This isn't real! I know what I know! (like, Invasion of the Body Snatchers)

An anecdote:

"Mr. C, an elegant retired art dealer, was hospitalized overnight with a small stroke. The next morning, he felt well and was discharged. Within moments of returning home, he phoned my office in a panic. He was certain that his favorite antique desk had been replaced by a cheap Levitz reproduction. * * * "Yes, I admit that it is physically impossible that the desk has been replaced. But it has. You have to take my word for it. I know real when I see real, and this desk isn't real." He ran his hand along the grain, repeatedly fingering a couple of prominent wormholes. "It's funny," he said with a puzzled expression. "These are exact replicas of the holes in my desk. But they don't feel the least bit familiar. No," he announced emphatically, "someone must have replaced it." He then delivered the cognitive checkmate: "After all, I know what I know."
— Robert A. Burton. On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2008. pp. 16-17.

This anecdote reminded me of this story:

What We Fear From the ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’. In 1954, it was a novel. Now it’s a handful of films. Still scary? (4 min read) Tucker Lieberman, The Shadow, Feb 2, 2021

Nature: Matter or mater?

In which of the two senses – "matter" or mater – are you a "materialist"?

Mark Corner:

[Anthropomorphized images of God] may lead us to undervalue the significance of the impersonal. ... [I wonder] whether there isn't a link between [Western] neglect of the physical environment...and a tendency to relate to God simply as a "person out there", unconnected to anything as "denigrating" as matter.

Pope John Paul II:

Moreover, once all reference to God has been removed, it is not surprising that the meaning of everything else becomes profoundly distorted. Nature itself, from being "mater" (mother), is now reduced to being "matter", and is subjected to every kind of manipulation. This is the direction in which a certain technical and scientific way of thinking, prevalent in present-day culture, appears to be leading when it rejects the very idea that there is a truth of creation which must be acknowledged, or a plan of God for life which must be respected. Something similar happens when concern about the consequences of such a "freedom without law" leads some people to the opposite position of a "law without freedom", as for example in ideologies which consider it unlawful to interfere in any way with nature, practically "divinizing" it. Again, this is a misunderstanding of nature's dependence on the plan of the Creator. Thus it is clear that the loss of contact with God's wise design is the deepest root of modern man's confusion, both when this loss leads to a freedom without rules and when it leaves man in "fear" of his freedom.

By living "as if God did not exist", man not only loses sight of the mystery of God, but also of the mystery of the world and the mystery of his own being.

James Hillman said the matter/mater verbal similarity is "neither a coincidence nor a joke," and Patrick Harpur expanded on this:

...although in one sense materialism represented the successful reduction of Dame Kind to the soulless machinery of matter, in another sense it was itself the successful ambush of rationalism by the ‘mother’ it had spurned — the etymological connection between the Latin mater, mother, and materia, matter, ‘is neither a coincidence nor a joke’.

Susan Griffin:

To be made an object is in itself a humiliation. To be made a thing is to become a being without a will...But to this degradation, the reduction of a whole being with a soul to mere matter, we must add the knowledge that matter itself is despised, and hated in its very essence. We read, for instance, in the phrase 'to feel like shit,' the quintessence of humiliation. For in the pornographic culture, humiliation emanates from the material.

Edward Abbey:

You call me, sir, a rank materialist – sir, I accept the appellation, and I accept with pride, sir, and glory. Never shall this flower of the spirit reject the good earth from which it grows – never shall I live in an alabaster spirit-city, separated from my mother by concrete or gold, by white robes, ineffables, or multicolored sewage and communication systems, not this n-----, no sir!

Or, a third option: measured?

Robert Anton Wilson:

It has often been observed that there is marked similarity between the words for matter in Indo-European languages (Latin materium, French matiere, etc.) and the words for measurement (French metre, English measure, etc.). More interestingly, both groups seem to relate to the words for mother (Latin mater, German mutter, French mere).

Carol S. Pearson:

There is a profound disrespect for human beings in modern life. Business encourages us to think of ourselves as human capital. Advertising appeals to our fears and insecurities to try to get us to buy products we do not need. Too many religious institutions teach people to be good but do not help them know who they are. Too many psychologists see their job as helping people learn to accommodate to what is, not to take their journeys and find out what could be. Too many educational institutions train people to be cogs in the economic machine, rather than educating them about how to be fully human.

Basically, we are viewed as products or commodities, to be either sold to the highest bidder or improved so that eventually we will be more valuable. Neither view respects the human soul or the human mind except as used as an acquisitive tool. As a consequence, people increasingly are disrespectful of themselves. Too many of us seek to fill our emptiness with food, or drink, or drugs, or obsessive and frantic activity. The much-lamented pace of modern life is not inevitable – it is a cover for its emptiness. If we keep in motion, we create the illusion of meaning.

Christopher Phillips:

"Many of the most barbaric acts in human history were carried out by those moved by what they deemed unalloyed, sublime spirituality. Perhaps if their spiritual and sensual sides had been cultivated in tandem, as Socrates modeled and exhorted, they might have acted with more humanity."

Also:

Leah Penniman:

“Enslaved Black folks carried on their earth-based religious traditions, even as they syncretized with white Christianity.” However, “the religion of enslaved Africans did not differentiate material and spiritual reality as sharply as white Christianity did. Spirits inhabit the world alongside people, plants, and animals, rather than transcending it, making humans therefore part of nature.”

Also:

Chris Clarke:

"Interaction within a network including the perspectives of animal and of non-living systems is an essential part of the stability of our world. Yet here Heron follows the experience of Abram (1997), that this interaction [with an object, such as a person gazing on a bowl] can be a ‘reciprocity,’ in being perceived as having the same empathic character as our interactions with other people. ... Participation at this level suggests that we can play a role with other objects in negotiating their appearance, just as in conversation or communion with another person we negotiate our joint way of being."

Clive Barker:

"They had methods of interrogation, he knew, even with dead people. They'd lay him in an ice room and examine him minutely, and when they'd studied him from the outside they'd start looking at his inside, and oh! what things they'd find. They'd saw off the top of his skull and take out his brain; examine it for tumors, slice it thinly like expensive ham, probe at it in a hundred ways to find out the why and how of him. But that wouldn't work, would it? He, of all people, should know that. You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it. No, they'd get nothing from his brain, they'd have to look further than that. They'd have to unzip him from neck to pubis, snip his ribs and fold them back. Only then could they unravel his guts, and rummage in his stomach, and juggle his liver and lights. There, oh yes, there, they'd find plenty to feast their eyes on."

Thomas Moore:

If things have soul, then they can also suffer and become neurotic: such is the nature of soul. Care of the soul therefore entails looking out for things, noticing where and how they are suffering, seeing their neuroses, and nursing them back to health. Robert Sardello suggests that a building have a resident therapist to take care of it in its suffering. He is not talking about care for the human residents, but for the building itself. His suggestion implies that we don't usually concern ourselves with the state of things, and tolerate much more ugliness and neglect in the things of our society than we should endure. We don't seem to realize how much our own pain reflects the diseases of our things.
* * *
Houses are boarded up, windows are smashed, wood is rotting, weeds have grown wild. We behold such a scene and think, the solution is to solve the problem of poverty. But why not feel for the things themselves. We are seeing things in a suffering condition — sick, broken, and dying. The disease before us is our failure in relation to the world. What is it in us that can allow the things of the world to become so distressed and to show so many symptoms without a nursing response from us? What are we doing when we treat things so badly?
* * *
When our citizens spray-paint a trolley or subway or a bridge or a sidewalk, clearly they are not just angry at society. They are raging at things.
* * *
We are also angry at things that we feel no longer serve us. Many of the rusting objects that pollute our city streets are outmoded or no longer functioning tools. If we define a thing only in terms of its function, when it no longer functions we have no feeling for it. We discard it without a proper burial. And yet old things eventually reveal that they hold a great deal of soul. I live among many small old New England farms and frequently see, for example, an old horse-drawn rake sitting beautifully in a pasture, or an old barn leaning into the wind, or the shell of a once stately house transformed now into a splendid ruin. These bits of evidence of past times seem literally to glow with soul.
J. B. Jackson, a historian of landscapes, makes a crucial point about such things in his essay 'The Necessity for Ruins.' Things in decay, he says, express a theology of birth, death, and redemption. In other words, our things, like us, have to die. We pretend to make things that will last forever, but we know that everything has a definite lifespan.

Abraham Heschel:

There is no equivalent for the word ‘thing’ in biblical Hebrew. The word ‘davar,’ which in later Hebrew came to denote thing, means in biblical Hebrew: speech; word; message; report; tidings; advice; request; promise; decision; sentence; theme, story; saying, utterance; business, occupation; acts; good deeds; events; way, manner, reason, cause; but never ‘thing.’ Is this a sign of linguistic poverty, or rather than indication of an unwrapped view of the world, of not equating reality (derived from the Latin word res, thing) with thinghood?

Naomi Klein:

Performing and partitioning and projecting are the individual steps that make up the dance of avoidance. What is being avoided? I think it’s our true doppelganger. What Daisy Hildyard calls our “second body,” the one enmeshed with wars and whales, the one benefiting from the genocides of the past and adding our little drops of poison to the great die-offs of the future. The second body that perpetually mines the Shadow Lands for its comforts and conveniences.

Sources

Mark Corner, Does God Exist? New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. p. 79

John Paul II. Evangelium Vitae [The Gospel of Life]. Papal Encyclical, Rome, March 25, 1995. Official Vatican English translation. 1.22

James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, New York, 1979. p. 69.

Patrick Harpur. The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination (2002). Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003. p. 54.

Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence, quoted by Starhawk, Truth or Dare, p 163

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, p 54

Robert Anton Wilson. Coincidance: A Head Test. (1988) Temple, Ariz.: New Falcon Publications, 1996. p 38.

Carol S. Pearson. Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World. HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. p. 4.

Christopher Phillips. Socrates in Love: Philosophy for a Die-Hard Romantic. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2007. p. 52.

Leah Penniman. Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations With Black Environmentalists. Amistad, 2023.

Chris Clarke. “Construction and reality: reflections on philosophy and spiritual/psychotic experience.” Printed in Psychosis and Spirituality: Exploring the New Frontier. ed. Isabel Clarke. London and Philadelphia: Whurr, 2001. pp. 156-157.

Clive Barker. The Damnation Game. (1985) New York: Charter Books, 1988. pp. 86-87.

Thomas Moore. Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life. (1992) New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. pp. 272-3, 273-274, 274, 275.

Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Sabbath (1951). Prologue. Reprint: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Humility on the home front while criticizing violence abroad

At the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 5, 2015, President Obama said:

But we also see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge -- or, worse, sometimes used as a weapon. From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith, their faith, professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact, are betraying it. We see ISIL, a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism...

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ...

And, first, we should start with some basic humility. I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt -- not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth.

Our job is not to ask that God respond to our notion of truth -- our job is to be true to Him, His word, and His commandments. And we should assume humbly that we’re confused and don’t always know what we’re doing and we’re staggering and stumbling towards Him, and have some humility in that process. And that means we have to speak up against those who would misuse His name to justify oppression, or violence, or hatred with that fierce certainty. No God condones terror. No grievance justifies the taking of innocent lives, or the oppression of those who are weaker or fewer in number.

Obama outlines the tension – a near paradox – inherent in this idea of humility. On the one hand, we must admit that we "don't always know what we're doing," and on the other hand, we "have to speak up against those who would misuse [God's] name to justify oppression, or violence, or hatred with that fierce certainty. No God condones terror." This humility means being certain that we can't have certainty. It is an attitude that we must profess uncertainty about our own righteousness. It is a conviction that we must not allow anyone else to commit violence in the name of their own misguided assumption of self-righteousness.

More specifically, in identifying the errors committed by others, we must remember the transgressions of our own groups and traditions. The "high horse" that is not to be ridden is the idea that barbaric violence is "unique to some other place". Obama clearly had a negative judgment of the Islamic State terrorist group, which he called ISIL. The United States military had been fighting it for six months, and less than a week after Obama gave his prayer breakfast speech, he presented Congress with a resolution to formally authorize the use of force.

Michael Felsen wrote for Haaretz that Obama was

modeling behavior that ought to be emulated. By acknowledging regrettable chapters in his own religion’s both distant and recent past, he implicitly calls on leaders and followers of other faiths to do the same: face and confront those who appropriate religious doctrines and beliefs to serve a brutal quest for power and control. Today – in the face of ISIS and Boko Haram and Al-Qaida – Muslim leaders, and the many millions of Muslim faithful, must do this. But they’re not alone in that obligation.

Stephen Marche wrote in 2009: "The reality we can't bear to look at, however, isn't hidden groups of powerful men controlling everything but the more terrifying truth that there are no hidden groups of powerful men controlling everything. It's our deepest form of escapism to imagine a world in which we are powerless, because it excuses our selfishness. The real nightmare is that no one is to blame for the state of the world but ourselves."

In this statement, Marche provides one explanation for why people avoid humility. Some people's rage at expressions of humility – for example, former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, who called Obama's remarks at the prayer breakfast "the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime" – may come from a place of fear of having to acknowledge our own crimes. Some disorder and ugliness is caused by other people, but some we also caused ourselves. As we acknowledge the former, we cannot lose sight of the latter, or we, too, will likely come to embody the very self-righteousness that we are challenging in others.

Andrew Bacevich wrote that humility supports realism, since humility is nothing more than seeing ourselves as we really are.

Realism in this sense implies an obligation to see the world as it actually is, not as we might like it to be. The enemy of realism is hubris, which in Niebuhr's day, and in our own, finds expression in an outsized confidence in the efficacy of American power as an instrument to reshape the global order.

Humility imposes an obligation of a different sort. It summons Americans to see themselves without blinders. The enemy of humility is sanctimony, which gives rise to the conviction that American values and beliefs are universal and that the nation itself serves providentially assigned purposes. This conviction finds expression in a determination to remark the world in what we imagine to be America's image.

Someone posted this “antique” yesterday. Published in 1910. They’ve been weaving this particular white supremacist narrative to avoid reckoning with actual enslavement since forever. The # of white women just in my lifetime who’ve used interracial kidnapping as a cover story… pic.twitter.com/qASozSGZTo

— Bethany C. Morrow (@BCMorrow) April 24, 2022

Sources

Transcript of Obama's National Prayer Breakfast speech, Feb. 5, 2015.

"Obama ISIS fight request sent to Congress," Jim Acosta and Jeremy Diamond, CNN, Feb. 12, 2015.

"Get real: Obama's prayer breakfast speech never really trampled on Christian or American values," Michael Felsen, Haaretz, Feb. 10, 2015.

"Why People Who Love Conspiracy Theories Are Part of the Problem," Stephen Marche, Esquire April 21, 2009.

Andrew J. Bacevich. The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008. p. 7.

See also

Pete Hegseth’s Crusade to Turn the Military into a Christian Weapon: Trump’s pick to run the Pentagon has embraced an aggressive form of Christianity that is at war with the military’s nonpartisan and pluralistic culture. Jasper Craven. Politico Magazine. December 6, 2024.

Trump says he ordered airstrikes on terrorist targets in Somalia. From CNN's Samantha Waldenberg and Alayna Treene. President Donald Trump ordered airstrikes on ISIS and affiliated targets in Somalia on Saturday, according to his administration. CNN, February 1, 2025.