Recommended: a couple of good online reflections on Marilynne Robinson's new book, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of Self, from D.G. Myers and Amelia Atlas.
While both these reviews are positive, I don't think I'll be picking up a copy anytime soon. Robinson is writing against what she calls "parascientific writing," a handy term that leaves respect for science intact while disparaging the recent trend of popular, scientifically-informed books that tend to argue against a spiritual realm, or that tend to denigrate individual experiences of consciousness.
Agreed: a lot of modern empiricism (and so-called empiricism) tends to denigrate individual accounts of what life or experience consists of. It wants to tell people what they're "really" doing, "really" thinking, and what the world is "really" like, and refuses to listen to what they themselves have to say. Robinson identifies the problem wonderfully. But the solution to this problem doesn't have to be a retrenchment in spirituality, or jaw-dropping wonder at the imponderable nature of existence/the human mind, or a dismissal of neuroscience's materialistic findings about the brain.
In fact, a number of thinkers in a variety of fields have been troubled by the same problem that disturbs Robinson, and have, I think, solved it better. For instance, Robinson's concern about the way "parascientific" writing downplays human experience has also been expressed by the sociologist Bruno Latour. Latour encourages researchers to take people seriously when they describe their sense that superhuman forces, for instance, are compelling them to do things. For someone like Latour, this information is a valuable clue to how the human mind, and how social activity, functions--it isn't some kind of charade to be exposed. (Latour makes this argument in Reassembling the Social.)
Easily my favorite book in this vein--and one of my favorite books of all time--is Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Bateson was a polymath who dabbled in anthropology, sociology, animal communication, and a number of other fields. Steps is an anthology of his writing from the 1940s through about 1970, showing the way he worked through questions of information and communication to form a new picture of what "mind" might mean--a picture that respects human experience and tries to place it appropriately in the framework of a larger system. His view manages to include both the mystical awe that comes with true appreciation for mental processes, and an empirical view that respects and deploys scientific understanding.
Later systems theorists and posthumanists have followed up on this work in various ways that--while equally fascinating--are more academic. (I'm thinking of people like Niklas Luhmann, or Cary Wolfe, whose What is Posthumanism? I'm currently devouring.) If you're interested in this problem--the poverty of popular scientific explanation, the difficulty of reconciling certain scientific claims with felt human experience--I strongly, strongly recommend Bateson's work. But my broader point is that we're at a kind of explanatory impasse, and Robinson has done a fine job identifying it--but the impasse doesn't mean we need to retreat to one camp or another. It means it's time to scout for new paths, and I think systems theory, in its various forms, offers them.
The Mind Is Not the Brain?
Agnostics Battle Atheists: Sabbath Spectacular
Andrew Sullivan points out an online scuffle going on between agnostics, represented by Ron Rosenbaum at Slate, and atheists, represented by Julian Sanchez, currently a fellow at the Cato Institute.
As a former agnostic, I find it hard not to agree with much of what Ron Rosenbaum says. The "New Atheists," as they're called--Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and that whole loose camp--are a little too vocal, a little too certain, and a little too abrasive to be attractive. That said, Julian Sanchez is right-on in his attack on Rosenbaum's logic: the fact that empirically-minded atheists can't explain creation doesn't mean they have to throw up their hands and vocally admit defeat. Just because you can't prove that something DOESN'T exist doesn't mean you can never commit to a position about its existence with reasonable certainty.
Sometimes I wish that atheism hadn't been perverted by this Enlightenment-obsessed New Atheism. My personal trip to atheism went along substantially different lines. I remember learning the word "agnostic" from a classmate in junior high, and (having been raised outside of any religious tradition) thinking something silly along the lines of, "Oh. That's a neat word for what I am." I stayed in the "I-dunno-about-God" camp--even when I immaturely delighted, as the New Atheists do now, in skewering believers--until a couple of years ago, when a sudden realization changed my mind.
The realization was that agnosticism is a kind of cheating. Here I was, not giving a damn about the Ten Commandments, not even really bothering to look into religious issues, but still claiming that I was somehow on the fence about the existence of a God. I asked myself: "If I really believed there might be a God, would I be living the way that I am?"
The answer was obvious: No.
If you are open to the possibility of a God in the only sense that seems worth arguing about--an all-knowing, all-powerful being (or group of them) that made the universe and mankind--then your very first task should be to figure out what that God might be like, in order to understand how to live in accordance with Its (His? Her? Their?) program. The stakes are unbelievably high, and by acting as if they weren't, I had in effect made my choice. In practice, I was an atheist--but when confronted, I was making excuses that, in the presence of an actual God, weren't likely to hold up.
I wasn't about to dedicate my life to religious inquiry--you can't just whip up belief like you whip up a batch of cookies--so I "converted" to atheism. (One perk: no paperwork involved.) But my atheism is really about a lack of belief in any god, unlike the New Atheists, who are, as their critics everywhere note, fundamentalist believers, worshippers of the greatness of No God. According to these faithful atheists, No God (sometimes known, arguably incorrectly, as "Science") will step in and solve all the world's problems, if only we would all listen to the Good News.
It's the latest rebranding of humanism, which is, pretty obviously, a religion--but one that, as far as I can tell, replaces the worship of one beloved imaginary being ("God") with another ("Mankind"). Agnosticism is essentially another brand of humanism, too--it's just not sure whether it should give God a quick nod before it returns to its primary, human-centered concerns.
Outdated and dangerous ideas about "Man" and "the human" are, I think, the real problem with most current belief systems. As a result, I don't have a lot of love for either side of this New Atheist/New Agnostic coin.