Creating Reality as Opposed to Simply Being Part of the Creation

This short essay is part of a collection of essays in a work-in-progress entitled "Prolegomena to a New Spiritual Psychology".

If our own thinking determines, or at least has a part in shaping the reality we live in, that is, in determining the nature of that reality, and is not just a sub-function of a pre-existing reality; if it is possible that we have a part in shaping reality, then there is no stronger argument for pursuing a spiritual life, a life of purpose and meaning, a religious life. Pursuing a religious life means choosing a trajectory towards the good, towards justice and morality, towards Adonai/God. This means that inwardly thru our beliefs and thoughts, and outwardly thru our acts of compassion, justice, and creativity, we are trying to build a human reality that reflects the Jewish conception of Adonai. But tho this conception is quintessentially Jewish, its fulfillment is in no way limited to Jews.

If we accept such a possibility and choose to pursue it, then faith alone is not sufficient. Nor are good works alone sufficient. If we are creating this reality through our thoughts as well as our deeds, then both our beliefs and our actions are critically important. Thus, to reject God or exclude God from our conceptions is to pursue an incomplete, broken, and ultimately dysfunctional model. Without God, one is inevitably left with the Machiavellian/Darwinian world of blind and random nature, devoid of any inherent ethics, justice, and purpose.

[A note on atheism:] While it is undeniable that one can be deeply and consistently ethical without actively believing in God, consistent ethical behavior (as opposed to situational, self-serving ethical behavior) ultimately rests on a belief in values that transcend personal needs and personal gain. And to believe in such “transcendental” values ultimately means our inner logic is founded on some sort of God idea. Many ethical atheists prefer not to pursue the logic of their beliefs, but in the end their atheism really rests on a religious, God-based foundation. Ideas such as “for the good of society” or “for the good of humankind” or “for the good of the earth” are all ways of submerging God into one’s beliefs without having to acknowledge God.

from Prolegomena to a New Spiritual Psychology

This is an excerpt from an essay I'm working on entitled Prolegomena to a New Spiritual Psychology. It is divided into a number of sections, including:
1. On perfectibility
2. Sensing the Divine
3. Knowing where we stand
4. What is faith?
5. On how we can discern our genomic nature?

This excerpt comes from the last section. Your critical feedback will be of great value to me.

Human institutions are the measure of our inherent, genomic values. They are the projection of the structures of our souls/consciousness/ phylogenic inheritance.  Categorizing those structures, those institutions, will help us see what our essential nature is, what I’ll call our genomic nature/essence/structure.

The primary institutions I am thinking of are religious and political, expressing our need for power, order, and meaning. Those institutions have created constitutions, canonical documents, and/or oral traditions. If we superimpose those canonical narratives and values over each other, we are able to ascertain the core narratives, the genomic essence of our laws. We will discern the ethics that define us all, that define our archetypes, our stereotypes, the core truth of us. This I call the organic view, a top down view, a deductive view, in which the individual is a minor variation in the genome.

Looking in the opposite way, from bottom up, from the individual towards the genome, an inductive view that observes the minute variations of the individual as it deviates from or conforms to the genome, this I will call the atomistic view. This is the view that characterizes much of modernism and post-modernism, thru deconstructionism, evolving out of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the politics of American democracy, and ironically*, Marxist philosophy, tending towards an anti-institutional stance and world view.

* I say that it is ironic that Marxist ideology supports the atomistic view because Marxism itself postulates a dominating role for central government. To this end its historical implementations have been anti-enlightenment, suppressing both the individual and non-institutional narratives. However, in its status as a minority opposition, it takes on a counter-institutional, Enlightenment stance!

The virtue of the organic view is that the genotype, the genomic essence is easily and fairly clearly derived, unobscured by atomistic variations. Shortly we will explore this as a methodology to derive conclusions about human genotypes, such as universal moral values. The virtue of the atomistic view is that it allows us to study and give value to individual variation. Developing this perspective as a methodology allows us to critique both institutions and individual narratives to discern where they fail and where they succeed.

The corollary to the above virtues is that the organic view will serve very poorly as a means to study the individual, and the atomistic view will serve very poorly at understanding archetypes and fundamental structures.

Indeed, both these views have often been used to draw conclusions where their knowledgebase is least qualified to do so. Thus, governments and religious institutions have suppressed minority and individual voices/narratives for the sake of maintaining authority and control, thus extinguishing information and knowledge and creativity, and destabilizing their ecological diversity and vitality. Equally destructive, atomistic thinking is incapable of discerning any inherent and defining structures in the profusion of individual perspectives. Thus, we have seen gulags, inquisitions, jihad, and death camps justified by institutions and their dogmas, and we have seen revolution, anarchy, the dissolution of individual worth, and the rejection of moral constraint, justified by ideologies based on relativism and egoism.

We now know that all the individual physical variations in the human species are the product of variation in less than 0.5% of the human physical genome*. While we are still unable to trace any links between the physical genome and human thought (indeed, we don’t even know what human thought is!), we can see quite clearly that well over 99% of the human physical genome is invariant, with the variation bell-curving narrowly away from the 99% mean, so with human thought, we are dominated by concerns, needs, and ideas that are as invariant as the 99+% of our physical genome.

* eg Wikipedia article “Human genetic variation”, where it says, “Genetic variation among humans occurs on many scales, from gross alterations in the human karyotype to single nucleotide changes.[6] Nucleotide diversity is the average proportion of nucleotides that differ between two individuals. The human nucleotide diversity is estimated to be 0.1%[7] to 0.4% of base pairs.[8]”
[6] Kidd, JM; et al. (2008). "Mapping and sequencing of structural variation from eight human genomes". Nature 453 (7191): 56–64. Bibcode:2008Natur.453...56K. doi:10.1038/nature06862. PMC 2424287. PMID 18451855.
[7] a b Jorde, LB; Wooding, SP (2004). "Genetic variation, classification and 'race'". Nature Genetics 36 (11s): S28–33. doi:10.1038/ng1435. PMID 15508000.
[8] a b Tishkoff, SA; Kidd, KK (2004). "Implications of biogeography of human populations for 'race' and medicine". Nature Genetics 36 (11s): S21–7. doi:10.1038/ng1438. PMID 15507999.

While from an atomistic point of view we appear, as individuals, to be unique and strikingly different, in both physical and mental manifestations, yet in fact, when observed organically we can see how minute our individual variations truly are.

So let me say again, just as we cannot trust the organic view (and most institutions) to properly value and protect individual variation, so we cannot trust the atomistic view to properly weigh and promote genomic (universal) standards.

multi-threaded nature of thought

My reading, reflecting my interests, spans a wide range of topics. However, the subject of thought – what it is and how we experience it - is almost entirely unexplored (with the exception of some lame and poorly written philosophical treatises on "mind"). It appears that, in large measure, most people think of "a thought" as a distinct, precise, and unalloyed unit, not unlike the idea of the "atom" as imagined in the late 19th century.

That late 19th century "atom", it turned out, is not the ultimate building block of matter, and indeed will probably end up being seen as a fictional unit altogether, discarded from scientific discourse. So too, it is becoming clear that our thoughts are not singular, fundamental units of consciousness, but are complex fabrics woven of many strands and fragments. Or to use another analogy, our thoughts are like symphonic compositions, with multiple instruments playing independent but related, or semi-related consonant and dissonant melodies, tones, and percussive beats.

This understanding of thought is derived from my direct experience, and emerges from the comprehensively documented observations of the highly superimposed nature of consciousness. To use a computing metaphor, human consciousness is a multi-tasking system, and each task is multi-threaded. At any given moment, consciousness is composed of multiple sensations, emotions, thoughts, and higher-order impressions and operations (these latter being beyond the threshold of common awareness), and each sensation, emotion, and thought is multi-threaded.

Most of the time most people are entirely unaware of this symphony of processing going on within them, that comprises human mentation. Indeed, we are wont to reduce this welter of processes to single thoughts, or single emotions, or single sensations, or at most, single (mostly) linear narratives. The arts, of course, challenge this kind of simplification. As noted, the symphony with its multiple instruments playing multiple melodies, phrases, and sounds replicates the multi-threaded nature of human consciousness. The novel, with its complex interacting characters and interwoven story lines replicates both the multi-tasking and multi-threading of consciousness. Yet, nowhere in literature, at least to my knowledge, has this exploration of complexity focused down into the multi-threaded functioning of consciousness itself. At most, we have stream-of-consciousness techniques exploring the uppermost level of awareness and its often non-linear narrative trajectory. 

Having introspectively explored my thinking processes for over 40 years, it seems appropriate (perhaps long overdue) that I now take my perspective down into the multiple threads of thought to try to unpack them. Perhaps the subject may seem more appropriate for a psychological essay or a phenomenological tract. But those forms lack both aesthetic richness and narrative ordering principles, and aesthetics and narrative are core components of consciousness. Therefore I am exploring these horizons of consciousness through a poetic lens, hoping, through a sort of stop-frame process, to expose a more accurate and nuanced representation of human mentation.

In my next post will you will be able to read (and critique) a first draft of just such an exploration.

Two psychological observations

These two pieces from my notebooks come nearly 35 years apart. One is from today, one from July, 1977.

1/26/12, 2 Shevat 5772, week of Bo
Four critical and fundamental errors in human analytical thinking:
1. The confusion of emotional attachment with ‘facticity’, truth; vis belief in God becomes dogma and supporting evidence (Bible) becomes incontrovertible; or, feelings of love can cause us to mis-see and misunderstand the person that is loved and the situation in which that love exists.
2. Confusion of emotional intensity for degree of certainty; vis the more comfort one derives from belief in God, the more certain one is of God’s existence; or, the more desperate our need for companionship, the more certain we may become that someone loves us.
3. The confusion that personal perspective is ‘true’ and co-equal with universal perspective; vis the certainty that whatever political beliefs one inclines towards, those beliefs are the correct (or better, CORRECT) way of understanding the situation.
4. The confusion that consciousness, observation, is an unmediated experience, and NOT an interpretive, filtered, and often profoundly limited or occulted experience; vis, the belief that what we see with our eyes is not merely real, but unimpeachable and unbiased ‘fact’.

Antidotes to ingest liberally:
1. facts all come with a point of view
2. observation and interpretation are co-equal
3. emotion is the carriage upon which all thought rides
4. there is no such thing as a single and pure emotion; all emotions resolve into other emotions

Trained philosophers and psychologists who reject or denigrate emotion and extol reason are equally subject to these four confusions. Emotion is a fact of consciousness, shaping and coloring it, whether it is obvious or not, whether it is intense or subtle, foregrounded or undertoned. It is there shaping, coloring, focusing, distorting, transforming, hiding the inputs of experience. Reason distinct from emotion is a conceptual illusion, a false ideal, a Newtonian distortion of the quantum mechanical nature of consciousness/reality. (I use ‘quantum mechanical’ here as a philosophical and psychological model of thought, and not merely as a way of studying matter and energy.)


7/3/77, Kayseri, Turkey
Symbolic thought:
Human consciousness is determined and constrained by density of thought. Density of thought means the number of conscious images and thoughts occurring in a given period. Even in highly exciting moments like the minutes before a race or curtain call, or the seconds before an auto-collision, there are only so many thoughts that consciously pass thru the mind. The actual number seems constrained by the normal activity of mental exertion The more one is able to concentrate, the more concentrated thoughts can be, ie, the denser the thoughts become. Like a thread or wire or beam that can hold so much tension [or transmit so much data - smb, 2012], so our consciousness can endure only so much stress. Beyond that limit it snaps, or blanks out; the system crashes. That limit can be extended by active practice of methods of concentration, however.

But this is the essential point: increased thought density does not work on a linear or algebraically continuous basis. At some point the many thoughts condense or merge into one or a few thoughts or images, like changing energy levels in an atom or molecule. One increases to a limit the number of thoughts per moment and then, remarkably, they condense into a symbol or archetype, and the working number of thoughts suddenly reduces [the ‘aha’ moment; epiphany] and the [potential] intensity of thought increases on an equivalent basis. This is a functional (phenomenological) description of the formation of symbols and symbolic thought.

Transforming our psychological ground

Our work:
Transforming the psychology of accumulation
To the psychology of sensitivity;
The psychology of control and conquest
To the psychology of empathy and compassion.

These are goals that cannot be framed in 12-step programs or 5 year plans. This is not a generation’s issue or a systemic flaw to be fixed with new laws or higher average wages. These are changes that work in evolutionary time, not human time, and our human engagement, if it is to be sustained, must be embedded in, and central to ideologies that have trans-generational endurance. I think specifically here of religious ideologies.

These ideals will come into direct conflict with political and economic desires, where accumulation of power and wealth is the guiding animus, and in which individuals are driven by nothing more than the dictates of self, which require an enemy, a competitor, or lower economic or social classes to motivate action and measure success. Respect and empathy, on the other hand, are values that require, in large measure, effacement of self, or more accurately, a higher sense of self. This is counter to our biological condition. Therefore, many will argue against the very viability of such an ideal, and those that argue for it will be working against a daunting gradient in biology.

However, I would argue that there is a counter-gradient in nature, a spiritual or divine gradient, more subtle than biology, and working on a longer wavelength, such that biology will appear dominant and more efficacious in generational time, but spirit will prevail in evolutionary time.

This is not mere fantasy or romanticism. It is now 2500 years since the Hebrew Prophets first articulated the basis for these ideals, and since then we see that for every cresting of political oppression and predatory economics, consistently and irresistibly there have arisen social, religious, political, and economic forces to counter and overthrow these regimes.

Witness: the re-emergence of Catholic faith in religiously eviscerated Poland, a re-emergence and resurgence strong enough to cast off the yoke of a superpower.

Witness: Marxist ideology, founded on deeply flawed sociological and psychological principles, which was yet able to swell in a single generation to effectively counter unrestrained predatory capitalism. Core principles of Marxism are now integral components of all high-functioning capitalistic systems, including unions and coops, workman’s comp and unemployment compensation, social security and universal health care. (Ironically, we do not yet see a similar, but opposite integration into most communist/Marxist systems, which remain predatory on the individual. However, Kerala state in India may be one of a few emerging counter-examples. Some might also argue that the Scandinavian countries are Marxist states that have successfully integrated capitalism.)

Witness: the emergence of a culturally, economically, and politically vibrant (and militarily powerful) Jewish state in the face of the most profound disaster to the Jewish people since the Roman destruction. Is there another example of such a reversal of fortune in all of history? Note also the rapid migration of anti-Jewish animus from Christian lands to Muslim lands, exposing the temporally local biological cross-currents and backwashes that are trying to counter the aeonic, spiritual tides of a Jewish national identity.

Indeed, I would argue that today the teaching of the Prophets is more well-known and more motivational than at any time in history, and that the force of their words, within and outside of religions, will increasingly shape political and economic systems.

Witness: the success of the American experiment based on prophetic ideals of freedom, justice, and equality, and of the value of the individual. America was founded to counter “divine right” and social and economic entitlement and ossification. The US continues to be a powerful magnet, drawing the best, brightest, and most idealistic from nations around the world, thus enhancing the likelihood of its continuing success. I would argue that America is the first example of a nation constituted on the prophetic ideals derived from the divine wavelengths valuing sensitivity and empathy over accumulation and power. The critical reader, of course, will immediately note how the biological cross-currents and backwashes of accumulation and power have swept across, and are disrupting these spiritual forces.

Concerning the sacred and profane

Prolegomena to Rebuilding our Moral Foundations

A fundamental distinction that human beings make
     is between the sacred and the profane,
     the moral and the evil,
     that is, between what is holy and “Godlike”
     and what is merely animal.
I believe it is a presumption and a lie
     to claim to know God's will, God's “desires”.
     But by evolving our understanding of the holy
     and pursuing its manifestations in our life
     we can approach, to some degree,
     a certitude of God's being
     and a sense of awareness of God's Presence.
The primary value in being aware of God's Presence
     is that it may help inspire us
     to higher ethical standards
     and it may help support us
     in times of grief and trouble.
Thus:

The Category of the Profane:
There is nothing holy about hatred.
There is nothing holy about anger.
There is nothing holy about violence.
There is nothing holy about bitterness.
There is nothing holy about cynicism.
There is nothing holy about controlling others.
This core of destructive emotions and behaviors
     all incline us towards the profane.

All of these emotions and behaviors
     are part of our being and part of our life.
We will express them sometimes, or often,
     And we must process them constantly,
     but there is, literally, nothing holy in them.
There will be times when such feelings
     may be an appropriate response
     to the world and its events,
     but because they may be appropriate responses
     does not make them holy,
     and therefore, they can never serve
     to elevate us towards the moral,
     and towards God's Presence.
     They are essentially degenerative.
Indeed, the more we feel and express them
     the further we will move away from God's Presence.
Finally, although there are times and situations
     when these feelings may be appropriate,
     even necessary,
When they become the guiding light
     of a person, a group, a nation, an ideology,
     they not only degenerate us morally,
     but they become a marker of a degenerative ideology
     and they can be called evil, unequivocally.
     As such, they become a dangerous enemy
     to the individual, the group, the species.

The Category Between Sacred and Profane:
This is the general realm of the existential,
     the psychological, and the social,
     and is the topic of many, if not most, books.
Most of what we feel and do
     is not inherently sacred or profane.
     Neither does it inherently move us
     towards evil or the moral.
Nonetheless, most of what we feel and do is driven
     by our sacred and profane feelings and motives,
     even though those motives
     may be hidden from our awareness.
Feelings and experiences such as
     fear, pain, suffering, and despair
     tend to damage the individual
     and stunt one's growth towards the sacred.
     It is uncommon for them to generate
     healing and growth
     although, in an environment of healing,
     later growth may occur.
This category of feeling, doing and experiencing –
     the human sitz-in-leben between sacred and profane –
     however compelling a topic of discussion,
     is not my topic here.

The Category of the Sacred:
Compassion strongly inclines us towards the holy.
Charity strongly inclines us towards the holy.
Love strongly inclines us towards the holy.
Prayer inclines us towards the holy.
Self-control inclines us towards the holy.
Respect inclines us towards the holy.
Gentleness inclines us towards the holy.
Some rituals will incline us towards the holy.
Art and creativity can incline us towards the holy.
Joy and pleasure can incline us towards the holy.

All of these emotions and behaviors
     are part of our being and our life.
We may express them sometimes, or often.
They seek to be constantly processed
     and integrated into our being
     although we may be largely unaware of them
     some or much of the time.
They do not originate from animal needs and drives,
     but animal needs and drives
     can sometimes express or further them.

               As an aside:
               The common scientific blindness
               to that aspect of being
               that is not animal,
               but rather of the holy, of the divine,
               is a fundamental stumbling block
               to scientific accuracy
               in theory and practice.

Yet none of these feelings and behaviors
     are inherently holy.
Neither can these feelings and behaviors
     be purely and exclusively holy
     even if done in the most exemplary manner
     by the most exemplary person.
These feelings and behaviors are always mixed
     with profane feelings and behaviors,
     particularly the profane desire to control others.
For this reason, even these feelings and behaviors
     that incline to the holy
     can become a means to do profane and evil things.
For example:
     to claim that there is only one correct way
     to do sacred behaviors
     is a blatant falsehood,
     and an active means of controlling others,
     and is therefore, profane, and inclines to evil,
     even though the conscious intention
     is to guide to the holy.

Shaping Communities to Incline towards the Sacred:
It is appropriate to punish profane action.
It is inappropriate to punish profane feelings and thoughts.
It is appropriate to critically challenge
     profane feelings and thoughts by exploring their motives
     and their potential consequences.
Proper education will incline
     away from profane thoughts and behaviors
     and towards the sacred,
     but no education, however exemplary,
     is capable of eliminating profane feelings
     and behaviors.

It is inappropriate to punish a failure to do sacred actions.
It is appropriate to critically encourage
     sacred feelings and thoughts
     by exploring their mixed motives,
     and their potential consequences,
     sacred and profane.
It is appropriate to encourage sacred action
     so long as care is taken
     to understand and evaluate
     the non-sacred motives within every sacred action.

Homeostasis, evolution, and paganism

What follows is a non-poetic restatement of the ideas in my poem “XIII” of “Pesez ov an Unrevelen Narrattiv”, which is a poem-series in my longer poem Mith ov the Aternen Jew.

While exploring the psychological roots of anti-Semitism, it has occurred to me that the contents of consciousness can be generated by interior workings of the body itself. Indeed, much of what we call myth (such as the various myths of the Jew, or the idea of Messiah, or ideas and stories about God or The Gods) may be seen as a narrativization of biological forces. This is not so strange as it might, at first, sound. The idea is derived by understanding that homeostasis and evolution are two conflicting forces in nature, and it is further substantiated by the circularity of consciousness. Let me explain.

Homeostasis is, to quote that intellectual cornerstone, Wikipedia,

...the property of a system, either open or closed, that regulates its internal environment and tends to maintain a stable, constant condition. Typically used to refer to a living organism, the concept came from that of milieu interieur that was created by Claude Bernard and published in 1865. Multiple dynamic equilibrium adjustment and regulation mechanisms make homeostasis possible.

Thus, all living creatures rely on homeostasis, the body-mind’s attempt to survive by maintaining balance and stability in an environment that is inherently, and ultimately, destabilizing and destructive.

One of those forces that is pitted against homeostasis is evolution. Evolutionary changes reconfigure both interior and exterior biological “landscapes”, causing organisms to constantly rebalance and reconfigure their systems to optimize survival. Exterior evolutionary and environmental changes threaten an organism’s ability to survive by changing the conditions of the niche in which the organism lives. Interior evolutionary changes, that is evolutionary changes in an organism itself, directly confront the homeostatic systems that manage an organism. The organism’s own systems now must compete for control of resources and management functions. From a homeostatic “point of view”, evolutionary changes are invasive and threatening systems.

I would suggest that these interior stresses, while largely subconscious, yet get converted to narratives, as the mind seeks explanations for its stresses. This narrativization of biological stressors is not surprising. One of the conundrums (or ironies) of human consciousness is that we are bound by the circularity of our senses. We use our senses to observe what our senses are. We are not able to step out of ourselves, to step out of our bodies, and perceive what our senses really are, or what our senses are truly perceiving. The notion that our senses are merely windows on reality, while alluring, is unfortunately just a simplistic attempt to step out of our inherent circularity. Acknowledging this circularity, we are forced to the notion that our minds, as our senses, are interpreters and mythmakers, not raw observers. Our identities are myths, as are our ideologies. Thus, our biology will serve our mythmaking, as part of our general experience.

By the way, I use the term “myth” here both in its lesser sense as “illusion”, and in its more elevated sense as a foundational layer of consciousness. Our myths are full of illusion, and yet they can also be our best attempts to understand the circular reality into which we are bound. Thus, for me, “science” is also myth.

We humans are a species in the midst of evolutionary stresses, both interior and exterior. Our particular interior competitions and stresses generated by evolution amplify the exterior stresses of survival, causing a persistent tendency to build a narrative of ethnic invasion. Thus we have biological as well as social stresses tending to create myths of the “other”. This would help account for the persistence of anti-Semitism and its many underlying narratives, including its most modern incarnation, anti-Zionism – hatred of the idea of a Jewish nation.

One final detail, critical to my semi-narrative poem Mith ov the Aternen Jew. While evolution is generally believed to proceed randomly, evolutionary forces are well known to pursue gradients, that is, to fill niches in nature. In my poem I claim that there are gradients in nature that are working to eliminate paganistic thinking. In this case I define “pagan” not in the traditional religious way - the worship of idols and “false” gods - but in psychological terms. Paganistic thinking claims that law and ethics are relative and human productions, and that therefore, there is no one correct system of law or ethics.

I would argue that history suggests the opposite. It appears that humans are moving towards a singular and unified definition of law and ethics. Tribal borders and ethnicities are rapidly breaking down (the foundational cause of Islamic terrorism, by the way). In this process, languages, too are rapidly disappearing.

It seems the biblical prophets understood this particular gradient working on human consciousness, unabashedly claiming that one law and one moral standard would dominate the world. There now seems to be much evidence to that effect, even as we struggle to know, and to shape, what that law and ethics is. What were once prophetic statements that appeared to be arrogantly ethnocentric and wildly implausible, now seem to be the first harbingers of the obvious and the necessary.

Thus I say, there ARE gradients directing evolution, and it seems some of them became a source of ideological belief, long before there was evidence to substantiate them.

Zeno's Paradox

I have been fascinated by Zeno's Paradox for at least 4 decades, and there must be many dozens of musings scattered through my notebooks on the topic, including not a few solutions to the paradox. This is my latest musing.

5/15/2010, Shabbat Bemidbar, plane to DC
Reading Bohm, Implicate Order, pp. 199 to a third of the way down 201.

Zeno’s paradox, although appearing to pertain to motion, really is about consciousness and the perception of time. In consciousness, time is overlapping, like a series of semi-transparent images arrayed and overlapping each other. The term I have used is “superimposition” and in some cases “embedded,” while Bohm uses “enfolded.” As our sense of time is superimposed (a fundamental property of consciousness), so events are embedded in each other, and “now” includes some indeterminate component of “past” and “future.” The more expanded and expansive (expansen) our consciousness, the more the past and future is “embedden” in our “now.” Indeed, we must not think of time as a single thread, and in the same way, we must not think of consciousness as a single thread, or even as just a few threads. Our math, Aristotelian, Euclidean, as it is, distorts and misrepresents reality. We mathematically represent motion as a vector, but it is really multiple vectors, which in the calculus of consciousness are synthesized and unified, a simplification useful for most applications, but inaccurate as we begin to unpack the actual “workings” (in quotes because the term implies a mechanistic representation, and consciousness is not mechanistic) of consciousness and our awareness of minute periods of time and motion. When we try to stop-frame time, we realize it can’t be done. Just as a geometric point is a fiction, so is an instant in time. However, an instant in consciousness is not only an indeterminately short moment, it is a series or compilation of time frames, long and short, extending back, potentially thousands of years, or more, and forward in ways and “distances” we cannot calculate or comprehend.

Hercules overtakes the turtle because the geometric model that would restrain him with its infinite regression is fundamentally flawed. It posits time as a single line made up of an infinite number of tangent points. But time is not a single line, it is not even linear, and there are no such things as instants.

At my horizon, and hazy still:

1. Time is a complex superimposition of multiple frame-periods, individually discontinuous (?), and variable in their endurance/extension, (reified, integrated synthesized) by consciousness.

2. Human will/intentionality is the (necessity)(?) that generates this uni-dimensional synthesis, this illusion of a single thread of time, of moments, of motion, and of divisibility. I say will is what drives us to create the Euclidean illusions of time because will is what motivates us build, make tools, hunt, plan, and calculate, and all these functions require that time be simplified into one dimension in a series of causally connected moments.

3. Concepts and perceptions of predictability and control derive from archaic portions of consciousness that incline us to strip reality of its complexities.

found this in my notebook

Those that act with most force in the world
Rarely act for good (or achieve much good).
Those that act with most good in the world
Rarely act with force.

The measure of force required
Is a crude measure of an action's ungood.

Learned at a Facing History seminar

As a teacher, one of the most important resources and teaching methods I have encountered is the Facing History and Ourselves approach (http://www.facing.org/home). They describe themselves as "Helping classrooms and communities worldwide link the past to moral choices today."

In an online seminar I am currently taking with them I came across the writings of Eboo Patel, an American Muslim from India. Among his many accomplishments, he is the founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core. I don't often post other people's writings here, but this little anecdote is worth repeating many times. He writes:

When I was in college, I had the sudden realization that all of my heroes were people of deep faith: Dorothy Day, the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, the Aga Khan. Moreover, they were all of different faiths. A little more research revealed two additional insights. First, This reading contains excerpts from Eboo Patel’s, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation. religious cooperation had been central to the work of most of these faith heroes. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. partnered with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in the struggle for civil rights. Mahatma Gandhi stated that Hindu Muslim unity was just as important to him as a free India. Second, each of my faith heroes assumed an important leadership role at a young age. King was only twenty-six years old when he led the Montgomery bus boycott. Gandhi was even younger when he started his movement against unjust laws in early-twentieth-century South Africa.

. . . In high school, the group I ate lunch with included a Cuban Jew, a Nigerian Evangelical, and an Indian Hindu. We were all devout to a degree, but we almost never talked about our religions with one another. Often somebody would announce at the table that he couldn’t eat a certain kind of food, or any food at all, for a period of time. We all knew religion hovered behind this, but nobody ever offered any explanation deeper than “my mom said,” and nobody ever asked for one.

This silent pact relieved all of us. We were not equipped with a language that allowed us to explain our faith to others or to ask about anyone else’s. Back then, I thought little about the dangers lurking within this absence. A few years after we graduated, my Jewish friend reminded me of a dark time during our adolescence. There were a group of kids in our high school who, for several weeks, took up scrawling anti-Semitic slurs on classroom desks and making obscene statements about Jews in the hallways. I did not confront them. I did not comfort my Jewish friend. I knew little about what Judaism meant to him, less about the emotional effects of anti-Semitism, and next to nothing about how to stop religious bigotry. So I averted my eyes and avoided my friend, because I couldn’t stand to face him.

A few years later, he described to me the fear he had experienced coming to school those days, and his utter loneliness as he had watched his close friends simply stand by. Hearing him recount his suffering and my complicity is the single most humiliating experience of my life. I did not know it in high school, but my silence was betrayal: betrayal of Islam, which calls upon Muslims to be courageous and compassionate in the face of injustice; betrayal of America, a nation that relies on its citizens to hold up the bridges of pluralism when others try to destroy them; betrayal of India, a country that has too often seen blood flow in its cities and villages when extremists target minorities and others fail to protect them. My friend needed more than my silent presence at the lunch table.

Pluralism is not a default position, an autopilot mode. Pluralism is an intentional commitment that is imprinted through action. It requires deliberate engagement with difference, outspoken loyalty to others, and proactive protection in the breach. You have to choose to step off the faith line onto the side of pluralism, and then you have to make your voice heard. To follow Robert Frost, it is easy to see the death of pluralism in the fire of a suicide bombing. But the ice of silence will kill it just as well.

Scientific Poetic Fragments

Arkettekcherrel Fragmenz Ammung the Ruwenz

1.
You are not what you appear to be.
Consciousness is not a clear glass;
The world is not a polished mirror.
As a drop of water is distinct
     From the vapor that expressed it,
A different state of itself;
As salt dissolved is distinct from its crystal form,
So are we,
From a finer matter condensed into living crystal,
And distorted by sense, and the coarseness of thought.

2.
Speken on the sixth day:
     “O mordel Addom
     “I will kreyate a werl with yu.
     “I will brake yu
     “An grate lite will por frum yur mienz.
     “I will replakkate yu,
     “Bilden bloks aplentee,
     “All simmaller an uneek.
     “I will press yu and twist yu
     “An stress yur hart
     “Tu make yu a lume
     “An weev a bodee a lite
     “Kompilen yur faent flashen.

Two Undefinable Equations

While pondering whether time, like energy, may be non-continuous, its passage being, thus, a series of discrete quanta, I came to this conclusion: there are two fundamental conundrums that mediate all knowledge.

The first:
Time and space are not pre-existing, distinct phenomena. They are interlinked in a determinate way. The equation linking them, like the reciprocity of electricity and magnetism, would show that they are, in fact, two manifestations of a single phenomenon. However, we do not have the means to step outside the space-time continuum and observe and measure the interrelationship. Thus the equation showing their reciprocity must remain undefinable.

The second:
We can be certain that the distinctions between mental and physical, or mind and body, are illusions. Consciousness is the continuum in which all human experience is embedded. As such, mind and body are reciprocal aspects of the continuum of consciousness. However, here again we cannot step outside consciousness, and thus we are entirely unable to determine the boundaries between mind and body, and more generally, self and non-self, dream and non-dream, real and unreal, truth and fantasy. However convinced we are of the verity of our experiences, and the truth of our beliefs, in fact, we live in utter indeterminacy.

And it is in this state that we must proceed, perhaps more humbly than we have been inclined, as a species, up to now.

revision to "Judgement in the Divine Court", 2

As I mentioned in my previous post, here is the first normspell translation of the poem, II. Juj Men in the Divvine Korten. Really, normspell and stevespell are old terms that don’t do justice to the transformation of language going on in my current poetry. I am not merely altering words and grammar and spelling for their own effect. I am composing, in one text, multiple statements with divergent meanings embedded into each other.

I am not aware that anyone else is doing anything even remotely similar in English. I do not say that with arrogance. What I am doing may be a total waste of your time. Even so, my experience in writing it has a unique and elevating quality to it. It seems to be forcing me to understand the world in an entirely new way.

You know that “new way.” You’ve heard it a thousand times before, but not quite like this. We must learn to see the world from multiple perspectives. But I’m not saying that we merely need to see the multiplicity. We must integrate those perspectives, allowing mutual admissibility, not just of what is compatible, but of what is contradictory. I am not talking about juxtaposition. Juxtaposition does not require integration. Nor does it require moral judgment. We juxtapose and we pick and choose. We juxtapose and we become relativists.

I am talking about formulating an intellectual and spiritual foundation for a diverse society, that is able to draw the borders between acceptable individualism, and the depredations of extremism. To achieve this, we must restructure the way we think. It is not enough to be well-read. Bigots can be well-read. It is not enough to be open-minded. Naive fools can be open-minded. We must see broadly, and then process what we see in a more integrated and critical/self-critical fashion.

I offer this writing as a possible model. Perhaps it is a good one; perhaps not. Well, what of it? But if Western society does not succeed in this venture, the great experiment of democracy and individualism will fail. And the likes of the 10 men in Mumbai that murdered hundreds will usher in our new world.

II. Judgement of our Divine Courtship

From their heavenly realms the Prophets of the Ancient of Days
Observe the worlds that they have bestirred.

Moses and his sanhedrin of disciples sit;
They, the human generation of Adonai.
From Yehoshua and Shmuel to Ezra and Malachi
Their court dictates through Israel, God’s beloved.
Tremulous, the people try to obey,
But even though their Soul is of the Messiah,
Its presence whispers so nebulously,
And this earth is so brash. What can they hear?
     Accept Israel for the sake of unity,
     And their word will extinguish the interfering worlds!

And into visionary fields, fallow and fertile,
In scorn, men went from the Temple to plow;
These two in caustic soil up to their teeth:

Jesus, his lone and enchanting voice,
Bits of abstract tales in a language unknown.
But his minions imagine his words are clear,
That he speaks a language that corresponds to what they hear.
They trample and stampede in their dreamlike hearing,
But when they will wake, they won’t believe a word.

From his tome of God-war comes the echos of Muhammed
Repenting. Hear his terrible groans,
His twisting and shaking from hate-full wisdom:
     “By my faith I have bred a house of pollution.
     “My book is a plan to build warrens of hate.
     “The jihad verses see a world so corrupt –
     “What a dim view of the holy Soul.
     “To carve into my children a realm of peace,*
                                                  *“Dar el Islam”
     “Behold the bloody knife that I bear!
     “Islam itself is the Dar el Harb.*
                                                  *”region of war”
     “To my Lord I have drawn them in brutish garb.”
Muhammed has turned his back on the soul
Of his generations. Till their will is broken,
He will intercede, that their work will fail.

Hans Jonas: The Imperative of Responsibility

The following link is, in my opinion, essential reading. It is a review of the book Memoirs: Hans Jonas. As discussed in the review, and as is obvious to any educated human, the twentieth century saw the dismantling of ethics from philosophy, art, literature, and science. And in the process Hitler killed his 11 million, Stalin his 20 million, Mao his 70 million. Genocide persists from Cambodia to Darfur. Yet the arts, philosophy, and science have blinked and turned away, saying ethics are relative; there is no God; this is not our topic.

The core idea of this review is that we can not, must not abdicate our commitment to establishing, and living out, a set of values and moral responsibilities that create dignity and respect for all human beings. And as far as I’m concerned, at least when it comes to art and literature, any other topic is an utter waste of time.

From Powell’s Books, Review-a-Day for Thu, Nov 6: Memoirs: Hans Jonas (Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry:
http://www.powells.com/review/2008_11_06.html?utm_source=overview&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss_overview&utm_content=Memoirs%3A%20Hans%20Jonas%20(Tauber%20Institute%20for%20the%20Study%20of%20European%20Jewry)&PID=18

The following is a juicy excerpt:
In his Memoirs, Jonas dismisses his early work on Gnosticism as a "journeyman's project," and prefers to stress the philosophical biology of his later years, but elsewhere in his work there is plenty of evidence for an intimate interrelation between the two. In "Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism," an essay that he published in 1952, Jonas suggested that the alienation of the ancient Gnostic from the created world was similar to that of the modern nihilist, with this difference: whereas the Gnostic creation had at least a negative transcendence, the modern one is completely indifferent, utterly wanting in the possibility of any and all transcendence, and therefore more terrifying. Already in the seventeenth century, with God not yet dead but increasingly non-interventionist in his creation, Pascal was getting scared: "Cast into the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened." But the terror of scientific modernity, entirely stripped of any teleological view of nature, is much worse. "That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss," Jonas declared. "That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation."

Time is Illusion

As Rovelli explains it, in quantum mechanics all particles of matter and energy can also be described as waves. And waves have an unusual property: An infinite number of them can exist in the same location. If time and space are one day shown to consist of quanta, the quanta could all exist piled together in a single dimensionless point. "Space and time in some sense melt in this picture," says Rovelli. "There is no space anymore. There are just quanta kind of living on top of one another without being immersed in a space."...

Einstein, for one, found solace in his revolutionary sense of time. In March 1955, when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died, he wrote a letter consoling Besso's family: "Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

The rabbis concur in their biblical exegesis. "There is no past or future in Torah," they teach. Therefore they are not bound by the vector of time and its inherent causality. Thus Abraham is bound by the laws of Kashrut (keeping kosher) even tho those laws were received "historically" 400 or more years after Abraham died, and Jacob studied in a Yeshiva (a school of Jewish learning, especially Talmud) even tho Talmud was not compiled until about 500 CE, or about 2400 years after Jacob died! From a historian's point of view, this kind of exegesis sounds like mere foolishness. From the point of view of quantum mechanics, the rabbis were brilliantly prescient.

Consciousness and personal narratives

Phenomenological observations:

In the eleven hours of intense prayer/introspection of Yom Kippur, I found myself contemplating, and critiquing, the narrative (narratives) that I have constructed to give shape, identity, and meaning to my life. In other words, I was researching, editing and rewriting my past.

Everyone does this, altho it seems many or most people do it quite unconsciously. So let me amplify: Our personal (and public) narratives are not just a compendium of all our experiences. Our narratives are constructed with much effort, however unconsciously. We include and exclude events from the sum of our experiences. But the process is not merely a winnowing. We edit, revise, distort, deny, and create ex nihilo, our past as we manage our narratives.

This process is not just limited to people in therapy. It is a day to day part of every human life. Going on a diet, managing anger, engaging in a rant, building a relationship, unraveling a relationship, going to work, staying home from work. These all involve building and editing our personal and public narratives. Indeed, everything we do is grist for the mill of our narrative building. And to observe ourselves doing this is what we call phenomenology.

To say this differently, we not only think our thoughts and do what we do. We also watch ourselves thinking our thoughts and doing what we do. And, as we watch ourselves doing what we do, we edit what and how we remember it. Problem is, what we leave out is not simply gone. What we edit and distort does not simply replace what actually happened. What we create does not simply take its place in the narrative without trace.

Our minds are compendiums of all that we experience, of all that we perceive and all that we misperceive, and all that we distort. The more inaccurate, distorted, and imaginary our narratives, the more limited and burdened and blind we become. The more static and bounded our narrative, the more constrained and choked our lives become.

Thus the process of narrative-editing is an existential necessity, if we are to change, grow, and renew ourselves. We read about this in various holy texts. It is true. The blind can regain sight. The troubled and the burdened can become free (or, more accurately, freer).A moral imperative can emerge in a hedonistic or cynical or sociopathic life.

Need I mention that a significant rethinking of one’s narrative is rarely fast, easy, or pleasant?

Turning back to the phenomenological process itself, we come to realize that we have multiple threads of thought concurrently ongoing in our consciousness. These layers include the obvious intellectual, emotional, and sensory layers. But we also think on supra-rational and supra-sensual (extrasensory) layers, as well as instinctual and autonomic layers. And at the same time we have multiple layers of self-observation overseeing all these processes.

Jung and others have lumped much of this multi-tiered thinking into 2 categories, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. I am trying here to be more precise than that. Being more precise, we can shed light on these “unconscious” realms, and we can more carefully, accurately, and responsibly edit our personal narratives. And thus we might increase our mental and moral development, our sensitivity to and respect for earth and the life it contains, and our awareness of a partnership with the Divine to create a world of kindness.

Europa, Europa: further discussion #2

The following is from a review of the book Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture, by Alan Sokal, written by Simon Blackburn for the “New Republic.” You can find the whole review at [http://www.powells.com/review/2008_08_14.html?utm_source=overview&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss_overview&utm_content=Beyond%20the%20Hoax%3A%20Science%2C%20Philosophy%20and%20Culture&PID=18].

While most of this article is not terribly pertinent to my poem Europa, Europa, the following excerpt, speaking of the limits, if not the end of relativism, is a clear statement of what is the beginning place for my poem. If you don’t understand and agree with the following, you will surely have trouble with the poem.

...but consider in this connection also "political liberalism," the heading under which John Rawls could imagine the peoples of the world willingly leaving their ideological and cultural differences at the door and coming into the political arena carrying only that which they hold in common. What they had in common turned out to be a birthright of reason sufficient all by itself to enchant them with a nice liberal democratic constitution, amazingly like that of the United States, or perhaps western Europe. Conflict could be talked through and violence abated. When the philosophers explained the right way to live, everyone would fall happily into line. Innocent times.

But no longer. The present decade is different. The United States has had its wake-up call, and may have others just as loud. It has been told, brutally, that disagreement matters, and that if our grasp of what we need to defend is feeble enough, there are people out there only too happy to wrest it away from us. It has reacted even more brutally to that alarm by declaring war on people who had nothing to do with it in the first place, and then conducting that war with counterproductive barbarity. It has learned that there is not much common reason that is everyone's birthright -- that when disagreement comes, people cannot afford to shrug.

There are times when we have to do better than [say] "whatever" and "anything goes." A country needs to understand what is good, and also what is not good, about its preferred ways of living. It needs to understand what is good, and why, about its science, history, and self-understandings; and it even needs to understand what was good, and why, about the politics and the ethics [or religion] that it may have abandoned, let us hope temporarily.

I am a Jew, not a Christian, but I have come to understand the value and importance of Christianity, in spite of its failings. The abandonment of a such a faith by the majority, no matter the reasons, will create a vacuum that will be filled, as surely as any physical vacuum. If Christianity needs to be renewed, then now is the time to do it. If not, be assured, another God-based faith will replace it. Europe, I call on you to take possession of your future, and not abandon it to “whatever.”

Europa, Europa: further discussion

My very good friend and fellow pilgrim, Greg Barker responded in this way to my poem of July 24, 2008, Europa, Europa:

GB:
Powerful. The Muslim flood IS coming. And it seems that you are suggesting that Freethinking-Atheism will not be providing anything more than that which can be choked on.

SMB:
My thought is that hollow men do not have the wherewithal to resist people with a mission. And that an empty soul will seek to be filled.

GB:
Can you tell me more about:
Their little bigots, they call them prophets,
Whose manifesto reads, "You are the hollow men."

SMB:
T.S. Eliot., the so-called great poet/prophet of C20, and his equally bigoted sidekick Ezra Pound. These men have done untold damage to culture, in my opinion. These are the kind of people that the Prophet Jeremiah railed against. And I will follow in Jeremiah’s footsteps.

GB:
I could carry on with so many more questions that this has sparked...and don't know if you want to go down these roads...but I'll put it out there anyways. I think the George Lucas of the 70's had some parallel concerns. Did he offer any solution in his mythology?

SMB:
Not sure what you mean here. The battle between good and evil in Star Wars? I'm not saying Islam is evil in this poem. I'm saying Europe's soul is dying, and that Christianity is in big trouble and may need some serious rethinking if it wants to survive in Europe. I'm hinting at the fact that nazism may have succeeded in at least one of its programs. By undermining and discrediting Europe’s Christian foundations, Europe has been re-paganized, in a manner of speaking. In the end Europe’s secular paganism will not stand up against existential spiritual yearnings, and the focus and authority of monotheism.

Where might this all go? Clearly, Europe won't become Jewish [smile]. But either Christianity will revitalize itself, or Islam will make significant, even massive inroads. The revitalization of Christianity is not out of the question. We see a religious resurgence in Eastern Europe and Russia after its long-standing ideological suppression. However, the Islamification of secular Europe might be a very interesting thing if it brings about the liberalizing of Islam's fundamentalism. Wouldn't that be an ironic and surprising development? And with a liberal Islam, the religious wars of the last 2000 years might very well come to a non-apocalyptic, and spiritually elevated end! We might finally be able to put the jihadist and hate-embedded apocalyptic mythology of Christianity and Islam behind us.

Why I write verses

An angel came and plopped himself down in my study last night. No one listened to him but me. Some people didn’t even see him. Sad, sad world we live in, eh? Oh well. He said,

“It is difficult to see a way ahead for the human race--though I fully believe there must be ways ahead.”

I suppose he was checking to see how closely my thoughts aspired to his. I’ll have to ask him the next time he stops by. Anyway, this is what I said, more or less:

Defining and declaring those ways ahead is critical. As I've said many times, quoting/misquoting Fred Turner, ‘we cannot build a better world if we don't first imagine what it will look like.’

Putting aside those who can only look backwards and cluck their tongues at how bad the world has become. And those who can only make cynical comments about our current state, but who have themselves done absolutely nothing to find a better path forward. And those who draw realistic pictures of the world and say, ‘this is all there is.’ And those who exaggerate, twist up, misrepresent, and just plain lie about how things are, in their vicious hypocrisy. There are yet many with faith, who believe that we can find a good way forward.

But too often those with such faith look so far ahead, they lose touch with who/what/where we are. Most religious thinkers and moralizers are driven by messianic visions that hang only by a thread to this world. Or take Marx, in his socialist dream. He is a perfect example of a utopian who forgot that he had to work with real people. Can anyone articulate the next step, rather than the final step? The final step is easy: people who are moral, wise, happy, full of wonder and love.

So how can we invoke more love from ourselves? That is a question dear to my angel friend, and is a theme he is working on in all his mystical machinations. How can we inspire more wonder? That was A.J. Heschel's theme. The problem is, we actually need to build the tools, and not just talk about what we ought to do, or where we ought to be. Perhaps that’s what the Buddha intended with his 8-fold path. That is definitely the purpose of all the 12-step programs that have become so popular, but which, unfortunately, are mostly just intended to get us back to “normal.”

I would suggest that art must take a leading role here. We have all seen great films that were meant to inspire people to want to love more or be wiser or be kinder. And at least until the 20th century, this was a major topic for literature. But still, there’s a problem. There’s plenty of inspirational material, but little that gives us a detailed how-to. Real change is assumed, but the process is glossed over.

What a contrast to our technological world! We can build all kinds of wonderful tools, to wash clothes or to fly to the moon. But we live in a world of dearth when it comes to psychological and spiritual tools.

The US - Iran axis can be seen as a stereotypic model (remembering that stereotypes distort and misrepresent even while offering a template). In the US people live in a Roman wilderness of indulgence. Or more crudely, people grow fat and stupid on junk food and junk entertainment. In Iran people live enchained in harsh religious mores that suppress creativity and diversity. Crudely, people are xenophobic and ignorant.

In general, we see a medieval world of ruthless oppressions to control rampant sinfulnesses. In the example above it's the sneering ayatollahs vs the fat Americans. Both are lawless and revolting, each in their separate ways. In both states there can be no dignity. Dignity must be earned through restraint and sensitivity. There is no restraint where indulgence reigns, and nothing can be earned where behavior is controlled from without. This is the state of our moral and psychological technology. Medieval.

And therefore I compose verses, trying to show how real people come to grips with new ways to see the world. Ahhh, to such little avail.

More on science and religion

In his insightful comment to my last post, David Van Dusen <http://www.typeschrift.blogspot.com/> says:

"The dogs will fight." & "There is a (divine) gradient to nature." --- Indeed! --- And a divine gradient, also, to the blood-feuds, cock-fights, and peace-by-other-means we wage over Divinity, and Nature?

Well David, a "Divine gradient" does not mean a straight line. To the contrary, it means a tendency with many irregularities and seeming inconsistencies, and even much that appears retrograde.

One example: The Romans destroyed the 2nd Temple and did their best to destroy Judaism, but what resulted was a renewed Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism, with a profoundly powerful social, moral, and intellectual trajectory. That’s the Jewish view, and we’ve been saying it for 1800 years, but you would be hard-pressed to find much Christian (or Muslim) acknowledgment of that point of view until the enlightenment was well under way (1750+). In fact, in Europe (as opposed to the US, whose founders used Judaism as an important model) it only became "reasonable" to openly talk about Judaism’s historic value and validity after the military destruction of European nazism. That war, which dismantled the last vestiges of Europe’s moral and intellectual "authority," allowed a more open and honest reevaluation of Judaism and Jews. In sum, in spite of, shall we say, 95 generations of active resistence, the Divine gradient, which we Jews believe establishes Judaism’s priesthood role, persisted. Israel was restored, and Judaism’s fundamental importance to Western and Middle Eastern culture is now beginning to be acknowledged and studied by people other than Jews.