Addendum to Catholic thinking

Following my post yesterday, Leanna politely pointed out that, despite her Catholic socialization, she is what I think Jung would have called someone who put feelings or what I called experience, ahead of thinking.

It made me realize that I was so focused on analyzing my own thinking that I failed to make it clear that not all Catholics are thinking types, nor are all thinking types Catholics.  What I would also like to say is that neither thinking or feeling types are better or worse.  We need both, and as we mature, we need to learn to do both.  But I tend to agree with Jung that we are born with a disposition toward one or the other.  I have been a thinking type for as long as I can remember, which is about the age of two, and I was analyzing how being socialized as a Catholic thinker has shaped me.

In this context, thes issue of thought and feeling is closely related to the question of which comes first – religious teaching or personal experience.  The Roman Catholic Church has historically taken a pretty strong position on this issue in favor of thinking.  Dogma comes first.  Galileo looked through his telescope and concluded with Copernicus that the earth revolved around the sun, not vice versa.  Rome hauled him in and said that his observations contradicted dogma.   Under threat of the rack, Galileo publicly – if not privately – recanted.

This issue remains alive today.  Evangelicals, for instance, reject many of the findings of science on the grounds that it contradicts Biblical truth.  There is, for them, an over-riding idea that cannot be contradicted under any circumstances, whatever they experience, whatever conclusions may rationally be suggested by science, or whatever anybody else might think.

I suspect that Catholic theologians more often tend to be thinkers in a way that many Protestant theologians are not for two reasons.  The first is Rome’s doctrine of papal infallibility.  Under pain of excommunication, one cannot reject teachings which Rome has declared to be infallible.  The virgin birth, the immaculate conception, the assumption, the resurrection and ascension, original sin, the trinity of God, for instance, have all been declared to be literally (not just metaphorically) true.  Catholic theologians cannot not publicly take another position, whatever their conscience may require.  At this very time, a Catholic priest has been excommunicated by Rome because he publicly supports the ordination of women, a position that Rome has forbidden Catholics to defend.

I think that celibacy also contributes to a continuation of a one-sided emphasis on thought among Catholic thinkers.  Celibacy is defended on the grounds that it represents a higher calling than a sexual partnership and raising a family.   I was taught this and entered the convent with this conviction.

My experience no longer supports this view.  I think a close sexual partnership is one of the most demanding experiences of human life.  A committed, enduring partnership with another person with different preferences, different points of view, different strengths and weaknesses requires a diminution of ones own egocentrism in the way nothing else does.  I emphatically do not agree that a life of celibacy is more difficult.  In fact, I think celibacy often permits the celibate (or at least the uncommitted if not celibate) priest to blithely proceed on a path of self-diagnosed belief in the superior rightness of their personal beliefs.

This is not to say that Catholic doctrine in itself tends to produce this outcome.  I don’t believe that the teachings of Jesus tend to turn us into thinkers at the cost of feeling.  Nor is Catholic doctrine the only system of thought that can give us a sense of righteousness.  I have seen scientists as rigidly committed to their theories as any theologian in Rome.  Science, however, in the end is committed to the primacy of using experience to validate thought.  Rome, with its position of infallibility, emphatically is not.

This is an extremely complex question, and although I obviously have thought about it a great deal, my discussion began as one of self-exploration, and I don’t want it to suggest that I think all believers are rigidly bound to a single system of ideas.  They are not.

I would be particularly interested in comments on this topic.  If you agree, disagree, or think I’m missing something significant, I’d hugely appreciate your saying so.

 

 

Still thinking like a Catholic

I grew up in an intellectual family.  I learned around the dinner table how to question and to look at other points of view before drawing my own conclusions.  I learned how to doubt received wisdom and even to question Catholic dogma.  This didn’t happen in most families I knew, and most Catholics I knew did not debate theological issues with the kind of knife-edge precision I’d learned at home.

When shortly after leaving the convent I stopped believing in just about all the tenets of faith required by Roman Catholicism, I naively thought I no longer thought like a Catholic.  My graduate education and all my professional life were in secular universities with no overt Catholic influences at all.

When my English, Protestant, academic husband assured me that many of my thought processes were still Catholic, I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Over the years I have recognized bits and pieces of what he meant.  But I am still uncovering layers of undiscovered socialization that go back to those discussions around the dinner table.  There are several characteristics of my thought that I can still point to.

My thinking is organized, with a much greater emphasis on right answers than creative solutions.  It makes me good at figuring things out, but highly critical of “wrong” answers.   I’m good at explaining things if someone wants to understand.  I am, however, exasperated with people whose thinking seems based more on wishful thinking than on evidence or logic.  My patience all but runs out if they are nonetheless adamant about how right they are.

I have always used ideas rather than experience as the main criterion for judging the validity of a position.  I did it first with Catholic dogma, and later with scientific principles.  I didn’t ask myself what I was feeling.  Dogma or theories told me what I was supposed to be feeling, so I thought that’s what I felt.  The Church taught that we should forgive others as an all-loving God forgave us our sins.  I didn’t feel outrage that an all-loving  God was capable of the kind of vindictive unforgiveness required by someone who inflicts eternal hell fire on anyone who crosses him once too often and doesn’t manage to get access to absolution before dying.  It didn’t even bother me that this all-loving God wouldn’t let completely innocent babies into heaven if they died without being baptized.  Later in my life, Freud said I was repressing the knowledge of an Oedipus complex, so I went into psychoanalysis to uncover it.  I knew beforehand what I was looking for.  I knew beforehand what I was supposed to be feeling.

I look now with astonishment at those who from a very young age simply dismissed some of these ideas as so contradicting their own experience and common sense that they disregarded them without any guilt or confusion whatsoever.  They just never took them seriously.

It’s not that I am against not trusting our own experiences.  If science has taught us anything, it’s that we make mistakes, that we misinterpret, we draw the wrong conclusions.  The world is not flat, despite my experience that it is, the sun does not go around the earth despite the fact that I see it doing so in the sky every day.   But experience is what we all begin with, and to dismiss it as I have during so much of my life in favour of pre-ordained “right answers” is to be alienated from myself.

I think that on some level I have always sensed that my search for right answers, for a complete world view devoid of contradictions and paradoxes, was limiting.  It’s why I find modern art  so liberating.  It’s why what sounds so much like the illogical nonsense of quantum mechanics is so freeing.  I keep looking for the kind of right answers, the kind of complete coherent system Roman Catholicism offered me as a child, and then experience an almost mystical delight when the whole system falls apart and has to be put together again.

Learning to trust my own intuitions is probably what I now call my acts of faith.  My intuition is that my husband loves me.  I don’t have scientific proof.  But I do have experience.  My intuition is that despite all its travails, life is worth living.  I don’t have scientific proof.  But I do experience it.

I still like right answers.  I still like things to make sense, to be organized and coherent.

But at least I don’t trust my right answers anymore.  If Plato didn’t devise an infallible system, if Kant or Newton didn’t, if Einstein couldn’t, then I think I can rest assured that I’m not going to.  So I don’t know how to solve all the world’s problems.  I don’t have all the right answers.  And I’m not, after all,  responsible for running the world.

What a relief.

My big mistake

One of the biggest errors of political judgement I have made in my adult life was in relation to the Iraq war.  Despite the fact that my husband, friends, and most colleagues were against the U.S. invasion from the beginning, I was influenced by my legacy of World War II.

As a result,  I was much more sympathetic to the idea of a just war.  It seemed to me there is a time when nations must do whatever is in their power to do to stop a government-directed rampage of genocide.

I still cannot dismiss this conviction outright.  I still think that when we can, each of us as individuals and as societies must do what we can to eliminate injustice.  ”What we can,” though, is a much more difficult reality to assess than I ever realized in my naiveté.

The death and destruction, or what Rumsfeld called “shock and awe”, that are achieved by modern weapons of destruction is one thing to remember.  Is Iraq really better off now, are people living better lives in greater security and peace, after ten years of U.S. occupation than they were under Saddam Hussein?

But the error I made in first supporting the Iraq war was not to under-estimate the destruction of modern weaponry.  Or even to over-estimate our ability to bring peace to Iraq once we were there.  Rather it was to believe what our governments told us.  I can hardly bring myself to admit it, but I believed them when they said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction of sufficient range to attack Europe and even Britain.

And what I fear is that they are at it again.  This time it’s Iran’s purported nuclear arsenal and potential weapons of mass destruction.

Oh but I’m sure it’s not oil this time like it was in Iraq.

I’m sure it’s not power.

Oh I’m sure that this time the government isn’t exaggerating or distorting or burying information.

I’m sure that this time the government is telling us only the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But.

Reverie for 2012

This is the day of the year in which tradition suggests we look back and look forward, that we make our resolutions to live better lives, and wish all those we love a healthy, prosperous New Year.

Here is my 2012 version.

2011 was the year of the Arab spring,  and of economic polarization and political paralysis in both America and Europe.  It was a year for freedom and for trenchant stubbornness.

It was the year that has left us facing another year with the potential for greater global economic devastation than the world has faced for at least 80 years.  That, in turn, increases the chances for violence and abuse,  both domestic and international.  We face the potential for the emergence of an even more virulent H1N1 virus epidemic, for civil wars, for food, water, and energy shortages.  We face the possibility of bank collapse and another credit crunch we have no idea how to moderate.

It looks like a scary year to me.

But life is scary.  Life is filled with challenges,  some beyond our abilities to cope with, some that bring out some of the best human ingenuity and human generosity has ever produced.

So on this day I am returning to my mantra:

Faith, Hope, and Love, these three:

The greatest of these is Love. 

But the most courageous of these is Hope.

2 for 1: Christmas wishes

 

This probably sounds a little strange, but it was quantum mechanics that first made me realize that little things are just as critically important to the way things are as what we think of as big things.  And now here it is showing up in an internet comic strip.

I’m been remembering some of the littlest things that have been so big in my life -

• the student who told me as I was leaving the university campus for the last time that my course had changed his life.
• the woman at one of those ghastly NY parties just several months after I’d left the convent where  I was being seduced by a well-known man who I suspect had a reputation to rival Strass Kahn’s.  It was a crowded room and she simply caught my eye and shook her head in the negative.  Who knows how long it would have taken me to learn what she told me in less than five seconds.
• the stranger who stayed in his car parked behind mine until help arrived when my own car broke down at midnight in the middle of Harlem.
• the woman who did no more than put her hand on my shoulder as I heaved with the shock of physical pain.
• the child who offered to let me hold his teddy bear when his dad told him my mother had just died.

I guess I really have to reassess my youthful judgement that St. Therese of Lisieux, the patron of little things, was a neurotic obsessive .  Maybe picking up little pieces of paper really isn’t quite as unworthy of my expenditure of energy as I have always thought.

Even if I’m still not all that thrilled about being a neatness freak.

I do wish you all a happy Christmas, though.

Or one that is meaningful, if “happy” is stretching it a bit far.

 

 

 

That last minute Christmas gift

A friend has introduced me to a new toy.  I think Flying Fishes could replace toy trains as the best gift under the tree.  Except, of course, it won’t actually be under the tree…

Reviews so far:  Amazon has posted more than three thousand reviews with an average 5 star rating.  Three adults that I know have ordered at least one.  One friend has ordered four.   So far no in-vivo reviews.  They will no doubt have to wait until after Christmas.  My 8-year-old nephew, on the other hand, laconically responded that the on-line reviews thus far suggest they don’t live up to their promised hype.

Here in our ancient Cambridgeshire village, my husband is fantasizing walking the fish along with the serious dog-walkers of the day.  I wouldn’t miss going along for the world.

But what do you with a flying fish after that?

Happy Saint-a-Claus Day

Today is the Feast of St. Nicholas, the original bishop from Holland, who has morphed into Santa Claus.

In my childhood we celebrated Christmas, but maintained the custom from our Dutch heritage and also celebrated the feast of St. Nicholas when we put our shoes outside to be filled with a gift from the saintly bishop.

My sister has just shared with me her efforts to spread this lovely tradition further afield.  Years ago she and her husband were friends with a family with 3 children, and they encouraged them to let them start the St. Nicholas tradition.  My sister surreptitiously asked each of the children what they wanted St. Nicholas to bring them.and received a request for a baton, and chocolate chip cookies.  Jason, the youngest,  said he hoped St. Nicholas would bring him a loaf of banana bread like the ones my sister makes.    So the night of December 5, she and her husband went over to the house and after the kids were in bed, left the treats in their waiting shoes.

The next morning, Jason asked his mother why St. Nicholas brought him a meat loaf.

And do you know what?  My said sister still doesn’t label the food she puts into her freezer.

 

 

Evil incarnate? Understanding child abusers

It is not uncommon to hear court judges tell an offender on sentencing for a particularly vicious crime that he is “evil.”  I have long cringed at this diagnosis first because if a person is indeed “evil,” only God is in a position to make that judgement.

But having given up belief in the existence of Plato’s spiritual world, I’ve given up the idea of evil incarnate as well.  Evil, for me, is not an adequate explanation of what happens in this universe.

And yet, there are some things people do that have seemed particularly inexplicable.  I can understand even if I don’t approve of many things – murder, revenge, theft are often explicable.  But I have never been able to find a reasonable explanation for torture and sometimes murder which some people seem to engage in for no apparent reward save some intrinsic satisfaction of causing pain to a helpless victim.  Child abuse has always seemed the worst.

Until now.

To explain, let me back up.  After the Newtonian revolution in which the entire universe was seen as a giant machine, many scientists came to the conclusion that there was no essential difference between sentient animals and machines.  They therefore undertook some harrowing experiments on animals on the grounds that they did not feel pain any more than does a car motor.  It is only in the last  century that this view was largely abandoned.

Obviously this illustrates the fact that science is an incomplete project, that it is not always right.  And that there is a place for at least a serious examination of scientific findings that seem to contradict common sense.  I value science as one of the better applications of human intelligence.  But obviously it is not infallible and never will be.

It is science, however, which has also suggested to me how it is possible for child abusers to engage so casually in many of the behaviors judges so frequently label as “evil.”  We are now learning from MRI scans, in particular, that part of the brain processes of some people is damaged or not functioning.  Typically they are called “autistic,” which means they find it difficult to put themselves in someone else’s place, to sense what someone else is feeling.

This is not a question of intelligence.  Many of these people are exceptionally brilliant.  Newton himself may have been autistic.  But it is a question of the kind of empathy most of us take for granted.  Most of us can understand the physical or psychological suffering of others even when we ourselves are not experiencing it.

But what if I can’t?  then torturing a child may feel no more disturbing than exploring a light switch or trying to figure out how my toy train works.

And now we are learning more about how this kind of autistic damage occurs.  We have known for a long time that being brought up in an abusive environment often results in children who grow up to be abusive themselves.  But we now also know that stress during pregnancy can have long-lasting effects on the child.  This stress may not have been abusive.  It may be stress caused by famine, death in the family, anxiety about losing ones job, enduring concerns about one’s physical safety, or by marital discord.

The study of epigenetics is suggesting that actual physical changes occur during fetal development which can explain how abusive behavior  can run in families.

But science is also beginning to explore how we might deal with people affected in this way.  Punishment – even draconian punishments – do little to change the inability to empathize with others whom we might be causing pain.  But there are approaches to teaching children how to recognize and to some extent overcome this profound destructive deficit.  Some day there may be drugs that can help at some stage but that is some way down the line and not apt to be a one-size-fits-all solution.

But I’d rather put my efforts into supporting the scientific search for answers than to send increasing numbers to prison where presumably they will be cured of their “evil.”

Thoughts on once-a-week posts

In the good news and bad news department, I am making more progress on writing the second edition of The Big Bang to Now than I expected.

But writing just one post a week is turning out to be harder than I expected. If I write something everyday, I don’t feel any obligation to say something useful, profound, informative, original or entertaining all the time.  With only one post a week, I feel some kind of obligation to post something worthwhile.

This, however, will bring the blog to a complete halt, because I simply will never be able to live up to such a strict standard.

So in keeping with my commitment to the ridiculous, this post is about the positioning of toilet paper holders.

To wit:  have you ever noticed that, given the choice, toilet roll holders are invariably placed to make access to the toilet paper most convenient for someone standing facing the toilet rather than sitting on it?  I’ve noticed this in  homes, apartments, hotels, and public restrooms in every country I have ever been in.  Obviously, I’ve only examined women’s restrooms but I doubt there is any reason whatsoever that access to men’s restrooms would provide any contradictory data.

I think we need more female plumbers.

 

 

Just Thank You

For all that has been, thanks.

For all that will be, yes!

Dag Hammarskjold

Secretary-General of the United Nations

 Nobel Peace Prize 1961

(1905-1961)

For all that has been, thanks.  Thanks beyond counting.  Thanks for my life.  Thanks especially for the hard things, for the losses, for the failures that looked so disastrous when they happened.  Thanks because there is not one of them I would trade in for the easy things, the gains, the achievements I thought I wanted most.

For all that will be, yes.  Well, yes with some qualifications.  I might not be ready for absolutely everything that could happen.

With best wishes for a truly thankful Thanksgiving.  Even if you aren’t American.  It’s our one holiday worth exporting to the whole world – a day to say thank you.

 Just thank you.