power to help other peple. Like if some one was blinde, I would make them see again. Wenever I would here HELP!, I would come.”
I wonder where “reversing disabilities” would be on a frequency graph of power preferences. Then there’s the fun fact that the children of Christian parents were busily emulating Superman while the child of humanists chose to essentially emulate Christ.
Last Thankgiving, Erin’s fourth grade class did the usual “what are you grateful for” assignment, and again we heard our child’s sideways answer in the teacher conference. Most of her classmates were grateful for health, family, sunshine, food, a home, our country, our soldiers, our freedom. All marvelous answers.
And my daughter?
“Pain,” said Mr. J. “She said she is most grateful for pain.”
I smiled. “Really.”
“Yes, pain. At first I was a little, uh…concerned,” he said, “but then she explained it. She said that pain warns us when something is wrong, and without it, a little injury or sickness could get worse and we’d never know. We could die from something small. So she’s grateful for pain.” He smiled and shook his head. “I never thought of it that way.”
We’d talked about this once when she had a bad splinter in her foot. If it weren’t for pain, I said as I worked the tweezers clumsily, she might not have known the splinter was there. It could have become infected, even dangerous.
But here’s the thing: that splinter came out four years ago, when she was six. I had no idea at the time that the idea of pain as our friend had made any impression, much less a deep one. Unlike the splinter, that sideways idea worked its way in and stayed.
Five little bits
1. Reminder: The deadline for the First Annual Parenting Beyond Belief Column Competition is TOMORROW (October 6). Your entry should tackle a subtopic within nonreligious parenting (as opposed to the topic on the whole) or a personal story from your own experience. Submissions should be attached in a Word document 600-800 words in length PLUS a bio of no more than 75 words, and emailed to column [at] parentingbeyondbelief dot com with the word COLUMN in the subject line.
2. Registration pages for the Austin seminar (Dec 13) and Chicago seminar (Jan 24) are now online.
3. Head-hanging moment of the week: A Christian blogger rightly blasted me for a misattribution in my post on the Book of Acts. I had taken a quote from theologian Bruce Metzger from a secondary source that apparently got it wrong. Metzger was quoting two other theologians disapprovingly, not expressing his own view on the unreliability of Acts. It frosts me when someone does that to the words of evolutionary biologists like Eldredge or Gould — then I turn around and do the same. Oh well, keeps me humble. I’m not perfect, just unforgiven.
But in an interesting way, my error supports my thesis. People cannot help introducing errors even within a single step of transmission and even when they are trying their damndest to get it right. So what chance of accuracy does any text have that has been through 80 generations of transcription, translation, and partisan transmission? Lemme see…carry the six…divide by the number of the beast…okay, here’s the answer.
4. Chest-thumping moment of the week: Question from Delaney last night before bed: “I know what evolution is, but how does it work? I mean, how does it make the changes happen?”
She’s not quite seven. Thumpa-thumpa-thump!
5. Raising Freethinkers, which doesn’t even release for another four months (hell, I’m not even done with the index) has, for the moment, entered the top 25 in Morals & Responsibility. A momentary bump that I’m sure will have dropped by the time you read this. At any rate, it’s the only unreleased title in the top 100, which is nice.
Meaning and nonforeverness
Young Pastor: You speak blasphemy, sir!
Man in the Yellow Suit: Fluently.
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What we Tucks have, you can’t call it living. We just… are. We’re like rocks, stuck at the side of a stream.
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Immortality isn’t everything the preachers crack it up to be.Quotes from the film version of TUCK EVERLASTING
Back from the Hawkeye State, where I had the temerity to hold a seminar two blocks from the University of Iowa homecoming game. Went well, as did the next day in Des Moines. Met more fabulous folks including Jaime and Brian Sabel and Becky Mason of Iowa Secularists and our very own blogreader Ei! Plus some nice Amish ladies at the airport.
Driving through corn and a lovely plague of black butterflies on the way to Iowa City, I found myself thinking about a question from an earlier seminar — Cincinnati, maybe. A young man introduced himself as a quite recent deconvert from fundamentalism and told me he’d been struggling with the problem of meaning in the absence of eternal life. If we live for a while and then cease to be, what exactly is the point?
The meaning thing is a legitimate problem. I’ve written before about the ways in which we discover meaning, but that’s down here on the local level of our experience. He was asking the larger philosophical question about the Point of It All. And that’s a much more interesting problem.
Thing is, I don’t remotely see how immortality solves it.
If I live to be eighty instead of forty, is my life more intrinsically meaningful? I think most would agree it is not. How about 200 years, or 500? Ten thousand? These are changes in quantity that don’t seem to affect the M&P question at all. No matter how long you live, right up to eternity, the basic M&P question remains in place. In fact, the excellent novel and movie Tuck Everlasting convincingly makes the opposite claim — that immortality actually robs life of its meaning.
Some suggest that religion solves the problem by means other than everlasting life. Our purpose is to do God’s will, and so on. Aside from how deeply dissatisfying this ant-farm model of meaning should be to any thinking person, it only transfers the question up one level: What is the purpose of God, and why, in the grandest scheme, is this hobby of his worth the time spent cleaning our cage?
Meaning is a legitimate human puzzle. The question is whether this abstracted, higher-level meaninglessness troubles you or not. Unlike death, I don’t find ultimate meaninglessness too arresting a thought, though I have seriously struggled at times with local, personal, self-discovered meaning. As I wrote last year (You put your whole self in, 6/5/07):
I don’t imagine other animals have “meaning crises,” but our cortical freakishness makes us feel that we need more than just the lucky fact of being — makes us imagine these enormous, fatal holes and cracks in our meaning and purpose.
Hence the use of God as meaning-spackle.
When I was a kid, my purposometer (purr-puh-SAH-mit-ter), was always in the 90s on a scale of 100. Didn’t even have to try. I knew what I was here for: getting good grades, playing the clarinet, getting Muriel Ruffino to kiss me (Editor’s note: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, booyah!), getting into college, getting various other girls to kiss and etc. me (mission roughly 17% accomplished). And so on.
Much like your need for a pancreas, you never even know you have the need for meaning and purpose until it begins to fail — which mine did, in no uncertain terms, as I sat black-robed and square-hatted in a folding chair on a Berkeley lawn, not hearing the words of some famous anthropologist standing before me and 150 other black-robed, square-hatted, non-hearing 22-year-olds.
For the first time in my life, I had no earthly idea what was next. It was my first genuine core-shaking crisis of meaning and purpose.
But for reasons I’m not sure about, that larger question — call it cosmic M&P — has never pecked too hard at my consciousness. The best I can do is acknowledge that it is legit and note that religion doesn’t cure it.
Those who aren’t as incurious as I can always imagine themselves in Yahweh’s ant farm — or engage, along with Viktor Frankl and others, in a truly difficult and probably worthwhile bit of philosophical work.
Lemme know how it goes.
Drugs are bad…m’kay?
I had an unusual interview two weeks ago.
I sleep through most media interviews now, since the questions tend to be the same, and in about the same order: Tell me a little about your book, Why do nonreligious parents need their own separate resource, How do you deal with moral development, How can you help kids deal with death without an afterlife, Isn’t it important to believe in something greater than ourselves. Before I know it, I’m being thanked for a fascinating hour I can’t quite remember.
It’s a bit like teaching. In my last few years as a college professor, I’d hear my brain stem doing the teaching while my neocortex was planning dinner. I’d come back just in time to dismiss. That’s when I knew it was time to do something else.
But the interview two weeks back snapped me out of my usual snooze. I was a little wary anyway, as the station runs syndicated neocon culture-warrior nonsense of the Medved/Prager variety most of the day. Even so, I was not prepared for the very first question to come out of the host’s mouth:
“Without a higher power,” he asked, “how are you going to keep your kids off crystal meth?”
Wha?
Now I can see this kind of thing coming up at some point…but right out of the starting gate? This, of all questions, was knocking on the back of his teeth? When he heard he would be interviewing a nonreligious parent, the first thing that bubbled up was, “B-b-but how’s he gonna keep them off meth?”
I answered that instead of a higher power, I encourage my kids to engage these questions with the power of their own reason, the power of their own minds. There are many compelling reasons to stay away from self-destructive things, after all — including the fact that they are, uh…self-destructive.
He threw it to the other guest, a minister at a private junior high school, who answered confidently that the higher power was the one and only option. Without Jesus, he’d have no way whatsoever to keep his kids from whirling out of control and into the black abyss. Only by staying tightly focused on biblical principles, he said, can kids avoid utter annihilation.
Mmkay.
Ready for the follow-up? Trust me, you’re not:
“Now Dr. McGowan,” said the host with a chuckle, “I gotta tell you, when you talk about the Power of the Mind, it sounds an awful lot like Scientology to me. Can you tell me what if anything distinguishes your worldview from Scientology?”
What, if anything.
This is what we’ve come to as a culture. When you advocate teaching kids to reason things out, it sounds to some like the process of auditing past lives to become an Operating Thetan, casting off the evil influence of Xenu (dictator of the Galactic Confederacy) and battling the alien implants from Helatrobus that seek to control our thoughts and actions.
I apologized for being so very unclear, assured him I had intended to evoke nothing alien, supernatural, or magical by encouraging my children to think. I’ve also never “informed” them, a la Mr. Mackey in South Park, that “drugs are bad, so you shouldn’t do drugs, m’kay?” That’s commandment-style morality, and it’s weak as hell. Instead, we’ve talked about what they stand to lose, what others have lost, how addiction works, and what a fragile and fantastic thing the mind is.
I remember drawing that last connection vividly as a teenager. I knew that my mind was the key to any eventual success I might have, an asset to protect. I didn’t want to risk screwing it up for any kind of pleasure or thrill, and drugs were just too unpredictable in their effects. It was a simple risk analysis, clinched by the death of my dad as an indirect consequence of smoking. I got the message: When you put poisonous stuff in your body, you risk too much for too little. And I never touched so much as a cigarette. My kids have received that same message: Grandpa David never got to meet them because he became addicted to poisonous stuff, couldn’t stop, and paid with his life.
I came out of my study after the interview and Connor (13) asked how it had gone. “A little weird,” I said, “but fine.”
“What was weird?”
I looked him in the eye. “Well, his first question was how I’m going to keep you guys off crystal meth without religion.”
“Pfft,” Connor said. “As if it’s an issue.”
It was nice to hear his quick, dismissive snort. I know my kids really well, and though anything’s possible, I don’t see drugs as a serious threat. In addition to reasoning through it, we’ve talked about craving and addiction — that your body can be chemically tricked into thinking it needs the drugs, and that this can be hard to reason your way out of once you’re in the middle of it. That, plus a number of personal, family, and community assets, kept me from using. And all without a Savior in sight. I figure it has a good chance of working with my kids as well.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that both the host and the minister had gone through the requisite “lost years” of sex and drugs, only to be gloriously saved by coming to Christ. It can and surely does work for some. I’d just love to hear someone on that side acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, there are other ways as well — ways that involve no magic, no demigods, no thetans, no fervent, focused distractions — just the ability to draw on our own natural resources.
An Inconvenient Commandment
One of the common worries I hear from religious commentators about nonreligious people is the absence of a solid, reliable, unchanging moral compass. Lacking that…why, folks could make up the rules as they go along.
I’ve written about this nonsense before (“The red herring of relativism,” July 8, 2007), so I won’t go too deep into the silly idea that moral relativism follows from the absence of religious guidance. I’m more struck at the moment by just how quickly the “solid, reliable, unchanging moral compass” of religion is cast aside when it’s inconvenient.
The Ninth Commandment, for example — which prohibits lying, or “bearing false witness” — is taking quite a hit at the moment among the most fervently religious of my fellow Americans as the presidential campaign heads into the final weeks.
Some will note that all politicians lie, as if that makes my outrage moot. Even if that’s true, it seems clear to me that they don’t do it with equal abandon. Jimmy Carter, who found it difficult to lie, declared the country had fallen into a “malaise” and was booted for his honesty. Ronald Reagan followed up by declaring “Morning in America,” then ushered in the most corrupt and scandal-ridden Administration in memory.
Secular, un-compassed me is furious when my own party lies or cynically stretches the truth, which is little different. About a decade ago, the Democrats in my then-home state of Minnesota ran a television ad with a little girl struggling to read a sentence on a blackboard: “Republicans in the state legislature cut 32 million dollars from education funding.” A tiny asterisk led to the following at the bottom of the screen:
*(Cuts forced by Governor’s memo of 03/08/99.)
It flashed by too fast and small to read, which I’m sure was an oversight.
They were forced to do it by our governor, Jesse Ventura, an Independent. I dashed off an angry note to my state party, which thanked me for (and ignored) my petty plea for integrity.
Barack Obama has offered at least one wincing, bald-faced lie in this campaign when he claimed that his comment
“it’s not surprising then that [some voters] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”
was really just an acknowledgment that in tough times, people turn to “the things they can count on,” traditional values that “endure.” Even without the obvious disproof of this (anti-immigrant sentiment is an enduring value?), it was obvious to all but those blinded by bias on the left that he had meant something much less flattering. The original statement, though impolitic, was true; the cover-up was false, and that diminished him in my eyes.
The half-hearted, embarrassed reaction from much of the left at the time shows that liberals tend to wince when their candidates lie so shamefully. At the very least, we tend not to line up behind him or her and repeat the obvious lie.
See where I’m headed, do ya?
How many supporters of Sarah Palin’s candidacy are wincing with embarrassment at the astonishing, breathtaking stream of lies (both half and whole) coming from her and her surrogates in the past ten days? The Bridge to Nowhere (“thanks but no thanks”) lie is just one of a dozen or more towering fabrications that have again raised serious questions about not just our collective gullibility but also the willingness of the Right to bear false witness whenever it suits the needs of the moment.
There’s a term for this — situational ethics. It also goes by the name of moral relativism. And the fact that it displays itself so dazzlingly in conservative Christian evangelicals — those whose God devoted fully ten percent of his ethical instruction manual to forbidding it — should give any sane person pause before yammering on about the rock solid reliability of that unchanging moral compass.
When Charles Gibson asked Sarah Palin about the Bush Doctrine last week, any thinking observer could see that she had no idea what he meant. She paused awkwardly, then asked if he meant “[Bush’s] general worldview.” To cover themselves and perpetuate the larger lie that Palin is prepared for the national stage, the McCain campaign engineered a whopper: Palin knew the Bush Doctrine so well that she wasn’t sure which of its many facets Gibson wanted her to address.
And a shriek of needles on paper was heard across the land, and countless polygraphs now sit sweating in straitjackets, their needles quivering fearfully, humming “Give Me Some Truth” loudly to themselves for fear they will hear the Republicans say…it…again.
When (Roman Catholic) Sean Hannity interviews (Assemblies of God) Sarah Palin this week, there can be little doubt what they will do to their beloved Commandment. He will ask her (no doubt with “respect and deference“) about the Bush Doctrine, and she will faithfully parrot the lines she has learned since Thursday about its many, many facets, pretending to have known this all along, locking the inconvenient truth away with a click as decisive as the syllables of “Ahmadinejad” she had so faithfully learned the week before.
And afterward, all talk will be about whether she hit a triple, a home run, or a ground rule double, measured not against a standard of truth, nor what it takes to be Vice-President of the U.S., but against “expectations” and the dial-in-your-vote-for-the-next-American-Idol perceptions of three hundred million marionettes.
Maybe we can’t ask for an administration that doesn’t lie. I don’t know. But is it too much to hope for one that feels some semblance of shame when they do it?
[Your City Here] Power!
Okay, folks, I’m throwing out the old algorithm for scheduling the seminar tour. Finding out firsthand where the interested folks are is ever so much more fun, and much more likely to build successful events.
Since posting Wednesday about the blizzard of requests I’d had from Austin to bring the parenting seminar there, the storm front has widened. I’ve received requests from 27 cities in the U.S., three in Canada, and one each in Belgium and the Netherlands. Woohoo! Time to get my shots!
But five cities stood out:
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AUSTIN (44 requests)
PORTLAND, OREGON (18 requests)
CHICAGO (17 requests)
SEATTLE (17 requests)
NEW YORK (13 requests)
…so these folks are getting the first seminars in 2009.
If you’re in one of those cities and haven’t yet sent in your email address, please click on your city name above to do so. When the schedule’s set, you’ll be among the first to know. And I’d like to hear from anyone in those five cities who might be connected to a potential host organization that can provide the room and help with promotion. Click here to drop me a note.
Other places climbing the list:
ST. LOUIS and KANSAS CITY: I’m already in conversation with the Ethical Society of St. Louis and All Souls UU in Kansas City for a pair of Missouri seminars, probably in January.
FLORIDA: A good number of Florida parents have expressed interest. Unfortunately they are literally all over the map, in seven different cities. If any one Florida city can organize a strong enough blizzard of interest, I’ll point my Honda south.
ASHEVILLE/CHARLOTTE NC: About eight requests from western North Carolina. That’s a quick drive for me, so double that number and I’m there.
DENVER/COLORADO SPRINGS: Weather delayed my plane and forced the cancellation of my Colorado Springs seminar in June. We’ll get that horse back under sail soon.
MINNEAPOLIS (again), PHOENIX, and LOS ANGELES: I’ve received just a handful for each of these. I’ll need a larger indication of interest before I happily submit to the airport security cavity search for y’all.
And a few more remain to go in 2008:
CINCINNATI on September 20
IOWA CITY on September 27
DES MOINES on September 28
PALO ALTO CA on October 25
…and BOSTON on December 6, in conjunction with my Alexander Lincoln “Harvard Humanist of the Year” Lecture at Harvard. (Registration info to come.)
If you’d like to see the half-day seminar come your way, fill out the general request form and get other interested parents to do the same.
Here’s what some past participants have said about the event:
“Very positive, practical, humorous, ethical presentation!”
“Eye-opening, interesting…fascinating”
“Wonderful seminar, wonderful book!”
“Very powerful to be given these tools to help our children…fabulous!”
“I have never felt less alone. Thank you Dale”
“I wish we could have gone on all day!”
“An effective combination of humor and powerful information”
“The family spectrum exercise was so revealing. I don’t see myself as an island anymore”
“I came away with a more positive attitude about parenting than I can remember having, ever.”
“Exhilarating, informative, fun”
Best Practices 1: Widening circles of empathy
[First in a nine-part series on best practices for nonreligious parenting.]
“I feel your pain.”
–BILL CLINTON at a campaign rally in 1992“We need to…pass along the value of empathy to our children. Not sympathy, but empathy – the ability to stand in somebody else’s shoes; to look at the world through their eyes.”
–BARACK OBAMA in a speech on Father’s Day 2008
In the Preface of Raising Freethinkers I offer a list of nine best practices for nonreligious parenting. The list is drawn largely from the growing consensus of nonreligious parents and grounded when possible in the social and developmental sciences. Between now and the release, I’ll try to draw attention to all nine. They are not commandments but an attempt to capture the consensus regarding effective practices. They’re intended to be the starting point of the conversation, not the end, carved in butter, not stone. So grab a spatula and shape away!
In today’s “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine, William Safire identifies empathy as one of the buzzwords of the current campaign. He notes that the issue of whether a given candidate could really empathize with everyday folks is nothing new. George H.W. Bush was (unfairly, but effectively) excoriated for not knowing the price of a gallon of milk in 1992. John McCain’s uncertain number of houses is assumed to undercut his empathy quotient, as Obama’s Ivy education and taste for arugula are said to undercut his.
Safire echoes Obama’s distinction between empathy and sympathy:
If you think empathy is the synonym of sympathy, I’m sorry for your confusion. Back to the Greeks: pathos is “emotion.” Sympathy feels pity for another person’s troubles…empathy identifies with whatever is going on in another’s mind…The Greek prefix sym means “together with, alongside”; the verbal prefix em goes deeper, meaning “within, inside.” When you’re sympathetic, your arm goes around the shoulders of others; when you’re empathetic, your mind lines up with what’s going on inside their heads. Big difference.
We talk about empathy as if it’s either something magical or something that can be willed into existence by saying, in essence, “Feel empathy! It’s what good people do.” Empathy is neither as easy nor as hard as we make it seem.
One school of thought in psychology (Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, Nancy Eisenberg, et al.) suggests infants are largely self-centered, putting the first twitches of empathy between 18 and 36 months. Another (led by Harry Stack Sullivan, Martin Hoffman and others) has recently made a case for “infantile empathy” toward the mother — something that would certainly make sense.
In either case, by age three, kids are reliably exhibiting empathy, which Eisenberg defines as “an affective response that stems from comprehension of another’s emotional state or condition and is similar to what the other person would be expected to feel.”
That sentence might ring some bells if you’ve followed the recent work on mirror neurons. I wrote about this in July of last year:
In your head are neurons that fire whenever you experience something. Pick up a marble, yawn, or slam your shin into a trailer hitch, and these neurons get busy. No news there. But these neurons also fire when you see someone else picking up a marble, yawning, or slamming a shin. They are called mirror neurons, and they have the powerful capacity to make you feel, quite directly, what somebody else is feeling…The implications are gi-normous, since it means we’re not completely self-contained after all…
It takes very little to see, in this remarkable neural system, the root of empathy, sympathy, compassion, conscience, cooperation, guilt, and a whole lot of other useful tendencies. It explains my kids’ tendency to wither under disapproval…Thanks to mirror neurons, the accused feels the condemnation all the more intensely. Empathizing with someone else’s rage toward you translates into a kind of self-loathing that we call guilt or conscience. Once again, no need for a supernatural agent.
So what are those “ever-wider circles” about?
Our natural tendency is to feel empathy for those who are most like us. Empathy extends outward from Mom to the rest of the family to the local tribe — all those who look and act essentially like us. And I’d argue that moral development is measurable in part by how far outward your concentric circles extend. I encourage my kids not just to think about how a person of a different gender, color, nationality, or worldview feels or thinks, but to see themselves in that person — to get those mirror neurons dancing to the tune of a shared humanity.
And why stop at the species? One of the biggest implications of evolution is a profound connectedness to the rest of life on Earth. As a recent interviewer put it, “It seems like you could be positively paralyzed” by the realization that walking the dog, eating a burger, and climbing a tree is literally walking, eating, and climbing distant cousins. True enough.
I applaud religious ideas that reinforce and sanctify connectedness, as well as seeing self in others. “See the Buddha in all things” is an example. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is another. But so many traditional ideas — religious, cultural, political — instead draw lines between people, defining in-groups and out-groups and outlining colorful punishments for those on the wrong side of that line. Having “dominion over the earth” doesn’t help matters, and Deuteronomy and Revelation are dedicated almost entirely to defining, judging, and annihilating the hated Other. Bad news for empathy, don’t you think?
Free of religious orthodoxy, nonreligious and progressive religious parents alike can encourage their kids to push the concentric circles of their empathy as far and wide as possible. That includes, of course, people who believe differently from us. I don’t have to buy what their selling, nor do I have to refrain from challenging it. But I want my kids to work hard at understanding why people believe as they do. And if I expect it of them, I damn well better achieve it myself. Sometimes I do all right at that. Other times…meh.
So then…how are y’all doing with empathy for religious believers?
the iWord revisited
One last ripple to address from last week’s posts…
In emails and comments, a few readers brought up another issue that cuts close to the bone for secular parents. In the conversation with my daughters, I described our condition after death as identical to our condition before birth. Some readers threw the flag at this point — Indoctrination, 10 yards against the parent, second down and 20! — because I did not say “I think our condition after death, etc.” or “other people think that when we die, etc.”
Wanna see a nonreligious parent turn cartwheels of panic? Accuse him or her of indoctrination. It’s the cardinal sin of freethought parenting. To avoid the appearance of it, we often bend over backwards to be evenhanded and neutral. Evenhanded is splendid. But in expressing ourselves to our children on these deeply-felt issues, we are not neutral, cannot be, and shouldn’t pretend to be.
Non-neutrality, however, is worlds away from indoctrination, and a source needs not be neutral to have value as a source. (My critical thinking students had trouble with this all the time, discarding one good source after another “because the author is biased” — meaning s/he had an opinion on the topic s/he was addressing.) Indoctrination is “Teaching someone to accept doctrines uncritically” (WordNet) — insisting they do so, in fact, often by invoking dire consequences should one stray from the party line. A parent can express his or her perspective without doing this. It’s all a matter of the larger context in which the expression takes place.
If this conversation with my daughters stood alone, the charge of indoctrination might stick. But parent-child conversations never stand alone — they build on everything that comes before. As regular MoL readers will know, freethought, not disbelief, is at the heart of my parenting, which makes the avoidance of indoctrination my Prime Directive. So my kids have heard from me, repeatedly, that different people believe different things, that they are free to form their own opinions, that my own statements are merely expressions of my opinion, that I would rather have them disagree with me than adopt my point of view only because it is mine, and so on. These are the foundational concepts in our family’s approach to knowledge. They’ve heard these things so often now that they roll their eyes and say “duh, I know, Dad” whenever I start in on one of those.
Once children hear that message loud and clear, a parent is freed up to express his/her perspective and welcome theirs without the burden of an added paragraph of caveat and disclaimer on every conversation.
Yes, a parent’s opinions will have a disproportionate influence on the child. As I said in a post last year,
there’s no use denying that, nor would I want to…Influence is sometimes passive and sometimes a matter of intentional teaching…My kids know — and are surely influenced by — my religious views. But I go to great lengths to counter that undue influence, keeping them off-balance while they’re young so they won’t be ossified before they can make up their adult minds:
“Dad? Did Jesus really come alive after he was dead?”
“I don’t think so. I think that’s just a made-up story so we feel better about death. But talk to Grandma Barbara. I know she thinks it really happened. And then you can make up your own mind and even change your mind back and forth about a hundred times if you want.”
That’s the idea. When influence exists in the context of direct encouragements to decide for one’s self and to seek out other points of view, it stops well short of that other iWord. That’s all I would ask of religious parents as well — not that they present themselves as neutral, but that they invite their kids to differ and ensure them that they will be no less loved if they do.
That’s influence without indoctrination.
Finks ahoy!
There’s plenty of nonsensical meme creation on the Internet (just so you know). One of my least favorites is what I’ll call the Fictional Narrative Cartoon (FNC, or ‘Fink’). Follow these steps to write a Fink of your own:
1. Select a life stance you have never held or attempted to understand.
2. Achieve a Vulcan mind-meld with people of that perspective. When that fails, simply pick a set of unflattering assumptions off the top of your head about what the world “must” look like from that perspective.
3. Weave a fictional monologue or dialogue to describe the world through the eyes of this worldview. Include acts of puppy smooshing for maximum effect.
4. Post!
I’ve seen atheists do this to religious folks and vice versa. It tends not to be a true Fink if the person once shared the worldview — the atheist who was once a genuine theist, or the theist who was once a genuine atheist. In those cases, the risk of nonfiction sneaking in is too great. The true Fictional Narrative Cartoon must spring entirely from willful ignorance.
My Google alert for “atheist parents” brings Christian FNCs about nonreligious parenting into my inbox once in a while. The gods of cyber-serendipity smiled on me yesterday, delivering a Fink about an atheist dad talking to his child about death just days after I had posted a nonfiction narrative of the same thing.
The blogger, a Christian father of seven, begins by describing his approach as a Christian parent talking to his children about death:
Have you ever had a surprise party thrown in your honor? You walk through the door and the lights come on and the horns blow, close friends cheer as ribbons and balloons are thrown into the air? Have you ever watched as an athlete’s name is announced and he runs from the dressing room tunnel and onto the field as 60 or 70 thousand people cheer his arrival?…When my kids ask about death, these are some of the analogies that I use…
What a difference it must be for atheist parents, especially for those who want to be honest with their child.
He’s right — it is certainly different. And yes, it’s a much greater challenge than contemplating death as a stadium full of angels doing the Wave. Unfortunately he doesn’t stop with what he knows, but begins to construct a Fink:
“Dad [says the child of the atheist], what happens when we die?”
“Well, nothing really. We come from nothing and we go to nothing. Either your mom and I or someone else will put you into the ground and cover you with dirt and the person that we knew as YOU will just totally and completely cease to exist.”
“But how can I just come to an end? What if I only live until I’m five years old? I won’t get to do anything important.”
“My dear boy. Five years or five hundred years, it doesn’t really matter because none of it counts, not ultimately anyhow. Humans are part of a dying species in a dying universe. You’re an accident little buddy. An absolute accident to which we gave a name. Don’t get me wrong. We love you, and perhaps some day you can even manipulate some other people to love you too. But apart from that you’re pretty much on your own.”
“But what are we here for? Is there any meaning or purpose to all this?”
“Use your brain son. How can there be meaning and purpose to something that’s an accident?…Reality is, you come from nothing and you’re headed to nothing, just emptiness, a void. That’s all there is son. That’s not a bad thing son. It just is. The fact is, our life has no meaning, no context and absolutely no purpose save the purpose that you pretend to give it. Pretty cool huh?”
“But daddy, shouldn’t I at least try to be a good person?”
“Oh my precious little munchkin. Good and bad are just subjective words that some people use to describe things that they like or don’t like…All I know is, live good, live bad, live for yourself, live for others, none of it matters because the end of the good and the end of the bad, the end of people, pigs and insects is exactly the same, we rot away and become a different form of matter. Now, why don’t you run along. I’ve got some useless and pointless things to do.”
“But dad, that’s absurd! How do you expect me to be happy if life has no meaning, context or purpose” If that’s the way things are, why did you make me in the fist place?”
“Well, sweetpea, now you’re starting to ask what’s beginning to feel like a lot of questions. First of all, I couldn’t not make you. My genes compel me to reproduce. I squirt my semen here and there and everywhere…”
You get the idea.
I was once at a family gathering where the subject turned to gays and lesbians. I chimed in that homosexual sex is disgusting. They all nodded, mildly surprised.
“You know something else that’s disgusting?” I added. “Heterosexual sex.” Reduce the sexual act to the physical slapping of flesh and it doesn’t matter who is involved — it’s disgusting. Gay rights opponents recoil at the idea of gay sex because they strip it of the emotional component that transforms their own rutting into something entirely else.
Reducing a nonreligious parent’s description of death to the slapping of dirt on a coffin achieves the same brand of reductionist nonsense. The Fink starts and stays with sterile facts, never granting the atheist parent the human faculties of compassion or love except as a laugh line. I do think we die, for real, and that love and understanding can help us live with this difficult fact quite beautifully and well — even without invoking balloons and confetti.
The best thing about the growing nonreligious parenting movement is that we no longer need be content with Finks about nonreligious parenting. We’re living the nonfiction versions. Which points to the most important difference between this blogger’s take on the atheist parent-child conversation and mine.
Mine actually happened.
[Link to the fictional conversation]
[Link to the nonfictional conversation]