Postman, Clocks, and Dunkers

In the preface to his book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," Neil Postman writes of The Age of Television: "Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think." And in the next paragraph, "Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy."

I won't attempt a summary here, though I will say that it was easily one of the more important books I've ever read -- one of those that will permanently alter the way you see the world. This type of work is a modern-day hint to why the early stages of philosophies and religions are always accompanied by "prophets" or "seers". There's nothing supernatural about this, it's just that some rare people have an unusual capacity for perceiving not only the external qualities of their society but the collective "spirit" behind it, which is composed of the fears, dreams, compulsions, and desires of the masses. In short, they are possessed with an understanding of how the "Mind at Large", at least on the cultural scale, is working at that particular point in history. Postman identifies some of the inner characteristics of contemporary mass culture and finds that the mental atmosphere hanging over the United States is not looking very good. Yet, as he notes in the references to Brave New World, few people are taking notice because of "man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."

Here's one minor passage from the book that I thought was interesting:

"In Lewis Mumford's great book Technics and Civilization, he shows how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded. Indeed, as Mumford points out, with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God's supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser. Perhaps Moses should have included another Commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time." And later, "Our own tribe is undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics. What I mean to point out here is that the introduction into a culture of a technique such as writing or a clock is not merely an extension of man's power to bind time but a transformation of his way of thinking--and, of course, of the content of his culture."

In a later chapter he writes briefly about a religious sect known as the Dunkers, which was attacked for its unconventional forms of worship but did not, as a rule, write down their beliefs or practices. A co-founder of the group is quoted in the book:

"When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were errors, and that others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing. Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological knowledge; and we fear that, if we should feel ourselves as if bound and confined by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from." Postman goes on to comment: "Benjamin Franklin describes this sentiment as a singular instance in the history of mankind of modesty in a sect. Modesty is certainly the word for it, but the statement is extraordinary for other reasons, too. We have here a criticism of the epistemology of the written word worthy of Plato. Moses himself might be interested although he could hardly approve. The Dunkers came close here to formulating a commandment about religious discourse: Thou shalt not write down thy principles, still less print them, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time."

WWJD: Why Wouldn't Jesus Drown?

http://www.skepticfiles.org/atheist/waterwak.htm

In 1994 a Seventh Day Adventist minister persuaded nine people sharing a canoe with him to follow Jesus Christ's example and walk with him across the water into the middle of Lake Victoria, Tanzania. They all drowned.

Scientists Study Mystical Effects of Mushrooms

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=health&id=4356299

"The controversial study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University of Medicine, looked at whether a pill containing psilocybin, derived from the psilocybe mushroom, would induce mystical experiences among 36 healthy adult study participants. All had religious backgrounds, and all were also given the active drug ingredient in the attention-deficit disorder drug, Ritalin, at a separate time as a comparison.

The results were clear: Sixty percent of the psilocybin group elicited behaviors consistent with a "full mystical experience" as measured by psychological scales. Two months later, about 79 percent of the group reported "moderately to greatly increased" well-being or life satisfaction."

The biggest criticism surrounding this study is the suggestion that, because the participants were all religious prior to taking the drug, they might've undergone a mystical experience largely through the power of suggestion and expectation. That argument is valid when it comes to psychological experiments dealing with everyday mental activities, but what they're talking about here -- a profoundly altered perception -- seems beyond sheer willpower and psychic trickery.

Many of us have brief, spontaneous encounters with the mystical state of consciousness wherein our habitual way of seeing things is suddenly invaded by a presence of the unknown, of "the absurd" or of "God" depending on one's outlook and predisposition, but the only thing that is really dependent on the will is a person's reaction to or interpretation of it, after the fact. Camus described the feeling as "the Absurd," whereas natives in South America said it was like "looking into the eyes of the Veiled Lady." Whatever you want to call "it" is common to every culture that respects alternative visions of reality, but in America we lack the language to even discuss its existence, let alone its possible significance. That very problem must have been the origin of all sacred art and every religion in human history. So what now? The images and symbols of our dominant religion, Christianity, are believed by nearly all followers today to be literal and historical, thus they are no longer symbols. They are facts to be verified in the afterlife, the realizations of which are to be put on hold here on earth through "faith."

Meanwhile, marketers and advertisers are gaining a better understanding of the people's mythic imagination than the priests whom they go to for spiritual guidance. Turn on your television and you'll find that much of the imagery we're bombarded with is blatantly psychedelic, hallucinatory, and dream-like. I don't think that's an accident. Nor is it a coincidence that politicians and corporations often inject religious themes and concepts into their messages. Whether consciously or unconsciously, they have tapped into a power that is deeply familiar to us, and which is greater than our capacity for rational thought. And that manipulation of the religious impulse is so prevalent in our society that it is as if there's a deliberate conspiracy aimed at hijacking and harnessing its inherent power while erasing its true, spiritual essence. I don't believe that literally, of course, but I do think some form of that idea could contribute to a rebellion against pop culture and a resurgence in authentic spirituality. Such a revolt is inevitable, but the obstacles are firmly in place. Everywhere we go in the modern city there is something to command our attention, to remind us of the human world with all of its endless distractions and excesses. We exist within these artificial environments and they threaten to cut us off entirely from nature, the very source of religious worship, but there always remains the potential for new revelations and for the rediscovery of ancient truths. There's a theory today of something called the "dialogic imagination" which says that any idea, once it enters a people's consciousness, is always capable of being reinvented by later generations. This could explain why so many common motifs of mythology kept popping up in different cultures throughout history, adapting in such a way that spoke to that particular group living at that specific time. I may say that Christianity is irrelevant to you and I, for instance, but the archetypal figure of Jesus -- of one who dies and is reborn anew -- is found all over the place in contemporary life and art, from Neo to Lester Burnham, and the immense popularity of those stories are indications that we are aware on some level of the illusory nature of the purely material world, and that we still possess a longing for someone or something to guide us toward transcendence. And, anyway, 'shrooms could possibly be a catalyst for a more unifying way of organizing ourselves around shared spiritual ideals that are not currently available to us.