ONE MAN'S JOURNEY FROM YESTERDAY TO TOMORROW and what it means to him!

ONE MAN’S JOURNEY FROM YESTERDAY TO TOMORROW

And what it means to him!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 30, 2014

A READER WRITES:

From what has gone on in Ferguson, Missouri with an 18-year-old African American shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer after an altercation, watching television, I find I harbor mixed emotions about this tragedy. 

A grand jury found the officer not guilty of any crime, after which riots occurred in Ferguson, and literally across the United States, instigated by people with no connection with this Missouri community, and certainly no access to the grand jury testimony that exonerated the police officer.  The incident killed the young police officer’s career, as he has now left the police force. 

I wondered if we are truly a mean-spirited, cruel, and violent species and that this is part of our Nature?

When does our evolution peak?  You saw the separatism of the races to the extreme in South Africa with apartheid, and wrote a compelling novel (A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA) about that experience.  Are we selectively indifferent to the violence that separates us?

St. Andrew's in Scotland is finally admitting women as students due, I’m sure, to the fact that a woman is president of the University.  Perhaps we are not very far on that path of evolution after all.  I’d appreciate your take on the subject.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

It is only my opinion, and has no more weight than that.  I frame the situation as you describe it more broadly than you have indicated, and so ask your indulgence as I attempt to get my arms around this most significant problem that impacts our collective destiny. 

When we talk of violence, gratuitous violence or purposeful violence, which in fact does exist to protect ourselves, our property, our heritage, our sensibilities and our families from being marginalized or destroyed, we are entering the world of philosophy and philosophical speculation. 

Over my lifetime, and through the process of pondering several lifetimes before me through my reading, I have found us, as a society and as a people less “self-directed,” and increasingly “other directed.”

Paradoxically, as we have become more individualistic and free, we have at the same time been victimized by convention, where the “other directed” thrive.  Our response to being “other directed” finds us in a cage of our own making.  Society has become that cage.

“Self-direction” can be defined as leading a life that is essentially self-determined on the basis of choices made, experiences realized, and quality assessments of life, liberty and happiness.

Being “other directed” involves leading a life of dependence or counterdependence on others or institutions for our well-being, sacrificing the freedom, the will and the power to significant others to make those choices for us, which amounts to voluntary enslavement.

THE MEDIA IS THE MESSAGE

The social media and 24/7 cable news has made the “other directed” essential entertainment that connects us to each other in comfort and complacency, reducing us to the image and likeness of a commercial stereotype.

Being "other directed" is endemic to our three major religions as they have devolved: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.  They took self-direction and self-appreciation away and assumed responsibility for our worldliness and filled the void with dogma and belief systems. 

Curiously, religion has lost its edge, and with it, its self-direction, falling prey to "other direction" in an attempt to be relevant and poised for the future, surrendering this advantage to the guile of the media.  

We are like puppets on a string responding to media diction and dictates. 

Religion in crisis has become more political and less purposeful, more obsessed with survival than dedicated to its mission, unwittingly fallen prey to media as predator. 

How could it be otherwise with industrialization and democracies on the one hand on cruise control, and wars and dictatorships destabilizing with a vengeance on the other?  There is precedence for this.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Great change occurred in Europe in the 18th and 19th century, and in America in the 20th century.

Radical social and political change has brought about an upheaval in Western culture and thinking.  This has been accelerating and doesn't seem to be slowing down. 

People of all matter of beliefs and social practices are lost in the frenzy.  

We cherry pick our problems which are only symptomatic of our collective state of confusion finding us in our “other direction” essentially operating on automatic pilot as a coping mechanism, surviving on secondary information from the media, social network and the Internet.  Stated another way, we are controlled by media and media outlets.  Ergo, as a consequence, we are in control of nothing, including ourselves.

Violence, and this missive is based on your response to the violence in Ferguson, Missouri, always hides the real cause of the violence. 

Everything that transpires after the fact has little to do what previously occurred.  That was as true of Ferguson, Missouri as it was true in the case of the preemptive invasion of Iraq after 9/11.  Reason takes a holiday as emotions take control.  

That said we are an animal, the best and least of us, yet no more beast than we ever were, but no less so.  Gratuitous violence today differs little with that in the time of Jesus.      

We act shocked with the scandals of Catholic priests abusing children who were in their trust.  We look at Israelis and Palestinians and see both sides equally ineffective and wonder what is wrong.  We decide that Islam is a bad religion judging an entire society of people by its radical fringe of Jihadists.    

This is cherry picking.  Media is good at cherry picking.  We are good at validating the cherry picking by behaving as media paints a picture of "what is," which often is "what isn't."  Instant "truth" is always a lie because it hides the truth in the lie.  

Philosophy has traditionally penetrated our confusion and promoted understanding of where we are, what we are, and what we value, and why, as it gets inside the why that we have become to who we are right now.  Philosophy moves slowly but methodically.

But, alas, philosophy has retreated into specialization and spontaneity like everything else.  No longer is philosophy “self-directed,” but is now mainly "other directed" into systems (like how religions are now perceived) so complex they mean little or nothing to us.  

Validation comes from professors in philosophy earning tenure at some university, preferably some elite university.  It has not always been like this.

During the Enlightenment period of the 17th and 18th century, Kant, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, and Berkeley spent time appealing to our rational side and looked at the prospects for the modern man to find contentment and purpose in his being.

This was a time of feudalism, the imperial dominance of Roman Catholicism, which was unraveling, a time of empire and the aristocracy, which was also fading.  Philosophers of the Enlightenment period saw man as a thinking being capable of self-direction, out of nature but part of nature with a balance of spiritual and cognitive possibilities.

Not surprising, once man came to realize and understand his potential, once he believed in self-direction, a series of revolutions in the 18th and 19th century occurred to unshackle man from the iron chains of the enslaving and demeaning status quo.  This led to among other revolutions the American and French Revolution. 

The philosophy of revolution of the 20th century twisted self-direction into other direction with Nazism and Communism. 

While more than 100 million souls perished in wars of the 20th century, self-direction was now superseded by the crafty manipulation of other directing propaganda by Germany and Russia.

War always disrupts the social fabric not unlike a child leaving home and rebelling against the dictates and domination of the parents.  

Revolution has one voice but many authors: Jefferson, Paine, Burke, Rousseau, Godwin, Marx, Proudhon, Lenin, Trotsky and Gramsci.  The world these philosophers envisioned had the spirit of the Enlightenment but not always its mind.    

Thus followed the Counter Enlightenment period, the dark and uncertain world that shattered the earlier triumphs of the march of reason.

We are still in the Counter Enlightenment period, which has been dominated by philosophers of "romanticism and existentialism," philosophies that question the "good life." the presence of "God," "Free Will," and the idea of "Happiness." 

These are the philosophies of Hegel, Nietzsche, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Freud. 

What these philosophers held in common, apart from their distinct literary talent to express their thoughts in comprehensible and often compelling language, was a singular contempt for religion and the prospects of the soul.  These thinkers saw man on earth as on an island, alone, in the darken jungle of despair with no prospects beyond this life for anything.

They lived in the "other directed" world where no one has control of destiny, or anything else, so why try?  This is it!  Period!

Yet, of the more than 7 billion souls on this planet earth, three quarter of them believe in a monotheistic or polytheistic faith, in other words, in religion.  It is apparent they feel the need for a sense of someone or something beyond the human experience with which to identify and to seek connection.

THE INFORMATION AGE

A small sliver of the world's population believes and thinks otherwise, yet it is this sliver that controls the Information Age and all its outlets. 

With young people today, essentially unaware of what I have just summarized in a few words, which is the foundation of our Western civilization, are influenced largely by media and the instruments of media in what is considered more or less as the tangible world of "Science and Utility." 

Young people have been turned into "things," for everything is a "thing."  Education is a thing, life is a thing; the emphasis is on the empirical useful application of things. 

The Information Age is a thing that Bentham, Russell, Dewey, Popper, Kuhn and Wittgenstein would approve of, a cadre of philosophers of mainly atheistic temperaments.  

For them there was no God, no soul, no religion, and therefore the violence of man's nature; his pettiness, envy, greed, licentiousness, and immaturity were considered by products of this nonsensical preoccupation with religion.  Indeed, religion has been found the source of modern man's dilemma, the citadel of violence, and wasted lives.  Other directed individuals and groups have an uncanny gift for projecting the blame on something or someone in a vulnerable state.

Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Max Weber, Karl Schmitt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, and Jurgen Habermas projected what modernity was all about, and what man must (or should) do to corral the beast that he is, and make him a more useful social being. 

Should you read these compelling thinkers, and they are compelling, you would see little evidence much less acknowledgement of the spiritual side of man's character, and how vital it is to life and living.  Man to them is a thing in a system with the focus on the system and how man is likely to behave in that system. 

In the postmodern world, the world of tomorrow, a world with a state of mind and attitude that is still in its formational stage, a world that I came back from South Africa to discover in 1969, a world that saw the end of the "American Century" some thirty years early," a world of old ideologies declining -- that includes all the great religions -- and new belief systems emerging of popular culture led by the likes of Dylan and Madonna, while the world was declared flat and nations reduced to a "global village."  None of it was true, but it sounded as if it were true, and so it became part of the lexicon.

The dystopia novels of Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" (1924), Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" (1932) and George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1949) are now coming to fruition as the nightmare they predicted.

To be fair, there is hope if philosophers such as Michel Foucault can see their ideas penetrate the categorization of humanity into such stereotypical groups such as the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the upper class, middle class, and the poor. 

My atomistic, individualistic nature has been subjected to such categorization by those who know me and those who think they know me. 

What I am and what I have always been is a poor boy from Clinton, Iowa who has read a lot, seen and done a lot, but has never abandoned his roots, while having the propensity to go against the grain of popular beliefs.

*     *     *

  

FROM THE PAGES OF "TIME OUT FOR SANITY!"

FROM THE PAGES OF “TIME OUT FOR SANITY!”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 26, 2014

REFERENCE:

Readers seemed to enjoy the excerpt from this book to be out in 2015.  This is another segment from the chapter “THINKING DOESN’T MAKE IT SO.”

   

*     *     *

George Bernard Shaw was fond to remind us that the virtues we hold dear to our hearts have a price tag on them. Shaw asked an elegant lady of society if she would go to bed with him for 20,000 British pounds. She replied, “But of course, silly, who wouldn’t?” Then Shaw parried, “Would you go to bed with me for five pounds?” Indignantly, the lady said, “I most certainly wouldn’t,” then added, “what kind of a woman do you think I am?” To which Shaw rejoined, “We already know that, my dear, now don’t we? We’re just trying to determine your price range.”

The games scholars play is not unlike the game we all play.  We compare and compete failing to see the flaw in imitation.  Consequently, deviant behavior often hides behind the mask of incorruptibility. Scholars lie. Scholars cheat. Scholars play the con. This is a humanistic fact and not a self-righteous fiction.  Supportive evidence is too overwhelming.

We know we lie and cheat and play the con on ourselves as well as others, but we are not scholars so we are excused for being human. We expect scholars like our priests to be above reproach, but they are not. We are all prisoners of our society’s mind, and that mind not only condones lying and cheating and playing the con, but also continuously invents new imaginative ways to exercise the propensity.

Scholars cheat because many are involved in research that they know beforehand is pointless, valueless and meaningless, and like hundreds of studies done before. So, why do these scholars write for grants to attempt research, the character of which is inconsistent with their professional code of ethics?

Scholars cheat for the same reasons that we all do. They cheat to keep the wolf from the door. They cheat because the academic freedom they purport to enjoy does not in fact exist. They operate in a managed environment of compromise and trade offs: from “publish or perish” to the seductive possibility of tenure and promotion.

This is not unlike the larger environment that embraces us all.  And like us, the majority of academics are docile, timid, tentative, yielding, unimaginative, protective, security conscious, afraid, mechanistic and unoriginal. It is the mindset that permeates our society, so why shouldn’t it penetrate the ivory towers of academia?

Academics are also petty because they are powerless; slaves to the norm and obsessively driven to replicate these norms, while giving off the impression to the contrary. They are not only nonthinkers like most of us they are non-leaders as well. They are our mirror image, and not protectors of the lamp of Diogenes that we fantasize them carrying with due diligence.

How they differ from most of us is that they can cover their deceptions in a sea of words, or hide their illusions in an ocean of statistics, which fortifies the veracity of their findings. Thus the “I” of academia from the societal “we” proves a gap too wide for ordinary minds to challenge. That is unfortunate as the question must be asked: if one community is sick can the other community be well?

Leon Festinger describes in “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance” (1957) how our obsession with making everything in our minds fit with everything else that is already there closes our minds to what is actually being experienced. No one, he cautions, totally escapes this self-imprisoning mania that requires cognitive consistency.  

As a coping mechanism, and given our limited capacity to store information, Festinger found that people modify incoming information to fit what is already there, thus the dissonance with the reality of experience.

We change things around to fit with what we perceive to be true no matter how outrageous the discrepancy. We are motivated to achieve consistency between our attitudes and behavior.

When it does not exist, our minds make the adjustment to make it so. It is why stereotypes are so precious to us. They save us from the drudgery of thinking, or the need to process information in real time and in real terms as it is experienced.

When someone says we have a twisted mind, they are not talking out of school. We all do. Unbeknownst to us –- our minds, vain, emotional, immoral, deluded, pigheaded, secretive, weak willed, and bigoted — push and pull, twist and turn our perceptions of reality until they fit with what is already there.

The scholar prides himself in his objectivity, his value-free conscience, his integrity, and open mindedness. He sees himself as a high priest pursuing research above the banality and carnality of society. He cannot accept academia being a reflection and pawn of society, and so he denies it emotionally and intellectually, hard evidence to the contrary be damned! He cannot accept it; therefore, it does not exist.

Consequently, the behavioral scientist in particular and the social scientist in general equate proliferation with profundity and methodology with meaning. They can describe society’s dilemma in impressive terms, but have failed to move society one iota closer to resolution of its conflicts. They have had little success in explaining why we lie, cheat, and steal from ourselves, much less make us less inclined to do so. They can define populations but not divine personal behavior. They are artists of methodology and paradigm, but continue to represent disciplines in search of a philosophy.

Fifty (50) percent of the world’s psychologists and seventy five (75) percent of the world’s sociologists work in the United States. They were given the body of America as patient in the 1960s to study. What single contribution did their collective genius produce?

They developed a new descriptive lexicon and new catch phrases such as “fail safe,” and “one man one vote,” “no child left behind,” and “Medicare,” “Medicaid,” “Megadeath,” and “lifestyle,” and “black humor,” and “elephant jokes,” and “God is dead” (Nietzsche style), “sensory deprivation,” “double-bind,” “cognitive dissonance,” “empowerment,” “weak affect,” “bad vibes,” “programmed learning,” “learned helpless,” and then produced “non-books.”

Whether at their instigation or inspiration, there arose the pervasive use of “soul,” “shrink” and “open system,” and “Marshall McLuhan imaginings,” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf innuendos,” and “cross-busing, and cross dressing,” “transgender,” “homophobic,” and “sex change,” “cluster development,” “cloning,” “white backlash,” and “multiversity,” and “super star,” “Super Power,” and “Super Bowl.”

Those so inclined have had no trouble mentioning in the same breath “White Paper,” and “Black Power,” and “New Math,” and “Sit-ins,” and “de facto segregation,” and “ad hoc committees,” and “Black studies,” “war as normalcy,” and currently, the most ambiguous term of all, “terrorism.” Then, in finance, there is “exponential expansion,” “sequestration,” and “flat lining.” We also have the hash tags dumbing down” and “charter schools” in education.

Here in 2014, our economy is limping along in recovery, while our school children continue to lag in basic skills compared with other advanced societies. According to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), as of 2009, US students are 31st in science, 17th in reading and 23rd in math. Shanghai-China is first in all three categories.

James Reston wrote:

“No nation ever fought such a vicious war (Viet Nam) in the midst of such sacrifice by some of its people and so little sacrifice by the rest.”

He was referring to one ethnic group, blacks, which make up 12 percent of the population but have represented more than 60 percent of the 55,000 fatalities in that war.

In the wake of the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York City, killing nearly 3,000 innocent people, and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism has become the most feared expression in the English language.

Although this word is bandied about and expressed with confidence by nimble social scientists, there is no reliable understanding of either the word, terrorism, or precisely who or what are terrorists.

At a fundamental level, a terrorist is hauntingly stereotyped and personified as a Middle Easterner man of the Islamic faith bearded with a leathery pallor and out to do the West harm.

“Terrorism,” however, is a fiercely political word and incredibly alive in our consciousness. Terrorists were thought to be nationless, but now we have the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant,” referred to as ISIL with the ambition of establishing a caliphate as part of Syria and Iraq and naming itself “the Islamic State.”

Recently, ISIL has resorted to beheading journalists and captured soldiers of the West. Recalling Reston’s words, while this disturbs our consciences, it hasn’t resulted in collective action.  Of course scholars were too busy to note the import of Reston’s words, as they were congratulating themselves with the panache of James V. McConnell, who proclaimed in Time magazine (April 2, 1973):

“I believe that the day has come when we can combine sensory deprivation with drugs, hypnosis and astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain absolute control over an individual’s behavior.”

McConnell is not alone. Behaviorists have for the past four decades held the heady belief that people can be molded by simply deciding how they should be molded and then manipulating their behavior to that criteria, as if man were a laboratory mouse.

Scholars have been given the exalting role of society’s thinkers, a role the rest of society relinquishes with a sigh of relief.

Scholarship, or the product scholars’ produce, is accepted unequivocally as the blueprint of wisdom and master plan of good sense. Little note is taken of the lack of originality, spark of wisdom, or pinch of sense.

Society accepts their prescriptions as the remedies it is looking for, even if these formulae later prove to be embarrassing, as McConnell’s thesis has proven to be fort years later.  Fortunately, most of these prescriptions have the innocuous consistency of placebos. Still, the danger exists because they are trusted without qualification, making society vulnerable to their hubris and excess.

Scholars have the comfort of hieroglyphic speak in that laymen fail to have access to their technical shorthand. One need only spend an hour in a university library perusing the journals of scholars to see how true that is. They insulate themselves from the vernacular hiding their frustration in a glib rhetorical style accompanied by grids and graphs, schematics and statistics that conveniently bury the definition of the problem in the blur. The non-scholar reader expects to be so impressed by this disguise that he takes solace that better minds than his are so employed.

This is obvious in social and behavioral research, but is equally true in the hard sciences as well.

To be fair, academics and scholars pursue the well defined boilerplate of Western thought with the hubris it has enjoyed over the centuries. If the rise of the jihadists of al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attack, along with the pusillanimity of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should do anything, it should be to first humble us and then alert us to the fact that we are in a changing world and not conditioned to understand much less deal effectively with that world. 

ISIL is another iteration of this aggravation with the unasked questions: “What inspired this insanity?  What part have we played in its creation?  What can we do now, short term, and later, long term, to defuse its justification and thus the possibility of its emotional spontaneous combustion?   

ARE YOU BORED? PERAMBULATING TO PERDITION!

Are You Bored?

Perambulating To Perdition!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 24, 2014

REFERENCE:

This is an excerpt from Time Out for Sanity! Blueprint for Dealing with an Anxious Age.  This is the final volume of a ten-book commitment to TATE Publishing Company, and should be out in early 2015.  

Though love repine, and reason chafe,

There came a voice without reply,

‘Tis man’s perdition to be safe,

When for the truth he ought to die

—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American essayist, lecturer and poet

Is society sick?  You don’t have to reflect on what your parents told you, what was taught in school, or what the media say. What do you think? Societal programming makes this difficult. You are taught to think in a prescribed manner and to take formulated thinking with a smile. You are not programmed to base your thinking on individual experience, but the collective will of other people.

This is a process that is followed and reinforced at every juncture of your life. You are taught what to think, feel and believe, indeed, what is true as society defines truth. Somehow society has fallen prey to its own refining process, coming to believe its own myths and taboos, and taking itself seriously as the last word to everything.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), author of Being and Time (1927), was apprehensive of the emerging techno¬logical forces of the 20th century that he called, Machenschaft or “machination.”

With the technological explosion of WWII, he saw machina¬tion assuming quasi-mythological status not unlike an ancient god. He declared it was “the unconditional power of machination and the complete groundlessness of things.” He could see this leading to technological nihilism or the ultimate metaphysical fate of the West.

The existential philosopher envision this disrupting our con-sciousness, or “deworlding of the world.” Stated otherwise, this would be akin to being in the world but not in charge of our exist¬ence. Does he have a point?

The consciousness of what constitutes an emotionally healthy man appears fixed. There is now a push to dispense what clearly are happiness pills to give people an emotional lift, as if life or existence itself cannot provide such a lift. Such recommendations do not come from quacks but trained professionals: psychiatrists and physicians.

The media give experts an awesome stage while reinforcing the low estimate of the public’s mentality. Take the headline in The Tampa Tribune (April 13, 1972): THE AGE OF DEPRESSION, with the following story:

“Never have so many people been so unhappy. A poll has shown one out of two people said they are depressed much or some of the time. Doctors are confirming this in their offices. Even though patients do not use the word, depression, the nature of their symptoms tip it off. Some psychiatrists are calling this the age of depression in contrast to the age of anxiety a generation ago.”

The article goes on to quote Dr. Harold Visotsky (1924-2002), chairman of the department of psychiatry, Northwestern University Medical School. He revamped the Illinois Mental Health System, which much of the nation adopted. He adds, “Today’s depression is becoming epidemic in our part of the world.”

The article makes reference to the novelist Albert Camus and the poet W. H. Auden and their prophecy that we would be entering “what may be decades of depression and apathy.”

Dr. Jan Fawcett, chief of the depression and suicide unit of the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute adds: “Many young people have a hopeless outlook for the future and feel frustrated in try-ing to cope with problems.” Visotsky concurs:

“Both the increasing incidence of suicides among youth and the widespread use of mood elevating drugs, such as amphetamines, indicate that depressions and depressive illnesses are more com-mon than even our statistics reveal. We are seeing significant numbers of young people as new cases, depressed for the first time. It signifies the illness is becoming epidemic.”

It should then come as no surprise that the profession of psy¬chiatry would develop a test for the reader to determine his or her state of depression. Dr. William W. Z. Zung of Duke University has developed such a test with the heading HOW DEPRESSED ARE YOU? Notice it assumes you are sick. Yet, the flippancy of this test is apparent, as it has no personal knowledge of you as an individual. It would appear the test simply wants you to confirm how sick you are.

The featured article (May 13, 1972) of “The National Observer” carried this caption: BOREDOM EPIDEMIC, “The Illness of the Age.” Journalist Peter T. Chew (1924–2006) wrote:

“Admiral Byrd so feared it that he took twelve strait jackets on his Antarctic expedition. Lindbergh complained of it repeatedly on his flight to Paris. Bertrand Russell wrote, ‘Half the sins of mankind are caused by fear of it.’ Erich Fromm calls it ‘the illness of the age,’ the root cause of violence and drug addiction. Boredom

has always been with us. But behavioral scientists make a strong case that chronic boredom is epidemic in our industrial society. They call ours ‘the land of the free and the home of the bored.’”

The article than unleashes a compelling cadre of experts to support this conclusion. Again, the premise assumes the reader is bored and needs someone in authority to wrench him or her from boredom. It is the old ruse of the self-filling prophecy: how we see others is how we expect them to behave. Sociological relativism suggests society is normal inasmuch as it functions, and pathological inasmuch as it is unable to adjust to the demands of society.

THE PERENNIAL SICKNESS: BOREDOM!

Boredom has defined by Cynthia D. Fisher in terms of its main central psychological processes: "an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest and difficulty concentrating on the current activity."  It is an affective experience associated with cognitive attentional processes for which the subject has more than enough skill.

There are three types of boredom, all of which involve problems of engagement of attention.

These include (1) times when we are prevented from engaging in wanted activity; (2) when we are forced to engage in unwanted activity; or (3) when we are simply unable for no apparent reason to maintain engagement in any activity or spectacle. 

Proneness to boredom is a tendency to experience boredom of all types. Recent research has found that boredom proneness is clearly and consistently associated with failures of attention, which are linked to depression, and strongly correlated with attentional lapses as with depression. 

Although boredom is often viewed as a trivial and mild irritant, proneness to boredom has been linked to a very diverse range of possible psychological, physical, educational, and social problems.

Boredom is a condition characterized by perception of one's environment as dull, or tedious, and lacking in stimulation. This can result from leisure and a lack of aesthetic interests.   For example, a person may feel alienated and passive when immersed in work found tedious.  T

There is an inherent anxiety in boredom; people will expend considerable effort to prevent or remedy it, yet in many circumstances, it is accepted as suffering to be endured. Common passive ways to escape boredom are to sleep or to think creative thoughts (daydream). Typical active solutions consist in an intentional activity of some sort, often something new, as familiarity and repetition can lead to boredom.

Boredom also plays a role in existentialist thought when ere one is confined, spatially or otherwise.  On the other hand, boredom may be met with various religious activities, partly because boredom may be taken as the essential human condition, to which God, wisdom, or morality are the ultimate answers. This is in fact how it was taken by existentialist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

Martin Heidegger wrote about boredom in “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics” and “What is Metaphysics?” in 1929-1930, perhaps the most extensive philosophical treatment ever of the subject. He focused on waiting at railway stations in particular as a major context of boredom. 

Søren Kierkegaard remarks in Either/Or (1843) that "patience cannot be depicted" visually, since there is a sense that any immediate moment of life may be fundamentally tedious.

Blaise Pascal in the Pensées (1664) discusses the human condition in saying "we seek rest in a struggle against some obstacles. And when we have overcome these, rest proves unbearable because of the boredom it produces … only an infinite and immutable object – that is, God himself – can fill this infinite abyss."

Without stimulus or focus, the individual is confronted with nothingness, the meaninglessness of existence, and experiences existential anxiety.

Heidegger states this idea as follows:

"Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole." Schopenhauer used the existence of boredom in an attempt to prove the vanity of human existence, stating ... for if life, in the desire for which our essence and existence consists, possessed in itself a positive value and real content, there would be no such thing as boredom: mere existence would fulfil and satisfy us."

Erich Fromm speaks of boredom as a common psychological response to industrial society, where people are required to engage in alienated labor. According to Fromm, boredom is "perhaps the most important source of aggression and destructiveness today."

For him, the search for thrills and novelty that characterizes consumer culture are not solutions to boredom, but mere distractions from boredom which, he argues, continues unconsciously. Above and beyond taste and character, the universal case of boredom consists in any instance of waiting, as Heidegger noted, such as in line, for someone else to arrive or finish a task, or while one is travelling somewhere. The automobile requires fast reflexes, making its operator busy and hence, perhaps for other reasons as well, making the ride more tedious despite being over sooner.

CAUSES AND EFFECTS OF BOREDOM

Although not studied widely, research on boredom suggests that it is a major factor impacting diverse areas of a person's life, including career, education, and a sense of autonomy with the bored possibly showing symptom of clinical depression.

Boredom can be a form of learned helplessness, a phenomenon closely related to depression. Some philosophies of parenting propose that if children are raised in an environment devoid of stimuli, and are not allowed or encouraged to interact with their environment, they will fail to develop the mental capacities to do so.

In a learning environment, a common cause of boredom is lack of understanding; for instance, if one is not following or connecting to the material in a class or lecture, it will usually seem boring. However, the opposite can also be true; something that is too easily understood, simple or transparent, can also be boring. Boredom is often inversely related to learning, and in school it may be a sign that a student is not challenged enough, or is too challenged. An activity that is predictable to the students is likely to bore them

A 1989 study indicated that an individual's impression of boredom may be influenced by the individual's degree of attention, as a higher acoustic level of distraction from the environment correlated with higher reports of boredom.

Boredom has also been studied as being related to drug abuse among teens. In the wider population, boredom has been proposed as a possible cause to pathological gambling behavior, as pathological gamblers seek stimulation to avoid states of boredom and depression.

In the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) has the character Lord Henry Wotton say to a young Dorian Gray: "The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness."

Popular artist Procol Harum, John Sebastian, Iggy Pop, the Deftones, Buzzcocks, and Blink-182 have all written songs with boredom mentioned in the title. Other songs about boredom and activities people turn to when bored include Green Day's song "Longview,” System of a Down's "Lonely Day,” and Bloodhound Gang's "Mope."  Douglas Adams depicted a robot named Marvin the Paranoid Android whose boredom appeared to be the defining trait of his existence in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The 1969 Vocational Guidance Counsellor sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus established a lasting stereotype of accountants as boring.  The Yellow Pages used to carry an entry under Boring, "See civil engineers" (referring to the "tunneling" meaning), but this was changed in 1996 to "See sites exploration.”

Society’s health or sickness is never confined to the rigors of logic. Experts have no hesitation to proffer faulty syllogisms on suspect data, as they are always in a state of subjective wonder hypothesizing in catchy hyperbole.

As you can see, considerable emotional intelligence of both popular artists, and established social thinkers has been devoted to the subject of boredom, which is a societal obsession if not sickness.  Syllogisms of logic have failed to be successful in training the mind to draw conclusions that are ameliorating to this problem.

The take away from this is boredom is a societal problem somewhat limited to the morality of the time. We witnessed this when the American Psychiatric Association declared homosexuality a sickness, a moralis¬tic not a scientific assessment. Now, in 2015, psychiatrists desig¬nate it a lifestyle choice. Even the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy of Pope Francis I is wrestling with homosexuality finding a way to include people of that persuasion to be practicing Catholics in good faith.  The brilliant Irish playwright, dramatist and novelist, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) suffered mightily for his sexuality more than a century ago.  Morality, alas, is in the mind of the times.

Treating scientists as priests on high has encouraged sloppi-ness in thinking and cheating in research. We forget that much of research is repetitive and therefore boring with often contradictory results.  Such findings are as inevitable as those that are meaningful and can be replicated are rare.  There is the famous case of the painted mice at Manhattan’s Sloan-Kettering Institute (Time, April 29, 1974). This illustrates the pressure for results at any cost. The best minds have been unable to understand the blur between what is so and what is not, between fact and fiction. We have depended on scientists and other experts to penetrate our confusion only to find they are often found as human and as confused as we are.

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF: WHAT CAN I KNOW? WHAT SHOULD I DO? WHAT CAN I HOPE FOR? WHY AM I HERE?

QUESTIONS TO ASK OURSELVES:

WHAT CAN I KNOW?

WHAT SHOULD I DO?

WHAT CAN I HOPE FOR?

WHY AM I HERE?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 19, 2014

WHY AM I HERE?  OVERVIEW

Perhaps the last question is the most perplexing if not equally the most controversial one in these times of secular philosophy.  Ergo, we will consider it first.

We didn’t choose to come into the world and we don’t choose to leave it if you exclude the fact that some of us are killing ourselves not very gently every day of our lives by life style and dietary excesses. 

If at an early age, you were taught how to think for yourself instead of being rote educated, the added advantage would be the ability to focus on a subject and truly learn it.  The ancillary benefits would be acquiring the discipline and structure, which would inevitably give you a sense of purposefulness.

The Sister of St. Francis of the Roman Catholic Church cauterized such programming into my soul for which I have never escaped or been inclined to shred.  Yet, while being a devout Irish Roman Catholic into my thirties, now in my eighties I no longer attend Catholic services, and when I go to church, such as at Christmas time or other Christian Holy Days, I am as likely to attend a Protestant service as not.  

This is one personal data point to explain why I have always had a sense of purpose, and although I have often misstep, faltered and failed, I have never doubted why I am here.  Some may see this as the raving of a fatalist.  I see it as my belief in God.

While my catholicity and belief in traditional religion has waned my belief in God has not.  If anything, I am more spiritual today than when I was routinely robotically attending Mass and Communion on a regular basis.  Moreover, I am more empathetic to faiths other than Christian.  As fatalistically as it may sound, I feel my life has a design that I consciously and subconsciously work to fulfill.

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Individualism and freedom of choice are part of our culture.  This means that everyone at some point in their lives tests limits be they of parental programming, the ritual and regimentation of school, church and career, where the limits of individualism and freedom are somewhat restricted. 

A point is reached either boldly or coyly, immaturely or sensibly when these limits and structures prove neither necessary nor sufficient to our purposes, and therefore need to be tested.  Stated another way, when our identity and motivation no longer is comfortable with where we find ourselves, we need to change what we do not how we think.

If we are truly interested in our subjective well-being, our mental and physical health, we should move on, not stay in place.  This takes courage, God fearing courage. 

Actually, the way we think is not likely to change in any case, and so the alternative seems quite obvious.  We need to change our experience. 

To break this logjam is not unlike that experienced by St. Paul, if not quite so melodramatic, on his way to Damascus when a voice told him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”  The reference was to the risen Jesus, and the early Christians.  Perhaps in a more modest sense, a voice within you is saying, “Why, why do you punish yourself so?”   It is a voice we often deny hearing. 

It is at this point you should go your own way, have the courage to go against the grain, and seek out your own identity and purpose in life.  Instinctively, this is apparent to you, but you are not listening.  Were you to listen, you would have broken through and truly understood why you are here!

When we do rebel, when we take responsibility for our personhood, we are certain to encounter push back from institutional impediments that we have chosen to ignore, not challenge, for we don’t want to embrace the aggravation or inconvenience of acting, choosing instead to endure the pain.

It’s not God’s plan that we remain in an abusive marriage or relationship because the church doesn’t sanction divorce or we don’t want to embarrass our friends.  Nor is it wise to remain in a job that is demeaning or humiliating because the pay in good.  Masochism has many faces and the most common one is self-rejection.  

 

We may come from a household that discouraged eating fast foods, partying, smoking, drinking, doing drugs, or other behaviors.  So, once we are free of that yoke, we defiantly do them all to excess because we have the right and the freedom to do so, not realizing we have gone from one prison into an even less forgiving one.

    

But how do these considerations answer the question, “Why am I here?”  How?   They introduce you to yourself.

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Theism and atheism are the parameters relevant to this discussion of “Why am I here?”  One deals with belief in God, and was does not.

Many thinkers, whatever their orientation, sense that we’re all out of sync with our times.  While they scurry hither and yon for relevance, most of us fall through the cracks, either going to church and getting little from the experience or not going to church and getting little out of life, wondering why we are here, but not concerned enough to reflect on the question and therefore do anything about it.    

Having myself been reared an Irish Roman Catholic, and familiar with the Adam and Eve story of their disobedience, and being driven out of the Garden of Paradise, I am equally familiar with being born with Original Sin on my soul, and the guilt and shame that goes with it.

This was a lot to absorb as a boy and to carry forward into my thirties before I experienced what real sin was.  It was international colonialism and South Africa apartheid.  It was my heart of darkness, and for me, everything changed.  Up to that point I took pleasure in my work and thought myself involved with purpose, only to find it was at the expense of others.  Suddenly, I realized my life was a sham.     

The abrupt change I made as a result of this new understanding was necessary to find subjective satisfaction, which is another word for “happiness.”  Conversely, when what I was doing didn’t make sense to me anymore, or no longer brought satisfaction, I felt it was time to make a change; for me, it proved a radical change.  I left my corporate career, took a two year sabbatical, and then went back to school to earn my Ph.D.   Now I live in my advance years motivated to effectively utilize my inherent ability in the service of others as a simple scribbler.

Why Am I Here? - A Perplexing Question

Why am I here, where did I come from, what am I worth, do I have any intrinsic value, do I serve a purpose?

These questions denote a need for focus and structure, and structure denotes a culture, and a culture suggests expected behavior.  These questions are likely to be seen in the abstract rather than the concrete justifying a failure to address them.  Who has the time, right? 

We leave these questions up to religion and philosophy, and to the disciplines of psychology, sociology, and politics when they are all about love, and therefore, they only belong to us.   

Observe the way those who would think for us play musical chairs in their power struggles and territorial imperatives motivated by survival at the expense of the missions they espouse.

These fundamental questions are meant to seem too big for us to solve!  We are left to our own devices in how we see the world and how we treat the world we see.

We are all part of the same world that is clearly out-of-control, a world that could perish if we don’t see ourselves as part of that same community with a consensus focus and purpose, and common humanity that goes beyond the bounds of nationalities, ideologies, ethnicities, politics, and common fears. 

We are here to trust each other, to help each other, to support each other so that history will not stop with our generation.

There is an absolute truth that is common to us all and it does not belong to a philosophy or religion, but exists inside us all and is common alike to believers and nonbelievers.  It starts with how we see and treat ourselves and how we see and treat others.

Before we are out of the gates and into a common field of endeavor we are often bogged down with the question, “Does God exist?”  The irony is not that God exists.  It is that we are too often adamant in our beliefs either as believers or nonbelievers found serving and supporting false gods in our actions.

This is evident as demonstrated by Christians and Jews and people of Islam who worship the same monotheistic God but use their differences to justify warring with each other.  Catholics war with Protestants in Northern Ireland, Shiites war with Sunnis in Syria and Iraq, often to the death.

In our secular world since the Enlightenment of the 18^th century, when natural law and objective truth took the game away from the Christian church, the whole idea of truth became as tenuous and as abstract as the idea of God itself.  Say what you will about Christianity, but it developed a civilization in the West that has yet been unrivaled in the annals of history. 

When the church proved too human an institution, attempting to protect itself from science, it was nearly destroyed by its ignorance.  The Enlightenment in its clumsy eloquence put the church on notice with Nietzsche’s misunderstood 19^th century declaration, “God is dead!”  God hadn’t died.  He just changed his wardrobe. 

The continuity of truth as it was once understood and truth as it was now defined was the same truth as truth cannot be changed.  It was the same truth, and God was the same God. 

God exists, even for atheists in their protest, but in a form in which they choose not to acknowledge Him.  By doing so, they construct a whole new set of paradigms with a rationale that strangely mirrors that which they have rejected.     

A Window to the Atheist

If we can assume that with the existence of God, people have purpose, then if God doesn’t exist, then life is catch-as-catch can, and lacks purpose.  In other words, we are here because we are here and our existence is impersonal, unintelligible and unexplainable.

Life is an accident and so are we.  In the grand scheme of things, we are here and then we are gone, and as we came from nowhere we go back to nowhere where we will find nothing, and we accept that because in our belief system that is all that there is.  Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Heidegger and many others can relate to that assumption. 

Life is just an accident and so are we.  We’re here because our parents either wanted us or found we were coming in the normal expression of their psychosexual lives.  From an atheistic perspective, conception is not a life in its cellular form and therefore abortion is not only permissible but a valid alternative to the accident of a woman becoming pregnant with child.  It is not murder.  It is a medical procedure.

This has always sounded depressing to me, but I know very successful atheists, and if they are depressed, they aren’t sharing it with me.  I have often wondered what they think of the idea of the “pursuit of happiness.”

If I am stating the case for atheists unfairly, it is because I am not one, and only know atheists from my limited exposure to them, and of course reading about this mindset.  What you see here is my interpretation of that exposure. 

If life is a big accident over which you have no control, in which life is seen to serve no lasting purpose, in which there is no cause and so there can be no effect, then I would assume everything is viewed as impermanent.  Given this orientation, my question is how can life be seen other than meaningless?   

Granted, the idea of a creator, personified for us to be in its image and likeness, yet quintessentially beyond human comprehension, is a lot to swallow.  But where atheists part from believers is not that God can be explained, because He can’t, not that God’s existence can be proven, because that is also not possible, but because God exists in our hearts and gives us purpose, wholeness and our lives a sense of meaningfulness.

You may ask, then, why are so many wise men and women atheists, so many scientists, intellectuals, artists and authors, so many creative people of rare accomplishment with an ability to see beyond what most of us see? 

My sense is that they have a prehensile sense of things and are guided by extrinsic and instrumental values whereas believers are guided by intrinsic or terminal values. 

God for believers is not necessarily religion or church specific.  Worth for believers is on display in terminal values such as mature love, world of beauty, happiness, inner harmony, freedom, exciting life, social recognition, true friendship, and salvation.  

Common instrumental values are being active, altruistic, competent, concerned, courageous, creative, efficient, forceful, honest, intellectual, idealistic, loyal, moral, noble, patriotic, persevering, practical, productive, responsible, silent, and spiritual with a strong sense of will. 

You can see from these instrumental values why so many atheists are highly successful, and often are Noble Laureates.  Obviously, instrumental and terminal values are not mutually exclusive with individuals of all orientations and/or persuasions displaying some of both.

Without God, we don't actually have an intrinsic value system, at least not an objective one. Our worth is ultimately subjective or extrinsic. You might think you're worth something but someone else might not. Without God as the Final Transcendent Assessor, there is no one that can dictate what is right or what is wrong, or act as the arbiter of your success or failure other than your relationship to your God.  Without God, there's really no such thing as right or wrong. 

John Dewey (1859-1952), the famous 20th century atheist explained,

 "There is no God and there is no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or moral absolutes."

Philosophers generally agree: without an absolute God to make the rules, there is no such thing as a moral absolute; there are only preferences. You don't actually have a right to live; you just prefer not to die. Someone else on the other hand might want to kill you regardless of how you feel about it, and who is to say that they're wrong? In the absence of absolute morality, power reigns supreme; the strong survive and the weak get exploited.

Thankfully most governments see it as their duty to uphold what they see as your God-given right to live in peace and freedom.  It is why governments also happen to be the strongest institution among men (which means they can enforce morality upon those who don't necessarily agree with your right to live).

The Founding Fathers in writing the Preamble to the Constitution put it well when they declared,

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…"

Unfortunately, some governments don't share that inclusive view and their people suffer terribly for it.

A Window to the Theist

As I’ve already indicated, the theistic view is wrought with contradictions as is the atheistic view.  The fact that we have cognitive consciousness and discriminating intellects has not saved us from making life uncomfortable if not difficult to the point of holy terror for people who differ with us.

You would think if God does exist for us, and that He is our ultimate reality, we would naturally be generous of spirit and tolerant to the point of accommodation of those who differ with us, but of course we know that is not true.

If God did in fact create us for a reason than that reason in and of itself is the reason we are here rather than not.

Likewise, if we are valuable to Him, that ultimately describes our worth.  What He says to us through the medium of our church, or directly to us through our introspective awareness of His presence is not only right, but absolutely right to us and for us.  And the corollary to this, what He says is wrong is absolutely wrong to us and for us. 

Before the rise of secularism, the church and organized Christianity through the auspices of their ordained clerics were our intercessors in most if not all matters of God and the absolutes of right and wrong.  The church was the final authority and indisputable interpreters of factors of morality.  That is no longer the case.  Morality appears to be in the mind of the times. 

The recently elected Pope Francis I of Roman Catholicism seems to realize this as he appears to have an open mind to having gays joining the church, divorced couples receiving the sacraments, giving women a larger ecclesiastical role, giving parishioners a greater role as well, reducing the pomp and circumstance, the rites and rituals to be less arcane, and allowing wayward Catholics to return to the fold without preconditions.  

This has however disturbed Doctors of the Church as they see, correctly, their powers being dissipated.  Pope Francis has reason for his concern.

While fully 87 percent of Americans believe in God, less than 50 percent of believers attend church on a regular basis.   

We have become essentially our own free moral agents with the freedom to make moral decisions, but that doesn't mean we can choose what is right or wrong.  It means we're capable of choosing to be right or wrong. God makes the rules.

Where it gets dicey in this secular age is this: Will God enforce the rules if the church and its acolytes cannot?  Will God hold us accountable for our moral decisions?  The evidence is that He will.

The prevailing instinct among the majority seems to be that, yes, God will hold us accountable.  We recognize this when we find we pay for a profligate lifestyle, promiscuous behavior, and self-indulgence excess in disease, debility, depression, anxiety and early or untimely death. 

Terrible sexually transmitted diseases are rampant across the globe, natural enemies to longevity, good health and purposeful behavior. 

We as individuals in freedom know instinctively that we get a report card every day of our lives which tallies up our behavior.  It records the good things and the bad things that we do to ourselves and others, which we know as believers stack up in term of moral absolutes that we instinctively believe to exist.

Atheists may not be shackled with such moralistic baggage but Christians, especially Catholics live in guilt, often when it is only a mirage but nonetheless felt.  As Belgian theologian Edward Schillebeeckx (1914-2009) puts it:

Jesus breaks with the idea that suffering has necessarily something to do with sinfulness … It is possible to draw conclusions from sin to suffering, but not from suffering to sin.

With believers, earthly salvation is an inner compass making justice and purpose and structure and morality not abstract notions, but a purposeful guidance system.  It is why He made us. It is His system and the reason He’ll see justice prevail. 

That's a comforting thought to some, but terrifying to others.

“Why am I here” is the right question for believers in God, but pointless for those who are not.  Everything is ultimately pointless if He does not exist.  Schillebeeckx puts this all in terms of the Christian response to evil, listing seven coordinates, which relate to human nature and lead to divine salvation.  These seven factors relate to the reality of experience in this life for each of us. 

Schillebeeckx claims we must embrace (1) our human bodiliness; (2) natural laws of nature; (3) the demands and limitations of our ecological environment; (4) the social nature of being men and women in a society; (5) humanity’s need for institutional (political) structures to maintain order, dispense equality and preserve society; (6) human conditioning by time and space, which calls for international solidarity and universal concerns to prevent catastrophic destruction of the planet and civilization; and (7) humanity’s utopian religious consciousness, which is the happy combination and irreducible synthesis of all these factors.

Schillebeeckx is a thorough modern theologian and philosopher who answers this question quite emphatically, Why am I here?  You are here to be engaged in the reality of experienced contributing to the survival of this planet for the honor and glory of God.  Atheists may have a different take on this but they, too, are energized with the same objective.

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NOTE:

These other questions (in the caption above) will be taken up at a later date.