Harry, thanks for those comments. I will come back to respond, but first, I really liked Chapter Three, in the main. His discussion of Unrealistic Optimism and Expecting the Universe to Care, showed me that some of my beliefs are wrong.

In the context of my father dying this year from mesothelioma, I have recently read several books that claim a person’s attitude can influence their health. Lewis cites a range of evidence such as this study from the British Medical Journal to show how exaggerated and dangerous such claims can be when taken to extremes, whereas a more balanced view still recognises the importance of a strong appetite for life within a modern evidence-based value system.

The risks of unfounded optimism and blind faith are that people can avoid medical treatment in favour of alleged spiritual cures. In this chapter Lewis explores this wishful thinking, puncturing unrealistic beliefs.

Cancer generates strong negative emotion about unfairness and the harshness of reality, since most cancers seem to be random. Optimism helps people to cope, but can convey the hurtful message that those who died lacked enough hope. Lewis says the scientific evidence indicates that a positive attitude makes no different to cancer survival, since mechanisms such as the effect of stress on the immune system are not strong enough to measure. I find that hard to believe, and would be interested to see more analysis of this research.

His point is that cancer patients should try to enjoy their lives and accept medical advice, rather than wasting their time and effort on alternative cures, unless these activities reduce their distress more than other things they could do.

These problems reflect a wider American meme of unrealistic optimism, seen in the happy ending requirement in movies, and in the tyranny of positive thinking as a factor in taking on excessive debt.

Mind-body connection is important, but can easily be misunderstood, with people imagining that psychological hangups have greater physical effects than they really do. One patient saw her ‘emotional dissonance’ as more important than medical treatment, and another felt like a suicidal failure because he was depressed and not strong enough compared to the ideals of spiritual healing programs.

The bitterness of feeling abandoned by God can lead people to fail to attend to practical matters in the face of a terminal diagnosis, or waste money on futile aggressive treatments. When people should be sharing memories they often waste their precious moments on pointless medical treatment or other activities.

Lewis says mildly depressed people are more realistic than the buoyantly optimistic. Often there are sound reasons for depression based in people’s life circumstances. But more seriously depressed people often have distorted views and are often vulnerable. Psychiatry aims to help people to function, not necessarily to be realistic. People who have been devastated by adverse life events need a lot more help.

The tendency to oversell spills over into psychiatry, with inflated claims about transforming people’s lives where the reality is only a prospect of minor adjustment. Mild anxiety and depression can be completely normal, or just part of someone’s personality, but there is a tendency to treat these conditions as illnesses, even though such people can also be more sensitive and attuned and cautious. Mild conditions can benefit from counselling, while severe conditions need medication or can be untreatable.

Harry wrote:However, I'm not sure a "book of this sort" is going to avoid doing violence to the real issues by settling for "the [concept] most widely believed."

If the concept that is most widely believed has issues, those issues are real, aren't they? I would think they are important as well. Perhaps not as satisfying to yourself, being an intellectual shepherd of the flock.

But I get my own jollies from arguing that the meanings that matter are the ones that are emotional.

I get my jollies from the opposite, but an unfortunate side effect is that my reasoning tells me I'm biased, which impacts my ability to reason. So I force myself to see the blend at every opportunity. I think you do as well. Too much emphasis in the emotional connections can lead to rabbit holes, where people trust their gut instinct over science. An example is in Robert's last post above, where he mentions the dangers of relying too much on positive thinking, without balancing that with "the importance of a strong appetite for life within a modern evidence-based value system."

Modern rationalists point out that "we don't know" is an adequate answer to "where did things first come from?"

Technically speaking, it's currently the most correct answer as well. Knowing this yet having the urge to close the circle imparts a bit of cognitive dissonance. But I think that's a healthy version of agnosticism.

Robert Tulip wrote:In the context of my father dying this year from mesothelioma, I have recently read several books that claim a person’s attitude can influence their health. Lewis cites a range of evidence such as the study from the British Medical Journal to show how exaggerated and dangerous such claims can be when taken to extremes, whereas a more balanced view still recognises the importance of a strong appetite for life within a modern evidence-based value system.

Thanks for sharing about this, Robert. I imagine it is still a somewhat painful topic, and not at all abstract for you. I sort of feel that these issues are only real when you are in a crisis. This is not a "no atheists in foxholes" claim, but simply that it's very easy to chat about existential choices when life is going well, but we may not have the right "phenomenology" in mind if we are not dealing with attitudes that really matter.

I agree that Lewis addresses the issues of unrealistic optimism, and expecting the universe to care, with a helpful directness and insightful stories. The issue of wanting to have more control in the situation is critical, and I am not sure he gives it enough thought. People who insist that it must be something they can determine with their own mind are probably doing more damage by creating stress than they are helping things by activating immune reactions, or whatever. Yet many more people try to have some control, unrealistically, than go to the lengths of the case he considers.

Robert Tulip wrote:The risks of unfounded optimism and blind faith are that people can avoid medical treatment in favour of alleged spiritual cures. In this chapter Lewis explores this wishful thinking, puncturing unrealistic beliefs.

Cancer generates strong negative emotion about unfairness and the harshness of reality, since most cancers seem to be random. Optimism helps people to cope, but can convey the hurtful message that those who died lacked enough hope. Lewis says the scientific evidence indicates that a positive attitude makes no different to cancer survival, since mechanisms such as the effect of stress on the immune system are not strong enough to measure. I find that hard to believe, and would be interested to see more analysis of this research.

I was not reading the discussion of the evidence with the care you gave it. I was left with the impression that a positive attitude might help a little, but not enough to make it worthwhile to turn it into a campaign of determination. That makes sense to me: insisting on an illusory sense of control in the face of tough odds is setting oneself up for serious distress.

But let's face it. Most of the distress comes with the situation. I knew someone who died youngish, about 50, with kids not yet in college, from skin cancer, and he was apparently at peace about the whole thing the whole time. Those of us who visited him were left wondering when he grieved, which he surely must have done.

What I see as the main risk is blaming oneself, or someone else, for inadequate determination or optimism. The outcome is mostly out of one's control, and hindsight tells us nothing about whether attitude mattered.

Robert Tulip wrote:His point is that cancer patients should try to enjoy their lives and accept medical advice, rather than wasting their time and effort on alternative cures, unless these activities reduce their distress more than other things they could do.

That advice made a lot of sense to me. In some sense all of life is like that. People attach their sense of happiness and well-being to some particular outcome, and let their attachment cost them dearly, and in the end they face either the disappointment of not getting what you want or the disappointment of getting what you want. Toni Morrison says it doesn't matter, forget about happiness and go for accomplishment. But one can seek to accomplish things out of more peaceful motivations than drivenness.

Robert Tulip wrote:These problems reflect a wider American meme of unrealistic optimism, seen in the happy ending requirement in movies, and in the tyranny of positive thinking as a factor in taking on excessive debt.

Mind-body connection is important, but can easily be misunderstood, with people imagining that psychological hangups have greater physical effects than they really do. One patient saw her ‘emotional dissonance’ as more important than medical treatment, and another felt like a suicidal failure because he was depressed and not strong enough compared to the ideals of spiritual healing programs.

Yes, I thought that Lewis did a good job addressing these issues. There is also some related material in Kahneman's book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" about how we package our view of risk-taking, with the perceived package actually making a difference in our regrets and in the rationality of our choices. Rationality isn't everything, but I think there is a real danger when facing such drastic threats, a danger of letting emotions overwhelm our ability to enjoy the life we have, as long or as short as it may extend. To the extent that rationality can free us from that, I am in favor of it.

Robert Tulip wrote:The bitterness of feeling abandoned by God can lead people to fail to attend to practical matters in the face of a terminal diagnosis, or waste money on futile aggressive treatments. When people should be sharing memories they often waste their precious moments on pointless medical treatment or other activities.

This is a big issue in Christianity these days, and I suppose in all religion. It is where the rubber meets the road, as we say in America, on theodicy and just what we believe about God. If your life is to some extent organized around people and activities that presume a theology of God doing favors for the believers, then it is fairly likely one will pull away from these when life clobbers you over the head with dire outcomes. It is quite common for people who go through this to deepen their relationship to life, but unfortunately it is even more common for them to conclude that their life was a mistake and their supposed friends are actually just using people as props for their little drama. So the clergy, including in most evangelical denominations, are actively trying to move people away from notions of God as vending machine or Santa Claus, existing for the purpose of making our lives more secure and helping us out materially.

Instead, religion should provide some consolation and perspective. If that happens mainly by looking forward to an afterlife, for some people, I do not have any serious objection. (But these days it is callous to assume that others share such an expectation and to lay it on them as a kind of obligation, and so Christians are also being counseled to avoid denigrating the importance of other people's crises with other-worldly perspectives.) Done really well, I think, this consolation and perspective comes from being satisfied that one is actually living for that which one believes to be worthwhile, whether or not that is expressed in other-worldly terms.

Stepping a bit further back from the sociology, you have to wonder about the theological shallowness of anyone who seriously thought God was protecting them from cancer/crime/auto accidents, etc. Obviously it is mainly an emotional reaction, a feeling about life. But people turn it into an article of faith, too. My father did that, and occasionally it provided him with cover for poor decisions, like not buying medical insurance and refusing to go see a doctor when he should. I have to admire the determination that went with that: he managed his own diabetes for 10 years by dietary control. But still, it was not rational, and dreadfully bad theology.

So here's my big question, which I was going to save for further chapters. According to Kubler-Ross's theory of five stages of grief, (or, better, of coping with terminal illness) after denial and anger it is typical to go through bargaining. That is, one imagines that by promising to "be good" or do some performance, one will be rewarded with healing. Now, that's a transparent effort to get some control over something that is clearly outside one's control. It isn't rational.

But my question is, shouldn't it be entered into wholeheartedly rather than held at arm's length by rationality? Sin boldly, one might say, against the requirements of rationality. I am not claiming that there is something inevitable about the stages and a person has to plunge into this to reach the final stage of acceptance. Rather, I am saying the emotional reaction is entirely sensible and understandable, even if it has no rational basis or justification.

In keeping with my argument that meaning is about emotional connections to events and causal relations, it seems to me that suppressing such emotional grasping at straws is likely to short-circuit some important connections. When we bargain, seeking control, we are searching for things we might be able to do that would have some effect. We are also searching for a narrative structure, with something to blame (loss of ozone, for mesothelioma in Australia, might be a candidate).

And finally, we are engaging in a new level of seriousness with life and the business of being alive. What are the values we have been treating casually, that we have a sense we really should have been engaging meaningfully? Like the fact that we will now have to settle debts (see Socrates' last words) we finally face up to the trifling we have been doing with life. No more procrastinating. No more time. It is not surprising to me (indeed, I have faced it myself over less serious issues) that this would initially feel like the child promising to be good in order to get some reward from the parent. The question is, how else do we come to the point of recognizing what we think "being good" really is?

Done wrong, this bargaining with life is a way of further denial. A game of let's pretend, to pretend we can control the outcome. Done right, it is the beginning of a solemn promise to use my life for what I really think it should be used for. To let my family know how much they mean to me, and to spend time with them rather than avoiding the emotional stress, for example. Done right, it is the beginning of a reckoning about life.

With that in mind, I think "Expecting the Universe to Care" can be seen as just sloppy thinking that still reflects, to some extent, an encounter one needs to have. Not with the Universe, but with life and what makes it meaningful. Referring once again to Kahneman, I suspect that "Bargaining" is a lazy jumping to emotionally-constructed answers, but like much of that perception-based thinking, is also a pointer to the fact that there is an issue needing to be addressed more seriously.

Robert Tulip wrote:Lewis says mildly depressed people are more realistic than the buoyantly optimistic. Often there are sound reasons for depression based in people’s life circumstances. But more seriously depressed people often have distorted views and are often vulnerable. Psychiatry aims to help people to function, not necessarily to be realistic. People who have been devastated by adverse life events need a lot more help.

I thought Lewis was also very good on this subject, at least at providing balance and perspective. I was quite impressed that he was willing to agree that realism is not a prime goal in itself, but could be subordinated to functioning well.

Interbane wrote:

Harry wrote:However, I'm not sure a "book of this sort" is going to avoid doing violence to the real issues by settling for "the [concept] most widely believed."

If the concept that is most widely believed has issues, those issues are real, aren't they? I would think they are important as well. Perhaps not as satisfying to yourself, being an intellectual shepherd of the flock.

Blush. I feel flattered or honored. Maybe both. Well, I am trying to withhold judgment til I have seen what Lewis has to say, but let me just say I think "finding meaning in a world without (a supernatural) God" is a very important topic. It is, one might say, meaningful. But the issues that are adequately addressed by good theology don't really need to be examined carefully for cognitive biases and their sources. It's fine for him to do so - I learn from it, so I expect others would as well. But if that's as deep as he gets, I will be left, as you suggest, unsatisfied.

The reason goes to the heart of my philosophy of life. I think autonomy is a worthy goal. That is, I think each of us should strive for an account of ethical decisions that makes enough sense to us that we are actually willing to live by it. This includes an account of the reasons for being willing to live by it.

The term "neoconservative" was coined, as I understand it, by William Kristol in the 70s, defining such a person as "a liberal who has been mugged by reality." The French often argue that the bourgeoisie have their "heart on the left but their pocketbook on the right." These both strike me as inadequate positions. I feel I would be left with only worthless principles if these were likely to give way when the potential bad stuff happened to me, or when I had to make real decisions based on them rather than just making talk.

If Lewis takes on such a weighty topic and in the end says only "people draw grand but mistaken conclusions based on emotional influences, in the following ways," then it is basically a self-help book, not a book that helps us think about God or about meaning or about the relationship between the two. Not a total waste of time, but hardly living up to the title.

Interbane wrote:

But I get my own jollies from arguing that the meanings that matter are the ones that are emotional.

I get my jollies from the opposite, but an unfortunate side effect is that my reasoning tells me I'm biased, which impacts my ability to reason. So I force myself to see the blend at every opportunity. I think you do as well.

Well, sort of. I tend to naturally gravitate to the factual account, which is what I think you are saying, and so I start asking myself about the emotional aspects and whether they have been artificially suppressed. Trying to write fiction, this comes up all the time. On the other hand, some of the ways that I don't naturally fit in with many of my colleagues result from my emotional connections, e.g. due to my father having been poorly educated and working class, and I am quite happy to stick with the meanings I was "thrown into" unless I have a reason, based in autonomous understanding of values, for changing them.

Interbane wrote:Too much emphasis in the emotional connections can lead to rabbit holes, where people trust their gut instinct over science.

Sure. I agree. I also think sometimes people's gut instincts are not really in conflict with the facts, as determined by science, but only perceived to be. It should be the job of "intellectual shepherds" to help people understand how they can maintain the solid values, like striving for some sense of control when cancer strikes, without giving up a basically realistic understanding of how things work. Those can be very difficult "technologies" to manage, and a willingness to keep faith with emotional motivations until the matter has been thought through can be indispensable to working out the methods.

Interbane wrote:

Modern rationalists point out that "we don't know" is an adequate answer to "where did things first come from?"

Technically speaking, it's currently the most correct answer as well. Knowing this yet having the urge to close the circle imparts a bit of cognitive dissonance. But I think that's a healthy version of agnosticism.

Yes, and settling for no definite answer is fine for questions like ultimate origins about which we do not need an answer. I get more worried with people I know who feel that they must reach a certain conclusion about it as a matter of maintaining their system of values. That kind of cognitive dissonance is a serious problem, perhaps precisely because people work so hard to avoid experiencing it. That is a big part of why I am reading the book, and, so far, appreciating it.

With lots of different comments on this book, I will dip in to a few that I find particularly interesting. This is a response to post166419.html#p166419

Harry Marks wrote:What if the proper solution to a large share of mental illness turns out to be integration into an ongoing social setting which provides people with some support and some opportunity to contribute to the community? Yet that hardly figures in "therapeutic" options considered, analyzed and reported. The challenge of building a conversation goes both ways.

Integration into a social setting is exactly the purpose of a church congregation at the local parish level. There is an evolutionary adaptive quality of local religious practice that faces major selective pressures in adapting to modern culture.

The emergence of anonymous mass culture, alongside the conservative tendency of churches to be slow to update their doctrine, and the tendency of rational people to give too much weight to the surface irrationality of church practice and belief, all mean the ability of church to build community is in decline.

It is quite natural that rational people refuse to countenance that false claims and seemingly meaningless rituals can contain hidden value, when this alleged spiritual value is hard to see as explicit conscious content, and its allegorical meaning is never explained in ways that make scientific sense. The churches give priority to the comfort of believers over the needs of non-believers, but that points to areas of dialogue and reform that are essential to rebuild church credibility.

Harry Marks wrote: Psychiatry was born in the harsh triage of the insane asylum, where broken people were sent to be coped with by whatever means were needed, and the privacy of the doctor's office, where taboo issues could at long last be discussed. We are terribly impressed by pharmacological success against mental illness, but that is partly because that is the type of intervention we are most enamored of. The idea that our whole society and economy might be called on to make space for those who are facing tough mental challenges seems too "religious" for the most driven people to take on board. Perhaps we could begin to think about what kind of mental illness being driven is.

Lewis may be terribly impressed by psychiatric drugs, but I am not. Drugs for depression and anxiety are a Band-Aid over the gaping wound of social dysfunction. The collapse of local community identity, vision and care is a primary cause of the epidemic of mental illness, in my view. Until people find ways to restore local connections, through new forms of religious identity, the problems will only get worse.

Welfare payments are another palliative, a fiscal transfer from the driven to the incompetent. Your description of being driven as a mental illness is interesting. The productivity of competitive economic growth has downsides with the exclusion of those who can’t keep up, leaving aside the ignored ecological risks.

‘Making space for those who face tough mental challenges’ has a religious dimension. It can be solved by the great quid pro quo of Matthew 25, the negotiated settlement between capitalist and socialist values that agrees if we produce abundance through accepting the morality of ‘to those who have will be given’, we will obtain the resources for works of mercy that treat the least as if they are Jesus Christ, distributing the wealth created by the driven.

Robert Tulip wrote: In the context of my father dying this year from mesothelioma, I have recently read several books that claim a person’s attitude can influence their health. Lewis cites a range of evidence such as this study from the British Medical Journal to show how exaggerated and dangerous such claims can be when taken to extremes, whereas a more balanced view still recognises the importance of a strong appetite for life within a modern evidence-based value system.

The risks of unfounded optimism and blind faith are that people can avoid medical treatment in favour of alleged spiritual cures. In this chapter Lewis explores this wishful thinking, puncturing unrealistic beliefs.

Cancer generates strong negative emotion about unfairness and the harshness of reality, since most cancers seem to be random. Optimism helps people to cope, but can convey the hurtful message that those who died lacked enough hope. Lewis says the scientific evidence indicates that a positive attitude makes no different to cancer survival, since mechanisms such as the effect of stress on the immune system are not strong enough to measure. I find that hard to believe, and would be interested to see more analysis of this research.

I'm sorry to hear of your father's death, Robert. You had mentioned him a few times over the past years in your posts. One of the best "debunking" books I've read deals partly with the message of failure that can come across to the person with cancer if he or she isn't sufficiently upbeat about winning over the disease. The book is The Last Self-Help Book You'll ever Need: Repress Your Anger, Think Negatively, Be a Good Blamer, and Throttle Your Inner Child , by Paul Pearsall. Pearsall is a psychologist who tells of his own experience with cancer, and how unhelpful he found exhortations to "keep positive." The book is full of anti-bromides, as one reviewer put it.

Lewis says mildly depressed people are more realistic than the buoyantly optimistic. Often there are sound reasons for depression based in people’s life circumstances. But more seriously depressed people often have distorted views and are often vulnerable. Psychiatry aims to help people to function, not necessarily to be realistic. People who have been devastated by adverse life events need a lot more help.

The tendency to oversell spills over into psychiatry, with inflated claims about transforming people’s lives where the reality is only a prospect of minor adjustment. Mild anxiety and depression can be completely normal, or just part of someone’s personality, but there is a tendency to treat these conditions as illnesses, even though such people can also be more sensitive and attuned and cautious. Mild conditions can benefit from counselling, while severe conditions need medication or can be untreatable.

Martin Seligman wrote that it behooves CEOs to keep such mildly depressed people around, because as advisers they often offer counsel that moderates irrational exuberance. The tendency for psychiatry to continually define new disorders is explored in another good book, Saving Normal, by Allen Frances.

DWill wrote:I'm sorry to hear of your father's death, Robert. You had mentioned him a few times over the past years in your posts.

Thanks DWill, speaking of my father, here is his obituary.

Robert, thanks for sharing the obituary. It sounds like he was a wonderful man and a good father. The brief part about his home (your home) was fascinating and inspiring. Truly quite a loss. You have my condolences.

I also took the trouble to look up mesothelioma, hoping to have some insight into the course of the disease, and discovered to my embarrassment that it is not skin cancer at all. Sorry about that. It is interesting that 80 percent of cases seem to originate with exposure to asbestos, so there is still a candidate for blame. Not that such a candidate helps the sense of control, but one can imagine it might help with the process of putting together a sense of meaning in this mostly random process.

Robert Tulip wrote:Integration into a social setting is exactly the purpose of a church congregation at the local parish level. There is an evolutionary adaptive quality of local religious practice that faces major selective pressures in adapting to modern culture.

The point was made to me long ago that Jesus's great religious innovation (or, in your perspective, the innovation of the early Christian church) was neither forgiveness nor the emphasis on the inner representation of the law, but the practice of intimate living among a small group of like-minded agents of the Kingdom (which of course may have come to him from Qumran or the ashrams of the East).

After being told, quite bizarrely really, that believing particular intellectual propositions will save you from hellfire, we have a tendency to think of Jesus in terms of particular teachings. But the understanding one gets from seeing the practice of relationship in action can shift that perspective dramatically.

Robert Tulip wrote:The emergence of anonymous mass culture, alongside the conservative tendency of churches to be slow to update their doctrine, and the tendency of rational people to give too much weight to the surface irrationality of church practice and belief, all mean the ability of church to build community is in decline.

There is something to this, but there are arguments out there that the ability of anything to build community is in decline. People don't even fracture over big questions of authority and purpose anymore, they fracture over "sensibility." ("If someone doesn't think George Carlin and John Oliver are funny, well, I don't want to know them." That kind of attitude.)

One of the most important arguments in "Habits of the Heart" is that communities of choice can never substitute for communities of proximity. If we can manage to get along with the people we are thrown together with (there's that word again) we are plunged into a much more authentic meaning than comes from the process of getting along with people who agree with us about life's big issues (which of course is difficult enough). If this sounds like saying that you have to discuss politics and religion with people you disagree with, so that awkward Thanksgiving Dinner experience takes over your life (sorry for the North American reference - it's about getting together with distant relatives who see life differently), well to some extent it is. But of course one of the ways of getting along with those people who see life so differently is to learn to see the world from a different perspective (or one could just move to Europe). And that rounds out a person's values in a way that doesn't usually happen from discussions with like-minded people.

Robert Tulip wrote:It is quite natural that rational people refuse to countenance that false claims and seemingly meaningless rituals can contain hidden value, when this alleged spiritual value is hard to see as explicit conscious content, and its allegorical meaning is never explained in ways that make scientific sense. The churches give priority to the comfort of believers over the needs of non-believers, but that points to areas of dialogue and reform that are essential to rebuild church credibility.

Well, oddly enough the allegorical meaning is always explained in plausible terms, in my experience. Even in the evangelical church I grew up in, the minister spent much more time relating the subject to the experience of the congregation than elucidating theological implications. There were two vital principles in operation: "put the hay down where the cows can reach it" which is about not storing wonderful theological insights like grace up in the unreachable parts of the barn; and "not being so heavenly minded that you are no earthly good" which is about avoiding the escapism temptation that comes with supernaturally oriented religion.

The falsity of the traditional, literal claims is much more problematic when they are used as a club to try to compel submissive behavior in others than when they are used to extract implications for good living. I think it's fine for churches to set aside claims of authority based on the supernatural, but it's more important to dwell on the lessons actually taught, like removing the beam from one's own eye first, instead of stroking people's sense of spiritual superiority over others.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: We are terribly impressed by pharmacological success against mental illness, but that is partly because that is the type of intervention we are most enamored of. The idea that our whole society and economy might be called on to make space for those who are facing tough mental challenges seems too "religious" for the most driven people to take on board. Perhaps we could begin to think about what kind of mental illness being driven is.

Lewis may be terribly impressed by psychiatric drugs, but I am not. Drugs for depression and anxiety are a Band-Aid over the gaping wound of social dysfunction. The collapse of local community identity, vision and care is a primary cause of the epidemic of mental illness, in my view. Until people find ways to restore local connections, through new forms of religious identity, the problems will only get worse.

Haidt is out with a new book arguing, apparently, that the epidemic of anxiety and perhaps depression is due to the loss of "play" in which children try out their social skills in an unsupervised setting. I don't know that any of us knows the answer, but there certainly seem to be powerful undercurrents of social disruption from all the societal change that is going on.

I do think that the loss of church community is a genuine loss for society, but that is based more on my own experience than on social science.

Robert Tulip wrote: The productivity of competitive economic growth has downsides with the exclusion of those who can’t keep up, leaving aside the ignored ecological risks.

If my personal diagnosis of the modern economic situation is correct, we will soon be learning more than we wanted to know about the inadequacies of the modern economy. Just as central planning failed when the economy reached a stage at which quality of output mattered more than quantity, so corporate capitalism may be failing as the economy reaches a stage at which it is no longer worthwhile from a purely private perspective to employ large segments of the work force. Writing so many voters off as "those who can't keep up" is a dangerous practice for democratic values.

Robert Tulip wrote:if we produce abundance through accepting the morality of ‘to those who have will be given’, we will obtain the resources for works of mercy that treat the least as if they are Jesus Christ, distributing the wealth created by the driven.

That may turn out to be an actual solution, but it doesn't ring true for my instincts about human nature. Rather I think we will make some major changes in the treatment of intellectual property and the ability to shelter multinational income from taxation, while finding social mechanisms to build up economic connections converting leisure by the more productive into empowerment for those who "can't keep up" without it.

Continuing response to post166419.html#p166419

Harry Marks wrote:I have no reason to believe that religion would be any better at self-criticism than, say, academia, which is really bad at it.

A reason in principle is that religion claims that self-criticism is central to morality. The Biblical critiques of hypocrisy, such as the criticisms of pharisaical morality by Jesus Christ, illustrate that Christianity aspires to accurate self-criticism. For example, an understanding of penitence and contrition can see forgiveness as conditional on understanding that what you did was wrong, and how and why it was wrong.

All that is of course only an ideal, since the mainstream Christian vision is perverted by fantasy, with untrue myths accepted as fact, leading to pervasive assumptions that often undermine any efforts at self-criticism. A problem in human psychology is that people confuse the ego with the self, meaning that academics, churchmen, businessmen and all practical people develop an arrogant attitude in which self-awareness is brushed aside in favour of worldly ambition.

Harry Marks wrote: I see very little willingness to believe that people can commit to the values of traditional religion without the supernatural language to back it up.

Mythology in religion appears in the literal acceptance of supernatural language. In memetic terms of cultural evolution, functional myths are durable, stable and fecund, displaying adaptive traits that are robust against competition.

The psycho-social problem here is that moral values are always embedded in a complex narrative. That means in practice it is immensely difficult to sustain values outside the story. This is something I want to return to in discussion of Chapter Five where Lewis celebrates the philosopher Immanuel Kant and his idea that modern rationality involves a maturing of human thinking.

I don’t see maturity as so simple, since this problem of embedding values in story indicates that psychology of the unconscious is far more complex than the surface rationalism perceives.

My view is that it is possible to retain the supernatural language of religious practice, for example praying to God as Heavenly Father, while completely gutting that language of literal content in terms of entailed belief in God as a personal entity. I don’t see that as deceptive, but rather as a conscious way to commit to values through acceptance of the cultural form in which values are transmitted, while seeing the language as pointing to a deeper allegorical meaning and a way of being open to mystery.

Harry Marks wrote: Some of this is the fear that religious leaders feel to confront supernatural claims as the motivation for religion. They may believe rightly that they would no longer be supported without it. Or they may have their own motivated reasoning telling them that they chose correctly when they decided on religious leadership as a path in life.

These are powerful problems that need to confront how society has largely moved on from the comforting acceptance of simple pieties, leaving churches somewhat stranded. There is certainly a fervent audience for supernatural claims, but this audience is generally viewed with derision and contempt by the modern secular world. Preaching to the choir ignores the world.

Furthermore, supernatural claims are seen as morally suspect, as a corrupt way to justify social control and exploitation, especially with the appalling sexual assault crisis of the church. One way to help bridge the divide may be to retain conventional language in worship while offering a critique in the preaching, explaining that all the claims of religion have to be assessed as parable. Churchgoers have been systematically lied to for such a long time that there is a wrenching jolt involved in assessing what is true and false in the heritage of faith.