Abandonded: The Necessity of Humanism

Part of the reason I started this blog was to have a place to put up some pieces I wrote years ago. I have since decided that only one of them deserves it, but it doesn’t make any sense unless you’ve read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig (and to a lesser extent his sequel Lila, though I wouldn’t wish that on anyone). It also references ideas laid down in the other pieces. I’m sure everyone reading this is now jumping to read Zen etc., so I will briefly talk about the other ideas, which I had intended to develop for an essay contest for The Humanist magazine and which I called “The Necessity of Humanism.”

It basically boils down to the connection between caring and understanding and how they would solve everything. (I was in college; don’t people always solve the world’s problems in college?) If people cared about themselves enough to understand themselves, even love themselves, that would allow them to care for others and at least attempt to understand others. Understanding others is the real crux. On some level it’s obvious: if people understood each other, they would be better able to solve their problems and resolve their differences. So many problems are brought about by a simple lack of understanding. (BTW there is a good TED talk about Empathy that is relevant here.) 

But the other problem is that people don’t want to understand each other. They might end up being wrong! (Also a good TED talk.) It is so much easier to tear down a caricature of what someone else believes, and there you have modern political discourse. There is no philosophical fallacy that angers me more than the straw man. It is like saying, “I am going to ignore you and willfully misrepresent everything you believe in order to have the appearance of being right.” And it works most of the time because straw men are hard to recognize, especially to laymen, and even sometimes, the person attacking the straw man really believes the straw man is the real thing… because they don’t understand! Because empathy is hard, or uncomfortable, and takes effort, and because people don’t care. 

The lack of caring is the problem behind the problem, and why this utopian ideal of everyone understanding each other doesn’t happen. I think there are perhaps biological, or sociological, reasons why people don’t care about the Other, i.e. people that believe in different religions, look different, talk different, or live in the other valley. Survival might have once depended on killing those people, and demonizing the Other might make it easier to kill them, but humanity needs to grow up. And the only way for this to happen is for individuals to grow up.

But they won’t, and don’t, and it’s all very frustrating! I want to scream at everyone to wake up!! Care Bear Stare! (I totally had the ice cream one btw…)

Instead, all I can do is drink some wine and write this blog. For the good of humanity.

The Inner Reaches of Outer Space

A mythological perspective on why we need the James Webb Space Telescope

On July 6 it was announced that a House Appropriations Subcommittee cut JWST from their proposed budget. JWST is the next Hubble – except it will be bigger and better and more amazing! I won’t go into details about why we need this for science, or for education and public outreach, or for the U.S. position as a world leader in space science and technology, or for supporting innovative STEM research and education that will ensure future economic prosperity and national security for generations to come (!!!) .... because others will do that better. The cosmic variance blog had some very informative posts along with this amazing video:

The Top 5 Awesome Things about the Webb Telescope 

This video is awesome itself! And it sums up my point: we don’t need Webb because it will cure malaria or do anything else useful; we need it because it is “awesome in the truest sense of the word awesome.” Astronomy is a unique science in its broad ability to be awe-inspiring. The vastness of space puts our daily lives in a different – and sometimes frightening – perspective. Space is the “final frontier,” the last boundary between everything that is familiar and everything else. Space is amazingly empty, but of the 20% of matter that we can actually see, there are a wide variety of stars, planets, galaxies, nebulae, clusters, etc. that are simply beautiful.

The title of this post refers to the last book written by Joseph Campbell: “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion,” of which the first chapter is called “Cosmology and the Mythic Imagination.” (Yea, I study cosmology. Word.) The contemplation of space provided us by the study of astronomy takes us out of ourselves into the great unknown. The feeling of awe is, in my opinion, exactly the feeling that we look for in religion: being a part of something “bigger” than ourselves. But what astronomy does is unite the “us” to be all of Earth and not one society, one religion, or one ethnicity. There’s nothing bigger than THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE! And it turns out we actually are a part of it because it actually exists. Campbell suggests that in Space lives a new mythology, able to invoke a sense of wonder and awe in a way that the old myths, founded in an obsolete 3-layer view of the world, cannot.

So yes, Virginia, we DO need the James Webb Space Telescope. Once Hubble dies for good, it is our best chance of keeping the awesome alive. We need to make a Webb 3D Imax that explores other worlds and their ability to support life, the first stars and first galaxies, the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and the new jewels in the vast emptiness that we have not yet imagined. We need to be reminded of our small and insignificant place in a universe that doesn’t care whether our planet survives. And we need more opportunities to be filled with the awe of being alive.

Symbolism and Probability

Last Friday was my birthday and it was a glorious day. Not only did I submit my shiny Paper draft to my collaborators, but after our regular happy our we went to a chocolate happy hour, followed by eating delicious burgers, then drinking wine, and finally closing out karaoke. My sister Kara came up for all of it (except for the Paper part) and we brunched at Golden West on Saturday. She had decided to give me a set of Tarot cards for my birthday, and I wanted the round Motherpeace set that she had, because I believe in the symbolic power of circles.

As luck would have it, the Motherpeace deck was at one of the local Hampden shops, “Crystals, Candles, and Cauldrons” that we stumbled into after brunch! She also got me a crystal that I picked out (turned out to be blood-red calcite which symbolizes vital energy and the opening of the heart chakra! score!). Despite telling her that it would only collect dust in my room, I love the color and the feel of it in my hand. It is both a meaningless rock and a symbol of Great Meaning, which will grow over time because I choose to see it as special. I won’t, however, expect it to cure lower body pains.

We are coming nearer the point now, trust me. Later on Saturday, after a gorgeous hangover nap, I got out the deck, looked at them, read the book, shuffled a lot, and decided to pick out some cards. I would pick a few, one at a time, reading about their meaning and considering how it might apply to me in this moment. The first I picked was the Two of Discs. The book describes the picture as: “A woman nurses twin babies as she is held in a circle by a double-headed snake.” Because the Tarot deck is round, the card can be upright, to the left, to the right, reversed, and anywhere in between, with a different take on the card’s meaning associated with each position. The upright meaning in the book says: “She is able to handle a lot now and there is a great variety of things she does or roles she plays. She can meet many diverse needs.” To me, however, the card appeared to the right, which says: “She’s handling more than her share.”

Well, okay… I don’t actually believe that I’m handling too many things right now, but maybe I could give myself more credit for what I’m actually doing. There’s the Paper that was put off for a long time with a variety of talks, conferences, a summer school, and a good measure of “idontwanna”. Maybe I expect too much of myself to think I should have been doing all of that plus the Paper? But then it’s not like I’ve been working too hard lately (or ever). So okay, that’s what that card says. It’s an interesting card, with the snake weaving itself through two wheels that are on either side of the woman, and with the fact that the snake has two heads.

I first hesitate whether to put the card back in the deck, but then think to myself, what are the chances that I would pull it again? So I shuffle everything for a while and cut the deck again to pick a new card… which is the Two of Discs! The card I just picked! I picked it again! And this time, it appears to the left. I picked the same card twice (a card whose number is two) and in opposite positions! Cue Jack Skellington singing “What does it mean? What does it mean??”

Simultaneously, I am fascinated by all the apparent meanings that I can extract from these events, and I am fascinated by probabilities. There are many examples of things which are a lot more probable than our intuition would tell us, such as the number of people (only 23) you need before the probability that two have the same birthday is greater than 50%. In my case, the probability of choosing a specific card is 1/78, and of choosing that specific card twice is (1/78)*(1/78) = 1/6084. Sounds small, but this only applies if you specify the exact card. The probability of pulling any card twice is only 1/78: given that a card is pulled, the probability of pulling that specific card again is 1/78. It is slightly more than 1% and within 3 standard deviations for a normal distribution, which pulling random cards certainly has. Though 3-sigma events are rare, they happen – even the 1/6084 case is within 4-sigma and falls below the 5-sigma astronomical standard of being a significant event. So who cares?

What can we say other than “that’s interesting”? Well, it turns out we can say a lot, though whether what we say is meaningful is a matter of opinion. While pondering probabilities I was also pondering how I could interpret this occurrence. The Two of Discs to the left says: “She isn’t fully available to everything that pulls on her.” So apparently, I am handling too much, while not being available to everything. This is not obviously contradictory, but I can see how by not being “fully available” I wouldn’t actually be “handling” what I’m taking on, so in that sense it is contradictory… Or maybe I am doing a lot, and by having too much to do I am not doing enough. The suit of Discs represents the Earth or physicality (the others are Swords (air and rationality), Cups (water and emotion), and Wands (fire and energy)), so it relates to tangible things. It is true that I have a lot of (work) things to do (first pull), but also that I don’t feel like I’m actually doing enough (second pull). So, there’s an interesting personal interpretation here that I could take away from the reading and leave it at that.

And then there is symbolism. The two-headed snake is trying to go in opposite directions. The number 2 symbolizes duality, polarity, choice, and receptivity according to the Tarot guide. So the number 2 of discs (circles, the Earth, everything, unity) appears twice but in two opposite directions, and here we have the symbolism of the Yin-Yang, for example. The dual is embodied in the one, the opposites are part of the whole, and what at first appears contradictory is understood to be two different reflections of the same thing. In the realm of the Earth (discs) you have pairs of opposites (night and day, man and woman, up and down, being and non-being). There is choice between one and the other. The two apparently contradictory pulls of the very same card are unified by occurring together.

There is another interpretation besides the unity of polar opposites that could be made, which is embodied in the symbolism of the Fool, the Zero card which is at once the creator goddess and the creation itself (wombic symbolism applies here), also known as the Trickster god. The Fool says, “Don’t take me seriously!” Don’t be stuck on the symbol! The Tarot, crystals, and organized religion are all metaphors that people become lost in by believing they are Real with a capital R. By pulling the same card in opposite positions, the Fool is showing his hand. Everything is possible, but nothing is True.

To wrap up: pulling the same card twice is unlikely, but not by much (not accounting for the directionality), so it’s pretty meaningless. On the other hand, pulling the Two of Discs in opposing positions is very unlikely, and means everything. The choice is yours: meaning is not something that exists out there, but within you.