Thinking out of the box

“There are no right answers to wrong questions,” said Ursula K. LeGuin. If our questions are wrong, there is a need to alter the entire framework of the way we investigate the world. Hayden Carruth wrote: “William Blake once remarked that he had to create his own system of thought in order to avoid being enslaved by those of others, and Sartre has said that genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.”

Sometimes the "wrong questions" are promoted with the intention of suppressing the thought of others. Sometimes they have this effect accidentally, originating only out of the vanity of philosophers. Rollo May: "The shelves of college libraries are weighed down with books that were written because other books were written because still other books were written – the meat of the meal getting thinner and thinner until the books seem to have nothing to do with the excitement of truth but only with status and prestige."

Getting out of the box and helping others to do so is hard work. After all, as a Yiddish proverb had it: "Not everyone is happy with his appearance, but all are happy with their brains!" We must remember it starts with thinking differently. "We are not in charge of the world. We just live here and try," as Donna Haraway put it, "to strike up noninnocent conversations."

Sources

Ursula K. LeGuin, quoted in The Village Voice, quoted in The Week, June 7, 2013, p. 19.

Hayden Carruth's introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea

Rollo May, Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1972. p 69.

Yiddish Proverb. Quoted by Rabbi Nilton Bonder. The Kabbalah of Envy: Transforming Hatred, Anger, and other Negative Emotions. Boston: Shambhala, 1997. p. 40.

Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledge: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective." Feminist Studies, 14:575-99, p 593-94. Quoted in "Ecological Feminism and Ecosystem Ecology" by Karen J. Warren and Jim Cheney, Ecological Feminist Philosophies, ed. Karen J. Warren, Indiana University Press, 1996. p 257.

Image

Crazy quilt in support of President Cleveland and Vice President Thomas Hendricks (American, 1880s). Public domain. From FolkArtMuseum.org and Wikimedia Commons.

War crime: Castration and killing of boys in South Sudan in 2015

Groups aligned with the South Sudanese military reportedly committed sexual violence against boys and girls over a period of several weeks in May 2015 in Unity state. In a story by the AP:

At least 129 children were killed, with boys castrated and girls raped, during a government offensive against rebels last month in South Sudan, according to the U.N. children's agency.

* * *

...UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake said survivors reported that boys were castrated and left to bleed out, while girls were gang raped and killed.

Other children were thrown into burning buildings, he said...

According to an article in Christian Today, this information was given to UNICEF by civilian witnesses and survivors who made it to the UN base in Bentiu, a city where tens of thousands of South Sudanese were seeking shelter. The witnesses said that the attackers did not want the children to grow up and exact revenge for the crimes they suffered in the civil war, so the attackers decided to kill the children – even including newborns. Nonetheless, some children were reportedly taken into slavery: boys as soldiers, girls as wives.

Sources

"UNICEF: 129 children killed in South Sudan fighting in May." AP, published by Fox News, June 18, 2015.

"Slaughter in South Sudan: Girls raped, boys castrated, newborns killed in civil war, UNICEF says." Monica Cantilero, Christian Today, June 22, 2015.

The character Radha in Anand Mahadevan's 'The Strike' (2011)

The novel The Strike by Anand Mahadevan, published in 2011, is set in India in the 1980s. It focuses on the accidental troubles of an innocent boy, Hari.

Radha, an hijra, first appears in Chapter 10. Hari meets her on a train after he wanders away from his family. She is initially described this way:

“Her arms were slender and fine, though her skin was very dark. Her thick hair was pitch black and tied into a neat bun at the back, with coral jasmines braided around it. There was a trace of red kumkum powder where the furrow of the parting met her forehead and under the kumkum, a short grayish white stripe of holy ash on her forehead. A small golden earring dangled from an earlobe. An electric blue sari was draped loosely on her thin frame, over a blue cotton blouse. She squatted atop a small red suitcase, next to the toilets, in the corridor that led to the umbilical linking the coaches. A woven bamboo basket stood next to her.”

She has been chewing betel nuts. In Hindi, she asks Hari if he wants oral sex, and she makes "the typical gesture of the hijra" with her hands clapping, pointing toward Hari. Because of her "disguise," Hari initially "failed to notice the man in the pretty woman," but then he "realized that she was a eunuch." He “found her rather pretty” but then thought: “This bizarre wretch was permitted her idiocies because she was an hijra – impotent, castrated – her head filled with superstitious nonsense as she was simultaneously revered and reviled.”

Radha is a strong personality.

‘What are you doing here?’ Hari said.
She frowned, ‘What? Is this your father’s train? What do you care what I do here?’

In another situation, she tells the legend of Kannaki who tore off her breast to save a city, and she acts it out by pulling out and throwing the cloth she uses to stuff her bra.

Radha comes to the car where the men are playing cards, and she “teased the men until they coughed up money.” She claps and says “chakka, chakka, chakka.” She warns them: “Remember, I can curse you with impotence as easily as I can bless you with sons.” When someone gets angry, she says: “It’s just dhandha [i.e. business], don’t get all spoiled.”

As is common for eunuch characters in other novels, Radha tells the story of her castration. She says, “No one is born a Chakka; you have to be selected to become one.” She says the selection process is secret. Hari requests more information and pays her five rupees to tell her story. Radha explains that, as a boy, at about age 13, she ran away to Bombay and took any work she could find, eventually becoming a Bollywood makeup artist. She liked wearing women's clothing but found that she didn’t like sex with men. An older hijra found her crying and took her into a household of about a half-dozen hijras, where Radha did their makeup. Eventually, in 1984, the older hijra traveled with Radha to a small village outside Bhopal. In an abandoned Devi temple, they offered alcohol to the goddess, and then Radha drank it and her genitals were tied tight. She nearly passed out, and, “just before the first ray of the dawn sun hit the sky,” the older hijra castrated her with a “long knife and slick”. Radha claims it was painless. They returned to Bhopal that day, which was full of poison gas. It was the day of the Bhopal gas tragedy.

This was probably a helpful story for Hari to hear. Hari is beset with guilt for committing small transgressions that are immediately followed by larger, unrelated accidents. He feels that he is somehow responsible for the larger accidents because of his own personal sin. In hearing Radha's story, he may be able to understand that Radha's castration did not cause the Bhopal gas tragedy.

Radha remains a mentor or guardian figure for Hari throughout the novel.

Begin where you are, evolve into yourself

Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek:

"Leadership expert Warren Bennis has said that ‘letting the self emerge is the essential task of leaders.’ He cites a study of the advice that top executives would give to younger ones, in which three recommendations surfaced: first, take advantage of every opportunity; second, aggressively search for meaning; and third, know yourself. Authors Bill George and Peter Sims call it finding your ‘true north’ – ‘the internal compass that guides you successfully through life. It represents who you are as a human being at your deepest level. It is your orienting point.’"

Uzma Aslam Khan:

"I mean, he died the way he needed to, without saying who he was, because he is Zahoor. He is becoming. If you leave behind definable tracks, people first point to them, then own you, then put you in a box. That leaves your poor spirit with an impossible burden. But a soul not bent with the weight of mortals wanders freely. We will remember your grandfather in an infinite number of ways."

J. Krishnamurti:

"We must create immediately an atmosphere of freedom so that you can live and find out for yourselves what is true, so that you become intelligent, so that you are able to face the world and understand it, not just conform to it, so that inwardly, deeply, psychologically you are in constant revolt; because it is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition."

Diana Butler Bass:

“Contemporary thinkers have noted the change – and the new role that storytelling plays in our lives. Sociologist Anthony Giddons claims that our identity is found "in the on-going story about the self" and further asserts that "each of us not only 'has' but lives a biography." Moral philosopher Charles Taylor says that we understand life as an "unfolding story" in which "we grasp our lives as narrative." Put simply, we become ourselves as we tell our stories. We cannot know ourselves apart from our stories – stories in which we are both author and actor.”

Brian Klaas:

“it’s important to understand that within the logic of these media universes—be it in Russia or with Fox in the United States—that you can’t defeat a “nothing is true and everything is possible” worldview with better facts.

As Pomerantsev told me: “The big mistake people make is to think: ‘What if we just give them the facts?’ It’s got nothing to do with that,” Pomerantsev says. “You’ve got to understand what you’re dealing with. They’re giving people a sense of identity, giving people meaning and giving people a way to interpret the world.”

There is a generational battle over reality in the United States. That is the political showdown that will determine the political future of the country—and whether democracy survives. For the foreseeable future, the nexus of Trumpworld and Fox News will remain the most powerful weapon that aids the forces of “unreality.””

Sources

Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek. Life Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives. Jossey-Bass, 2008.

Uzma Aslam Khan. The Geometry of God. Clockroot Books, 2009. Kindle Location 3155

J. Krishnamurti. Think on These Things. ed. by D. Rajagopal. New York: Perennial, 1964. pp. 12-13.

Diana Butler Bass, Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith, HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. p. 138.

Brian Klaas. How Fox "News" Mimics Russian Propaganda Tactics. The Garden of Forking Paths. May 14, 2024.

Don't believe everything the sacred book says

Some people say that it is necessary to follow a sacred text so that one has a source of moral standards. A dialogue from Tom Perrotta's novel The Abstinence Teacher:

"Say what you want about the Bible, at least it takes a clear position on right and wrong."

"See, Ruth told him. "This is what bugs me. The way you people talk, it's like you're the only ones who know how to distinguish right from wrong. Just because my moral system's different from yours, that doesn't mean I don't have one. And by the way, just because something's written down in a book that's a couple of thousand years old, that doesn't necessarily mean it's right."

"It does if it's the Word of God."

"The last I heard, the Bible wasn't written by God. It was written by human beings. And you gotta admit, some of it's a little nutty."

* * *

"I'm no scholar," he admitted. "I just feel like, you know, with all the moral relativism in the world, it's good to have some absolute standards."

Whose standards – that ought to be the question. Even if we need a single book as the source of our standards, how would we know which book to pick? "It's time to stop caring what desert nomads were spooked by five thousand years ago," Toby Johnson wrote.

Maybe we could choose based on popularity. A billion people or so couldn't be wrong, could they? Well, sure they could. The world has got about 7 billion people, and Christianity and Islam each have about a billion adherents; their holy books cannot both simultaneously be literally true in their propositional truth claims about theology and morality. Besides, the popularity of these religions has changed over time and will continue to change.

Ibn Warraq wrote, "To assess the truth of a doctrine by the number of people who believe it is also totally ridiculous. The number of people who believe in Scientology is increasing yearly. Is its truth also growing year by year?
"

If one happens to identify a book that one likes, one could, of course, also identify what seems to be true and false within that book. Biblical literalists derisively call this "picking and choosing," but it is the same kind of discernment that we use in all other areas of life. We don't assume that people, institutions, and books are correct (or wrong) all the time. We are even capable of recognizing authorities and experts while remembering that they might sometimes be wrong. Frank Schaeffer wrote that

"They [holy books] are also, inevitably, full of mistakes. The question is what to follow and what to ignore, in the same way one ignores a village idiot but knows the value of the village where both the idiot and the rest of us all live.

Every religious and every scientific/secular tradition has a 'village idiot' or two lurking in its scriptures..."

Jennifer Wright Knust said:

"The only way that the Bible can be regarded as straightforward and simple is if no one bothers to read it. As I had already gathered as a child, the Bible is not only contradictory but complex. Biblical books take sides, they disagree with one another, they intentionally change earlier teachings, and they make irreconcilable claims about human life and the nature of God. In some cases, they promote points of view that, from a modern perspective anyway, are patently immoral."

And, when interviewed by the Boston University Alumni magazine, she gave this opinion:

[Bostonia:] Do you think people will ever stop using the Bible for their own arguments?

[Knust:] That's my dream, that people will get the idea that there's the notion of context.

Sources

Tom Perrotta. The Abstinence Teacher. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007. p. 288.

Toby Johnson, reviewing Men, Homosexuality, and the Gods by Ronald E. Long, White Crane Journal, Issue #64, Spring 2005, p 37.

Ibn Warraq. Why I Am Not a Muslim. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995. p 22.

Frank Schaeffer. Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism). Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2009. p. 215.

Jennifer Wright Knust. Unprotected Texts. Kindle edition. Location 216.

"Biblical Sexuality: Author Jennifer Knust on what the Bible says about Homosexuality." By Kimberly Cornuelle. Bostonia: The Alumni Magazine of Boston University. Winter/Spring 2010. p. 19.

Is there a true self?

Martin Laird wrote:

"There is a lot of talk in contemporary theology and philosophy about what a "self" is. One wonders how much of it Paul would have been able to follow, or care about for that matter. But he does have something evocative to contribute: your life, your "self," who you truly are, is something that is "hidden in Christ in God." Whatever there is about human identity that can be objectively known, measured, predicted, observed, whether by the Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, the tax man, or the omniscient squint of your most insightful aunt, there is a foundational core of what we might as well call identity that remains hidden from scrutiny's grip and somehow utterly caught up in God, 'in whom we live and move and have our being,' in whom our very self is immersed."

Uzma Aslam Khan wrote in the novel The Geometry of God:

"That is the ultimate goal of his devotion: to revert to his original self. It's a belief in pre-existence. Or extinction. You could say the Sufi is the original evolutionist."

Or is there no "foundational core," no "original self"? Shunryu Suzuki wrote:

"What we call "I" is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale."

Sources

Martin Laird, O.S.A. Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. pp. 13-14.

Uzma Aslam Khan. The Geometry of God. Clockroot Books, 2009. Location 77.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Quoted in Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox, Your Mythic Journey: Finding Meaning in Your Life Through Writing and Storytelling. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1989. p. 19. (This is a revised version of Telling Your Story, originally published 1973.)

Also

'No Cuisine In The World Can Be Called Authentic.' Here's Why.: Food Network champion Maneet Chauhan will make you think twice next time you criticize a culture's cuisine. Sucheta Rawal, HuffPost, May 15, 2024

How could God have created a world like this? When does it get better?

Daniel Dennett wrote in Breaking the Spell:

"I, too, want the world to be a better place. This is my reason for wanting people to understand and accept evolutionary theory: I believe that their salvation may depend on it! How so? By opening their eyes to the dangers of pandemics, degradation of the environment, and loss of biodiversity, and by informing them about some of the foibles of human nature. So isn’t my belief that belief in evolution is the path to salvation a religion? No; there is a major difference. We who love evolution do not honor those whose love of evolution prevents them from thinking clearly and rationally about it! On the contrary, we are particularly critical of those whose misunderstandings and romantic misstatements of these great ideas mislead themselves and others. In our view, there is no safe haven for mystery or incomprehensibility. Yes, there is humility, and awe, and sheer delight, at the glory of the evolutionary landscape, but it is not accompanied by, or in the serve of, a willing (let alone thrilling) abandonment of reason. So I feel a moral imperative to spread the word of evolution, but evolution is not my religion. I don’t have a religion."

The desire for the world to become a better place is sometimes expressed more bitterly, as Romain Gary did in his novel The Dance of Genghis Cohn:

"If I were a believer, I would say it was God trying to create the world at last, an idea which has not yet occurred to Him, unless you consider this world to be a creation, an insult which would not even spring to the mind of an atheist."

The mathematician John Allen Paulos wrote in Irreligion that "the uncaused first cause needn't have any traditional God-like qualities. It's simply first, and as we know from other realms, being first doesn't mean being best." If being first cause doesn't equate to being the best god, being the first creation probably doesn't equate to being the best planet.

The crankiest language on the subject is from Christopher Hitchens in God is Not Great:

"In this way they choose to make a fumbling fool of their pretended god, and make him out to be a tinkerer, an approximator, and a blunderer, who took eons of time to fashion a few serviceable figures and heaped up a junkyard of scrap and failure meanwhile. Have they no more respect for the deity than that?"

Sources

Daniel C. Dennett. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Penguin Group, 2006. p. 268.

Romain Gary. The Dance of Genghis Cohn. (1968) New York: Signet Books, 1969. pp. 101-102.

John Allen Paulos. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008. p. 5.

Christopher Hitchens. God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007. p. 85.