What Happens When We Die? Religion, Science, and NDEs.

What Happens When We Die? Religion, Science, and NDEs.

Scott Cawelti

Town/Gown Supper Club Talk

Nov. 15, 2011 at Ferrari’s

3,407 wds

FINAL VERSION as of 11-15-11

For certain Christians, what happens after we die makes perfect and certain sense: we go to meet Jesus and his Father in a celestial realm, mysteriously accompanied by the Holy Ghost, and we live in bliss for eternity. For saved evangelicals, that is--those who have accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal savior. The unsaved billions—Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Mormons, Catholics—will roast in eternal fire for their ignorance and/or wrong beliefs.

I heard this same story over and over in sermon and song weekly for the first twelve years of my life at Calvary Baptist Church in Cedar Falls, and came to believe it. Eventually I too became saved--saved from eternal damnation, and to hell with those wrongbelievers. To paraphrase the great old hymn: “’twas the church that taught my heart to fear, and the church my fear relieved.” What a deal.

Saved or not, we’ve all attended memorial services where a grieving loved one insists that the deceased has gone to a better place. Often they’re said to be smiling down, amused and honored by our comments. This happens even at relatively secular mourning events.

In one way, I still believe this message of comfort: if cessation of pain is a good thing, I know they’re better off. Death ends bodily pain, since pain begins with nerves located in the physical body.

However, if the “better place” is the fundamentalists’ celestial realm where Jesus and his Father reign like Kings of a Sky-Utopia, it seems preposterous. I lost my born-again evangelical religion before I could legally drive, and stopped believing in all formal religion not long after.

So I had none of the comfort that religious certainty provides when I lost my mother at nineteen, my close friend Dick Rackstraw a decade later, my brother Jim some 13 years ago, my father three years ago, and my oldest and dearest male friend Dale Phelps two years ago.

Except for their no longer suffering, never did I think of my mother or Dick or Jim or my dad and Dale as having gone to a better place, though at times I wondered if they had gone to a different place.

Much, much different. They might have discovered, as Walt Whitman asserted, “To die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.” To even call it a “place” misleads.

Over the past five years I’ve been entertained by a lively and articulate bunch of atheists, partly as a reaction to my fundamentalist upbringing. I’m speaking of Sam Harris, Victor Stenger, Dan Barker, Christopher Hitchens, Roger Dawkins, and Carl Sagan, all of whom reinforced my semi-certainty about the fairy-tale nature of literal heavens and hells.

Just getting a religious person to define “God” is enough to reveal they stand on shaky ground, as Hitchens points out. Ask them to explain the massive suffering visited regularly on mankind and they stand on no ground at all, if their God is both omniscient and good. If He’s not neither good nor omniscient, what makes Him God? This, from former fundamentalist Bart Ehrmann, who cannot reconcile a loving and all-knowing God with massive suffering visited regularly on mankind.

Still, semi-certainty remained, my doubt about doubt.

I always felt when reading these atheists that they were just too sure of themselves, too set in their opposition to everything that religion supposedly represents. In a way, they themselves seemed like fundamentalists, the flip side of that same coin.

As a result, recently I’ve turned to a long-time favorite writer and thinker on these matters: Karen Armstrong. You may have heard of or read some of her books: A History of God, Buddha, The Prophet Muhammad, The Spiral Staircase, and her 2009 book The Case for God. Armstrong is a former nun who fell away from religion too, but unlike most, came back to it with new eyes, partly as a reaction to those specific atheists I just mentioned. In The Case for God she asserts that she cannot believe in religion as an ideology, but rather as an activity that leads toward respecting the vast mysteries of existence.

Armstrong insists that seriously undertaking the discipline of regularly contemplating what religions reveal at their mysterious best should incite not dogmatic faith-based belief so much as awe and wonder about the nature and mystery of the universe.

In her conclusion she describes the truly religious person who has found success in practicing what religion offers at its best: “Instead of being a mere workaday cup, they aspired to transform themselves into a beautiful ritual vessel brimful of the sanctity they were learning to see in life. They tried to honor the ineffable mystery they sensed in each human being and create societies that protected and welcomed the stranger, the alien, the poor, and the oppressed. Of course, they often failed, sometimes abysmally. But overall they found that the disciplines of religion helped them to do all this. Those who applied themselves most assiduously showed that it was possible for mortal men to live on a higher, divine, or godlike plane and thus wake up to their true selves.”

Armstrong here articulates what I’ve been feeling about these ultimate issues. And I agree with her that hard-core atheists are refuting a straw deity. Armstrong calls fundamentalist beliefs aberrations, at least in the larger scheme of centuries of theologians wrestling with questions of faith and knowledge.

But non-evangelical Christian theologians believed that certain Bible passages pointed to a great mystery, and that whenever humans pretend to understand it on their own terms, and especially if they take any of it literally, they become idolaters. In other words, many Christian theologians were non-believers in a literal God too—they believed that religion at its most valid challenges us to contemplate the mysteries behind the veil, which must forever remain beyond our ability to even begin to understand, much less presume to use for daily needs. Just undertaking that journey requires a rare mix of humility and curiosity, a willingness to remain a permanent beginner. And a willingness to reject religions that have turned idolatrous.

Modern atheists don’t seem to notice or care about this powerful insight, which sits firmly in the Christian and Jewish tradition, according to Armstrong. We can attempt to explain what God is not, but can’t begin to comprehend what He/She/It is.

Armstrong’s insights have helped me explain some experiences that anti-fundamentalist atheism cannot.

I’m speaking of NDEs, or Near-Death-Experiences. Atheists of the Hitchens variety will dismiss what follows as patent nonsense. For them, life begins in the womb and ends in the tomb. I’m not so sure.

I’ve had two experiences, one first-hand and another second-hand that have made me wonder whether the tomb is the end of our road.

The first happened the night after Dick Rackstraw, a dear friend and colleague, committed suicide in 1974. He died by inhaling carbon monoxide from his car exhaust in his garage the previous night about four blocks from where I was sleeping near the UNI campus. The next night he came to visit.

I woke from a sound sleep well after midnight and realized that some version of Dick Rackstraw was sitting in the living room, waiting to talk face to face about his passage to another realm. Understand, he didn’t talk out loud; there was no human voice literally speaking to me. But I understood everything he was communicating.

Dick insisted that if I wasn’t ready to talk, it was no big deal. He knew I would find meeting my deceased friend beyond strange.

I wasn’t exactly scared, but I knew that communicating directly with a spirit I could actually see was going to change my life forever. I had no frame of reference that allowed me to talk to ghosts, holy or otherwise. So I didn’t.

I still wish I had, and would now in a heartbeat, assuming my heart could take it. However, if I had, I doubt I would ever talk in public about it; it just sounds too crazy.

The second experience involved two conversations I had with a friend’s wife. I visited them in Arizona years ago when she first talked about it and again at the end of September when we dined before my fiftieth class reunion. Both times she grew too emotional to talk about it, and after catching her breath, talked about how utterly beautiful it was, how much she wanted to stay there, on the other side of this bright tunnel. She regretted coming back, since she had gone through a car windshield and was in considerable pain. After that, she never feared death at all; in fact, she was looking forward to it, realizing that she had in fact come back from being dead, or near-dead.

So, what is this “Near-Death Experience,” or NDE? What do materialist-minded scientists say about it? Religions, by the way, are fairly quiet about it, some of them even claiming that such visions are the work of the devil.

I’m drawing here on Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience, by Pim van Lommel, Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death, by Chris Carter, and Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences, by Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry. There are many others, beginning with Raymond Moody’s 1975 book, Life after Life, and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s earlier studies on death and dying. There’s also a web site you may want to visit if you find this subject engaging: NDERF, for Near-Death Experience Research Foundation.

So, what is an NDE? A “Near-Death Experience” is actually fairly well-reported among humans in all cultures and times. Plato reports on the story of Er, a soldier who died and came back on his funeral pyre after 12 days and reported on what he saw, which bears a few striking resemblances to modern NDEs. According to Pim Van Lommel, “a near-death experience is the (reported) recollection of all the impressions gained during a special state of consciousness, which includes some specific elements such as witnessing a tunnel, a blinding light, a panoramic life review, meeting deceased relatives, or observing one’s own resuscitation. This special state of consciousness can occur during a cardiac arrest, that is, during period of clinical death, but also in the course of a serious illness or without any apparent medical indication.”

I’m convinced Walt Whitman had such an experience, and in fact all mystics, including the founders of world religions, seem to have undergone a visitation to an afterlife realm or beyond life realm—another form of existence, but not really “life” as we understand it. When someone asks me whether I believe in either God or life after death, I offer my best answer: Depends on what you mean by God and life. Definitions change everything.

Now, thanks to new and widespread use of resuscitating devices after heart attacks, people can be revived after losing consciousness and in some cases all signs of life, including heartbeat and brain waves. Flatliners returning to talk about what’s over there.

In some cases, doctors had completely given up (these are rare) yet the person seems to snap back to life spontaneously. These people have been reluctant to report what they saw and heard, but now they’re actively sought out and interviewed at length. (See the NDERF web site) [Near-Death Experience Research Foundation]

They describe these aspects, and I’m giving them here arranged here from most to least frequently reported:

· feelings of peace or joy

· out of body experience

· encountering a light

· meeting the deceased or a being of light

· unearthly realm

· entering a tunnel or darkness

· life review

How does science explain these anomalous reports from

people who were supposed to be deeply unconscious? Pim Van Lommel explains, “I grew up in an academic environment where I was taught there was a reductionist and materialist explanation for everything. And up until that point, I had always accepted this as indisputably true.”

His large-scale NDE research project changed his mind completely.

Conventional science (and common sense, for that matter) leads to what seems clearly and obviously true: brain and mind are one and the same. Whatever happens to the brain affects the mind, directly and indisputably, and whatever happens to the mind seems to connect to and directly affect the brain. This is the standard “materialist” explanation, and would lead to the logical conclusion that when the brain dies, the mind dies, along with all memories and personality of the brain’s owner. Just like our senses tell us the earth is flat and sits still while the sun orbits around it.

As both Van Lommel and Chris Carter argue, the materialist explanation does not fit what research is beginning to reveal, nor what many relate as first-hand experiences. In fact, as Van Lommel observes, “On the basis of . . . studies of near-death experience, recent results from neurophysiological research, and concepts from quantum physics, . . . consciousness cannot be located in a particular time and place. This is known as nonlocality.”

He continues: “Complete and endless consciousness is everywhere in a dimension that is not tied to time or place, where past, present, and future all exist and are accessible at the same time . . .”

“Our brain may be compared both to a television set, receiving information from electromagnetic fields and decoding this into sound and vision, and to a television camera, converting or encoding sound and vision into electromagnetic waves. Our consciousness transmits information to the brain and via the brain receives information from the body and senses. The function of the brain can be compared to a transceiver; our brain has a facilitating rather than a producing role: it enables the experience of consciousness.”

Of course at the level of mere speculation, this assertion amounts to a Twilight Zone episode or ruminations of spiritualists and theosophists.

It’s the doctors and scientists, many of whom were former skeptics like Van Lommel who provide compelling evidence beyond anecdotes and wishful thinking.

Van Lommel devotes a chapter to reviewing the materialist explanations for NDEs and convincingly refutes them, at least for me.

Here’s an overview of his main refutation. NDEs, which are now accepted (even by skeptics) as actual experiences that about five percent of the population have had, are nothing more than an oxygen deficiency, which causes the brain to go into a kind of overload and produce so called “Near Death” hallucinations.

As Van Lommel states, “This used to be my own firm belief.”

Hypoxia, or oxygen deficiency, however, and a related increase in carbon dioxide, will in fact produce fragments of an NDE experience, but not the whole integrated experience that affects people so deeply that it changes their lives. Nor can other chemical release explanations, since the experiences people report are more like extended lucid dreams, and in fact they can sometimes relate actual verifiable conversations among the living which took place while they were being resuscitated—hardly possibly while unconscious and barely breathing. In effect, Van Lommel insists, none of the many explanations—whether physiological, psychological, or hallucinogenic drug related—explain the NDE in all its complexity. He asserts “there appears to be an inverse relationship between clarity of consciousness and loss of brain function.”

Moreover, “There is no explanation for the fact that people across all ages and cultures have reported essentially similar experiences.”

Van Lommel conducted a large study in the Netherlands in the first part of this decade, which was published in Lancet, and replicated with essentially the same results in America and Britain. All three studies concluded that NDEs are real, they reveal a definite conscious awareness when the patient was unconscious, and that “This finding all but forces us to reconsider the relationship between the brain and consciousness.” “The fact that clear, lucid experiences were reported during a time when the brain was devoid of activity does not sit easily with current scientific belief.” --This, from Penny Sartori, the British researcher who replicated Van Lommel’s study.

These studies led Van Lommel to conclude “We have no direct evidence to prove if and how neurons in the brain produce the subjective essence of our consciousness.”

Now here’s the mind-boggler: Van Lommel asserts there’s no way our physical brains can both store and process the information needed to create consciousness. It’s like a computer putting out information with a processor that’s too small to have processed it. Van Lommel mentions Simon Berkovich, a computer expert, who calculated that “despite the brain’s huge number of synapses (each cubic centimeter has approximately 10 to the 11^th power of dendrites connected to synapses, which means that the brain contains a total of about 10 to the 14^th power of synapses.”

Yet at any waking moment the brain’s output in terms of processing and short and long-term memory requires approximately 10 to the 24^th power of synaptic action. That’s not possible, given the number of connections within the brain itself, according to recent brain research.

Or as Van Lommel puts it, “On the basis of these findings, we are forced to conclude that the brain has insufficient capacity for storing all memories with associated thoughts and feelings or retrieving capacity for stored information.”

The only explanation for this disparity is that memories are stored not in brain tissue itself but in electromagnetic fields of the brain. Again, Van Lommel explains: “Neurosurgeon Karl Pribram was equally certain that memories cannot be stored in brain cells, but only in the coherent patterns of the electromagnetic fields of neural networks.” (p. 194) LOCATION 3678 of Van Lommel book.

To Pribram, the brain is less like a central processing unit and more like a hologram, which is “capable of storing the vast quantity of information of the human memory.” Some 90 years ago, psychologist Karl Lashley proved that “memories are not stored in any single part of the brain but throughout the brain as a whole.”

Moreover, the brain is highly plastic, meaning it can be physically altered by thoughts—thoughts can alter physical structures in the brain, which explains a good deal about the placebo effect, not to mention hypnosis.

The conclusion of all this speculating? The brain facilitates consciousness, but does not create or merely contain it.

And here’s the larger point: consciousness can be experienced independently of brain function. That’s what NDEs reveal.

We can and do leave our bodies at times, to put it more directly, since consciousness is not located only in our brain.

Van Lommel concludes, “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that our endless consciousness preceded birth and will survive death independently of the body and in a nonlocal space where time and place play no role. According to the theory of nonlocal consciousness there is no beginning and no end to consciousness.”

Jeffrey Long, a doctor who founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation and author of Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experience, asserts that “I long ago quit believing that death is the cessation of our existence. I was born into a scientific family. My father was the chair of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Iowa and a onetime contender for the Nobel Prize. Through him and others in our family I developed great respect for science.

By scientifically studying the more than 1,300 cases shared with the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation, I believe that the nine lines of evidence presented in [his] book [mentioned earlier] all converge on one central point: There is life after death.”

Again, I want to remind us that it’s not “life” as we know it—it’s an ineffable state of consciousness free of time and space—whatever you choose to call that. I would avoid calling it “heaven,” which sounds like a place with definite features—clearly a projection that arises from our bodily attachment to time and place.

To close, I’d like to quote what Mona Simpson related about her brother’s death. In her printed eulogy printed recently in the New York Times she said that he spoke three sets of two monosyllables as he looked over his family’s shoulders: Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow. Those were his last words.

Mona Simpson’s brother, of course, was the lucky Steve Jobs.

Slaves Rule! Agency and Autonomy in the Age of Technology

Supper Club Speech: Slaves Rule! Agency and Autonomy in the Age of Technology

David G. Sparks | January 17, 2012

Agency vs Autonomy,

Competence vs Dependency,

Citizenship vs Entitlement,

Self-control,

Self-esteem,

and what's all that go to do with sourdough anyhow?

It has always been easy, but never easier than today, to form an opinion without the effort of thought.

Today, social media degrade opinion down to vacuous extremes of “Like” versus “Dislike”. On any

subject whatsoever, the owner of a handheld information appliance can instantly access a

contemporaneous, global tally of likes and dislikes. She can consult her online friends' consensus just

as easily. Far beyond the freedom to think for herself, our modernist attains freedom from thinking

itself. The effortless certitude of knowing the likes of others affords her a blissful elision into decision.

Who wants anything more?

What matters if the consensus is wrong? Most people would agree with John Maynard Keynes who

said, “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed

unconventionally.” Failure by convention is no one's fault because everyone's fault. Safety in numbers.

This introduction on the difference between making up your own mind and allowing others to make it

for you is just a special case of a general challenge that I believe is central to our current situation and

our social future. My talk explores the ancient topic of autonomy and agency, and its current

significance for education, technology, citizenship and economic justice.

Contemporary society is having trouble finding work for all its members. This is a symptom of a deep

illness. One of the questions I will ask you tonight is whether, in our modern zeal to get freedom from

all manner of unpleasantness, we accidentally acquired the idea that we should be free from work.

Agency and Autonomy

Autonomy, as I will address it, means the freedom to determine one's own actions. Agency, I will

propose, is the action itself. Philosophy sometimes sounds like these are two different things. They are

not, but part of the same thing. To divide them is to divide the mind against itself.

Speech of David Sparks to Supper Club January 17, 2012 Page 1 of 14

I am not talking about agency in the sense of two parties, such as the kind of ethical problems between

agent and principal that can come up in employment or commercial dealings.

I will invoke but ultimately disagree somewhat with Immanuel Kant's top-down assertion of autonomy

as an a priori freedom of will in the sense of writing one's own rules subject to instrumental and moral

principles, distinct from a lesser thing called Agency that follows downward from autonomy based on

will toward some definite end.

A different perspective comes from the scholarship of technology, especially artificial intelligence. In

this realm agency in human service is the a priori condition, then in a bottom-up kind of way autonomy

grows out of it based on motivationi. That is, we have a machine that does things for us—an agent, if

you will—then we imbue it with a task and grant it autonomy to decide its own actions.

So, what kind of task would motivate a mechanized agent enough to warrant the autonomy to decide

action for itself? An example of where this can lead appears in an unclassified publication by the U.S.

Air Force in May, 2009 titled “Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Flight Plan.”ii At page 41, under the

heading “Path to Autonomy”, the document looks at the future of combat machines.

Today the role of technology is changing from supporting to fully participating with

humans in each step of the process. In 2047 technology will be able to reduce the time to

complete the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act loop to micro or nanoseconds. UAS will be

able to react (in nanoseconds) and therefore (move) toward becoming a “perceive and

act” vector. Increasingly humans will no longer be “in the loop” but rather “on the loop”

– monitoring the execution of certain decisions. Simultaneously, advances in AI will

enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints

without necessarily requiring human input.

One can only hope that the word, “think”, will stay in there somewhere, otherwise deadly devices may

become “jump to conclusions” machines. Terminator, anyone?

To repeat: Autonomy, as I will address it, means the freedom to determine one's own actions. Agency, I

will propose, is the action itself. Here, one's actions are constrained by the properties of the materials

we work with and overarching, widely shared moral principles.

Speech of David Sparks to Supper Club January 17, 2012 Page 2 of 14

We need not arrange the two concepts into a hierarchy. To me, attempts to relate agency with autonomy

become something of a chicken-egg problem. You can't have one without the others. But with so many

eggs and chickens in the world it is possible to consider each separately. Action toward a goal without

freedom of will? Sure, ask any soldier. Autonomy without action? That is our modern media consumer,

reductio ad absurdem. But is she free?

At the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show last week in Las Vegas, Audi unveiled an autonomous driving

system for your car that it calls Traffic Jam Assistant. Says Audi on its corporate web site,iii the system

will be designed to

relieve the driver at times when driving is not much fun, such as in congested traffic. At

speeds between zero and 60 km/h (37.28 mph), the system helps to steer the car within

certain constraints. The traffic jam assistant can be used on expressways or in cities,

provided that the course of the road is not too complex. (It handles) accelerating and

braking (autonomously;) it also reacts to cars moving into or out of the lane.

Here we have the New Autonomy, a Technautonomy. Wish I had coined that word. Alas, it is out there

already. Technautonomy is the point of this talk. But I get ahead of myself.

Competence and Dependency

In this section I re-interpret Autonomy and Agency as Dependency and Competence, that is, in

practical terms of who does what for whom. On this continuum, autonomy detaches toward

dependency while agency moves toward competence respecting the action. Technology already in some

cars is shifting the paradigm. Matthew Crawford's article on Agency and Autonomy in the Hedgehog

Review of June, 2010iv began with these two paragraphs.

Some of the current Mercedes models do not have dipsticks. If the oil level gets low,

the owner is sent an email. This serves nicely as an index of a shift in our relationship

to machines. Lubrication has been recast, for the user, in the frictionless terms of the

electronic device. In those terms, lubrication has no rationale and ceases to be an

object of active concern for anyone but the service technician. In a sense, this

increases the freedom of the Mercedes user. He has gained a kind of independence by

not having to futz around with dipsticks and dirty rags.

Speech of David Sparks to Supper Club January 17, 2012 Page 3 of 14

But in another sense, it makes him more dependent. He has outsourced the burden of

paying attention to his oil level to another, and the price he pays for this

disburdenment is that he is entangled in a more minute, all-embracing, one might

almost say maternal relationship with ... what? Not with the service technician at the

dealership, at least not directly, as there are layers of bureaucracy that intervene: the

dealership that employs the technician; Daimler AG, Stuttgart, Germany, who hold the

service plan and warranty on their balance sheet; and finally Mercedes shareholders,

unknown to one another, who collectively dissipate the financial risk of your engine

running low on oil. There are now layers of collectivized, absentee interest in your

motor's oil level, and no single person is responsible for it. If we understand this under

the rubric of "globalization," we see that its tentacles reach down into things that were

once unambiguously our own: the amount of oil in a man's crankcase.

But facts are stubborn things, and the requirement of lubrication is in the nature of engines. Crawford

begs the question: if the engine seizes up whose fault would that be? The driver without a dipstick will

not share the blame, but call his lawyer to pursue a claim. Perhaps he rationalizes that he can justify a

deliberate, personal helplessness before the fact by reliance upon a post hoc, social entitlement to

money damages. In his technautonomy, he is never to blame; always it is “they” who are.

Crawford is an important scholar and writer on this subject, in my opinion. You can read a pretty good

synopsis of his popular book online thanks to The New Atlantis. I will include a link in the endnotes of

this article for your information.v

My view is that such a driver is making a big mistake. He renders himself not autonomously free but

technautonomously dependent. Metal is metal and it needs oiling. It is merely prideful to assert a

heedless will against the properties of of his machine. I will come back to this thought.

Citizenship and Entitlement

In this section I will argue that the vector of Agency and Autonomy in contemporary society runs away

from freedom-to, towards freedom-from.

Speech of David Sparks to Supper Club January 17, 2012 Page 4 of 14

A driver who desires and retains the responsibility to check and fill her own oil, drive her own car, and

plan her own route, may go where she will and it's nobody's business.

Today's luxury car inhabitant keeps General Motors constantly apprised of his location and speed, and

tells Google where he is going so it can determine his every move in real time. He should care what

this freedom from care might be costing him.

Last December in Milwaukee two men stole a new Cadillac Escalade. Soon after, the police were on its

tail because the car was reporting its location through the OnStar system. It even transmitted the

conversations inside the car. At a point where the interstate ran down through a deep road cut with high

retaining walls on both sides, General Motors sent a signal at the cops' request—and stopped the

engine. Maybe you like the idea of catching car thieves that way. Keep thinking.

In October 2007 the U.S. Justice Department published a special report on Investigative Uses of

Technology: Devices, Tools, and Techniques.vi The document discusses the rich trove of information

available from in-vehicle technology and how to get it. As far back as May, 2004, the Wisconsin Bar

Association reported that courts are increasingly admitting GPS evidence into trials. You would be

surprised to learn how far back your handy dandy navigator remembers, accurate to within the length

of your car and the tick of the atomic clock, where you were, and when, and how long you stayed there.

GPS sells you a narcotic technautonomy in the freedom from having to find your own way. Soon you

are hooked; you forgive it for times it sends you the wrong way around because you would feel literally

lost without it.

But let me steer back to citizenship and entitlement with a modern problem of the commons. What does

technautonomy teach young people concerning finite, community resources? The owner of a new

Apple iPhone 4-S feels a delicious surge of entitlement when she commands SIRI, the inner voice, to

tell her what cool restaurants are offering discounts within walking distance, and how to get there from

here. Kings could not command such sorcery, yet now we commoners take it for granted. Get an

iPhone, get SIRI, and get going! That's the pitch. But this individual benefit comes at a social cost.

The iPhone 4-S consumes twice as much capacity in a cellular infrastructure compared to its

predecessor. Bandwidth hogging is a massive example of the tragedy of the commons. Even today's

tiered-price plans do not begin to level the playing field between bandwidth bandits and people who

Speech of David Sparks to Supper Club January 17, 2012 Page 5 of 14

just want a phone. User hogging explains most of your dropped calls.

The radio frequency spectrum is a finite, community resource. Happily, we keep learning how to

squeeze more data through it. Sadly, our technological success in doing so relieves phone users of any

care for one another. Applauded behavior these days goes beyond mere conspicuous consumption to

competitive consumption. The fastest phone with the most apps and streaming videos wins!

My notions of citizenship formed around more altruistic behavior such as contributing to a community,

limiting personal use of shared resources, giving back more than I get, and trying to leave this place

better than I found it. The culture of entitlement I see taking shape in this era of dependent

technautonomy seems to emphasize the opposite: maximizing personal use of shared resources, getting

more than you give, and grabbing all you can before the next guy takes it all. How do you celebrate

Christmas?

Self control and self-esteem

I once fitted a cornet mouthpiece into a Sousaphone to hit higher notes with it. It was for a summer

orchestra performance of Schuman's Circus Overture. There is a moment in the score where all the

animals go wild. I found I could do glissandos in the upper register without fingering the valves. The

conductor enjoyed a good laugh, thought it sounded like a love-struck elephant and left it in the piece.

Now, consider learning to play an instrument. Scott Cawelti talked to us a while back about the guitar.

It is easy to learn to play one, he said, but very hard to learn to play it well. Angeleita Floyd would add

that the flute is no different – well, maybe harder even at first. I can play a guitar but never managed to

get a toot from a flute.

The would-be musician must choose an instrument, learn its properties, submit to the discipline

required to invoke its voice reliably, then master the literature of it. The process takes years. The

evidence is in every performance. The musician says, live and in person, “You have heard me. Judge

for yourself.”

Yet even upon mastery, the instrument will constrain the player. A violin cannot produce the Oom Pah-

Pah of a tuba. The tuba cannot hit the piccolo's pitch. Well, it can with a cornet mouthpiece but it's not

the same and we would hope to laugh at the attempt.

Speech of David Sparks to Supper Club January 17, 2012 Page 6 of 14

An instrument, including electronic ones, is just a way to get air vibrating at an audible frequency. The

vibration is just a way to manifest a certain thought. Even that is just our need to touch the face beyond

the reach of consciousness. And that? Who knows. Which is the point of all our striving.

Even though electronics figures into musical performance these days, technology corrupts us to

surrender. Why learn to play when we have iTunes?

It seems to me that the choice we make over and over again in life is between being a user and a doer.

Users have things done for them, while doers want to do things. Doers make things. Users, well, use

them. Users want it easy. Doers don't mind difficulty as long as it is interesting and seems tractable.

This difference defines one of the dimensions that measure a person's individuality. Take art for one

obvious example. Users like to look at art, and might even learn to display it very effectively. Doers, of

course, produce it. Think about audiences and actors, playwrights and critics, cooks and diners. You see

this dimension everywhere.

A doer will submit to evaluation based on the work itself. Crawford describes the test of a bricklayer: a

wall. It says to any who look at it, “Here stands the work. It is level and plumb and finished; check for

yourself.” Its maker takes an important measure of his worth from his work. He earns not only his

living but his self-respect thereby.

By contrast, a user has walls built, then needs a narrative to inflate his reputation with it. He will say,

“those bricks are of special clay from Habersham County, the last of its kind dug from the banks of the

Chattahoochee where it crosses the ancestral home of Sidney Lanier. The brickmason, an Italian known

to fame in both Tuscany and the Vatican; I flew him here on my Gulfstream for the job.”

All of us are users of many things most of the time. So merely using technology does not signify. The

continuum describes a preference between doing-ness and using-ness as a personal lifestyle. Doing is a

somewhat lonely choice in the social sense because most people incline toward the other side. But I

find it a wonderfully interesting way to live. Never a dull moment.

Sourdough

Every time I contemplate a speech to Supper Club I reconsider giving one I call “The Sourdough Life.”

This looks like the time.

Speech of David Sparks to Supper Club January 17, 2012 Page 7 of 14

The Sourdough Life means to pursue an artistic hobby with the hands. Former Merrill Lynch Chief

Executive Officer, U.S. Treasury Secretary and White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan explained it

at the first gallery showing of his paintings. He started painting at close to age 80, some time after his

political career ended. He said to someone attending the gallery, “After Wall Street and the government,

I decided there had to be more to life than the stock market, golf and drinking."

My response to that is, Why wait? For me a lifelong interest in sourdough bread has provided recreational

relief. I learned to bake from my mother. In college I started experimenting with sourdough

cultures captured from the air. The one I use now showed up around 20 years ago. I devoured books, of

course, but most of what I know the bread and yeast taught me. Finally the day came when I could

reliably produce well-raised loaves with labyrinthine crumb enclosed in deep brown, crackly crust,

made from nothing else but whole wheat and water.

Several speeches ago, my talk would have been about working the sourdough process into a busy life

by spreading the different steps across several days. I probably would have gone on from there to extoll

the virtue of household chores to anchor a life pulled this way and that by markets and sales goals.

Now, however, I see a different dimension. I see a continuum between the work of the head and the

work of the hands. I think part of our sickness as a culture may be that we live more in our heads these

days and less by our hands. For evidence, consider TV reality programs showing manual work. It is

exhibited as odd, dirty, the people who do it being obviously very different from you and me. But

sourdough says, Hold on there. You can reconnect with your hands, and you ought to.

Jeffrey Hamelman, a master baker and head of King Arthur Flour's Baking Education Center, wrote

these words in his book, titled simply, “Bread.”

So much of baking is about the sense of touch. We feel the dough as it mixes, in order to

learn to understand in a tactile sense the changes it goes through from the beginning of

the mix to the end. … (W)e slowly train ourselves to understand what is happening

inside the dough simply by feeling the outside...

The baker is lucky, lucky indeed, to have this life of the hands... For thousands of years,

most of the world's work—the “days of hands,” as T.S. Elliot called it—was manual and

required the ineffable sensitivity of the human hand. To be sure there were people of

Speech of David Sparks to Supper Club January 17, 2012 Page 8 of 14

wealth and power whose hands had little purpose. But for the bulk of humanity, the

hands were the conduit between effort and result. Then, perhaps 90 percent or more of

the population was engaged directly in hand work of some form. And now, perhaps the

number is reversed. Today, increasingly the primary use of the hand seems to be for

computer and telephone.

It's true that the machines of today can with certainty guarantee a consistent output of

predictable good quality. On the other hand, the baker who relies on his hands will

surely have mishaps. At times his efforts might yield only a 75 percent level of quality.

But at other times he will coax loaves of incredible beauty and taste, and score a 95

percent! He lives for this, and the memory of those surpassing loaves lingers. He strives

for perfection, but wonders; where would he go from there?

Hearing, touching, smelling, seeing, and tasting—bread is about all of these. The bread

is always talking to us, and only when we open ourselves fully—mind and senses

together—do we slowly begin to learn the subtle, but quite articulate, language of

bread.vii

Well said, say I. Work is fulfilling when it fills us to the full. We must be open to it. Work informs our

self respect when it teaches us to trust ourselves through disappointments and savor moments of

excellence for the special occasions they really are. We must work in order to know these things. A

society that organizes its laws and economy in a way that excludes some people from access to dignity

through work is beyond unjust, beyond unwise; it is unwell. Even if in doing so it means well.

Education, Work, and Economic Justice

A life lived on the using-ness end on the preference continuum would be a fully entitled existence,

where one does nothing but consumes everything. A cartoon many years ago captured the idea with an

executive sitting in a corner office. Obviously very high up, his floor-to-ceiling windows look down

onto birds, circling above the tops of other buildings. He occupies an ornate chair, but otherwise the

room is bare. No bookshelves, no computer, no phone, not even a desk. He explains to a visitor, “I

delegate everything!”

I saw this using-ness preference in my corporate finance classrooms. Corp is basically an applied math

Speech of David Sparks to Supper Club January 17, 2012 Page 9 of 14

course. The math makes the concepts accessible to thought. We encouraged students to use financial

calculators for speed and accuracy with computations that would otherwise be tedious. My motivation

as a teacher was to furnish their minds with knowledge, skills and abilities, namely the basic financial

decision making concepts and some discipline to exercise them correctly. Silly me.

Most of my students had a different idea. Their idea was to use me to get the grade they need, to check

the course off the list of requirements. They would have me teach them how to press keys on the

calculator to get right answers on exams. My effort to make them think in class consumed time that

they felt could be better spent memorizing keystrokes for the next test.

Thank goodness a few actually came there to learn. These students lived on the doing-ness end of the

preference continuum. Unfortunately, most just wanted to pass. They were at the using-ness end. I

never understood how they figured to survive in business. Perhaps they just plan to delegate

everything. I wonder how many of them really did not belong in college.

I think sometimes about Charlie Garrett, a shade tree mechanic in Fountain Inn, South Carolina where I

grew up. The man worked miracles in the shop down behind his house. The ten teeth in his head were

more than the number of years he went to school. But cars talked to him, told him what needed fixing.

With his screwdriver and a timing light he could teach them how to sing. He mattered to his customers.

You had to wait your turn to get in Mr. Garrett's shop. He raised his family, took care of business, and

made his way in the world.

Today he would need at least a Hawkeye Tech diploma. He would work at a dealership where they

would not let him talk to customers; they have unskilled, form-filling employees for that work. Nobody

would know about Mr. Garrett and his music with machines.

I wonder if he would have gotten that diploma. We have increased the cognitive demands of so many

jobs that we are in danger of creating a permanent underclass that cannot find good-paying work at all.

There are no jobs down at the plant for Gus when he drops out of school. Just a generation ago, there

were. He just had to know somebody to get in. They would train him on the job. Not any more.

Our society's demand to live free from hassles has made us intolerant toward error in the products and

services we consume. The best-possible becomes the minimum-acceptable. Every defect is a warranty

claim, every fault a tort. It would be too dangerous to keep Gus on the line when he makes mistakes.

Speech of David Sparks to Supper Club January 17, 2012 Page 10 of 14

My thoughts on public schools are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my wife. What is

this notion in mass testing that all children will perform at or above “grade level?” If grade level is a

norm, then statistically there must be scores both above and below it. Only in Lake Woebegone do all

children score above average.

Even crazier, comes now an idea from Governor Branstad that all children must sit a college entrance

exam—SAT or ACT—before graduating high school. Hey, I know from experience that not every kid

should go to college. Where did we get this idea that there is no avenue to human worth without a BA

degree?

Pure piffle. Parents may rejoice their child graduated business school and now makes $40,000 a year

salary working 80-hour weeks in a marketing firm, yet never register that their kid carries a quarter

million in college debt and is making $20 an hour. Meanwhile, the plumber who graduated high school

with their precicious child charges $100 just to pull in the driveway plus $80 an hour, and they thank

him. If he has debt, it is likely on a house that can be sold to repay most of it.

Alas, there is no market for used MBA degrees. The parents may hope their budding magnate will hit it

big, and she might. For future wealth, however, the plumber has a huge head start.

Crawford points out that repair work is actually cognitively heavy, exercising both knowledge and

differential diagnosis. A factory can crank out identical copies by a rote procedure, but the diesel

mechanic faces a unique object that has worn and broken not quite like any other. She must judge

which parts to replace and which ones just need cleaning. She stakes her reputation on it. She looks you

in the eye. Such a job brings dignity and a paycheck that cannot be relocated overseas. Sounds like a

great job! Yet we discourage our children from aspiring to such worthy work.

Why do schools no longer teach trades? Is it because we do not want our children to work?

Frankly, I agree with Crawford that everyone should learn a trade. Work with your head, too, that's fine.

Use a computer, a tablet, a phone. But know how to do work with your hands, be part of a crew, be

known by what stands after you. We should all add a bit of the sourdough to our lives. It would civilize

us, and I mean make us more civil, better citizens; teach us not only to appreciate quality but also cut

the other guy some slack because we know things don't always go right.

Speech of David Sparks to Supper Club January 17, 2012 Page 11 of 14

Coda

Sourdough opened my eyes to the possibility of competence with natural materials, flour and water, to

make bread, food for myself and others, provided I work within the rubric of the materials themselves

and honor their properties. The experience prepared me to understand agency as the work itself, my

skill subsumed within the task and ingredients and not the other way around. My claim to autonomy,

including citizenship and standing in a community, in some way relates to a manifest ability of the kind

that shows in the work. Money wealth cannot supply this kind of standing because money can be got in

many ways but good bread can only come about the right way. Somehow, in our souls, we all know

this. I think that realization makes us uncomfortable in our conflation of money and worth, because

money spent on technautonomous dependency does not buy happiness.

As an aside, it does buy a quick thrill. But after a while, that iPhone 4-S is just your old phone.

As a baker I can rightly expect competence and self control of myself. To this end I must subordinate

myself to the nature of the task at hand and the materials the world affords me. When I enter that state,

I am free-to and thus sustainably autonomous. I gain by giving bread away. I fill up by opening up.

This kind of freedom is quite different from one where self-esteem requires continuous affirmation

from online friends, agency is for others to fuss with, where freedom from burdens and cares brings the

illusion of entitlement but reality of dependency. Poor man he, the Technautonomous, constrained to

live within the choices made for him by inscrutable providers of his conveniences.

Autonomy and agency are distinguishable, but only in the way that hands and feet are from each other.

Detached them from each other, and something important diminishes.

The technautonomous one who does nothing is not free; he is slave to his servants and their true

masters who program his dependency upon them. The one who works without authority over his skill is

not free either. There is no separation of the two in a free man, therefore no inherent hierarchy, no a

priori status of one over the other. In a competent and well settled soul, agency is autonomy; autonomy,

agency.

The autonomous self will be a complex function in three dimensions:

1. what it know it can do objectively, and does in fact: that is, its agency,

Speech of David Sparks to Supper Club January 17, 2012 Page 12 of 14

2.

the subjective pleasure it gives and the good that others find in the work: its competence,

3.

self-governance under an overarching moral stricture derived from avoiding harm to others and

accepting the acts of others who self-govern according to the same principles; its citizenship.

That in a nutshell is the autonomy I seek. Freedom to do what I choose rooted in submission to the

work that it requires. That is the balance I fear the children of our “freedom—from” society may be

missing. I wish I could call their attention to the wisdom wheat and water can teach them: the serenity

to say, “I just baked bread. Here, would you like some?”

Speech of David Sparks to Supper Club January 17, 2012

Page 13 of 14

i

D'Inverno, Mark, and Luck, Michael. A Formal Framework for Agency and Autonomy. 1995. MIT Press. Retrieved

11/20/2011 from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.25.8941&rep=rep1&type=pdf&ei=rF7JTrgGqa42wXtzuDKDw&

usg=AFQjCNFZC7hcdkyzH_MLDGArAINNFz3P6w

ii

United States Air Force. Michael B. Donley, Secretary of the Air Force, and Norton A Schwartz, General, USAF, Chief

of Staff. May 18, 2009. Downloaded January 14, 2012 from http://www.govexec.com/pdfs/072309kp1.pdf

iii

“Driver Assistance Systems”. Online news release January 10, 2012. Audi of America. Accessed January 14, 2012.

http://www.audiusanews.com/pressrelease/2757/104/driver-assistance-systems

iv

Crawford, Matthew B., “Agency Versus Autonomy”, The Hedgehog Review – Critical Reflections on Contemporary

Culture, Vol 12, No. 2 (Summer 2010). Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. University of Virginia. Charlottesville,

Virginia.

v

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as-soulcraft., Summer, 2006 edition.

vi

Keisler, Peter D., Acting Attorney General., Daley, Cybele K., Acting Assistant Attorney General., Hagy, David W.,

Acting Principal Deputy Director., October, 2007., Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice, U.S. Justice

Dpeartment. Accessed January 14, 2012. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/213030.pdf

vii Hamelman, Jeffrey., Bread, A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes, 2004., Hoboken, N.J., John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

BARUCH SPINOZA: PIONEER OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT Outline of Talk by Fred Hallberg

BARUCH SPINOZA:

PIONEER OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Outline of Talk by Fred Hallberg

For the Cedar Falls Town and Gown Club

At Bourbon Street Café, Cedar Falls, Iowa, 6:00 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2011.

I. Introduction: I wish to introduce you to Baruch Spinoza, a Dutch Jew of Portuguese descent, living in Holland in the 17^th Century.

Why is Spinoza of interest today?

A. I had not dealt with Spinoza for several decades, when I last taught a course at UNI entitled “History of Philosophy: Renaissance and Enlightenment.”

1. Spinoza was recalled to memory for me, by the events of the “Arab Spring” beginning in Tunisia last December. The unrest spread to Egypt, where I saw on television a phalanx of women carrying a banner displaying words in Arabic. The words (when translated by the TV announcer) said “Peace” and “Solidarity.” The announcer then explained the women were a mixture of Coptic Christians and Sunni Muslims, who were agitating for a world in which they could live together in “Peace” and “Solidarity,” as their sign said.

2. Suddenly Spinoza began rattling his cage from deep within my memory. He was insisting that “I have something to say to those women!” I had lost most of my Spinoza books during the move from Janesville to Eisenach Village, so I bought a half dozen new books on Spinoza from Amazon.com, and began to get reacquainted with the man. I wanted to find out what Spinoza might have wanted to say to these women in such circumstances.

3. I re-discovered that Spinoza was for me a very attractive person. His first name means “Blessed,” and I grant that he was. He succeeded in making his philosophy a positive way of life, as well as a set of arguments and doctrines. I am probably most attracted to him because he showed me how one can find a sense of belonging in almost any social circumstance, as I shall explain shortly.

B. Spinoza has in my view been inadequately recognized in the history books for:

1. His defense of freedom of conscience and of speech as universal human rights.

2. His advocacy of the toleration of religious diversity within a secular state as an alternative to religious war.

3. And for his having invented modern Biblical criticism 200 years before Graf and Wellhausen made it an acceptable academic discipline.

II. Life and Times. (Born 1632. Died 1677 at the early age of 45). (The Treaties of Munster and Westphalia, which brought the main Religious Wars in Europe to a close, were signed 1648, when Spinoza was 16 years old.)

A. The 17^th Century marked the Dawn of the Enlightenment, but it was a terribly violent time.

1. John Milton called it “the century of iron.” It was a time of religious wars: the 30 Years War in Germany; the 80 Years War in the Netherlands; the civil religious wars in France and England. The 30 Years War was especially destructive. Large regions of Germany lost between 1/5 and 2/3 of their population.

2. By time of Spinoza’s death (1677) religious wars had become largely a thing of the past, at least in Europe. Religious uniformity was no longer given as a motive for war. Toleration of religious diversity became much more common.

3. I believe Spinoza’s ideas helped to justify this transition toward more liberal and tolerant societies.

III. Why was a man with a Spanish name (d’Spinoza) living in a Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam?

A. Spinoza’s family had lived in Spain perhaps for centuries. Beginning in 1492 Jews began to be persecuted as Ferdinand and Isabella attempted to purify Spanish culture by eliminating non-Catholic-Christian influences.

1. The Spinoza family first sought refuge in Portugal, where the Inquisition was not yet operating. But then Portugal became part of Spain in 1580, which brought along the Inquisition. So the Spinoza family had to flee again. They happily accepted the Dutch invitation to Portuguese Jews that they move to a suburb of Amsterdam, and carry on their international trading activities from there.

2. Spinoza’s father became a reasonably successful shipping trader in Amsterdam.

3. The young Spinoza proved to be very good at learning Biblical Hebrew at his synagogue school. His teachers hoped he would become a prominent rabbi.

4. During his early 20's, Spinoza began quarreling with his teachers over the meaning of many Biblical texts. He was offered a stipend to teach Hebrew but to keep his own views about what it all meant, hidden from the students. Spinoza refused. One early biographer reported he was attacked by a man with a knife on the synagogue steps. In 1656, at age of 24, he was brought before a tribunal and formally excommunicated from the Amsterdam synagogue. This ban endured for his entire life.

5. Spinoza’s response to this ban (which forbade contacts with any Dutch Jew,

including members of his own family) is part of what has made him so attractive to me. I have been searching all my life for a special sort of community which would provide a truly authentic home. I had memories of life in such an idyllic community from my life as a child in a small town in western Minnesota in the 1930's and 1940's. But that community disappeared with the advent of large scale industrial agriculture, and the destruction of the traditional family farm. Spinoza’s response to his ban showed me how it is possible to find a support community in almost any circumstances, if you can share a commitment to some sort of positive values or interests. You simply have to be open to these values or interests being shared across more ordinary tribal forms of identity.

D. Spinoza’s relationship with Dutch gentiles.

1. Spinoza developed a circle of friends and admirers among dissenting religious groups within his predominately Calvinist Christian society. These included the Remonstrants (who denied the Calvinist doctrine of predestination to salvation), the Collegiants (who tried to live a simple religion of the heart like that of the American Quakers), and the Socinians (who denied the post-Biblical doctrine of the trinity). He also befriended a publisher in Amsterdam (Jan Rieuwertsz), along with others in the Amsterdam publishing community, and he participated in various discussion groups concerned with the new sciences. A life-long friend and correspondent (Henry Oldenburg) later became Secretary to the British Royal Society, which kept him connected with what was happening there. Spinoza was a popular figure in all of these groups. He may have been rejected by his original home community at the Amsterdam Synagogue. But managed to develop a robust, if informal, support community among other dissenting Christian and secular groups. His example says to me; “Go forth and do likewise!”

E. Spinoza taught himself the craft of lense grinding as a way to earn a living after his excommunication. It seems fitting that a philosopher would commit himself to a craft which would enable him to see things more clearly. He was soon able to support himself making magnifying glasses, reading glasses, and later compound microscopes and refracting telescopes. He was also offered support remittances by wealthy friends. He accepted a small fraction of these offers, but turned down most of them. One acquaintance said he subsisted comfortably on “pennies a day.”

F. Spinoza mastered Latin by working with a tutor, then traveled from Amsterdam to a suburb of Leiden, a university town about 25 miles to the southwest of Amsterdam. He spent a couple years there (1655-57) studying the philosophy of Descartes. He then moved to a suburb of The Hague, called Voorburg, which is about 20 miles further southwest of Amsterdam. He published an exposition of Descartes’ philosophy there in 1663. It was the only thing published under his name during his lifetime.

G. While at Voorburg Spinoza began working on his two master works, his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and his Ethics. The first of these two works, the Treatise on Theology and Politics, which I am calling the “Tractatus,” was finished first, and was published clandestinely and anonymously in Amsterdam in the winter of 1669-70. It was written in Latin to make it less accessible to the masses (and their often intolerant and trouble-making clergy). The title page said it was published “In Hamburg,” which was untrue, and the author’s name was never stated.

III. Why Was the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus Important?

A. I claim the Tractatus is Spinoza’s most influential work, even though it is seldom discussed at any length in standard histories of philosophy. The book consists of 20 chapters, of which 15 are devoted to biblical scholarship. He discusses the alleged uniqueness of Jewish law, the role of prophesy in the Bible, and whether the Bible can be accepted as the inerrant Word of God. He then unexpectedly shifts to political issues in the last five chapters. He shows how the foundational ideas of the modern liberal democratic state can be derived from elements of the very Biblical material he had criticized so severely in the preceding 15 chapters.

B. My claim that the Tractatus had a greater cultural impact than did his more ambitious Ethics, is controversial. I make my claim because the Tracatus achieved the following effects: He succeeded in “denaturing” the Bible. No serious person could take the Bible as inerrant after reading the Tractatus. He simultaneously provided a persuasive rationale for a secular state which could protect human rights and religious diversity. I find the Ethics to be much more difficult to read than is the Treatise. The Ethics was, however, much more important in Spinoza’s eyes, as well as in the eyes of most historians of philosophy. It was organized in a rigorous deductive way, like a gigantic mathematical proof. It spelled out his world-encompassing metaphysical system, as well as his detailed discipline of personal salvation. It may be of greater interest to professional philosophers. But I do not believe his Ethics had nearly the impact on 17^th and 18^th Century European Enlightenment culture, as did his Tractatus.

C. Spinoza began his Tractatus by criticizing certain hoary self-congratulatory claims Jews have commonly made about their own religion. He denies that the Jews are the only people to have received knowledge of the Law from God, and he denies that the Jews have been the only people to have been enlightened about the Law of God by means of prophesy.

1. Concerning the first claim, that the revelation of the Law of God was given uniquely to the Jews, Spinoza refutes it by reference to the Biblical material itself. He refers to Genesis 14, where Abram is portrayed as accepting the religious authority of King Melchizedek of Salem. (Abram was not called “Abraham” until after he received his commission from God.) The city would become (Jeru) Salem later, after the Jewish religion was created. The king was, of course, not yet a Jew. Yet he is called a priest of the God most high, which is the same name used to designate the God who called Abram to his mission. The king also provided a blessing for Abram in the name of this God, even though all these events occurred long before Moses first encountered God at Mount Sinai. Spinoza also lists proof texts to the effect that the Law of God is mainly about personal moral virtue, and is therefore accessible to any morally upright person. Spinoza is a universalist concerning the content and applicability of the Law of God. According to Spinoza, the authentic Law applies to all persons everywhere, and it has been made available to persons across the earth by a variety of means, including both prophecy and critical reason.

2. What Grounds Does Spinoza give for Denying the Bible is Inerrant?

a. Spinoza catalogues many sorts of factual and formal errors in the Biblical texts. I shall describe just one such type, which I call errors of “redundancy and contradiction.”

b.c. Spinoza has a heyday with examples of Biblical redundancy and contradiction. The Biblical texts are filled with them. Stories which we can recognize as being about the same event are often told more than once. But the content of these two recitations of the same story often differ in significant details, so the entire narrative becomes contradictory.

c. Spinoza discusses one such example of special importance to Jews, namely the story of Moses’ first encounter with God on Mount Sinai to receive the Law. The story of this first encounter is told twice, once in Exodus beginning at Chapter 19, and again in Deuteronomy beginning at Chapter 4. But the unfolding details of these two accounts of the giving of the Law by God, and of the reception of this Law by Moses and by the Jews, differs significantly in these two contexts. So the whole narration cannot be a literally true account of what actually transpired. These difficulties are compounded by the fact that the content of the Law is given a third time in Exodus Ch.34, after the first edition of the Law was destroyed as result of the Golden Calf incident (Ch.32). This third version of the Law is nowhere near identical with either the first one in Exodus or with the later one in Deuteronomy.

IV, How Did Spinoza Derive Liberal Political Principles from such Ambiguous Biblical Material?

A. The Two Great Commandments provide the key to Spinoza’s positive interpretation of the Bible.

1. The last five chapters of the Tractatus come as a surprise to the reader. (They certainly did to me.) After 15 chapters of unrelieved negative Biblical criticism, we are suddenly informed that there are gems of unsurpassed value buried in this deeply flawed material.

a. Spinoza defends a version of progressive revelation. He portrays the Old Testament writers as groping through the darkness and fog of their primitive religious consciousness, toward the light of progressive modern awareness.

b. There is no evidence Spinoza ever converted to Christianity, so we are further surprised to learn what this progressive light reveals about the Old Testament and the New. The fog of the Old Testament lifts in the New, to allow a much more clear and illuminating vision of moral reality. The point of the New Testament stories is not, according to Spinoza, the revelation of Christ as our cosmic savior. It is rather that Jesus, acting as our rabbi (that is, as our teacher), reveals to us the inner essence of the Law of God highlighted by the Two Great Commandments.

c. The two Great Commandments are first, that we love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our mind, and all our soul. The second is that we love our neighbor as our self.

2. This specific version of the Two Great Commandments is asserted in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, namely, in Matthew Ch. 22:34, in Mark Ch. 12:30-31, and in Luke Ch. 10:25-28. The only difference is that Jesus himself asserts the two commandments in Matthew and Mark, whereas he elicits this assertion from his interlocutor (said to be “a lawyer”) in Luke. But the order and content of these formulations are identical in all three instances.

a. Both commandments can be found in the Old Testament, but they occur there in entirely unrelated contexts, in entirely separate books. The First Commandment occurs in a number of different forms in the Old Testament, but it is stated in the specific form quoted in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, only in Deuteronomy Ch. 6:5. The Second Commandment, or anything remotely like it, occurs but once in the entire Old Testament. It occurs in Leviticus 19:18. It appears there amidst a hodge-podge of largely unrelated prohibitions about how to treat women during their menstrual cycle, how to treat one’s relatives and members of one’s household, and those with whom one may or may not have sex.

3. The New Testament affirmations of these Two Great Commandments meet Spinoza’s requirements for an authentic element of the Law of God. They are very simple, so anyone can understand them. And they can be ratified by discursive reason as well as by prophetic revelation. That makes them universal in a way that can be applied to all persons everywhere, regardless of their cultural differences. According to Spinoza, if people are smart enough to do arithmetic, they are smart enough appreciate the validity of these two Great Commandments.

B. Can the Two Great Commandments really be ratified by Reason alone?

1. Many contemporary philosophers would deny that they can be ratified by reason alone. I am not myself such a skeptic. Those of you who heard my paper entitled, “My Search for Absolutes,” know that I claim there is a close analogy between the Second Great Commandment and what Immanuel Kant called the Categorical Imperative. Both involve norms of mutuality and reciprocity. Kant held that such norms should govern our relations with one another. He provided arguments in support of the validity of such norms, as have such contemporary philosophers as John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas, among many others. My own arguments supporting this component of the Categorical Imperative are most similar to those given by Habermas. We both argue that the procedures by means of which beliefs are ratified, presuppose something like the Second Great Commandment as a background condition of our being consistent in thought and action. So I do believe the Second Great Commandment can be plausibly defended by discursive reason alone.

2. The First Great Commandment appears to present more of a problem, especially in the face of trenchant assertions of atheism by prominent contemporary philosophers such as Daniel Dennett. (You may have heard that Dennett calls atheists “the brights,” whereas he calls religious believers “not bright.” In other words religious people are, according to Dennett, just plain dumb.) Spinoza, on the other hand, had no problem affirming the existence of God, because he accepted what is called the “ontological argument.” This argument allegedly proves God’s existence as follows: God is an infinite being, so God must have all consistent attributes, including the attribute of existence itself. The conclusion is that God exists necessarily, the way, say, the number “3" exists necessarily. That is the so-called “ontological argument” for God’s existence.

3. I do not accept this argument for a number of technical reasons which I shall not burden you with here. But I still accept the claim that the First Great Commandment can be ratified by reason alone, so long is God is conceived of in a Spinozistic way. For Spinoza, the conception of God is purged of all anthropomorphic attributes. Spinoza denies, for example, that God could have either a face or a back side, as asserted in Exodus Ch. 33:23, or that God could “walk” with Enoch (Genesis, Ch. 5:22).

4. God, for Spinoza, is the infinite substance (that is, “something, I know not what”), which has created all present and past events, and which is creating future events. I take this doctrine to imply that we should take a realistic and affirmative stance toward our ongoing tasks of inquiry. Spinoza and I both deny the skeptical claim that the procedures of inquiry might simply be futile. I would argue that our very consciousness requires that there be a created world to be discovered and treasured. So I can accept this Spinozistic ratification of the First Great Commandment.

5. I suspect Daniel Dennett could accept it as well, if only he would cease viewing inquiry as a competitive, zero-sum game. If he could allow himself to become open to alternative points of view, I am confident he would see that accepting Spinoza’s argument would not require that he surrender his philosophical integrity.

E. How Can The Two Great Commandments Provide a Basis for

Universal Human Rights?

1. Spinoza is able to generate a surprising amount of substantive political theory from the Two Great Commandments. The Second Commandment requires that we internalize and enact norms of mutuality and reciprocity. I must risk opening my self and my basic beliefs to your inspection and possible criticism, and you must risk opening yourself to me. But I cannot thus open myself to you unless I have such an inner conscious life which I am able to articulate to you. The same must be true of you. That is why we must both have the basic rights of freedom of conscience and of freedom of expression if we are to be able to function as responsible persons in a community of inquiry.

2. Spinoza further argues that persons who share certain basic beliefs will tend to gather together in groups where they can share and celebrate these beliefs. This “flocking together” of “birds of a feather” is what generates the religious diversity characteristic of modern societies.

3. The rulers of early-modern nation-states often tried to secure social stability by

enforcing uniformity of basic beliefs at the point of a sword. But this has proven to be a self-defeating policy. The connection between outer behavior and inner belief is a weak one, so physical coercion cannot really get at what these rulers wanted to control. And second, such efforts always violated the victim’s sense of identity and integrity. That is why such efforts typically stimulated the very unrest and instability they are supposed to eliminate.

4. Spinoza argued it is much better to allow groups with differing basic beliefs to meet and function under the protection of a government which remains neutral with respect to such ultimate issues. That is what the United Provinces (what we now call the nation of “Holland”), had done during the 80 Years War with Spain (1568-1648). Calvinists, Catholics, and Jews were all allowed to live in contiguous communities within the United Provinces, and they generally did so in peace and harmony. This proved to be the form of social organization which would finally end the nihilistic Wars of Religion in Europe.

5. That was how Spinoza purported to “derive” the principle of separation of church and state from the New Testament formulation of the Two Great Commandments. It may not have been a strictly logical derivation. But history has proven to be on Spinoza’s side in this matter. Institutionalized separation of church and state has proved to be the only way we know to avoid irreconcilable sectarian conflicts. The lessons Spinoza taught us is what is being so painfully re-learned in the Islamic world today during the so-called “Arab Spring.”

V. How Was the Tractatus received?

1. Spinoza hoped the Tractatus would not stir up any great controversy. He could not have been more wrong. His publisher produced two printings over the winter of 1669 and 1670. They sold like hot cakes. But then the authorities got wind of what was happening, and the book was abruptly banned. Neither the author nor the publisher were publicly identified until after Spinoza’s death in 1677. So the author and publisher avoided being sent to prison. The book was soon published without his permission in other countries, often translated into the vernacular. Before long most of the influential philosophers of the Enlightenment had a copy of the Tractatus in their library.

2. I cannot claim Spinoza’s pioneering philosophy of the Enlightenment was what brought the 17^th Century European Wars of Religion to a close. But he was an early and influential source of the modern idea that the state should remain religiously neutral, and thus render religious warfare pointless.

4. The positive facts of the Arab Spring, as well as the negative facts of 9/11 and of the rise of the religious right in this country, all show that Spinoza’s pioneering efforts in defense of the modern, secular, liberal democratic state, are far from complete. With the street demonstrations of the Arab spring ringing in my ears, I can still hear his voice calling on us to help complete the world-historical task of cultural change which he began 350 years ago.

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