Thought du jour - 9 October 2011

Mac Tonnies created this version of a photo of him speaking at the 2006 New Frontiers Symposium to sum up the gist of his presentation that day, and his philosophy about humanity and our future in general.

Paul Kimball

The Morality Pill

In a recent issue of the Globe and Mail Guy Kahane, who is deputy director of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, wrote an opinion piece titled  Would We Swallow A Morality Pill, in which he posed the following question: Should we use our growing scientific understanding of the basis of human morality to try to make people morally better?

Here's an excerpt:

It would be ideal if individuals could freely explore different ways to improve themselves, whether by practising mindfulness, reading moral philosophy or, yes, by taking a “morality” pill. But it’s also true that, although some people are eager to take pills that make them feel better, it’s not so obvious that people would want to take pills that would make them morally better. It’s not clear people really want to be morally better. And those who, like the psychopathic Alex [of A Clockwork Orange], need the most help are probably those who would want it least.

Well worth a look, and then consideration, less so for the idea that an actual "morality pill" might be invented than for the question that Kahane leaves the reader with:

"Will we want to take them if they ever become available? And what does it say about us if we won't."

Paul Kimball

Paul Tillich, the Meaning of Life, and the "Other"

Paul Tillich was one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. This fascinating conversation with him was recorded in 1956.

A Conversation with Paul Tillich - 1956 - 1/3 by Victor_Eremita


A Conversation with Paul Tillich - 1956 - 2/3 by Victor_Eremita


A Conversation with Paul Tillich - 1956 - 3/3 by Victor_Eremita

I made an impromptu guest appearance on Radio Misterioso a couple of weeks ago with my good friend and fellow traveler, Greg Bishop, and we got into a conversation about time, and timelessness, and consciousness, and the possibility of the existence of an advanced non-human intelligence of some sort, all of which led me to reference the idea of "the eternal now", which has been part of Christian theology for centuries, particularly the mystical tradition within Christianity, something I studied at length whilst a graduate student in history. In my opinion, the most thoughtful exposition of the concept of an "eternal now" came from Tillich, who I count as one of the primary influences on my own way of thinking. Greg and I discussed his work a bit on the show, in particular his work The Eternal Now, a collection of his sermons, from which I quoted at length. I highly recommend it as a work of profound importance, which should be of interest to anyone who contemplates our place in this universe, and the possibility of contact with an "other"; you can read it here.

The quote that I referenced comes from the end of chapter 11, which deals specifically with the concept of time, and an "eternal now". Here it is:

The mystery of the future and the mystery of the past are united in the mystery of the present. Our time, the time we have, is the time in which we have "presence." But how can we have "presence"? Is not the present moment gone when we think of it? Is not the present the ever-moving boundary line between past and future? But a moving boundary is not a place to stand upon. If nothing were given to us except the "no more" of the past and the "not yet" of the future, we would not have anything. We could not speak of the time that is our time; we would not have "presence."

The mystery is that we have a present; and even more, that we have our future also because we anticipate it in ‘the present; and that we have our past also, because we remember it in the present. In the present our future and our past are ours. But there is no "present" if we think of the never-ending flux of time. The riddle of the present is the deepest of all the riddles of time. Again, there is no answer except from that which comprises all time and lies beyond it -- the eternal. Whenever we say "now" or "today," we stop the flux of time for us. We accept the present and do not care that it is gone in the moment that we accept it. We live in it and it is renewed for us in every new present." This is possible because every moment of time reaches into the eternal. It is the eternal that stops the flux of time for us. It is the eternal "now" which provides for us a temporal "now." We live so long as "it is still today" -- in the words of the letter to the Hebrews. Not everybody, and nobody all the time, is aware of this "eternal now" in the temporal "now." But sometimes it breaks powerfully into our consciousness and gives us the certainty of the eternal, of a dimension of time which cuts into time and gives us our time.

People who are never aware of this dimension lose the possibility of resting in the present. As the letter to the Hebrews describes it, they never enter into the divine rest. They are held by the past and cannot separate themselves from it, or they escape towards the future, unable to rest in the present. They have not entered the eternal rest which stops the flux of time and gives us the blessing of the present. Perhaps this is the most conspicuous characteristic of our period, especially in the western world and particularly in this country. It lacks the courage to accept "presence" because it has lost the dimension of the eternal.

"I am the beginning and the end." This is said to us who live in the bondage of time, who have to face the end, who cannot escape the past, who need a present to stand upon. Each of the modes of time has its peculiar mystery, each of them carries its peculiar anxiety. Each of them drives us to an ultimate question. There is one answer to these questions -- the eternal. There is one power that surpasses the all-consuming power of time -- the eternal: He Who was and is and is to come, the beginning and the end. He gives us forgiveness for what has passed. He gives us courage for what is to come. He gives us rest in His eternal Presence.

Despite what some Biblical literalists might have you believe, Tillich clearly viewed all of this within the Christian tradition, but one does not have to accept that framework to see the merit in the general thoughts that he expressed about the idea of time and timelessness, and how it might affect our interaction with an advanced non-human intelligence that has unlocked the secrets of the "eternal now", i.e. time.

Whether we call it "God", as Tillich did, or whether we call it something else, an examination of "an other" amongst us requires more than just dogmatic scientism, or fundamental religiosity. In the end, it is an existential question, and the answer lies within each of us, and our ability to see beyond the "here and now" and into the "eternal now", in all of its possible manifestations. 

Paul Kimball

Carl Jung: The Origin of Evil & Self-Awareness

Following up on The Modern Man. The one thing that the pre-war Albert Speer lacked, by all accounts, was self-awareness.

Paul Kimball

The Modern Man

Albert Speer was Hitler's Minister of Armaments from 1942 onwards, and for much of the 1930s and early 1940s was the closest thing that Hitler had to a friend. He was tried at Nuremberg in 1945 - 1946 for various war crimes and crimes against humanity, and found  guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, though he was acquitted on the other two counts (participating in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of crime against peace, and planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace). He was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment at Spandau, which he served.

At his trial, Speer was the one Nazi leader who admitted at least a sense of general responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi regime. However, he was always very careful to deny direct knowledge for the greatest crime of all - the Holocaust. If it had been shown that he knew, he surely would have been hanged, like Fritz Sauckel, the man who rounded up the labour that Speer used to keep the factories running.

In the years that followed his release, Speer published Inside the Third Reich, which told his side of the story, and which was accepted by many historians as a reasonably accurate and candid version of events. But Speer always maintained that he did not know about the Holocaust. In Inside the Third Reich, he wrote that in mid-1944, he was told by Gauleiter Hanke of Lower Silesia that he should never accept an invitation to inspect a concentration camp in neighboring Upper Silesia, as "he had seen something there which he was not permitted to describe and moreover could not describe". Speer later concluded that Hanke had been speaking of Auschwitz, and blamed himself for not inquiring further of Hanke or seeking information from Himmler or Hitler:

These seconds were uppermost in my mind when I stated to the international court at the Nuremberg Trial that, as an important member of the leadership of the Reich, I had to share the total responsibility for all that had happened. For from that moment on I was inescapably contaminated morally; from fear of discovering something which might have made me turn from my course, I had closed my eyes ... Because I failed at that time, I still feel, to this day, responsible for Auschwitz in a wholly personal sense.

However, his claims to not have known became more controversial as the years went along, and new information surfaced, particularly about his presence at the Posen Conference on October 6, 1943, at which Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler gave a speech in which he detailed the ongoing Holocaust to Nazi leaders. Himmler said, "The grave decision had to be taken to cause this people to vanish from the earth ... In the lands we occupy, the Jewish question will be dealt with by the end of the year." Speer was mentioned several times in the speech, and Himmler seemed to address him directly.

In Inside the Third Reich, Speer mentioned his own address to the officials (which took place earlier in the day), but did not mention Himmler's speech. He later claimed that he left before Himmler gave his speech. However, in Inside the Third Reich, Speer recalled that on the evening after the conference, many Nazi officials were so drunk that they needed help boarding the special train which was to take them to a meeting with Hitler. One of his biographers suggested this necessarily implied he must have still been present at Posen then, and must have heard Himmler's speech. In response, Speer claimed that in writing Inside the Third Reich, he erred in reporting an incident that happened at another conference at Posen a year later, as happening in 1943 - a claim which strains credulity on such an important point.

Speer died in 1981 whilst on a visit to London. To the end of his life, he maintained that he did not know about the Holocaust, and that he was not at Posen for Himmler's speech. It's hard to find a historian who accepts the former contention anymore. Gitta Sereny, in her book Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth, concluded that Speer must have known about the Final Solution at least by the time of the Posen conference, whether or not he was actually present at Himmler's speech. She based this judgment on extensive conversations with Speer, analysis of his published and unpublished writings, and interviews with Speer's family and colleagues. In Sereny's view, Speer's acknowledgment of his guilt as a Nazi and his complicity in crimes of which he claimed to be unaware was part of a complex process by which he evaded acknowledgment of the full truth.

I wrote my major paper in law school on a comparative study of Speer's case at Nuremberg versus that of Sauckel. My conclusion was that Speer should have been hanged with Sauckel. Speer's responsibility as the man who employed the slave labour was at least as great as that of Sauckel, who procured that labour. Also, Speer's position in the Nazi hierarchy was far more significant than Sauckel's. Finally, I was convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, as Sereny was, that Speer knew about the Holocaust, no matter how much he struggled with this knowledge in later years.

Questions such as: "what did Albert Speer know?" are useful, however, because they provided a window into a bigger question: "what did the average German know?"

It's a question that leads us to... us.

It's easy now to look back at the Nazis and say that was then, and there, and they were a singular kind of evil. We look at the likes of Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich, who have assumed an almost cartoon-like quality over the decades, and then look around and comfort ourselves with the thought that it could never happen to us. They were an anomaly, we say. Monsters. It could never happen again, and certainly not here.

But those men were the exception. Speer was the rule. He was a bright, civilized man, filled with ambition. He was the thoroughly modern man who enabled the monsters to flourish. It's was probably the key factor that saved his life at Nuremberg - compared with a thug like Sauckel, or a killer like Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Speer looked normal, because he was normal. Subconsciusly, he reminded the Western judges of themselves. They could convict him, and the could sentence him to prison, but they couldn't bring themselves to hang him, because they couldn't bring themselves to see him as he was - just as guilty as the monsters. He was, in the end, their kind of Nazi. 

That was their tragic mistake. Without Speer, and millions like him, there would have been no Nazi regime, no Second World War, no Holocaust. He wasn't less guilty; he was the most guilty of them all - not because he was a monster, but because he wasn't.

When one looks at the life and career of Albert Speer, the correct question isn't to ask what he knew, or even what he wanted to know, but what he didn't want to know. Then we have to ask ourselves what happens when everyone in government, and industry, and our society in general, acts like Speer. What happens when people just don't want to know anymore?

That's the question that, in our own way, we all need to ask ourselves, every day. It's not the next Adolf Hitler we need to be looking for, it's the next Albert Speer, hiding inside each and every one of us.

Paul Kimball

Fall Well

"Ten thousand liars
tell ten thosuand lies
and then they whisper
silent goodbyes,
Ten thousand prophets
tell ten thousand tales
they put Revelations
on the auction block for sale,
stranged, stranged
we've been stranged...

Ten thousand saviours
on ten thousand TVs
offer salvation
for a nominal fee,
Ten thousand sailors
on ten thousand ships
out on the ocean
alone and adrift,
stranged, stranged
we've been stranged...

Ten thousand opiates
cloud ten thousand minds
never allowing them
to seek what they must find,
stranged, stranged
we've been stranged."

Of all the songs that I wrote in the 1990s, this is the one that seems the most relevant today. "Reality" television (or, as it's often known now, "factual programming"), "news" channels that don't tell us anything about what's really happening in the world, Michael Bay "filmmaking", conspicuous consumption raised to a virtual religion...  the opiates get more powerful and ingrained with each passing year, and we just keep falling for it all.

The only silver lining is that I don't think we've reached terminal velocity yet, but we're accelerating... and the ground is getting closer.

Paul Kimball

The Ishmael Imperative

Is the life of a human being worth more than the life of any other inhabitant of this planet - like this chimpanzee that I saw at the Los Angeles Zoo a month ago? We would say yes, but "God" - or any advanced non-human intelligence - might not make that distinction. As I wrote on my Facebook status after coming back from the Zoo by way of a stop in Beverley Hills, I saw more "humanity" staring into the eyes of this chimp than I did on all of Rodeo Drive.

I recommend that everyone read the wonderful and thought-provoking book Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn.  The novel is a philosophical examination of the captivity of mankind under a distorted, imprisoning and damaging "civilization". In the end, Ishmael, a gorilla which can communicate telepathically, tells the narrator:

The story of Genesis must be undone. First, Cain must stop murdering Abel. This is essential if you're to survive. The Leavers* are the endangered species most critical to the world - not because they're humans but because they alone can show the destroyers of the world that there is more than one right way to live. And then, of course, you must spit out the fruit of the forbidden tree. You must absolutely and forever relinquish the idea that you know who should live and who should die on this planet.
 * All "primitive" cultures

I believe that we will be judged by how we treat the other inhabitants with whom we share this planet. As things stand now, we would be found sorely wanting. Change is imperative -  and not just "at the margins" change which would still have us at the top of the "planetary pyramid", but rather radical and revolutionary change that replaces that pyramid model of order with a different view - a circle, where everyone and everything is interconnected. 

We must become neither "takers" nor "leavers" as envisioned in Ishmael - we must become sharers. Our future depends on it.

This might all sound very "new age" to many readers. To those who would see it that way, I ask one simple question - isn't it about time for a "new age" given how the "old age" has worked out for us, and our fellow inhabitants of this fragile world?


As I wrote in 1992:





In other words, who are we, and more important - who do we want to become?


Paul Kimball