Some thoughts on what we are

"Our brains are ethical by design."

A while back, I read a book titled "Why We Believe in God(s) -- A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith." It was written by J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., MD with Clair Aukofer.

In my opinion, the book is brilliant, and explains a lot of things to me that never seemed to make sense before. It's all about how we humans have evolved, specifically our brains and body chemistry, to produce the kinds of behaviour we exhibit as modern homo sapiens. Obviously, from the title, most of the focus of the book is on how our brains and body chemistry function to make most of us susceptible to belief in higher beings for which no tangible proof exists.

This post isn't about atheism though. This post is about, well, about biology, I guess. What makes people people. How our brains work and why we are the way we are.

Anderson and Aukover's book has made me more convinced than ever that human beings are no more special or unique than, let's say, ants. Certainly we're far more complex. But we really are nothing more than bags of meat and chemicals that are programmed to react to the outside world (and the inner world too) in predictable ways.

I'm completely comfortable with this concept. I suppose being the hard-core atheist that I am makes me more predisposed than most to be able to accept that people are no more special biologically than ants or any other living thing. Evolution has given us abilities that set us apart from other creatures, but our ability to empathize with a fellow human being, or believe in gods, or write poetry stems from the same place as the evolved ability of birds to fly in flocks and never bump into each other or to find their way from their nesting grounds to a winter feeding ground and back again.

However, when I presented this concept to a group of writers I interact with regularly online...a very intelligent and open-minded group of people if there ever was one... some of the people who responded were outright offended by the idea and even those who weren't offended refused to accept that humans don't have some special "something other" that no other creature on the planet has. Even those who are also atheists wouldn't accept it. That blew me away. How can you call yourself an atheist and still sit there and insist that humans have "something special" that makes them somehow "more" than every other biological creature on the planet?

They almost seemed to think it was disrespectful of me to suggest it. Disrespectful to who?? To god, I guess, if they believe in one, or to humankind, if they don't.  Even the atheists were so protective of their precious status as the dominant species on the planet that they couldn't, or wouldn't, entertain the idea that we'd got where we are by simple chance and evolution.

I guess that blew me away as much as the concept that most of the people on the planet believe with all their hearts that there's some imaginary sky-god out there looking down on them, hearing their every thought and caring whether they eat a mollusk, say "goddam", or make love with someone of their own sex. To believe that humans are somehow more than collections of cells, chemicals, meat and bones, you cannot, in my opinion, truly consider yourself an atheist.

Excerpts from the book
Here are some of my favourite passages, that I'd highlighted in the book (don't worry, I didn't deface a book, though I'm not averse to highlighting favourite passages in printed tomes. This particular book was an e-book I bought through Kobo:

"Your snap judgements are millions of years in the making."

"Religious beliefs are basic human social survival concepts with slight alterations."

"Just to believe in a god, our mind bounces off no fewer than twenty hard-wired adaptations evolved over eons of natural selection to help us coexist and communicate with our fellow homo sapiens to survive and dominate the planet."

"Severe climate variation between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago apparently reduced our population to perhaps as few as 600 breeding individuals. That is what modern genetics now tells us. That means that every one of the 7 billion people on this planet is a descendant of that small group of hunter-gatherers who lived in Africa and survived the harsh climate change."

"The fact is, we never lose the longing for a caretaker." (This is in reference to the strong need of most people to feel someone is watching over them, even once they become adults.)

"It begins with our ability to mentally separate their [other peoples'] minds from their bodies, which in turn circles back to our ability not only to believe in what we cannot see, but also to interact with the invisible. We are born with the ability to read what others may be thinking even when they are not there to tell us. In a way, all of those to whom we are attached sometimes become imaginary friends."

"Belief in the supernatural is not something learned from our culture as we grow from infants to toddlers and more cognizant children. It is original equipment, requiring no social prompting."

"This human ability for self-deception is crucial to religious belief. If many believers could see their own minds more clearly, they would see that self-deception plays a role in their acceptance of faith."

"Most people live their lives as if there is no god. We stop at red lights, we put our children in car seats, and we act responsibly to protect our safety and the safety of those we love. If a person is religious, he is an atheist in relation to others' gods and the gods of history. He also will almost invariably live as an atheist in relation to his own worshipped deity." (In other words, we tend to behave as if there was no god protecting us even when we do believe...ie: we stop at red lights, not trusting that a god will save us if we go through.)

"We in the west have become so used to religious people not really, truly and fully believing what they say they believe, that we are startled when, as on 9/11, we encounter people who really do believe their religion and put their beliefs into murderous practice."

"At heart, we are all born creationists. Disbelief requires effort."

"The less you abide by scripture and the more you use your basic moral intuitions, the more moral you are likely to be. Genuine morality is doing what is right, regardless of what we may be told; religious morality is doing what we are told."

"We evolved to favour those with our genes over those without. Religions evoke and exploit kin emotions."

"Most religions are preoccupied with sex, and that in itself offers strong evidence that religion is man-made."

"The sacred is found between the ears." (Danish neurobiologist, Lone Frank)

"It has been documented for years that many individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy, which comes from electrical disturbances in the temporal lobes, have intense religious experiences, and that extreme religiosity is a common character trait among such patients." (he goes on the cite the following examples of people who are thought to have had temporal lobe epilepsy: St. Paul was having an epileptic fit when he was "struck down" on the road to Damascus; others: Ste. Theresa of Avila, Feodor Dostoevsky and Marcel Proust.)

"We often hear that if it weren't for religion, we would be immoral and unethical. Mirror neurons resoundingly refute this." (mirror neurons, put simply, are responsible for humans' ability to feel empathy. You'll have to read the book to get it.)

"God, No" ...a book review

I've been reading Penn Jillette's new book, "God, No," and I'm loving it so much I just had to put it out there.

You'll know Penn Jillette as the big guy in the Penn & Teller magic duo. Penn is what he calls a "hard-core atheist." I'm stealing that one to describe myself too. His book is about being an atheist, so if that offends you, just don't read it. Or, maybe you should read it if atheism offends you, because you really need to get over that.

If you've ever seen Jillette rant on any of his videos (many of which can be found on YouTube), you'll know what I mean when I say he writes like he talks. His book is liberally sprinkled with the f-word and with a veritable feast of hilarious, pointed, brilliant metaphors, similes and descriptions. He meanders around his topic like an avid needleworker browsing the world's biggest needle crafts store, idly wandering from one story to the next, picking up a thread here and a thimble there, not always with any obvious connection, until coming back finally to his point. And all along the way you've been treated to a delightful, deliciously scandalous, funny ride with a point at the end.

The book is divided up into sections named after the ten commandments. In place of the real ten commandments, he offers his own versions, which I like very much. For instance, instead of "Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy" and so on, Jillette's fourth commandment is:

"Put aside some time to rest and think (if you're religious, that might be the Sabbath; if you're a Vegas magician, that'll be the day with the lowest grosses)."

I like that.

If for no other reason than an appreciation of good humour, I recommend this book. I frequently laugh out loud while I read it. I shit you not. It constantly makes me wish I could write like that. It's funny, it's fun to read, and it has a lot of good points. But not only is it funny, it's often very touching too... as I found with his story about the orthodox Jew-turned-atheist who approached him after a show asking him to participate in a very special moment in his life. I actually found myself dabbing tears from my eyes as I read that story.

Great book. Read it.

Book Reviews - Mistress of the Art of Death, and The Serpent's Tale

I'm reviewing these two books together because they're the first two books in what I hope will be a series of novels by Ariana Franklin, a brilliant writer who I've just recently discovered.

The books revolve around the character Adelia, a very unusual woman for her times. She is a doctor, specializing in pathology - hence the title of the first book.

In Mistress of the Art of Death, Adelia is sent to England by the king of Sicily, who has received an urgent plea from his cousin, Henry II, to send someone who can help him investigate, and hopefully solve, a series of gruesome child murders. Adelia is accompanied by two men, a Jew and a Saracen castrato, as she travels to England where she must hide the fact that she's a doctor. The Saracen, Mansur, pretends to be the doctor, while Adelia "assists" him as nurse, and the the Jew acts as private eye. Once arrived, they must fight more than chauvenism. Anti-semitism and bigotry are rampant. All the Jews of the city are shut up in the castle to protect them from the hoards who blame them for the childrens' murders. And still the murderer walks free. He could be anyone. During her investigation, Adelia befriends Gyltha, her housekeeper, and Ulf, Gyltha's grandson. There's even a smelly, cowardly dog named Safeguard to lend a note of humour. Every character in the book sings with a life of their own, and you care for them all. In particular, Henry II himself is written as a powerful, yet witty and extremely likeable fellow, who makes the reader hope that Franklin will write a novel with him in the central role.

The serpent's Tale picks up two years after Mistress leaves off. Now Adelia is tasked with discovering the identity of the murderer of the king's mistress, Rosamund. Filled with political intrigue, potential civil war, and the same delicious assortment of characters as the first novel, it's difficult to say which book was more enjoyable. But I'd have to say that Mistress wins out, if only because the delight of getting to know the characters for the first time gives it that bit of an edge that tips it over into favourite status.

These are two books that will have you neglecting your chores and going to bed early to read. I could barely put them down, and devoured them quickly. I can only hope to find more books by this amazing writer,whose real name, I have just discovered, is Diana Norman - under which name she has written at least a dozen other historical novels which I shall be running out to look for at the first opportunity!

Book Review - A Canticle for Leibowitz

Just finished reading A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. a few days ago. The book has haunted me, so I guess that makes it blog-worthy. I really doubt that anyone who reads this blog will pick it up and read it, but on the off-chance that I'm wrong, please note there is a major spoiler in this review...I'm going to give away the ending. My friend Tonia will be pleased, but most "normal" people would probably rather not know the ending before they read the book (winks at Tonia).

Just to be nice, I've clearly indicated where you should stop reading if you don't wish to know the ending.

A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of those "end-of-the-world" novels I wrote about several entries back. It's written in three parts. The first part takes place about 600 years after a nuclear war in the late 20th century decimates the world and blasts civilization back to the dark ages. The second part is another 600 years later, and the third part 600 years later again, concluding in 3781. It opens with a novice monk on a solitary fast in the desert who encounters a strange, bedraggled pilgrim. The pilgrim inadvertently leads the monk to discover an old fallout shelter where he finds some relics left behind by his monastery's revered founder, the beatus Leibowitz.
The book is often wryly amusing. When the monk finds the fallout shelter, he wonders what fallouts are and assumes they must have been dreadful if people had to build special shelters to protect themselves from them. And, irony of ironies, St. Leibowitz, the founder of a Catholic monastery, is Jewish!

Now, this monastery's main function (other than prayer and reflection) is to protect and preserve "the Memorabilia". The Memorabilia are found writings from before the "flame deluge"...the nuclear war. As a result of the flame deluge the world is now almost universally illiterate. Revolts and mass murders of literate people by common folk who blamed the war on them have almost wiped out all the knowledge that existed at the time of the war. The monks, literate and learned, want to preserve the Memorabilia as much as possible by copying any literature they find, and "booklegging"...memorizing writings so they can't be destroyed.

The Abbey of St. Leibowitz (for he does eventually get canonized) is the constant thread throughout the book. Gentle, peaceful people who believe in learning and literacy, their world is vastly different from our own.. They struggle along, trying to apply their somewhat modified Christianity to the perverted world they find themselves in, which is filled with tribal warfare, human mutants and illiterate masses struggling just to survive in this new wasteland. The Abbey remains mostly the same throughout the 1800 year span of the book. The world around them changes, advances and becomes ever more dangerous. The electric light is reinvented by a monk at the Abbey. A wooden carving of the revered Leibowitz appears throughout the book in the Abbot's office, or sometimes relegated to the hallway, or to the basement storage room because of its disturbingly and definitely un-saintlike smirk. The Abbey and its Memorabilia receive interest from the Pope's messengers from New Rome (which seems to now be somewhere in the American northeast), and it all seems to represent the slow, agonizing crawl back to "civilization".

You really come to admire and like these simple monks who are just trying to do the right thing. The final third of the book especially reveals this. The world has finally regained and surpassed its technological glory. Air travel, and indeed interstellar travel, has once again become commonplace. Oddly primitive contraptions do things that our current computers can't even do. The Abbot curses and fights with a translation machine that listens to his spoken dictation, writes it out in English and then translates it into a written version of any other language he chooses before transmitting it to the intended recipient. Well, when it works, that's what it's supposed to do. It's the kind of future gadget that Terry Gilliam envisioned in his weird and disturbing movie Brazil.

STOP READING NOW...SPOILERS FOLLOW

Yet, it's not just airplanes and computers that have been reinvented. Lucifer is back too, and Lucifer is the nuclear weapon. One or two bombs have "accidentally" dropped in the centuries since they were reinvented, but now, in the final pages of this novel, a world crisis develops which creates havoc at the Abbey.

A bomb is dropped on one of North America's new major cities, killing hundreds of thousands, and the monastery is turned into a bustling triage station. The Abbot fights with a doctor, forbidding the doctor from issuing "red tags" to victims of the fallout. Red tags entitle the recipients to receive government-sanctioned euthanasia. The Abbot does everything in his power to prevent the red tags from being distributed, but to no avail.

In the final pages of the book, the Abbot is listening to the confession of Mrs. Grales, a strange, two-headed woman who seems to have a foresense of what is to come. And indeed, during her confession, Lucifer falls again. Mrs. Grales' second head, Rebecca, until then mute, asleep, childlike, awakens and Mrs Grales herself seems to wither, as if Rebecca has now received all of their life-force.

As the Abbot and Grales/Rebecca flee the collapsing church, the Abbot's lower body is pinned under falling rock. Obviously he won't survive. The vultures begin to circle almost immediately, themselves singed and half-blinded by the flash. As the Abbot lays dying, Rebecca comes to comfort him, rejecting his offered baptism, but offering him absolution in return.

As Mrs. Grales represents the crass state society has reached, so Rebecca represents the childlike innocence of a society that has reverted, however violently, to its infancy. Perhaps the author is saying that technology is always going to be ultimately destructive. That a simple life is best because, however hard we scrabble to climb, we'll always knock ourselves back to the stone age in the end.

In the final scenes of the book, a starship takes off, carrying several monks, sisters and children to a new world to carry on the work and the faith. Even the fact that they had the foresight to organize this says that the monks, at least, were skeptical enough of the new technology to plan to escape if things went to hell again.

I can't decide if this book is ultimately positive or negative. Certainly, on the surface, it's depressingly negative. It's saying we can never escape our own brutality and destructiveness and that it will always destroy us in the end, no matter how high we climb. But...in a way, there's a positive message here as well. The message is that we will survive, now matter how many times we fuck up. And maybe it's suggesting that it's better to remain simple, to live with nature, than to mess around with forces that we can't control. And one of those uncontrollable forces is certainly man's own folly.

I Love... End-of-the-World stories

I love apocalypse stories. Books, movies, anything where some cataclysmic event blasts mankind back to the dark ages and forces him to struggle back up again. I'm not sure why this type of story appeals to me so much. I'm sure part of it is the misanthrope in me. I love to imagine a world where there are no people around to bother me, where I don't have to pay taxes or go to work or attend functions where I'm always ten minutes away from a panic attack.

There are lots of ways for the world to end. Nuclear war is the most common scenario in most apocalypse stories. That's how the world ended in A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. The story takes place centuries after the "Flame Deluge" as they call it, when an odd form of Christianity has developed. The adherents worship St. Leibowitz, who was an electrician in the last days before the Flame Deluge. It's a quirky book, with a dark humour about it that's really enjoyable to read.

On the Beach by Stanley Cramer is another death by nukes story. I haven't read the book, but I saw the movie a few weeks ago. It's a forebodingly quiet movie, and after a while that quiet starts to get to you and you begin to feel like the characters in the story must feel. Doomed. The story follows a group of people in Australia, which is just about the only place in the world left with any kind of civilization after a nuclear war. But the prevailing winds are bringing death to Australia too. It's only a matter of time.

We could also be hit by a comet, as happens in Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The fun thing about this book is that it was first published in 1977 and reading it feels just like watching one of those hokey disaster movies we all loved so much back then... Earthquake, Poseidon Adventure etc. The world has changed so much in the past 30 years and reading something like this makes it very tangible. In this book, women's lib is a very new thing. Radical black men call white people "honkeys." Home computers are virtually unheard of, the scientists at NASA and JPL had only just switched from slide rulers to pocket calculators (which cost a few hundred dollars)....and there were leisure suits people. Leisure suits! Written into scenes with perfect seriousness. I think a civilization-ending comet was a good thing with regards to leisure suits. As books go, it's not one of the better ones I've read. Too many characters, too much detail, not enough move-it-along action (at least so far...I'm only 3/4 of the way through) to let me find out who things turn out a few years down the road when all the manufactured goods are gone or broken down. It reads way too much like a book written by a guy who was hoping it would be made into a blockbuster disaster flick like Towering Inferno.

My favourite kind of end-of-the-world scenario is the death-by-disease story. Killer bug wipes out most of the earth's population, leaving everything else standing, slowly crumbling back into nature. The best book in this vein has to be Stephen King's The Stand. A true modern classic and the best book King ever wrote...probably the best he ever will write. A deadly, man-made disease nicknamed Captain Trips wipes out almost everyone, and the survivors band together in two opposing groups. This is not just a great apocalypse story, but it's a classic tale of the battle between good and evil, with all the literary archetypes and symbolism you could ask for.

While The Stand is my favourite King book, and probably my second-favourite apocalypse book, my very favourite is called The Last Canadian by William C. Heine (why do so many authors use their middle initials in their byline?). Another death-by-disease story...also a man-made disease, if I remember correctly. One of the things I like about this book is that it was written by a Canadian...the editor of a newspaper in London, Ontario. Like Lucifer's Hammer, it was published in 1977, and you can feel the culture difference when you read it. Misogyny is rampant in this book. But something about it always appealed to me...the survivor thing, I guess. I've read this book at least five times.

The aliens invading Earth scenario is another big one in the apocalypse genre, but not an angle I'm particularly interested in. Probably because it's so unlikely. The idea that a nuke or a comet or a killer disease could wipe us all out is much more real, and therefore much more compelling (and scary!), than the idea of someone just showing up out of the blue (literally) to take over and eat us all or something.

No...give me a good Superbug story any day.

Book Review - Earth's Children series by Jean M. Auel

The Earth's Children series is a collection of (so far) five novels that follow the life of Ayla, a Cro-magnon woman living during the most recent ice age (probably around 30,000 years ago) in what is now, as close as I can tell, eastern Europe. Cro-magnons differed from us only slightly. They were generally quite a bit taller, and were more rubustly built, especially in their skulls. No doubt, if one happened to walk down the street, you would notice him, but probably wouldn't think him remarkable for much more than his height.

I started reading this series of books when they first started coming out in 1980. At that time, I only got as far as part-way through the third book. For some reason, I recently decided I wanted to read them again, so I went out and bought the whole series in paperback. I'm just about finished the third book (The Mammoth Hunters) and look forward to the next two. Unfortunately, the author is still working on the sixth book of the series.

What I like most about these stories is the way the main character Ayla, and to lesser extents, the characters around her, represent all humans of their era, which spanned tens of thousands of years. Ayla discovers how to make fire with flint. She learns how to tame and domesticate animals, and to ride horses and use them for pack animals. She develops her own (biologically correct) ideas about how babies are made. She is even able to see into the future, albeit with the help of some very dangerous plant-based hallucinogens, and envisions a day when the earth is covered with flat surfaces, non-natural formations, and quickly moving objects. Ayla is the link between the Neanderthals who raised her as an orphan found in the wilderness, and us, modern humans.

Auel's research and understanding of the era allows the reader to feel she is spying on another time, a time with which we seem to have lost all connection, but a time that is still startlingly familiar. We can see, through Auels' postulations on culture, spirituality and the physical demands of the time, the things that make us like them and where many of our current practices may have been born. Do you feel a little bit ashamed about staring into the windows of houses as you walk along the street? Perhaps that's a vestige of the way ancient peoples avoided looking into the living areas of other families when several families would live in small, undivided communal dwellings. Rape was just as abhorrent to Cro-magnons as it is to us, Auel postulates.

It was also a time when the earth provided everything needed for existence, and ingenius methods were devised to use every last fragment of the bounty that could be collected from the land or hunted from among its teeming wildlife. Harsh though their environment was, they seemed mostly happy and content and, so far in the series at least, war was unknown.

Along with some brilliant world-building, Auel also knows how to spin a ripping good yarn, and this is as intense and compelling a love story as I have ever read, not to mention a great and far-sweeping adventure. Ayla, an ancient homo-sapiens raised by a Neanderthal clan, falls in love with Jondalar, a man of her own kind but as different from her in culture as he could possibly be. Their cultural, linguistic and spiritual differences create situations between them that have the reader biting her lip and growling with frustration over the situations, which seem silly and easily-solved by us, but which keep Ayla and Jondalar constantly at odds in spite of their deep and mutual love for one another. It's enough to make you want to throw the book across the room at times, but you don't because Auel has her way of leading you along by the nose, thinking some little thing will fall into place and Ayla and Jondalar will see what silly gits they've been.

There is not much to criticize in these books. There are too-frequent and too-detailed passages describing the natural environment in which the characters move and live. You feel as if you're reading a text-book at these moments. I would much rather she stuck to the less intrusive and more easily absorbed descriptions that naturally flow with any scene-writing, rather than yanking you out of the storytelling and plopping you down in front of a documentary during the books' natural segues.

And I hate to say it, but her sex scenes are not much better. The first time Ayla and Jondalar made love, long-anticipated and masterfully built-up to, was gloriously written and enjoyable to read. But all subsequent sex scenes are about as interesting and sexy as the natural history documentaries she subjects the reader to from time to time. They are too long and too minutely detailed to make for good erotic reading. While she does manage to get some heat going, she dispels it with too much step-by-step description. Tab A into Slot B, and then he did this and then she moaned and squirmed, and then they reached a perfect mutual orgasm and of course there is never any mess or goo afterwards, even though they never change the sleeping furs.

Then again...who wants to read about mess and goo anyway.

As with any TV show in which you know the main character will prevail in spite of the mortal peril she appears to face in a particular episode, I know that Ayla and Jondalar will eventually work through their frustrating differences and carry on to their next great adventure together. I even have a good idea what that adventure will be, and that they will probably prevail again. But Auel's storytelling is so adept that I will continue to read and be delighted with the tale, just like my ancient ancestors would sit around a fire and raptly listen to a story they've heard dozens of times before.