onsdag den 10. december 2008
lørdag den 29. november 2008
onsdag den 26. november 2008
onsdag den 8. oktober 2008
mandag den 29. september 2008
mandag den 14. juli 2008
Toms Portal
| Tom's Portal | |||
| | Opslag |
|
|
| Omvokaliseringsstrukturalisme |
|
| |
|
|
| ||
|
|
| ||
|
|
| ||
|
|
| ||
| Nyheder |
|
| |
| Offentlige |
|
| |
|
|
| ||
|
|
| ||
|
|
| ||
|
|
| ||
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
| Bøger | Diverse |
|
|
|
|
| ||
|
|
| ||
|
|
| ||
|
|
| ||
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Musik |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
lørdag den 5. juli 2008
onsdag den 25. juni 2008
torsdag den 29. maj 2008
Epilogue
Epilogue
MY GOAL in writing this book has been to help close the door to a
certain style of irrationality. While religious faith is the one species
of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of
correction, it is still sheltered from criticism in every corner of our
culture. Forsaking all valid sources of information about this world
(both spiritual and mundane), our religions have seized upon
ancient taboos and prescientific fancies as though they held ultimate
metaphysical significance. Books that embrace the narrowest spectrum
of political, moral, scientific, and spiritual understanding—
books that, by their antiquity alone, offer us the most dilute wisdom
with respect to the present—are still dogmatically thrust upon us as
the final word on matters of the greatest significance. In the best
case, faith leaves otherwise well-intentioned people incapable of
thinking rationally about many of their deepest concerns; at worst,
it is a continuous source of human violence. Even now, many of us
are motivated not by what we know but by what we are content
merely to imagine. Many are still eager to sacrifice happiness, compassion,
and justice in this world, for a fantasy of a world to come.
These and other degradations await us along the well-worn path of
piety. Whatever our religious differences may mean for the next life,
they have only one terminus in this one—a future of ignorance and
slaughter.
We live in societies that are still constrained by religious laws and
threatened by religious violence. What is it about us, and specifically
about our discourse with one another, that keeps these astonishing
223
2 2 4 E P I L O G UE
bits of evil loose in our world? We have seen that education and
wealth are insufficient guarantors of rationality. Indeed, even in the
West, educated men and women still cling to the blood-soaked heirlooms
of a previous age. Mitigating this problem is not merely a
matter of reining in a minority of religious extremists; it is a matter
of finding approaches to ethics and to spiritual experience that make
no appeal to faith, and broadcasting this knowledge to everyone.
Of course, one senses that the problem is simply hopeless. What
could possibly cause billions of human beings to reconsider their
religious beliefs ? And yet, it is obvious that an utter revolution in
our thinking could be accomplished in a single generation: if parents
and teachers would merely give honest answers to the questions of
every child. Our doubts about the feasibility of such a project should
be tempered by an understanding of its necessity, for there is no reason
whatsoever to think that we can survive our religious differences
indefinitely.
Imagine what it would be like for our descendants to experience
the fall of civilization. Imagine failures of reasonableness so total
that our largest bombs finally fall upon our largest cities in defense
of our religious differences. What would it be like for the unlucky
survivors of such a holocaust to look back upon the hurtling career
of human stupidity that led them over the precipice? A view from
the end of the world would surely find that the six billion of us currently
alive did much to pave the way to the Apocalypse.
THIS world is simply ablaze with bad ideas. There are still places
where people are put to death for imaginary crimes—like blasphemy—
and where the totality of a child's education consists of his
learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction. There are
countries where women are denied almost every human liberty,
except the liberty to breed. And yet, these same societies are quickly
acquiring terrifying arsenals of advanced weaponry. If we cannot
inspire the developing world, and the Muslim world in particular, to
E P I L O G U E 225
pursue ends that are compatible with a global civilization, then a
dark future awaits all of us.
The contest between our religions is zero-sum. Religious violence
is still with us because our religions are intrinsically hostile to one
another. Where they appear otherwise, it is because secular knowledge
and secular interests are restraining the most lethal improprieties
of faith. It is time we acknowledged that no real foundation
exists within the canons of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any of
our other faiths for religious tolerance and religious diversity.
If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way
that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of
our having dispensed with the dogma of faith. If our tribalism is ever
to give way to an extended moral identity, our religious beliefs can
no longer be sheltered from the tides of genuine inquiry and genuine
criticism. It is time we realized that to presume knowledge
where one has only pious hope is a species of evil. Wherever conviction
grows in inverse proportion to its justification, we have lost the
very basis of human cooperation. Where we have reasons for what
we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we
have lost both our connection to the world and to one another. People
who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the
margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing we
should respect in a person's faith is his desire for a better life in this
world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits
him in the next.
Nothing is more sacred than the facts. No one, therefore, should
win any points in our discourse for deluding himself. The litmus test
for reasonableness should be obvious: anyone who wants to know
how the world is, whether in physical or spiritual terms, will be open
to new evidence. We should take comfort in the fact that people tend
to conform themselves to this principle whenever they are obliged
to. This will remain a problem for religion. The very hands that prop
up our faith will be the ones to shake it.
226 EPILOGUE
IT is as yet undetermined what it means to be human, because every
facet of our culture—and even our biology itself—remains open to
innovation and insight. We do not know what we will be a thousand
years from now—or indeed that we will be, given the lethal absurdity
of many of our beliefs—but whatever changes await us, one
thing seems unlikely to change: as long as experience endures, the
difference between happiness and suffering will remain our
paramount concern. We will therefore want to understand those processes—
biochemical, behavioral, ethical, political, economic, and spiritual—
that account for this difference. We do not yet have anything
like a final understanding of such processes, but we know enough to
rule out many false understandings. Indeed, we know enough at this
moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the
immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.
We do not know what awaits each of us after death, but we know
that we will die. Clearly, it must be possible to live ethically—with a
genuine concern for the happiness of other sentient beings—without
presuming to know things about which we are patently ignorant.
Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person you
will pass in the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each
will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose
everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything
but kind to them in the meantime?
We are bound to one another. The fact that our ethical intuitions
must, in some way, supervene upon our biology does not make ethical
truths reducible to biological ones. We are the final judges of what
is good, just as we remain the final judges of what is logical. And on
neither front has our conversation with one another reached an end.
There need be no scheme of rewards and punishments transcending
this life to justify our moral intuitions or to render them effective in
guiding our behavior in the world. The only angels we need invoke are
those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons
we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance,
hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil's masterpiece.
E P I L O G U E 227
Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is
shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our
own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the
name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this
mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call
"spiritual." No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the
profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped
for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No
tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that
we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable
from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people
everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish. The days of our
religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of civilization
itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather too much,
on how soon we realize this.
Afterword
The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry
vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group
labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic
religion gives strong sanction to both—and mixes explosively
with both. Only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive
force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in
the world today. Without a doubt it is the prime aggravator of the
Middle East. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our
contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to
stand up and speak out. Things are different now. "All is changed,
changed utterly." —RICHARD DAWKINS
IT HAS BEEN nearly a year since The End of Faith was first published
in the United States. In response, I have received a continuous correspondence
from readers and nonreaders alike, expressing everything
from ecstatic support to nearly homicidal condemnation.
Many thousands of people have apparently read the book, and millions
more have heard its contents discussed in the media. In
response, letters and e-mails have come to me from scientists and
physicians at every stage of their careers, from soldiers fighting in
Iraq, from Christian ministers who have lost their faith (and from
those who haven't), from Muslims who agree with my general disparagement
of their religion, and from others who would have me
meet them at a local mosque so that I might better learn the will of
God. I have also heard from hundreds of embattled freethinkers liv-
229
230 AFTE RWO R D
ing in "red state" America. Judging from this last group of correspondents,
the American heartland is fast becoming as blinkered as
the wilds of Afghanistan. It may be too much to hope that the efforts
of reasonable people will yet turn the tide.
According to several recent polls, 22 percent of Americans are certain
that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty years.
Another 22 percent believe that he will probably do so. This is likely
the same 44 percent who go to church once a week or more, who
believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, and
who want to stop teaching children about the biological fact of evolution.
Believers of this sort constitute the most cohesive and motivated
segment of the American electorate. Consequently, their views
and prejudices now influence almost every decision of national
importance. Political liberals seem to have drawn the wrong lesson
from these developments and are now thumbing scripture, wondering
how best to ingratiate themselves to the legions of men and
women in our country who vote mainly on the basis of religious
dogma. More than 50 percent of Americans have a "negative" or
"highly negative" view of people who do not believe in God; 70 percent
think it important for presidential candidates to be "strongly
religious." Because it is taboo to criticize a person's religious beliefs,
political debate over questions of public policy (stem-cell research,
the ethics of assisted suicide and euthanasia, obscenity and free
speech, gay marriage, etc.) generally gets framed in terms appropriate
to a theocracy. Unreason is now ascendant in the United States—
in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal
government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 72
percent believe in angels. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in
both the head and the belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a
problem for the entire world.
HAVING seen my argument against faith discussed, attacked, celebrated,
and misconstrued in blogs and book reviews throughout the
A F T E R W O R D 231
world, I would like to take the occasion of its release in paperback as
an opportunity to respond to the most common criticisms and misconceptions.
These are by no means straw-man arguments; these are
what real people (and the occasional book reviewer) believe to be
devastating retorts to my basic thesis:
1. Yes, religion occasionally causes violence, but the greatest crimes
of the twentieth century were perpetrated by atheists. Godlessness—
as witnessed by the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Kim
Jong-Il—is the most dangerous condition of all.
This is one of the most common criticisms I encounter. It is also the
most depressing, as I anticipate and answer it early in the book
(p. 79). While some of the most despicable political movements in
human history have been explicitly irreligious, they were not especially
rational. The public pronouncements of these regimes have
been mere litanies of delusion—about race, economics, national
identity, the march of history, or the moral dangers of intellectualism.
Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields are not examples of
what happens when people become too critical of unjustified
beliefs; to the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of not
thinking critically enough about specific secular ideologies. Needless
to say, my argument against religious faith is not an argument
for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem I raise in
the book is none other than the problem of dogma itself—of which
every religion has more than its fair share. I know of no society
in human history that ever suffered because its people became
too reasonable.
As I argue throughout the book, certainty without evidence is
necessarily divisive and dehumanizing. In fact, respect for evidence
and rational argument is what makes peaceful cooperation possible.
As human beings, we live in a perpetual choice between conversation
and violence; what, apart from a fundamental willingness to be
reasonable, can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another?
2 3 2 A F T E R W O RD
2. We need faith to do almost anything. It is absurd to think that we
could ever do without it.
One e-mail I received on this subject began: "I like your writing style
but you are an idiot." Fair enough. My correspondent then went on
to point out, as many have, that each of us has to get out of bed in the
morning and live his life, and we do this in a context of uncertainty,
and in the context of terrible certainties, like the certainty of death.
This positive disposition, this willingness to set a course in life without
any assurance that things will go one's way, is occasionally called
"faith." Thus, one may prop up a disconsolate friend with the words
"have faith in yourself." Such words are almost never facetious, even
on the forked tongue of an atheist. Let me state for the record that I
see nothing wrong with this kind of "faith."
But this is not the faith that has given us religion. It would be
rather remarkable if a positive attitude in the face of uncertainty led
inevitably to ludicrous convictions about the divine origin of certain
books, to bizarre cultural taboos, to the abject hatred of homosexuals,
and to the diminished status of women. Adopt too positive an
outlook, and the next thing you know architects and engineers may
start flying planes into buildings.
As I do my best to spell out over the course of the book, religious
faith is the belief in historical and metaphysical propositions without
sufficient evidence. When the evidence for a religious proposition
is thin or nonexistent, or there is compelling evidence against
it, people invoke faith. Otherwise, they simply cite the reasons for
their beliefs (e.g., "the New Testament confirms Old Testament
prophecy," "I saw the face of Jesus in a window," "We prayed, and
our daughter's cancer went into remission"). Such reasons are generally
inadequate, but they are better than no reasons at all. People
of faith naturally recognize the primacy of reasons and resort to reasoning
whenever they possibly can. Faith is simply the license they
give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail. When rational
inquiry supports the creed it is championed; when it poses a threat,
AFTE RWO RD 233
it is derided; sometimes in the same sentence. Faith is the mortar
that fills the cracks in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus
it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty
still looming dangerously over our world.
3. Islam is no more amenable to violence than any other religion is.
The violence we see in the Muslim world is the product of politics
and economics, not faith.
The speciousness of this claim is best glimpsed by the bright light of
bomb blasts. Where are the Palestinian Christian suicide bombers?
They, too, suffer the daily indignity of the Israeli occupation. Where,
for that matter, are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? The
Tibetans have suffered an occupation far more cynical and repressive
than any that the United States or Israel has ever imposed upon the
Muslim world. Where are the throngs of Tibetans ready to perpetrate
suicidal atrocities against Chinese noncombatants? They do
not exist. What is the difference that makes the difference? The difference
lies in the specific tenets of Islam. This is not to say that
Buddhism could not help inspire suicidal violence. It can, and it has
(Japan, World War II). But this concedes absolutely nothing to the
apologists for Islam. As a Buddhist, one has to work extremely hard
to justify such barbarism. One need not work nearly so hard as
a Muslim.
Recent events in Iraq offer further corroboration on this point. It
is true, of course, that the Iraqi people have been traumatized by
decades of war and repression. But war and repression do not
account for suicidal violence directed against the Red Cross, the
United Nations, foreign workers, and Iraqi innocents. War and
repression would not have attracted an influx of foreign fighters
willing to sacrifice their lives merely to sow chaos. The Iraqi insurgents
have not been motivated principally by political or economic
grievances. They have such grievances, of course, but politics and
economics do not get a man to intentionally blow himself up in a
234 AFTE RWO RD
crowd of children, or get his mother to sing his praises for it. Miracles
of this order generally require religious faith.
There are other confounding variables here, of course—state
sponsorship of terrorism, the occasional coercion of reluctant suicide
bombers—but we cannot let them blind us to the pervasive and
lunatic influence of religious belief. The truth that we must finally
confront is that Islam contains specific doctrines about martyrdom
and jihad that now directly inspire Muslim terrorism. Unless the
world's Muslims can find some way of expunging a theology that is
fast turning their religion into a cult of death, we will ultimately face
the same perversely destructive behavior throughout much of the
world. Wherever these events occur, we will find Muslims tending
to side with other Muslims, no matter how sociopathic their behavior.
This is the malignant solidarity that religion breeds. It is time
that sane human beings stopped making apologies for it. And it is
time for Muslims—especially Muslim women—to realize that
nobody suffers the consequences of Islam more than they do.
4. The End of Faith is not a truly atheistic book. It is really a stalking
horse for Buddhism, New-Age mysticism, or some other form of
irrationality.
As almost every page of my book is dedicated to exposing the problems
of religious faith, it is ironic that some of the harshest criticism
has come from atheists who feel that I have betrayed their cause on
peripheral issues. If there is a book that takes a harder swing at religion,
I'm not aware of it. This is not to say that my book does not
have many shortcomings—but appeasing religious irrationality is
not among them.
Nevertheless, atheists have found much to complain about in the
book, especially in the last chapter where I attempt to put meditation
and "spirituality" on a rational footing. "Meditation," in the sense
that I use the term, merely requires that a person pay extraordinarA
F T E R W O R D 235
ily close attention to his moment-by-moment experience of the
world. There is nothing irrational about doing this. In fact, it constitutes
the only rational basis for making detailed claims about the
nature of our subjectivity.
Through meditation, a person can come to observe the flow of his
experience with remarkable clarity, and this sometimes results in a
variety of insights that people tend to find both intellectually credible
and personally transformative. As I discuss in the final chapter of
the book, one of these insights is that the feeling we call "I"—the
sense that we are the thinker of our thoughts, the experiencer of our
experiences—can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. This
is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation,
analogous to the discovery of one's optic blind spots. Most
people never notice their blind spots (caused by the transit of the
optic nerve through the retina of each eye), but they can be pointed
out to almost anyone with a little effort. The absence of the "self"
can also be pointed out with some effort, though this discovery
tends to require considerably more training on the part of both
teacher and student. The only faith required to get such a project off
the ground is the faith of scientific hypothesis. The hypothesis is
this: If I use my attention in a certain way, it may have a specific,
reproducible effect. Needless to say, what happens (or fails to happen)
along any path of "spiritual" practice must be interpreted in
light of some conceptual scheme, and everything should be open to
rational argument.
I have also taken considerable heat from atheists for a few
remarks I made about the nature of consciousness. Most atheists
appear to be certain that consciousness is entirely dependent on (and
reducible to) the workings of the brain. In the last chapter of the
book, I briefly argue that this certainty is unwarranted. The fact is
that scientists still do not know what the relationship between consciousness
and matter actually is. I am not suggesting that we make
a religion out of this uncertainty, or do anything else with it. And,
236 AFTERWORD
needless to say, the mysteriousness of consciousness does nothing to
make conventional religious notions about God and paradise any
more plausible.
SINCE The End of Faith was first published, current events have
remained a running confirmation of its central thesis. There are days
when almost every headline in the morning paper attests to the
social costs of religious faith, and the nightly news seems miraculously
broadcast from the fourteenth century. One spectacle of religious
hysteria follows fast upon the next. Sanctimonious eruptions
announcing the death of the pope (a man who actively opposed condom
use in sub-Saharan Africa and shielded frocked child molesters
from secular justice) are soon followed by other outbursts of religious
lunacy. At the time of this writing, Muslims in several countries
are rioting over a report that U.S. interrogators desecrated a
copy of the Koran. Seventeen people are dead and hundreds injured.
The response of the U.S. government has been to offer up some
lunacy of its own. No less a spokeswoman than the Secretary of
State has assured the righteous hordes that "the United States government
will not tolerate any disrespect for the holy Koran." What
form our government's intolerance will take remains unspecified. I
await a knock on the door.
Such perfect visions of unreason have been punctuated by the
more ordinary trespasses of faith: daily reports of pious massacres in
Iraq, of evangelical ravings against the evils of a secular judiciary, of
widespread religious coercion in the U.S. Air Force, of efforts in at
least twenty states to redefine science to include supernatural explanations
of the origin of life, of devout pharmacists refusing to fill
prescriptions for birth control, of movie theaters refusing to show
documentaries that report the actual age of the earth, and on and on
and onward . . . to the fifteenth century.
For anyone with eyes to see, there can be no doubt that religious
faith remains a perpetual source of human conflict. Religion perAFTE
RWO RD 237
suades otherwise intelligent men and women to not think, or to
think badly, about questions of civilizational importance. And yet it
remains taboo to criticize religious faith in our society, or to even
observe that some religions are less compassionate and less tolerant
than others. What is worst in us (outright delusion) has been elevated
beyond the reach of criticism, while what is best (reason and
intellectual honesty) must remain hidden, for fear of giving offense.
The End of Faith represents my first attempt to call attention to the
dangers and absurdities inherent in this situation. I sincerely hope
that readers will continue to find the book useful.
Sam Harris
New York
May 2005
Notes
1 Reason in Exile
1 As we will see in chapter 4, the chances are decidedly against the possibility
that he comes from the lowest strata of society.
2 Some readers may object that the bomber in question is most likely to be
a member of the Liberations Tigers of Tamil Eelam—the Sri Lankan separatist
organization that has perpetrated more acts of suicidal terrororism
than any other group. Indeed, the "Tamil Tigers" are often offered as a
counterexample to any claim that suicidal terrorism is a product of religion.
But to describe the Tamil Tigers as "secular"—as R. A. Pape, "The
Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," American Political Science Review
97, no. 3 (2003): 20-32, and others have—is misleading. While the motivations
of the Tigers are not explicitly religious, they are Hindus who
undoubtedly believe many improbable things about the nature of life and
death. The cult of martyr worship that they have nurtured for decades
has many of the features of religiosity that one would expect in people
who give their lives so easily for a cause. Secular Westerners often underestimate
the degree to which certain cultures, steeped as they are in otherworldliness,
look upon death with less alarm than seems strictly
rational. I was once traveling in India when the government rescheduled
the exams for students who were preparing to enter the civil service:
what appeared to me to be the least of bureaucratic inconveniences precipitated
a wave of teenage self-immolations in protest. Hindus, even
those whose preoccupations appear to be basically secular, often harbor
potent religious beliefs.
3 I am speaking here of "alchemy" as that body of ancient and ultimately
fanciful metallurgic and chemical techniques whose purpose was to
transmute base metals into gold and mundane materials into an "elixir of
life." It is true that there are people who claim to find the alchemical lit-
239
2 4 0 NOTES TO PAGES 1 6 - 3 0
erature prescient with the most contemporary truths of pharmacology,
solid-state physics, and a variety of other disciplines. I find the results of
such Rorschach readings less than inspiring, however. See T. McKenna,
The Archaic Revival ([San Francisco]: Harper San Francisco, 1991), Food
of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (New York:
Bantam Books, 1992), and True Hallucinations ([San Francisco]: Harper
San Francisco, 1993), for an example of a bright and beautiful mind that
takes such revaluations of alchemy seriously, however.
4 S. J. Gould, "Nonoverlapping Magisteria," Natural History, March 1997.
5 G. H. Gallup Jr., Religion in America 1996 (Princeton: Princeton Religion
Research Center, 1996).
6 This is not to deny that there are problems with democracy, particularly
when it is imposed prematurely on societies that have high birthrates,
low levels of literacy, profound ethnic and religious factionalism, and
unstable economies. There is clearly such a thing as a benevolent despotism,
and it may be a necessary stage in the political development of
many societies. See R. D. Kaplan, "Was Democracy Just a Moment?,"
Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1997, pp. 55-80, and F. Zakaria, The Future of
Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2003).
7 Bernard Lewis, in "The Revolt of Islam," New Yorker, Nov. 19, 2001, pp.
50-63, and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York:
Modern Library, 2003), has pointed out that the term "fundamentalist"
was coined by American Protestants and can be misleading when applied
to other faiths. It seems to me that the term has escaped into general
usage, however, and that it now signifies any sort of scriptural literalism.
I use it only in this general sense. The problems of applying the phrase
to Islam in particular will be addressed in chapter 4.
8 C. W. Dugger, "Religious Riots Loom over Indian Politics," New York
Times, July 27, 2002. See also P. Mishra, "The Other Face of Fanaticism,"
New York Times Magazine, Feb. 2, 2003, pp. 42-46.
9 A. Roy, War Talk (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2003), 1.
10 As Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 57-58, notes, we have caused far more chaos in
Central America, Southeast Asia, and southern Africa. Those Muslim
countries which have been occupied by foreign powers (like Egypt) are in
many ways much better off than countries (like Saudi Arabia) which
have not. Taking Saudia Arabia as an example, despite its relative wealth
—which is due to nothing more than an accident of nature—this country
lags behind its neighbors in many respects. The Saudis have only
NOTES TO PAGES 3 1 - 3 5 241
eight universities to serve 21 million people, and they did not abolish
slavery until 1962. P. Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2003), 16, also points out that most of our conflicts of recent
years have been fought in defense of various Muslim populations: the
first Gulf War was fought in defense of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and was
followed by a decade of air protection for the Iraqi Kurds in the north and
the Iraqi Shia in the south; the intervention in Somalia was designed to
relieve famine there; and our intervention in the Balkans was for the purpose
of defending Bosnians and Kosovars from marauding Christian
Serbs. Our original support of the mujahideen in Afghanistan belongs in
this category as well. As Berman says, "In all of recent history, no country
on earth has fought so hard and consistently as the United States on
behalf of Muslim populations." This is true. And yet the Muslim worldview
is such that this fact, if acknowledged at all, is generally counted as
a further grievance against us; it is yet another source of Muslim "humiliation."
11 Of course, the Sunnis would still hate the Shiites, but this is also an
expression of their faith.
12 J. Bennet, "In Israeli Hospital, Bomber Tells of Trying to Kill Israelis,"
New York Times, June 8, 2002.
13 "[I]n 1994, at a village south of Islamabad, police charged a doctor with
setting fire to the sacred Koran, a blasphemous crime punishable by
death. Before he could be tried, an enraged mob dragged him from the
police station, doused him with kerosene, and burned him alive." J. A.
Haught, Holy Hatred: Religious Conflicts of the '90s (Amherst, Mass.:
Prometheus Books, 1995), 179.
14 S. P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
15 As many commentators have observed, there is no Koranic equivalent of
the New Testament line "Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar's,
and render unto God those things that are God's" (Matt. 22:21). As
a result, there appears to be no Islamic basis for the separation of the
powers of the church and state. This, needless to say, is a problem.
16 Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 20.
17 Just consider what would fill our newspapers if there were no conflict
between Israel and the Palestinians, the Indians and the Pakistanis, the
Russians and the Chechens, Muslim militants and the West, etc. Problems
between the West and countries like China and North Korea would
remain—but they, too, are often the result of an uncritical acceptance of
242 NOTES TO PAGES 4 1 - 4 5
a variety of dogmas. While our differences with North Korea, for
instance, are not explicitly religious, they are a direct consequence of the
North Koreans' having grown utterly deranged by their political ideology,
their abject worship of their leaders, and their lack of information
about the outside world. They are now like a cargo cult armed with
nuclear weapons. If the 29 million inhabitants of North Korea knew that
they were unique among the world's basket cases, they might behave
rather differently. The problem of North Korea is, first and foremost, a
problem of the unjustified (and unjustifiable) beliefs of North Koreans.
See P. Gourevitch, "Letter from Korea: Alone in the Dark," New Yorker,
Sept. 8, 2003, pp. 55-75.
18 See, e.g., D. Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic
Phenomena (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), R. Sheldrake, The
Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (New
York: Crown, 2003), and R. S. Bobrow, "Paranormal Phenomena in the
Medical Literature Sufficient Smoke to Warrant a Search for Fire," Medical
Hypotheses 60 (2003): 864-68. There may even be some credible evidence
for reincarnation. See I. Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of
Reincarnation (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1974), Unlearned
Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of
Virginia, 1984), and Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (Westport,
Conn.: Praeger, 1997).
19 Yes, human beings can echolocate. We're just not very good at it. To
demonstrate this, simply close your eyes, hum loudly, and pass your
hand back and forth in front of your face. The sound reflecting off your
hand indicates its position.
20 Witness John von Neumann—mathematician, game theorist, savant of
national defense, and agnostic—converting to Catholicism while in the
throes of cancer. See W. Poundstone, Prisoner's Dilemma (New York:
Doubleday, 1992).
21 The Nazis disparaged the "Jewish physics" of Einstein, and the communists
rejected the "capitalist biology" of Mendel and Darwin. But these
were not rational criticisms—as witnessed by the fact that dissenting scientists
were often imprisoned or killed.
These facts notwithstanding, K. Peng and R. E. Nisbett, "Culture,
Dialectics, and Reasoning about Contradiction," American Psychologist
54 (1999): 741-54, have argued that significant differences in reasoning
styles exist across cultures. While the data appear to me to be inconclusive,
even if Eastern and Western minds address problems differently,
NOTES TO PAGES 4 6 - 5 O 243
there is no reason why we cannot, in principle, agree about what it is ultimately
rational to believe.
22 The emergence in 2003 of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in
southern China is a recent example of the global implications of local
health practices. China's mishandling of the epidemic was born not of
irrational medical beliefs but of irrational political ones—and the consequences,
at the time of this writing, have not been catastrophic. But it is
not difficult to imagine a culture whose beliefs relative to epidemiology
could systematically impose unacceptable risks on the rest of us. There is
little doubt that we would ultimately quarantine, invade, or otherwise
subjugate such a society.
23 Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2002.
24 G. Wills, "With God on His Side," New York Times Magazine, March 30,
2003.
25 M. Rees, Our Final Hour (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 61.
26 Questions of their plausibility aside, the mutual incompatibility of our
religious beliefs renders them suspect in principle. As Bertrand Russell
observed, even if we were to grant that one of our religions must be correct
in its every particular, given the number of conflicting views on offer,
every believer should expect damnation on mere probabilistic grounds.
27 Rees, Our Final Hour, has given our species no better than a 50 percent
chance of surviving this century. While his prognostications are nothing
more than educated guesswork, they are worth taking seriously. The man
is not a crank.
2 The Nature of Belief
1 Proof of this fact is never so eloquent as when injury to the brain
destroys one facet of a person's memory while sparing the others—and
indeed, it is largely upon such clinical case histories (like W. B. Scoville
and B. Milner, "Loss of Recent Memory after Bilateral Hippocampal
Lesions," Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry 20 (1957):
11-21) that our understanding of human memory depends. Long-term
memory has since fragmented into semantic, episodic, procedural, and
other forms of information processing; and short-term memory (generally
called "working memory") is now subdivided into phonological,
visual, spatial, conceptual, echoic, and central executive components. Our
analysis of both forms of memory is surely incomplete. The distinction
244 NOTE TO PAGE 50
between semantic and episodic memory, for instance, doesn't seem to
hold for topographical recall (E. A. Maguire et al., "Recalling Routes
around London: Activation of the Right Hippocampus in Taxi Drivers,"
Journal of Neuroscience 17 [1997]: 7103-10); and semantic memory
seems susceptible to further division into category-specific subtypes, as
in memory for living v. nonliving things (S. L. Thompson-Schill et al, "A
Neural Basis for Category and Modality Specificity of Semantic Knowledge,"
Neuropsychologia 37 [1999]: 671-76; J. R. Hart et al., "Category-
Specific Naming Deficit following Cerebral Infarction," Nature 316
[Aug. 1,1985]: 439-40)-
2 There are ways of construing the concept of "belief" that make it appear
equally disjoint. If we use the term too loosely, it can seem that the entire
brain is intimately involved in "belief" formation. Imagine, for instance,
that a man has come to your door claiming to represent the "Publishers
Clearing House Sweepstakes":
1. You see the man's face, recognize it, and therefore "believe" that
you know who this person is. Activity in your fusiform cortex, especially
in the right hemisphere, is crucial for such recognition to occur,
and a lesion here will lead to prosopagnosia (the inability to recognize
familiar faces, or indeed to see faces as faces at all). Using "belief" in
this context, it is tempting to say that prosopagnosics have lost certain
"beliefs" about what other people look like.
2. Having recognized the man's face, you form the "belief," based on
your long-term memory for both faces and facts that he is Ed McMahon,
the famous spokesman for Publishers Clearing House. Damage
to your perirhinal and perihippocampal cortices would have prevented
this "belief" from forming. See R. R. Davies et al., "The Human
Perirhinal Cortex in Semantic Memory: An in Vivo and Postmortem
Volumetric Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study in Semantic Dementia,
Alzheimer's Disease and Matched Controls," Neuropathology and
Applied Neurobiology 28, no. 2 (2002): 167-78 [abstract], and A. R.
Giovagnoli et al., "Preserved Semantic Access in Global Amnesia and
Hippocampal Damage," Clinical Neuropsychology 15 (2001): 508-15
[abstract].
3. Not yet being sure whether this is a hoax of some sort (perhaps Mr.
McMahon is now working for Candid Camera) you take another
moment to study the man at your door. You form the "belief," based
on his tone of voice, the look in his eye, and many other factors, that
NOTE TO PAGE 50 245
he is trustworthy and therefore means what he says. Your ability to
form such judgments reliably—in particular, your ability to detect
untrustworthiness—requires that you have at least one functioning
amygdala (R. Adolphs et al., "The Human Amygdala in Social Judgment,"
Nature 393 [June 4, 1998]: 470-74), a small, almond-shaped
nucleus in your medial temporal lobe.
4. Mr. McMahon then informs you that you are the lucky winner of
a "big jackpot." Your memory for words (requiring different processing
from your memory for faces) leads you to "believe" that you have
won some money, rather than a "pot" of some sort. Making sense of
this phrase will require the work of your superior and middle temporal
gyri, predominantly in your left hemisphere. See A. Ahmad et al.,
"Auditory Comprehension of Language in Young Children: Neural
Networks Identified with fMRI," Neurology 60 (2003): 1598-605, and
M. H. Davis and I. S. Johnsrude, "Hierarchical Processing in Spoken
Language Comprehension," Journal of Neuroscience 23 (2003): 3423-
31.
5. Ed then produces a piece of paper, which he invites you to read. He
does this by pointing. Your "belief" that he wants you to read requires
what has come to be called "theory of mind" processing on your part
(D. Premack and G. Woodruff, "Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory
of Mind," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (1978): 515-26)—if a tree
limb had swayed in the direction of a piece of paper, you would not
have understood it as "pointing" at all. The anatomy underlying theory
of mind processing is not entirely clear at present, but it seems
that the anterior cingulate cortex as well as regions of the frontal and
temporal lobes enable to you to attribute mental states (including
beliefs) to others. See K. Vogeley et al., "Mind Reading: Neural Mechanisms
of Theory of Mind and Self-perspective," Neurolmage 14
(2001): 170-81; C. D. Frith and U. Frith, "Interacting Minds—A Biological
Basis," Science's Compass 286 (1999): 1692-95; and P. C.
Fletcher et al., "Other Mind in the Brain: A Functional Imaging Study
of 'Theory of Mind' in Story Comprehension," Cognition 57 (1995):
109-28.
6. Scanning the paper with your eyes, you see the following symbols
appended after your name: $10,000,000. Some processing relative to
Arabic numerals (probably in your left parietal lobe—G. Denes and
M. Signorini, "Door But Not Four and 4 a Category Specific Transcoding
Deficit in a Pure Acalculic Patient," Cortex 37, no. 2 [2001]:
2 4 6 NOTES TO PAGES 5 1 - 5 3
267-77) leads you to "believe" that this paper is actually a check for
ten million dollars.
While many diverse streams of neural activity have conspired to
make you believe that you have won a terrific sum of money, it is this
idea—explicitly represented in language—that underwrites the sweeping
changes that will take place in your nervous system, and in your life. Perhaps
you will startle the benevolent Mr. McMahon by shrieking; you
may even burst into tears; it is only a matter of hours before you begin
shopping with an unusual degree of abandon. Your belief that you have
just won ten million dollars will be the author of all these actions, both
voluntary and involuntary. In particular, it will dictate the following
behavior: to the question "Have you just won ten million dollars?" you
will—if moved by the spirit of candor—reply yes.
3 Belief, in this sense, is what philosophers generally call a "propositional
attitude." We have many such attitudes, in fact, and they are usually indicated
by a clause containing the word "that"; we can believe that, fear
that, intend that, appreciate that, hope that, etc.
4 The formation of certain primitive beliefs may be indistinguishable from
the preparation of a motor plan. See J. I. Gold and M. N. Shadlen, "Representation
of a Perceptual Decision in Developing Oculomotor Commands,"
Nature 404 (March 23, 2000): 390-94, and "Banburismus and
the Brain: Decoding the Relationship between Sensory Stimuli, Decisions,
and Reward," Neuron 36, no. 2 (2002): 299-308, for a discussion of
visual judgments and oculomotor response.
5 We do not have to bring the membership of Al Qaeda "to justice"
merely because of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001. The thousands of
men, women, and children who disappeared in the rubble of the World
Trade Center are beyond our help—and successful acts of retribution,
however satisfying they may be to some people, will not change this
fact. Our subsequent actions in Afghanistan and elsewhere are justified
because of what will happen to more innocent people if members of Al
Qaeda are allowed to go on living by the light of their peculiar beliefs.
The horror of Sept. 11 should motivate us, not because it provides us
with a grievance that we now must avenge, but because it proves
beyond any possibility of doubt that certain twenty-first-century
Muslims actually believe the most dangerous and implausible tenets of
their faith.
6 A consideration of the structure of our language reveals that this is not a
NOTES TO PAGES 5 4 - 5 7 2 47
special case, since all words and their usages lead us in circles of mutual
explanation.
7 The philosopher Donald Davidson has made this insight do some very
heavy lifting in his work on "radical interpretation." One interesting
consequence of the relationship between belief and meaning is that any
attempt to understand a language user requires that we assume him to be
basically rational (this is Davidson's "principle of charity").
8 At least at the "classical" scale at which we live. That the quantum world
does not behave in this way accounts for why no one can claim to
"understand" it in realistic terms.
9 D. Kahneman and A. Tversky, "On the Reality of Cognitive Illusions,"
Psychological Review 103 (1996): 582-91; G. Gigerenzer, "On Narrow
Norms and Vague Heuristics: A Reply to Kahneman and Tversky," ibid.,
592-96; K. J. Holyoak and P. C. Cheng, "Pragmatic Reasoning with a
Point of View," Thinking and Reasoning 1 (1995): 289-313; J. R. Anderson,
"The New Theoretical Framework," in The Adaptive Character of
Thought (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1990); K. Peng and R. E. Nisbett, "Culture,
Dialectics, and Reasoning about Contradiction," American Psychologist
54 (1999): 741-54; K. E. Stanovich and R. F. West, "Individual
Differences in Rational Thought," journal of Experimental Psychology:
General 127 (1998): 161.
10 A. R. Mele, "Real Self-Deception," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20
(1997): 91-102, "Understanding and Explaining Real Self-Deception,"
ibid., 127-36, and Self-Deception Unmasked (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 2001); H. Fingarette, Self-Deception (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 2000); J. P. Dupuy, ed., Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality
(Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1998); D. Davidson, "Who Is Fooled?"
ibid.; G. Quattrone and A. Tversky, "Self-Deception and the Voter's Illusion,"
in The Multiple Self, ed. J. Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1985), 35-57.
11 This assumes that many of the beliefs have common terms, as the beliefs
of human beings invariably do.
12 This example is taken from W. Poundstone, Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox,
Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Press,
1988), 183-88.
13 Recently, physical theories have been advanced that predict quantum
computation across an infinite number of parallel universes (D. Deutsch,
The Fabric of Reality [New York: Penguin, 1997]) or the possibility that
all matter will one day be organized as an "omniscient" supercomputer
248 NOTES TO PAGE 58
(F. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality [New York: Doubleday, 1995])
availing itself of a dilation of space-time resulting from the gravitational
collapse of the universe. I have excluded these and other theoretical
hierophanies from the present discussion.
Another way of getting at these logical and semantic constraints is to say
that our beliefs must be systematic. Systematicity is a property that
beliefs inherit from language, logic, and the world at large. Just as most
words derive their sense from the existence of other words, every belief
requires many others to situate it in a person's overall representation of
the world. How the loom of cognition first begins weaving is still a mystery,
but there seems little doubt that we come hardwired with a variety
of proto-linguistic, proto-doxastic (from the Greek doxa, "belief") capacities
that enable us to begin interpreting the tumult of the senses as regularities
in the environment and in ourselves. We do not learn a language
by memorizing a list of unrelated phrases, and we do not form a view of
the world by adopting a string of unconnected beliefs. For a discussion of
the systematicity of language, see J. A. Fodor and Z. W. Pylyshyn, "Systematicity
of Cognitive Representation," excerpt from "Connectionism
and Cognitive Architecture," in Connections and Symbols, ed. S. Pinker
and J. Mehler (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988). A belief must be knitted
together with other beliefs for it to be a belief about anything at all. (I
have left aside, for the moment, whether there exist beliefs that do not
rely upon any others to derive their meaning. Whether or not such
atomic beliefs exist, it is clear that most of our beliefs are not of this sort.)
The systematicity of logic seems guaranteed by the following fact: if
a given proposition is "true," any proposition (or chain of reasoning) that
contradicts it must be "false." Such a requirement seems to mirror the
disposition of objects in the world, and therefore places logical constraints
upon our behavior. If a statement like "The cookies are in the cupboard"
is believed, it will become a principle of action—which is to say that when
I desire cookies, I will seek them in the cupboard. In the face of such a
belief, a contradictory claim like "The cupboard is bare" will be seen as
hostile to my forming a behavioral plan. Confident cookie-seeking
behavior requires that my beliefs have a certain logical relationship.
S. Pinker, The Blank Slate (New York: Viking, 2002), p. 33.
There is a point of contact between my remarks here and the "mental
models" account of reasoning developed by P. N. Johnson-Laird and R.
M. J. Byrne, Deduction (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991), chaps. 5-6. I
would note, however, that our mental models of objects in the world
NOTES TO PAGE 59 249
behave as they do because objects do likewise. See L. Rips, "Deduction
and Cognition," in An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Thinking, ed. E. E.
Smith and D. N. Osherson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 297-343, for
doubts about whether a concept like AND could be learned at all.
17 Of course, we can think of examples where certain of our words run afoul
of ordinary logic. For instance, one cannot put the shadow of an apple
and the shadow of an orange in Jack's lunchbox, close the lid, and then
expect to retrieve one or the other at the end of the day.
18 Another property of belief follows directly from the nature of language:
just as there is no limit to the number of sentences a person can potentially
speak (language is often said to be "productive" in this sense), there
is no limit to the number of beliefs he can potentially form about the
world. Because I now believe that there is no owl in my closet, I also
believe that there are not two owls there, or three . . . ad infinitum.
19 Most neuroscientists believe that we have somewhere on the order of
1011-1012 neurons, each of which makes an average of 104 connections
with its neighbors. We therefore have something like 1015 or 1016 individual
synapses. It's a big number, but it's still finite.
20 Following N. Block, "The Mind as the Software of the Brain," in An Invitation
to Cognitive Science: Thinking, ed. E. E. Smith and D. N. Osherson
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 377-425.
21 D. J. Simons et al., "Evidence for Preserved Representations in Change
Blindness," Consciousness and Cognition 11, no. 1 (2002): 78-97; M.
Niemeier et al., "A Bayesian Approach to Change Blindness," Annals of
the New York Academy of Sciences 956 (2002): 474-75 [abstract].
22 R. Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Penguin, 1999).
23 Consider a mathematical belief like 2 + 2 = 4. Not only do most of us
believe this proposition; this belief seems to be antecedently true of us in
every present moment. We do not appear to construct it as the occasion
warrants, rather it is by virtue of such rudimentary beliefs that we construct
others. But what about a belief like 865762 + 2 = 865764? Most of
us will have never considered this sum before, and we will believe it only
by virtue of constructing it according to the laws of arithmetic. And yet,
doing so, we can cash it out just as we do the proposition 2 + 2 = 4. Is
there any difference between these two mathematical beliefs? In phenomenological
terms there surely is. You will notice, for instance, that
you cannot easily speak (or think) the longer sum, while two plus two
equals four comes to mind almost reflexively. As far as our basic epistemic
commitments are concerned, however, these beliefs are equally
2 5 0 NOTES TO PAGES 6 1 - 6 3
"true." In fact, all of us stake our lives on the validity of far more complicated
(and therefore less transparent) mathematical propositions every
time we board an airplane or cross a bridge. At bottom, most of us believe
that an operation like addition is truth preserving, in that it can be
repeated over and over, and with arbitrarily large values, and still yield a
true result. But the question remains, how can we know that our belief
that 2 + 2 = 4 isn't constructed anew each time we use it? How, in other
words, do we know that we believe it antecedently! If we are tempted to
say that this belief is always newly constructed, we must ask, constructed
with what! The rules of addition? It seems doubtful that a person could
know that he was successfully practicing addition unless he already
believed that 2 + 2 = 4. It seems just as certain, however, that you did not
wake up this morning believing that eight hundred and sixty-five thousand,
seven hundred and sixty-two, plus two, equals eight hundred and
sixty-five thousand, seven hundred and sixty-four. To really exist inside
your brain, this belief must be constructed, in the present moment, on
the basis of your prior belief that two plus two equals four. Clearly, many
beliefs are like this. We may not, in fact, believe most of what we believe
about the world until we say we do.
See D. T. Gilbert et al., "Unbelieving the Unbelievable: Some Problems in
the Rejection of False Information," journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 59 (1990): 601-13; D. T. Gilbert, "How Mental Systems
Believe," American Psychologist 46, no. 2 (1991): 107-19.
This explains why beliefs that are accidentally true do not constitute
knowledge, even when they are justified. As the philosopher Edmund
Gettier observed long ago, we may believe something to be true (e.g., I
may think the time is exactly 12:31 a.m.), we may believe it for good reasons
(I am currently looking at a clock that reads 12:31 a.m.), and our
belief may be true (it really is 12:31 a.m.), but we may not be in a state
of knowledge about the world (because, in the present instance, the clock
is broken and shows the correct time only by accident). While there are
many philosophical niceties to be explored here, the basic fact is that for
our beliefs to be truly representative of the world, they must stand in the
right relationship to the world.
Questions of epistemology seem to be stirring here: How, after all, is it
possible for us to have true knowledge of the world? Depending how
one interprets words like "true" and "world," questions of this sort can
seem either hopelessly difficult or trivial. As it turns out, a trivial reading
will be good enough for our present purposes. Whatever reality is,
NOTES TO PAGES 6 4 - 7 3 251
in ultimate terms, the world of our experience displays undeniable regularities.
These regularities are of various kinds, of course, and some of
them suggest lawful connections between certain events. There is a difference
between mere correlation, and juxtapositions of the sort that
we deem to be causal. As the Scottish philosopher David Hume
famously noted, this presents an interesting puzzle, because we never
encounter causes in the world, only reliable correlations. What, exactly,
leads us to attribute causal power to certain events, while withholding
it from others, is still a matter of debate. (See M. Wu and P. W. Cheng,
"Why Causation Need Not Follow from Statistical Association: Boundary
Conditions for the Evaluation of Generative and Preventative
Causal Powers," Psychological Science 10 [1999]: 92-97.) And yet, once
we have our beliefs about the world in hand, and they are guiding our
behavior, there seems to be no mystery worth worrying about. It just
so happens that certain regularities (those we deem to be causal), when
adopted as guides to action, serve our purposes admirably; others that
are equally regular (mere correlations, epiphenomena) do not. Surprises
here simply lead to a reevaluation of causal roles and to the formation
of new beliefs. We need not wrestle with Hume to know that if
it is heat we want, it is better to seek fire than smoke; nor need we know
all the criteria we employ in making causal judgments to appreciate the
logical and behavioral implications of believing that A is the cause of B,
while C is not. Once we find ourselves believing anything (whether for
good or bad reasons), our words and actions demand that we rectify
inconsistency wherever we find it.
27 See H. Benson, with M. Stark, Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology
of Belief (New York: Scribner, 1996).
28 The shroud of Turin has been perhaps the most widely venerated relic of
Christendom, for it is believed to be the very shroud in which the body
of Jesus was wrapped for burial. In 1988 the Vatican allowed small sections
of the shroud to be carbon-dated by three independent laboratories
(Oxford University, University of Arizona, and the Federal Institute of
Technology in Zurich) in a blind study coordinated by the British
Museum. All three institutions concluded that the shroud was a medieval
forgery dating from between 1260 and 1390.
29 O. Friedrich, The End of the World: A History (New York: Coward,
McCann & Geoghegan, 1982), 122-24.
30 The quoted passage is found in The Profession of Faith of the Roman
Catholic Church.
252 NOTES TO PAGES 7 4 - 8 1
31 This explicit belief has behavioral and neural underpinnings that are
implicit, and clearly a matter of our genetic inheritance. Lower animals,
it will be noted, are not in the habit of wandering off cliffs.
32 K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959; reprint, London:
Routledge, 1972), and Objective Knowledge (1972; reprint, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995).
33 T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; reprint, Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970).
34 Popper and Kuhn both had some very interesting and useful things to
say about the philosophy of science and about the problems we face in
claiming to know how the world is, but one effect of their work, particularly
on those who haven't read it, has been to engender the growth of
ridiculous ideas across the quad. While there are genuine problems of
epistemology to be thought about, there are gradations of reasonableness
that can be appreciated by any sane person. Not all knowledge claims are
on the same footing.
35 B. Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, ed. P. Edwards (New York: Simon
and Schuster 1957), 35.
36 J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), strikes the same note. See also A. N.
Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 2002).
3 In the Shadow of God
1 "As to squassation, it is thus performed: The prisoner hath his hands
bound behind his back, and weights tied to his feet, and then is drawn up
on high, till his head reaches the pulley. He is kept hanging in this manner
for some time, that by the greatness of the weight hanging at his feet,
all his joints and limbs may be dreadfully stretched, and on a sudden he
is let down with a jerk, by the slackening of the rope, but is kept from
coming quite to the ground, by which terrible shake, his arms and legs
are disjointed, whereby he is put to the most exquisite pain; the shock
which he receives by the sudden stop of his fall, and the weight at his feet
stretching his whole body more intensely and cruelly." John Marchant,
cited in J. Swain, The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber (New York:
Dorset Press, 1931), 169.
2 Ibid., 174-75,178.
NOTES TO PAGES 8 1 - 8 4 253
3 See Swain, Pleasures; O. Friedrich, The End of the World: A History
(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1982); and L. George,
Crimes of Perception: An Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics (New
York: Paragon House, 1995).
4 For explicit mention of heresy in the New Testament, and of the natural
intolerance of the faithful to dissent, see 1 Cor. 11:19; Gal. 5:20; 2 Pet. 2:1;
Rom. 16:17; 1 Cor. 1:10, 3:3, 14:33; Phil. 4:2; and Jude 19.
5 We need only recall the fate of William Tyndale, which came as late as
1536, after he published his translation of the New Testament in English:
Then, believing himself safe, he settled in Antwerp. However, he had
underestimated the gravity of his offense and the persistence of his
sovereign [Henry VIII, in a pious mood]. British agents had never
ceased stalking him. Now they arrested him. At Henry's insistence he
was imprisoned for sixteen months in the castle of Vilvorde, near
Brussels, tried for heresy, and, after his conviction, publicly garrotted.
His corpse was burned at the stake, an admonition for any who might
have been tempted by his folly.
See W. Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and
the Renaissance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), 204.
6 The Bible, however, demands that there be at least two witnesses attesting
that the accused has "served other gods," and that they be the first to
stone him (Deut. 17:6-7). The Inquisition was forced, for the sake of efficiency,
to relax this standard.
7 Matt. 5:18.
8 Friedrich, End of the World, 70.
9 The Franciscans, it is true, shouldered their share of the burden. As Russell
wrote in A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1945), 450:
If Satan existed, the future of the order founded by Saint Francis
would afford him the most exquisite gratification. The saint's immediate
successor as head of the order, Brother Elias, wallowed in luxury,
and allowed complete abandonment of poverty. The chief work of the
Franciscans in the years immediately following the death of their
founder was as recruiting sergeants in the bitter and bloody wars of
Guelfs and Ghibellines. The Inquisition, founded seven years after his
death, was, in several countries, chiefly conducted by Franciscans. A
small minority, called the Spirituals, remained true to his teaching;
2 5 4 NOTES TO PAGES 8 4 - 8 5
many of these were burnt by the Inquisition for heresy. These men
held that Christ and the Apostles owned no property, not even the
clothes they wore; this opinion was condemned as heretical in 1323 by
John XXII. The net result of Saint Francis' life was to create yet one
more wealthy and corrupt order, to strengthen the hierarchy, and to
facilitate the persecution of all who excelled in moral earnestness or
freedom of thought. In view of his own aims and character, it is impossible
to imagine any more bitterly ironical outcome.
10 Friedrich, End of the World, 74.
11 Ibid., 96.
12 Compare much of what Jesus taught with the above quotation from John
15:6, or with Matt. 10:34—"Think not that I am come to send peace on
earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." For a remarkably elegant
demonstration of the incoherency of the Bible, I recommend Burr's Selfcontradictions
of the Bible (1860). In it, Burr presents 144 propositions—
theological, moral, historical, and speculative—all neatly opposed by
their antitheses, in the following manner: God is seen and heard/God is
invisible and cannot be heard; God is everywhere present, sees and knows
all things/God is not everywhere present, neither sees nor knows all
things; God is the author of evil/God is not the author of evil; Adultery
forbidden/adultery allowed; The father of Joseph, Mary's husband, was
Jacob/The father of Mary's husband was Heli; The infant Christ
was taken into Egypt/The infant Christ was not taken into Egypt; John
was in prison when Jesus went into Galilee/John was not in prison when
Jesus went into Galilee; Jesus was crucified at the third hour/Jesus was
crucified at the sixth hour; Christ is equal with God/Christ is not equal
with God; It is impossible to fall from grace/It is possible to fall from
grace; etc.—all with supporting quotations from the Old and New Testaments.
Many of these passages represent perfect contradictions (that is,
one cannot affirm the truth of one without equally asserting the falsity
of the other). There is, perhaps, no greater evidence for the imperfection
of the Bible as an account of reality, divine or mundane, than such
instances of self-refutation. Of course, once faith has begun its reign of
folly, even perfect contradictions may be relished as heavenly rebukes to
earthly logic. Martin Luther closed the door on reason with a single line:
"The Holy Spirit has an eye only to substance and is not bound by words."
The Holy Spirit, it seems, is happy to play tennis without the net.
n It is true that Augustine was not a perfect sadist. He thought that
NOTES TO PAGES 8 5 - 8 9 255
heretics should be examined "not by stretching them on the rack, not by
scorching them with flames or furrowing their flesh with iron claws, but
by beating them with rods." See P. Johnson, A History of Christianity
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 116-17.
14 Voltaire, "Inquisition," Philosophical Dictionary, ed and trans. T. Besterman
(London: Penguin Books, 1972), 256.
15 From The Percy Anecdotes, cited in Swain, Pleasures, 181.
16 Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire, 190-93.
17 W. Durant, The Age of Faith (1950; reprint, Norwalk, Conn.: Easton
Press, 1992), 784.
18 The Christians, while they were still a lowly sect, had been accused of the
same crime by pagan Romans. There were, in fact, many points of convergence
between witches and Jews in the mind of medieval Christians.
Jews were regularly accused of sorcery, and magical texts were often
attributed (speciously) to Solomon and to a variety of kabbalistic sources.
19 R. Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of
European Witchcraft (New York: Viking, 1996), 8, has this to say on the
subject:
On the wilder shores of the feminist and witch-cult movements a
potent myth has become established, to the effect that 9 million
women were burned as witches in Europe; gendercide rather than
genocide. This is an overestimate by a factor of up to 200, for the most
reasonable modern estimates suggest perhaps 100,000 trials between
1450 and 1750, with something between 40,000 and 50,000 executions,
of which 20 to 25 per cent were men.
Such a revaluation of numbers does little to mitigate the horror and
injustice of this period. Even to read of the Salem witch trials, which
resulted in the hanging of "only" nineteen people, is to be brought face
to face with the seemingly boundless evil that is apt to fill the voids in
our understanding of the world.
20 C. Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of
Crowds (1841; reprint, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993), 529.
21 R. Rhodes, Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New
Plague (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 78.
22 There is some doubt as to whether the Fore, or any other people for that
matter, ever practiced systematic cannibalism (see the entry "cannibalism"
in The Oxford Companion to the Body). If these doubts are borne
out, an alternative explanation for the transmission of kuru would have
2 5 6 NOTES TO PAGES 9 0 - 9 5
to be found. But it should go without saying that its vector was not sorcery.
Scholarly doubts about cannibalism seem somewhat far-fetched,
however, given the widespread evidence of it among modern African
militias in countries like Congo, Uganda, Liberia, Angola, and elsewhere.
In such places, magical beliefs remain widespread—like the notion that
eating your enemy's organs can make you immune to bullets. See D.
Bergner, "The Most Unconventional Weapon," New York Times Magazine,
March 26, 2003, pp. 48-53.
23 Friedrich Spee (1631), cited in Johnson, History of Christianity, 311.
24 Mackay, Delusions, 540-41.
25 B. Russell, Religion and Science (1935; reprint, Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1997), 95.
26 Mackay, Delusions, 525-26.
27 "Anti-Semitism," like the term "Aryan," is a misnomer of nineteenthcentury
German pseudo-science. Semitic (derived from Shem, one of
Noah's three sons) "designated a group of cognate languages that
included Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Babylonian, Assyrian and Ethiopic,
not an ethnic or racial group." See R. S. Wistrich, Anti-Semitism: The
Longest Hatred (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), xvi. "Anti-Semitism"
should therefore denote a hatred of Arabs as well, which it does not.
Despite its mistaken roots, "anti-Semitism" has become the only acceptable
term for the hatred of Jews.
28 D. J. Wakin, "Anti-Semitic 'Elders of Zion' Gets New Life on Egypt TV,"
New York Times, Oct. 26, 2002. This spurious document is actually cited
in the founding covenant of Hamas. See J. I. Kertzer, "The Modern Use
of Ancient Lies," New York Times, May 9, 2002.
29 E. Goldberg, The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).
30 This said, Judaism is a far less fertile source of militant extremism. Jews
tend not to draw their identity as Jews exclusively from the contents of
their beliefs about God. It is possible, for instance, to be a practicing Jew
who does not believe in God. The same cannot be said for Christianity
and Islam.
31 See B. M. Metzger and M. D. Coogan, eds., The Oxford Companion to
the Bible (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 789-90, and A. N. Wilson,
Jesus: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 79. Many other uncouth
pairings have been pointed out: Matt. 2:3-5 and Micah 5:2; Matt. 2:16-18
and Jer. 31:15/Gen. 35:19; Matt. 8:18 and Isa. 53:4; Matt. 12:18 and Isa.
42:1-4; Matt. 13:35 and Ps. 78:2; Matt. 21:5k and Zech. 9:9/Isa. 62:11.
NOTES TO PAGES 9 5 - 9 7 257
Matt. 27:9-10 claims to fulfill a saying that it erroneously attributes to
Jeremiah, which actually appears in Zech. 11:12—providing further evidence
of the text's "inerrancy."
32 The stigma attached to illegitimacy among Jews in the first century CE
was considerable. See S. Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus (New
York: HarperCollins, 1991).
33 See ibid., 78, and J. Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries (New York:
Harper and Row, 1987), 80.
34 B. Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Baltimore: Penguin Books,
1966), sec. 189.
35 Nietzsche had it right when he wrote, "The most pitiful example: the
corruption of Pascal, who believed in the corruption of his reason
through original sin when it had in fact been corrupted only by his
Christianity" (The Portable Nietzsche, trans. W. Kaufmann [New York:
Viking, 1954], 572). It is true that Pascal had what was for him an astonishing
contemplative experience on the night of Nov. 23,1654—one that
converted him entirely to Jesus Christ. I do not doubt the power of such
experiences, but it seems to me self-evident that they are no more the
exclusive property of devout Christians than are tears shed in joy. Hindus,
Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, along with animists of every description
have had these experiences throughout history. Pascal, being highly
intelligent and greatly learned, should have known this; that he did not
(or chose to disregard it) testifies to the stultifying effect of orthodoxy.
36 They also avenged themselves against their Roman persecutors: "The
Christians threw Maximian's wife into the Orontes, and put to death all
his relatives. In Egypt and Palestine they massacred the magistrates who
had most strongly opposed Christianity. The widow and daughter of Diocletian,
having taken refuge in Thessalonica, were recognized, and their
bodies were thrown into the sea." Voltaire, "Christianity," Philosophical
Dictionary, 137.
37 Wistrich, Anti-Semitism, 19-20.
38 Augustine (The City of God, XVIII, 46):
Therefore, when they do not believe our Scriptures, their own, which
they blindly read, are fulfilled in them, lest perchance any one should
say that the Christians have forged these prophecies about Christ
which are quoted under the name of the sibyl, or of others, if such
there be, who do not belong to the Jewish people. For us, indeed, those
suffice which are quoted from the books of our enemies, to whom we
2 5 8 NOTES TO PAGES 99- 1 00
make our acknowledgment, on account of this testimony which, in
spite of themselves, they contribute by their possession of these
books, while they themselves are dispersed among all nations, wherever
the Church of Christ is spread abroad. For a prophecy about this
thing was sent before in the Psalms, which they also read, where it is
written, "My God, His mercy shall prevent me. My God hath shown
me concerning mine enemies, that Thou shalt not slay them, lest they
should at last forget Thy law: disperse them in Thy might" [Ps.
69:10-11]. Therefore God has shown the Church in her enemies the
Jews the grace of His compassion, since, as saith the apostle, "their
offense is the salvation of the Gentiles" [Rom. 11:11]. And therefore
He has not slain them, that is, He has not let the knowledge that they
are Jews be lost in them, although they have been conquered by the
Romans, lest they should forget the law of God, and their testimony
should be of no avail in this matter of which we treat. But it was not
enough that he should say, "Slay them not, lest they should at last
forget Thy law," unless he has also added, "Disperse them"; because if
they had only been in their own land with that testimony of the
Scriptures, and everywhere, certainly the Church which is everywhere
could not have had them as witnesses among all nations to the
prophecies which were sent before concerning Christ.
39 See J. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of
the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (1943; reprint,
Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 153.
40 Ibid., 140.
41 Ibid., 114. The Reformation, by undermining belief in the doctrine of
transubstantiation, seems to have rendered host desecration less of a concern.
Thus, it was during the schismatic sixteenth century that the persecution
of Jews as "sorcerers" came into its own.
42 The Egyptian paper Al Akhbar and the Saudi paper Al Riyadh have both
published articles purporting to verify the blood libel. The Syrian
defense minister Mustafa Tlas has written a book, The Matzoh of Zion,
charging the Jews with ritual murder. Nazi propaganda on the subject,
dating from the 1930s, now appears on Islamist websites. See Kertzer,
"Modern Use."
43 Cited in J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), 328.
44 Ibid., 360-61.
NOTES TO PAGES 101-103 259
45 D. J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and
the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 28-48.
46 Kertzer, "Modern Use."
47 It has grown fashionable to assert that the true horror of the Holocaust,
apart from its scale, was that it was an expression of reason, and
that it therefore demonstrates a pathology inherent to the Western
Enlightenment tradition. The truth of this assertion is held by many
scholars to be self-evident—for no one can deny that technology,
bureaucracy, and systematic managerial thinking made the genocidal
ambitions of the Third Reich possible. The romantic thesis lurking here
is that reason itself has a "shadow side" and is therefore no place to
turn for the safeguarding of human happiness. This is a terrible misunderstanding
of the situation, however. The Holocaust marked the culmination
of German tribalism and two thousand years of Christian
fulminating against the Jews. Reason had nothing to do with it. Put a
telescope in the hands of a chimpanzee, and if he bashes his neighbor
over the head with it, reason's "shadow side" will have been equally
revealed. (K. Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality [Boston: Shambhala,
1995], 663-64, makes the same point.)
48 M. Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the
Second World War (New York: Henry Holt, 1985), 22.
49 Ibid.
50 Quoted in G. Wills, "Before the Holocaust," New York Times Book
Review, Sept. 23, 2001.
51 Quoted in Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, 106. Of course,
Church-mandated anti-Semitism was not confined to Germany. Consider
the statement of the Roman Catholic primate of Poland, August
Cardinal Hlond, in a 1936 pastoral letter: "There will be the Jewish problem
as long as the Jews remain. It is a fact the Jews are fighting against
the Catholic Church, persisting in free thinking, and are the vanguard of
godlessness, Bolshevism, and subversion. . . . It is a fact that the Jews
deceive, levy interest, and are pimps. It is a fact that the religious and ethical
influence of the Jewish young people on the Polish young people is a
negative one." As J. Carroll, "The Silence," New Yorker, April 7, 1997,
points out, "Hlond's letter was careful to say that these 'facts' did not justify
the murder of Jews, but it is hard to see how such anti-Semitism on
the part of the leading Catholic in Poland was unconnected with what followed.
Over the decades and centuries of this millennium such sentiments
expressed by Christian leaders were not unusual."
260 NOTES TO PAGES 103-109
52 G. Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1964), 282, quoted in Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, n o .
53 Cited in L. George, Crimes of Perception: An Encyclopedia of Heresies
and Heretics (New York: Paragon House, 1995), 211.
54 Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1994), 10. This book really is a breathtaking piece of sophistry,
evasion, and narrow-mindedness. It demonstrates my thesis in almost
every line, erudite references to Wittgenstein, Feuerbach, and Ricoeur
notwithstanding.
55 M. Aarons and J. Loftus, Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the
Swiss Banks, rev. ed. (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998); G. Sereny, Into
That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Vintage, 1974).
56 See Sereny, Into That Darkness, 318.
57 See, e.g., Glover, Humanity, chap. 40.
4 The Problem with Islam
1 As we saw in chapter 2, this is a direct consequence of what it means—
logically, psychologically, and behaviorally—to believe that our beliefs
actually represent the way the world is. The moment you believe that
religious (or spiritual, or ethical) propositions say anything at all of substance,
you will be obliged to admit that they can be more or less accurate,
comprehensive, or useful. Hierarchies of this sort are built into the
very structure the world. We will take a closer look at ethics in chapter 6.
2 R. A. Pape, "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," American Political
Science Review 97, no. 3 (2003): 20-32, has argued that suicidal terrorism
is best understood as a strategic means to achieve certain
well-defined nationalist goals and should not be considered a consequence
of religious ideology. In support of this thesis, he recounts the
manner in which Hamas and Islamic Jihad have systematically used suicide
bombings to extract concessions from the Israeli government. Pape
argues that had these organizations been merely "irrational" or
"fanatic," we would not expect to see such a calculated use of violence.
Their motivation must be, therefore, primarily nationalistic. Like most
commentators on this infernal wastage of human life, Pape seems unable
to imagine what it would be like to actually believe what millions of
Muslims profess to believe. The fact that terrorist groups have demonstrable,
short-term goals does not in the least suggest that they are not
NOTES TO PAGES 111-115 261
primarily motivated by their religious dogmas. Pape claims that "the
most important goal that a community can have is the independence of
its homeland (population, property, and way of life) from foreign influence
or control." But he overlooks the fact that these communities define
themselves in religious terms. Pape's analysis is particularly inapposite
with respect to Al Qaeda. To attribute "territorial" and "nationalistic"
motives to Osama bin Laden seems almost willfully obscurantist, since
Osama's only apparent concerns are the spread of Islam and the sanctity
of Muslim holy sites. Suicide bombing, in the Muslim world at least, is
an explicitly religious phenomenon that is inextricable from notions of
martyrdom and jihad, predictable on their basis, and sanctified by their
logic. It is no more secular an activity than prayer is.
3 B. Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York:
Modern Library, 2003), 32.
4 M. Ruthven, Islam in the World, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
2000), 7.
5 Some of these hadiths are cited in Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 32. Others are
drawn from an Internet database: www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/reference/
searchhadith.html.
6 Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 55.
7 "Idolatry is worse than carnage" (Koran 2:190). The rule of the Mogul
emperor Akbar (1556-1605) offers an exception here, but it is merely
that Akbar's tolerance of Hinduism was a frank violation of Islamic law.
8 F. Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and
Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 126.
9 See A. Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2003),
61.
10 These facts and dates are drawn from R. S. Wistrich, Anti-Semitism: The
Longest Hatred (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), and Dershowitz,
Case for Israel.
11 L. Binder, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), 129.
12 A. Cowell, "Zeal for Suicide Bombing Reaches British Midland," New
York Times, May 2, 2003. Consider the case of England: British Muslims
have been found fighting with the Taliban, plotting terror attacks in
Yemen, attempting to blow up airplanes, and kidnapping and killing
Western journalists in Pakistan. Recently, two British citizens volunteered
for suicide missions in Israel (one succeeded, one failed).
Terrorist Hunter (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), whose anonymous
262 NOTES TO PAGES 1 1 5 - 1 2 3
author has gone undercover to tape the proceedings at Muslim conferences
in the United States, depicts a shocking level of intolerance among
Muslims living in the West. The author reports that at one conference,
held at the Ramada Plaza hotel in suburban Chicago, Arab American children
performed skits in which they killed Jews and became martyrs.
Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and Palestine
(appointed by Yasir Arafat), recently announced, "The Jews do not dare
to bother me, because they are the most cowardly creatures Allah has
ever created. . . . We tell them: In as much as you love life, the Muslim
loves death and martyrdom" (ibid., 134). Sabri, who regularly calls for
the destruction of America and all infidel nations, and encourages child
suicide bombers ("The younger the martyr, the more I respect him"—
ibid., 132), spoke these words not in a mosque on the West Bank but at
the Twenty-sixth Annual Convention of the Islamic Circle of North
America, in Cleveland, Ohio.
13 Lewis, Crisis of Islam, xxviii.
14 Ruthven, Islam in the World, 137.
15 Yosuf Islam, in his wisdom, had this to say in a written response to those
who were shocked by his apparent endorsement of Khomeini's fatwa:
Under Islamic Law, the ruling regarding blasphemy is quite clear; the
person found guilty of it must be put to death. Only under certain circumstances
can repentance be accepted.... The fact is that as far as the
application of Islamic Law and the implementation of full Islamic way
of life in Britain is concerned, Muslims realize that there is very little
chance of that happening in the near future. But that shouldn't stop
us from trying to improve the situation and presenting the Islamic
viewpoint wherever and whenever possible. That is the duty of every
Muslim and that is what I did.
(See catstevens.com/articles/00013). If even a Western educated exhippie
was talking this way, what do you think the sentiments were on
the streets of Tehran?
16 K. H. Pollack, "The Crisis of Islam': Faith and Terrorism in the Muslim
World," New York Times Book Review, April 6, 2003.
17 As Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) wrote, "I must say, it is as toilsome reading
as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite;
endless iterations, longwindedness, entanglement . . . insupportable stupidity,
in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European
through the Koran!" Cited in Ruthven, Islam in the World, 81-82.
NOTES TO PAGES 1 2 3 - 1 3 3 263
Cited in P. Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton,
2003), 68.
www.people-press.org.
Christopher Luxenberg (this is a pseudonym), a scholar of ancient
Semitic languages, has recently argued that a mistranslation is responsible
for furnishing the Muslim paradise with "virgins" (Arabic hur,
transliterated as "houris"—literally "white ones"). It seems that the passages
describing paradise in the Koran were drawn from earlier Christian
texts that make frequent use of the Aramaic word hur, meaning "white
raisins." White raisins, it seems, were a great delicacy in the ancient
world. Imagine the look on a young martyr's face when, finding himself
in a paradise teeming with his fellow thugs, his seventy houris arrive as
a fistful of raisins. See A. Stille, "Scholars Are Quietly Offering New
Theories of the Koran," New York Times, March 2, 2002.
S. P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
E. W. Said, "The Clash of Ignorance," Nation, Oct. 4, 2001.
E. W. Said, "Suicidal Ignorance," CounterPunch, Nov. 18, 2001.
For an alarming look at the rising political influence of Christianity in
the developing world, see P. Jenkins, "The Next Christianity," Atlantic
Monthly, Oct. 2002, pp. 53-68.
1 From the United Nations' Arab Human Development Report 2002, cited
in Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 115-17.
' See R. D. Kaplan, "The Lawless Frontier," Atlantic Monthly, March
2000, pp. 66-80.
' S. Atran, "Opinion: Who Wants to Be a Martyr?" New York Times, May
5, 2003. Atran also reports that a Pakistani relief worker interviewed
nearly 250 aspiring Palestinian suicide bombers and their recruiters and
concluded, "None were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded or
depressed. . . . They all seemed to be entirely normal members of their
families." He also cites a 2001 poll conducted by the Palestinian Center
for Policy and Survey Research indicating "that Palestinian adults with
12 years or more of education are far more likely to support bomb attacks
than those who cannot read."
1 B. Hoffman, "The Logic of Suicide Terrorism," Atlantic Monthly, June
2003, pp. 40-47.
' Indeed, this may be happening in Iran. Having truly achieved a Muslim
theocracy, the Iranian people now have few illusions that their problems
are the result of their insufficient conformity to Islam.
2 6 4 NOTES TO PAGES 1 3 4 - 1 3 7
30 Zakaria, future of Freedom, cites a CNN poll (Feb. 2002) conducted
across nine Muslim countries. Some 61 percent of those polled said they
do not believe that Arabs were responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. No
doubt the 39 percent who thought otherwise represent millions who wish
the Arab world would take credit for a job well done.
31 It would be impossible to do justice to the richness of the Muslim imagination
in the context of this book. To take only one preposterous example:
it seems that many Iraqis believe that the widespread looting that
occurred after the fall of Saddam's regime was orchestrated by Americans
and Israelis, as part of a Zionist plot. The attacks upon American soldiers
were carried out by CIA agents "as part of a covert operation to justify
prolonging the U.S. military occupation." Wow! See J. L. Anderson,
"Iraq's Bloody Summer," New Yorker, Aug. 11, 2003, pp. 43-55.
32 Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 153.
33 Also see M. B. Zuckerman, "Graffiti on History's Walls," U.S. News and
World Report, Nov. 3, 2003, for an account of anti-Semitism in the mainstream
European press.
34 Dershowitz, Case for Israel, 2.
35 This miraculous ascension (mi'raj) is fully described only in the hadith,
though it may be alluded to in the Koran (17:1). The likening of the
Israelis to the Nazis is especially egregious, given that the Palestinians
distinguished themselves as Nazi collaborators during the war years.
Their calculated attacks upon Jews in the 1930s and 1940s led to the
deaths of hundreds of the thousands of European Jews who would otherwise
have been permitted to immigrate by the British. This result does
not appear to have been inadvertent. Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the grand
mufti of Jerusalem and the leader of the Palestinians throughout the war
years, served as an adviser to the Nazis on the Jewish question, was given
a personal tour of Auschwitz by Heinrich Himmler, and aspired to open
his own death camp for the Jews in Palestine once the Germans had won
the war. These activities were well publicized and merely increased his
popularity in the Arab world when, as a war criminal sought by the
Allies, he was given asylum in Egypt. As recently as 2002, Yasser Arafat,
the head of the Palestinian Authority, referred to Husseini as a "hero."
See Dershowitz, Case for Israel, 56.
36 Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 183.
37 Ibid., 206-7.
38 See ibid., 108: "Khomeini whipped up a religious fervor for that kind of
mass death—a belief that to die on Khomeini's orders in a human wave
NOTES TO PAGES I 3 8 - I 5 I 265
attack was to achieve the highest and most beautiful of destinies. All over
Iran young men, encouraged by their mothers and their families, yearned
to participate in those human wave attacks—actively yearned for martyrdom.
It was a mass movement for suicide. The war was one of the
most macabre events that has ever occurred. . . ."
39 Ibid.
40 J. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. C. Turner (New York: Verso,
2002).
41 It may seem strange to encounter phrases like "our enemies," uttered
without apparent self-consciousness, and it is strange for me to write
them. But there is no doubt that enemies are what we have (and I leave
it for the reader to draw the boundaries of "we" as broadly or narrowly
as he or she likes). The liberal fallacy that I will attempt to unravel in the
present section is the notion that we made these enemies and that we are,
therefore, their "moral equivalent." We are not. An analysis of their religious
ideology reveals that we are confronted by people who would have
put us to sword, had they had the power, long before the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization were
even a gleam in the eye of the first rapacious globalizes
42 N. Chomsky, 9-11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), 119.
43 P. Unger, Living High & Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1996).
44 A. Roy, War Talk (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2003), 84-85.
45 J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), 58.
46 Ibid., 62.
47 Are intentions really the bottom line? What are we to say, for instance,
about those Christian missionaries in the New World who baptized
Indian infants only to promptly kill them, thereby sending them to
heaven? Their intentions were (apparently) good. Were their actions ethical?
Yes, within the confines of a deplorably limited worldview. The
medieval apothecary who gave his patients quicksilver really was trying
to help. He was just mistaken about the role this element played in the
human body. Intentions matter, but they are not all that matters.
48 Zakaria, Future of Freedom, 138.
49 Ibid., 143.
50 Ibid., 123.
51 Ibid., 150.
52 Robert Kaplan, "Supremacy by Stealth," Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 2003, pp.
266 NOTES TO PAGES 1 5 1 - 1 5 5
65-83, has made a strong case that interventions of this sort should be
almost entirely covert and will, for the foreseeable future, be the responsibility
of the United States to carry out.
53 Glover, Humanity, 140.
54 M. Rees, Our Final Hour (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 42.
5 West of Eden
1 "At a 1971 dinner, Reagan told California legislator James Mills that
'everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the Second
Coming of Christ.' The President has permitted Jerry Falwell to attend
National Security Council briefings and author and Armageddon-advocate
Hal Lindsey to give a talk on nuclear war with Russia to top Pentagon
strategists." Cited in E. Johnson, "Grace Halsell's Prophecy and
Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War," Journal of
Historical Review 7, no. 4 (Winter 1986).
2 See G. Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for
the Temple Mount (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), for a lengthy analysis.
3 Ibid., p. 80.
4 "Justic Roy Moore's Lawless Battle," editorial to New York Times, Dec.
17, 2002.
5 Frank Rich, "Religion for Dummies," New York Times, April 23, 2002.
6 www.gallup.com.
7 Rich, "Religion." See also F. Clarkson, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle
between Theocracy and Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage
Press, 1997).
8 E. Bumiller, "Evangelicals Sway White House on Human Rights Issues
Abroad," New York Times, Oct. 26, 2003.
9 C. Mooney, "W.'s Christian Nation," American Prospect, June 1, 2003.
Also see the website for Americans United for Separation of Church and
State (www.au.org).
10 One of the concerns with giving federal funds to religious organizations
is that these organizations are not bound by the same equal employment
opportunity regulations that apply to the rest of the nonprofit world.
Church groups can ban homosexuals, people who have divorced and
remarried, those who have married interracially, etc., and still receive
federal funds. They can also find creative ways to use these funds to proselytize.
Granting such funds in the first place puts the federal governNOTES
TO PAGES 1 5 5 - 1 6 1 267
ment in the position of deciding what is, and what isn't, a genuine
religion—a responsibility that seems fraught with problems of its own.
11 M. Dowd, "Tribulation Worketh Patience," New York Times, April 9, 2003.
12 W. M. Arkin, "The Pentagon Unleashes a Holy Warrior," Los Angeles
Times, Oct. 16, 2003.
13 J. Hendren, "Religious Groups Want Outspoken General Punished,"Los
Angeles Times, Oct. 17, 2003.
14 G. H. Gallup Jr., Religion in America 1996 (Princeton: Princeton Religion
Research Center, 1996).
15 Paul Krugman, "Gotta Have Faith," New York Times, April 27, 2002.
16 A. Scalia, "God's Justice and Ours," First Things, May 2002, pp. 17-21.
17 www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr030519.asp.
18 Mooney, "W.'s Christian Nation."
19 See Scalia's dissent to Daryl Renard Atkins, Petitioner, v. Virginia, on
writ of certiorari to the supreme court of Virginia, June 20, 2002.
20 See Scalia's dissent to John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner, Petitioners
v. Texas, on writ of certiorari to the court of appeals of Texas, fourteenth
district, June 26, 2003.
21 Ted Bundy claimed, on the eve of his execution, that violent pornography
had inscribed certain terrible ideas indelibly into his head. See R.
Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), for a discussion of this.
22 There is a distinction between public and private freedoms that I have
glossed over here. Clearly, there are innumerable behaviors that are
blameless in private that we ban in most public spaces, simply because
they pose a nuisance to others. Cooking food on a public sidewalk, cutting
one's hair on a commercial aircraft, or taking one's pet snake to the
movies are among the countless examples of private freedoms that do not
translate into public virtues.
23 Happily, the ruling by the Supreme Court in Lawrence and Garner
v. Texas seems to have rendered these laws unconditional (see
www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/06/26/scotus.sodomy).
24 Viewing the drug problem from the perspective of health care is instructive:
our laws against providing addicts with clean needles have increased
the spread of AIDS, hepatitis C, and other blood-borne diseases. Since the
purity and dosage of illegal drugs remains a matter of guesswork for the
user, the rates of poisoning and overdose from drug use are unnecessarily
high (as they were for alcohol during Prohibition). Perversely, the criminal
prohibition of drugs has actually made it easier for minors to get
268 NOTES TO PAGES l 6 l - l 6 2
them, because the market for them has been driven underground. The
laws limiting the medical use of opiate painkillers do little more than keep
the terminally ill suffering unnecessarily during their last months of life.
25 L. Carroll, "Fetal Brains Suffer Badly from the Effects of Alcohol," New
York Times, Nov. 4, 2003.
26 www.drugwarfacts.com.
27 www.rand.org/publications/RB/RB6010/.
28 These events are described in E. Schlosser, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs,
and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 2003).
29 Some 51 percent of all violent offenders are released from jail after serving
two years or less, and 76 percent were released after serving four
years or less (www.lp.org). At the federal level, the average sentence for
a drug offense in the U.S. is 6¼ years (from the Office of National Drug
Control Policy [ONDCP] Drug Data Summary, www.whitehousedrugpolicy.
gov).
30 And yet, this mountain of imponderables reaches higher still. In many
states, a person who has been merely accused of a drug crime can have
his property seized, and those who informed against him can be rewarded
with up to 25 percent of its value. The rest of these spoils go to police
departments, which now rely upon such property seizures to meet their
budgets. This is precisely the arrangement of incentives that led to this
sort of corruption during the Inquisition (if one can even speak of such a
process being "corrupted"). Like the heretic, the accused drug offender
has no hope but to trade information for a reduced sentence. The person
who can't (or won't) implicate others inevitably faces punishments of
fantastical severity. Information has grown so valuable, in fact, that a
black market for it has emerged. Defendants who have no information to
trade can actually buy drug leads from professional informers (and they
do not come cheap). The net result of all this is that police departments
have learned to target property rather than crime. Property can be seized
and forfeited even if a defendant is ultimately found innocent of any
criminal offense. One national survey found that 80 percent of property
seizures occur without any criminal prosecution whatsoever (www.drug
warfacts.com). Under these enlightened laws, couples in their eighties
have permanently lost their homes because a grandchild was caught with
marijuana. For more facts of this sort see Schlosser, Reefer Madness.
The war on drugs has clearly done much to erode our civil liberties. In
particular, the standards for search and seizure, pretrial release, and judiNOTES
TO PAGES 1 6 2 - 1 6 3 269
cial discretion in sentencing have all been revised in an attempt to make
this unwinnable war easier to prosecute. Since drug offenses are covered
by local, state, and federal jurisdictions, people can be tried multiple times
for the same crime—some have been found not guilty at one level, only
to receive life sentences upon subsequent prosecution. On more than one
occasion, members of Congress have introduced legislation seeking to
apply the death penalty to anyone caught selling drugs. Unsurprisingly,
our attempts to eradicate the supply of drugs in other countries have
been even more detrimental to the liberties of others. In Latin America,
we have become a tireless benefactor of human rights violators. (See, for
example, the Human Rights Watch website: www.hrw.org.)
In environmental terms, the war on drugs has been no more auspicious.
The aerial spraying of herbicides has hastened the destruction of
the rainforest as well as contaminated water supplies, staple crops, and
people. The U.S. government has recently sought approval to use a genetically
engineered "killer fungus," designed to attack marijuana crops
domestically and coca and opium plants abroad. For the moment, some
rather obvious environmental concerns have prevented its use. (See
www.lindesmith.org.)
31 From the ONDCP Drug Data Summary (March 2003). The war on drugs
has also become a great engine of racial inequity, for while blacks constitute
only 12 percent of the U.S. population and 13 percent of U.S. drug
users, 38 percent of those arrested and 59 percent of those convicted for
drug crimes are black. Our drug laws have contributed to the epidemic of
fatherlessness in the black community, and this—along with the profits
and resultant criminality of the drug trade—has devastated our inner
cities. (See www.drugwarfacts.com.)
32 Ibid.
33 M. S. Gazzaniga, "Legalizing Drugs: Just Say Yes," National Review, July
10,1995, pp. 26-37, makes a similar estimate. Needless to say, the cost has
only grown with time.
34 W. F. Buckley Jr., "The War on Drugs Is Lost," National Review, Feb. 12,
1996.
35 www.lindesmith.org.
36 when was the last time someone was killed over an alcohol or tobacco
deal gone awry? We can be confident that the same normalcy would be
achieved if drugs were regulated by the government. At the inception of
the modern "war on drugs," the economist Milton Friedman observed
that "legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime
270 NOTES TO PAGE 1 64
and raise the quality of law enforcement." He then invited the reader to
"conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote
law and order" (Friedman, "Prohibition and Drugs," Newsweek,
May 1, 1972). What was true then remains true after three decades of
pious misrule; the criminality associated with the drug trade is the
inescapable consequence of our drug laws themselves.
37 According to the U.S. government, twelve of the twenty-eight groups
that have been officially classed as terrorist organizations finance their
activities, in whole or in part, by the drug trade. (See www.theantidrug.
com/drugs_terror/terrorgroups.html.)
38 S. Weinberg, "What Price Glory," New York Review of Books, Nov. 6,
2003, pp. 55-60.
39 All of this folly persists, even though the legalized and regulated sale of
drugs would most effectively keep them out of the hands of minors
(when was the last time someone was caught selling vodka in a schoolyard?),
eradicate organized crime, reduce the annual cost of law enforcement
by tens of billions of dollars, raise billions more in new sales taxes,
and free hundreds of thousands of police officers for the job of fighting
violent crime and terrorism. Against these remarkable benefits stands the
fear that the legalization of drugs would lead to an epidemic of drug
abuse and addiction. Common sense, as well as comparisons between the
United States and places like Holland, reveals this fear to be unfounded.
As more than 100 million of the estimated 108 million Americans who
have used illegal drugs can attest, addiction is a phenomenon distinct
from mere use, and users merely require good information to keep from
becoming addicts. Addicts require treatment, of course—for which there
are at present insufficient funds.
This is not to deny that a small percentage of people who use drugs
(both legal and illegal) have their lives powerfully disrupted by them. We
generally think of this problem as having two stages of severity: "abuse"
and "addiction." It remains true, however, that most people who use
drugs do not abuse them, and many illegal drugs do not readily become
sources of addiction even in the hands of abusers (marijuana, LSD, psilocybin,
mescaline, etc.). To say that a drug is addictive is to say that people
develop both tolerance to it (and therefore require progressively
higher doses to achieve the same effect) and withdrawal symptoms upon
stoppage. It is not hard to see why well-intentioned people would worry
that others might become inadvertent slaves of such biochemistry. While
opium and its derivatives (like heroin and morphine) are the classic
NOTES TO PAGES 1 6 5 - 1 6 8 271
examples of drugs of this sort, nicotine and alcohol can fall into this category
as well (depending on usage). Given our laws, however, all users of
illicit drugs—whether dysfunctional or not, addicted or not—are considered
criminals and subject to arrest, imprisonment, property seizure, and
other punishments by the state.
Our drug policy has created arbitrary and illusory distinctions
between biologically active substances, while obscuring valid ones. No
one doubts that the use of certain drugs can destroy the lives of certain
people. But the same can be said of almost any commodity. People
destroy their lives and the lives of their dependents by simply overeating.
In 2003 the Centers for Disease Control declared obesity to be the
greatest public health problem in the United States, and yet few of us
imagine that new criminal laws should be written to control the use of
cheeseburgers. Where drugs are a problem, they are a problem whose
remedy is better education and better health care, not incarceration. Simply
observe the people in public life who are incapable of having a rational
discussion on these matters (start with John Ashcroft and work your
way down), and you will find that religious faith does much to inform
their view of the world.
40 See, e.g., D. Kahneman and A. Tversky, "On the Reality of Cognitive Illusions,"
Psychological Review 103 (1996): 582-91.
41 "Misguided Faith on AIDS" (editorial), New York Times, Oct. 15, 2003.
42 N. Kristof, "When Prudery Kills," New York Times, Oct. 8, 2003.
43 Ibid.
44 Kristof also misinterprets Einstein's famous statement "Science without
religion is lame; religion without science is blind," suggesting that Einstein
was voicing respect for religious credulity. Science without religion
is lame, merely because "science can only be created by those who are
thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding.
This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion."
Whereas religion without science is blind because religion has no access
to the truth—it was, to Einstein's mind, nothing other than this "source
of feeling," this striving for something greater that cannot itself be scientifically
justified. Faith, therefore, is hunger only; while reason is its food.
Einstein seemed to consider faith nothing more than a eunuch left to
guard the harem while the intellect was away solving the problems of the
world. By pretending that it could proceed without any epistemic aspirations
whatsoever, Einstein robbed religion of the truth of its doctrine. In
so doing, he also relieved it of its capacity to err. This is not the faith that
272 NOTES TO PAGES 1 7 0 - 1 7 3
evangelicals, or any other religious believers, have ever practiced. See
Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Wings Books, 1954), 41-49.
6 A Science of Good and Evil
1 N. Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 543.
2 This linkage between happiness and ethics is not a mere endorsement of
utilitarianism. There may be ethical questions that escape a utilitarian
analysis, but they will be questions of ethics, or so I will argue, only to
the degree that anyone is in a position to suffer on account of them. I
have elected to bypass the categories of moral theory that usually frame
any discussion of ethics—utilitarianism (or consequentialism) and deontology
being the most common. I do not believe that these categories are
as conceptually distinct, or as useful, as their omnipresence in the literature
suggests.
3 One could argue that these behaviors do "victimize" others in more subtle
ways. If a compelling argument of this sort exists, I am not aware of
it. There is undoubtedly something to say about the relationship between
such behavior and one's own happiness, but this becomes a matter of
ethics only when the happiness of others is also at stake.
4 See M. D. Hauser, "Swappable Minds," in The Next Fifty Years, ed. J.
Brockman (New York: Vintage, 2002).
5 B. Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, ed. P. Edwards (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1957), vi.
6 This observation formed the central strand of Carl Jung's famous study
of Job, Answer to Job, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1958).
7 The belief that human beings are endowed with freedom of will underwrites
both our religious conception of "sin" and our judicial ideal of
"retributive justice." This makes free will a problem of more than passing
philosophical interest. Without freedom of will, sinners would just be
poorly calibrated clockwork, and any notion of justice that emphasized
their punishment (rather than their rehabilitation or mere containment)
would seem deeply incongruous. Happily, we will find that we need no
illusions about a person's place in the causal order to hold him accountable
for his actions, or to take action ourselves. We can find secure foundations
for ethics and the rule of law without succumbing to any obvious
cognitive illusions.
NOTE TO PAGE 1 7 3 273
Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less) in that it cannot
even be rendered coherent conceptually, since no one has ever described
a manner in which mental and physical events could arise that would
attest to its existence. Surely, most illusions are made of sterner stuff
than this. If, for instance, a man believes that his dental fillings are receiving
radio broadcasts, or that his sister has been replaced by an alien who
looks exactly like her, we would have no difficulty specifying what would
have to be true of the world for his beliefs to be, likewise, true. Strangely,
our notion of "free of will" achieves no such intelligibility. As a concept,
it simply has no descriptive, or even logical, moorings. Like some perverse,
malodorous rose, however we might attempt to enjoy its beauty up
close, it offers up its own contradiction.
The idea of free will is an ancient artifact of philosophy, of course, as
well as a subject of occasional, if guilty, interest among scientists—e.g.,
M. Planck, Where Is Science Going? trans, and ed. J. Murphy (1933;
reprint, Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1981); B. Libet, "Do We Have
Free Will?" Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, nos. 8-9 (1999): 47-57;
S. A. Spence and C. D. Frith, "Towards a Functional Anatomy of Volition,"
ibid., 11-29; A. L. Roskies, "Yes, But Am I free?" Nature Neuroscience
4 (2001): 1161; and D. M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). It has long been obvious, however, that
any description of the will in terms of causes and effects sets us sliding
toward a moral and logical crevasse, for either our wills are determined
by prior causes, and we are not responsible for them, or they are the
product of chance, and we are not responsible for them. The notion of
free will seems particularly suspect once we begin thinking about the
brain. If a man's "choice" to shoot the president is determined by a certain
pattern of neural activity, and this neural activity is in turn the product
of prior causes—perhaps an unfortunate coincidence of an unhappy
childhood, bad genes, and cosmic-ray bombardment—what can it possibly
mean to say that his will is "free"? Despite the clever exertions of
many philosophers who have sought to render free will "compatible"
with both deterministic and indeterministic accounts of mind and brain,
the project appears to be hopeless. The endurance of free will, as a problem
in need of analysis, is attributable to the fact that most of us feel that
we freely author our own actions and acts of attention (however difficult
it may be to make sense of this notion in logical or scientific terms). It is
safe to say that no one was ever moved to entertain the existence of free
will because it holds great promise as an abstract idea.
274 NOTE TO PAGE 174
In physical terms, every action is clearly reducible to a totality of
impersonal events merely propagating their influence: genes are transcribed,
neurotransmitters bind to their receptors, muscle fibers contract,
and John Doe pulls the trigger on his gun. For our commonsense notions
of agency to hold, our actions cannot be merely lawful products of our
biology, our conditioning, or anything else that might lead others to predict
them—and yet, were our actions to be actually divorced from such a
causal network, they would be precisely those for which we could claim
no responsibility. It has been fashionable, for several decades now, to speculate
about the manner in which the indeterminacy of quantum processes,
at the level of the neuron or its constituents, could yield a form of mental
life that might stand free of the causal order; but such speculation is
entirely oblique to the matter at hand—for an indeterminate world, governed
by chance or quantum probabilities, would grant no more autonomy
to human agents than would the incessant drawing of lots. In the face
of any real independence from prior causes, every gesture would seem to
merit the statement "I don't know what came over me." Upon the horns
of this dilemma, fanciers of free will can often be heard making shrewd
use of philosophical language, in an attempt to render our intuitions about
a person's moral responsibility immune to worries about causation. (See
Ayer, Chisholm, Strawson, Frankfurt, Dennett, and Watson—all in G.
Watson, ed., Free Will [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982].) Although we
can find no room for it in the causal order, the notion of free will is still
accorded a remarkable deference in philosophical and scientific literature,
even by scientists who believe that the mind is entirely dependent upon
the workings of the brain.
What most people overlook is that free will does not even correspond
to any subjective fact about us. Consequently, even rigorous introspection
soon grows as hostile to the idea of free will as the equations of
physics have, because apparent acts of volition merely arise, spontaneously
(whether caused, uncaused, or probabilistically inclined, it makes
no difference), and cannot be traced to a point of origin in the stream of
consciousness. A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny and the reader
might observe that he no more authors the next thought he thinks than
the next thought I write.
We may have the ethical obligation to preserve certain rocks for future
generations, but this is an obligation we would have with respect to other
people, not with respect to the rocks themselves. The equation of a creature's
being conscious with there being "something that it is like to be"
NOTES TO PAGES I 7 4 - I 7 5 275
said creature comes from T. Nagel, "What Is It like to Be a Bat," in Mortal
Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979).
9 That is, they felt no pain, in the phenomenal sense; even Descartes could
see that animals avoided certain stimuli—he just didn't think that there
was "something that it was like" for them to do so. His error here is based
on a kernel of truth: it is conceivable that something could seem to be
conscious without being conscious (i.e., passing the Turing test says
nothing about whether or not a physical system actually is conscious; it
just leaves us feeling, from the outside, that it probably is). Behaviorism
amounts to the doctrine that seeming to be conscious is all there is to
being conscious. If even a kernel of truth is to be found lurking here, I
have yet to find it.
10 Cited in J. M. Masson and S. McCarthy, When Elephants Weep: The
Emotional Lives of Animals (New York: Delacorte Press, 1995), 18.
11 The stakes here should be obvious. What is it like to be a chimpanzee?
If we knew more about the details of chimpanzee experience, even our
most conservative use of them in research might begin to seem unconscionably
cruel. Were it possible to trade places with one of these creatures,
we might no longer think it ethical to so much as separate a pair
of chimpanzee siblings, let alone perform invasive procedures on their
bodies for curiosity's sake. It is important to reiterate that there are
surely facts of the matter to be found here, whether or not we ever
devise methods sufficient to find them. Do pigs led to slaughter feel
something akin to terror? Do they feel a terror that no decent man or
woman would ever knowingly impose upon another sentient creature?
We have, at present, no idea at all. What we do know (or should) is that
an answer to this question could have profound implications, given our
current practices.
All of this is to say that our sense of compassion and ethical responsibility
tracks our sense of a creature's likely phenomenology. Compassion,
after all, is a response to suffering—and thus a creature's capacity
to suffer is paramount. Whether or not a fly is "conscious" is not precisely
the point. The question of ethical moment is, What could it possibly
be conscious of?
Much ink has been spilled over the question of whether or not animals
have conscious mental states at all. It is legitimate to ask how and
to what degree a given animal's experience differs from our own (Does
a chimpanzee attribute states of mind to others? Does a dog recognize
himself in a mirror?), but is there really a question about whether any
276 NOTE TO PAGE 1 75
nonhuman animals have conscious experience? I would like to suggest
that there is not. It is not that there is sufficient experimental evidence to
overcome our doubts on this score; it is just that such doubts are unreasonable.
Indeed, no experiment could prove that other human beings
have conscious experience, were we to assume otherwise as our working
hypothesis.
The question of scientific parsimony visits us here. A common misconstrual
of parsimony regularly inspires deflationary accounts of animal
minds. That we can explain the behavior of a dog without resort to notions
of consciousness or mental states does not mean that it is easier or more
elegant to do so. It isn't. In fact, it places a greater burden upon us to
explain why a dog brain (cortex and all) is not sufficient for consciousness,
while human brains are. Skepticism about chimpanzee consciousness
seems an even greater liability in this respect. To be biased on the side of
withholding attributions of consciousness to other mammals is not in the
least parsimonious in the scientific sense. It actually entails a gratuitous
proliferation of theory—in much the same way that solipsism would, if it
were ever seriously entertained. How do I know that other human beings
are conscious like myself? Philosophers call this the problem of "other
minds," and it is generally acknowledged to be one of reason's many cul
de sacs, for it has long been observed that this problem, once taken seriously,
admits of no satisfactory exit. But need we take it seriously?
Solipsism appears, at first glance, to be as parsimonious a stance as
there is, until I attempt to explain why all other people seem to have
minds, why their behavior and physical structure are more or less identical
to my own, and yet I am uniquely conscious—at which time it
reveals itself to be the least parsimonious theory of all. There is no argument
for the existence of other human minds apart from the fact that to
assume otherwise (that is, to take solipsism as a serious hypothesis) is to
impose upon oneself the very heavy burden of explaining the (apparently
conscious) behavior of zombies. The devil is in the details for the solipsist;
his solitude requires a very muscular and inelegant bit of theorizing
to be made sense of. Whatever might be said in defense of such a view, it
is not in the least "parsimonious."
The same criticism applies to any view that would make the human
brain a unique island of mental life. If we withhold conscious emotional
states from chimpanzees in the name of "parsimony," we must then
explain not only how such states are uniquely realized in our own case but
also why so much of what chimps do as an apparent expression of emoNOTES
TO PAGES 1 7 5 - 1 7 7 277
tionality is not what it seems. The neuroscientist is suddenly faced with
the task of finding the difference between human and chimpanzee brains
that accounts for the respective existence and nonexistence of emotional
states; and the ethologist is left to explain why a creature, as apparently
angry as a chimp in a rage, will lash out at one of his rivals without feeling
anything at all. If ever there was an example of a philosophical dogma
creating empirical problems where none exist, surely this is one.
12 For a recent review of the cognitive neuroscience of moral cognition see
W. D. Casebeer, "Moral Cognition and Its Neural Constituents," Nature
Reviews Neuroscience 4 (2003): 840-46. It is clearly too early to draw
any strong conclusions from this research.
13 There is a wide literature on morality and ethics—I use these words interchangeably—
but like most writers who have pretensions to "first philosophy,"
I have not found much use for it here. In considering questions of
ethics, I think we should exhaust the resources of common sense before
we begin ransacking the armory of philosophies past. In this, my intuitions
are vaguely Kantian and therefore lead me to steer as clear of Kant
as of any other philosopher. Putting the matter this way—purporting to
take "common sense" in hand, where others have gotten mired in technicalities—
risks begging many of the questions that certain readers will
want to ask. Indeed, one person's common sense is invariably another's
candidate for original sin. The manner in which I have circumscribed the
domain of ethics is also somewhat idiosyncratic, and consequently my
account will fail to catch some of the concerns that people regularly consider
to be integral to the subject. This, as far as I can see, is not so much
a weakness of my approach as one of its strengths, because I believe that
our map of the moral wilderness should be redrawn. The complex interrelationships
between morality, law, and politics will also be set aside for
the present. While these domains certainly overlap, an analysis of their
mutual (and well contested) influence upon one another is beyond the
scope of this book.
14 A circularity is surely lurking here, since only those who have demonstrated
the requisite degree of convergence will be deemed "adequate."
This circularity is not unique to ethics, however; nor is it a problem. That
we generally require people to demonstrate an understanding of current
theories before we take their views seriously does not mean that revolutions
in our understanding of the world are not possible.
15 C. Hitchens, "Mommie Dearest," Slate, Oct. 20, 2003, slate.msn.com.
16 R. Rorty, Hope in Place of Knowledge: The Pragmatics Tradition in
2 7 8 NOTES TO PAGES 1 7 9 - 1 8 0
Philosophy (Taipei: Institute of European and American Studies,
Academia Sinica, 1999), 90-91.
17 William James is usually considered the father of pragmatism. Whether
he should be viewed as having extended the philosophy of Charles
Sanders Peirce, or utterly debauched it, seems to be very much an open
question—one that can be persuasively answered either way by consulting
James in half his moods. There is no doubt that the great man contradicted
himself greatly. As George Santayana said, "The general
agreement in America to praise [James] as a marvelous person, and to
pass on, is justified by delight at the way he started, without caring where
he went." (See his Persons and Places [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1963],
401.) For the tenets of pragmatism, I have principally relied on the work
of Richard Rorty, who articulates this philosophical position as clearly
and consistently as any of its fans or critics could wish.
18 The emphasis on utility, rather than on truth, can be easily caricatured
and misunderstood—and has been ever since William James first articulated
the principles of pragmatism in a lecture before the Philosophical
Union of the University of California in 1898. Far from being the absurdity
of wishful thinking that Bertrand Russell lampooned in his History
of Western Philosophy—where we encounter a wayward pragmatist
finding it useful to believe that every man in sight is named Ebenezer
Wilkes Smith—when presented in all its subtleties, pragmatism can be
made to seem synonymous with every species of good sense. One can
easily find oneself careening, in a single hour, through the stages that
James sketched for the career of any successful theory: at first it appears
ridiculous; then true but trivial; then so important that one is tempted to
say that one knew it all along.
19 P. Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 171.
20 We should note that realism is an epistemological position, not an ontological
one. This is a regular source of confusion in philosophy. It is often
assumed, for instance, that realism is opposed to various forms of idealism
and subjectivism and, indeed, to certain developments in the physical
sciences (like Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics) that seem
to grant the mind a remarkable role in the governance of creation. But if
the moon does not exist unless someone is looking at it, this would still
be a realistic truth (in that it would be true, whether or not anyone knew
that this is the way the world works). To say that reality has a definite
character is not to say that this character must be intelligible to us, or that
it might not be perversely shifty—or, indeed, that consciousness and
NOTES TO PAGE l 8 l 279
thought might not play some constitutive role in defining it. If reality
changes its colors every time a physicist blinks his eyes, this would still
be a realistic truth.
21 There is a naive version of realism that has few defenders today. It is the
view of the world that most of us inherit along with ten fingers and ten
toes and maintain in innocence of philosophy. Such realism holds that
the world is more or less as common sense would have it: tables and
chairs really exist in a physical space of three dimensions; grass is green;
the sky is blue; everything is made of atoms; and every atom is crammed
with particles tinier still. The basic view is that our senses, along with
their extensions—telescopes, microscopes, etc.—merely deliver us the
facts of the universe as they are. While being an indispensable heuristic
for making one's way in the world, this is not the stuff of which current
scientific and philosophical theories are made. Nor is it the form of realism
that any philosophical realist currently endorses.
Thomas Nagel, an eloquent opponent of pragmatism, offers us, in The
Last Word (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 30, three propositions that
he feels can be adequately accounted for only by realism:
1. There are many truths about the world that we will never know and
have no way of finding out.
2. Some of our beliefs are false and will never be discovered to be so.
3. If a belief is true, it would be true even if no one believed it.
While a pragmatist like Rorty will concede that this manner of speaking
is intelligible, he will maintain that it is just that—a manner of
speaking—and he will shuttle all statements of this kind into his pragmatism
by reading words like "true" in a purely discursive sense and
then pirouette to his basic thesis: "We can talk like this, of course, but to
know the nature of anything is merely to know the history of the way it
has been talked about." The pragmatist attempts to conserve our realistic
intuitions by conceding that if one is going to play certain language
games correctly and use words like "true" so as to be understood, one
will, of course, grant one's assent to statements like "There were mountains
around before there was anyone to talk about mountains"—but he
will never hesitate to add that the "truth" of such a statement is just a
matter of our common agreement.
22 J. Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, ed. M. Cooke (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1998), 357.
23 To set all the relevant features of the pragmatic construal of knowledge
280 NOTE TO PAGE l 8 l
before us, it will be useful to briefly consider the work of Donald Davidson.
Davidson has been very influential in philosophical circles, and his
views on mind and meaning now appear to underwrite Rorty's pragmatism.
Davidson asserts, in an undated manuscript titled "The Myth of the
Subjective," that any view of the world, along with its concepts and truth
claims, must be translatable into any other:
Of course there are contrasts from epoch to epoch, from culture to
culture, and person to person of kinds we all recognize and struggle
with; but these are contrasts which with sympathy and effort we can
explain and understand. Trouble comes when we try to embrace the
idea that there might be more comprehensive differences, for this
seems (absurdly) to ask us to take up a stance outside our own ways
of thought.
In my opinion, we do not understand the idea of such a really foreign
scheme. We know what states of mind are like, and how they are
correctly identified; they are just those states whose contents can be
discovered in well-known ways. If other people or creatures are in
states not discoverable by these methods, it cannot be because our
methods fail us, but because those states are not correctly called states
of mind—they are not beliefs, desires, wishes, or intentions.
Perhaps the first thing a realist will want to say in response to these
ideas is that we need not ("absurdly") take a stance outside our own to
make sense of the claim that radically different views of the universe
might exist. As T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1986), points out, a community of pragmatists with the mental age
of nine would simply be wrong to think that "truth" is just a matter of
justification among themselves, and they would be right to think that
other human beings understand facts about the world that they will
never be able to translate into their discourse. Who is to say that our own
view of the world might not appear similarly delimited from some other
vantage point?
Davidson's doctrine of translatability comes bundled with what he
calls his "principle of charity": all language users must be endowed with
mostly true beliefs, for beliefs can be recognized as beliefs only against a
background of massive agreement. All interlocutors, therefore, must be
deemed by us to be basically rational—for the moment we imagine confronting
a mind stocked stem to stern with false beliefs, we realize that
we would see no basis to call it a "mind" in the first place. Davidson's
NOTE TO PAGE l 8 l 28l
view here amounts to a curious inversion of Wittgenstein's famous line
"If a lion could talk, we would not understand him." For Davidson, if we
cannot understand him, he cannot be talking.
Davidson's conclusions here appear rather incredible. What if a speaker
and an interpreter have mutually intelligible and false canons of belief?
Whether or not a given community's beliefs about reality are mutually
translatable need have nothing to do with whether or not they are true.
Mutual intelligibility may signify nothing more than homology of error;
my errors may be enough like your own to pass for "truth" in your discourse.
We need only imagine the communities of gorillas and chimpanzees
getting their most precocious, language-trained members
together to test this: each might fail to recognize the utterances of the
other (perhaps they were taught incompatible forms of sign language) and
conclude that the other is not a language user at all. In this case, these ape
translators would both be wrong. If, on the other hand, they were to successfully
converse and agreed with Rorty that "truth" is just a matter of
what prevails in their discourse, they would likewise be wrong—because
the men and women watching their interaction would be acquainted with
a variety of truths that they could not possibly be made to understand.
According to pragmatism, beliefs serve their purpose in different contexts,
and there is simply no cognitive project that corresponds to "knowing
how things are" or "knowing what reality is really like." Our ape
pragmatists would likely concur, but they might also say that there is no
such project as "knowing how to fly to the moon" or "knowing where
babies come from" either. Let us postulate that apes are cognitively closed
to the facts of rocket design and biology as we know them—that is, try as
he or she might, no ape scientist will ever have the requisite cognitive
abilities to bring the relevant data into view, much less make theoretical
sense of them. To this community of pragmatists, such facts simply do
not exist. It seems clear that if there could exist worldviews which supersede
our own in this way, then what passes for "truth" in our discourse
could not be the final measure of what is true.
The only means Rorty has found to resist this slide into ever-widening
contexts of knowledge is to follow Davidson in claiming that we could
translate any language into our own, and therefore incorporate any
"truths" that more advanced language users might articulate. Davidson's
reasoning is actually circular here, because the only reason why we could
translate any language is that translatability is his criterion for picking
out a language in the first place. This simply begs the question at issue.
282 NOTE TO PAGE l 8 l
Davidson's claims about translatability also seem to rely on a kind of verificationist
fallacy: he mistakes the way we pick out language use in the
world for what language is in itself. The fact that in order to ascribe language
to another creature we must first translate his language into our
own is simply irrelevant to the question of whether or not this creature
is actually a language user, has a mind, or is communicating with his own
kind. The error here tracks that of behaviorism—which cast a stultifying
shadow over the sciences of mind for most of the twentieth century. That
we may be constrained to pick out mentality in others by their behavior
and verbal utterance does not mean that such outward signs constitute
what mind is in itself.
According to Rorty and Davidson, there is no language game that
human beings could not, in principle, play. The spectrum of possible
minds, points of view, "true" descriptions of the world is therefore continuous.
All possible languages are commensurable; all cognitive horizons
can be ultimately fused. Whether or not this is true is not really the
point. The point is that it amounts to a realistic claim about the nature of
language and cognition.
It seems that there are two possible forms of retort to pragmatism: in
the first place we could seek to demonstrate that it is not pragmatic, and
specifically that it is not as pragmatic as realism. The approach here
would be to show that it serves neither our ends of fashioning a coherent
picture of the world nor other ends to which we might be purposed. It
may be, for instance, that talking about truth and knowledge in terms of
human "solidarity," as Rorty does, could ultimately subvert the very solidarity
at issue. While I believe that a pragmatic case against pragmatism
can be made, I have not made it here (B. Williams, in "Auto-da-Fé," New
York Review of Books, April 28, 1983, has taken a stab at it). Instead, I
have attempted to show that pragmatism is covertly realistic, arguing
that in the act of distancing himself from the sins of realism, the pragmatist
commits them with both hands. The pragmatist seems to be tacitly
saying that he has surveyed the breadth and depth of all possible acts
of cognition (not just his own, and not just those that are human) and
found both that all knowledge is discursive and that all spheres of discourse
can be potentially fused. Pragmatism, therefore, amounts to the
assertion that any epistemic context wider than our own can be ruled out
in principle. While I find these claims incredible, the more important
point is that a pragmatist can believe otherwise only as a realist.
As a final note, I would like to point out that both pragmatic and realNOTES
TO PAGE 1 8 5 283
istic objections to pragmatism can be made to converge. Let us first reduce
pragmatism and realism to their core theses (P and R respectively):
P: All statements about the world are "true" only by virtue of being
justified in a sphere of discourse.
R: Certain statements about the world are true, whether or not they
can be justified—and many justified statements happen to be false.
There appear to be two routes over the precipice for the pragmatist—
and both can be reached when we press the question "What if P seems
wrong to everybody and R seems right?" After all, the pragmatist must
admit the possibility that we might live in a world where P will fail to be
justified (that is, pragmatism itself may prove to be unpragmatic), which
raises the question of whether or not P applies to itself. If P applies to
itself, and is not justified, then it would seem that pragmatism selfdestructs
the moment it loses its subscribers. The pragmatist cannot
resist this line by saying that P does not apply to itself, for then he will
have falsified P and endorsed R; nor can he say that it is a necessary truth
that P will always be justified.
Another logical peril emerges for the pragmatist the moment R
becomes justified. According to P, if R is justified, it is "true"—but R cannot
remain true by virtue of being justified. If the pragmatist attempts to
resist the revaluation of "true" that R itself urges upon us, by saying that
R cannot be really true (in the sense that it corresponds to reality as it
is), this would be tantamount to saying that P itself is true realistically.
Hence, he will fall into contradiction with his thesis once again. This is a
rock and a hard place that the pragmatist cannot even be intelligibly
accused of standing between—for they are, after all, the same place. It is,
therefore, upon the very rock of realism—or beneath it—that we should
seek the pragmatist out.
24 This is often called, erroneously, the "naturalistic fallacy." The naturalistic
fallacy, due to G. E. Moore, is a fallacy of another sort. Moore claimed
that our judgments of goodness cannot be reduced to other properties
like happiness. He would undoubtedly argue that I have committed the
naturalistic fallacy in defining ethics in terms of human happiness.
Moore felt that his "open question argument" was decisive here: it would
seem, for instance, that we can always coherently ask of any state of happiness,
"Is this form of happiness itself good?" The fact that the question
still makes sense suggests that happiness and goodness cannot be the
same. I would argue, however, that what we are really asking in such a
case is "Is this form of happiness conducive to (or obstructive of) some
284 NOTES TO PAGES 1 8 6 - 1 9 1
higher happiness?" This question is also coherent, and keeps our notion
of what is good linked to the experience of sentient beings.
25 S. Pinker, The Blank Slate (New York: Viking, 2002), 53-54.
26 J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), 24.
27 Cited in O. Friedrich, The End of the World: A History (New York: Coward,
McCann & Geoghegan, 1982), 61.
28 The role of Christian dogma in turning sexual neurosis into a principle
of cultural oppression need hardly be elaborated upon. Perhaps the most
shocking disclosures in recent years (coming amid thousands of reports
about pedophile priests in the United States) were those that surrounded
a group of nuns that ran orphanages throughout Ireland during the
1950s and 1960s. The incongruously named Sisters of Mercy tortured
children as young as eleven months (flogging and scalding them, as well
as subjecting them to astonishing acts of psychological cruelty) for "the
sins of their parents" (i.e., the sin of their own illegitimacy). In the service
of ancient ideas about female sexuality, original sin, virgin births,
etc., thousands of these infants were forcibly removed from the care of
their unwed mothers and sent overseas for adoption.
29 Reports of honor killings have been steadily trickling out of Muslim
countries for years. For a recent example, see N. Banerjee, "Rape (and
Silence about It) Haunts Baghdad," New York Times, July 16, 2003. The
UNICEF Web site posts the following statistics:
In 1997, some 300 women were estimated to have been killed in the
name of "honour" in one province of Pakistan alone. According to
1999 estimates, more than two-thirds of all murders in Gaza strip and
West bank were most likely "honour" killings. In Jordan there are an
average of 23 such murders per year.
Thirty-six "honour" crimes were reported in Lebanon between
1996 and 1998, mainly in small cities and villages. Reports indicate
that offenders are often under 18 and that in their communities they
are sometimes treated as heroes. In Yemen as many as 400 "honour"
killings took place in 1997. In Egypt there were 52 reported "honour"
crimes in 1997.
30 In the Buddhist tradition, which has approached the cultivation of these
states most systematically, love and compassion are cultivated alongside
equanimity and sympathetic joy (that is, joy in the happiness of others).
Each state is believed to balance the others.
NOTE TO PAGE 1 9 2 285
31 It seems reasonably clear that not all people are equally endowed with
ethical intelligence. In particular, not all people are equally adept at discerning
the link between their intentions toward others and their own
happiness. While it may seem undemocratic to posit a hierarchy of moral
knowledge, we know that knowledge cannot be equally distributed in the
world. This is not to say that one must master a wide body of facts to be
moral. Morality may be more like chess than like medicine—there may
be very few facts to understand, but it can still be remarkably difficult to
use what one has learned impeccably. To assert that there should be no
"experts" in morals—as both Kantians and anti-Kantians tend to do—is,
on my account, rather like saying that there should be no experts in chess,
perhaps adducing as one's evidence that every party to our discourse can
plainly see how to move the pieces. We need no experts to tell us how the
matter stands; nor do we need experts to tell us that cruelty is wrong. But
we do need experts to tell us what the best move is from any given position;
and there is little doubt that we will need experts to tell us that
loving all people, without distinction, makes one happier than feeling
preferential love for one's intimates (if this is indeed the case).
Why should we think that living a profoundly ethical life would be
any more common an attainment than playing brilliant chess? Why
should penetrating insight into the logical relations among one's ethical
beliefs be any easier to come by than penetrating insight into any other
logical framework? As in any field, some cherished intuitions may prove
irreconcilable with some others, and the search for coherence will force
itself upon us as a practical necessity. Not everyone can play championship
chess, and not everyone can figure out how to live so as to be as
happy as possible. We can offer heuristics for playing winning chess, of
course (secure the middle of the board, keep good pawn structure, etc.);
and we can offer heuristics for bringing ethical truths to light (Kant's categorical
imperative, Rawls' "original position," etc.). The fact that not
every last one of us sees the point of them does not cast doubt upon their
usefulness. There is no doubt that the relations among our ethical precepts
and intuitions admit of deeper insights, requiring greater and
greater intellectual capacities on the part of all of us to comprehend and,
comprehending, to be inspired to practice. Here, I think, the greatest difference
among persons is to be found (along with the greatest difference
between the ethical and the epistemic spheres), since any insight into
ethical normativity must lay claim to our emotions in order to become
effective. Once he has understood that π is the ratio of a circle's circum286
NOTES TO PAGES 1 9 2 - 1 9 8
ference to its diameter, not even the most libertine geometer will feel
tempted to compute a circle's area using another measure. When a person
sees that it is generally wrong to lie, however, this normative ground,
once conquered, must be secured by feeling. He must feel that lying is
beneath him—that it is tending to lead him away from happiness—and
such a conversion of moral sentiments seems to require more than mere
conceptual understanding. But then, so do certain kinds of reasoning. See
A. Damasio, Descartes' Error. Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
(New York: Avon Books, 1994).
Put this way, it is easy to see that two people who both have learned
that lying is not conducive to happiness may differ considerably in the
depth to which they feel this proposition to be true, and therefore in the
degree to which they feel obliged to conform to it in their actions.
Instances of discrepancy between belief and action in the moral sphere
are legion: it is one thing to think it "wrong" that people are starving
elsewhere in the world; it is another to find this as intolerable as one
would if these people were one's friends. There may, in fact, be no ethical
justification for all of us fortunate people to carry on with our business
while other people starve (see P. Unger, Living High & Letting Die: Our
Illusion of Innocence [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996]). It may be that
a clear view of the matter—that is, a clear view of the dynamics of our
own happiness—would oblige us to work tirelessly to alleviate the
hunger of every last stranger as though it were our own. On this account,
how could one go to the movies and remain ethical? One couldn't. One
would simply be taking a vacation from one's ethics.
32 60 Minutes, Sept. 26, 2002.
33 That these men are being held indefinitely, without access to legal counsel,
should be genuinely troubling to us, however. See R. Dworkin, "Terror
and the Attack on Civil Liberties," New York Review of Books, Nov.
6, 2003, pp. 37-41, for a fine analysis of the legal and ethical issues here.
34 It seems to me that we can stop this inquisitorial slide by recourse to the
"perfect weapon" argument presented in chapter 4. There is a difference,
after all, between intending to inflict suffering on an innocent person and
inflicting it by accident. To include a suspected terrorist's family among
the instruments of torture would be a flagrant violation of this principle.
35 Quoted in Glover, Humanity, 55.
36 I suspect that if our media did not censor the more disturbing images of
war, our moral sentiments would receive a correction on two fronts: first,
we would be more motivated by the horrors visited upon us by our eneNOTES
TO PAGES 1 9 9 - 2 0 2 287
mies: seeing Daniel Pearl decapitated, for instance, would have surely
provoked a level of national outrage that did not arise in the absence of
such imagery. Second, if we did not conceal the horrible reality of collateral
damage from ourselves, we would be far less likely to support the
dropping of "dumb" bombs, or even "smart" ones. While our newspapers
and newscasts would be horrible to look at, I believe we would feel both
greater urgency and greater restraint in our war on terrorism.
37 See J. D. Greene et al., "An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement
in Moral Judgment," Science 293 (Sept. 14, 2001): 2105-8; and J. D.
Greene, "From Neural 'Is' to Moral 'Ought': What Are the Moral Implications
of Neuroscientific Moral Psychology?" Nature Reviews Neuroscience
4 (2003): 846-49.
38 For an illuminating account of the use of "coercion" by U.S. and Israeli
interrogators, see M. Bowden, "The Dark Art of Interrogation," Atlantic
Monthly, March 2003, pp. 51-77.
39 Many flavors of pacifism can be found in the philosophical literature. I
am considering here what is often called "absolute" pacifism—that is, the
belief that violence is never morally acceptable, whether in self-defense
or on behalf of others. This is the sort of pacifism that Gandhi practiced,
and it is the only form that seems to carry with it pretensions of moral
impregnability.
40 Am I saying that overt opposition to a wrong is the ethical standard? Yes,
when the stakes are high, I think that it is. One can always make the
argument that covert resistance in particularly dangerous situations—
where open opposition would be to forfeit one's life—is the best possible
course. Those remarkable men and women who hid Jews in their basements
or ferried them to safety during World War II provide the textbook
example of this. Surely they did more good by living and helping
others in secret than by openly protesting the Nazis and dying on principle.
But this was their situation only because so few people were willing
to offer open opposition in the first place. If more had, there would
have been Nazis hiding in basements, writing journals to the God that
had forsaken them, not innocent little girls bound for Auschwitz. Thus,
as a categorical imperative, confrontation with evil seems the best imperative
we've got. What form this confrontation takes, of course, is open
to debate. But simply making room for human evil, or sidestepping it,
doesn't seem an ethically auspicious option.
41 G. Orwell, "Reflections on Gandhi," in The Oxford Book of Essays, ed. J.
Gross (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1949), 506.
288 NOTES TO PAGES 2 0 7 - 2 0 8
7 Experiments in Consciousness
1 I am not suggesting that thoughts themselves are not equivalent to certain
states of the brain. In conventional terms, however, there is a rather
large difference between taking a drug and taking on a new idea. That
both have the power to alter our perception is one of the more fascinating
facts about the human mind.
2 While this literature is too wide to cite here, numerous examples of such
texts can be found in my bibliography.
3 What happens after death is surely a mystery, as is the relationship
between consciousness and the physical world, but there is no longer any
doubt whether the character of our minds is dependent upon the functioning
of our brains—and dependent in ways that are profoundly counterintuitive.
Consider one of the common features of the near-death
experience: the nearly dying seem regularly to encounter their loved
ones who have gone before them into the next world. See A. Kellehear,
Experiences Near Death: Beyond Medicine and Religion (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1996). We know, however, that recognizing a person's face
requires an intact fusiform cortex, primarily in the right hemisphere.
Damage to this area of the brain definitely robs the mind of its powers of
facial recognition (among other things), a condition we call prosopagnosia.
People with this condition have nothing wrong with their primary
vision. They can see color and shape perfectly well. They can recognize
almost everything in their environment, but they cannot distinguish
between the faces of even their closest friends and family members. Are
we to imagine in such cases that a person possesses an intact soul, somewhere
behind the mind, that retains his ability to recognize his loved
ones? It would seem so. Indeed, unless the soul retains all of the normal
cognitive and perceptual capacities of the healthy brain, heaven would be
populated by beings suffering from all manner of neurological deficit.
But then, what are we to think of the condition of the neurologically
impaired while alive? Does a person suffering from aphasia have a soul
that can speak, read, and think flawlessly? Does a person whose motor
skills have been degraded by cerebellar ataxia have a soul with preserved
hand-eye coordination? This is rather like believing that inside every
wrecked car lurks a new car just waiting to get out.
The implausibility of a soul whose powers are independent of the
brain only increases once we recognize that even normal brains can be
placed somewhere on a continuum of pathology. I know my soul speaks
NOTES TO PAGES 2 0 8 - 2 0 9 289
English, because that is the language that comes out of me whenever I
speak or write. I used to know a fair amount of French as well. It seems
that I've forgotten most of it, though, since my attempts at communication
while in France provoke little more than amusement and consternation
in the natives. We know, however, that the difference between my
remembering and not remembering something is a matter of physical
differences in the neural circuits in my brain—specifically in the synaptic
connections that are responsible for information encoding, information
retrieval, or both. My loss of French, therefore, can be considered a
form of neurological impairment. And any Frenchman who found his
linguistic ability suddenly degraded to the level of my own would rush
straight to the hospital. Would his soul retain his linguistic ability in any
case? Has my soul retained its memory of how to conjugate the verb
bruire? Where does this notion of soul-brain independence end? A native
speaker of one of the Bantu languages would find that the functioning of
my language cortex leaves even more to be desired. Given that I was
never exposed to Bantu sounds as a child, it is almost certain that I would
find it difficult in the extreme, if not impossible, to distinguish between
them, much less reproduce them in a way that would satisfy a native
speaker. But perhaps my soul has mastered the Bantu languages as well.
There are only five hundred of them.
4 Whether the angle of approach is through the study of priming effects
and visual masking, change blindness (D. J. Simons et al., "Evidence for
Preserved Representations in Change Blindness," Consciousness and
Cognition 11, no. 1 [2002]: 78-97), visual extinction and visuospatial
neglect (G. Rees et al., "Neural Correlates of Consciousness in Humans,"
Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3 [April 2002]: 261-70), binocular rivalry
and other bistable percepts (R. Blake and N. K. Logothetis, "Visual Competition,"
Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3, no. 1 [2002]: 13-21; N. K.
Logothetis, "Vision: A Window on Consciousness," Scientific American
Special Edition 12, no. 1 [2002] 18-25), or blind-sight (L. Weiskrantz,
"Prime-sight and Blindsight," Consciousness and Cognition 11, no. 4
[2002]: 568-81), the signature of conscious perception is always the same:
the subject (be he man or monkey) simply tells us, by word or deed,
whether or not the character of his experience has changed.
5 Why isn't general anesthesia a way of ruling it out? Bathe the brain in
the requisite chemicals, and people lose consciousness—end of story. The
problem, however, is that we do not know that consciousness itself
is truly interrupted during anesthesia. The problem with conflating
2 9 0 NOTES TO PAGES 2 1 1 - 2 1 2
consciousness with reportability is that we cannot distinguish the genuine
cessation of consciousness from a mere failure of memory. What
was it like to be asleep last night? You may feel that it was like nothing
at all—you were "unconscious." But what about the dreams you don't
remember? You were surely conscious while having them. Indeed, you
may have been conscious throughout all the stages of sleep. We cannot
rule out this possibility through subjective report alone.
6 Nevertheless, these are exactly the sorts of equivalences that scientists
and philosophers working on "the self" are apt to draw. A conference was
recently held at the New York Academy of Sciences entitled "The Self:
From Soul to Brain," and while much of interest was said about the brain,
not a single presenter defined the self in such a way as to distinguish it
from truly global concepts like "the human mind" or "personhood." The
feeling that we call "\" was left entirely untouched.
7 Certain philosophers, while they clearly have not transcended the subject/
object divide as a matter of stable experience, conceptually repudiate
it in their thinking. Sartre, for instance, saw that the subject could be
nothing more than another object in the field of consciousness and, as
such, was "contemporaneous with the World":
The World has not created me; the me has not created the World.
These are two objects for absolute, impersonal consciousness, and it
is by virtue of this consciousness that they are connected. This absolute
consciousness, when it is purified of the J, no longer has anything
of the subject. . . . It is quite simply a first condition and
absolute source of existence. And the relation of interdependence
established by this absolute consciousness between me and the World
is sufficient for the me to appear as "endangered" before the World,
for the me (indirectly and through the intermediary states) to draw
the whole of its content from the World. No more is needed in the
way of a philosophical foundation for an ethics and a politics which
are absolutely positive.
J. P. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of
Consciousness, trans. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1937), 105-6.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes a similar point, even while confining
himself to subject/object language: "The world is inseparable from the
subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world,
and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the
NOTES TO PAGES 2 1 3 - 2 1 5 291
subject itself projects." Cited in F. Varela at al., The Embodied Mind: Cognitive
Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 4.
8 This is not to say that infants are mystics. Nevertheless, a process of
increasing individuation clearly occurs from birth onward. See K. Wilber,
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala, 1995), for a criticism of
the false equation between what he calls the pre-rational and the transrational.
As Wilber points out, there is no reason to romanticize childhood
in spiritual terms. Indeed, if our children appear to inhabit the
kingdom of heaven, why stop with them? We might as well direct our
envy at our primate cousins, for they—when they are not too overcome
by the pleasures of cannibalism, gang rape, and infanticide to seem so—
are the most gleeful children of all.
9 Thus, a man like Heidegger, who was an abject admirer of Hitler, can nevertheless
be commended to our attention, with scarcely a hint of shame,
as one of the giants of European thought. Schopenhauer, who was
undoubtedly a clever fellow, hurled a seamstress down a flight of stairs,
injuring her permanently (he was, we are told, annoyed by the sound of
her voice). Other eminent thinkers could also be singled out—Wittgenstein
was a manifestly tortured soul and an enthusiastic practitioner of
corporal punishment when in the company of unruly little girls—but,
and this is the astonishing fact, not a single Western thinker can be
named who rivals the great philosopher-mystics of the East. There are
those who feel no embarrassment at reaching as far back as Plotinus for
an example of a mystic reared in an Eastern corner of the West. But Plotinus,
by his own admission, enjoyed only an occasional glimpse of the
plenum that he so eloquently described. In the context of one of the Eastern
schools of contemplative practice, he would have been acknowledged
for nothing more than having set out toward the goal in earnest.
The situation appears to have been somewhat different in the ancient
world. Greek philosophers spoke frequently of the state of eudaimonia—
the objective state of happiness that was thought to attend the good life—
but their efforts to reach it were not very sophisticated. The closest thing
to an Eastern mysticism to be found among the ancient Greeks was skepticism,
in the tradition of Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 365-270 BC)—but Pyrrho's
teachings amounted to disavowal of philosophy altogether. Happiness has
since been relegated to the ontological backwater of moral philosophy, and
the ideal of the philosopher as sage is not even a distant memory.
The teachings of Pyrrho, which have survived in the writings of the
second-century physician Sextus Empiricus, enunciate what is clearly a
292 NOTE TO PAGE 2 15
spiritual discipline, not at all unlike the dialectic of Madhyamika in
Mahayana Buddhism. The Skeptic (with a capital S) is not merely a
philosopher who failed in his office—having sought to gather true beliefs
about the world and found his basket empty at the end of the day—he is
the person who has found the peace (Greek ataraxia) to which such a
failure can lead.
Skepticism, in Pyrrho's sense, is not the dogmatic assertion that nothing
at all can be known. It is the acknowledgment that whatever we know
at present is simply the way things seem, and the Skeptic refuses to take
another step into the twilight of metaphysical views. He knows that he
does not know anything other than appearances—and the fact that this
seems to be a truth about the nature of experience is, likewise, nothing
more than the way things appear to him at present. As Sextus says, "the
Skeptic continues to search," studiously withholding judgment (Greek
epoché). He does not even judge that this is a position that should be
maintained—rather, every belief on offer seems to invite its own contradiction,
and the Skeptic has merely taken note of the unsatisfactoriness
of the situation thus far. The man is befuddled, and he is happy to stay
that way.
This position has rarely been accorded the respect that it deserves in
the West, for it has been widely doubted whether it can be honestly
maintained by any means short of administering repeated blows to one's
head. It is also generally conflated (as in B. Russell, A History of Western
Philosophy [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945]) with the more
dogmatic mistrust of knowledge evinced by Arcesilaus, Carneades, and
the other regents of Plato's Academy during its two-hundred-year flirtation
with the refusal of all dogmas—having decided, in opposition to
obvious contradictions in its tradition, to take its inspiration from
Socrates in only his skeptical moods. Academic skepticism appears to
have been a more strident critique of the knowledge of others—and
therefore a declaration of the "truth" that no one knows anything at
all—though it is true that in conversation, Pyrrho's suspension of belief
would have amounted to much the same thing. Consequently, most
philosophers have not recognized Pyrrho's innovation to be the empirical
turn toward profundity that it genuinely was. It is said that Pyrrho
acquired his discipline from a naked ascetic (Greek gymnosophist) he met
while on Alexander's campaign to the borders of India. He is also
reported to have been quite a saintly figure, presumably as a consequence
of the peace he acquired in the absence of opinions. It should be noted,
NOTES TO PAGE 215 293
however, that the ataraxia which Sextus describes in his Outlines of
Pyrrhonism was not "enlightenment" in the Eastern sense—rather, it
seems to have amounted to little more than a condition of not suffering
as much as ordinary men. Nevertheless, ataraxia was a realizable spiritual
goal supported by sound reasoning and, as such, represents an empirical
advance over the aims of mere philosophy.
10 There is more to Diamond's thesis than this, but it essentially boils down
to the unequal geographical distribution of animals and foodstuffs that
can be readily domesticated.
11 At least on paper. Nevertheless, what is so remarkably barren about the
Western philosophical tradition is that while the occasional lucky man in
his most muscular moments of inquiry may have won a brief, experiential
insight into the nondual nature of consciousness—someone like
Schelling, for instance, or Rousseau while he was lolling in a boat on Lake
Geneva—philosophers in the East have spent millennia articulating and
integrating such insights into distinct methods of contemplative practice:
rendering them both reproducible and verifiable by consensus.
12 My debt to a variety of contemplative traditions that have their origin in
India will be obvious to many readers. The esoteric teachings of Buddhism
(e.g., the Dzogchen teachings of the Vajrayana) and Hinduism
(e.g., the teachings of Advaita Vedanta), as well as many years spent practicing
various techniques of meditation, have done much to determine
my view of our spiritual possibilities. While these traditions do not offer
a unified perspective on the nature of the mind or the principles of spiritual
life, they undoubtedly represent the most committed effort human
beings have made to understand these things through introspection.
Buddhism, in particular, has grown remarkably sophisticated. No other
tradition has developed so many methods by which the human mind can
be fashioned into a tool capable of transforming itself. Attentive readers
will have noticed that I have been very hard on religions of faith—
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even Hinduism—and have not said
much that is derogatory of Buddhism. This is not an accident. While Buddhism
has also been a source of ignorance and occasional violence, it is
not a religion of faith, or a religion at all, in the Western sense. There are
millions of Buddhists who do not seem to know this, and they can be
found in temples throughout Southeast Asia, and even the West, praying
to Buddha as though he were a numinous incarnation of Santa Claus.
This distortion of the tradition notwithstanding, it remains true that the
esoteric teachings of Buddhism offer the most complete methodology we
294 NOTE TO PAGE 2 15
have for discovering the intrinsic freedom of consciousness, unencumbered
by any dogma. It is no exaggeration to say that meetings between
the Dalai Lama and Christian ecclesiastics to mutually honor their religious
traditions are like meetings between physicists from Cambridge
and the Bushmen of the Kalahari to mutually honor their respective
understandings of the physical universe. This is not to say that Tibetan
Buddhists are not saddled with certain dogmas (so are physicists) or that
the Bushmen could not have formed some conception of the atom. Any
person familiar with both literatures will know that the Bible does not
contain a discernible fraction of the precise spiritual instructions that can
be found in the Buddhist canon. Though there is much in Buddhism that
I do not pretend to understand—as well as much that seems deeply
implausible—it would be intellectually dishonest not to acknowledge its
preeminence as a system of spiritual instruction.
As for the many distinguished contemplatives who have graced the
sordid history of Christianity—Meister Eckhart, Saint John of the Cross,
Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Seraphim of Sarov, the venerable Desert
Fathers, et al.—these were certainly extraordinary men and women: but
their mystical insights, for the most part, remained shackled to the dualism
of church doctrine, and accordingly failed to fly. Where they do take
to the air, with a boost from Neoplatonism and other heterodox views, it
is in defiance of the very tradition they might have epitomized (had it
been wise enough to transcend its own literary conceits), and therefore
they serve as hallowed exceptions that prove the rule—mystical Christianity
was dead the day Saul set out for Damascus.
Contemplatives within the other Semitic traditions have had their
mystical impulses similarly constrained. Sufism (itself influenced by
Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Christian monasticism) has
generally been considered a form of heresy in the Muslim world—as the
terrible deaths of Al-Hallaj (854-922) and other distinguished Sufis
attest. Where its doctrine has remained mindful of the Koran, Sufism is
wedded to an indissoluble dualism; similarly, Jewish Kabbalists (whose
teachings bear the influence of Christian Gnosticism, Sufism, and Neoplatonism)
do not seem to have considered a truly nondual mysticism a
possibility. See G. Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Dorsette Press, 1974).
There is no denying the mystical talents of many Jewish, Christian,
and Muslim contemplatives. Every religious tradition, no matter how
wayward its beliefs, is likely to have produced a handful of men and
women who profoundly realized the inherent freedom of consciousness.
NOTE TO PAGE 2 1 5 295
As consciousness already is free of subject and object duality, the emergence
of an Eckhart or a Rumi is no surprise at all. The existence of such
spiritual luminaries, however, suggests nothing about the adequacy of
the Bible and the Koran as contemplative manuals. I trust that some
lucky man has been enlightened while being run over by a train or flung
from the bow of a pirate ship. Does this mean that such mishaps constitute
adequate spiritual instruction? While I do not deny that every tradition,
East and West, is likely to have produced a few mystics whose
insights breached the gilded prison of their faith, the failures of faithbased
religion are so conspicuous, its historical degradation so great, its
intolerance so of this world, that I think it is time we stopped making
excuses for it.
The New Age has offered little progress in this regard, because it has
made spiritual life seem generally synonymous with the forfeiture of
brain cells. Most of the beliefs and practices that have been designated as
"spiritual," in this New Age or in any other, have arisen and thrive in a
perfect vacuum of critical intelligence. Indeed, many New Age ideas are
so ridiculous as to produce terror in otherwise dispassionate men. In
response to the absurdities that are arrayed, each year, at events like the
Whole Life Expo, scientists and other rational people have found new
reason to criticize and discard all spiritual claims and their evidence. And
so it is that every man who concerns himself with the disposition of the
planets before the disposition of his ideas simply heaps more fuel upon
the dark fires of cynicism.
But there have been other sources of cynicism. Inevitably, spiritual
practice must be taught by those who are expert in it, and those who profess
to be experts—to be genuine gurus—are not always as selfless as
they claim. As a consequence of their antics, many educated people now
believe that a guru is simply a man who, while professing his love for all
beings, secretly longs to rule an ashram populated exclusively by beautiful
young women. This stereotype is not without its exemplars—and
while the occasional yogi of renown may lick a leper's wounds with
apparent enthusiasm, many display far more ordinary longings.
I know a group of veteran spiritual seekers who, after searching for a
teacher among the caves and dells of the Himalayas for many months,
finally discovered a Hindu yogi who seemed qualified to lead them into
the ethers. He was as thin as Jesus, as limber as an orangutan, and wore
his hair matted, down to his knees. They promptly brought this prodigy
to America to instruct them in the ways of spiritual devotion. After a
2 9 6 NOTES TO PAGES 2 1 6 - 2 1 7
suitable period of acculturation, our acetic—who was, incidentally, also
admired for his physical beauty and for the manner in which he played
the drum—decided that sex with the prettiest of his patrons' wives would
suit his pedagogical purposes admirably. These relations were commenced
at once, and endured for some time by a man whose devotion to
wife and guru, it must be said, was now being sorely tested. His wife, if I
am not mistaken, was an enthusiastic participant in this "tantric" exercise,
for her guru was both "fully enlightened" and as dashing a swain as
Lord Krishna. Gradually, this saintly man further refined his spiritual
requirements, as well as his appetites. The day soon dawned when he
would eat nothing for breakfast but a pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice
cream topped with cashews. We might well imagine that the meditations
of a cuckold, wandering the frozen-food aisles of a supermarket in search
of an enlightened man's enlightened repast, were anything but devotional.
This guru was soon sent back to India with his drum.
13 Padmasambhava, Self-liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness,
trans. J. M. Reynolds (New York: Station Hill Press, 1989), 12.
14 Padmasambhava was an eighth-century mystic who is generally credited
with having brought the teachings of Buddhism (particularly those of
Tanta and Dzogchen) from India to Tibet.
15 No doubt, many students of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish esoterica will
claim that my literal reading of their scriptures betrays my ignorance of
their spiritual import. To be sure, occult, alchemical, and conventionally
mystical interpretations of various passages in the Bible and the Koran
are as old as the texts themselves, but the problem with such hermeneutical
efforts—whether it be the highly dubious theory of gematria (the
translation of the Hebrew letters of the Torah into their numerical equivalents
so that numerologists can work their interpretive magic upon the
text) or the glib symbol seeking of popular scholars like Joseph Campbell—
is that they are perfectly unconstrained by the contents of the texts
themselves. One can interpret every text in such a way as to yield almost
any mystical or occult instruction.
A case in point: I have selected another book at random, this time
from the cookbook aisle of a bookstore. The book is A Taste of Hawaii:
New Cooking from the Crossroads of the Pacific. Therein I have discovered
an as yet uncelebrated mystical treatise. While it appears to be a
recipe for wok-seared fish and shrimp cakes with ogo-tomato relish, we
need only study its list of ingredients to know that we are in the presence
of an unrivaled spiritual intelligence:
N O T E T O PAGE 2 1 7 297
snapper filet, cubed
3 teaspoons chopped scallions
salt and freshly ground black pepper
a dash of cayenne pepper
2 teaspoons chopped fresh ginger
1 teaspoon minced garlic
8 shrimp, peeled, deveined, and cubed
½ cup heavy cream; 2 eggs, lightly beaten
3 teaspoons rice wine; 2 cups bread crumbs
3 tablespoons vegetable oil; 2 ½ cups ogo tomato relish
The snapper filet, of course, is the individual himself—you and I—
awash in the sea of existence. But here we find it cubed, which is to say
that our situation must be remedied in all three dimensions of body,
mind, and spirit.
Three teaspoons of chopped scallions further partakes of the cubic
symmetry, suggesting that that which we need add to each level of our
being by way of antidote comes likewise in equal proportions. The import
of the passage is clear: the body, mind, and spirit need to be tended to with
the same care.
Salt and freshly ground black pepper: here we have the perennial
invocation of opposites—the white and the black aspects of our nature.
Both good and evil must be understood if we would fulfill the recipe for
spiritual life. Nothing, after all, can be excluded from the human experience
(this seems to be a Tantric text). What is more, salt and pepper come
to us in the form of grains, which is to say that our good and bad qualities
are born of the tiniest actions. Thus, we are not good or evil in general,
but only by virtue of innumerable moments, which color the stream
of our being by force of repetition.
A dash of cayenne pepper: clearly, being of such robust color and flavor,
this signifies the spiritual influence of an enlightened adept. What shall we
make of the ambiguity of its measurement? How large is a dash? Here we
must rely upon the wisdom of the universe at large. The teacher himself
will know precisely what we need by way of instruction. And it is at just
this point in the text that the ingredients that bespeak the heat of spiritual
endeavor are added to the list—for after a dash of cayenne pepper, we find
two teaspoons of chopped fresh ginger and one teaspoon of minced garlic.
These form an isosceles trinity of sorts, signifying the two sides of our spiritual
nature (male and female) united with the object meditation.
2 9 8 NOTES TO PAGES 2 1 7 - 2 2 0
Next comes eight shrimp—peeled, deveined, and cubed. The eight
shrimp, of course, represent the eight worldly concerns that every spiritual
aspirant must decry: fame and shame; loss and gain; pleasure and
pain; praise and blame. Each needs to be deveined, peeled, and cubed—
that is, purged of its power to entrance us and incorporated on the path
of practice.
That such metaphorical acrobatics can be performed on almost any
text—and that they are therefore meaningless—should be obvious. Here
we have scripture as Rorschach blot: wherein the occultist can find his
magical principles perfectly reflected; the conventional mystic can find
his recipe for transcendence; and the totalitarian dogmatist can hear God
telling him to suppress the intelligence and creativity of others. This is
not to say that no author has ever couched spiritual or mystical information
in allegory or ever produced a text that requires a strenuous
hermeneutical effort to be made sense of. If you pick up a copy of
Finnegans Wake, for instance, and imagine that you have found therein
allusions to various cosmogonic myths and alchemical schemes, chances
are that you have, because Joyce put them there. But to dredge scripture
in this manner and discover the occasional pearl is little more than a literary
game.
16 For a recent scholarly treatment of the phenomenology of Buddhist
meditation that is compatible with my usage here, see B. A. Wallace,
"Intersubjectivity in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism," Journal of Consciousness
Studies 8, nos. 5-7 (2001): 209-30. For extensive discussion of meditation
by neuroscientists, see J. H. Austin, Zen and the Brain (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1998), and C. deCharms, Two Views of Mind: Abhidharma and
Brain Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1998).
17 I believe this metaphor comes from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, but I have
forgotten where in his many discourses I read it.
18 It is often said that a person cannot learn these things from reading a
book. In the general case, this is undoubtedly true. 1 would add that one
is by no means guaranteed to recognize the intrinsic nonduality of consciousness
simply by having an eminent meditation master point it out.
The conditions have to be just right: the teacher has to be really delivering
the goods, leaving no conceptual doubt as to what is to be recognized;
and the student has to be endowed with sufficient concentration of mind
to follow his instructions and notice what there is to notice. In this sense,
meditation is undoubtedly an acquired skill.
19 The recognition of the nonduality of consciousness is not susceptible to
N O T E S T O PAGE 2 2 0 299
a linguistically oriented analysis. While it is perfectly natural that men
who knew only their thoughts would attempt to reduce everything to
language, the efforts of Wittgenstein and his imitators in philosophy do
not cut deeply enough to shed any light upon this terrain. Perhaps an
intuition of these things could be read into Wittgenstein's celebrated
statement "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."
But the true mystery, whereof we cannot speak, can nevertheless be recognized.
20 Meditation has, in fact, been the subject of scientific study for many
years. See J. Andresen, "Meditation Meets Behavioral Medicine: The
Story of Experimental Research on Meditation," journal of Consciousness
Studies 7, nos. 11-12 (2000): 17-73, for an exhaustive review. Much
of this research has employed EEG and physiological measures and, in so
doing, has not attempted to localize changes in brain function. Most studies
that have utilized modern techniques of neuroimaging have not studied
meditation relative to the self-sense per se. See A. B. Newberg et al.,
"The Measurement of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow during the Complex
Cognitive Task of Meditation: A Preliminary SPECT Study," Psychiatry
Research: Neuroimaging Section 106 (2000 and 2001): 113-22,
for the results of a SPECT study. To my knowledge, only one group has
begun working with meditators who are producing the specific, subjective
effect of losing their sense of self; a preliminary report on these studies
can be found in D. Goleman, Destructive Emotions: A Scientific
Dialogue with the Dalai Lama (New York: Bantam, 2003).
21 F. Varela, "Neurophenomenology," Journal of Consciousness Studies 3,
no. 4 (1996): 330-49, makes this point with regard to the scientific validity
of "subjective" data: "The line of separation—between rigor and lack
of it—is not to be drawn between first and third person accounts, but
determined rather by whether there is a clear methodological ground
leading to a communal validation and shared knowledge."
22 I would like to briefly address the concern that the experience of nonduality
brought on by meditation is entirely private, and therefore not
amenable to independent verification. Are we obliged merely to take a
meditator's word for it? And if so, is this a problem?
Those who would demand an independent measure of mental events
should first consider two things: (1) many features of human experience
are irretrievably private and, as a consequence, self-report remains our
only guide to their existence: depression, anger, joy, visual and auditory
hallucinations, dreams, and even pain are among the innumerable "first300
NOTE TO PAGE 2 21
person" facts that can be finally verified only by self-report; (2) in those
cases where independent measures of internal states do exist, they exist
only by virtue of their reliable correlation with self-report. Even fear,
which is now dependably linked to a variety of physiological and behavioral
measures—increased startle response, rising Cortisol, increased skin
conductance, etc.—cannot be taken off the gold standard of self-report.
Imagine what would happen if subjective ratings of fear ever broke free
of such "independent" measures: if, say, 50 percent of subjects claimed to
feel no fear when their Cortisol levels rose and to feel terror when they
fell. These measures would cease to be of any use at all in the study of
fear. It is important that we not lose sight of the cash value that physiological
and behavioral variables have in the study of mental events: they
are only as good as the subjects say they are. (I do not mean to suggest
that people are subjectively incorrigible, or that every mental event is
best studied by recourse to self-report. When the topic under consideration
is how things seem to the subject, however, self-report will be our
only compass.)
23 Indeed, the future looks rather like the past in this respect. We may live
to see the technological perfection of all the visionary strands of traditional
mysticism: shamanism (Siberian or South American), Gnosticism,
Kabbalah, Hermetism and its magical Renaissance spawn (Hermeticism),
and all the other byzantine paths whereby man has sought the Other in
every guise of its conception. But all these approaches to spirituality are
born of a longing for esoteric knowledge and a desire to excavate the
visionary strata of the mind—in dreams, or trance, or psychedelic
swoon—in search of the sacred. While I have no doubt that remarkable
experiences are lying in wait for the initiate down each of these byways,
the fact that consciousness is always the prior context and condition of
every visionary experience is a great clarifying truth—and one which
brands all such excursions as fundamentally unnecessary. That consciousness
is not improved—not made emptier of self, or more mysterious,
transcendental, etc.—by the pyrotechnics of esotericism is a fact,
which contemplatives of every persuasion could confirm in their own
experience.
The modern version of the visionary impulse, perhaps best exemplified
in the exquisite ravings of Terence McKenna, is the equation of spiritual
transcendence with information of a transcendental kind. Thus, any
experience (most effectively invoked with the aid of psychedelic drugs) in
which the mind is flooded by paradoxical disclosures—visions of other
N O T E TO PAGE 2 2 1 3 0 1
realms, ethereal beings, the grammatology of alien intelligences, etc.—is
considered to be an improvement upon ordinary consciousness. What
such a romance of the subtle overlooks, however, is the sublimity of consciousness
itself, prior to subject/object perception. That subtle disclosures
are captivating to the intellect (whether or not they are "true"),
there can be no doubt. But their impermanence—any vision, having
arisen, is destined to pass away—proves that such phenomena are not the
basis for permanent transformation.
I do not mean to suggest, however, that these "interior" landscapes
should remain unexplored. Increasingly subtle appearances hold intrinsic
interest for anyone who would acquire more knowledge about the body,
the mind, or the universe at large. I am simply saying that to seek freedom
amid any continuum of possible disclosures seems a mistake, one
that only the nondual schools of mysticism have adequately criticized.
What is more, the fascination with such esoterica is largely responsible
for the infantilism and mere credulity that attends most expressions of
spirituality in the West. Either we find mere belief, wedded to the
hideous presumption of its own sufficiency, or we are met by the frenzied
search for novelty—psychic experience, prophecies of doom or
splendor, and a thousand errant convictions about the personality of God.
But the fact remains that whatever changes occur in the stream of our
experience—whether a vision of Jesus appears to each of us, or the totality
of human knowledge can one day be downloaded directly onto our
synapses—in spiritual terms we will be consciousness first, and only, and
already free of "I." It does not seem too soon for us to realize this.
24 Whether mysticism entails the transcendence of all concepts is surely an
open question. The claim here is merely that the concepts that underwrite
our dualistic perception of the world are left aside by mystics.
Bibliography
Aarons, M., and J. Loftus. Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss
Banks. Rev. ed. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998.
Abraham, R., T. McKenna, and R. Sheldrake. Trialogues at the Edge of the West:
Chaos, Creativity, and the Resacralization of the World. Santa Fe: Bear Publishing,
1992.
Adolphs, R., D. Tranel, and A. R. Damasio. "The Human Amygdala in Social Judgment."
Nature 393 (June 4,1998): 470-74.
Ahmad, Z., L. M. Balsamo, B. C. Sachs, B. Xu, and W. D. Gaillard. "Auditory Comprehension
of Language in Young Children: Neural Networks Identified with
fMRI." Neurology 60 (2003): 1598-605.
Albert, D. Z. Quantum Mechanics and Experience. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
1992.
Allman, J. M. Evolving Brains. New York: Scientific American Library, 1999.
Anderson, J. R. "The New Theoretical Framework." In The Adaptive Character of
Thought. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1990.
Andresen, J. "Meditation Meets Behavioral Medicine: The Story of Experimental
Research on Meditation." Journal of Consciousness Studies 7, nos. 11-12 (2000):
17-73.
Anonymous. Terrorist Hunter. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
Anscombe, G. E. M. "The First Person." In Self-knowledge, ed. Q. Cassam. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1975.
Appleyard, B. Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man.
New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Armstrong, K. A History of God. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Astavakra. The Ashtavakra Gita. Translated by Thomas Byrom. Boston: Shambhala,
1990.
Augustine, Saint. The City of God. Translated by M. Dods. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1952.
——. Confessions. Translated by J. G. Pilkington. Great Britain: Folio Society,
1993.
303
304 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Austin, J. H. Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.
Austin, J. L. Sense and Sensibilia. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962.
Ayer, A. J. Wittgenstein. New York: Random House, 1985.
Bacovcin, H., trans. The Way of a Pilgrim and A Pilgrim Continues His Way. New
York: Doubleday, 1978.
Baddeley, A. "The Fractionation of Working Memory." Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences U.S.A. 93 (1996): 13468-72.
Baier, A. C. Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
1994.
Baker, L. R. Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism. Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1987.
Bankei. The Unborn: The Life and Teaching of Zen Master Bankei (1622-1693).
Translated by N. Waddell. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984.
Barnstone, W., ed. The Other Bible: Jewish Pseudepigrapha, Christian Apocrypha,
Gnostic Scriptures, Kabbalah, Dead Sea Scrolls. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco,
1984.
Barrett, W., and H. D. Aiken., eds. Philosophy in the 20th Century. 4 vols. New York:
Random House, 1962.
Baudrillard, J. The Spirit of Terrorism. Translated by C. Turner. New York: Verso,
2002.
Baumgartner, P., and S. Payr, eds. Speaking Minds: Interviews with Twenty Eminent
Cognitive Scientists. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995.
Bechara, A., H. Damasio, D. Tranel, and A. R. Damasio. "Deciding Advantageously
before Knowing the Advantageous Strategy." Science 275 (1997): 1293-95.
Becker, E. The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press, 1973.
Beedle, A. S. "A Philosopher Looks at Neuroscience." Journal of Neuroscience
Research 55 (1999): 141-46.
Beloff, J. "Minds and Machines: A Radical Dualist Perspective." Journal of Consciousness
Studies 1, no. 1 (1994): 32-37.
Bennet, J. "In Israeli Hospital, Bomber Tells of Trying to Kill Israelis." New York
Times, June 8, 2002.
Bennett, J. "How Is Cognitive Ethology Possible?" In Cognitive Ethology: The Minds
of Other Animals, ed. C. A. Ristau. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991.
Benson, H., with M. Stark. Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology of Belief. New
York: Charles Scribner, 1996.
Bergson, H. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.
Translated by F. L. Pogson. 1910; reprint, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971.
Berkow, R., ed. The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy. 16th ed. Rahway, N.J.:
Merck Research Laboratories, 1992.
Berman, P. "The Philosopher of Islamic Terror." New York Times Magazine, March
23, 2003.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 305
——. Terror and Liberalism. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
Beyerstein, B. L. "Neuropathology and the Legacy of Spiritual Possession." Skeptical
Inquirer 12, no. 3 (1998): 248-61.
Binder, L. Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies. Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1988.
Blake, R., and N. K. Logothetis. "Visual Competition." Nature Reviews Neuroscience
3, no. 1 (2002): 13-21.
Blakemore, C, and S. Jennett, eds. The Oxford Companion to the Body. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2001.
Block, N. "Troubles with Functionalism." In The Nature of Mind, ed. D. Rosenthal.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991.
——. "The Mind as the Software of the Brain." In An Invitation to Cognitive Science:
Thinking, ed. E. E. Smith and D. N. Osherson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Block, N., O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere, eds. The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical
Debates. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.
Bloom, H. Omens of the Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection.
New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.
——, ed. The Book of J. Translated by D. Rosenberg. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Bobrow, R. S. "Paranormal Phenomena in the Medical Literature: Sufficient Smoke
to Warrant a Search for Fire." Medical Hypotheses 60 (2003): 864-68.
Bogen J. E. "Mental Duality in the Intact Brain." Bulletin of Clinical Neuroscience 51
(1986): 3-29.
——. "On the Neuropsychology of Consiousness: Parts I and II." Consciousness
and Cognition 4 (1995): 52-62,137-58.
Bohm, D., and B. J. Hiley. The Undivided Universe. London: Routledge, 1993.
Bok, S. Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. New York: Vintage, 1978.
Bouveresse, J. Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious. Translated
by C. Cosman. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995.
Bowden, M. "The Dark Art of Interrogation." Atlantic Monthly, March 2003, pp.
51-77.
Bowker, J., ed. The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions. Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1997.
——. What Muslims Believe. Oxford: Oneworld, 1998.
Boyer, P. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture.
Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992.
Braun, S. The Science of Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Mood. New York:
John Wiley, 2000.
Briggs, R. Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European
Witchcraft. New York: Viking, 1996.
Brisick, W, ed. Crystal Cave: A Compendium of Teachings by Masters of the Practice
Lineage. Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Katmandu: Rangjung Yeshe Publications,
1990.
306 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brockman, J., ed. The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first
Century. New York: Vintage, 2002.
——, ed. The Third Culture. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
Buber, M., ed. Ecstatic Confessions. Translated by E. Cameron. New York: Harper and
Row, 1985.
——. 7 and Thou. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Charles Scribner, 1970.
Buckley, W. R, Jr. "The War on Drugs Is Lost." National Review, Feb. 12,1996.
——. "Abolish Drug Laws?: 400 Readers Give Their Views." National Review, July
1,1996.
Buddhaghosa. The Path of Purification. Translated by Bhikkhu Nanamoli. Kandy, Sri
Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1975.
Burt, A. M. Textbook of Neuroanatomy. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1993.
Campbell, A. "Cartesian Dualism and the Concept of Medical Placebos." Journal of
Consciousness Studies 1, no 2 (1994): 230-33.
Campbell, J. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1949.
Canetti, E. Crowds and Power. Translated by C. Stewart. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1962.
Carroll, J. "The Silence." New Yorker, April 7,1997.
——. Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2001.
Casebeer, W. D. "Moral Cognition and Its Neural Constituents." Nature Reviews
Neuroscience 4 (2003): 840-46.
Chalmers, D. J. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1996.
Cheney, D. L., and R. M. Seyfarth. How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of
Another Species. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990.
Chisholm, R. M. "On the Observability of the Self." Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 30 (1969): 7-21.
Chomsky, N. 9-11. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001.
Chuang Tzu. Basic Writings. Translated by B. Watson. New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1964.
Churchland, P. M. Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1979.
——. Matter and Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988.
——. "Knowing Qualia: A Reply to Jackson." In The Nature of Consciousness:
Philosophical Debates, ed. N. Block, O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1997.
Churchland, P. S., and P. M. Churchland. "Neural Worlds and Real Worlds." Nature
Reviews Neuroscience 3 (2002): 903-7.
Cialdini, R. B. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. New York: Quill, 1993.
Cohen, J. D., and K. I. Blum. "Reward and Decision." Neuron 36, no. 2 (2002): 193-98.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 307
Collins, L., and D. Lapierre. Freedom at Midnight. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1975.
Conway, M. A. "Repression Revisited." Nature 410 (March 15, 2001): 319-20.
Conze, E. A Short History of Buddhism. Oxford: Oneworld, 1980.
——, trans, and ed. Buddhist Texts through the Ages. Boston: Shambhala,
1990.
Copleston, F. A History of Philosophy. 9 vols. New York: Image, 1960-77.
Corballis, M. C. "Sperry and the Age of Aquarius: Science, Values, and the Split
Brain." Neuropsychologia 36 (1998): 1083-87.
Crick, F. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York:
Charles Scribner, 1994.
Crick, F., and C. Koch. "Consciousness and Neuroscience." Cerebral Cortex 8 (1998):
97-107.
——. "The Unconscious Humunculus." In The Neural Correlates of Consciousness,
ed. T. Metzinger. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
——. "The Problem of Consciousness." Scientific American Special Edition 12, no.
1 (2002): 10-17.
Dahlbom, B., ed. Dennett and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Damasio, A. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York:
Avon Books, 1994.
——. "How the Brain Creates the Mind." Scientific American Special Edition 12,
no. 1 (2002): 4-9.
——. Looking for Spinoza: joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. New York: Harcourt,
2003.
Daprati, E., N. Franck, N. Georgieff, J. Proust, E. Pacherie, J. Dalery, M. Jeannerod.
"Looking for the Agent: An Investigation into Consciousness and Selfconsciousness
in Schizophrenic Patients." Cognition 65 (1997): 71-86.
Davidson, D. "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge." Undated MS.
——. "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs." Undated MS.
——. "The Myth of the Subjective." Undated MS.
——. "Actions, Reasons, and Causes." In Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1980.
——. "Paradoxes of Irrationality." In Philosophical Essays on Freud, ed. R. Wollheim
and J. Hopkins. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982.
——. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
——. "Deception and Division." In The Multiple Self, ed. J. Elster. Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985.
——. "Knowing One's Own Mind." Proceedings and Addresses of the American
Philosophical Association 60 (1987): 441-58.
——. "Who Is Fooled?" In Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality, ed. J. P.
Dupuy. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1998.
Davies, N. Europe: A History. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996.
308 B I B L I O G R A P HY
Davies, P. Are We Alone?: Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial
Life. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
Davies, P., and J. Gribbin. The Matter Myth. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.
Davies, P., and J. R. Brown, eds. The Ghost in the Atom. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1986.
Davies, R. R., J. H. Xuereb, and J. R. Hodges. "The Human Perirhinal Cortex in
Semantic Memory: An in Vivo and Postmortem Volumetric Magnetic Resonance
Imaging Study in Semantic Dementia, Alzheimer's Disease and Matched Controls."
Neuropathology and Applied Neurobiology 28, no. 2 (April 2002): 167-68
[abstract].
Davis, M. H., and I. S. Johnsrude. "Hierarchical Processing in Spoken Language Comprehension."
Journal of Neuroscience 23 (2003): 3423-31.
Davis, P. J., and R. Hersh. The Mathematical Experience. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1981.
Dawkins, R. Climbing Mount Improbable. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
Dawood, N. J., trans. The Koran. New York: Viking, 1956.
de Quincey, C. "Consciousness All the Way Down?" Journal of Consciousness Studies
1, no. 2 (1994): 217-29.
——. "Conceiving the 'Inconceivable'?" Journal of Consciousness Studies 7, no. 4
(2000): 67-81.
deCharms, C. Two Views of Mind: Abhidharma and Brain Science. Ithaca, N.Y: Snow
Lion Publications, 1998.
Delacour, J. "An Introduction to the Biology of Consciousness." Neuropsychologia 33
(1995): 1061-74.
Denes, G., and M. Signorini. "Door But Not Four and 4 a Category Specific Transcoding
Deficit in a Pure Acalculic Patient." Cortex 37, no. 2 (2001): 267-77.
Dennett, D. C. "Intentional System in Cognitive Ethology: The Tanglossian
Paradigm' Defended." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (1983): 343-90.
——. Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1984.
——. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991.
——. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1995.
——. "Facing Backwards on the Problem of Consciousness." Journal of Consciousness
Studies 3, no. 1 (1996): 4-6.
——. "It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature." Journal of Consciousness Studies 7, no. 4
(2000): 25-27.
Dershowitz, A. The Case for Israel. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2003.
Descartes, R. Discourse and Method and Meditations. Translated by L. J. Lafleur.
Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, 1960.
Deutsch, D. The Fabric of Reality. New York: Penguin, 1997.
Dewey, J. Reconstruction in Philosophy. 1920; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 309
Diamond, J. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W
Norton, 1997.
——. "The Last Americans: Environmental Collapse and the End of Civilization."
Harper's, June 2003, pp. 43-51.
Didion, J. "Mr. Bush and the Divine." New York Review of Books, Nov. 6, 2003, pp.
81-86.
Dobbie-Bateman, A. F. The Spiritual Instructions of St. Seraphim of Sarov. Clearlake:
Dawn Horse Press, 1973.
Doherty, C, ed. What the World Thinks in 2002. Washington, D.C.: Pew Research
Center for the People & the Press, 2002.
Doty, R. W. "The Five Mysteries of the Mind, and Their Consequences." Neuropsychologia
36 (1998): 1069-76.
Du Pasquier, R. Unveiling Islam. Translated by T J. Winter. Cambridge: Islamic Texts
Society, 1992.
Dudjom Rinpoche. The Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism, Its Fundamentals and
History. Translated by G. Dorje and M. Kapstein. 2 vols. Boston: Wisdom Publications,
1991.
Dupuy, J. P. 1989. "Common Knowledge, Common Sense." Theory and Decision, 27
(1989): 37-62.
——, ed. Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality. Stanford: CSLI Publications,
1998.
Durant, W The Age of Faith. 1950; reprint, Norwalk, Conn.: Easton Press, 1992.
Dworkin, R. "Terror & the Attack on Civil Liberties." New York Review of Books,
Nov. 6, 2003, pp. 37-41.
Dyson, F. Imagined Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997.
Eccles, J. C. How the Self Controls Its Brain. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1994.
Edelman, G. M., and G. Tononi. A Universe of Consciousness. New York: Basic
Books, 2000.
Edwards, P. Reincarnation: A Critical Examination. Amherst: Prometheus Books,
1996.
——, ed. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 8 vols. New York: Collier Macmillan,
1967.
Einstein, A. Ideas and Opinions. New York: Wings Books, 1954.
——. Out of My Later Years. New York: Wings Books, 1956.
——. Einstein On Peace. Edited by O. Nathan and H. Norden. New York: Avenel
Books, 1960.
——. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. New York: Crown, 1961.
Fain, G. L. Molecular and Cellular Physiology of Neurons. Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1999.
Farah, C. E. Islam. Hauppauge, N.Y.: Barron's Educational Services, 2000.
Feigl, H. The "Mental" and the "Physical." Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,
1958.
3 1 0 B I B L I O G R A P HY
Feinberg, T. E. Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self. Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2001.
Feldman, D. H., and L. T. Goldsmith. Nature's Gambit: Child Prodigies and the
Development of Human Potential. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
Feldman, F. Confrontations with the Reaper: A Philosophical Study of the Nature
and Value of Death. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992.
Feser, E. "Can Phenomenal Qualities Exist Unperceived?" Journal of Consciousness
Studies 5, no. 4 (1998): 405-14.
Feynman, R. The Character of Physical Law. New York: Modern Library, 1965.
——. Six Easy Pieces. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995.
——. The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist. Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley, 1998.
Fingarette, H. Self-Deception. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000.
Flanagan, O. Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
——. "Consciousness as a Pragmatist Views It." In The Cambridge Companion to
William James, ed. R. A. Putnam. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. 1997.
Fletcher, P. C, F. Happe, U. Frith, S. C. Baker, R. J. Dolan, R. S. J. Fackowiak, and C. D.
Frith. "Other Mind in the Brain: A Functional Imaging Study of Theory of Mind'
in Story Comprehension." Cognition 57 (1995): 109-28.
Flew, A., ed. Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Parapsychology. Buffalo:
Prometheus Books, 1987.
Fodor, J. The Mind Doesn't Work That Way. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.
Fodor, J. A., and Z. W. Pylyshyn. "Systematicity of Cognitive Representation."
Excerpt from "Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture." In Connections and
Symbols, ed. S. Pinker and J. Mehler. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988.
Follesdal, D. "What Computers Cannot Do: Two Strategies." In Transcendental Philosophy
and Everyday Experience, ed. T. Rockmore and V. Zeman. Atlantic Highlands,
N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997.
Forman, R. K. C. "Mysticism, Language, and the Via Negativa." Journal of Consciousness
Studies 1, no. 1 (1994): 38-49.
Freeman, W. J. "Self, Awareness of Self, and the Illusion of Control." Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 20 (1997): 112-13.
——. "Three Centuries of Category Errors in Studies of the Neural Basis of Consciousness
and Intentionality." Neural Networks 10 (1997): 1175-83.
Freud, S. The Major Works of Sigmund Freud. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952.
Friedman, M. "Prohibition and Drugs." Newsweek, May 1,1972.
Friedrich, O. The End of the World: A History. New York: Coward, McCann &
Geoghegan, 1982.
——. The Kingdom of Auschwitz. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.
Frith, C. D. "Attention to Action and Awareness of Other Minds." Consciousness and
Cognition 11 (2002): 481-87.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 311
Frith, C. D., and U. Frith. 1999. "Interacting Minds—A Biological Basis." Science's
Compass 286 (1999): 1692-95.
Fuller, G. E. The future of Political Islam. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Fuster, J. M. Cortex and Mind: Unifying Cognition. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
2002.
Gallup, G. H., Jr. Religion in America 1996. Princeton: Princeton Religion Research
Center, 1996.
Gallup, G. H., Jr., and R. Bezilla. The Role of the Bible in American Society. Princeton:
Princeton Religion Research Center, 1990.
Garab Dorje. The Golden Letters: The Three Statements of Garab Dorje the First
Teacher of Dzogchen together with a Commentary by Dza Patrul Rinpoche.
Translated and edited by J. Reynolds. Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1996.
Gardner, M. The New Ambidextrous Universe: Symmetry and Asymmetry from
Mirror Reflections to Superstrings. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1990.
——. The New Age: Notes of a Fringe-Watcher. New York: Prometheus Books,
1991.
——. Relativity Simply Explained. New York: Dover, 1996.
Gazzaniga, M.S. "Legalizing Drugs: Just Say Yes." National Review, July 10,
1995.
——. "The Split Brain Revisited." Scientific American Special Edition 12, no. 1
(2002): 26-37.
——, ed. The New Cognitive Neurosciences. 2d ed. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.
Gazzaniga, M. S., J. E. Bogen, and R. W. Sperry. "Some Functional Effects of Sectioning
the Cerebral Commissures in Man." Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 48 (1962): 1765-69.
Gazzaniga, M. S., R. B. Ivry, and G. R. Mangun. Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology
of the Mind. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
Gentner, D., and A. B. Markman. "Structure Mapping in Analogy and Similarity."
American Psychologist 52 (1997): 45-56.
George, L. Crimes of Perception: An Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics. New
York: Paragon House, 1995.
Gigerenzer, G. "On Narrow Norms and Vague Heuristics: A Reply to Kahneman and
Tversky." Psychological Review 103 (1996): 592-96.
Gilbert, D. T. "How Mental Systems Believe." American Psychologist 46 2 (1991):
107-19.
Gilbert, D. T, et al. "Unbelieving the Unbelievable: Some Problems in the Rejection of
False Information." journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59 (1990): 601-13.
Gilbert, M. The Holocaust: A History of the jews of Europe during the Second World
War. New York: Henry Holt, 1985.
Gilovich, T. How We Know What Isn't So. New York: Free Press, 1991.
Giovagnoli, A. R., A. Erbetta, and O. Bugiani. "Preserved Semantic Access in Global
312 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Amnesia and Hippocampal Damage." Clinical Neuropsychology 15 (2001):
508-15 [abstract].
Gleick, J. Isaac Newton. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.
Glenny, M. "Why the Balkans Are So Violent." New York Review of Books, Sept. 19,
1996, pp. 34-39.
Glimcher, P. W. "Decisions, Decisions, Decisions: Choosing a Biological Science of
Choice." Neuron 36, no. 2 (2002): 323-32.
Glover, J. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1999.
Glynn, I. An Anatomy of Thought: The Origin and Machinery of the Mind. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1999.
Goel, V., B. Gold, S. Kapur, and S. Houle. "The Seats of Reason? An Imaging Study of
Deductive and Inductive Reasoning." Neuroreport 8 (March 24,1997): 1305-10.
Goel, V., and R. J. Dolan. "Explaining Modulation of Reasoning by Belief." Cognition
87, no. 1 (2003): B11-22.
Goenka, S. N. The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation as Taught by S. N. Goenka.
Edited by W. Hart. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.
Goffman, E. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face to Face Behavior. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1967.
Gold, J. I., and M. N. Shadlen. "Representation of a Perceptual Decision in Developing
Oculomotor Commands." Nature 404 (March 23, 2000): 390-94.
——. "Banburismus and the Brain: Decoding the Relationship between Sensory
Stimuli, Decisions, and Reward." Neuron 36, no. 2 (2002): 299-308.
Goldberg, E. The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2001.
Goldberg, J. "Letter from Cairo: Behind Mubarak." New Yorker, Oct. 8, 2001, pp. 48-55.
Goldhagen, D. J. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
Goleman, D. Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. New
York: Bantam Books, 2003.
Goodenough, E. R. "Depth Psychology: Wish Projection." In Toward a Mature Faith.
Lanham, Md.: Univ. Press of America, 1955.
——. "A Historian of Religion Tries to Define Religion." Zygon 2 (1967): 7-22.
Gorenberg, G. The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple
Mount. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000.
Gould, S. J. "Nonoverlapping Magisterial Natural History, March 1997.
Gourevitch, P. "Letter from Korea: Alone in the Dark." New Yorker, Sept. 8, 2003, pp.
55-75.
Govinda, A. Lama. A Living Buddhism for the West. Translated by M. Walshe.
Boston: Shambhala, 1989.
Graham, G., and G. L. Stephens, eds. Philosophical Psychopathology. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1994.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 313
Green, D. Gold in the Crucible: Teresa of Avila and the Western Mystical Tradition.
Longmead, Eng.: Element Books, 1989.
Greene, J. D. "From Neural 'Is' to Moral 'Ought': What Are the Moral Implications
of Neuroscientific Moral Psychology?" Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4 (2003):
846-49.
Greene, J. D., et al. "An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment."
Science 293 (Sept. 14, 2001): 2105-8.
Gregory, R. L., ed. The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1987.
Griffin, D. R. Animal Minds. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992.
——. "Panexperientialist Physicalism and the Mind-Body Problem." Journal of
Consciousness Studies 4, no. 3 (1997): 248-68.
Griffiths, P. J. On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and the Mind-Body Problem.
La Salle, III: Open Court, 1986.
Guttenplan, S., ed. A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Blackwell,
1994.
Haack, S. "Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism." Skeptical
Inquirer 21, no. 6 (1997): 37-42.
Habermas, J. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Translated by F. Lawrence.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.
——. The Past as Future. Translated and edited by M. Pensky. Lincoln: Univ. of
Nebraska Press, 1994.
——. On the Pragmatics of Communication. Edited by M. Cooke. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1998.
Hadamard, J. The Mathematician's Mind: The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical
Field. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1945.
Hagen, S. How the World Can Be the Way It Is. Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1995.
Haggard, P. "The Psychology of Action." British Journal of Psychology 92 (2001):
113-28.
Haggard, P., and E. Magno. "Localizing Awareness of Action with Transcortical Magnetic
Stimulation." Experimental Brain Research 127 (1999): 102-7.
Haggard, P., and M. Eimer. "On the Relation between Brain Potentials and the Awareness
of Voluntary Movements." Experimental Brain Research 126 (1999): 128-33.
Hall, M. P. The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Los Angeles: Philosophical Research
Society, 1977.
Hameroff, S. R. "Quantum Coherence in Microtubules: A Neural Basis for Emergent
Consciousness?" Journal of Consciousness Studies 1, no. 1 (1994): 91-118.
Hameroff, S., A. W. Kaszniak, and A. C. Scott, eds. Toward a Science of Consciousness:
The First Tucson Discussions and Debates. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.
Hardcastle, V. G. "The Naturalists versus the Skeptics: The Debate over a Scientific
Understanding of Consciousness." Journal of Mind and Behavior 14, no. 1 (1993):
27-50.
314 BIBLIOGRAPHY
——. "Psychology's Binding Problem and Possible Neurobiological Solutions."
journal of Consciousness Studies 1, no. 1 (1994): 66-90.
Hardcastle, V. G., and O. Flanagan. "Multiplex vs. Multiple Selves: Distinguishing
Dissociative Disorders." Monist 82 (1999): 645-57.
Harding, D. E. On Having No Head: Zen and the Re-discovery of the Obvious. London:
Arkana, 1961.
Harman, G. "Rationality." In An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Thinking, ed. E. E.
Smith and D. N. Osherson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Harman, W. "The Scientific Exploration of Consciousness: Towards an Adequate
Epistemology." Journal of Consciousness Studies 1, no. 1 (1994): 140-48.
Hart, J., R. Sloan Berndt, and A. Caramazza. "Category-Specific Naming Deficit following
Cerebral Infarction." Nature 316 (Aug. 1,1985): 439-40.
Haught, J. A. Holy Hatred: Religious Conflicts of the '90s. Amherst: Prometheus
Books, 1995.
Hauser, M. D. Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
——. "Swappable Minds." In The Next Fifty Years, ed. J. Brockman. New York:
Vintage, 2002.
Hauser, M. D., N. Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch. "The Faculty of Language: What
Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?" Science 298 (2002): 1569-79.
Hawking, S., and R. Penrose. The Nature of Space and Time. Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press. 1996.
Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by J. B. Baillie. New York:
Harper and Row, 1967.
Heisenberg, W. Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. New
York: Harper and Row, 1958.
Hill, F. A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials. New York:
Doubleday, 1995.
Hille, B. Ionic Channels of Excitable Membranes. 2d ed. Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer
Associates, 1992.
Hitchens, C. "Mommie Dearest." Slate, Oct. 20, 2003. http://slate.msn.com.
Hobbes, T. Leviathan. 1651; reprint, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952.
Hobson, J. A. The Chemistry of Conscious States. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994.
Hoffman, B. "The Logic of Suicide Terrorism." Atlantic Monthly, June 2003, pp.
40-47.
Hoffmann, R. J., trans. Porphyry's Against the Christians. Amherst: Prometheus
Books, 1994.
Hofstadter, D. R. The Tumult of Inner Voices or What Is the Meaning of the Word
"I"?. Cedar City, Utah: Grace A. Tanner Lecture in Human Values, 1982.
Hofstadter, D. R., and D. C. Dennett. The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self
and Soul. New York: Bantam Books, 1981.
Holton, G. Einstein, History, and Other Passions: The Rebellion against Science at
the End of the Twentieth Century. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 315
Holyoak, K. J. "Problem Solving." In An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Thinking,
eds. E. E. Smith and D. N. Osherson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Holyoak, K. J., and J. E. Hummel. "Toward an Understanding of Analogy within a
Biological Symbol System." In The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive
Science, ed. D. Gentner, K. J. Holyoak, and B. N. Kokinov. Cambridge: MIT Press,
2001.
Holyoak, K. J., and P. C. Cheng. "Pragmatic Reasoning with a Point of View." Thinking
and Reasoning 1 (1995): 289-313.
Honderich, T., ed. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1995.
Hopkins, J. Emptiness Yoga: The Tibetan Middle Way. Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications,
1987.
Horgan, J. The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the
Scientific Age. Reading, Mass.: Helix Books, 1996.
——. The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication,
and Explanation. New York: Free Press, 1999.
——. Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border between Science and Spirituality.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
Horner, I. B., trans. Milinda's Questions. 2 vols. Oxford: Pali Text Society, 1990.
Howard, M. "What's in a Name? How to Fight Terrorism." Foreign Affairs 81, no. 1
(2002): 8-13.
Hume, D. The Philosophical Works of David Hume. 4 vols. 1854; reprint, Bristol, Eng:
Thoemmes Press, 1996.
Humphrey, N. "How to Solve the Mind-Body Problem." Journal of Consciousness
Studies 7, no. 4 (2000): 5-20.
Huntington, S. P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Huxley, A. The Perennial Philosophy. New York: Harper and Row, 1944.
Ignatieff, M. "Why Are We in Iraq? (And Liberia? And Afghanistan?)." New York
Times Magazine, Sept. 7, 2003.
Inge, W. R. The Philosophy of Plotinus. 2 vols. 1929; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Wood
Press, 1968.
Jackson, F. "What Mary Didn't Know" In The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical
Debates, ed. N. Block, O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere. Cambridge: MIT Press,
1997.
Jackson, R. R., ed. and trans. Is Enlightenment Possible?: Dharmakirti and rGyal
tshab rje on Knowledge, Rebirth, No-Self and Liberation. Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion
Publications, 1993.
James, W. The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. 1890; reprint, New York: Dover, 1950.
——. The Will to Believe. 1897; reprint, New York: Longmans, Green, 1919.
——. Essays in Radical Empiricism. 1912; reprint, Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska
Press.
3 1 6 BIBLIOGRAPHY
——. The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition. Edited by J. J.
McDermott. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997.
Jeannerod, M. "To Act or Not to Act: Perspectives on the Representation of Actions."
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 52A, no. 1 (1999): 1-29.
——. 2001. "Neural Simulation of Action: A Unifying Mechanism for Motor Cognition."
Neurolmage 14 (2001): S103-S109.
Jenkins, P. "The Next Christianity." Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 2002, pp. 53-68.
John Paul II (pope). Crossing the Threshold of Hope. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Johnson, E. "Grace Halsell's Prophecy and Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road
to Nuclear War." Journal of Historical Review 7, no. 4 (Winter 1986).
Johnson, P. A History of Christianity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976.
Johnson-Laird, P. N., and R. M. J. Byrne. Deduction. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991.
Jung, C. G. Answer to Job. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1958.
Kafatos, M., and R. Nadeau. The Conscious Universe. New York: Springer-Verlag,
1990.
Kahneman, D., and A. Tversky. "On the Reality of Cognitive Illusions." Psychological
Review 103 (1996): 582-91.
Kaku, M. Hyperspace. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994.
Kalat, J. W. Biological Psychology. 6th ed. Pacific Grove, Calif.: Brooks/Cole Publishing,
1998.
Kandel, E. R., et al. Principles of Neural Science. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill,
2000.
Kant, I. The Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by T. K. Abbott. Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1952.
Kaplan, R. D. The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century.
New York: Random House, 1996.
——. "Was Democracy Just a Moment?" Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1997, pp. 55-80.
——. "The Lawless Frontier." Atlantic Monthly, March 2000, pp. 66-80.
——. "Looking the World in the Eye." Atlantic Monthly, May 2001, pp. 68-82.
——. "The World in 2005." Atlantic Monthly, March 2002, pp. 54-56.
——. "Supremacy by Stealth." Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 2003, pp. 65-83.
Kaufmann, W. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: New American
Library, 1956.
——. Critique of Religion and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1958.
——. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ. Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1974.
Kellehear, A. Experiences near Death: Beyond Medicine and Religion. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1996.
Keller, B. "The Thinkable." New York Times Magazine, May 4, 2003.
Kennedy, P. Preparing for the Twenty-first Century. New York: Vintage, 1993.
Kershaw, I. Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 317
Kertzer, J. I. "The Modern Use of Ancient Lies." New York Times, May 9, 2002.
Kim, J. "Epiphenomenal and Supervenient Causation." In The Nature of Mind, ed. D.
Rosenthal. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991.
——. "The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism." In Supervenience and Mind.
Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993.
——. Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental
Causation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.
Kircher, T. T. J., C. Senior, M. L. Phillips, P. J. Benson, E. T. Bullmore, M. Brammer, A.
Simmons, S. C. R. Williams, M. Bartels, and A. S. David. "Towards a Functional
Neuroanatomy of Self Processing: Effects of Faces and Words." Cognitive Brain
Research 10 (2000): 133-44.
Kircher, T. T J., C. Senior, M. L. Phillips, S. Rabe-Hesketh, P. J. Benson, E. T. Bullmore,
M. Brammer, A. Simmons, M. Bartels, and A. S. David. "Recognizing One's Own
Face." Cognition 78 (2001): B1-B15.
Klagge, J. C. "Wittgenstein and Neuroscience." Synthese 78 (1989): 319-43.
Klein, E. Conversations with the Sphinx: Paradoxes in Physics. Translated by D. Le
Vay. London: Souvenir Press, 1996.
Korsgaard, C. M. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1996.
Krakauer, J. Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. New York: Doubleday,
2003.
Kripke, S. "From Naming and Necessity." In The Nature of Mind, ed. D. Rosenthal.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991.
Krishnamurti, J., and D. Bohm. The Ending of Time. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco,
1985.
Kristof, N. "When Prudery Kills." New York Times, Oct. 8, 2003.
Krugman, P. "'Some Crazy Guy.'" New York Times, June 13, 2003.
Kuhn, T. S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962; reprint, Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1970.
Kurzweil, R. The Age of Spiritual Machines. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Lahav, R. "The Conscious and the Non-conscious: Philosophical Implications of Neuropsychology."
In Mindscapes: Philosophy, Science, and the Mind, ed. M. Carrier
and P. K. Machamer. Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.
Lanier, J. "Death: The Skeleton Key of Consciousness Studies?" Journal of Consciousness
Studies 4, no. 2 (1997): 181-85.
Lazare, D. "False Testament: Archeology Refutes the Bible's Claim to History."
Harper's, March 2002, pp. 39-47.
Lehrer, K. Self Trust. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997.
Lelyveld, J. "All Suicide Bombers Are Not Alike." New York Times Magazine, Oct.
28, 2001.
Leslie, J. The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction. London:
Routledge, 1996.
318 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Levi, P. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Levine, J. "On Leaving Out What It's Like." In The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical
Debates, ed. N. Block, O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1997.
Levy, L. W. Blasphemy. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1993.
Lewis, B. "The Roots of Muslim Rage." Atlantic Monthly, March 1990, pp. 47-60.
——. "The Revolt of Islam." New Yorker, Nov. 19, 2001, pp. 50-63.
——. The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. New York: Modern
Library, 2003.
Lewis, D. "Mad Pain and Martian Pain." In The Nature of Mind, ed. D. Rosenthal.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991.
——. "What Experience Teaches." In The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical
Debates, ed. N. Block, O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.
Lewontin, R. C. "The Evolution of Cognition: Questions We Will Never Answer." In
Invitation to Cognitive Science. Vol. 4, Methods, Models, and Conceptual Issues,
ed. D. Scarborough and S. Sternberg. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.
——. It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions.
New York: New York Review Books, 2000.
Libet, B. "A Testable Field Theory of Mind-Brain Interaction." Journal of Consciousness
Studies 1, no. 1 (1994): 119-26.
——. "Do We Have Free Will?" Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, nos. 8-9
(1999): 47-57.
——. "'Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain': Commentary on John Searle's
Article." Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, no. 8 (2001): 59-65.
——. "The Timing of Mental Events: Libet's Experimental Findings and Their
Implications." Consciousness and Cognition 11 (2002): 291-99.
Lockwood, M. Mind, Brain & the Quantum: The Compound "I." Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
——. "Unsensed Phenomenal Qualities: A Defense." Journal of Consciousness
Studies 5, no. 4 (1998): 415-18.
Logothetis, N. K. "Vision: A Window on Consciousness." Scientific American Special
Edition 12, no. 1 (2002): 18-25.
Logothetis, N. K., et al. "Neurophysiological Investigation of the Basis of the fMRI
Signal." Nature 412 (July 12, 2001): 150-57.
Longchenpa. Kindly Bent to Ease Us. 3 vols. Translated by H. V. Guenther. Berkeley,
Calif.: Dharma Publishing, 1975.
——. The Four-Themed Precious Garland. Translated by A. Berzin. Dharmsala:
Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1978.
——. Buddha Mind: An Anthology of Longchen Rabjam's Writings on Dzogpa
Chenpo. Translated by Tulku Thondup Rinpoche, edited by H. Talbott. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1989.
Luria, A. R. The Mind of a Mnemonist. Translated by L. Solotaroff. 1968; reprint,
Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 319
Lyon, J., and P. Corner. Altered Fates: Gene Therapy and the Retooling of Human
Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Lyons, R, J. R. Hanley, and J. Kay. "Anomia for Common Names and Geographical
Names with Preserved Retrieval of Names of People: A Semantic Memory Disorder."
Cortex 38, no. 1 (2002): 23-35 [abstract].
Maclntyre, A. The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis. Bristol, Eng.: Thoemmes
Press, 1958.
Mackay, C. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. 1841;
reprint, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993.
Maguire, E. A., R. S. J. Frackowiak, and C. D. Frith. "Recalling Routes around London:
Activation of the Right Hippocampus in Taxi Drivers." Journal of Neuroscience 17
(1997): 7103-10.
Maguire, E. A., C. D. Frith, and R. G. Morris. "The Functional Neuroanatomy of
Comprehension and Memory: The Importance of Prior Knowledge." Brain 122
(1999): 1839-50.
Maha Boowa Nanasampanno. Straight from the Heart: Thirteen Talks on the Practice
of Meditation. Translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Bangkok: P. Sumphan
Panich, 1987.
——. 1988. Things as They Are. Translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Bangkok: P.
Samphan Panich, 1988.
Mahasi Sayadaw. Buddhist Meditation and Its Forty Subjects. Translated by U Pe
Thin. N.p.: Buddha Sasana Council Press, 1957.
——. Thoughts on the Dhamma. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society,
1983.
——. The Progress of Insight. Translated by Nyanaponika Thera. Kandy, Sri
Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1985.
Malachowski, A., ed. Reading Rorty. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
Manchester, W. A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1992.
Margulis, L., and D. Sagan. Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution.
New York: Springer-Verlag, 1997.
Marks, C. E. Commissurotomy, Consciousness, and the Unity of Mind. Montgomery,
Vt.: Bradford Books, 1980.
Marr, D. "Understanding Complex Information-Processing Systems." In Vision. New
York: W. H. Freeman, 1982.
Martin, J. H. Neuroanatomy: Text and Atlas. Stamford, Conn.: Appleton and Lange,
1996.
Masson, J. M. My Father's Guru. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993.
Masson, J. M., and S. McCarthy. When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals.
New York: Delacorte Press, 1995.
Mates, B., ed. and trans. The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996.
320 BIBLIOGRAPHY
McCormick, P. J., ed. Star Making: Realism, Anti-realism, and Irrealism. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1996.
McGinn, C. "Consciousness and Space." Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3
(1995): 220-30.
——. "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?" In The Nature of Consciousness:
Philosophical Debates, ed. N. Block, O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1997.
——. The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World. New York:
Basic Books, 1999.
McKenna, T. The Archaic Revival. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991.
——. Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge. New York:
Bantam Books, 1992.
——. True Hallucinations. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993.
Medin, D. L. "Concepts and Conceptual Structure." American Psychologist 44
(1989): 1469-81.
Mele, A. R. "Real Self-Deception." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1997): 91-102.
——. "Understanding and Explaining Real Self-Deception." Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 20 (1997): 127-36.
——. Self-Deception Unmasked. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001.
Melton, J. G., ed. American Religious Creeds. 3 vols. New York: Triumph Books, 1991.
Menand, L. The Metaphysical Club: The Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2001.
Merikle, P. M., and M. Daneman. "Conscious vs. Unconscious Perception." In The
New Cognitive Neurosciences. 2d ed. Edited by M. S. Gazzaniga. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2000.
Metzger, B. M., and M. D. Coogan., eds. The Oxford Companion to the Bible. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1993.
Miller, W. I. Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence.
Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993.
——. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997.
Minsky, M. The Society of Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.
——. "Consciousness Is a Big Suitcase." 1998 Interview, www.edge.org/3rd_cul
ture/minsky/index.html
Mischel, W. Introduction to Personality. 6th ed. Orlando: Harcourt Brace College
Publishers, 1999.
Mishra, P. "The Other Face of Fanaticism." New York Times Magazine, Feb. 2,
2003.
Mitchell, S. The Gospel according to Jesus. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Monk, R. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: Viking Penguin,
1990.
——. Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921. New York: Free Press,
1996.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 321
Montaigne. The Complete Works of Montaigne. Translated by D. M. Frame. Stanford:
Stanford Univ. Press, 1943.
Murphy, J. P. Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press,
1990.
Murphy, M. P., and L. A. J. O'Neill, eds. What Is Life? The Next Fifty Years: Speculations
on the Future of Biology. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995.
Murti, T. The Central Philosophy of Buddhism. London: Allen and Unwin, 1974.
Naess, A. A Skeptical Dialogue on Induction. Assen, Netherlands: Vangorcum, 1984.
Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna's Seventy Stanzas: A Buddhist Psychology of Emptiness.
Translated by D. R. Comito. Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1987.
——. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika.
Edited and Translated by J. L. Garfield. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1995.
Nagel, T. Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979.
——. The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986.
——. What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1987.
——. Other Minds. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995.
——. The Last Word. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997.
Nahmias, E. A. "Verbal Reports on the Contents of Consciousness: Reconsidering
Introspectionist Methodology." Psyche, Oct. 2002.
Naipaul, V. S. Among the Believers: An Islamic journey. New York: Vintage, 1981.
——. India: A Million Mutinies Now. New York: Viking, 1990.
Namgyal, T. T. Mahamudra: The Quintessence of Mind and Meditation. Translated
by L. P. Lhalungpa. Boston: Shambhala, 1986.
Nanamoli Thera, ed. Selected Buddhist Texts. Vol. 1. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication
Society, 1958.
——, trans. Mindfulness of Breathing. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication
Society, 1982.
Nanamoli, Bhikkhu, trans. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New
Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya. Edited by Bhikkhu Bodhi. Boston: Wisdom
Publications, 1995.
Narada Maha Thera. The Buddha and His Teachings. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist
Publication Society, 1973.
Newberg, A. B. "The Neuropsychology of Religious and Spiritual Experience." Journal
of Consciousness Studies 7, nos. 11-12 (2000): 251-66.
Newberg, A. B., A. Alavi, M. Baime, M. Pourdehnad, J. Santanna, and E. d'Aquili.
"The Measurement of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow during the Complex Cognitive
Task of Meditation: A Preliminary SPECT Study." Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging
Section 106 (2001): 113-22.
Nichols, M. J., and W. T. Newsome. "The Neurobiology of Cognition." Nature 402
(1999): SUPP,C35-C38.
322 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Niemeier, M., J. Douglas Crawford, and D. B. Tweed. "A Bayesian Approach to
Change Blindness." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 956 (2002):
474-75. [abstract]
Nietzsche, F. The Portable Nietzsche. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Viking,
1954.
——. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Penguin
Books, 1954.
——. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage
Books, 1966.
——. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Translated by W. Kaufmann.
New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
——. The Birth of Tragedy. New York: Dover, 1995.
Nikhilananda, Swami, trans. The Bhagavad Gita. New York: Ramakrishna-
Vivekananda Center, 1979.
Nisargadatta Maharaj. J Am That. Translated by M. Frydman, edited by S. S. Dikshit.
Durham, N.C.: Acorn Press, 1973.
——. Prior to Consciousness. Edited by J. Dunn. Durham, N.C.: Acorn Press, 1985.
——. The Nectar of the Lord's Feet. Edited by R. Powell. Great Britain: Element
Books, 1987.
——. The Ultimate Medicine. Edited by R. Powell. San Diego: Blue Dove Press,
1994.
Niznik, J., and J. T. Sanders, eds. Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty,
and Kolakowski. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996.
Norbu, N. The Small Golden Key. Translated by L. Anderson. New York: Jewel Publishing
House, 1977.
——. The Crystal and the Way of Light. Edited by J. Shane. New York: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1986.
——. The Cycle of Day and Night. Translated by J. M. Reynolds. New York: Station
Hill Press, 1987.
——. Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State. Translated by J. Shane. London: Arkana,
1989.
——. Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light. Edited by M. Katz. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1992.
Norbu, T. Magic Dance. New York: Jewel Publishing House, 1981.
——. White Sail. Boston: Shambhala, 1992.
Norretranders, T. The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size. New York:
Viking, 1998.
Nozick, R. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981.
Nuland, S. B. How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1994.
Nyanaponika Thera. The Heart of Buddhist Meditation. York Beach, Maine: Samuel
Weiser, 1962.
BIB L I O G R A P H Y 323
——. The Vision of Dhamma. Edited by Bhikkhu Bodhi. York Beach, Maine:
Samuel Weiser, 1986.
——, ed. The Three Basic Facts of Existence. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication
Society 1974.
——, ed. The Road to Inner Freedom: A Survey of the Buddha's Teachings. Kandy
Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1982.
Nyanatiloka. Fundamentals of Buddhism. Bauddha Sahitya Sabha, 1949.
——. The Buddha's Path to Deliverance. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication
Society 1952.
——, trans, and ed. The Word of the Buddha. Santa Barbara: J. F. Rowny Press, 1959.
Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche. Natural Great Perfection. Translated by Surya Das.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1995.
O'Brien, C. C. On the Eve of Millennium: The Future of Democracy through an Age
of Unreason. New York: Free Press, 1994.
Ojemann, G., J. Ojemann, E. Lettich, and M. Berger. "Cortical Language Localization
in Left, Dominant Hemisphere: An Electrical Stimulation Mapping Investigation
in 117 Patients." Journal of Neurosurgery 71, no. 3 (1989): 316-26.
Oltmanns, T. F., J. M Neale, and G. C. Davison. Case Studies in Abnormal Psychology.
New York: John Wiley, 1999.
Ornstein, R. The Right Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997.
Orwell, G. "Reflections on Gandhi." In The Oxford Book of Essays, ed. J. Gross.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991.
Osherson, D. N. "Probability Judgment." In An Invitation to Cognitive Science:
Thinking, ed. E. E. Smith and D. N. Osherson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Osherson. D.N., D. Perani, S. Cappa, T. Schnur, F. Grassi, and F. Fazio. "Distinct Brain
Loci in Deductive versus Probabilistic Reasoning." Neuropsychologia 36 (1998):
369-76.
Osserman, R. Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Explanation of the Cosmos.
New York: Doubleday, 1995.
Ott, H. Martin Heidegger: A Political Life. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
Ott, J. Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History. Kennewick,
Wash.: Natural Products Company, 1993.
Padmasambhava. Self-liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness. Translated
by J. M. Reynolds. New York: Station Hill Press, 1989.
——. Dakini Teachings: Padmasambhava's Oral Instructions to Lady Tsogyal.
Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Boston: Shambhala, 1990.
——. Advice from the Lotus-Born. Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Boudhanath:
Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 1994.
——. The Light of Wisdom with Commentary by Jamgon Kongtrul the Great.
Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Boston: Shambhala, 1995.
Pape, R. A. "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism." American Political Science
Review 97, no. 3 (2003): 20-32.
324 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Pascal, B. Pensées. Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer. New York: Penguin Books,
1966.
Patrul Rinpoche. The Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones with Commentary by
Dilgo Khyentse. Boston: Shambhala, 1992.
——. Kunzang Lama'i Shelung: The Words of My Perfect Teacher. San Francisco:
HarperCollins, 1994.
Pelikan, J. Jesus through the Centuries. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.
Peng, K., and R. E. Nisbett. "Culture, Dialectics, and Reasoning about Contradiction."
American Psychologist 54 (1999): 741-54.
Pennisi, E. "Are Our Primate Cousins 'Conscious'?" Science 284 (1999): 2073-76.
Penrose, R. The Emperor's New Mind. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989.
——. "Mechanisms, Microtubules, and the Mind." Journal of Consciousness Studies
1, no. 2 (1994): 241-49.
——. The Large, the Small and the Human Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1997.
Perry, J. A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. Indianapolis: Hackett,
1978.
——. Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.
——, ed. Personal Identity. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975.
Peters, E. Inquisition. New York: Free Press, 1988.
Pinchbeck, D. Breaking Open the Head. New York: Broadway Books, 2002.
Pipes, D. Militant Islam Reaches America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.
Planck, M. Where Is Science Going? Translated and edited by J. Murphy. 1933;
reprint, Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1981.
Plato. The Complete Works. Edited by J. M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.
Pollack, K. H. "'The Crisis of Islam': Faith and Terrorism in the Muslim World." New
York Times Book Review, April 6, 2003.
Popper, K. R. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. 1959; reprint, London: Routledge,
1995.
——. Objective Knowledge. 1972; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
Popper, K. R., and J. C. Eccles. The Self and Its Brain. 1977; reprint, London: Routledge,
1993.
Posner, R. A. The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory. Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1999.
Poundstone, W. Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge.
New York: Anchor Press, 1988.
——. Prisoner's Dilemma. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Price, A. F., and W. Mou-Lam., trans. The Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui-Neng.
Boston: Shambhala, 1990.
Prinz, J. "Functionalism, Dualism and Consciousness." In Philosophy and the Neurosciences,
ed. W. Bechtel, P. Mandik, J. Mundale, and R. S. Stufflebeam. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 325
Pryse-Phillips, W. The Oxford Companion to Clinical Neurology. Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2003.
Putnam, R. A., ed. The Cambridge Companion to William James. New York: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1997.
Quattrone, G. A., and A. Tversky. "Self-Deception and the Voter's Illusion." In The
Multiple Self, ed. J. Elster. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985.
Quine, W. V. From a Logical Point of View. 1953; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1994.
Quine, W. V. Pursuit of Truth. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990.
Radin, D. The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. New
York: HarperCollins, 1997.
Ramachandran, V. S., and S. Blakeslee. Phantoms in the Brain. New York: William
Morrow, 1998.
Ramachandran, V. S., and W. Hirstein. "Three Laws of Qualia: What Neurology Tells
Us about the Biological Functions of Consciousness."Journal of Consciousness
Studies 4, nos. 5-6 (1997): 429-57.
Ramana Maharshi. Talks with Sri Ramana. Tiruvannamalai: Sri Ramanasramam,
1955.
——. The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi. Edited by A. Osborne. York
Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1972.
——. Self-enquiry. Translated by T. M. P. Mahadevan. Tiruvannamalai: Sri
Ramanasramam, 1981.
Reber, A. S. "The Cognitive Unconscious: An Evolutionary Perspective." Consciousness
and Cognition 1 (1992): 93-133.
Rees, G., G. Kreiman, and C. Koch. "Neural Correlates of Consciousness in Humans."
Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3 (2002): 261-70.
Rees, M. Our Final Hour. New York: Basic Books, 2003.
Rhodes, R. Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.
Rips, L. "Deduction and Cognition." In An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Thinking,
ed. E. E. Smith and D. N. Osherson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Rorty, R. The Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,
1982.
——. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers. Vol. 1. Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991
——. "Universality and Truth." 1994 MS.
——. Hope in Place of Knowledge: The Pragmatics Tradition in Philosophy. Taipei:
Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, 1999.
Rosenbaum, R. Explaining Hitler. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
Rosenthal, D. The Nature of Mind. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991.
Roskies, A. L. "Yes, But Am I Free?" Nature Neuroscience 4 (2001): 1161.
Roy, A. War Talk. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2003.
326 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rumelhart, D. E. "Schemata: The Building Blocks of Cognition." In Theoretical Issues
in Reading Comprehension, ed. R. J. Spiro, B. C. Bruce, and W. F. Brewer. Hillsdale,
N.J.: Erlbaum, 1980.
——. "The Architecture of Mind: A Connectionist Approach." In Foundations of
Cognitive Science, ed. M. I. Posner. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.
Russell, B. The Problems of Philosophy. 1912; reprint, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990.
——. Religion and Science. 1935; reprint, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997.
——. A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945.
——. Why I Am Not a Christian. Edited by P. Edwards. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1957.
Russell, J. "At Two with Nature: Agency and the Development of Self-World Dualism."
In The Body and The Self, ed. J. L. Bermudez, A. Marcel, and N. Eilan. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1995.
Ruthven, M. Islam in the World. 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000.
Ryle, G. The Concept of Mind. 1949; reprint, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984.
Sacks, O. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. New York: Harper Perennial,
1970.
——. An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. New York: Vintage,
1995.
Saddhatissa, H., trans. The Sutta-Nipata. London: Curzon Press, 1985.
Sagan, C. The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York:
Random House, 1995.
Sagan, C, and A. Druyan. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. New York: Random
House, 1992.
Said, E. W. "The Clash of Ignorance." Nation, Oct. 4, 2001.
——. "Suicidal Ignorance." CounterPunch, Nov. 18, 2001.
——. "An Unacceptable Helplessness." Al-Ahram, Jan. 16-22, 2003.
——. "A Monumental Hypocricy." CounterPunch, Feb. 15, 2003.
Santayana, G. Skepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy.
New York: Dover, 1923.
——. Persons and Places. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1963.
Sartre, J. P. The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness.
Translated by F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick. New York: Hill and Wang, 1937.
——. Being and Nothingness. Translated by H. E. Barnes. 1956; reprint, New York:
Gramercy Books, 1994.
Saxe, R., and N. Kanwisher. "People Thinking about Thinking People: The Role of the
Temporo-parietal Junction in Theory of Mind.'" Neuolmage 19 (2003): 1835-42.
Scalia, A. "God's Justice and Ours." First Things, May 2002, pp. 17-21.
Schell, J. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
——. The Unfinished Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 2001.
Schilpp, P. A., ed. The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court,
1944.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 327
——, ed. Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist. London: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1949.
Schlosser, E. Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black
Market. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
Schneewind, J. B. "What Has Moral Philosophy Done for Us . . . Lately?'' Undated MS.
Scholem, G. Kabbalah. New York: Dorsette Press, 1974.
Schooler, J. W., and J. Melcher. "The Ineffability of Insight." In The Creative Cognition
Approach, ed. S. M. Smith, T. B. Ward, and R. A. Finke. Cambridge: MIT Press,
1995.
Schopenhauer, A. Essays and Aphorisms. Edited and translated by R. J. Hollingdale.
London: Penguin Books, 1970.
Schrödinger, E. My View of the World. Translated by C. Hastings. Woodbridge,
Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1961.
——. What Is Life, Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches. Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967.
Searle, J. R. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
——. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press, 1995.
——. "Consciousness and the Philosophers." New York Review of Books, March 6,
1997, pp. 43-50.
——. The Mystery of Consciousness. New York: New York Review Books, 1997.
——. "Consciousness." Annual Review of Neuroscience 23 (2000): 557-78.
——. "Further Reply to Libet." Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, no. 8 (2001):
63-65.
——. "Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology." 2001 MS.
Sereny, G. Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience. New York: Vintage,
1974.
Shabkar, Lama. Flight of the Garuda. Translated E. P. Kunsang. Katmandu: Rangjung
Yeshe Publications, 1986.
——. The Life of Shabkar. Translated by Matthieu Ricard. Albany: State Univ. of
New York Press, 1994.
Shafir, E., and A. Tversky "Decision Making." In An Invitation to Cognitive Science:
Thinking, ed. E. E. Smith and D. N. Osherson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Shankaracharya. The Crest-Jewel of Discrimination. Translated by Swami Prabhavananda
and C. Isherwood. Hollywood, Calif.: Vedanta Press, 1947.
——. Self-knowledge. Translated and edited by Swami Nikhilananda. Mylapore,
Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1987.
Shattuck, R. Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1996.
Sheldrake, R. Seven Experiments That Could Change the World. New York: Riverhead
Books, 1995.
——. The Sense of Being Stared At, and Other Aspects of the Extended Mind.
New York: Crown, 2003.
328 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sheldrake, R., T. McKenna, and R. Abraham. The Evolutionary Mind: Trialogues at
the Edge of the Unthinkable. Santa Cruz, Calif.: Trialogue Press, 1998.
Shoemaker, S. "Self-reference and Self-awareness." Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968):
——. "Functionalism and Qualia." In The Nature of Mind, ed. D. Rosenthal.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991.
Simon, H. A. "What Is 'Explanation' of Behavior?" Psychological Science 3 (1992):
150-61.
Simons, D. J., C. F. Chabris, T. Schnur, D. T. Levin. "Evidence for Preserved Representations
in Change Blindness." Consciousness and Cognition 11 (2002): 78-97.
Singer, P. Writings on an Ethical Life. New York: Ecco Press, 2000.
Singer, W. "Striving for Coherence." Nature 397 (Feb. 4,1999): 391-93.
Sluga, H. "'Whose House Is That?': Wittgenstein on the Self." In The Cambridge
Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. H. Sluga and D. G. Stern. Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1996.
Smith, D. W. "The Structure of (Self-) Consciousness." Topoi 5 (1986): 149-56.
Smith, E. E. "Concepts and Categorization." In An Invitation to Cognitive Science:
Thinking, ed. E. E. Smith and D. N. Osherson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Smith, G. H. Atheism: The Case against God. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1979.
Spence, S. A., and C. D. Frith. "Towards a Functional Anatomy of Volition." Journal
of Consciousness Studies 6, no. 8-9 (1999): 11-29.
Sperry, R. W. "Cerebral Organization and Behavior." Science 133 (1961): 1749-57.
——. "A Powerful Paradigm Made Stronger." Neuropsychologia 36 (1998):
1063-68.
Sperry, R. W., D. Zaidel, and D. Zaidel. "Self Recognition and Social Awareness in the
Deconnected Minor Hemisphere." Neuropsychologia 17 (1979): 153-66.
Squire, L. R., and E. R. Kandel. Memory: From Mind to Molecules. New York: Scientific
American Library, 2000.
Squires, E. J. "Quantum Theory and the Need for Consciousness." Journal of Consciousness
Studies 1, no. 2 (1994): 201-4.
Stanovich, K. E., and R. F. West. "Individual Differences in Rational Thought." Journal
of Experimental Psychology: General 127 (1998): 161-88.
Stcherbatsky, T. The Buddhist Conception of Nirvana. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1968.
Stevenson, I. Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. Charlottesville: Univ. Press
of Virginia, 1974.
——. Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy. Charlottesville: Univ.
Press of Virginia, 1984.
——. Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997.
Storr, A. Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus. New York:
Free Press, 1996.
Stroud, B. The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1984.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 329
Swain, J. The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber. New York: Dorset Press, 1931.
Swinburne, R. The Existence of God. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.
Tarnas, R. The Passion of the Western Mind. New York: Harmony Books, 1991.
Taylor, E. William fames on Consciousness beyond the Margin. Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1996.
Teilhard de Chardin, P. Toward the Future. Translated by R. Hague. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1973.
Tenzin Gyatzo (Dalai Lama). The Buddha Nature: Death and Eternal Soul in Buddhism.
Woodside, Calif.: Bluestar Communications, 1996.
——. Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying: An Exploration of Consciousness with the
Dalai Lama. Edited by F. J. Varela. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1997.
Thompson-Schill, S. L., G. K. Aguirre, M. D'Esposito, and M. J. Farah. "A Neural
Basis for Category and Modality Specificity of Semantic Knowledge." Neuropsychologia
37 (1999): 671-76.
Thorne, K. S. Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy. New York:
W. W. Norton, 1994.
Tillich, P. Dynamics of Faith. New York: Harper and Row, 1957.
——. A History of Christian Thought. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.
Tipler, F. The Physics of Immortality. New York: Doubleday, 1994.
Tononi, G., and G. M. Edelman. "Consciousness and Complexity." Science's Compass
282 (Dec. 4,1998): 1846-51.
Trachtenberg, J. The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its
Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1943.
Trevena, J. A., and J. Miller. "Cortical Movement Preparation before and after a Conscious
Decision to Move." Consciousness and Cognition 11 (2002): 162-90.
Tsele Natsok Rangdrol. The Lamp of Mahamudra. Translated by E. P. Kunsang.
Boston: Shambhala, 1989.
——. The Mirror of Mindfulness: The Cycle of the Four Bardos. Translated by E.
P. Kunsang. Boston: Shambhala, 1989.
——. The Circle of the Sun. Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Hong Kong: Rangjung
Yeshe Publications, 1990.
——. Empowerment and the Path of Liberation. Translated by E. P. Kunsang.
Hong Kong: Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 1993.
——. The Heart of the Matter. Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Hong Kong: Rangjung
Yeshe Publications, 1996.
Tuan, Y. Segmented Worlds and Self: Group Life and Individual Consciousness. Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982.
Tversky, A. "Features of Similarity." Psychological Review 84 (1977): 327-52.
Tye, M. Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal
Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
U Ba Khin. The Essentials of Buddha Dhamma in Meditative Practice. Kandy, Sri
Lanka. Buddhist Publication Society, 1981.
330 BIBLIOGRAPHY
U Pandita, Sayadaw. In This Very Life: The Liberation Teachings of the Buddha.
Translated by U Aggacitta, edited by K. Wheeler. Boston: Wisdom Publications,
1992.
Unger, P. Living High & Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence. Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1996.
Urgyen Rinpoche, Tulku. Vajra Heart. Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Katmandu:
Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 1988.
——. Repeating the Words of the Buddha. Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Katmandu:
Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 1992.
——. Rainbow Painting. Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Boudhanath, Nepal:
Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 1995.
——. As It Is. Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Boudhanath, Nepal: Rangjung Yeshe
Publications, 1999.
Van Gulick, R. "Understanding the Phenomenal Mind: Are We All Just Armadillos?
Part I: Phenomenal Knowledge and Explanatory Gaps." In The Nature of Consciousness:
Philosophical Debates, ed. N. Block, O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.
Varela, F. "Neurophenomenology." Journal of Consciousness Studies 3, no. 4 (1996):
330-49.
Varela, E, E. Thompson, and E. Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and
Human Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
Vermes, G. The Religion of ]esus the Jew. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.
Vogeley, K., M. Kurthen, P. Falkai, and W. Maier. "Essential Functions of the Human
Self Model Are Implemented in the Prefrontal Cortex." Consciousness and Cognition
8 (1999): 343-63.
Vogeley, K., P. Bussfeld, A. Newen, S. Herrmann, F. Happe, P. Falkai, W. Maier, N. J.
Shah, G. R. Fink, and K. Zilles. "Mind Reading: Neural Mechanisms of Theory of
Mind and Self -perspective." NeuroImage 14 (2001): 170-81.
Voltaire. Philosophical Dictionary. Edited and Translated by T. Besterman. London:
Penguin Books, 1972.
Wallace, B. A. Choosing Reality: A Contemplative View of Physics and the Mind.
Boston: New Science Library, 1989.
——. "Intersubjectivity in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism." Journal of Consciousness
Studies 8, nos. 5-7 (2001): 209-30.
Walshe, M., trans. The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Digha
Nikaya. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1987.
Wansbrough, H. The New Jerusalem Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
Washington, P. Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and
Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America. New York: Schocken Books, 1993.
Watson, G., ed. Free Will. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982.
Watts, A. "Psychedelics and Religious Experience." California Law Review 56, no. 1
(1968): 74-85.
BIB L I O G R A P H Y 33 1
Weber, M. The Sociology of Religion. 1922; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.
Weil, S. Waiting for God. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.
Weinberg, S. "What Price Glory." New York Review of Books, Nov. 6, 2003, pp. 55-60.
Weiskrantz, L. "Prime-sight and Blindsight." Consciousness and Cognition 11
(2002): 568-81.
Whitebread, C. H. "The History of the Non-medical Use of Drugs in the United
States." Journal of Cognitive Liberties 1, no. 3 (2000): 29-64.
Whitehead, A. N. Religion in the Making. 1926; reprint, New York: Fordham Univ.
Press, 1996.
Wiesel, E. Night. Translated by S. Rodway. New York: Bantam Books, 1960.
Wigner, E. "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences."
Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, no. 1 (1960).
Wilber, K. Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala, 1995.
Wills, G. "Before the Holocaust." New York Times Book Review, Sept. 23, 2001.
——. "With God on His Side." New York Times Magazine, March 30, 2003.
Wilson, A. N. Jesus: A Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.
——. Paul: The Mind of the Apostle. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
Wilson, E. O. In Search of Nature. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996.
Wistrich, R. S. Anti-Semitism: The Longest Hatred. New York: Schocken Books, 1991.
Wittgenstein, L. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F.
McGuinness. London: Routledge, 1922 .
——. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1953.
——. On Certainty. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, translated
by D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.
Wrangham, R., and D. Peterson. Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human
Violence. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
Wright, R. The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. New
York: Pantheon Books, 1994.
Wu, M., and P. W. Cheng. "Why Causation Need Not Follow from Statistical Association:
Boundary Conditions for the Evaluation of Generative and Preventative
Causal Powers." Psychological Science 10 (1999): 92-97.
Wyman, D. S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust,
1941-1945. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
Yakovlev, A. N. A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
2002.
Zakaria, F. The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. New
York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
Zuckerman, M. B. "Graffiti on History's Walls." U.S. News and World Report, Nov.
3, 2003.
Acknowledgments
I BEGAN writing this book on September 12, 2001. Many friends
read and commented on a long essay that I produced in those first
weeks of collective grief and stupefaction, and that text became the
basis for this book. I am very grateful for this early feedback. I am
also indebted to those colleagues and advisers who patiently awaited
my return to scientific research (and to my senses). Several of them
generously reviewed two chapters on the brain that did not find a
place in the finished book. Their comments were much appreciated.
One friend slogged through the text at every stage of its composition,
found an agent for me, and helped craft the book proposal. She
knows who to call should she ever require an organ transplant. My
stepfather also read the entire manuscript, while under considerable
time pressure, and gave very useful notes.
My agent and my editor both played an indispensable role in
getting the book into its present form and on to the far side of a
printer's press. My editor's assistant was a pleasure to work with
throughout the entire process of writing and revisions. My copy editor
at Norton performed a veritable exorcism upon the text, armed
with nothing but a red pencil.
In writing this book, as in all else, I am especially indebted to my
mother and to my fiancee. Both showed a level of dedication to the
project that no theory of genetic or conjugal self-interest can explain.
Their wise and timely interventions spared the good people at Norton
abundant horror. While they are in no way responsible for the
inadequacies of the book, it would be a far lesser book without them.
333
Index
Page numbers beginning with 239 refer to notes.
Abdullah, Prince of Saudi Arabia, 132
abortion, 165-67,177-78
Abraham, 17-18, 94, 226
adultery, 24,155,179
Afghanistan, 53,131,139,164,195,196,
198, 203, 241, 246, 261
Ahmed, Omar Sheikh, 133
AIDS, 150,167-68, 267
Akbar, Mogul Emperor, 261
alchemy, 14, 239-40, 296
alcohol, 161,163, 267, 269, 271
Allah, 14, 27, 30-31, 35
Al Qaeda, 130,141,164,197-98, 246,
261
Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant bombing
(1998), 140-41
anti-Semitism, 79, 87, 92-106,114,123,
134,135, 242, 255, 256, 257-58,
259, 262, 264, 287
Apocalypse, 15, 34, 35, 38, 66,129,180,
224, 266
Arafat, Yasir, 262, 264
Ashcroft, John, 154,155
Augustine, Saint, 85, 95, 97,188, 254-55,
257-58
Bacon, Francis, 186
Balfour Declaration (1917), 153
baptism, 15, 78, 96, 98-99,102-3,105
Baudrillard, Jean, 138-39
behavior:
beliefs as motivations for, 12, 25-30,
35-36, 44-45, 51-53, 54, 57-58,
60-61, 63, 68-69, 92, 226, 244-46,
251
criminal, 78-79,157-64, 268, 270
economic motivations for, 12,17, 27,
32, 52-53
emotional basis of, 192,196,
276-77
irrational, 69, 91-92,160,165, 223
moral, 36,176-78,191-92, 221, 226
perception and, 51, 59, 60-61
political motivations for, 27, 30, 202,
260-61
private vs. public, 44-45, 71-72,
158-60,164,171, 267
rational, 58-59, 68-69, 248, 251
behaviorism, 275, 282
beliefs, 50-79
adherence to, 61-62, 72-73,154-55
bad vs. good, 14-15, 45-46, 74,108,
179-81,184, 221, 224
behavior based on, 12, 25-30, 35-36,
44-45, 51-53, 54, 57-58, 60-61,
63, 68-69, 92, 226, 244-46, 251
"causally active," 59-60, 62-63
coherence of, 53-60, 62, 63, 65,103
common, 24-25, 74-75, 207, 247
core, 15,16-23, 29-36, 72-73, 76, 80,
93-94, 99-100,106,112-24,128,
130,148,154-55, 203, 204, 246,
257, 258, 260-61
cultural differences in, 17-21, 45, 89,
101-2,145,170-71,178-79,190,
225, 242-43
335
3 3 6 INDEX
beliefs (continued)
discourse on, 44-46, 48-49, 65, 67,
75-76, 77,136,138,150,168,176,
189, 223-26
diversity of, 13-15, 34, 51, 71-72,
77-79, 94,108,135,139,151,176,
179, 225, 301
dogmatic, 12,15, 21-22, 25, 39, 41-42,
50-51, 68, 70-73,106,165,176,
203, 220, 223, 225, 243, 260-61,
293-94
doubt and, 59-60, 61, 63, 66-67, 68,
180
education and, 21-22, 48-49, 73-74,
133,180, 224
emotional aspect of, 12, 52-53,192,
196,199, 219-20, 276-77
epistemology of, 35, 50, 60-62, 65, 74,
250-51, 252
evidence for, 26-27, 29, 38-39, 48, 51,
58-73,105,176
faith compared with, 64-67, 68
false vs. true, 51, 60-62, 68,179-80,
278-84
formation of, 50-51, 57-58, 73
inconsistent, 55-60, 63,103
inference as basis of, 54—55, 60-61
justified, 14-15, 59-60, 71-79,165
linguistic basis of, 50-51, 53-54, 56,
57-59, 61, 71,181, 245, 246-47,
248
logical basis of, 51, 52-60, 63,103,
248, 254
magical, 87-92, 97, 99, 106,150,
255-56, 258
memory and, 244-46
modification of, 17-21, 48-49, 54-59,
61, 73,184, 291
perception and, 51, 59, 60-61,198-99,
207-8, 217, 218, 301
political, 13, 27, 30, 45, 78-79,100,
135-39, 241-42, 260-61
private, 44-45, 71-72
psychological aspect of, 42, 55-57, 64,
71-73,100-101
reality represented by, 12, 58-61, 63,
68-69, 71-72,178,180-82, 248,
250-51, 260
rejection of, 61,184,196, 291-93
scientific analysis of, 74, 75-76,
249-50, 252, 271-72
spiritual, 63,181, 215, 216-17
systems of, 55-58, 93-94,103,145,
175,176,178, 248
terminology of, 50-51, 64-67, 68, 244
terrorist, 28-29, 239, 246
tolerance of, 14-15, 22-23, 101-2,115,
134,135,138-39,168,176
transmission of, 21-25, 30-31, 72-73
truth of, 22-24, 60-63, 72, 273, 284
unjustified, 14-15, 25, 51, 65-66, 68,
71-79,171-73,188, 225
utility of, 179-80
violence sanctioned by, 12-14, 43, 44,
52-53, 64, 72, 77-79,187-90,
223-25, 230, 246, 284
see also faith; religion
Berman, Paul, 134-36,138,180, 241
Bernard, Saint, 83
Bible:
authority of, 17-20, 63, 85, 94, 95,
137-38,167, 254
Buddhist texts compared with, 216-17
capital punishment justified by,
154-58, 253
evidence for, 66, 76-77
faith defined in, 64-65, 67
historical significance of, 23-24, 66
inconsistency of, 85, 104—5, 254
knowledge of, 17-18, 20, 23-25, 39,
294, 295
Koran compared with, 23, 24, 34,
35-36, 241
literal interpretation of, 17, 18-19, 34,
66, 68, 69, 82-83, 94,104,180,
240
modernist interpretation of, 16-21,
31-32, 104-5
morality of, 171-72
prophesy in, 35, 38, 95-96, 153-54,
180, 224, 266
study of, 47, 78,104, 253, 294, 295
I N D E X 337
translations of, 64, 82, 253
veracity of, 22-24, 76-77,104-5, 294,
295, 296
as word of God, 17-20, 23, 35-36,
82-83
see also New Testament; Old Testament
bin Laden, Osama:
beliefs of, 28-29, 261
education of, 133,180
hunt for, 155-56
as Islamic terrorist, 28-29, 30, 34-35,
130,133,141,142,143
Muslim support for, 117
political agenda of, 30, 261
biological weapons, 14,144,152,195
biology, 74, 76, 79,165-67,172,180, 226,
242
Blair, Tony, 142
blasphemy, 63, 70-71,155, 224, 241, 262
"blood libel," 85, 87, 97-99,102, 258
Boykin, William G., 155-56
brain:
belief and, 50-52, 54-57, 60, 244-46
consciousness and, 208-9, 213,
275-77, 289-90
embryonic stem cells and, 165-66
ethics and, 175
fly, 167
free will and, 273-74
human, 20, 39-43, 50-53, 54-60, 89,
159,166-67,175,198, 208-9,
212-13, 244-46, 250, 273-77,
288-90, 299-300
ideas and, 288
kuru and, 89
meditation and, 228-29, 299-300
memory and, 50, 243, 245
mind and, 175, 288
self and, 212, 290
soul and, 208, 288-89
"theory of mind" and, 245
vision and, 175,198, 245
Buddha, 215, 293, 296
Buddhism, 114,191, 215-17, 233, 234,
257, 284, 292, 293-94, 296, 298
Bundy, Ted, 267
Burr, William Henry, 254
Bush, George W., 46-47,142,143,155,
158,167
Campbell, Joseph, 296
cannibalism, 89, 255-56
Carlyle, Thomas, 262
categorical imperative, 186, 285
Catharism, 83-85,106
Catholic Church:
anti-Semitism of, 87,102-6, 259
authority of, 81-83
clergy of, 84-85
conversion to, 102-3,105, 242
core beliefs of, 72-73,76, 80, 99-100,
106, 258
excommunication by, 103-5
heresy suppressed by, 17-18, 45-46,
68, 80-87, 99,101, 252, 253-55
Nazi collaboration of, 102-6
papal authority in, 74,76-77, 92,
104-5,106,157
Cautio Criminalis (Spee), 90
censorship, 104—5
Centers for Disease Control, 271
"change blindness," 59
chemical weapons, 14,144,152,195
China, 79,151,184, 241-42, 243
Chomsky, Noam, 139-42,143,146-47
Christianity:
anti-Semitism in, 79, 92-106,114,
255, 257-58
biblical basis of, 17-18
core beliefs of, 16-23,154-55, 204
fundamentalist, 46-47,153-54,155,
240, 256, 271-72
Islam compared with, 32, 45,110, 111,
114,118,121,131, 257
Judaism compared with, 94, 96-97,
256, 257, 259
medieval, 21-22, 70-71, 80-92, 98-99,
101, 111, 132,150,153, 255
as missionary religion, 78, 265
mystical tradition of, 215-17, 293,
294-95, 296
political impact of, 16, 97,153-64
338 INDEX
Christianity (continued)
reform of, 86,103,148, 240, 258
sexual repression in, 95, 97,155,158,
159-60,167-68,188, 284
spiritual authority of, 13,15,16-18,
63,137, 215-17, 225
violence sanctioned by, 46, 106-7
see also Catholic Church; Jesus Christ;
Protestantism
Christian Scientists, 38, 69
civilization:
advances in, 14, 45,144-45,171, 215
"clashes" of, 130-31,135,180
survival of, 12, 26-27, 48-49,144-45,
150-52, 224-25, 227
Western, 29-33,153,179
Clinton, Bill, 141
cognition:
agency and, 173, 272-74
coherence of, 54-55, 59-62
evolution of, 51-52
introspective, 40,191-92, 205, 209-10,
217-20, 257, 274-75, 293-95,
299-301
intuitive, 20,167,171-77,182-84,
185, 226, 279
linguistic basis of, 58-59,181, 246-47,
279-82, 288, 290-91, 298-99
machine-based, 220-21
neurological basis of, 20, 39-42,
51-52, 55, 56, 58,175,198-99,
208-9, 212, 244-46, 273-77,
280-82, 288
rational, 55, 60,182-84, 247, 279, 291
reality as represented in, 60-61, 248,
278-79, 288
scientific investigation of, 51-52,
217-18
collateral damage, 142-47,194-97,198,
203, 287
communism, 79,100, 242
consciousness, 204-21
of animals, 170-71,174-75,177-78,
275-77, 281
dualism in, 207-8, 213, 214, 217, 218,
219, 294-95, 298-99, 301
emergence of, 211-14
experiments in, 204-21, 299
happiness and, 205-7, 212
loss of, 212-14, 289-90
moral understanding and, 173-76
nature of, 207-10, 216-17, 220-21,
227, 235-36
neurological basis of, 20, 39-42,175,
191,198-99, 208-9, 212, 249,
288-90
ordinary, 204, 213, 218-19
phenomenology of, 208-14, 249-50
reality as represented by, 206-8,
210-14, 278-79, 288
reportability of, 208-9, 289-90,
299-300
scientific investigation of, 39-40,
207-9, 212, 217-19, 299-300
of self, see self
subjective nature of, 40-42,177-78,
207, 208-9, 213-14, 290-91,
299-300
transformation of, 39-40, 204, 206,
209-10, 212-14, 215, 300-301
Constantine I, Emperor of Rome, 97
Constitution, U.S., 154
Darwin, Charles, 79, 85-86,105, 242
Davidson, Donald, 247, 279-82
Dawkins, Richard, 229
death:
beliefs about, 36-39, 208, 288
of children, 18, 36, 38, 49,140-41,
146-47,194-95,198, 202, 203
cults of, 123,136, 239
inevitability of, 36-39, 226
life after, 20, 25-29, 32, 36-39, 68, 74,
78, 86-87,177, 208
DeLay, Tom, 156
Dershowitz, Alan, 135,192-94,197,198
Descartes, René, 105,174, 207-8, 275
Deuteronomy, book of, 18, 82, 253
Diamond, Jared, 215, 293
dictatorship, 132, 150-51, 240
disease, 19, 36-37, 89,145,166,191, 243
Dominic, Saint, 84, 85
INDEX 339
Dominican order, 84-85
Durant, Will, 86
Dynamics of Faith, The (Tillich), 65
Dyson, Freeman, 15
Einstein, Albert, 15, 242, 271-72
embryonic stem cells, 165-67, 169
ethics, see morality
Eucharist, 72-73, 80, 99-100
evolution, 51-52,156,172,185-86,
192-99, 230, 236
Exodus, book of, 155
faith:
authority and, 74, 76-77, 254
beliefs compared with, 64-67, 68
consolation of, 39, 66-68, 69
cruelty and, 80-100
death as basis of, 36-39
end of, 23-25, 47-49, 221, 223-27,
300-301
evidence for, 26-27, 29, 38-39, 61-73,
85,105,165,176, 225
idolatrous, 65,118,120,122,160,162
as ignorance, 20-21, 65-66, 72, 89,
107,151,173, 223, 226, 254
"leap of," 23, 62-63, 96
mental illness compared with, 42, 64,
71-73,100-101
metaphysics based on, 11,14, 64-65,
68
power of, 12-49, 64, 67-68,131, 225
privacy and, 158-60,164
reason vs., 15-16,17,19, 21, 38,
43-46, 64, 71-72, 86-87, 95,137,
168, 204, 221, 223, 225, 232-33
redemption by, 15, 44, 69-71,127
as sacred, 16, 43, 46,134,177, 225,
254, 300
self-justification of, 62-63, 64, 71-79,
85
spirituality compared with, 40-41, 65
terminology of, 23, 62-67, 68, 96
truth and, 19-20, 61-63, 67-68
violence sanctioned by, 29-36, 67,
80-100,131, 230, 284
see also beliefs; religion
faith-based initiative, 155, 266-67
Falwell, Jerry, 153, 266
family planning, 150,167-68,169
Faraday, Michael, 86
fatwas, 116, 262
Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 298
First Amendment, 154
Fore people, 89, 255-56
Fourth Lateran Council (1215), 83-84, 99
Franciscan order, 253-54
Francis of Assisi, Saint, 253-54
free will, 173, 272-74
Freud, Sigmund, 37-38
Friedman, Milton, 269-70
Friedman, Thomas, 131
Galileo Galilei, 105
Gandhi, Mohandas K., 202, 287
Genesis, book of, 47
genetics, 177,186,191, 210, 220, 274
genocide, 78-79,100-106,129,134,140,
153
Gettier, Edmund, 250
Global Attitudes Project, 124
Glover, Jonathan, 151,186,195,196
God:
anger of, 70-71,154-55,159-60
belief in, 12-14, 22-23, 29, 30-31, 35,
36, 51, 62-71, 77-79,137,152,
180, 214, 227, 256, 301
as concept, 12-17, 22, 36, 46-47,
66-67, 93-94, 96
doubts about, 29-30, 66-67, 68,180
existence of, 14,16,18, 24, 62-63,
70-71, 82,159-60, 226
infallibility of, 13,16-17,172-73
laws of, 17-18, 21, 27,148,154-58,
170
obedience to, 82-83,148-49
omnipotence of, 17, 66-67, 69, 70-71,
136,173
omniscience of, 13,17,117-18,
159-60,164,173
as personal deity, 12-14,17-18, 36,
66-67, 93-94, 96,177, 226, 227
340 INDEX
God (continued)
as supreme creator, 12-14,17,19, 24,
45, 72,105,117-18,172-73,184,
226, 227
word of, 12-13,16,17-20, 23, 24,
35-36, 39-40, 45, 61, 77, 78,
82-83
Golden Rule, 186,190
Goldhagen, Daniel, 101,102,103
Gospels, 65, 66, 69-70, 82-83, 94-95, 97,
98,137, 203, 210, 241
Gould, Stephen Jay, 15,16
Greece, ancient, 46-47, 291-93
Gulf War, 132,241
Habermas, Jürgen, 181
hadith, 29,109-10,112,115-16, 261, 264
Hager, W. David, 155
Hamas, 133, 256, 260
"Heaven's Gate" cult, 69
Heidegger, Martin, 291
Henry VIII, King of England, 253
Hensley, George, 69
hermeneutics, 296-98
Hess, Rudolf, 100
Hezbollah, 133,164
Himmler, Heinrich, 100-101, 264
Hinduism, 17, 26-28, 94,114, 239, 257,
261, 293, 294
Hitchens, Christopher, 176
Hitler, Adolf, 93,100,102,105,143,173,
202, 230, 291
Hlond, August Cardinal, 259
Holocaust, 66-67, 79, 93,100-106,140,
176,177,184, 202, 259, 264, 287
homosexuality, 158,160,169, 266
honor killings, 184,187-90, 284
"host desecration," 99-100,150, 258
Hudal, Alois, 105
human rights, 18, 78-79,132,135,
192-99
Hume, David, 251
Huntington, Samuel, 32,130
Hussein, Saddam, 128,142,143,151
Hussein (grandson of Mohammed), 149
Husseini, Hajj Amin al-, 264
imperialism, 27-28, 30, 32-33,113,131
India, 26-28, 202, 205, 239, 241
Innocent III, Pope, 84
Inquisition, 79, 80-87, 88, 99,106,107,
252, 253-55, 268
Iran, 263
Iran-Iraq War, 137, 264-65
Iraq, 140,149, 233, 236
Iraq War, 128,143,146,196,198
Isis, 23-24
Islam, 108-52
accomplishments of, 108-9
anti-Semitism in, 92, 93,100,114,
123,134, 258, 262, 264
Christianity compared with, 32, 45,
110, 111, 114,118,121,131, 257
clerics of, 67, 78,116, 262
conversion to, 110,113,115
core beliefs of, 29-36,112-24,128,
130,148,154, 246, 260-61
death penalty in, 16, 24,113,115, 241,
262
economic aspect of, 109,116,133,
147-48,151-52
education and, 109,133,180, 263
fundamentalist, 28-36,110,147-48,
202-3, 240, 256
Hinduism compared with, 26-28,
114
holy sites of, 30, 46, 261
House of, 110,113,115,131
humiliation as issue for, 30,131-34,
241
intolerance by, 15, 29-35,107,109,
112-23,127,131, 225, 256,
261-62
jihad as doctrine of, 28-36,111-13,
124,128-29, 261
Judaism compared with, 32,114,118,
131, 256
law of (sharia), 46,113,115,123,131,
132, 261, 262
liberal critique of, 109-10, 111, 115,
131,134-50, 265
as military threat, 110, 128-31,
151-52, 246
I N D E X 341
as missionary religion, 30-31,110,
113,115
moderate, 31-32,110, 111, 114, 115,
132,133,150-52
in modern world, 125-27,130-31,
136,147-49
moral standards of, 143,148-49
mystical tradition of, 215-17, 293,
294-95, 296
obligations prescribed by, 111, 127
political impact of, 34,109,128,
137-41,147-48,150-52, 202-3,
241, 263
powerlessness as concern of, 130-33
reform of, 116,131,148-49,151-52,
224-25
as "religion of peace," 31-32
salvation in, 15,127
sexual repression in, 127,184,187-90
Shia, 111, 132,149, 241
social impact of, 131-32,133,150-52,
202-3
spiritual authority in, 13,17, 34,148,
215-17
Sunni, 111, 123, 241
terrorism and, 11-12,13, 28-29, 31,
32-34, 72,109,111-12,114,117,
123,180, 227-28, 246, 260-61
U.S. as adversary of, 30,128,180, 264,
265, 266
violence sanctioned by, 11-12, 29-36,
46,109,127,139,147-48,184,
187-90, 227-28, 286-87
Western culture as incompatible with,
29-33, 111, 113-15,117,130-31,
133,137-38,150-52,180, 202-3,
240-41
women in, 46,131-32,136,179,184,
187-90, 203, 224, 284
Islamic Jihad, 164, 260
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 27, 30, 31, 38,
93, 94,109,126,135,153-54, 241,
263, 264
Jainism, 108,148
James, William, 278
Jehovah's Witnesses, 69
Jesuits, 86
Jesus Christ:
apostles of, 65, 82-83, 94-98,137,
156-57,158, 241, 254
crucifixion of, 92-93
divinity of, 35, 38, 68, 74, 87, 92-96,
99,105,106, 203, 301
Jewish identity of, 94, 96-97
miracles of, 95-96
Mohammed compared with, 111
physical appearance of, 76-77
resurrection of, 87-88, 97
second coming of, 38, 97,153-54, 203,
266
transubstantiation of, 72-73, 80,
99-100, 258
virgin birth of, 16, 23, 73, 74, 76, 77,
94-95, 203
John, Gospel according to, 65, 82-83, 97
John XXII, Pope, 254
John Paul II, Pope, 105,106, 260
Jones, Jim, 130
Joyce, James, 298
Judaism:
biblical basis of, 17-18, 95
Christianity compared with, 94,
96-97, 256, 257, 259
core beliefs of, 15, 93-94, 257
God as concept in, 17-18, 66-67,
93-94, 96
intolerance by, 15,18,137, 225, 256
Islam compared with, 32,114,118,
131, 256
mystical tradition of, 215-17, 293,
294-95, 296
spiritual authority of, 13,17, 215-17
violence sanctioned by, 154-55
Julian of Norwich, 69-70
Jung, Carl, 15
Justinian Code, 97
Kabbalism, 294, 300
Kant, Immanuel, 105,186, 277, 285
karma, 202
Kennedy, John F., 189
342 INDEX
Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 116, 262,
264-65
Kierkegaard, Søren, 23, 62-63
Kim Jong II, 151, 224
knowledge:
absolute, 13,16-17, 63,106,172-73
evidence for, 19, 23-25, 35, 65, 71-72,
220
interpretation of, 73-77, 243
limits of, 35, 50, 60-62, 65, 74,
250-51, 252, 291-93
religious, 38-39, 65, 67, 70-71, 225
scientific, 21-22, 45, 89,178
sensory, 41-42, 51-52, 58, 71-72, 206,
248
transcendental, 181-82, 300-301
Koran, 236
authority of, 16, 28-36,115, 294, 295,
296
Bible compared with, 23, 24, 34,
35-36, 241
Buddhist texts compared with, 216-17
historical significance of, 23-24
inconsistency of, 23, 24, 262
infidels condemned by, 31-35,109,
110-13,115-16, 241
jihad sanctioned by, 28-36,112
literal interpretation of, 28-36,110,
115-16,117,148, 240, 294, 295
paradise as described in, 12,13, 29, 31,
33-34,113,117,124,127-28,129,
136, 263, 264
suicide discussed in, 33-34,117,123,
125
textual analysis of, 127, 263
veracity of, 16, 28-29, 31
as word of God, 16, 23, 28-29, 31,
35-36, 67
see also hadith
Kristof, Nicholas, 168, 271
Kuhn, Thomas, 75,178, 252
LaHaye, Tim, 155
Last Word, The (Nagel), 279
laws:
anti-terrorist, 192-94,197-98
criminal, 158-64, 267-71
divine, 17-18, 21, 27,148,154-58,170
Islamic (sharia), 46,113,115,123,131,
132, 261, 262
religious, 85, 97,154-58,162,170
vice, 24,155,158-60,179
Leo XIII, Pope, 104
Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, 191
Leviticus, book of, 155,158
Lewis, Bernard, 34, 111, 112-13,116
Lewy, Guenther, 103
Lindh, John Walker, 133
Lindsey, Hal, 153, 266
logic:
antithesis in, 55
beliefs based on, 51, 52-60, 63,103,
248, 254
contradiction in, 51, 85, 248, 254
evidence based on, 16, 71-72, 85, 221
language and, 249, 279-83
moral, 135,182-84,194, 226
"unfalsifiable propositions" in, 66
Lucius III, Pope, 83
Luke, Gospel according to, 94-95
Luther, Martin, 254
Lysenko, Trofim, 79
Mackay, Charles, 91-92
Mahayana Buddhism, 292
Manicheanism, 83
Mao Tse-tung, 79, 230
Marduk, 24
marijuana, 160-64,169, 267-71
Mark, Gospel according to, 95
Mass, 72-73, 99-100
mathematics, 182-83, 220, 249-50
Matthew, Gospel according to, 94-95, 98,
137, 241
Matzoh of Zion, The (Tlas), 258
Mecca, 46
medicine, 19, 22, 46, 67-68, 69, 70-71,
145,150,165-69,191, 267-68,
285
memory, 243-46
long-term vs. short-term, 50, 243-44
neurological basis of, 58, 59
I N D E X 343
Mendel, Gregor, 79, 242
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 290-91
Mills, James, 266
Mishnah, 97
Miss World Pageant (2002), 46
Mohammed, 29, 30-31, 34, 50,109-10,
111, 121, 216
Mohammed, Khalid Sheikh, 197-98
Montgomery, William, 91-92
Moore, G. E., 283-84
Moore, Roy, 154-55
morality, 170-203
actions based on, 138-47, 224, 285-87
community and, 176-78, 221
comparative, 139-40,146-47
compassion and, 106,117,171-72,
176-78,188,189-92, 223, 275
diversity in, 180-82
evil and, 130,134-35,169,170-71,
173,175,179, 223-24, 225
failure of, 178-79,189-90,199-202
false equivalence in, 139-42,192-99,
265
goodness and, 78,149,184-85, 283-84
guilt and, 80-81,193-99
happiness and, 42,160,170-71,172,
175,177,185-87,190-92, 202,
205-7, 212, 221, 225-27, 259, 272,
283-86, 291-93
intent as issue in, 138-47
intuition and, 20,167,171-77,
182-84,185, 226
liberal, 101-2,115,135,138-39,168
logic of, 135,182-84,194, 226
love and, 20, 24, 85,165,185-92,
219-20, 226, 227, 284
of pacifism, 142,199-203, 287
pragmatic approach to, 179-82, 278,
279-83
reason and, 42-44,170-71,182-84
relativism in, 178-82
religious basis of, 15, 36, 52-53,143,
149,156-58,168-73
science of, 43-44,145-46,173-76,177
self-identity and, 176-77', 185-87, 225
spirituality as basis of, 149, 204, 221
standards of, 36,135,142-47, 226,
285-87
suffering and, 80-87,106-7,117,167,
168-78,185-99, 206-7, 223, 272,
275, 286-87, 292
systems of, 149,157,167,168-71, 277,
285-87
technology and, 13-14, 47-48,142-47,
286
of terrorism, 28-29,109,130,135,
138-47,192-99
torture as issue in, 80-92, 99,105,
176,192-99, 286-87
truth of, 170-73,178-82
violence and, 15, 53,112-13,123-29,
135,142-47,157,161,162-63,
192-203, 287
Moses, 19, 94
Moyers, Bill, 47
My Lai massacre (1968), 144
mysticism, see spirituality
"Myth of the Subjective, The" (Davidson),
280
Nagarjuna, 215
Nagel, Thomas, 279, 280
nationalism, 30-31, 260-61
National Prayer Breakfast, 46-47
naturalistic fallacy, 283-84
Nazism, 79,100-106,114,134,176,177,
178-79, 202, 242, 258, 259, 264,
287
near-death experiences, 288
New Age movements, 205-6, 295-96
New Testament, 14, 64, 65, 66f 69-70,
82-83, 84, 94-96, 97, 98,137,152,
168, 203, 210, 241, 253, 254
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 257
9-11 (Chomsky), 139-41
nuclear weapons, 14, 26-28, 38,128-29,
144,152,153,164,173,195, 242,
266
oil wealth, 147,152, 240-41
Old Testament, 18, 47, 64, 82-83, 94-95,
154-55,156,158, 253, 254
344 I N D E X
Omar, Mullah Mohammed, 155-56
"open question" argument, 283-84
Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Sextus Empiricus),
291-93
pacifism, 125,142,199-203, 287
Padmasambhava, 215, 216-17, 296
Pakistan, 26-28, 241
Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey
Research, 263
Pape, R. A., 260-61
Pascal, Blaise, 62-63, 95-96, 257
Paul, Saint, 95, 96,156-57,158
Pearl, Daniel, 133,197-98, 286-87
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 278
Pentecostals, 69
"perfect weapons," 142-47, 286
Philip VI, King of France, 70-71
Pilate, Pontius, 98
Pinker, Stephen, 58,186
Pius VII, Pope, 92
Pius X, Pope, 104-5
Pius XII, Pope, 104,106
plague, 70-71
Planck, Max, 15
Plotinus, 291
Pollack, Kenneth, 116
Popper, Karl, 66, 75, 252
pornography, 158,159, 267
Poseidon, 16
prayer, 44, 47, 48-49, 63, 69,160, 261
Prohibition, 163, 267
"propositional attitude," 246
prosopagnosia, 244, 288
Protestantism, 86,103, 240, 258
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 93
Pyrrho of Elis, 291-93
Qutb, Sayyid, 123,180
racism, 27-28, 30-31,101,102,145-16
Raymond du Fauga, bishop of Toulouse,
84-85
Reagan, Ronald, 153, 266
reality:
appearance vs., 51, 59, 60-61
beliefs as representations of, 12,
58-61, 63, 68-69, 71-72,178,
180-82, 248, 250-51, 260
nature of, 180-82, 250-51
normativity in, 54-55,108
objective, 218-21
subjective, 40-42, 50, 54-55, 206-7,
278, 280
visionary, 42, 76-77, 300-301
reason:
atrocities and failure of, 55, 78-79, 259
common sense and, 74-75, 207, 274,
277, 279
cultural factors in, 242-43
faith vs., 15-16,17,19, 21, 38, 43-46,
64, 71-72, 86-87, 95,137,168,
204, 221, 223, 225, 232-33
hierarchical systems of, 145
limits of, 39-44, 55, 64,101, 259, 276
love and, 165, 226
mental models for, 50, 206-9, 248-49
morality and, 42-44,170-71,182-84
social impact of, 21, 28, 55
spirituality and, 39-46,181, 205, 221
subjectivity and, 40-42, 278
Rees, Martin, 47,152
reincarnation, 202
religion:
authority of, 34, 63, 74, 76-77, 254
conversion in, 30-31, 94,102-3,105,
110,113,115, 242
damnation in, 20, 32, 68, 74, 86-87,
177
diversity of, 13-23, 34, 46, 77-78,108,
176, 179, 235; see also specific
religions
dogmatic beliefs of, 12,15, 21-22, 25,
39, 41-42, 50-51, 68, 70-73,106,
165,176, 203, 220, 223, 225, 243,
260-61, 293-94
education and, 19, 21-22, 25, 32,109,
133,180, 224, 263
evidence for, 17,19, 23-25, 29, 31, 35,
41, 45-46, 48, 221, 225
freedom of, 51, 71-72, 77-79, 94,139,
154-55,176, 301
I N D E X 345
fundamentalist, 14,17-18, 20, 29-36,
133,168
government as separate from, 34, 39,
46-47,150-64, 241, 266-67
identity based on, 128,176-78, 225,
227
immortality in, 20, 25-29, 36-39, 78,
177, 208
intolerance based on, 13, 25-27, 86,
87-88, 93-94,106,115,131,137,
223-24, 225
knowledge derived from, 38-39, 65,
67, 70-71, 225
malignant solidarity of, 234
moderate position in, 14-23, 31-32,
38-39, 42-43,101-2,176
in modern world, 17-21, 24—25,
78-79, 94,137-38
morality based on, 15, 36, 52-53,143,
149,156-58,168-73
as mythology, 14,16, 24-26, 39-40,
46-48, 79, 296-98
persecution in name of, 17-18, 29-35,
45-46, 68, 79, 80-100,106,107,
252, 253-55, 268
political impact of, 16, 34, 39, 46-47,
137,153-64, 241, 266-67
poverty and, 32,109,133
prophetic tradition in, 32, 35, 38,
95-96,105,153-54,180, 224, 266
reform of, 22-23, 86,103,116,131,
148,151-52, 223-25, 240, 258
science compared with, 13,15-16,18,
43-44,165-69, 271-72
secularism vs., 15, 28,153-69,170,
223-24
sin as concept in, 12,19, 20, 24, 32, 68,
74, 86-87,158-64,167-68,177,
188, 236, 257, 272, 284
social costs of, 230-31
spirituality compared with, 15, 20,
214-17, 220, 221
traditions of, 14,16, 21-25, 43, 65,
72-73, 293
truth of, 16,19, 22-25, 29,45-46, 72,
85, 204, 221, 271-72, 294, 295, 296
in U.S., 17-18, 46-47,153-69
violence sanctioned by, 12-13,15, 20,
26-36,46,106-7, 223-25, 230, 284
as waste of resources, 17,147-50
see also beliefs; faith
Revelation, book of, 14,152,168
Roman Empire, 94, 97, 255, 257
Rorty, Richard, 177,179,181, 278, 280,
281, 282
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 104, 293
Roy, Arundhati, 27-28,142,143
Rushdie, Salman, 116
Russell, Bertrand, 78, 90,173, 243,
253-54, 278, 292
Ruthven, Malise, 111
Said, Edward, 130
Santayana, George, 278
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 290
Satan, 16,19, 22n, 35, 80-81, 83, 87-92,
122,155-56,163-64, 253
Scalia, Antonin, 156-58, 267
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von,
209, 293
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 291
science, 236
beliefs analyzed by, 74, 75-76, 249-50,
252, 271-72
development of, 14, 45, 85-86
ideology vs., 79, 242
intuition in, 182-84,199, 220
knowledge derived from, 21-22, 45,
89,178
methodology of, 19,133-34, 208, 220
moral analysis by, 43-44,145-46,
173-76,177
parsimony principle in, 276-77
religion compared with, 13,15-16,18,
43-44,165-69, 271-72
spiritual analysis by, 43-44, 217-18,
220
truth of, 75-76,170,172,180,181,
184, 271-72
self:
awareness of, 20, 39-40, 55, 206-7,
210-14, 217, 218, 219-20, 301
346 I N D EX
self (continued)
emergence of, 211-12
identity of, 39-40, 54,128,173,
176-78,185-87, 206, 225, 227,
272-74
loss of, 212-14
personality and, 211-12
separateness of, 37-38,189,191-92,
206, 290
Self-contradictions of the Bible (Burr),
254
self-deception, 55,134
September 11th attacks:
liberal response to, 138-42
Muslim reaction to, 28,117,127,134,
264
security concerns after, 55-58
Western reaction to, 134,139-41,196,
246
Sextus Empiricus, 291-93
Shakespeare, William, 35
shamanism, 300
Sheikh, Ahmed Omar, 133
Shiva, 24
sin, see religion, sin as concept in
Sisters of Mercy, 284
society:
authoritarian, 82,100-106,132-36,
147-51
civil, 150-52, 240, 268-69
democratic, 18,132,150,153-58, 240
freedom in, 44-45, 71-72,158-60,
164,171, 267
pluralistic, 15,138
relationships in, 186-87,192, 206,
211, 227
tribal, 89,179,187,190, 227, 255-56
Socrates, 68, 292
sodomy, 25,158,160,169
soul (spirit), 68,174-75, 207-8, 288-89
Soviet Union, 79,100,129,152,195
Spain, Muslim influence in, 108
Spee, Frederick, 90
Spinoza, Baruch, 61
spirituality, 204-21
beliefs based on, 63,181, 215, 216-17
consciousness in, 206-7, 227
definition of, 205-6
Eastern traditions of, 214-17, 291,
293, 298-301
emotional states in, 219-20
faith compared with, 40-41, 65
happiness and, 191-92, 205-7, 221,
284, 291-93
love and, 165, 284
meditation as basis of, 40,191-92,
205, 209-10, 217-20, 234-35,
293-94, 299-301
morality based on, 149, 204, 221
philosophy vs., 214-15, 217-18
reason and, 39-46,181, 205, 221
religion compared with, 15, 20,
214-17, 220, 221
scientific analysis of, 43-44, 217-18,
220
self-awareness in, 206-7, 210-14, 217,
218, 219-20, 301
teachings of, 204, 206, 214-17
visionary, 42, 76-77,181-82, 300-301
Western traditions of, 291-96, 301
Stalin, Joseph, 79,173, 230
stem cells, see embryonic stem cells
Stevens, Cat (Yosuf Islam), 116, 262
stoning, 16, 24, 25, 82,179, 253
Sufism, 294
suicide bombers, 11-12,13, 31, 32-35,
109,117,123-27,136,178,
233-34, 239, 260-61, 262, 263
Supreme Court, U.S., 156-58,165
taboos, 21, 25, 223
Taliban, 131,133,139,164, 203, 261
Tamil Tigers, 239
Taylor, Brook, 91
Ten Commandments, 154-55
terrorism, terrorists:
anti-, 192-94,197-98
beliefs of, 28-29, 239, 246
civilian victims of, 124-27,142-47,
192-99
economic background of, 13,109,133
education and, 109,133,180, 263
I N D E X 347
funding of, 163-64, 270
humiliation and, 131-34
Islamic, 11-12,13, 28-29, 31, 32-34,
72,109,111-12,115,117,123,
131-34,180, 233-34, 246, 260-61
liberalism and, 134,136,138-42
martyrdom sought by, 11-12, 13,14,
28-29, 31, 32-35, 47-48,109,112,
117,128-29,136,178, 234, 239,
260-61, 262, 263
Muslim support for, 117,123-27
political aspect of, 13, 78-79,137,
260-61
torture used for, 192-99
U.S. as target of, 28, 55-58, 67,117,
127,129,134,138-42,192-99,
246, 264
war on, 28, 53,109,151-52,155-56,
163,194-97, 202-3
weapons of mass destruction available
to, 14, 33, 47-48,107,128-29,
143,152,153,195, 203, 224-25,
266
theocracy, 132,153-58, 263
theory of mind, see brain, "theory of
mind"and
Thessalonians, Paul's epistles to, 96
Tibetan Buddhism, 233, 294
"ticking-bomb" case, 192-94,198
Tillich, Paul, 65
Tlas, Mustafa, 258
Torah, 296
torture:
the Church and, 80-81, 83-88, 90-92,
99, 252, 284
ethics of, 144,170,192-99, 286
Saddam Hussein and, 127
totalitarianism, 82,100-106, 132-36,
147-51
translatability, principle of, 280-82
trepanning, 22
truth:
accidental, 250
antecedent, 249-50
of beliefs, 22-24, 60-63, 72, 273, 284
consensus on, 181-82, 280
faith and, 19-20, 61-63, 67-68
language and, 181, 279, 280-81
metaphysical, 68, 217
moral, 170-73,178-82
nature of, 178-82, 214-15, 278-84,
291-93
preservation of, 250
religious, 16,19, 22-25, 29, 45-46, 72,
85, 204, 221, 271-72, 294, 295,
296
scientific, 75-76,170,172,180,181,
184, 271-72
transcendental, 181-82, 300-301
Turin, shroud of, 66, 251
Turing test, 209n, 265
Tyndale, William, 253
Unger, Peter, 141
United Nations, 163
United States:
anti-terrorism measures of, 129,
192-99
church and state separated in, 154—55,
241, 266-67
drug policy in, 150,152,158, 159,
160-64,169, 267-71
foreign policy of, 136,139-42
as global power, 138-39
Islam as adversary of, 30,128,180,
264, 265, 266
legal system of, 158-59,171,192-94,
197-98, 272
Middle East policy of, 30,153, 266
moral development of, 143-44
nuclear weapons of, 153, 266
public policy in, 230
religious influence in, 17-18, 46-47,
153-69, 230, 266-67
terrorist attacks on, 28, 55-58, 67,117,
127,129,134,138-42,192-99,
246, 264
utilitarianism, 179-80, 272, 278
victimless crimes, 158-64
View from Nowhere, The (Nagel), 280
vivisection, 25,174
348 I N D E X
Voltaire, 85,104
von Neumann, John, 242
Wells, H. G., 15
Wills, Garry, 47
witch trials, 87-92, 97, 99,106,150,
255
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 184, 280-81, 291,
299
Yahweh, 16,18, 24, 82
Yeats, William Butler, 180
Zakaria, Fareed, 114,115,117,131-32,
133,147-49,150-51
Zaydan (suicide bomber), 31
Zeus, 16, 47
Zia-ul-Haq, Mohammed, 137
Zoroastrianism, 83, 294
MY GOAL in writing this book has been to help close the door to a
certain style of irrationality. While religious faith is the one species
of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of
correction, it is still sheltered from criticism in every corner of our
culture. Forsaking all valid sources of information about this world
(both spiritual and mundane), our religions have seized upon
ancient taboos and prescientific fancies as though they held ultimate
metaphysical significance. Books that embrace the narrowest spectrum
of political, moral, scientific, and spiritual understanding—
books that, by their antiquity alone, offer us the most dilute wisdom
with respect to the present—are still dogmatically thrust upon us as
the final word on matters of the greatest significance. In the best
case, faith leaves otherwise well-intentioned people incapable of
thinking rationally about many of their deepest concerns; at worst,
it is a continuous source of human violence. Even now, many of us
are motivated not by what we know but by what we are content
merely to imagine. Many are still eager to sacrifice happiness, compassion,
and justice in this world, for a fantasy of a world to come.
These and other degradations await us along the well-worn path of
piety. Whatever our religious differences may mean for the next life,
they have only one terminus in this one—a future of ignorance and
slaughter.
We live in societies that are still constrained by religious laws and
threatened by religious violence. What is it about us, and specifically
about our discourse with one another, that keeps these astonishing
223
2 2 4 E P I L O G UE
bits of evil loose in our world? We have seen that education and
wealth are insufficient guarantors of rationality. Indeed, even in the
West, educated men and women still cling to the blood-soaked heirlooms
of a previous age. Mitigating this problem is not merely a
matter of reining in a minority of religious extremists; it is a matter
of finding approaches to ethics and to spiritual experience that make
no appeal to faith, and broadcasting this knowledge to everyone.
Of course, one senses that the problem is simply hopeless. What
could possibly cause billions of human beings to reconsider their
religious beliefs ? And yet, it is obvious that an utter revolution in
our thinking could be accomplished in a single generation: if parents
and teachers would merely give honest answers to the questions of
every child. Our doubts about the feasibility of such a project should
be tempered by an understanding of its necessity, for there is no reason
whatsoever to think that we can survive our religious differences
indefinitely.
Imagine what it would be like for our descendants to experience
the fall of civilization. Imagine failures of reasonableness so total
that our largest bombs finally fall upon our largest cities in defense
of our religious differences. What would it be like for the unlucky
survivors of such a holocaust to look back upon the hurtling career
of human stupidity that led them over the precipice? A view from
the end of the world would surely find that the six billion of us currently
alive did much to pave the way to the Apocalypse.
THIS world is simply ablaze with bad ideas. There are still places
where people are put to death for imaginary crimes—like blasphemy—
and where the totality of a child's education consists of his
learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction. There are
countries where women are denied almost every human liberty,
except the liberty to breed. And yet, these same societies are quickly
acquiring terrifying arsenals of advanced weaponry. If we cannot
inspire the developing world, and the Muslim world in particular, to
E P I L O G U E 225
pursue ends that are compatible with a global civilization, then a
dark future awaits all of us.
The contest between our religions is zero-sum. Religious violence
is still with us because our religions are intrinsically hostile to one
another. Where they appear otherwise, it is because secular knowledge
and secular interests are restraining the most lethal improprieties
of faith. It is time we acknowledged that no real foundation
exists within the canons of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any of
our other faiths for religious tolerance and religious diversity.
If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way
that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of
our having dispensed with the dogma of faith. If our tribalism is ever
to give way to an extended moral identity, our religious beliefs can
no longer be sheltered from the tides of genuine inquiry and genuine
criticism. It is time we realized that to presume knowledge
where one has only pious hope is a species of evil. Wherever conviction
grows in inverse proportion to its justification, we have lost the
very basis of human cooperation. Where we have reasons for what
we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we
have lost both our connection to the world and to one another. People
who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the
margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing we
should respect in a person's faith is his desire for a better life in this
world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits
him in the next.
Nothing is more sacred than the facts. No one, therefore, should
win any points in our discourse for deluding himself. The litmus test
for reasonableness should be obvious: anyone who wants to know
how the world is, whether in physical or spiritual terms, will be open
to new evidence. We should take comfort in the fact that people tend
to conform themselves to this principle whenever they are obliged
to. This will remain a problem for religion. The very hands that prop
up our faith will be the ones to shake it.
226 EPILOGUE
IT is as yet undetermined what it means to be human, because every
facet of our culture—and even our biology itself—remains open to
innovation and insight. We do not know what we will be a thousand
years from now—or indeed that we will be, given the lethal absurdity
of many of our beliefs—but whatever changes await us, one
thing seems unlikely to change: as long as experience endures, the
difference between happiness and suffering will remain our
paramount concern. We will therefore want to understand those processes—
biochemical, behavioral, ethical, political, economic, and spiritual—
that account for this difference. We do not yet have anything
like a final understanding of such processes, but we know enough to
rule out many false understandings. Indeed, we know enough at this
moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the
immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.
We do not know what awaits each of us after death, but we know
that we will die. Clearly, it must be possible to live ethically—with a
genuine concern for the happiness of other sentient beings—without
presuming to know things about which we are patently ignorant.
Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person you
will pass in the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each
will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose
everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything
but kind to them in the meantime?
We are bound to one another. The fact that our ethical intuitions
must, in some way, supervene upon our biology does not make ethical
truths reducible to biological ones. We are the final judges of what
is good, just as we remain the final judges of what is logical. And on
neither front has our conversation with one another reached an end.
There need be no scheme of rewards and punishments transcending
this life to justify our moral intuitions or to render them effective in
guiding our behavior in the world. The only angels we need invoke are
those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons
we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance,
hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil's masterpiece.
E P I L O G U E 227
Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is
shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our
own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the
name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this
mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call
"spiritual." No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the
profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped
for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No
tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that
we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable
from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people
everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish. The days of our
religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of civilization
itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather too much,
on how soon we realize this.
Afterword
The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry
vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group
labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic
religion gives strong sanction to both—and mixes explosively
with both. Only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive
force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in
the world today. Without a doubt it is the prime aggravator of the
Middle East. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our
contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to
stand up and speak out. Things are different now. "All is changed,
changed utterly." —RICHARD DAWKINS
IT HAS BEEN nearly a year since The End of Faith was first published
in the United States. In response, I have received a continuous correspondence
from readers and nonreaders alike, expressing everything
from ecstatic support to nearly homicidal condemnation.
Many thousands of people have apparently read the book, and millions
more have heard its contents discussed in the media. In
response, letters and e-mails have come to me from scientists and
physicians at every stage of their careers, from soldiers fighting in
Iraq, from Christian ministers who have lost their faith (and from
those who haven't), from Muslims who agree with my general disparagement
of their religion, and from others who would have me
meet them at a local mosque so that I might better learn the will of
God. I have also heard from hundreds of embattled freethinkers liv-
229
230 AFTE RWO R D
ing in "red state" America. Judging from this last group of correspondents,
the American heartland is fast becoming as blinkered as
the wilds of Afghanistan. It may be too much to hope that the efforts
of reasonable people will yet turn the tide.
According to several recent polls, 22 percent of Americans are certain
that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty years.
Another 22 percent believe that he will probably do so. This is likely
the same 44 percent who go to church once a week or more, who
believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, and
who want to stop teaching children about the biological fact of evolution.
Believers of this sort constitute the most cohesive and motivated
segment of the American electorate. Consequently, their views
and prejudices now influence almost every decision of national
importance. Political liberals seem to have drawn the wrong lesson
from these developments and are now thumbing scripture, wondering
how best to ingratiate themselves to the legions of men and
women in our country who vote mainly on the basis of religious
dogma. More than 50 percent of Americans have a "negative" or
"highly negative" view of people who do not believe in God; 70 percent
think it important for presidential candidates to be "strongly
religious." Because it is taboo to criticize a person's religious beliefs,
political debate over questions of public policy (stem-cell research,
the ethics of assisted suicide and euthanasia, obscenity and free
speech, gay marriage, etc.) generally gets framed in terms appropriate
to a theocracy. Unreason is now ascendant in the United States—
in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal
government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 72
percent believe in angels. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in
both the head and the belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a
problem for the entire world.
HAVING seen my argument against faith discussed, attacked, celebrated,
and misconstrued in blogs and book reviews throughout the
A F T E R W O R D 231
world, I would like to take the occasion of its release in paperback as
an opportunity to respond to the most common criticisms and misconceptions.
These are by no means straw-man arguments; these are
what real people (and the occasional book reviewer) believe to be
devastating retorts to my basic thesis:
1. Yes, religion occasionally causes violence, but the greatest crimes
of the twentieth century were perpetrated by atheists. Godlessness—
as witnessed by the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Kim
Jong-Il—is the most dangerous condition of all.
This is one of the most common criticisms I encounter. It is also the
most depressing, as I anticipate and answer it early in the book
(p. 79). While some of the most despicable political movements in
human history have been explicitly irreligious, they were not especially
rational. The public pronouncements of these regimes have
been mere litanies of delusion—about race, economics, national
identity, the march of history, or the moral dangers of intellectualism.
Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields are not examples of
what happens when people become too critical of unjustified
beliefs; to the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of not
thinking critically enough about specific secular ideologies. Needless
to say, my argument against religious faith is not an argument
for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem I raise in
the book is none other than the problem of dogma itself—of which
every religion has more than its fair share. I know of no society
in human history that ever suffered because its people became
too reasonable.
As I argue throughout the book, certainty without evidence is
necessarily divisive and dehumanizing. In fact, respect for evidence
and rational argument is what makes peaceful cooperation possible.
As human beings, we live in a perpetual choice between conversation
and violence; what, apart from a fundamental willingness to be
reasonable, can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another?
2 3 2 A F T E R W O RD
2. We need faith to do almost anything. It is absurd to think that we
could ever do without it.
One e-mail I received on this subject began: "I like your writing style
but you are an idiot." Fair enough. My correspondent then went on
to point out, as many have, that each of us has to get out of bed in the
morning and live his life, and we do this in a context of uncertainty,
and in the context of terrible certainties, like the certainty of death.
This positive disposition, this willingness to set a course in life without
any assurance that things will go one's way, is occasionally called
"faith." Thus, one may prop up a disconsolate friend with the words
"have faith in yourself." Such words are almost never facetious, even
on the forked tongue of an atheist. Let me state for the record that I
see nothing wrong with this kind of "faith."
But this is not the faith that has given us religion. It would be
rather remarkable if a positive attitude in the face of uncertainty led
inevitably to ludicrous convictions about the divine origin of certain
books, to bizarre cultural taboos, to the abject hatred of homosexuals,
and to the diminished status of women. Adopt too positive an
outlook, and the next thing you know architects and engineers may
start flying planes into buildings.
As I do my best to spell out over the course of the book, religious
faith is the belief in historical and metaphysical propositions without
sufficient evidence. When the evidence for a religious proposition
is thin or nonexistent, or there is compelling evidence against
it, people invoke faith. Otherwise, they simply cite the reasons for
their beliefs (e.g., "the New Testament confirms Old Testament
prophecy," "I saw the face of Jesus in a window," "We prayed, and
our daughter's cancer went into remission"). Such reasons are generally
inadequate, but they are better than no reasons at all. People
of faith naturally recognize the primacy of reasons and resort to reasoning
whenever they possibly can. Faith is simply the license they
give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail. When rational
inquiry supports the creed it is championed; when it poses a threat,
AFTE RWO RD 233
it is derided; sometimes in the same sentence. Faith is the mortar
that fills the cracks in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus
it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty
still looming dangerously over our world.
3. Islam is no more amenable to violence than any other religion is.
The violence we see in the Muslim world is the product of politics
and economics, not faith.
The speciousness of this claim is best glimpsed by the bright light of
bomb blasts. Where are the Palestinian Christian suicide bombers?
They, too, suffer the daily indignity of the Israeli occupation. Where,
for that matter, are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? The
Tibetans have suffered an occupation far more cynical and repressive
than any that the United States or Israel has ever imposed upon the
Muslim world. Where are the throngs of Tibetans ready to perpetrate
suicidal atrocities against Chinese noncombatants? They do
not exist. What is the difference that makes the difference? The difference
lies in the specific tenets of Islam. This is not to say that
Buddhism could not help inspire suicidal violence. It can, and it has
(Japan, World War II). But this concedes absolutely nothing to the
apologists for Islam. As a Buddhist, one has to work extremely hard
to justify such barbarism. One need not work nearly so hard as
a Muslim.
Recent events in Iraq offer further corroboration on this point. It
is true, of course, that the Iraqi people have been traumatized by
decades of war and repression. But war and repression do not
account for suicidal violence directed against the Red Cross, the
United Nations, foreign workers, and Iraqi innocents. War and
repression would not have attracted an influx of foreign fighters
willing to sacrifice their lives merely to sow chaos. The Iraqi insurgents
have not been motivated principally by political or economic
grievances. They have such grievances, of course, but politics and
economics do not get a man to intentionally blow himself up in a
234 AFTE RWO RD
crowd of children, or get his mother to sing his praises for it. Miracles
of this order generally require religious faith.
There are other confounding variables here, of course—state
sponsorship of terrorism, the occasional coercion of reluctant suicide
bombers—but we cannot let them blind us to the pervasive and
lunatic influence of religious belief. The truth that we must finally
confront is that Islam contains specific doctrines about martyrdom
and jihad that now directly inspire Muslim terrorism. Unless the
world's Muslims can find some way of expunging a theology that is
fast turning their religion into a cult of death, we will ultimately face
the same perversely destructive behavior throughout much of the
world. Wherever these events occur, we will find Muslims tending
to side with other Muslims, no matter how sociopathic their behavior.
This is the malignant solidarity that religion breeds. It is time
that sane human beings stopped making apologies for it. And it is
time for Muslims—especially Muslim women—to realize that
nobody suffers the consequences of Islam more than they do.
4. The End of Faith is not a truly atheistic book. It is really a stalking
horse for Buddhism, New-Age mysticism, or some other form of
irrationality.
As almost every page of my book is dedicated to exposing the problems
of religious faith, it is ironic that some of the harshest criticism
has come from atheists who feel that I have betrayed their cause on
peripheral issues. If there is a book that takes a harder swing at religion,
I'm not aware of it. This is not to say that my book does not
have many shortcomings—but appeasing religious irrationality is
not among them.
Nevertheless, atheists have found much to complain about in the
book, especially in the last chapter where I attempt to put meditation
and "spirituality" on a rational footing. "Meditation," in the sense
that I use the term, merely requires that a person pay extraordinarA
F T E R W O R D 235
ily close attention to his moment-by-moment experience of the
world. There is nothing irrational about doing this. In fact, it constitutes
the only rational basis for making detailed claims about the
nature of our subjectivity.
Through meditation, a person can come to observe the flow of his
experience with remarkable clarity, and this sometimes results in a
variety of insights that people tend to find both intellectually credible
and personally transformative. As I discuss in the final chapter of
the book, one of these insights is that the feeling we call "I"—the
sense that we are the thinker of our thoughts, the experiencer of our
experiences—can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. This
is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation,
analogous to the discovery of one's optic blind spots. Most
people never notice their blind spots (caused by the transit of the
optic nerve through the retina of each eye), but they can be pointed
out to almost anyone with a little effort. The absence of the "self"
can also be pointed out with some effort, though this discovery
tends to require considerably more training on the part of both
teacher and student. The only faith required to get such a project off
the ground is the faith of scientific hypothesis. The hypothesis is
this: If I use my attention in a certain way, it may have a specific,
reproducible effect. Needless to say, what happens (or fails to happen)
along any path of "spiritual" practice must be interpreted in
light of some conceptual scheme, and everything should be open to
rational argument.
I have also taken considerable heat from atheists for a few
remarks I made about the nature of consciousness. Most atheists
appear to be certain that consciousness is entirely dependent on (and
reducible to) the workings of the brain. In the last chapter of the
book, I briefly argue that this certainty is unwarranted. The fact is
that scientists still do not know what the relationship between consciousness
and matter actually is. I am not suggesting that we make
a religion out of this uncertainty, or do anything else with it. And,
236 AFTERWORD
needless to say, the mysteriousness of consciousness does nothing to
make conventional religious notions about God and paradise any
more plausible.
SINCE The End of Faith was first published, current events have
remained a running confirmation of its central thesis. There are days
when almost every headline in the morning paper attests to the
social costs of religious faith, and the nightly news seems miraculously
broadcast from the fourteenth century. One spectacle of religious
hysteria follows fast upon the next. Sanctimonious eruptions
announcing the death of the pope (a man who actively opposed condom
use in sub-Saharan Africa and shielded frocked child molesters
from secular justice) are soon followed by other outbursts of religious
lunacy. At the time of this writing, Muslims in several countries
are rioting over a report that U.S. interrogators desecrated a
copy of the Koran. Seventeen people are dead and hundreds injured.
The response of the U.S. government has been to offer up some
lunacy of its own. No less a spokeswoman than the Secretary of
State has assured the righteous hordes that "the United States government
will not tolerate any disrespect for the holy Koran." What
form our government's intolerance will take remains unspecified. I
await a knock on the door.
Such perfect visions of unreason have been punctuated by the
more ordinary trespasses of faith: daily reports of pious massacres in
Iraq, of evangelical ravings against the evils of a secular judiciary, of
widespread religious coercion in the U.S. Air Force, of efforts in at
least twenty states to redefine science to include supernatural explanations
of the origin of life, of devout pharmacists refusing to fill
prescriptions for birth control, of movie theaters refusing to show
documentaries that report the actual age of the earth, and on and on
and onward . . . to the fifteenth century.
For anyone with eyes to see, there can be no doubt that religious
faith remains a perpetual source of human conflict. Religion perAFTE
RWO RD 237
suades otherwise intelligent men and women to not think, or to
think badly, about questions of civilizational importance. And yet it
remains taboo to criticize religious faith in our society, or to even
observe that some religions are less compassionate and less tolerant
than others. What is worst in us (outright delusion) has been elevated
beyond the reach of criticism, while what is best (reason and
intellectual honesty) must remain hidden, for fear of giving offense.
The End of Faith represents my first attempt to call attention to the
dangers and absurdities inherent in this situation. I sincerely hope
that readers will continue to find the book useful.
Sam Harris
New York
May 2005
Notes
1 Reason in Exile
1 As we will see in chapter 4, the chances are decidedly against the possibility
that he comes from the lowest strata of society.
2 Some readers may object that the bomber in question is most likely to be
a member of the Liberations Tigers of Tamil Eelam—the Sri Lankan separatist
organization that has perpetrated more acts of suicidal terrororism
than any other group. Indeed, the "Tamil Tigers" are often offered as a
counterexample to any claim that suicidal terrorism is a product of religion.
But to describe the Tamil Tigers as "secular"—as R. A. Pape, "The
Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," American Political Science Review
97, no. 3 (2003): 20-32, and others have—is misleading. While the motivations
of the Tigers are not explicitly religious, they are Hindus who
undoubtedly believe many improbable things about the nature of life and
death. The cult of martyr worship that they have nurtured for decades
has many of the features of religiosity that one would expect in people
who give their lives so easily for a cause. Secular Westerners often underestimate
the degree to which certain cultures, steeped as they are in otherworldliness,
look upon death with less alarm than seems strictly
rational. I was once traveling in India when the government rescheduled
the exams for students who were preparing to enter the civil service:
what appeared to me to be the least of bureaucratic inconveniences precipitated
a wave of teenage self-immolations in protest. Hindus, even
those whose preoccupations appear to be basically secular, often harbor
potent religious beliefs.
3 I am speaking here of "alchemy" as that body of ancient and ultimately
fanciful metallurgic and chemical techniques whose purpose was to
transmute base metals into gold and mundane materials into an "elixir of
life." It is true that there are people who claim to find the alchemical lit-
239
2 4 0 NOTES TO PAGES 1 6 - 3 0
erature prescient with the most contemporary truths of pharmacology,
solid-state physics, and a variety of other disciplines. I find the results of
such Rorschach readings less than inspiring, however. See T. McKenna,
The Archaic Revival ([San Francisco]: Harper San Francisco, 1991), Food
of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (New York:
Bantam Books, 1992), and True Hallucinations ([San Francisco]: Harper
San Francisco, 1993), for an example of a bright and beautiful mind that
takes such revaluations of alchemy seriously, however.
4 S. J. Gould, "Nonoverlapping Magisteria," Natural History, March 1997.
5 G. H. Gallup Jr., Religion in America 1996 (Princeton: Princeton Religion
Research Center, 1996).
6 This is not to deny that there are problems with democracy, particularly
when it is imposed prematurely on societies that have high birthrates,
low levels of literacy, profound ethnic and religious factionalism, and
unstable economies. There is clearly such a thing as a benevolent despotism,
and it may be a necessary stage in the political development of
many societies. See R. D. Kaplan, "Was Democracy Just a Moment?,"
Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1997, pp. 55-80, and F. Zakaria, The Future of
Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2003).
7 Bernard Lewis, in "The Revolt of Islam," New Yorker, Nov. 19, 2001, pp.
50-63, and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York:
Modern Library, 2003), has pointed out that the term "fundamentalist"
was coined by American Protestants and can be misleading when applied
to other faiths. It seems to me that the term has escaped into general
usage, however, and that it now signifies any sort of scriptural literalism.
I use it only in this general sense. The problems of applying the phrase
to Islam in particular will be addressed in chapter 4.
8 C. W. Dugger, "Religious Riots Loom over Indian Politics," New York
Times, July 27, 2002. See also P. Mishra, "The Other Face of Fanaticism,"
New York Times Magazine, Feb. 2, 2003, pp. 42-46.
9 A. Roy, War Talk (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2003), 1.
10 As Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 57-58, notes, we have caused far more chaos in
Central America, Southeast Asia, and southern Africa. Those Muslim
countries which have been occupied by foreign powers (like Egypt) are in
many ways much better off than countries (like Saudi Arabia) which
have not. Taking Saudia Arabia as an example, despite its relative wealth
—which is due to nothing more than an accident of nature—this country
lags behind its neighbors in many respects. The Saudis have only
NOTES TO PAGES 3 1 - 3 5 241
eight universities to serve 21 million people, and they did not abolish
slavery until 1962. P. Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2003), 16, also points out that most of our conflicts of recent
years have been fought in defense of various Muslim populations: the
first Gulf War was fought in defense of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and was
followed by a decade of air protection for the Iraqi Kurds in the north and
the Iraqi Shia in the south; the intervention in Somalia was designed to
relieve famine there; and our intervention in the Balkans was for the purpose
of defending Bosnians and Kosovars from marauding Christian
Serbs. Our original support of the mujahideen in Afghanistan belongs in
this category as well. As Berman says, "In all of recent history, no country
on earth has fought so hard and consistently as the United States on
behalf of Muslim populations." This is true. And yet the Muslim worldview
is such that this fact, if acknowledged at all, is generally counted as
a further grievance against us; it is yet another source of Muslim "humiliation."
11 Of course, the Sunnis would still hate the Shiites, but this is also an
expression of their faith.
12 J. Bennet, "In Israeli Hospital, Bomber Tells of Trying to Kill Israelis,"
New York Times, June 8, 2002.
13 "[I]n 1994, at a village south of Islamabad, police charged a doctor with
setting fire to the sacred Koran, a blasphemous crime punishable by
death. Before he could be tried, an enraged mob dragged him from the
police station, doused him with kerosene, and burned him alive." J. A.
Haught, Holy Hatred: Religious Conflicts of the '90s (Amherst, Mass.:
Prometheus Books, 1995), 179.
14 S. P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
15 As many commentators have observed, there is no Koranic equivalent of
the New Testament line "Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar's,
and render unto God those things that are God's" (Matt. 22:21). As
a result, there appears to be no Islamic basis for the separation of the
powers of the church and state. This, needless to say, is a problem.
16 Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 20.
17 Just consider what would fill our newspapers if there were no conflict
between Israel and the Palestinians, the Indians and the Pakistanis, the
Russians and the Chechens, Muslim militants and the West, etc. Problems
between the West and countries like China and North Korea would
remain—but they, too, are often the result of an uncritical acceptance of
242 NOTES TO PAGES 4 1 - 4 5
a variety of dogmas. While our differences with North Korea, for
instance, are not explicitly religious, they are a direct consequence of the
North Koreans' having grown utterly deranged by their political ideology,
their abject worship of their leaders, and their lack of information
about the outside world. They are now like a cargo cult armed with
nuclear weapons. If the 29 million inhabitants of North Korea knew that
they were unique among the world's basket cases, they might behave
rather differently. The problem of North Korea is, first and foremost, a
problem of the unjustified (and unjustifiable) beliefs of North Koreans.
See P. Gourevitch, "Letter from Korea: Alone in the Dark," New Yorker,
Sept. 8, 2003, pp. 55-75.
18 See, e.g., D. Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic
Phenomena (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), R. Sheldrake, The
Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (New
York: Crown, 2003), and R. S. Bobrow, "Paranormal Phenomena in the
Medical Literature Sufficient Smoke to Warrant a Search for Fire," Medical
Hypotheses 60 (2003): 864-68. There may even be some credible evidence
for reincarnation. See I. Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of
Reincarnation (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1974), Unlearned
Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of
Virginia, 1984), and Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (Westport,
Conn.: Praeger, 1997).
19 Yes, human beings can echolocate. We're just not very good at it. To
demonstrate this, simply close your eyes, hum loudly, and pass your
hand back and forth in front of your face. The sound reflecting off your
hand indicates its position.
20 Witness John von Neumann—mathematician, game theorist, savant of
national defense, and agnostic—converting to Catholicism while in the
throes of cancer. See W. Poundstone, Prisoner's Dilemma (New York:
Doubleday, 1992).
21 The Nazis disparaged the "Jewish physics" of Einstein, and the communists
rejected the "capitalist biology" of Mendel and Darwin. But these
were not rational criticisms—as witnessed by the fact that dissenting scientists
were often imprisoned or killed.
These facts notwithstanding, K. Peng and R. E. Nisbett, "Culture,
Dialectics, and Reasoning about Contradiction," American Psychologist
54 (1999): 741-54, have argued that significant differences in reasoning
styles exist across cultures. While the data appear to me to be inconclusive,
even if Eastern and Western minds address problems differently,
NOTES TO PAGES 4 6 - 5 O 243
there is no reason why we cannot, in principle, agree about what it is ultimately
rational to believe.
22 The emergence in 2003 of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in
southern China is a recent example of the global implications of local
health practices. China's mishandling of the epidemic was born not of
irrational medical beliefs but of irrational political ones—and the consequences,
at the time of this writing, have not been catastrophic. But it is
not difficult to imagine a culture whose beliefs relative to epidemiology
could systematically impose unacceptable risks on the rest of us. There is
little doubt that we would ultimately quarantine, invade, or otherwise
subjugate such a society.
23 Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2002.
24 G. Wills, "With God on His Side," New York Times Magazine, March 30,
2003.
25 M. Rees, Our Final Hour (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 61.
26 Questions of their plausibility aside, the mutual incompatibility of our
religious beliefs renders them suspect in principle. As Bertrand Russell
observed, even if we were to grant that one of our religions must be correct
in its every particular, given the number of conflicting views on offer,
every believer should expect damnation on mere probabilistic grounds.
27 Rees, Our Final Hour, has given our species no better than a 50 percent
chance of surviving this century. While his prognostications are nothing
more than educated guesswork, they are worth taking seriously. The man
is not a crank.
2 The Nature of Belief
1 Proof of this fact is never so eloquent as when injury to the brain
destroys one facet of a person's memory while sparing the others—and
indeed, it is largely upon such clinical case histories (like W. B. Scoville
and B. Milner, "Loss of Recent Memory after Bilateral Hippocampal
Lesions," Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry 20 (1957):
11-21) that our understanding of human memory depends. Long-term
memory has since fragmented into semantic, episodic, procedural, and
other forms of information processing; and short-term memory (generally
called "working memory") is now subdivided into phonological,
visual, spatial, conceptual, echoic, and central executive components. Our
analysis of both forms of memory is surely incomplete. The distinction
244 NOTE TO PAGE 50
between semantic and episodic memory, for instance, doesn't seem to
hold for topographical recall (E. A. Maguire et al., "Recalling Routes
around London: Activation of the Right Hippocampus in Taxi Drivers,"
Journal of Neuroscience 17 [1997]: 7103-10); and semantic memory
seems susceptible to further division into category-specific subtypes, as
in memory for living v. nonliving things (S. L. Thompson-Schill et al, "A
Neural Basis for Category and Modality Specificity of Semantic Knowledge,"
Neuropsychologia 37 [1999]: 671-76; J. R. Hart et al., "Category-
Specific Naming Deficit following Cerebral Infarction," Nature 316
[Aug. 1,1985]: 439-40)-
2 There are ways of construing the concept of "belief" that make it appear
equally disjoint. If we use the term too loosely, it can seem that the entire
brain is intimately involved in "belief" formation. Imagine, for instance,
that a man has come to your door claiming to represent the "Publishers
Clearing House Sweepstakes":
1. You see the man's face, recognize it, and therefore "believe" that
you know who this person is. Activity in your fusiform cortex, especially
in the right hemisphere, is crucial for such recognition to occur,
and a lesion here will lead to prosopagnosia (the inability to recognize
familiar faces, or indeed to see faces as faces at all). Using "belief" in
this context, it is tempting to say that prosopagnosics have lost certain
"beliefs" about what other people look like.
2. Having recognized the man's face, you form the "belief," based on
your long-term memory for both faces and facts that he is Ed McMahon,
the famous spokesman for Publishers Clearing House. Damage
to your perirhinal and perihippocampal cortices would have prevented
this "belief" from forming. See R. R. Davies et al., "The Human
Perirhinal Cortex in Semantic Memory: An in Vivo and Postmortem
Volumetric Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study in Semantic Dementia,
Alzheimer's Disease and Matched Controls," Neuropathology and
Applied Neurobiology 28, no. 2 (2002): 167-78 [abstract], and A. R.
Giovagnoli et al., "Preserved Semantic Access in Global Amnesia and
Hippocampal Damage," Clinical Neuropsychology 15 (2001): 508-15
[abstract].
3. Not yet being sure whether this is a hoax of some sort (perhaps Mr.
McMahon is now working for Candid Camera) you take another
moment to study the man at your door. You form the "belief," based
on his tone of voice, the look in his eye, and many other factors, that
NOTE TO PAGE 50 245
he is trustworthy and therefore means what he says. Your ability to
form such judgments reliably—in particular, your ability to detect
untrustworthiness—requires that you have at least one functioning
amygdala (R. Adolphs et al., "The Human Amygdala in Social Judgment,"
Nature 393 [June 4, 1998]: 470-74), a small, almond-shaped
nucleus in your medial temporal lobe.
4. Mr. McMahon then informs you that you are the lucky winner of
a "big jackpot." Your memory for words (requiring different processing
from your memory for faces) leads you to "believe" that you have
won some money, rather than a "pot" of some sort. Making sense of
this phrase will require the work of your superior and middle temporal
gyri, predominantly in your left hemisphere. See A. Ahmad et al.,
"Auditory Comprehension of Language in Young Children: Neural
Networks Identified with fMRI," Neurology 60 (2003): 1598-605, and
M. H. Davis and I. S. Johnsrude, "Hierarchical Processing in Spoken
Language Comprehension," Journal of Neuroscience 23 (2003): 3423-
31.
5. Ed then produces a piece of paper, which he invites you to read. He
does this by pointing. Your "belief" that he wants you to read requires
what has come to be called "theory of mind" processing on your part
(D. Premack and G. Woodruff, "Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory
of Mind," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (1978): 515-26)—if a tree
limb had swayed in the direction of a piece of paper, you would not
have understood it as "pointing" at all. The anatomy underlying theory
of mind processing is not entirely clear at present, but it seems
that the anterior cingulate cortex as well as regions of the frontal and
temporal lobes enable to you to attribute mental states (including
beliefs) to others. See K. Vogeley et al., "Mind Reading: Neural Mechanisms
of Theory of Mind and Self-perspective," Neurolmage 14
(2001): 170-81; C. D. Frith and U. Frith, "Interacting Minds—A Biological
Basis," Science's Compass 286 (1999): 1692-95; and P. C.
Fletcher et al., "Other Mind in the Brain: A Functional Imaging Study
of 'Theory of Mind' in Story Comprehension," Cognition 57 (1995):
109-28.
6. Scanning the paper with your eyes, you see the following symbols
appended after your name: $10,000,000. Some processing relative to
Arabic numerals (probably in your left parietal lobe—G. Denes and
M. Signorini, "Door But Not Four and 4 a Category Specific Transcoding
Deficit in a Pure Acalculic Patient," Cortex 37, no. 2 [2001]:
2 4 6 NOTES TO PAGES 5 1 - 5 3
267-77) leads you to "believe" that this paper is actually a check for
ten million dollars.
While many diverse streams of neural activity have conspired to
make you believe that you have won a terrific sum of money, it is this
idea—explicitly represented in language—that underwrites the sweeping
changes that will take place in your nervous system, and in your life. Perhaps
you will startle the benevolent Mr. McMahon by shrieking; you
may even burst into tears; it is only a matter of hours before you begin
shopping with an unusual degree of abandon. Your belief that you have
just won ten million dollars will be the author of all these actions, both
voluntary and involuntary. In particular, it will dictate the following
behavior: to the question "Have you just won ten million dollars?" you
will—if moved by the spirit of candor—reply yes.
3 Belief, in this sense, is what philosophers generally call a "propositional
attitude." We have many such attitudes, in fact, and they are usually indicated
by a clause containing the word "that"; we can believe that, fear
that, intend that, appreciate that, hope that, etc.
4 The formation of certain primitive beliefs may be indistinguishable from
the preparation of a motor plan. See J. I. Gold and M. N. Shadlen, "Representation
of a Perceptual Decision in Developing Oculomotor Commands,"
Nature 404 (March 23, 2000): 390-94, and "Banburismus and
the Brain: Decoding the Relationship between Sensory Stimuli, Decisions,
and Reward," Neuron 36, no. 2 (2002): 299-308, for a discussion of
visual judgments and oculomotor response.
5 We do not have to bring the membership of Al Qaeda "to justice"
merely because of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001. The thousands of
men, women, and children who disappeared in the rubble of the World
Trade Center are beyond our help—and successful acts of retribution,
however satisfying they may be to some people, will not change this
fact. Our subsequent actions in Afghanistan and elsewhere are justified
because of what will happen to more innocent people if members of Al
Qaeda are allowed to go on living by the light of their peculiar beliefs.
The horror of Sept. 11 should motivate us, not because it provides us
with a grievance that we now must avenge, but because it proves
beyond any possibility of doubt that certain twenty-first-century
Muslims actually believe the most dangerous and implausible tenets of
their faith.
6 A consideration of the structure of our language reveals that this is not a
NOTES TO PAGES 5 4 - 5 7 2 47
special case, since all words and their usages lead us in circles of mutual
explanation.
7 The philosopher Donald Davidson has made this insight do some very
heavy lifting in his work on "radical interpretation." One interesting
consequence of the relationship between belief and meaning is that any
attempt to understand a language user requires that we assume him to be
basically rational (this is Davidson's "principle of charity").
8 At least at the "classical" scale at which we live. That the quantum world
does not behave in this way accounts for why no one can claim to
"understand" it in realistic terms.
9 D. Kahneman and A. Tversky, "On the Reality of Cognitive Illusions,"
Psychological Review 103 (1996): 582-91; G. Gigerenzer, "On Narrow
Norms and Vague Heuristics: A Reply to Kahneman and Tversky," ibid.,
592-96; K. J. Holyoak and P. C. Cheng, "Pragmatic Reasoning with a
Point of View," Thinking and Reasoning 1 (1995): 289-313; J. R. Anderson,
"The New Theoretical Framework," in The Adaptive Character of
Thought (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1990); K. Peng and R. E. Nisbett, "Culture,
Dialectics, and Reasoning about Contradiction," American Psychologist
54 (1999): 741-54; K. E. Stanovich and R. F. West, "Individual
Differences in Rational Thought," journal of Experimental Psychology:
General 127 (1998): 161.
10 A. R. Mele, "Real Self-Deception," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20
(1997): 91-102, "Understanding and Explaining Real Self-Deception,"
ibid., 127-36, and Self-Deception Unmasked (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 2001); H. Fingarette, Self-Deception (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 2000); J. P. Dupuy, ed., Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality
(Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1998); D. Davidson, "Who Is Fooled?"
ibid.; G. Quattrone and A. Tversky, "Self-Deception and the Voter's Illusion,"
in The Multiple Self, ed. J. Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1985), 35-57.
11 This assumes that many of the beliefs have common terms, as the beliefs
of human beings invariably do.
12 This example is taken from W. Poundstone, Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox,
Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Press,
1988), 183-88.
13 Recently, physical theories have been advanced that predict quantum
computation across an infinite number of parallel universes (D. Deutsch,
The Fabric of Reality [New York: Penguin, 1997]) or the possibility that
all matter will one day be organized as an "omniscient" supercomputer
248 NOTES TO PAGE 58
(F. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality [New York: Doubleday, 1995])
availing itself of a dilation of space-time resulting from the gravitational
collapse of the universe. I have excluded these and other theoretical
hierophanies from the present discussion.
Another way of getting at these logical and semantic constraints is to say
that our beliefs must be systematic. Systematicity is a property that
beliefs inherit from language, logic, and the world at large. Just as most
words derive their sense from the existence of other words, every belief
requires many others to situate it in a person's overall representation of
the world. How the loom of cognition first begins weaving is still a mystery,
but there seems little doubt that we come hardwired with a variety
of proto-linguistic, proto-doxastic (from the Greek doxa, "belief") capacities
that enable us to begin interpreting the tumult of the senses as regularities
in the environment and in ourselves. We do not learn a language
by memorizing a list of unrelated phrases, and we do not form a view of
the world by adopting a string of unconnected beliefs. For a discussion of
the systematicity of language, see J. A. Fodor and Z. W. Pylyshyn, "Systematicity
of Cognitive Representation," excerpt from "Connectionism
and Cognitive Architecture," in Connections and Symbols, ed. S. Pinker
and J. Mehler (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988). A belief must be knitted
together with other beliefs for it to be a belief about anything at all. (I
have left aside, for the moment, whether there exist beliefs that do not
rely upon any others to derive their meaning. Whether or not such
atomic beliefs exist, it is clear that most of our beliefs are not of this sort.)
The systematicity of logic seems guaranteed by the following fact: if
a given proposition is "true," any proposition (or chain of reasoning) that
contradicts it must be "false." Such a requirement seems to mirror the
disposition of objects in the world, and therefore places logical constraints
upon our behavior. If a statement like "The cookies are in the cupboard"
is believed, it will become a principle of action—which is to say that when
I desire cookies, I will seek them in the cupboard. In the face of such a
belief, a contradictory claim like "The cupboard is bare" will be seen as
hostile to my forming a behavioral plan. Confident cookie-seeking
behavior requires that my beliefs have a certain logical relationship.
S. Pinker, The Blank Slate (New York: Viking, 2002), p. 33.
There is a point of contact between my remarks here and the "mental
models" account of reasoning developed by P. N. Johnson-Laird and R.
M. J. Byrne, Deduction (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991), chaps. 5-6. I
would note, however, that our mental models of objects in the world
NOTES TO PAGE 59 249
behave as they do because objects do likewise. See L. Rips, "Deduction
and Cognition," in An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Thinking, ed. E. E.
Smith and D. N. Osherson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 297-343, for
doubts about whether a concept like AND could be learned at all.
17 Of course, we can think of examples where certain of our words run afoul
of ordinary logic. For instance, one cannot put the shadow of an apple
and the shadow of an orange in Jack's lunchbox, close the lid, and then
expect to retrieve one or the other at the end of the day.
18 Another property of belief follows directly from the nature of language:
just as there is no limit to the number of sentences a person can potentially
speak (language is often said to be "productive" in this sense), there
is no limit to the number of beliefs he can potentially form about the
world. Because I now believe that there is no owl in my closet, I also
believe that there are not two owls there, or three . . . ad infinitum.
19 Most neuroscientists believe that we have somewhere on the order of
1011-1012 neurons, each of which makes an average of 104 connections
with its neighbors. We therefore have something like 1015 or 1016 individual
synapses. It's a big number, but it's still finite.
20 Following N. Block, "The Mind as the Software of the Brain," in An Invitation
to Cognitive Science: Thinking, ed. E. E. Smith and D. N. Osherson
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 377-425.
21 D. J. Simons et al., "Evidence for Preserved Representations in Change
Blindness," Consciousness and Cognition 11, no. 1 (2002): 78-97; M.
Niemeier et al., "A Bayesian Approach to Change Blindness," Annals of
the New York Academy of Sciences 956 (2002): 474-75 [abstract].
22 R. Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Penguin, 1999).
23 Consider a mathematical belief like 2 + 2 = 4. Not only do most of us
believe this proposition; this belief seems to be antecedently true of us in
every present moment. We do not appear to construct it as the occasion
warrants, rather it is by virtue of such rudimentary beliefs that we construct
others. But what about a belief like 865762 + 2 = 865764? Most of
us will have never considered this sum before, and we will believe it only
by virtue of constructing it according to the laws of arithmetic. And yet,
doing so, we can cash it out just as we do the proposition 2 + 2 = 4. Is
there any difference between these two mathematical beliefs? In phenomenological
terms there surely is. You will notice, for instance, that
you cannot easily speak (or think) the longer sum, while two plus two
equals four comes to mind almost reflexively. As far as our basic epistemic
commitments are concerned, however, these beliefs are equally
2 5 0 NOTES TO PAGES 6 1 - 6 3
"true." In fact, all of us stake our lives on the validity of far more complicated
(and therefore less transparent) mathematical propositions every
time we board an airplane or cross a bridge. At bottom, most of us believe
that an operation like addition is truth preserving, in that it can be
repeated over and over, and with arbitrarily large values, and still yield a
true result. But the question remains, how can we know that our belief
that 2 + 2 = 4 isn't constructed anew each time we use it? How, in other
words, do we know that we believe it antecedently! If we are tempted to
say that this belief is always newly constructed, we must ask, constructed
with what! The rules of addition? It seems doubtful that a person could
know that he was successfully practicing addition unless he already
believed that 2 + 2 = 4. It seems just as certain, however, that you did not
wake up this morning believing that eight hundred and sixty-five thousand,
seven hundred and sixty-two, plus two, equals eight hundred and
sixty-five thousand, seven hundred and sixty-four. To really exist inside
your brain, this belief must be constructed, in the present moment, on
the basis of your prior belief that two plus two equals four. Clearly, many
beliefs are like this. We may not, in fact, believe most of what we believe
about the world until we say we do.
See D. T. Gilbert et al., "Unbelieving the Unbelievable: Some Problems in
the Rejection of False Information," journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 59 (1990): 601-13; D. T. Gilbert, "How Mental Systems
Believe," American Psychologist 46, no. 2 (1991): 107-19.
This explains why beliefs that are accidentally true do not constitute
knowledge, even when they are justified. As the philosopher Edmund
Gettier observed long ago, we may believe something to be true (e.g., I
may think the time is exactly 12:31 a.m.), we may believe it for good reasons
(I am currently looking at a clock that reads 12:31 a.m.), and our
belief may be true (it really is 12:31 a.m.), but we may not be in a state
of knowledge about the world (because, in the present instance, the clock
is broken and shows the correct time only by accident). While there are
many philosophical niceties to be explored here, the basic fact is that for
our beliefs to be truly representative of the world, they must stand in the
right relationship to the world.
Questions of epistemology seem to be stirring here: How, after all, is it
possible for us to have true knowledge of the world? Depending how
one interprets words like "true" and "world," questions of this sort can
seem either hopelessly difficult or trivial. As it turns out, a trivial reading
will be good enough for our present purposes. Whatever reality is,
NOTES TO PAGES 6 4 - 7 3 251
in ultimate terms, the world of our experience displays undeniable regularities.
These regularities are of various kinds, of course, and some of
them suggest lawful connections between certain events. There is a difference
between mere correlation, and juxtapositions of the sort that
we deem to be causal. As the Scottish philosopher David Hume
famously noted, this presents an interesting puzzle, because we never
encounter causes in the world, only reliable correlations. What, exactly,
leads us to attribute causal power to certain events, while withholding
it from others, is still a matter of debate. (See M. Wu and P. W. Cheng,
"Why Causation Need Not Follow from Statistical Association: Boundary
Conditions for the Evaluation of Generative and Preventative
Causal Powers," Psychological Science 10 [1999]: 92-97.) And yet, once
we have our beliefs about the world in hand, and they are guiding our
behavior, there seems to be no mystery worth worrying about. It just
so happens that certain regularities (those we deem to be causal), when
adopted as guides to action, serve our purposes admirably; others that
are equally regular (mere correlations, epiphenomena) do not. Surprises
here simply lead to a reevaluation of causal roles and to the formation
of new beliefs. We need not wrestle with Hume to know that if
it is heat we want, it is better to seek fire than smoke; nor need we know
all the criteria we employ in making causal judgments to appreciate the
logical and behavioral implications of believing that A is the cause of B,
while C is not. Once we find ourselves believing anything (whether for
good or bad reasons), our words and actions demand that we rectify
inconsistency wherever we find it.
27 See H. Benson, with M. Stark, Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology
of Belief (New York: Scribner, 1996).
28 The shroud of Turin has been perhaps the most widely venerated relic of
Christendom, for it is believed to be the very shroud in which the body
of Jesus was wrapped for burial. In 1988 the Vatican allowed small sections
of the shroud to be carbon-dated by three independent laboratories
(Oxford University, University of Arizona, and the Federal Institute of
Technology in Zurich) in a blind study coordinated by the British
Museum. All three institutions concluded that the shroud was a medieval
forgery dating from between 1260 and 1390.
29 O. Friedrich, The End of the World: A History (New York: Coward,
McCann & Geoghegan, 1982), 122-24.
30 The quoted passage is found in The Profession of Faith of the Roman
Catholic Church.
252 NOTES TO PAGES 7 4 - 8 1
31 This explicit belief has behavioral and neural underpinnings that are
implicit, and clearly a matter of our genetic inheritance. Lower animals,
it will be noted, are not in the habit of wandering off cliffs.
32 K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959; reprint, London:
Routledge, 1972), and Objective Knowledge (1972; reprint, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995).
33 T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; reprint, Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970).
34 Popper and Kuhn both had some very interesting and useful things to
say about the philosophy of science and about the problems we face in
claiming to know how the world is, but one effect of their work, particularly
on those who haven't read it, has been to engender the growth of
ridiculous ideas across the quad. While there are genuine problems of
epistemology to be thought about, there are gradations of reasonableness
that can be appreciated by any sane person. Not all knowledge claims are
on the same footing.
35 B. Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, ed. P. Edwards (New York: Simon
and Schuster 1957), 35.
36 J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), strikes the same note. See also A. N.
Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 2002).
3 In the Shadow of God
1 "As to squassation, it is thus performed: The prisoner hath his hands
bound behind his back, and weights tied to his feet, and then is drawn up
on high, till his head reaches the pulley. He is kept hanging in this manner
for some time, that by the greatness of the weight hanging at his feet,
all his joints and limbs may be dreadfully stretched, and on a sudden he
is let down with a jerk, by the slackening of the rope, but is kept from
coming quite to the ground, by which terrible shake, his arms and legs
are disjointed, whereby he is put to the most exquisite pain; the shock
which he receives by the sudden stop of his fall, and the weight at his feet
stretching his whole body more intensely and cruelly." John Marchant,
cited in J. Swain, The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber (New York:
Dorset Press, 1931), 169.
2 Ibid., 174-75,178.
NOTES TO PAGES 8 1 - 8 4 253
3 See Swain, Pleasures; O. Friedrich, The End of the World: A History
(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1982); and L. George,
Crimes of Perception: An Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics (New
York: Paragon House, 1995).
4 For explicit mention of heresy in the New Testament, and of the natural
intolerance of the faithful to dissent, see 1 Cor. 11:19; Gal. 5:20; 2 Pet. 2:1;
Rom. 16:17; 1 Cor. 1:10, 3:3, 14:33; Phil. 4:2; and Jude 19.
5 We need only recall the fate of William Tyndale, which came as late as
1536, after he published his translation of the New Testament in English:
Then, believing himself safe, he settled in Antwerp. However, he had
underestimated the gravity of his offense and the persistence of his
sovereign [Henry VIII, in a pious mood]. British agents had never
ceased stalking him. Now they arrested him. At Henry's insistence he
was imprisoned for sixteen months in the castle of Vilvorde, near
Brussels, tried for heresy, and, after his conviction, publicly garrotted.
His corpse was burned at the stake, an admonition for any who might
have been tempted by his folly.
See W. Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and
the Renaissance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), 204.
6 The Bible, however, demands that there be at least two witnesses attesting
that the accused has "served other gods," and that they be the first to
stone him (Deut. 17:6-7). The Inquisition was forced, for the sake of efficiency,
to relax this standard.
7 Matt. 5:18.
8 Friedrich, End of the World, 70.
9 The Franciscans, it is true, shouldered their share of the burden. As Russell
wrote in A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1945), 450:
If Satan existed, the future of the order founded by Saint Francis
would afford him the most exquisite gratification. The saint's immediate
successor as head of the order, Brother Elias, wallowed in luxury,
and allowed complete abandonment of poverty. The chief work of the
Franciscans in the years immediately following the death of their
founder was as recruiting sergeants in the bitter and bloody wars of
Guelfs and Ghibellines. The Inquisition, founded seven years after his
death, was, in several countries, chiefly conducted by Franciscans. A
small minority, called the Spirituals, remained true to his teaching;
2 5 4 NOTES TO PAGES 8 4 - 8 5
many of these were burnt by the Inquisition for heresy. These men
held that Christ and the Apostles owned no property, not even the
clothes they wore; this opinion was condemned as heretical in 1323 by
John XXII. The net result of Saint Francis' life was to create yet one
more wealthy and corrupt order, to strengthen the hierarchy, and to
facilitate the persecution of all who excelled in moral earnestness or
freedom of thought. In view of his own aims and character, it is impossible
to imagine any more bitterly ironical outcome.
10 Friedrich, End of the World, 74.
11 Ibid., 96.
12 Compare much of what Jesus taught with the above quotation from John
15:6, or with Matt. 10:34—"Think not that I am come to send peace on
earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." For a remarkably elegant
demonstration of the incoherency of the Bible, I recommend Burr's Selfcontradictions
of the Bible (1860). In it, Burr presents 144 propositions—
theological, moral, historical, and speculative—all neatly opposed by
their antitheses, in the following manner: God is seen and heard/God is
invisible and cannot be heard; God is everywhere present, sees and knows
all things/God is not everywhere present, neither sees nor knows all
things; God is the author of evil/God is not the author of evil; Adultery
forbidden/adultery allowed; The father of Joseph, Mary's husband, was
Jacob/The father of Mary's husband was Heli; The infant Christ
was taken into Egypt/The infant Christ was not taken into Egypt; John
was in prison when Jesus went into Galilee/John was not in prison when
Jesus went into Galilee; Jesus was crucified at the third hour/Jesus was
crucified at the sixth hour; Christ is equal with God/Christ is not equal
with God; It is impossible to fall from grace/It is possible to fall from
grace; etc.—all with supporting quotations from the Old and New Testaments.
Many of these passages represent perfect contradictions (that is,
one cannot affirm the truth of one without equally asserting the falsity
of the other). There is, perhaps, no greater evidence for the imperfection
of the Bible as an account of reality, divine or mundane, than such
instances of self-refutation. Of course, once faith has begun its reign of
folly, even perfect contradictions may be relished as heavenly rebukes to
earthly logic. Martin Luther closed the door on reason with a single line:
"The Holy Spirit has an eye only to substance and is not bound by words."
The Holy Spirit, it seems, is happy to play tennis without the net.
n It is true that Augustine was not a perfect sadist. He thought that
NOTES TO PAGES 8 5 - 8 9 255
heretics should be examined "not by stretching them on the rack, not by
scorching them with flames or furrowing their flesh with iron claws, but
by beating them with rods." See P. Johnson, A History of Christianity
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 116-17.
14 Voltaire, "Inquisition," Philosophical Dictionary, ed and trans. T. Besterman
(London: Penguin Books, 1972), 256.
15 From The Percy Anecdotes, cited in Swain, Pleasures, 181.
16 Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire, 190-93.
17 W. Durant, The Age of Faith (1950; reprint, Norwalk, Conn.: Easton
Press, 1992), 784.
18 The Christians, while they were still a lowly sect, had been accused of the
same crime by pagan Romans. There were, in fact, many points of convergence
between witches and Jews in the mind of medieval Christians.
Jews were regularly accused of sorcery, and magical texts were often
attributed (speciously) to Solomon and to a variety of kabbalistic sources.
19 R. Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of
European Witchcraft (New York: Viking, 1996), 8, has this to say on the
subject:
On the wilder shores of the feminist and witch-cult movements a
potent myth has become established, to the effect that 9 million
women were burned as witches in Europe; gendercide rather than
genocide. This is an overestimate by a factor of up to 200, for the most
reasonable modern estimates suggest perhaps 100,000 trials between
1450 and 1750, with something between 40,000 and 50,000 executions,
of which 20 to 25 per cent were men.
Such a revaluation of numbers does little to mitigate the horror and
injustice of this period. Even to read of the Salem witch trials, which
resulted in the hanging of "only" nineteen people, is to be brought face
to face with the seemingly boundless evil that is apt to fill the voids in
our understanding of the world.
20 C. Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of
Crowds (1841; reprint, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993), 529.
21 R. Rhodes, Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New
Plague (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 78.
22 There is some doubt as to whether the Fore, or any other people for that
matter, ever practiced systematic cannibalism (see the entry "cannibalism"
in The Oxford Companion to the Body). If these doubts are borne
out, an alternative explanation for the transmission of kuru would have
2 5 6 NOTES TO PAGES 9 0 - 9 5
to be found. But it should go without saying that its vector was not sorcery.
Scholarly doubts about cannibalism seem somewhat far-fetched,
however, given the widespread evidence of it among modern African
militias in countries like Congo, Uganda, Liberia, Angola, and elsewhere.
In such places, magical beliefs remain widespread—like the notion that
eating your enemy's organs can make you immune to bullets. See D.
Bergner, "The Most Unconventional Weapon," New York Times Magazine,
March 26, 2003, pp. 48-53.
23 Friedrich Spee (1631), cited in Johnson, History of Christianity, 311.
24 Mackay, Delusions, 540-41.
25 B. Russell, Religion and Science (1935; reprint, Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1997), 95.
26 Mackay, Delusions, 525-26.
27 "Anti-Semitism," like the term "Aryan," is a misnomer of nineteenthcentury
German pseudo-science. Semitic (derived from Shem, one of
Noah's three sons) "designated a group of cognate languages that
included Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Babylonian, Assyrian and Ethiopic,
not an ethnic or racial group." See R. S. Wistrich, Anti-Semitism: The
Longest Hatred (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), xvi. "Anti-Semitism"
should therefore denote a hatred of Arabs as well, which it does not.
Despite its mistaken roots, "anti-Semitism" has become the only acceptable
term for the hatred of Jews.
28 D. J. Wakin, "Anti-Semitic 'Elders of Zion' Gets New Life on Egypt TV,"
New York Times, Oct. 26, 2002. This spurious document is actually cited
in the founding covenant of Hamas. See J. I. Kertzer, "The Modern Use
of Ancient Lies," New York Times, May 9, 2002.
29 E. Goldberg, The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).
30 This said, Judaism is a far less fertile source of militant extremism. Jews
tend not to draw their identity as Jews exclusively from the contents of
their beliefs about God. It is possible, for instance, to be a practicing Jew
who does not believe in God. The same cannot be said for Christianity
and Islam.
31 See B. M. Metzger and M. D. Coogan, eds., The Oxford Companion to
the Bible (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 789-90, and A. N. Wilson,
Jesus: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 79. Many other uncouth
pairings have been pointed out: Matt. 2:3-5 and Micah 5:2; Matt. 2:16-18
and Jer. 31:15/Gen. 35:19; Matt. 8:18 and Isa. 53:4; Matt. 12:18 and Isa.
42:1-4; Matt. 13:35 and Ps. 78:2; Matt. 21:5k and Zech. 9:9/Isa. 62:11.
NOTES TO PAGES 9 5 - 9 7 257
Matt. 27:9-10 claims to fulfill a saying that it erroneously attributes to
Jeremiah, which actually appears in Zech. 11:12—providing further evidence
of the text's "inerrancy."
32 The stigma attached to illegitimacy among Jews in the first century CE
was considerable. See S. Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus (New
York: HarperCollins, 1991).
33 See ibid., 78, and J. Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries (New York:
Harper and Row, 1987), 80.
34 B. Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Baltimore: Penguin Books,
1966), sec. 189.
35 Nietzsche had it right when he wrote, "The most pitiful example: the
corruption of Pascal, who believed in the corruption of his reason
through original sin when it had in fact been corrupted only by his
Christianity" (The Portable Nietzsche, trans. W. Kaufmann [New York:
Viking, 1954], 572). It is true that Pascal had what was for him an astonishing
contemplative experience on the night of Nov. 23,1654—one that
converted him entirely to Jesus Christ. I do not doubt the power of such
experiences, but it seems to me self-evident that they are no more the
exclusive property of devout Christians than are tears shed in joy. Hindus,
Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, along with animists of every description
have had these experiences throughout history. Pascal, being highly
intelligent and greatly learned, should have known this; that he did not
(or chose to disregard it) testifies to the stultifying effect of orthodoxy.
36 They also avenged themselves against their Roman persecutors: "The
Christians threw Maximian's wife into the Orontes, and put to death all
his relatives. In Egypt and Palestine they massacred the magistrates who
had most strongly opposed Christianity. The widow and daughter of Diocletian,
having taken refuge in Thessalonica, were recognized, and their
bodies were thrown into the sea." Voltaire, "Christianity," Philosophical
Dictionary, 137.
37 Wistrich, Anti-Semitism, 19-20.
38 Augustine (The City of God, XVIII, 46):
Therefore, when they do not believe our Scriptures, their own, which
they blindly read, are fulfilled in them, lest perchance any one should
say that the Christians have forged these prophecies about Christ
which are quoted under the name of the sibyl, or of others, if such
there be, who do not belong to the Jewish people. For us, indeed, those
suffice which are quoted from the books of our enemies, to whom we
2 5 8 NOTES TO PAGES 99- 1 00
make our acknowledgment, on account of this testimony which, in
spite of themselves, they contribute by their possession of these
books, while they themselves are dispersed among all nations, wherever
the Church of Christ is spread abroad. For a prophecy about this
thing was sent before in the Psalms, which they also read, where it is
written, "My God, His mercy shall prevent me. My God hath shown
me concerning mine enemies, that Thou shalt not slay them, lest they
should at last forget Thy law: disperse them in Thy might" [Ps.
69:10-11]. Therefore God has shown the Church in her enemies the
Jews the grace of His compassion, since, as saith the apostle, "their
offense is the salvation of the Gentiles" [Rom. 11:11]. And therefore
He has not slain them, that is, He has not let the knowledge that they
are Jews be lost in them, although they have been conquered by the
Romans, lest they should forget the law of God, and their testimony
should be of no avail in this matter of which we treat. But it was not
enough that he should say, "Slay them not, lest they should at last
forget Thy law," unless he has also added, "Disperse them"; because if
they had only been in their own land with that testimony of the
Scriptures, and everywhere, certainly the Church which is everywhere
could not have had them as witnesses among all nations to the
prophecies which were sent before concerning Christ.
39 See J. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of
the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (1943; reprint,
Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 153.
40 Ibid., 140.
41 Ibid., 114. The Reformation, by undermining belief in the doctrine of
transubstantiation, seems to have rendered host desecration less of a concern.
Thus, it was during the schismatic sixteenth century that the persecution
of Jews as "sorcerers" came into its own.
42 The Egyptian paper Al Akhbar and the Saudi paper Al Riyadh have both
published articles purporting to verify the blood libel. The Syrian
defense minister Mustafa Tlas has written a book, The Matzoh of Zion,
charging the Jews with ritual murder. Nazi propaganda on the subject,
dating from the 1930s, now appears on Islamist websites. See Kertzer,
"Modern Use."
43 Cited in J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), 328.
44 Ibid., 360-61.
NOTES TO PAGES 101-103 259
45 D. J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and
the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 28-48.
46 Kertzer, "Modern Use."
47 It has grown fashionable to assert that the true horror of the Holocaust,
apart from its scale, was that it was an expression of reason, and
that it therefore demonstrates a pathology inherent to the Western
Enlightenment tradition. The truth of this assertion is held by many
scholars to be self-evident—for no one can deny that technology,
bureaucracy, and systematic managerial thinking made the genocidal
ambitions of the Third Reich possible. The romantic thesis lurking here
is that reason itself has a "shadow side" and is therefore no place to
turn for the safeguarding of human happiness. This is a terrible misunderstanding
of the situation, however. The Holocaust marked the culmination
of German tribalism and two thousand years of Christian
fulminating against the Jews. Reason had nothing to do with it. Put a
telescope in the hands of a chimpanzee, and if he bashes his neighbor
over the head with it, reason's "shadow side" will have been equally
revealed. (K. Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality [Boston: Shambhala,
1995], 663-64, makes the same point.)
48 M. Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the
Second World War (New York: Henry Holt, 1985), 22.
49 Ibid.
50 Quoted in G. Wills, "Before the Holocaust," New York Times Book
Review, Sept. 23, 2001.
51 Quoted in Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, 106. Of course,
Church-mandated anti-Semitism was not confined to Germany. Consider
the statement of the Roman Catholic primate of Poland, August
Cardinal Hlond, in a 1936 pastoral letter: "There will be the Jewish problem
as long as the Jews remain. It is a fact the Jews are fighting against
the Catholic Church, persisting in free thinking, and are the vanguard of
godlessness, Bolshevism, and subversion. . . . It is a fact that the Jews
deceive, levy interest, and are pimps. It is a fact that the religious and ethical
influence of the Jewish young people on the Polish young people is a
negative one." As J. Carroll, "The Silence," New Yorker, April 7, 1997,
points out, "Hlond's letter was careful to say that these 'facts' did not justify
the murder of Jews, but it is hard to see how such anti-Semitism on
the part of the leading Catholic in Poland was unconnected with what followed.
Over the decades and centuries of this millennium such sentiments
expressed by Christian leaders were not unusual."
260 NOTES TO PAGES 103-109
52 G. Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1964), 282, quoted in Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, n o .
53 Cited in L. George, Crimes of Perception: An Encyclopedia of Heresies
and Heretics (New York: Paragon House, 1995), 211.
54 Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1994), 10. This book really is a breathtaking piece of sophistry,
evasion, and narrow-mindedness. It demonstrates my thesis in almost
every line, erudite references to Wittgenstein, Feuerbach, and Ricoeur
notwithstanding.
55 M. Aarons and J. Loftus, Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the
Swiss Banks, rev. ed. (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998); G. Sereny, Into
That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Vintage, 1974).
56 See Sereny, Into That Darkness, 318.
57 See, e.g., Glover, Humanity, chap. 40.
4 The Problem with Islam
1 As we saw in chapter 2, this is a direct consequence of what it means—
logically, psychologically, and behaviorally—to believe that our beliefs
actually represent the way the world is. The moment you believe that
religious (or spiritual, or ethical) propositions say anything at all of substance,
you will be obliged to admit that they can be more or less accurate,
comprehensive, or useful. Hierarchies of this sort are built into the
very structure the world. We will take a closer look at ethics in chapter 6.
2 R. A. Pape, "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," American Political
Science Review 97, no. 3 (2003): 20-32, has argued that suicidal terrorism
is best understood as a strategic means to achieve certain
well-defined nationalist goals and should not be considered a consequence
of religious ideology. In support of this thesis, he recounts the
manner in which Hamas and Islamic Jihad have systematically used suicide
bombings to extract concessions from the Israeli government. Pape
argues that had these organizations been merely "irrational" or
"fanatic," we would not expect to see such a calculated use of violence.
Their motivation must be, therefore, primarily nationalistic. Like most
commentators on this infernal wastage of human life, Pape seems unable
to imagine what it would be like to actually believe what millions of
Muslims profess to believe. The fact that terrorist groups have demonstrable,
short-term goals does not in the least suggest that they are not
NOTES TO PAGES 111-115 261
primarily motivated by their religious dogmas. Pape claims that "the
most important goal that a community can have is the independence of
its homeland (population, property, and way of life) from foreign influence
or control." But he overlooks the fact that these communities define
themselves in religious terms. Pape's analysis is particularly inapposite
with respect to Al Qaeda. To attribute "territorial" and "nationalistic"
motives to Osama bin Laden seems almost willfully obscurantist, since
Osama's only apparent concerns are the spread of Islam and the sanctity
of Muslim holy sites. Suicide bombing, in the Muslim world at least, is
an explicitly religious phenomenon that is inextricable from notions of
martyrdom and jihad, predictable on their basis, and sanctified by their
logic. It is no more secular an activity than prayer is.
3 B. Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York:
Modern Library, 2003), 32.
4 M. Ruthven, Islam in the World, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
2000), 7.
5 Some of these hadiths are cited in Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 32. Others are
drawn from an Internet database: www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/reference/
searchhadith.html.
6 Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 55.
7 "Idolatry is worse than carnage" (Koran 2:190). The rule of the Mogul
emperor Akbar (1556-1605) offers an exception here, but it is merely
that Akbar's tolerance of Hinduism was a frank violation of Islamic law.
8 F. Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and
Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 126.
9 See A. Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2003),
61.
10 These facts and dates are drawn from R. S. Wistrich, Anti-Semitism: The
Longest Hatred (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), and Dershowitz,
Case for Israel.
11 L. Binder, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), 129.
12 A. Cowell, "Zeal for Suicide Bombing Reaches British Midland," New
York Times, May 2, 2003. Consider the case of England: British Muslims
have been found fighting with the Taliban, plotting terror attacks in
Yemen, attempting to blow up airplanes, and kidnapping and killing
Western journalists in Pakistan. Recently, two British citizens volunteered
for suicide missions in Israel (one succeeded, one failed).
Terrorist Hunter (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), whose anonymous
262 NOTES TO PAGES 1 1 5 - 1 2 3
author has gone undercover to tape the proceedings at Muslim conferences
in the United States, depicts a shocking level of intolerance among
Muslims living in the West. The author reports that at one conference,
held at the Ramada Plaza hotel in suburban Chicago, Arab American children
performed skits in which they killed Jews and became martyrs.
Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and Palestine
(appointed by Yasir Arafat), recently announced, "The Jews do not dare
to bother me, because they are the most cowardly creatures Allah has
ever created. . . . We tell them: In as much as you love life, the Muslim
loves death and martyrdom" (ibid., 134). Sabri, who regularly calls for
the destruction of America and all infidel nations, and encourages child
suicide bombers ("The younger the martyr, the more I respect him"—
ibid., 132), spoke these words not in a mosque on the West Bank but at
the Twenty-sixth Annual Convention of the Islamic Circle of North
America, in Cleveland, Ohio.
13 Lewis, Crisis of Islam, xxviii.
14 Ruthven, Islam in the World, 137.
15 Yosuf Islam, in his wisdom, had this to say in a written response to those
who were shocked by his apparent endorsement of Khomeini's fatwa:
Under Islamic Law, the ruling regarding blasphemy is quite clear; the
person found guilty of it must be put to death. Only under certain circumstances
can repentance be accepted.... The fact is that as far as the
application of Islamic Law and the implementation of full Islamic way
of life in Britain is concerned, Muslims realize that there is very little
chance of that happening in the near future. But that shouldn't stop
us from trying to improve the situation and presenting the Islamic
viewpoint wherever and whenever possible. That is the duty of every
Muslim and that is what I did.
(See catstevens.com/articles/00013). If even a Western educated exhippie
was talking this way, what do you think the sentiments were on
the streets of Tehran?
16 K. H. Pollack, "The Crisis of Islam': Faith and Terrorism in the Muslim
World," New York Times Book Review, April 6, 2003.
17 As Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) wrote, "I must say, it is as toilsome reading
as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite;
endless iterations, longwindedness, entanglement . . . insupportable stupidity,
in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European
through the Koran!" Cited in Ruthven, Islam in the World, 81-82.
NOTES TO PAGES 1 2 3 - 1 3 3 263
Cited in P. Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton,
2003), 68.
www.people-press.org.
Christopher Luxenberg (this is a pseudonym), a scholar of ancient
Semitic languages, has recently argued that a mistranslation is responsible
for furnishing the Muslim paradise with "virgins" (Arabic hur,
transliterated as "houris"—literally "white ones"). It seems that the passages
describing paradise in the Koran were drawn from earlier Christian
texts that make frequent use of the Aramaic word hur, meaning "white
raisins." White raisins, it seems, were a great delicacy in the ancient
world. Imagine the look on a young martyr's face when, finding himself
in a paradise teeming with his fellow thugs, his seventy houris arrive as
a fistful of raisins. See A. Stille, "Scholars Are Quietly Offering New
Theories of the Koran," New York Times, March 2, 2002.
S. P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
E. W. Said, "The Clash of Ignorance," Nation, Oct. 4, 2001.
E. W. Said, "Suicidal Ignorance," CounterPunch, Nov. 18, 2001.
For an alarming look at the rising political influence of Christianity in
the developing world, see P. Jenkins, "The Next Christianity," Atlantic
Monthly, Oct. 2002, pp. 53-68.
1 From the United Nations' Arab Human Development Report 2002, cited
in Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 115-17.
' See R. D. Kaplan, "The Lawless Frontier," Atlantic Monthly, March
2000, pp. 66-80.
' S. Atran, "Opinion: Who Wants to Be a Martyr?" New York Times, May
5, 2003. Atran also reports that a Pakistani relief worker interviewed
nearly 250 aspiring Palestinian suicide bombers and their recruiters and
concluded, "None were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded or
depressed. . . . They all seemed to be entirely normal members of their
families." He also cites a 2001 poll conducted by the Palestinian Center
for Policy and Survey Research indicating "that Palestinian adults with
12 years or more of education are far more likely to support bomb attacks
than those who cannot read."
1 B. Hoffman, "The Logic of Suicide Terrorism," Atlantic Monthly, June
2003, pp. 40-47.
' Indeed, this may be happening in Iran. Having truly achieved a Muslim
theocracy, the Iranian people now have few illusions that their problems
are the result of their insufficient conformity to Islam.
2 6 4 NOTES TO PAGES 1 3 4 - 1 3 7
30 Zakaria, future of Freedom, cites a CNN poll (Feb. 2002) conducted
across nine Muslim countries. Some 61 percent of those polled said they
do not believe that Arabs were responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. No
doubt the 39 percent who thought otherwise represent millions who wish
the Arab world would take credit for a job well done.
31 It would be impossible to do justice to the richness of the Muslim imagination
in the context of this book. To take only one preposterous example:
it seems that many Iraqis believe that the widespread looting that
occurred after the fall of Saddam's regime was orchestrated by Americans
and Israelis, as part of a Zionist plot. The attacks upon American soldiers
were carried out by CIA agents "as part of a covert operation to justify
prolonging the U.S. military occupation." Wow! See J. L. Anderson,
"Iraq's Bloody Summer," New Yorker, Aug. 11, 2003, pp. 43-55.
32 Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 153.
33 Also see M. B. Zuckerman, "Graffiti on History's Walls," U.S. News and
World Report, Nov. 3, 2003, for an account of anti-Semitism in the mainstream
European press.
34 Dershowitz, Case for Israel, 2.
35 This miraculous ascension (mi'raj) is fully described only in the hadith,
though it may be alluded to in the Koran (17:1). The likening of the
Israelis to the Nazis is especially egregious, given that the Palestinians
distinguished themselves as Nazi collaborators during the war years.
Their calculated attacks upon Jews in the 1930s and 1940s led to the
deaths of hundreds of the thousands of European Jews who would otherwise
have been permitted to immigrate by the British. This result does
not appear to have been inadvertent. Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the grand
mufti of Jerusalem and the leader of the Palestinians throughout the war
years, served as an adviser to the Nazis on the Jewish question, was given
a personal tour of Auschwitz by Heinrich Himmler, and aspired to open
his own death camp for the Jews in Palestine once the Germans had won
the war. These activities were well publicized and merely increased his
popularity in the Arab world when, as a war criminal sought by the
Allies, he was given asylum in Egypt. As recently as 2002, Yasser Arafat,
the head of the Palestinian Authority, referred to Husseini as a "hero."
See Dershowitz, Case for Israel, 56.
36 Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 183.
37 Ibid., 206-7.
38 See ibid., 108: "Khomeini whipped up a religious fervor for that kind of
mass death—a belief that to die on Khomeini's orders in a human wave
NOTES TO PAGES I 3 8 - I 5 I 265
attack was to achieve the highest and most beautiful of destinies. All over
Iran young men, encouraged by their mothers and their families, yearned
to participate in those human wave attacks—actively yearned for martyrdom.
It was a mass movement for suicide. The war was one of the
most macabre events that has ever occurred. . . ."
39 Ibid.
40 J. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. C. Turner (New York: Verso,
2002).
41 It may seem strange to encounter phrases like "our enemies," uttered
without apparent self-consciousness, and it is strange for me to write
them. But there is no doubt that enemies are what we have (and I leave
it for the reader to draw the boundaries of "we" as broadly or narrowly
as he or she likes). The liberal fallacy that I will attempt to unravel in the
present section is the notion that we made these enemies and that we are,
therefore, their "moral equivalent." We are not. An analysis of their religious
ideology reveals that we are confronted by people who would have
put us to sword, had they had the power, long before the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization were
even a gleam in the eye of the first rapacious globalizes
42 N. Chomsky, 9-11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), 119.
43 P. Unger, Living High & Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1996).
44 A. Roy, War Talk (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2003), 84-85.
45 J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), 58.
46 Ibid., 62.
47 Are intentions really the bottom line? What are we to say, for instance,
about those Christian missionaries in the New World who baptized
Indian infants only to promptly kill them, thereby sending them to
heaven? Their intentions were (apparently) good. Were their actions ethical?
Yes, within the confines of a deplorably limited worldview. The
medieval apothecary who gave his patients quicksilver really was trying
to help. He was just mistaken about the role this element played in the
human body. Intentions matter, but they are not all that matters.
48 Zakaria, Future of Freedom, 138.
49 Ibid., 143.
50 Ibid., 123.
51 Ibid., 150.
52 Robert Kaplan, "Supremacy by Stealth," Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 2003, pp.
266 NOTES TO PAGES 1 5 1 - 1 5 5
65-83, has made a strong case that interventions of this sort should be
almost entirely covert and will, for the foreseeable future, be the responsibility
of the United States to carry out.
53 Glover, Humanity, 140.
54 M. Rees, Our Final Hour (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 42.
5 West of Eden
1 "At a 1971 dinner, Reagan told California legislator James Mills that
'everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the Second
Coming of Christ.' The President has permitted Jerry Falwell to attend
National Security Council briefings and author and Armageddon-advocate
Hal Lindsey to give a talk on nuclear war with Russia to top Pentagon
strategists." Cited in E. Johnson, "Grace Halsell's Prophecy and
Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War," Journal of
Historical Review 7, no. 4 (Winter 1986).
2 See G. Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for
the Temple Mount (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), for a lengthy analysis.
3 Ibid., p. 80.
4 "Justic Roy Moore's Lawless Battle," editorial to New York Times, Dec.
17, 2002.
5 Frank Rich, "Religion for Dummies," New York Times, April 23, 2002.
6 www.gallup.com.
7 Rich, "Religion." See also F. Clarkson, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle
between Theocracy and Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage
Press, 1997).
8 E. Bumiller, "Evangelicals Sway White House on Human Rights Issues
Abroad," New York Times, Oct. 26, 2003.
9 C. Mooney, "W.'s Christian Nation," American Prospect, June 1, 2003.
Also see the website for Americans United for Separation of Church and
State (www.au.org).
10 One of the concerns with giving federal funds to religious organizations
is that these organizations are not bound by the same equal employment
opportunity regulations that apply to the rest of the nonprofit world.
Church groups can ban homosexuals, people who have divorced and
remarried, those who have married interracially, etc., and still receive
federal funds. They can also find creative ways to use these funds to proselytize.
Granting such funds in the first place puts the federal governNOTES
TO PAGES 1 5 5 - 1 6 1 267
ment in the position of deciding what is, and what isn't, a genuine
religion—a responsibility that seems fraught with problems of its own.
11 M. Dowd, "Tribulation Worketh Patience," New York Times, April 9, 2003.
12 W. M. Arkin, "The Pentagon Unleashes a Holy Warrior," Los Angeles
Times, Oct. 16, 2003.
13 J. Hendren, "Religious Groups Want Outspoken General Punished,"Los
Angeles Times, Oct. 17, 2003.
14 G. H. Gallup Jr., Religion in America 1996 (Princeton: Princeton Religion
Research Center, 1996).
15 Paul Krugman, "Gotta Have Faith," New York Times, April 27, 2002.
16 A. Scalia, "God's Justice and Ours," First Things, May 2002, pp. 17-21.
17 www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr030519.asp.
18 Mooney, "W.'s Christian Nation."
19 See Scalia's dissent to Daryl Renard Atkins, Petitioner, v. Virginia, on
writ of certiorari to the supreme court of Virginia, June 20, 2002.
20 See Scalia's dissent to John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner, Petitioners
v. Texas, on writ of certiorari to the court of appeals of Texas, fourteenth
district, June 26, 2003.
21 Ted Bundy claimed, on the eve of his execution, that violent pornography
had inscribed certain terrible ideas indelibly into his head. See R.
Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), for a discussion of this.
22 There is a distinction between public and private freedoms that I have
glossed over here. Clearly, there are innumerable behaviors that are
blameless in private that we ban in most public spaces, simply because
they pose a nuisance to others. Cooking food on a public sidewalk, cutting
one's hair on a commercial aircraft, or taking one's pet snake to the
movies are among the countless examples of private freedoms that do not
translate into public virtues.
23 Happily, the ruling by the Supreme Court in Lawrence and Garner
v. Texas seems to have rendered these laws unconditional (see
www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/06/26/scotus.sodomy).
24 Viewing the drug problem from the perspective of health care is instructive:
our laws against providing addicts with clean needles have increased
the spread of AIDS, hepatitis C, and other blood-borne diseases. Since the
purity and dosage of illegal drugs remains a matter of guesswork for the
user, the rates of poisoning and overdose from drug use are unnecessarily
high (as they were for alcohol during Prohibition). Perversely, the criminal
prohibition of drugs has actually made it easier for minors to get
268 NOTES TO PAGES l 6 l - l 6 2
them, because the market for them has been driven underground. The
laws limiting the medical use of opiate painkillers do little more than keep
the terminally ill suffering unnecessarily during their last months of life.
25 L. Carroll, "Fetal Brains Suffer Badly from the Effects of Alcohol," New
York Times, Nov. 4, 2003.
26 www.drugwarfacts.com.
27 www.rand.org/publications/RB/RB6010/.
28 These events are described in E. Schlosser, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs,
and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 2003).
29 Some 51 percent of all violent offenders are released from jail after serving
two years or less, and 76 percent were released after serving four
years or less (www.lp.org). At the federal level, the average sentence for
a drug offense in the U.S. is 6¼ years (from the Office of National Drug
Control Policy [ONDCP] Drug Data Summary, www.whitehousedrugpolicy.
gov).
30 And yet, this mountain of imponderables reaches higher still. In many
states, a person who has been merely accused of a drug crime can have
his property seized, and those who informed against him can be rewarded
with up to 25 percent of its value. The rest of these spoils go to police
departments, which now rely upon such property seizures to meet their
budgets. This is precisely the arrangement of incentives that led to this
sort of corruption during the Inquisition (if one can even speak of such a
process being "corrupted"). Like the heretic, the accused drug offender
has no hope but to trade information for a reduced sentence. The person
who can't (or won't) implicate others inevitably faces punishments of
fantastical severity. Information has grown so valuable, in fact, that a
black market for it has emerged. Defendants who have no information to
trade can actually buy drug leads from professional informers (and they
do not come cheap). The net result of all this is that police departments
have learned to target property rather than crime. Property can be seized
and forfeited even if a defendant is ultimately found innocent of any
criminal offense. One national survey found that 80 percent of property
seizures occur without any criminal prosecution whatsoever (www.drug
warfacts.com). Under these enlightened laws, couples in their eighties
have permanently lost their homes because a grandchild was caught with
marijuana. For more facts of this sort see Schlosser, Reefer Madness.
The war on drugs has clearly done much to erode our civil liberties. In
particular, the standards for search and seizure, pretrial release, and judiNOTES
TO PAGES 1 6 2 - 1 6 3 269
cial discretion in sentencing have all been revised in an attempt to make
this unwinnable war easier to prosecute. Since drug offenses are covered
by local, state, and federal jurisdictions, people can be tried multiple times
for the same crime—some have been found not guilty at one level, only
to receive life sentences upon subsequent prosecution. On more than one
occasion, members of Congress have introduced legislation seeking to
apply the death penalty to anyone caught selling drugs. Unsurprisingly,
our attempts to eradicate the supply of drugs in other countries have
been even more detrimental to the liberties of others. In Latin America,
we have become a tireless benefactor of human rights violators. (See, for
example, the Human Rights Watch website: www.hrw.org.)
In environmental terms, the war on drugs has been no more auspicious.
The aerial spraying of herbicides has hastened the destruction of
the rainforest as well as contaminated water supplies, staple crops, and
people. The U.S. government has recently sought approval to use a genetically
engineered "killer fungus," designed to attack marijuana crops
domestically and coca and opium plants abroad. For the moment, some
rather obvious environmental concerns have prevented its use. (See
www.lindesmith.org.)
31 From the ONDCP Drug Data Summary (March 2003). The war on drugs
has also become a great engine of racial inequity, for while blacks constitute
only 12 percent of the U.S. population and 13 percent of U.S. drug
users, 38 percent of those arrested and 59 percent of those convicted for
drug crimes are black. Our drug laws have contributed to the epidemic of
fatherlessness in the black community, and this—along with the profits
and resultant criminality of the drug trade—has devastated our inner
cities. (See www.drugwarfacts.com.)
32 Ibid.
33 M. S. Gazzaniga, "Legalizing Drugs: Just Say Yes," National Review, July
10,1995, pp. 26-37, makes a similar estimate. Needless to say, the cost has
only grown with time.
34 W. F. Buckley Jr., "The War on Drugs Is Lost," National Review, Feb. 12,
1996.
35 www.lindesmith.org.
36 when was the last time someone was killed over an alcohol or tobacco
deal gone awry? We can be confident that the same normalcy would be
achieved if drugs were regulated by the government. At the inception of
the modern "war on drugs," the economist Milton Friedman observed
that "legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime
270 NOTES TO PAGE 1 64
and raise the quality of law enforcement." He then invited the reader to
"conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote
law and order" (Friedman, "Prohibition and Drugs," Newsweek,
May 1, 1972). What was true then remains true after three decades of
pious misrule; the criminality associated with the drug trade is the
inescapable consequence of our drug laws themselves.
37 According to the U.S. government, twelve of the twenty-eight groups
that have been officially classed as terrorist organizations finance their
activities, in whole or in part, by the drug trade. (See www.theantidrug.
com/drugs_terror/terrorgroups.html.)
38 S. Weinberg, "What Price Glory," New York Review of Books, Nov. 6,
2003, pp. 55-60.
39 All of this folly persists, even though the legalized and regulated sale of
drugs would most effectively keep them out of the hands of minors
(when was the last time someone was caught selling vodka in a schoolyard?),
eradicate organized crime, reduce the annual cost of law enforcement
by tens of billions of dollars, raise billions more in new sales taxes,
and free hundreds of thousands of police officers for the job of fighting
violent crime and terrorism. Against these remarkable benefits stands the
fear that the legalization of drugs would lead to an epidemic of drug
abuse and addiction. Common sense, as well as comparisons between the
United States and places like Holland, reveals this fear to be unfounded.
As more than 100 million of the estimated 108 million Americans who
have used illegal drugs can attest, addiction is a phenomenon distinct
from mere use, and users merely require good information to keep from
becoming addicts. Addicts require treatment, of course—for which there
are at present insufficient funds.
This is not to deny that a small percentage of people who use drugs
(both legal and illegal) have their lives powerfully disrupted by them. We
generally think of this problem as having two stages of severity: "abuse"
and "addiction." It remains true, however, that most people who use
drugs do not abuse them, and many illegal drugs do not readily become
sources of addiction even in the hands of abusers (marijuana, LSD, psilocybin,
mescaline, etc.). To say that a drug is addictive is to say that people
develop both tolerance to it (and therefore require progressively
higher doses to achieve the same effect) and withdrawal symptoms upon
stoppage. It is not hard to see why well-intentioned people would worry
that others might become inadvertent slaves of such biochemistry. While
opium and its derivatives (like heroin and morphine) are the classic
NOTES TO PAGES 1 6 5 - 1 6 8 271
examples of drugs of this sort, nicotine and alcohol can fall into this category
as well (depending on usage). Given our laws, however, all users of
illicit drugs—whether dysfunctional or not, addicted or not—are considered
criminals and subject to arrest, imprisonment, property seizure, and
other punishments by the state.
Our drug policy has created arbitrary and illusory distinctions
between biologically active substances, while obscuring valid ones. No
one doubts that the use of certain drugs can destroy the lives of certain
people. But the same can be said of almost any commodity. People
destroy their lives and the lives of their dependents by simply overeating.
In 2003 the Centers for Disease Control declared obesity to be the
greatest public health problem in the United States, and yet few of us
imagine that new criminal laws should be written to control the use of
cheeseburgers. Where drugs are a problem, they are a problem whose
remedy is better education and better health care, not incarceration. Simply
observe the people in public life who are incapable of having a rational
discussion on these matters (start with John Ashcroft and work your
way down), and you will find that religious faith does much to inform
their view of the world.
40 See, e.g., D. Kahneman and A. Tversky, "On the Reality of Cognitive Illusions,"
Psychological Review 103 (1996): 582-91.
41 "Misguided Faith on AIDS" (editorial), New York Times, Oct. 15, 2003.
42 N. Kristof, "When Prudery Kills," New York Times, Oct. 8, 2003.
43 Ibid.
44 Kristof also misinterprets Einstein's famous statement "Science without
religion is lame; religion without science is blind," suggesting that Einstein
was voicing respect for religious credulity. Science without religion
is lame, merely because "science can only be created by those who are
thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding.
This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion."
Whereas religion without science is blind because religion has no access
to the truth—it was, to Einstein's mind, nothing other than this "source
of feeling," this striving for something greater that cannot itself be scientifically
justified. Faith, therefore, is hunger only; while reason is its food.
Einstein seemed to consider faith nothing more than a eunuch left to
guard the harem while the intellect was away solving the problems of the
world. By pretending that it could proceed without any epistemic aspirations
whatsoever, Einstein robbed religion of the truth of its doctrine. In
so doing, he also relieved it of its capacity to err. This is not the faith that
272 NOTES TO PAGES 1 7 0 - 1 7 3
evangelicals, or any other religious believers, have ever practiced. See
Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Wings Books, 1954), 41-49.
6 A Science of Good and Evil
1 N. Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 543.
2 This linkage between happiness and ethics is not a mere endorsement of
utilitarianism. There may be ethical questions that escape a utilitarian
analysis, but they will be questions of ethics, or so I will argue, only to
the degree that anyone is in a position to suffer on account of them. I
have elected to bypass the categories of moral theory that usually frame
any discussion of ethics—utilitarianism (or consequentialism) and deontology
being the most common. I do not believe that these categories are
as conceptually distinct, or as useful, as their omnipresence in the literature
suggests.
3 One could argue that these behaviors do "victimize" others in more subtle
ways. If a compelling argument of this sort exists, I am not aware of
it. There is undoubtedly something to say about the relationship between
such behavior and one's own happiness, but this becomes a matter of
ethics only when the happiness of others is also at stake.
4 See M. D. Hauser, "Swappable Minds," in The Next Fifty Years, ed. J.
Brockman (New York: Vintage, 2002).
5 B. Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, ed. P. Edwards (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1957), vi.
6 This observation formed the central strand of Carl Jung's famous study
of Job, Answer to Job, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1958).
7 The belief that human beings are endowed with freedom of will underwrites
both our religious conception of "sin" and our judicial ideal of
"retributive justice." This makes free will a problem of more than passing
philosophical interest. Without freedom of will, sinners would just be
poorly calibrated clockwork, and any notion of justice that emphasized
their punishment (rather than their rehabilitation or mere containment)
would seem deeply incongruous. Happily, we will find that we need no
illusions about a person's place in the causal order to hold him accountable
for his actions, or to take action ourselves. We can find secure foundations
for ethics and the rule of law without succumbing to any obvious
cognitive illusions.
NOTE TO PAGE 1 7 3 273
Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less) in that it cannot
even be rendered coherent conceptually, since no one has ever described
a manner in which mental and physical events could arise that would
attest to its existence. Surely, most illusions are made of sterner stuff
than this. If, for instance, a man believes that his dental fillings are receiving
radio broadcasts, or that his sister has been replaced by an alien who
looks exactly like her, we would have no difficulty specifying what would
have to be true of the world for his beliefs to be, likewise, true. Strangely,
our notion of "free of will" achieves no such intelligibility. As a concept,
it simply has no descriptive, or even logical, moorings. Like some perverse,
malodorous rose, however we might attempt to enjoy its beauty up
close, it offers up its own contradiction.
The idea of free will is an ancient artifact of philosophy, of course, as
well as a subject of occasional, if guilty, interest among scientists—e.g.,
M. Planck, Where Is Science Going? trans, and ed. J. Murphy (1933;
reprint, Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1981); B. Libet, "Do We Have
Free Will?" Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, nos. 8-9 (1999): 47-57;
S. A. Spence and C. D. Frith, "Towards a Functional Anatomy of Volition,"
ibid., 11-29; A. L. Roskies, "Yes, But Am I free?" Nature Neuroscience
4 (2001): 1161; and D. M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). It has long been obvious, however, that
any description of the will in terms of causes and effects sets us sliding
toward a moral and logical crevasse, for either our wills are determined
by prior causes, and we are not responsible for them, or they are the
product of chance, and we are not responsible for them. The notion of
free will seems particularly suspect once we begin thinking about the
brain. If a man's "choice" to shoot the president is determined by a certain
pattern of neural activity, and this neural activity is in turn the product
of prior causes—perhaps an unfortunate coincidence of an unhappy
childhood, bad genes, and cosmic-ray bombardment—what can it possibly
mean to say that his will is "free"? Despite the clever exertions of
many philosophers who have sought to render free will "compatible"
with both deterministic and indeterministic accounts of mind and brain,
the project appears to be hopeless. The endurance of free will, as a problem
in need of analysis, is attributable to the fact that most of us feel that
we freely author our own actions and acts of attention (however difficult
it may be to make sense of this notion in logical or scientific terms). It is
safe to say that no one was ever moved to entertain the existence of free
will because it holds great promise as an abstract idea.
274 NOTE TO PAGE 174
In physical terms, every action is clearly reducible to a totality of
impersonal events merely propagating their influence: genes are transcribed,
neurotransmitters bind to their receptors, muscle fibers contract,
and John Doe pulls the trigger on his gun. For our commonsense notions
of agency to hold, our actions cannot be merely lawful products of our
biology, our conditioning, or anything else that might lead others to predict
them—and yet, were our actions to be actually divorced from such a
causal network, they would be precisely those for which we could claim
no responsibility. It has been fashionable, for several decades now, to speculate
about the manner in which the indeterminacy of quantum processes,
at the level of the neuron or its constituents, could yield a form of mental
life that might stand free of the causal order; but such speculation is
entirely oblique to the matter at hand—for an indeterminate world, governed
by chance or quantum probabilities, would grant no more autonomy
to human agents than would the incessant drawing of lots. In the face
of any real independence from prior causes, every gesture would seem to
merit the statement "I don't know what came over me." Upon the horns
of this dilemma, fanciers of free will can often be heard making shrewd
use of philosophical language, in an attempt to render our intuitions about
a person's moral responsibility immune to worries about causation. (See
Ayer, Chisholm, Strawson, Frankfurt, Dennett, and Watson—all in G.
Watson, ed., Free Will [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982].) Although we
can find no room for it in the causal order, the notion of free will is still
accorded a remarkable deference in philosophical and scientific literature,
even by scientists who believe that the mind is entirely dependent upon
the workings of the brain.
What most people overlook is that free will does not even correspond
to any subjective fact about us. Consequently, even rigorous introspection
soon grows as hostile to the idea of free will as the equations of
physics have, because apparent acts of volition merely arise, spontaneously
(whether caused, uncaused, or probabilistically inclined, it makes
no difference), and cannot be traced to a point of origin in the stream of
consciousness. A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny and the reader
might observe that he no more authors the next thought he thinks than
the next thought I write.
We may have the ethical obligation to preserve certain rocks for future
generations, but this is an obligation we would have with respect to other
people, not with respect to the rocks themselves. The equation of a creature's
being conscious with there being "something that it is like to be"
NOTES TO PAGES I 7 4 - I 7 5 275
said creature comes from T. Nagel, "What Is It like to Be a Bat," in Mortal
Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979).
9 That is, they felt no pain, in the phenomenal sense; even Descartes could
see that animals avoided certain stimuli—he just didn't think that there
was "something that it was like" for them to do so. His error here is based
on a kernel of truth: it is conceivable that something could seem to be
conscious without being conscious (i.e., passing the Turing test says
nothing about whether or not a physical system actually is conscious; it
just leaves us feeling, from the outside, that it probably is). Behaviorism
amounts to the doctrine that seeming to be conscious is all there is to
being conscious. If even a kernel of truth is to be found lurking here, I
have yet to find it.
10 Cited in J. M. Masson and S. McCarthy, When Elephants Weep: The
Emotional Lives of Animals (New York: Delacorte Press, 1995), 18.
11 The stakes here should be obvious. What is it like to be a chimpanzee?
If we knew more about the details of chimpanzee experience, even our
most conservative use of them in research might begin to seem unconscionably
cruel. Were it possible to trade places with one of these creatures,
we might no longer think it ethical to so much as separate a pair
of chimpanzee siblings, let alone perform invasive procedures on their
bodies for curiosity's sake. It is important to reiterate that there are
surely facts of the matter to be found here, whether or not we ever
devise methods sufficient to find them. Do pigs led to slaughter feel
something akin to terror? Do they feel a terror that no decent man or
woman would ever knowingly impose upon another sentient creature?
We have, at present, no idea at all. What we do know (or should) is that
an answer to this question could have profound implications, given our
current practices.
All of this is to say that our sense of compassion and ethical responsibility
tracks our sense of a creature's likely phenomenology. Compassion,
after all, is a response to suffering—and thus a creature's capacity
to suffer is paramount. Whether or not a fly is "conscious" is not precisely
the point. The question of ethical moment is, What could it possibly
be conscious of?
Much ink has been spilled over the question of whether or not animals
have conscious mental states at all. It is legitimate to ask how and
to what degree a given animal's experience differs from our own (Does
a chimpanzee attribute states of mind to others? Does a dog recognize
himself in a mirror?), but is there really a question about whether any
276 NOTE TO PAGE 1 75
nonhuman animals have conscious experience? I would like to suggest
that there is not. It is not that there is sufficient experimental evidence to
overcome our doubts on this score; it is just that such doubts are unreasonable.
Indeed, no experiment could prove that other human beings
have conscious experience, were we to assume otherwise as our working
hypothesis.
The question of scientific parsimony visits us here. A common misconstrual
of parsimony regularly inspires deflationary accounts of animal
minds. That we can explain the behavior of a dog without resort to notions
of consciousness or mental states does not mean that it is easier or more
elegant to do so. It isn't. In fact, it places a greater burden upon us to
explain why a dog brain (cortex and all) is not sufficient for consciousness,
while human brains are. Skepticism about chimpanzee consciousness
seems an even greater liability in this respect. To be biased on the side of
withholding attributions of consciousness to other mammals is not in the
least parsimonious in the scientific sense. It actually entails a gratuitous
proliferation of theory—in much the same way that solipsism would, if it
were ever seriously entertained. How do I know that other human beings
are conscious like myself? Philosophers call this the problem of "other
minds," and it is generally acknowledged to be one of reason's many cul
de sacs, for it has long been observed that this problem, once taken seriously,
admits of no satisfactory exit. But need we take it seriously?
Solipsism appears, at first glance, to be as parsimonious a stance as
there is, until I attempt to explain why all other people seem to have
minds, why their behavior and physical structure are more or less identical
to my own, and yet I am uniquely conscious—at which time it
reveals itself to be the least parsimonious theory of all. There is no argument
for the existence of other human minds apart from the fact that to
assume otherwise (that is, to take solipsism as a serious hypothesis) is to
impose upon oneself the very heavy burden of explaining the (apparently
conscious) behavior of zombies. The devil is in the details for the solipsist;
his solitude requires a very muscular and inelegant bit of theorizing
to be made sense of. Whatever might be said in defense of such a view, it
is not in the least "parsimonious."
The same criticism applies to any view that would make the human
brain a unique island of mental life. If we withhold conscious emotional
states from chimpanzees in the name of "parsimony," we must then
explain not only how such states are uniquely realized in our own case but
also why so much of what chimps do as an apparent expression of emoNOTES
TO PAGES 1 7 5 - 1 7 7 277
tionality is not what it seems. The neuroscientist is suddenly faced with
the task of finding the difference between human and chimpanzee brains
that accounts for the respective existence and nonexistence of emotional
states; and the ethologist is left to explain why a creature, as apparently
angry as a chimp in a rage, will lash out at one of his rivals without feeling
anything at all. If ever there was an example of a philosophical dogma
creating empirical problems where none exist, surely this is one.
12 For a recent review of the cognitive neuroscience of moral cognition see
W. D. Casebeer, "Moral Cognition and Its Neural Constituents," Nature
Reviews Neuroscience 4 (2003): 840-46. It is clearly too early to draw
any strong conclusions from this research.
13 There is a wide literature on morality and ethics—I use these words interchangeably—
but like most writers who have pretensions to "first philosophy,"
I have not found much use for it here. In considering questions of
ethics, I think we should exhaust the resources of common sense before
we begin ransacking the armory of philosophies past. In this, my intuitions
are vaguely Kantian and therefore lead me to steer as clear of Kant
as of any other philosopher. Putting the matter this way—purporting to
take "common sense" in hand, where others have gotten mired in technicalities—
risks begging many of the questions that certain readers will
want to ask. Indeed, one person's common sense is invariably another's
candidate for original sin. The manner in which I have circumscribed the
domain of ethics is also somewhat idiosyncratic, and consequently my
account will fail to catch some of the concerns that people regularly consider
to be integral to the subject. This, as far as I can see, is not so much
a weakness of my approach as one of its strengths, because I believe that
our map of the moral wilderness should be redrawn. The complex interrelationships
between morality, law, and politics will also be set aside for
the present. While these domains certainly overlap, an analysis of their
mutual (and well contested) influence upon one another is beyond the
scope of this book.
14 A circularity is surely lurking here, since only those who have demonstrated
the requisite degree of convergence will be deemed "adequate."
This circularity is not unique to ethics, however; nor is it a problem. That
we generally require people to demonstrate an understanding of current
theories before we take their views seriously does not mean that revolutions
in our understanding of the world are not possible.
15 C. Hitchens, "Mommie Dearest," Slate, Oct. 20, 2003, slate.msn.com.
16 R. Rorty, Hope in Place of Knowledge: The Pragmatics Tradition in
2 7 8 NOTES TO PAGES 1 7 9 - 1 8 0
Philosophy (Taipei: Institute of European and American Studies,
Academia Sinica, 1999), 90-91.
17 William James is usually considered the father of pragmatism. Whether
he should be viewed as having extended the philosophy of Charles
Sanders Peirce, or utterly debauched it, seems to be very much an open
question—one that can be persuasively answered either way by consulting
James in half his moods. There is no doubt that the great man contradicted
himself greatly. As George Santayana said, "The general
agreement in America to praise [James] as a marvelous person, and to
pass on, is justified by delight at the way he started, without caring where
he went." (See his Persons and Places [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1963],
401.) For the tenets of pragmatism, I have principally relied on the work
of Richard Rorty, who articulates this philosophical position as clearly
and consistently as any of its fans or critics could wish.
18 The emphasis on utility, rather than on truth, can be easily caricatured
and misunderstood—and has been ever since William James first articulated
the principles of pragmatism in a lecture before the Philosophical
Union of the University of California in 1898. Far from being the absurdity
of wishful thinking that Bertrand Russell lampooned in his History
of Western Philosophy—where we encounter a wayward pragmatist
finding it useful to believe that every man in sight is named Ebenezer
Wilkes Smith—when presented in all its subtleties, pragmatism can be
made to seem synonymous with every species of good sense. One can
easily find oneself careening, in a single hour, through the stages that
James sketched for the career of any successful theory: at first it appears
ridiculous; then true but trivial; then so important that one is tempted to
say that one knew it all along.
19 P. Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 171.
20 We should note that realism is an epistemological position, not an ontological
one. This is a regular source of confusion in philosophy. It is often
assumed, for instance, that realism is opposed to various forms of idealism
and subjectivism and, indeed, to certain developments in the physical
sciences (like Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics) that seem
to grant the mind a remarkable role in the governance of creation. But if
the moon does not exist unless someone is looking at it, this would still
be a realistic truth (in that it would be true, whether or not anyone knew
that this is the way the world works). To say that reality has a definite
character is not to say that this character must be intelligible to us, or that
it might not be perversely shifty—or, indeed, that consciousness and
NOTES TO PAGE l 8 l 279
thought might not play some constitutive role in defining it. If reality
changes its colors every time a physicist blinks his eyes, this would still
be a realistic truth.
21 There is a naive version of realism that has few defenders today. It is the
view of the world that most of us inherit along with ten fingers and ten
toes and maintain in innocence of philosophy. Such realism holds that
the world is more or less as common sense would have it: tables and
chairs really exist in a physical space of three dimensions; grass is green;
the sky is blue; everything is made of atoms; and every atom is crammed
with particles tinier still. The basic view is that our senses, along with
their extensions—telescopes, microscopes, etc.—merely deliver us the
facts of the universe as they are. While being an indispensable heuristic
for making one's way in the world, this is not the stuff of which current
scientific and philosophical theories are made. Nor is it the form of realism
that any philosophical realist currently endorses.
Thomas Nagel, an eloquent opponent of pragmatism, offers us, in The
Last Word (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 30, three propositions that
he feels can be adequately accounted for only by realism:
1. There are many truths about the world that we will never know and
have no way of finding out.
2. Some of our beliefs are false and will never be discovered to be so.
3. If a belief is true, it would be true even if no one believed it.
While a pragmatist like Rorty will concede that this manner of speaking
is intelligible, he will maintain that it is just that—a manner of
speaking—and he will shuttle all statements of this kind into his pragmatism
by reading words like "true" in a purely discursive sense and
then pirouette to his basic thesis: "We can talk like this, of course, but to
know the nature of anything is merely to know the history of the way it
has been talked about." The pragmatist attempts to conserve our realistic
intuitions by conceding that if one is going to play certain language
games correctly and use words like "true" so as to be understood, one
will, of course, grant one's assent to statements like "There were mountains
around before there was anyone to talk about mountains"—but he
will never hesitate to add that the "truth" of such a statement is just a
matter of our common agreement.
22 J. Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, ed. M. Cooke (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1998), 357.
23 To set all the relevant features of the pragmatic construal of knowledge
280 NOTE TO PAGE l 8 l
before us, it will be useful to briefly consider the work of Donald Davidson.
Davidson has been very influential in philosophical circles, and his
views on mind and meaning now appear to underwrite Rorty's pragmatism.
Davidson asserts, in an undated manuscript titled "The Myth of the
Subjective," that any view of the world, along with its concepts and truth
claims, must be translatable into any other:
Of course there are contrasts from epoch to epoch, from culture to
culture, and person to person of kinds we all recognize and struggle
with; but these are contrasts which with sympathy and effort we can
explain and understand. Trouble comes when we try to embrace the
idea that there might be more comprehensive differences, for this
seems (absurdly) to ask us to take up a stance outside our own ways
of thought.
In my opinion, we do not understand the idea of such a really foreign
scheme. We know what states of mind are like, and how they are
correctly identified; they are just those states whose contents can be
discovered in well-known ways. If other people or creatures are in
states not discoverable by these methods, it cannot be because our
methods fail us, but because those states are not correctly called states
of mind—they are not beliefs, desires, wishes, or intentions.
Perhaps the first thing a realist will want to say in response to these
ideas is that we need not ("absurdly") take a stance outside our own to
make sense of the claim that radically different views of the universe
might exist. As T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1986), points out, a community of pragmatists with the mental age
of nine would simply be wrong to think that "truth" is just a matter of
justification among themselves, and they would be right to think that
other human beings understand facts about the world that they will
never be able to translate into their discourse. Who is to say that our own
view of the world might not appear similarly delimited from some other
vantage point?
Davidson's doctrine of translatability comes bundled with what he
calls his "principle of charity": all language users must be endowed with
mostly true beliefs, for beliefs can be recognized as beliefs only against a
background of massive agreement. All interlocutors, therefore, must be
deemed by us to be basically rational—for the moment we imagine confronting
a mind stocked stem to stern with false beliefs, we realize that
we would see no basis to call it a "mind" in the first place. Davidson's
NOTE TO PAGE l 8 l 28l
view here amounts to a curious inversion of Wittgenstein's famous line
"If a lion could talk, we would not understand him." For Davidson, if we
cannot understand him, he cannot be talking.
Davidson's conclusions here appear rather incredible. What if a speaker
and an interpreter have mutually intelligible and false canons of belief?
Whether or not a given community's beliefs about reality are mutually
translatable need have nothing to do with whether or not they are true.
Mutual intelligibility may signify nothing more than homology of error;
my errors may be enough like your own to pass for "truth" in your discourse.
We need only imagine the communities of gorillas and chimpanzees
getting their most precocious, language-trained members
together to test this: each might fail to recognize the utterances of the
other (perhaps they were taught incompatible forms of sign language) and
conclude that the other is not a language user at all. In this case, these ape
translators would both be wrong. If, on the other hand, they were to successfully
converse and agreed with Rorty that "truth" is just a matter of
what prevails in their discourse, they would likewise be wrong—because
the men and women watching their interaction would be acquainted with
a variety of truths that they could not possibly be made to understand.
According to pragmatism, beliefs serve their purpose in different contexts,
and there is simply no cognitive project that corresponds to "knowing
how things are" or "knowing what reality is really like." Our ape
pragmatists would likely concur, but they might also say that there is no
such project as "knowing how to fly to the moon" or "knowing where
babies come from" either. Let us postulate that apes are cognitively closed
to the facts of rocket design and biology as we know them—that is, try as
he or she might, no ape scientist will ever have the requisite cognitive
abilities to bring the relevant data into view, much less make theoretical
sense of them. To this community of pragmatists, such facts simply do
not exist. It seems clear that if there could exist worldviews which supersede
our own in this way, then what passes for "truth" in our discourse
could not be the final measure of what is true.
The only means Rorty has found to resist this slide into ever-widening
contexts of knowledge is to follow Davidson in claiming that we could
translate any language into our own, and therefore incorporate any
"truths" that more advanced language users might articulate. Davidson's
reasoning is actually circular here, because the only reason why we could
translate any language is that translatability is his criterion for picking
out a language in the first place. This simply begs the question at issue.
282 NOTE TO PAGE l 8 l
Davidson's claims about translatability also seem to rely on a kind of verificationist
fallacy: he mistakes the way we pick out language use in the
world for what language is in itself. The fact that in order to ascribe language
to another creature we must first translate his language into our
own is simply irrelevant to the question of whether or not this creature
is actually a language user, has a mind, or is communicating with his own
kind. The error here tracks that of behaviorism—which cast a stultifying
shadow over the sciences of mind for most of the twentieth century. That
we may be constrained to pick out mentality in others by their behavior
and verbal utterance does not mean that such outward signs constitute
what mind is in itself.
According to Rorty and Davidson, there is no language game that
human beings could not, in principle, play. The spectrum of possible
minds, points of view, "true" descriptions of the world is therefore continuous.
All possible languages are commensurable; all cognitive horizons
can be ultimately fused. Whether or not this is true is not really the
point. The point is that it amounts to a realistic claim about the nature of
language and cognition.
It seems that there are two possible forms of retort to pragmatism: in
the first place we could seek to demonstrate that it is not pragmatic, and
specifically that it is not as pragmatic as realism. The approach here
would be to show that it serves neither our ends of fashioning a coherent
picture of the world nor other ends to which we might be purposed. It
may be, for instance, that talking about truth and knowledge in terms of
human "solidarity," as Rorty does, could ultimately subvert the very solidarity
at issue. While I believe that a pragmatic case against pragmatism
can be made, I have not made it here (B. Williams, in "Auto-da-Fé," New
York Review of Books, April 28, 1983, has taken a stab at it). Instead, I
have attempted to show that pragmatism is covertly realistic, arguing
that in the act of distancing himself from the sins of realism, the pragmatist
commits them with both hands. The pragmatist seems to be tacitly
saying that he has surveyed the breadth and depth of all possible acts
of cognition (not just his own, and not just those that are human) and
found both that all knowledge is discursive and that all spheres of discourse
can be potentially fused. Pragmatism, therefore, amounts to the
assertion that any epistemic context wider than our own can be ruled out
in principle. While I find these claims incredible, the more important
point is that a pragmatist can believe otherwise only as a realist.
As a final note, I would like to point out that both pragmatic and realNOTES
TO PAGE 1 8 5 283
istic objections to pragmatism can be made to converge. Let us first reduce
pragmatism and realism to their core theses (P and R respectively):
P: All statements about the world are "true" only by virtue of being
justified in a sphere of discourse.
R: Certain statements about the world are true, whether or not they
can be justified—and many justified statements happen to be false.
There appear to be two routes over the precipice for the pragmatist—
and both can be reached when we press the question "What if P seems
wrong to everybody and R seems right?" After all, the pragmatist must
admit the possibility that we might live in a world where P will fail to be
justified (that is, pragmatism itself may prove to be unpragmatic), which
raises the question of whether or not P applies to itself. If P applies to
itself, and is not justified, then it would seem that pragmatism selfdestructs
the moment it loses its subscribers. The pragmatist cannot
resist this line by saying that P does not apply to itself, for then he will
have falsified P and endorsed R; nor can he say that it is a necessary truth
that P will always be justified.
Another logical peril emerges for the pragmatist the moment R
becomes justified. According to P, if R is justified, it is "true"—but R cannot
remain true by virtue of being justified. If the pragmatist attempts to
resist the revaluation of "true" that R itself urges upon us, by saying that
R cannot be really true (in the sense that it corresponds to reality as it
is), this would be tantamount to saying that P itself is true realistically.
Hence, he will fall into contradiction with his thesis once again. This is a
rock and a hard place that the pragmatist cannot even be intelligibly
accused of standing between—for they are, after all, the same place. It is,
therefore, upon the very rock of realism—or beneath it—that we should
seek the pragmatist out.
24 This is often called, erroneously, the "naturalistic fallacy." The naturalistic
fallacy, due to G. E. Moore, is a fallacy of another sort. Moore claimed
that our judgments of goodness cannot be reduced to other properties
like happiness. He would undoubtedly argue that I have committed the
naturalistic fallacy in defining ethics in terms of human happiness.
Moore felt that his "open question argument" was decisive here: it would
seem, for instance, that we can always coherently ask of any state of happiness,
"Is this form of happiness itself good?" The fact that the question
still makes sense suggests that happiness and goodness cannot be the
same. I would argue, however, that what we are really asking in such a
case is "Is this form of happiness conducive to (or obstructive of) some
284 NOTES TO PAGES 1 8 6 - 1 9 1
higher happiness?" This question is also coherent, and keeps our notion
of what is good linked to the experience of sentient beings.
25 S. Pinker, The Blank Slate (New York: Viking, 2002), 53-54.
26 J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), 24.
27 Cited in O. Friedrich, The End of the World: A History (New York: Coward,
McCann & Geoghegan, 1982), 61.
28 The role of Christian dogma in turning sexual neurosis into a principle
of cultural oppression need hardly be elaborated upon. Perhaps the most
shocking disclosures in recent years (coming amid thousands of reports
about pedophile priests in the United States) were those that surrounded
a group of nuns that ran orphanages throughout Ireland during the
1950s and 1960s. The incongruously named Sisters of Mercy tortured
children as young as eleven months (flogging and scalding them, as well
as subjecting them to astonishing acts of psychological cruelty) for "the
sins of their parents" (i.e., the sin of their own illegitimacy). In the service
of ancient ideas about female sexuality, original sin, virgin births,
etc., thousands of these infants were forcibly removed from the care of
their unwed mothers and sent overseas for adoption.
29 Reports of honor killings have been steadily trickling out of Muslim
countries for years. For a recent example, see N. Banerjee, "Rape (and
Silence about It) Haunts Baghdad," New York Times, July 16, 2003. The
UNICEF Web site posts the following statistics:
In 1997, some 300 women were estimated to have been killed in the
name of "honour" in one province of Pakistan alone. According to
1999 estimates, more than two-thirds of all murders in Gaza strip and
West bank were most likely "honour" killings. In Jordan there are an
average of 23 such murders per year.
Thirty-six "honour" crimes were reported in Lebanon between
1996 and 1998, mainly in small cities and villages. Reports indicate
that offenders are often under 18 and that in their communities they
are sometimes treated as heroes. In Yemen as many as 400 "honour"
killings took place in 1997. In Egypt there were 52 reported "honour"
crimes in 1997.
30 In the Buddhist tradition, which has approached the cultivation of these
states most systematically, love and compassion are cultivated alongside
equanimity and sympathetic joy (that is, joy in the happiness of others).
Each state is believed to balance the others.
NOTE TO PAGE 1 9 2 285
31 It seems reasonably clear that not all people are equally endowed with
ethical intelligence. In particular, not all people are equally adept at discerning
the link between their intentions toward others and their own
happiness. While it may seem undemocratic to posit a hierarchy of moral
knowledge, we know that knowledge cannot be equally distributed in the
world. This is not to say that one must master a wide body of facts to be
moral. Morality may be more like chess than like medicine—there may
be very few facts to understand, but it can still be remarkably difficult to
use what one has learned impeccably. To assert that there should be no
"experts" in morals—as both Kantians and anti-Kantians tend to do—is,
on my account, rather like saying that there should be no experts in chess,
perhaps adducing as one's evidence that every party to our discourse can
plainly see how to move the pieces. We need no experts to tell us how the
matter stands; nor do we need experts to tell us that cruelty is wrong. But
we do need experts to tell us what the best move is from any given position;
and there is little doubt that we will need experts to tell us that
loving all people, without distinction, makes one happier than feeling
preferential love for one's intimates (if this is indeed the case).
Why should we think that living a profoundly ethical life would be
any more common an attainment than playing brilliant chess? Why
should penetrating insight into the logical relations among one's ethical
beliefs be any easier to come by than penetrating insight into any other
logical framework? As in any field, some cherished intuitions may prove
irreconcilable with some others, and the search for coherence will force
itself upon us as a practical necessity. Not everyone can play championship
chess, and not everyone can figure out how to live so as to be as
happy as possible. We can offer heuristics for playing winning chess, of
course (secure the middle of the board, keep good pawn structure, etc.);
and we can offer heuristics for bringing ethical truths to light (Kant's categorical
imperative, Rawls' "original position," etc.). The fact that not
every last one of us sees the point of them does not cast doubt upon their
usefulness. There is no doubt that the relations among our ethical precepts
and intuitions admit of deeper insights, requiring greater and
greater intellectual capacities on the part of all of us to comprehend and,
comprehending, to be inspired to practice. Here, I think, the greatest difference
among persons is to be found (along with the greatest difference
between the ethical and the epistemic spheres), since any insight into
ethical normativity must lay claim to our emotions in order to become
effective. Once he has understood that π is the ratio of a circle's circum286
NOTES TO PAGES 1 9 2 - 1 9 8
ference to its diameter, not even the most libertine geometer will feel
tempted to compute a circle's area using another measure. When a person
sees that it is generally wrong to lie, however, this normative ground,
once conquered, must be secured by feeling. He must feel that lying is
beneath him—that it is tending to lead him away from happiness—and
such a conversion of moral sentiments seems to require more than mere
conceptual understanding. But then, so do certain kinds of reasoning. See
A. Damasio, Descartes' Error. Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
(New York: Avon Books, 1994).
Put this way, it is easy to see that two people who both have learned
that lying is not conducive to happiness may differ considerably in the
depth to which they feel this proposition to be true, and therefore in the
degree to which they feel obliged to conform to it in their actions.
Instances of discrepancy between belief and action in the moral sphere
are legion: it is one thing to think it "wrong" that people are starving
elsewhere in the world; it is another to find this as intolerable as one
would if these people were one's friends. There may, in fact, be no ethical
justification for all of us fortunate people to carry on with our business
while other people starve (see P. Unger, Living High & Letting Die: Our
Illusion of Innocence [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996]). It may be that
a clear view of the matter—that is, a clear view of the dynamics of our
own happiness—would oblige us to work tirelessly to alleviate the
hunger of every last stranger as though it were our own. On this account,
how could one go to the movies and remain ethical? One couldn't. One
would simply be taking a vacation from one's ethics.
32 60 Minutes, Sept. 26, 2002.
33 That these men are being held indefinitely, without access to legal counsel,
should be genuinely troubling to us, however. See R. Dworkin, "Terror
and the Attack on Civil Liberties," New York Review of Books, Nov.
6, 2003, pp. 37-41, for a fine analysis of the legal and ethical issues here.
34 It seems to me that we can stop this inquisitorial slide by recourse to the
"perfect weapon" argument presented in chapter 4. There is a difference,
after all, between intending to inflict suffering on an innocent person and
inflicting it by accident. To include a suspected terrorist's family among
the instruments of torture would be a flagrant violation of this principle.
35 Quoted in Glover, Humanity, 55.
36 I suspect that if our media did not censor the more disturbing images of
war, our moral sentiments would receive a correction on two fronts: first,
we would be more motivated by the horrors visited upon us by our eneNOTES
TO PAGES 1 9 9 - 2 0 2 287
mies: seeing Daniel Pearl decapitated, for instance, would have surely
provoked a level of national outrage that did not arise in the absence of
such imagery. Second, if we did not conceal the horrible reality of collateral
damage from ourselves, we would be far less likely to support the
dropping of "dumb" bombs, or even "smart" ones. While our newspapers
and newscasts would be horrible to look at, I believe we would feel both
greater urgency and greater restraint in our war on terrorism.
37 See J. D. Greene et al., "An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement
in Moral Judgment," Science 293 (Sept. 14, 2001): 2105-8; and J. D.
Greene, "From Neural 'Is' to Moral 'Ought': What Are the Moral Implications
of Neuroscientific Moral Psychology?" Nature Reviews Neuroscience
4 (2003): 846-49.
38 For an illuminating account of the use of "coercion" by U.S. and Israeli
interrogators, see M. Bowden, "The Dark Art of Interrogation," Atlantic
Monthly, March 2003, pp. 51-77.
39 Many flavors of pacifism can be found in the philosophical literature. I
am considering here what is often called "absolute" pacifism—that is, the
belief that violence is never morally acceptable, whether in self-defense
or on behalf of others. This is the sort of pacifism that Gandhi practiced,
and it is the only form that seems to carry with it pretensions of moral
impregnability.
40 Am I saying that overt opposition to a wrong is the ethical standard? Yes,
when the stakes are high, I think that it is. One can always make the
argument that covert resistance in particularly dangerous situations—
where open opposition would be to forfeit one's life—is the best possible
course. Those remarkable men and women who hid Jews in their basements
or ferried them to safety during World War II provide the textbook
example of this. Surely they did more good by living and helping
others in secret than by openly protesting the Nazis and dying on principle.
But this was their situation only because so few people were willing
to offer open opposition in the first place. If more had, there would
have been Nazis hiding in basements, writing journals to the God that
had forsaken them, not innocent little girls bound for Auschwitz. Thus,
as a categorical imperative, confrontation with evil seems the best imperative
we've got. What form this confrontation takes, of course, is open
to debate. But simply making room for human evil, or sidestepping it,
doesn't seem an ethically auspicious option.
41 G. Orwell, "Reflections on Gandhi," in The Oxford Book of Essays, ed. J.
Gross (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1949), 506.
288 NOTES TO PAGES 2 0 7 - 2 0 8
7 Experiments in Consciousness
1 I am not suggesting that thoughts themselves are not equivalent to certain
states of the brain. In conventional terms, however, there is a rather
large difference between taking a drug and taking on a new idea. That
both have the power to alter our perception is one of the more fascinating
facts about the human mind.
2 While this literature is too wide to cite here, numerous examples of such
texts can be found in my bibliography.
3 What happens after death is surely a mystery, as is the relationship
between consciousness and the physical world, but there is no longer any
doubt whether the character of our minds is dependent upon the functioning
of our brains—and dependent in ways that are profoundly counterintuitive.
Consider one of the common features of the near-death
experience: the nearly dying seem regularly to encounter their loved
ones who have gone before them into the next world. See A. Kellehear,
Experiences Near Death: Beyond Medicine and Religion (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1996). We know, however, that recognizing a person's face
requires an intact fusiform cortex, primarily in the right hemisphere.
Damage to this area of the brain definitely robs the mind of its powers of
facial recognition (among other things), a condition we call prosopagnosia.
People with this condition have nothing wrong with their primary
vision. They can see color and shape perfectly well. They can recognize
almost everything in their environment, but they cannot distinguish
between the faces of even their closest friends and family members. Are
we to imagine in such cases that a person possesses an intact soul, somewhere
behind the mind, that retains his ability to recognize his loved
ones? It would seem so. Indeed, unless the soul retains all of the normal
cognitive and perceptual capacities of the healthy brain, heaven would be
populated by beings suffering from all manner of neurological deficit.
But then, what are we to think of the condition of the neurologically
impaired while alive? Does a person suffering from aphasia have a soul
that can speak, read, and think flawlessly? Does a person whose motor
skills have been degraded by cerebellar ataxia have a soul with preserved
hand-eye coordination? This is rather like believing that inside every
wrecked car lurks a new car just waiting to get out.
The implausibility of a soul whose powers are independent of the
brain only increases once we recognize that even normal brains can be
placed somewhere on a continuum of pathology. I know my soul speaks
NOTES TO PAGES 2 0 8 - 2 0 9 289
English, because that is the language that comes out of me whenever I
speak or write. I used to know a fair amount of French as well. It seems
that I've forgotten most of it, though, since my attempts at communication
while in France provoke little more than amusement and consternation
in the natives. We know, however, that the difference between my
remembering and not remembering something is a matter of physical
differences in the neural circuits in my brain—specifically in the synaptic
connections that are responsible for information encoding, information
retrieval, or both. My loss of French, therefore, can be considered a
form of neurological impairment. And any Frenchman who found his
linguistic ability suddenly degraded to the level of my own would rush
straight to the hospital. Would his soul retain his linguistic ability in any
case? Has my soul retained its memory of how to conjugate the verb
bruire? Where does this notion of soul-brain independence end? A native
speaker of one of the Bantu languages would find that the functioning of
my language cortex leaves even more to be desired. Given that I was
never exposed to Bantu sounds as a child, it is almost certain that I would
find it difficult in the extreme, if not impossible, to distinguish between
them, much less reproduce them in a way that would satisfy a native
speaker. But perhaps my soul has mastered the Bantu languages as well.
There are only five hundred of them.
4 Whether the angle of approach is through the study of priming effects
and visual masking, change blindness (D. J. Simons et al., "Evidence for
Preserved Representations in Change Blindness," Consciousness and
Cognition 11, no. 1 [2002]: 78-97), visual extinction and visuospatial
neglect (G. Rees et al., "Neural Correlates of Consciousness in Humans,"
Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3 [April 2002]: 261-70), binocular rivalry
and other bistable percepts (R. Blake and N. K. Logothetis, "Visual Competition,"
Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3, no. 1 [2002]: 13-21; N. K.
Logothetis, "Vision: A Window on Consciousness," Scientific American
Special Edition 12, no. 1 [2002] 18-25), or blind-sight (L. Weiskrantz,
"Prime-sight and Blindsight," Consciousness and Cognition 11, no. 4
[2002]: 568-81), the signature of conscious perception is always the same:
the subject (be he man or monkey) simply tells us, by word or deed,
whether or not the character of his experience has changed.
5 Why isn't general anesthesia a way of ruling it out? Bathe the brain in
the requisite chemicals, and people lose consciousness—end of story. The
problem, however, is that we do not know that consciousness itself
is truly interrupted during anesthesia. The problem with conflating
2 9 0 NOTES TO PAGES 2 1 1 - 2 1 2
consciousness with reportability is that we cannot distinguish the genuine
cessation of consciousness from a mere failure of memory. What
was it like to be asleep last night? You may feel that it was like nothing
at all—you were "unconscious." But what about the dreams you don't
remember? You were surely conscious while having them. Indeed, you
may have been conscious throughout all the stages of sleep. We cannot
rule out this possibility through subjective report alone.
6 Nevertheless, these are exactly the sorts of equivalences that scientists
and philosophers working on "the self" are apt to draw. A conference was
recently held at the New York Academy of Sciences entitled "The Self:
From Soul to Brain," and while much of interest was said about the brain,
not a single presenter defined the self in such a way as to distinguish it
from truly global concepts like "the human mind" or "personhood." The
feeling that we call "\" was left entirely untouched.
7 Certain philosophers, while they clearly have not transcended the subject/
object divide as a matter of stable experience, conceptually repudiate
it in their thinking. Sartre, for instance, saw that the subject could be
nothing more than another object in the field of consciousness and, as
such, was "contemporaneous with the World":
The World has not created me; the me has not created the World.
These are two objects for absolute, impersonal consciousness, and it
is by virtue of this consciousness that they are connected. This absolute
consciousness, when it is purified of the J, no longer has anything
of the subject. . . . It is quite simply a first condition and
absolute source of existence. And the relation of interdependence
established by this absolute consciousness between me and the World
is sufficient for the me to appear as "endangered" before the World,
for the me (indirectly and through the intermediary states) to draw
the whole of its content from the World. No more is needed in the
way of a philosophical foundation for an ethics and a politics which
are absolutely positive.
J. P. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of
Consciousness, trans. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1937), 105-6.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes a similar point, even while confining
himself to subject/object language: "The world is inseparable from the
subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world,
and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the
NOTES TO PAGES 2 1 3 - 2 1 5 291
subject itself projects." Cited in F. Varela at al., The Embodied Mind: Cognitive
Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 4.
8 This is not to say that infants are mystics. Nevertheless, a process of
increasing individuation clearly occurs from birth onward. See K. Wilber,
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala, 1995), for a criticism of
the false equation between what he calls the pre-rational and the transrational.
As Wilber points out, there is no reason to romanticize childhood
in spiritual terms. Indeed, if our children appear to inhabit the
kingdom of heaven, why stop with them? We might as well direct our
envy at our primate cousins, for they—when they are not too overcome
by the pleasures of cannibalism, gang rape, and infanticide to seem so—
are the most gleeful children of all.
9 Thus, a man like Heidegger, who was an abject admirer of Hitler, can nevertheless
be commended to our attention, with scarcely a hint of shame,
as one of the giants of European thought. Schopenhauer, who was
undoubtedly a clever fellow, hurled a seamstress down a flight of stairs,
injuring her permanently (he was, we are told, annoyed by the sound of
her voice). Other eminent thinkers could also be singled out—Wittgenstein
was a manifestly tortured soul and an enthusiastic practitioner of
corporal punishment when in the company of unruly little girls—but,
and this is the astonishing fact, not a single Western thinker can be
named who rivals the great philosopher-mystics of the East. There are
those who feel no embarrassment at reaching as far back as Plotinus for
an example of a mystic reared in an Eastern corner of the West. But Plotinus,
by his own admission, enjoyed only an occasional glimpse of the
plenum that he so eloquently described. In the context of one of the Eastern
schools of contemplative practice, he would have been acknowledged
for nothing more than having set out toward the goal in earnest.
The situation appears to have been somewhat different in the ancient
world. Greek philosophers spoke frequently of the state of eudaimonia—
the objective state of happiness that was thought to attend the good life—
but their efforts to reach it were not very sophisticated. The closest thing
to an Eastern mysticism to be found among the ancient Greeks was skepticism,
in the tradition of Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 365-270 BC)—but Pyrrho's
teachings amounted to disavowal of philosophy altogether. Happiness has
since been relegated to the ontological backwater of moral philosophy, and
the ideal of the philosopher as sage is not even a distant memory.
The teachings of Pyrrho, which have survived in the writings of the
second-century physician Sextus Empiricus, enunciate what is clearly a
292 NOTE TO PAGE 2 15
spiritual discipline, not at all unlike the dialectic of Madhyamika in
Mahayana Buddhism. The Skeptic (with a capital S) is not merely a
philosopher who failed in his office—having sought to gather true beliefs
about the world and found his basket empty at the end of the day—he is
the person who has found the peace (Greek ataraxia) to which such a
failure can lead.
Skepticism, in Pyrrho's sense, is not the dogmatic assertion that nothing
at all can be known. It is the acknowledgment that whatever we know
at present is simply the way things seem, and the Skeptic refuses to take
another step into the twilight of metaphysical views. He knows that he
does not know anything other than appearances—and the fact that this
seems to be a truth about the nature of experience is, likewise, nothing
more than the way things appear to him at present. As Sextus says, "the
Skeptic continues to search," studiously withholding judgment (Greek
epoché). He does not even judge that this is a position that should be
maintained—rather, every belief on offer seems to invite its own contradiction,
and the Skeptic has merely taken note of the unsatisfactoriness
of the situation thus far. The man is befuddled, and he is happy to stay
that way.
This position has rarely been accorded the respect that it deserves in
the West, for it has been widely doubted whether it can be honestly
maintained by any means short of administering repeated blows to one's
head. It is also generally conflated (as in B. Russell, A History of Western
Philosophy [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945]) with the more
dogmatic mistrust of knowledge evinced by Arcesilaus, Carneades, and
the other regents of Plato's Academy during its two-hundred-year flirtation
with the refusal of all dogmas—having decided, in opposition to
obvious contradictions in its tradition, to take its inspiration from
Socrates in only his skeptical moods. Academic skepticism appears to
have been a more strident critique of the knowledge of others—and
therefore a declaration of the "truth" that no one knows anything at
all—though it is true that in conversation, Pyrrho's suspension of belief
would have amounted to much the same thing. Consequently, most
philosophers have not recognized Pyrrho's innovation to be the empirical
turn toward profundity that it genuinely was. It is said that Pyrrho
acquired his discipline from a naked ascetic (Greek gymnosophist) he met
while on Alexander's campaign to the borders of India. He is also
reported to have been quite a saintly figure, presumably as a consequence
of the peace he acquired in the absence of opinions. It should be noted,
NOTES TO PAGE 215 293
however, that the ataraxia which Sextus describes in his Outlines of
Pyrrhonism was not "enlightenment" in the Eastern sense—rather, it
seems to have amounted to little more than a condition of not suffering
as much as ordinary men. Nevertheless, ataraxia was a realizable spiritual
goal supported by sound reasoning and, as such, represents an empirical
advance over the aims of mere philosophy.
10 There is more to Diamond's thesis than this, but it essentially boils down
to the unequal geographical distribution of animals and foodstuffs that
can be readily domesticated.
11 At least on paper. Nevertheless, what is so remarkably barren about the
Western philosophical tradition is that while the occasional lucky man in
his most muscular moments of inquiry may have won a brief, experiential
insight into the nondual nature of consciousness—someone like
Schelling, for instance, or Rousseau while he was lolling in a boat on Lake
Geneva—philosophers in the East have spent millennia articulating and
integrating such insights into distinct methods of contemplative practice:
rendering them both reproducible and verifiable by consensus.
12 My debt to a variety of contemplative traditions that have their origin in
India will be obvious to many readers. The esoteric teachings of Buddhism
(e.g., the Dzogchen teachings of the Vajrayana) and Hinduism
(e.g., the teachings of Advaita Vedanta), as well as many years spent practicing
various techniques of meditation, have done much to determine
my view of our spiritual possibilities. While these traditions do not offer
a unified perspective on the nature of the mind or the principles of spiritual
life, they undoubtedly represent the most committed effort human
beings have made to understand these things through introspection.
Buddhism, in particular, has grown remarkably sophisticated. No other
tradition has developed so many methods by which the human mind can
be fashioned into a tool capable of transforming itself. Attentive readers
will have noticed that I have been very hard on religions of faith—
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even Hinduism—and have not said
much that is derogatory of Buddhism. This is not an accident. While Buddhism
has also been a source of ignorance and occasional violence, it is
not a religion of faith, or a religion at all, in the Western sense. There are
millions of Buddhists who do not seem to know this, and they can be
found in temples throughout Southeast Asia, and even the West, praying
to Buddha as though he were a numinous incarnation of Santa Claus.
This distortion of the tradition notwithstanding, it remains true that the
esoteric teachings of Buddhism offer the most complete methodology we
294 NOTE TO PAGE 2 15
have for discovering the intrinsic freedom of consciousness, unencumbered
by any dogma. It is no exaggeration to say that meetings between
the Dalai Lama and Christian ecclesiastics to mutually honor their religious
traditions are like meetings between physicists from Cambridge
and the Bushmen of the Kalahari to mutually honor their respective
understandings of the physical universe. This is not to say that Tibetan
Buddhists are not saddled with certain dogmas (so are physicists) or that
the Bushmen could not have formed some conception of the atom. Any
person familiar with both literatures will know that the Bible does not
contain a discernible fraction of the precise spiritual instructions that can
be found in the Buddhist canon. Though there is much in Buddhism that
I do not pretend to understand—as well as much that seems deeply
implausible—it would be intellectually dishonest not to acknowledge its
preeminence as a system of spiritual instruction.
As for the many distinguished contemplatives who have graced the
sordid history of Christianity—Meister Eckhart, Saint John of the Cross,
Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Seraphim of Sarov, the venerable Desert
Fathers, et al.—these were certainly extraordinary men and women: but
their mystical insights, for the most part, remained shackled to the dualism
of church doctrine, and accordingly failed to fly. Where they do take
to the air, with a boost from Neoplatonism and other heterodox views, it
is in defiance of the very tradition they might have epitomized (had it
been wise enough to transcend its own literary conceits), and therefore
they serve as hallowed exceptions that prove the rule—mystical Christianity
was dead the day Saul set out for Damascus.
Contemplatives within the other Semitic traditions have had their
mystical impulses similarly constrained. Sufism (itself influenced by
Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Christian monasticism) has
generally been considered a form of heresy in the Muslim world—as the
terrible deaths of Al-Hallaj (854-922) and other distinguished Sufis
attest. Where its doctrine has remained mindful of the Koran, Sufism is
wedded to an indissoluble dualism; similarly, Jewish Kabbalists (whose
teachings bear the influence of Christian Gnosticism, Sufism, and Neoplatonism)
do not seem to have considered a truly nondual mysticism a
possibility. See G. Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Dorsette Press, 1974).
There is no denying the mystical talents of many Jewish, Christian,
and Muslim contemplatives. Every religious tradition, no matter how
wayward its beliefs, is likely to have produced a handful of men and
women who profoundly realized the inherent freedom of consciousness.
NOTE TO PAGE 2 1 5 295
As consciousness already is free of subject and object duality, the emergence
of an Eckhart or a Rumi is no surprise at all. The existence of such
spiritual luminaries, however, suggests nothing about the adequacy of
the Bible and the Koran as contemplative manuals. I trust that some
lucky man has been enlightened while being run over by a train or flung
from the bow of a pirate ship. Does this mean that such mishaps constitute
adequate spiritual instruction? While I do not deny that every tradition,
East and West, is likely to have produced a few mystics whose
insights breached the gilded prison of their faith, the failures of faithbased
religion are so conspicuous, its historical degradation so great, its
intolerance so of this world, that I think it is time we stopped making
excuses for it.
The New Age has offered little progress in this regard, because it has
made spiritual life seem generally synonymous with the forfeiture of
brain cells. Most of the beliefs and practices that have been designated as
"spiritual," in this New Age or in any other, have arisen and thrive in a
perfect vacuum of critical intelligence. Indeed, many New Age ideas are
so ridiculous as to produce terror in otherwise dispassionate men. In
response to the absurdities that are arrayed, each year, at events like the
Whole Life Expo, scientists and other rational people have found new
reason to criticize and discard all spiritual claims and their evidence. And
so it is that every man who concerns himself with the disposition of the
planets before the disposition of his ideas simply heaps more fuel upon
the dark fires of cynicism.
But there have been other sources of cynicism. Inevitably, spiritual
practice must be taught by those who are expert in it, and those who profess
to be experts—to be genuine gurus—are not always as selfless as
they claim. As a consequence of their antics, many educated people now
believe that a guru is simply a man who, while professing his love for all
beings, secretly longs to rule an ashram populated exclusively by beautiful
young women. This stereotype is not without its exemplars—and
while the occasional yogi of renown may lick a leper's wounds with
apparent enthusiasm, many display far more ordinary longings.
I know a group of veteran spiritual seekers who, after searching for a
teacher among the caves and dells of the Himalayas for many months,
finally discovered a Hindu yogi who seemed qualified to lead them into
the ethers. He was as thin as Jesus, as limber as an orangutan, and wore
his hair matted, down to his knees. They promptly brought this prodigy
to America to instruct them in the ways of spiritual devotion. After a
2 9 6 NOTES TO PAGES 2 1 6 - 2 1 7
suitable period of acculturation, our acetic—who was, incidentally, also
admired for his physical beauty and for the manner in which he played
the drum—decided that sex with the prettiest of his patrons' wives would
suit his pedagogical purposes admirably. These relations were commenced
at once, and endured for some time by a man whose devotion to
wife and guru, it must be said, was now being sorely tested. His wife, if I
am not mistaken, was an enthusiastic participant in this "tantric" exercise,
for her guru was both "fully enlightened" and as dashing a swain as
Lord Krishna. Gradually, this saintly man further refined his spiritual
requirements, as well as his appetites. The day soon dawned when he
would eat nothing for breakfast but a pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice
cream topped with cashews. We might well imagine that the meditations
of a cuckold, wandering the frozen-food aisles of a supermarket in search
of an enlightened man's enlightened repast, were anything but devotional.
This guru was soon sent back to India with his drum.
13 Padmasambhava, Self-liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness,
trans. J. M. Reynolds (New York: Station Hill Press, 1989), 12.
14 Padmasambhava was an eighth-century mystic who is generally credited
with having brought the teachings of Buddhism (particularly those of
Tanta and Dzogchen) from India to Tibet.
15 No doubt, many students of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish esoterica will
claim that my literal reading of their scriptures betrays my ignorance of
their spiritual import. To be sure, occult, alchemical, and conventionally
mystical interpretations of various passages in the Bible and the Koran
are as old as the texts themselves, but the problem with such hermeneutical
efforts—whether it be the highly dubious theory of gematria (the
translation of the Hebrew letters of the Torah into their numerical equivalents
so that numerologists can work their interpretive magic upon the
text) or the glib symbol seeking of popular scholars like Joseph Campbell—
is that they are perfectly unconstrained by the contents of the texts
themselves. One can interpret every text in such a way as to yield almost
any mystical or occult instruction.
A case in point: I have selected another book at random, this time
from the cookbook aisle of a bookstore. The book is A Taste of Hawaii:
New Cooking from the Crossroads of the Pacific. Therein I have discovered
an as yet uncelebrated mystical treatise. While it appears to be a
recipe for wok-seared fish and shrimp cakes with ogo-tomato relish, we
need only study its list of ingredients to know that we are in the presence
of an unrivaled spiritual intelligence:
N O T E T O PAGE 2 1 7 297
snapper filet, cubed
3 teaspoons chopped scallions
salt and freshly ground black pepper
a dash of cayenne pepper
2 teaspoons chopped fresh ginger
1 teaspoon minced garlic
8 shrimp, peeled, deveined, and cubed
½ cup heavy cream; 2 eggs, lightly beaten
3 teaspoons rice wine; 2 cups bread crumbs
3 tablespoons vegetable oil; 2 ½ cups ogo tomato relish
The snapper filet, of course, is the individual himself—you and I—
awash in the sea of existence. But here we find it cubed, which is to say
that our situation must be remedied in all three dimensions of body,
mind, and spirit.
Three teaspoons of chopped scallions further partakes of the cubic
symmetry, suggesting that that which we need add to each level of our
being by way of antidote comes likewise in equal proportions. The import
of the passage is clear: the body, mind, and spirit need to be tended to with
the same care.
Salt and freshly ground black pepper: here we have the perennial
invocation of opposites—the white and the black aspects of our nature.
Both good and evil must be understood if we would fulfill the recipe for
spiritual life. Nothing, after all, can be excluded from the human experience
(this seems to be a Tantric text). What is more, salt and pepper come
to us in the form of grains, which is to say that our good and bad qualities
are born of the tiniest actions. Thus, we are not good or evil in general,
but only by virtue of innumerable moments, which color the stream
of our being by force of repetition.
A dash of cayenne pepper: clearly, being of such robust color and flavor,
this signifies the spiritual influence of an enlightened adept. What shall we
make of the ambiguity of its measurement? How large is a dash? Here we
must rely upon the wisdom of the universe at large. The teacher himself
will know precisely what we need by way of instruction. And it is at just
this point in the text that the ingredients that bespeak the heat of spiritual
endeavor are added to the list—for after a dash of cayenne pepper, we find
two teaspoons of chopped fresh ginger and one teaspoon of minced garlic.
These form an isosceles trinity of sorts, signifying the two sides of our spiritual
nature (male and female) united with the object meditation.
2 9 8 NOTES TO PAGES 2 1 7 - 2 2 0
Next comes eight shrimp—peeled, deveined, and cubed. The eight
shrimp, of course, represent the eight worldly concerns that every spiritual
aspirant must decry: fame and shame; loss and gain; pleasure and
pain; praise and blame. Each needs to be deveined, peeled, and cubed—
that is, purged of its power to entrance us and incorporated on the path
of practice.
That such metaphorical acrobatics can be performed on almost any
text—and that they are therefore meaningless—should be obvious. Here
we have scripture as Rorschach blot: wherein the occultist can find his
magical principles perfectly reflected; the conventional mystic can find
his recipe for transcendence; and the totalitarian dogmatist can hear God
telling him to suppress the intelligence and creativity of others. This is
not to say that no author has ever couched spiritual or mystical information
in allegory or ever produced a text that requires a strenuous
hermeneutical effort to be made sense of. If you pick up a copy of
Finnegans Wake, for instance, and imagine that you have found therein
allusions to various cosmogonic myths and alchemical schemes, chances
are that you have, because Joyce put them there. But to dredge scripture
in this manner and discover the occasional pearl is little more than a literary
game.
16 For a recent scholarly treatment of the phenomenology of Buddhist
meditation that is compatible with my usage here, see B. A. Wallace,
"Intersubjectivity in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism," Journal of Consciousness
Studies 8, nos. 5-7 (2001): 209-30. For extensive discussion of meditation
by neuroscientists, see J. H. Austin, Zen and the Brain (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1998), and C. deCharms, Two Views of Mind: Abhidharma and
Brain Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1998).
17 I believe this metaphor comes from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, but I have
forgotten where in his many discourses I read it.
18 It is often said that a person cannot learn these things from reading a
book. In the general case, this is undoubtedly true. 1 would add that one
is by no means guaranteed to recognize the intrinsic nonduality of consciousness
simply by having an eminent meditation master point it out.
The conditions have to be just right: the teacher has to be really delivering
the goods, leaving no conceptual doubt as to what is to be recognized;
and the student has to be endowed with sufficient concentration of mind
to follow his instructions and notice what there is to notice. In this sense,
meditation is undoubtedly an acquired skill.
19 The recognition of the nonduality of consciousness is not susceptible to
N O T E S T O PAGE 2 2 0 299
a linguistically oriented analysis. While it is perfectly natural that men
who knew only their thoughts would attempt to reduce everything to
language, the efforts of Wittgenstein and his imitators in philosophy do
not cut deeply enough to shed any light upon this terrain. Perhaps an
intuition of these things could be read into Wittgenstein's celebrated
statement "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."
But the true mystery, whereof we cannot speak, can nevertheless be recognized.
20 Meditation has, in fact, been the subject of scientific study for many
years. See J. Andresen, "Meditation Meets Behavioral Medicine: The
Story of Experimental Research on Meditation," journal of Consciousness
Studies 7, nos. 11-12 (2000): 17-73, for an exhaustive review. Much
of this research has employed EEG and physiological measures and, in so
doing, has not attempted to localize changes in brain function. Most studies
that have utilized modern techniques of neuroimaging have not studied
meditation relative to the self-sense per se. See A. B. Newberg et al.,
"The Measurement of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow during the Complex
Cognitive Task of Meditation: A Preliminary SPECT Study," Psychiatry
Research: Neuroimaging Section 106 (2000 and 2001): 113-22,
for the results of a SPECT study. To my knowledge, only one group has
begun working with meditators who are producing the specific, subjective
effect of losing their sense of self; a preliminary report on these studies
can be found in D. Goleman, Destructive Emotions: A Scientific
Dialogue with the Dalai Lama (New York: Bantam, 2003).
21 F. Varela, "Neurophenomenology," Journal of Consciousness Studies 3,
no. 4 (1996): 330-49, makes this point with regard to the scientific validity
of "subjective" data: "The line of separation—between rigor and lack
of it—is not to be drawn between first and third person accounts, but
determined rather by whether there is a clear methodological ground
leading to a communal validation and shared knowledge."
22 I would like to briefly address the concern that the experience of nonduality
brought on by meditation is entirely private, and therefore not
amenable to independent verification. Are we obliged merely to take a
meditator's word for it? And if so, is this a problem?
Those who would demand an independent measure of mental events
should first consider two things: (1) many features of human experience
are irretrievably private and, as a consequence, self-report remains our
only guide to their existence: depression, anger, joy, visual and auditory
hallucinations, dreams, and even pain are among the innumerable "first300
NOTE TO PAGE 2 21
person" facts that can be finally verified only by self-report; (2) in those
cases where independent measures of internal states do exist, they exist
only by virtue of their reliable correlation with self-report. Even fear,
which is now dependably linked to a variety of physiological and behavioral
measures—increased startle response, rising Cortisol, increased skin
conductance, etc.—cannot be taken off the gold standard of self-report.
Imagine what would happen if subjective ratings of fear ever broke free
of such "independent" measures: if, say, 50 percent of subjects claimed to
feel no fear when their Cortisol levels rose and to feel terror when they
fell. These measures would cease to be of any use at all in the study of
fear. It is important that we not lose sight of the cash value that physiological
and behavioral variables have in the study of mental events: they
are only as good as the subjects say they are. (I do not mean to suggest
that people are subjectively incorrigible, or that every mental event is
best studied by recourse to self-report. When the topic under consideration
is how things seem to the subject, however, self-report will be our
only compass.)
23 Indeed, the future looks rather like the past in this respect. We may live
to see the technological perfection of all the visionary strands of traditional
mysticism: shamanism (Siberian or South American), Gnosticism,
Kabbalah, Hermetism and its magical Renaissance spawn (Hermeticism),
and all the other byzantine paths whereby man has sought the Other in
every guise of its conception. But all these approaches to spirituality are
born of a longing for esoteric knowledge and a desire to excavate the
visionary strata of the mind—in dreams, or trance, or psychedelic
swoon—in search of the sacred. While I have no doubt that remarkable
experiences are lying in wait for the initiate down each of these byways,
the fact that consciousness is always the prior context and condition of
every visionary experience is a great clarifying truth—and one which
brands all such excursions as fundamentally unnecessary. That consciousness
is not improved—not made emptier of self, or more mysterious,
transcendental, etc.—by the pyrotechnics of esotericism is a fact,
which contemplatives of every persuasion could confirm in their own
experience.
The modern version of the visionary impulse, perhaps best exemplified
in the exquisite ravings of Terence McKenna, is the equation of spiritual
transcendence with information of a transcendental kind. Thus, any
experience (most effectively invoked with the aid of psychedelic drugs) in
which the mind is flooded by paradoxical disclosures—visions of other
N O T E TO PAGE 2 2 1 3 0 1
realms, ethereal beings, the grammatology of alien intelligences, etc.—is
considered to be an improvement upon ordinary consciousness. What
such a romance of the subtle overlooks, however, is the sublimity of consciousness
itself, prior to subject/object perception. That subtle disclosures
are captivating to the intellect (whether or not they are "true"),
there can be no doubt. But their impermanence—any vision, having
arisen, is destined to pass away—proves that such phenomena are not the
basis for permanent transformation.
I do not mean to suggest, however, that these "interior" landscapes
should remain unexplored. Increasingly subtle appearances hold intrinsic
interest for anyone who would acquire more knowledge about the body,
the mind, or the universe at large. I am simply saying that to seek freedom
amid any continuum of possible disclosures seems a mistake, one
that only the nondual schools of mysticism have adequately criticized.
What is more, the fascination with such esoterica is largely responsible
for the infantilism and mere credulity that attends most expressions of
spirituality in the West. Either we find mere belief, wedded to the
hideous presumption of its own sufficiency, or we are met by the frenzied
search for novelty—psychic experience, prophecies of doom or
splendor, and a thousand errant convictions about the personality of God.
But the fact remains that whatever changes occur in the stream of our
experience—whether a vision of Jesus appears to each of us, or the totality
of human knowledge can one day be downloaded directly onto our
synapses—in spiritual terms we will be consciousness first, and only, and
already free of "I." It does not seem too soon for us to realize this.
24 Whether mysticism entails the transcendence of all concepts is surely an
open question. The claim here is merely that the concepts that underwrite
our dualistic perception of the world are left aside by mystics.
Bibliography
Aarons, M., and J. Loftus. Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss
Banks. Rev. ed. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998.
Abraham, R., T. McKenna, and R. Sheldrake. Trialogues at the Edge of the West:
Chaos, Creativity, and the Resacralization of the World. Santa Fe: Bear Publishing,
1992.
Adolphs, R., D. Tranel, and A. R. Damasio. "The Human Amygdala in Social Judgment."
Nature 393 (June 4,1998): 470-74.
Ahmad, Z., L. M. Balsamo, B. C. Sachs, B. Xu, and W. D. Gaillard. "Auditory Comprehension
of Language in Young Children: Neural Networks Identified with
fMRI." Neurology 60 (2003): 1598-605.
Albert, D. Z. Quantum Mechanics and Experience. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
1992.
Allman, J. M. Evolving Brains. New York: Scientific American Library, 1999.
Anderson, J. R. "The New Theoretical Framework." In The Adaptive Character of
Thought. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1990.
Andresen, J. "Meditation Meets Behavioral Medicine: The Story of Experimental
Research on Meditation." Journal of Consciousness Studies 7, nos. 11-12 (2000):
17-73.
Anonymous. Terrorist Hunter. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
Anscombe, G. E. M. "The First Person." In Self-knowledge, ed. Q. Cassam. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1975.
Appleyard, B. Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man.
New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Armstrong, K. A History of God. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Astavakra. The Ashtavakra Gita. Translated by Thomas Byrom. Boston: Shambhala,
1990.
Augustine, Saint. The City of God. Translated by M. Dods. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1952.
——. Confessions. Translated by J. G. Pilkington. Great Britain: Folio Society,
1993.
303
304 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Austin, J. H. Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.
Austin, J. L. Sense and Sensibilia. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962.
Ayer, A. J. Wittgenstein. New York: Random House, 1985.
Bacovcin, H., trans. The Way of a Pilgrim and A Pilgrim Continues His Way. New
York: Doubleday, 1978.
Baddeley, A. "The Fractionation of Working Memory." Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences U.S.A. 93 (1996): 13468-72.
Baier, A. C. Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
1994.
Baker, L. R. Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism. Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1987.
Bankei. The Unborn: The Life and Teaching of Zen Master Bankei (1622-1693).
Translated by N. Waddell. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984.
Barnstone, W., ed. The Other Bible: Jewish Pseudepigrapha, Christian Apocrypha,
Gnostic Scriptures, Kabbalah, Dead Sea Scrolls. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco,
1984.
Barrett, W., and H. D. Aiken., eds. Philosophy in the 20th Century. 4 vols. New York:
Random House, 1962.
Baudrillard, J. The Spirit of Terrorism. Translated by C. Turner. New York: Verso,
2002.
Baumgartner, P., and S. Payr, eds. Speaking Minds: Interviews with Twenty Eminent
Cognitive Scientists. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995.
Bechara, A., H. Damasio, D. Tranel, and A. R. Damasio. "Deciding Advantageously
before Knowing the Advantageous Strategy." Science 275 (1997): 1293-95.
Becker, E. The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press, 1973.
Beedle, A. S. "A Philosopher Looks at Neuroscience." Journal of Neuroscience
Research 55 (1999): 141-46.
Beloff, J. "Minds and Machines: A Radical Dualist Perspective." Journal of Consciousness
Studies 1, no. 1 (1994): 32-37.
Bennet, J. "In Israeli Hospital, Bomber Tells of Trying to Kill Israelis." New York
Times, June 8, 2002.
Bennett, J. "How Is Cognitive Ethology Possible?" In Cognitive Ethology: The Minds
of Other Animals, ed. C. A. Ristau. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991.
Benson, H., with M. Stark. Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology of Belief. New
York: Charles Scribner, 1996.
Bergson, H. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.
Translated by F. L. Pogson. 1910; reprint, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971.
Berkow, R., ed. The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy. 16th ed. Rahway, N.J.:
Merck Research Laboratories, 1992.
Berman, P. "The Philosopher of Islamic Terror." New York Times Magazine, March
23, 2003.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 305
——. Terror and Liberalism. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
Beyerstein, B. L. "Neuropathology and the Legacy of Spiritual Possession." Skeptical
Inquirer 12, no. 3 (1998): 248-61.
Binder, L. Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies. Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1988.
Blake, R., and N. K. Logothetis. "Visual Competition." Nature Reviews Neuroscience
3, no. 1 (2002): 13-21.
Blakemore, C, and S. Jennett, eds. The Oxford Companion to the Body. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2001.
Block, N. "Troubles with Functionalism." In The Nature of Mind, ed. D. Rosenthal.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991.
——. "The Mind as the Software of the Brain." In An Invitation to Cognitive Science:
Thinking, ed. E. E. Smith and D. N. Osherson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Block, N., O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere, eds. The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical
Debates. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.
Bloom, H. Omens of the Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection.
New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.
——, ed. The Book of J. Translated by D. Rosenberg. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Bobrow, R. S. "Paranormal Phenomena in the Medical Literature: Sufficient Smoke
to Warrant a Search for Fire." Medical Hypotheses 60 (2003): 864-68.
Bogen J. E. "Mental Duality in the Intact Brain." Bulletin of Clinical Neuroscience 51
(1986): 3-29.
——. "On the Neuropsychology of Consiousness: Parts I and II." Consciousness
and Cognition 4 (1995): 52-62,137-58.
Bohm, D., and B. J. Hiley. The Undivided Universe. London: Routledge, 1993.
Bok, S. Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. New York: Vintage, 1978.
Bouveresse, J. Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious. Translated
by C. Cosman. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995.
Bowden, M. "The Dark Art of Interrogation." Atlantic Monthly, March 2003, pp.
51-77.
Bowker, J., ed. The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions. Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1997.
——. What Muslims Believe. Oxford: Oneworld, 1998.
Boyer, P. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture.
Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992.
Braun, S. The Science of Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Mood. New York:
John Wiley, 2000.
Briggs, R. Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European
Witchcraft. New York: Viking, 1996.
Brisick, W, ed. Crystal Cave: A Compendium of Teachings by Masters of the Practice
Lineage. Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Katmandu: Rangjung Yeshe Publications,
1990.
306 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brockman, J., ed. The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first
Century. New York: Vintage, 2002.
——, ed. The Third Culture. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
Buber, M., ed. Ecstatic Confessions. Translated by E. Cameron. New York: Harper and
Row, 1985.
——. 7 and Thou. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Charles Scribner, 1970.
Buckley, W. R, Jr. "The War on Drugs Is Lost." National Review, Feb. 12,1996.
——. "Abolish Drug Laws?: 400 Readers Give Their Views." National Review, July
1,1996.
Buddhaghosa. The Path of Purification. Translated by Bhikkhu Nanamoli. Kandy, Sri
Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1975.
Burt, A. M. Textbook of Neuroanatomy. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1993.
Campbell, A. "Cartesian Dualism and the Concept of Medical Placebos." Journal of
Consciousness Studies 1, no 2 (1994): 230-33.
Campbell, J. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1949.
Canetti, E. Crowds and Power. Translated by C. Stewart. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1962.
Carroll, J. "The Silence." New Yorker, April 7,1997.
——. Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2001.
Casebeer, W. D. "Moral Cognition and Its Neural Constituents." Nature Reviews
Neuroscience 4 (2003): 840-46.
Chalmers, D. J. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1996.
Cheney, D. L., and R. M. Seyfarth. How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of
Another Species. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990.
Chisholm, R. M. "On the Observability of the Self." Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 30 (1969): 7-21.
Chomsky, N. 9-11. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001.
Chuang Tzu. Basic Writings. Translated by B. Watson. New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1964.
Churchland, P. M. Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1979.
——. Matter and Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988.
——. "Knowing Qualia: A Reply to Jackson." In The Nature of Consciousness:
Philosophical Debates, ed. N. Block, O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1997.
Churchland, P. S., and P. M. Churchland. "Neural Worlds and Real Worlds." Nature
Reviews Neuroscience 3 (2002): 903-7.
Cialdini, R. B. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. New York: Quill, 1993.
Cohen, J. D., and K. I. Blum. "Reward and Decision." Neuron 36, no. 2 (2002): 193-98.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 307
Collins, L., and D. Lapierre. Freedom at Midnight. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1975.
Conway, M. A. "Repression Revisited." Nature 410 (March 15, 2001): 319-20.
Conze, E. A Short History of Buddhism. Oxford: Oneworld, 1980.
——, trans, and ed. Buddhist Texts through the Ages. Boston: Shambhala,
1990.
Copleston, F. A History of Philosophy. 9 vols. New York: Image, 1960-77.
Corballis, M. C. "Sperry and the Age of Aquarius: Science, Values, and the Split
Brain." Neuropsychologia 36 (1998): 1083-87.
Crick, F. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York:
Charles Scribner, 1994.
Crick, F., and C. Koch. "Consciousness and Neuroscience." Cerebral Cortex 8 (1998):
97-107.
——. "The Unconscious Humunculus." In The Neural Correlates of Consciousness,
ed. T. Metzinger. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
——. "The Problem of Consciousness." Scientific American Special Edition 12, no.
1 (2002): 10-17.
Dahlbom, B., ed. Dennett and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Damasio, A. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York:
Avon Books, 1994.
——. "How the Brain Creates the Mind." Scientific American Special Edition 12,
no. 1 (2002): 4-9.
——. Looking for Spinoza: joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. New York: Harcourt,
2003.
Daprati, E., N. Franck, N. Georgieff, J. Proust, E. Pacherie, J. Dalery, M. Jeannerod.
"Looking for the Agent: An Investigation into Consciousness and Selfconsciousness
in Schizophrenic Patients." Cognition 65 (1997): 71-86.
Davidson, D. "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge." Undated MS.
——. "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs." Undated MS.
——. "The Myth of the Subjective." Undated MS.
——. "Actions, Reasons, and Causes." In Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1980.
——. "Paradoxes of Irrationality." In Philosophical Essays on Freud, ed. R. Wollheim
and J. Hopkins. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982.
——. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
——. "Deception and Division." In The Multiple Self, ed. J. Elster. Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985.
——. "Knowing One's Own Mind." Proceedings and Addresses of the American
Philosophical Association 60 (1987): 441-58.
——. "Who Is Fooled?" In Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality, ed. J. P.
Dupuy. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1998.
Davies, N. Europe: A History. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996.
308 B I B L I O G R A P HY
Davies, P. Are We Alone?: Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial
Life. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
Davies, P., and J. Gribbin. The Matter Myth. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.
Davies, P., and J. R. Brown, eds. The Ghost in the Atom. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1986.
Davies, R. R., J. H. Xuereb, and J. R. Hodges. "The Human Perirhinal Cortex in
Semantic Memory: An in Vivo and Postmortem Volumetric Magnetic Resonance
Imaging Study in Semantic Dementia, Alzheimer's Disease and Matched Controls."
Neuropathology and Applied Neurobiology 28, no. 2 (April 2002): 167-68
[abstract].
Davis, M. H., and I. S. Johnsrude. "Hierarchical Processing in Spoken Language Comprehension."
Journal of Neuroscience 23 (2003): 3423-31.
Davis, P. J., and R. Hersh. The Mathematical Experience. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1981.
Dawkins, R. Climbing Mount Improbable. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
Dawood, N. J., trans. The Koran. New York: Viking, 1956.
de Quincey, C. "Consciousness All the Way Down?" Journal of Consciousness Studies
1, no. 2 (1994): 217-29.
——. "Conceiving the 'Inconceivable'?" Journal of Consciousness Studies 7, no. 4
(2000): 67-81.
deCharms, C. Two Views of Mind: Abhidharma and Brain Science. Ithaca, N.Y: Snow
Lion Publications, 1998.
Delacour, J. "An Introduction to the Biology of Consciousness." Neuropsychologia 33
(1995): 1061-74.
Denes, G., and M. Signorini. "Door But Not Four and 4 a Category Specific Transcoding
Deficit in a Pure Acalculic Patient." Cortex 37, no. 2 (2001): 267-77.
Dennett, D. C. "Intentional System in Cognitive Ethology: The Tanglossian
Paradigm' Defended." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (1983): 343-90.
——. Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1984.
——. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991.
——. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1995.
——. "Facing Backwards on the Problem of Consciousness." Journal of Consciousness
Studies 3, no. 1 (1996): 4-6.
——. "It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature." Journal of Consciousness Studies 7, no. 4
(2000): 25-27.
Dershowitz, A. The Case for Israel. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2003.
Descartes, R. Discourse and Method and Meditations. Translated by L. J. Lafleur.
Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, 1960.
Deutsch, D. The Fabric of Reality. New York: Penguin, 1997.
Dewey, J. Reconstruction in Philosophy. 1920; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 309
Diamond, J. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W
Norton, 1997.
——. "The Last Americans: Environmental Collapse and the End of Civilization."
Harper's, June 2003, pp. 43-51.
Didion, J. "Mr. Bush and the Divine." New York Review of Books, Nov. 6, 2003, pp.
81-86.
Dobbie-Bateman, A. F. The Spiritual Instructions of St. Seraphim of Sarov. Clearlake:
Dawn Horse Press, 1973.
Doherty, C, ed. What the World Thinks in 2002. Washington, D.C.: Pew Research
Center for the People & the Press, 2002.
Doty, R. W. "The Five Mysteries of the Mind, and Their Consequences." Neuropsychologia
36 (1998): 1069-76.
Du Pasquier, R. Unveiling Islam. Translated by T J. Winter. Cambridge: Islamic Texts
Society, 1992.
Dudjom Rinpoche. The Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism, Its Fundamentals and
History. Translated by G. Dorje and M. Kapstein. 2 vols. Boston: Wisdom Publications,
1991.
Dupuy, J. P. 1989. "Common Knowledge, Common Sense." Theory and Decision, 27
(1989): 37-62.
——, ed. Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality. Stanford: CSLI Publications,
1998.
Durant, W The Age of Faith. 1950; reprint, Norwalk, Conn.: Easton Press, 1992.
Dworkin, R. "Terror & the Attack on Civil Liberties." New York Review of Books,
Nov. 6, 2003, pp. 37-41.
Dyson, F. Imagined Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997.
Eccles, J. C. How the Self Controls Its Brain. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1994.
Edelman, G. M., and G. Tononi. A Universe of Consciousness. New York: Basic
Books, 2000.
Edwards, P. Reincarnation: A Critical Examination. Amherst: Prometheus Books,
1996.
——, ed. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 8 vols. New York: Collier Macmillan,
1967.
Einstein, A. Ideas and Opinions. New York: Wings Books, 1954.
——. Out of My Later Years. New York: Wings Books, 1956.
——. Einstein On Peace. Edited by O. Nathan and H. Norden. New York: Avenel
Books, 1960.
——. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. New York: Crown, 1961.
Fain, G. L. Molecular and Cellular Physiology of Neurons. Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1999.
Farah, C. E. Islam. Hauppauge, N.Y.: Barron's Educational Services, 2000.
Feigl, H. The "Mental" and the "Physical." Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,
1958.
3 1 0 B I B L I O G R A P HY
Feinberg, T. E. Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self. Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2001.
Feldman, D. H., and L. T. Goldsmith. Nature's Gambit: Child Prodigies and the
Development of Human Potential. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
Feldman, F. Confrontations with the Reaper: A Philosophical Study of the Nature
and Value of Death. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992.
Feser, E. "Can Phenomenal Qualities Exist Unperceived?" Journal of Consciousness
Studies 5, no. 4 (1998): 405-14.
Feynman, R. The Character of Physical Law. New York: Modern Library, 1965.
——. Six Easy Pieces. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995.
——. The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist. Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley, 1998.
Fingarette, H. Self-Deception. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000.
Flanagan, O. Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
——. "Consciousness as a Pragmatist Views It." In The Cambridge Companion to
William James, ed. R. A. Putnam. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. 1997.
Fletcher, P. C, F. Happe, U. Frith, S. C. Baker, R. J. Dolan, R. S. J. Fackowiak, and C. D.
Frith. "Other Mind in the Brain: A Functional Imaging Study of Theory of Mind'
in Story Comprehension." Cognition 57 (1995): 109-28.
Flew, A., ed. Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Parapsychology. Buffalo:
Prometheus Books, 1987.
Fodor, J. The Mind Doesn't Work That Way. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.
Fodor, J. A., and Z. W. Pylyshyn. "Systematicity of Cognitive Representation."
Excerpt from "Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture." In Connections and
Symbols, ed. S. Pinker and J. Mehler. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988.
Follesdal, D. "What Computers Cannot Do: Two Strategies." In Transcendental Philosophy
and Everyday Experience, ed. T. Rockmore and V. Zeman. Atlantic Highlands,
N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997.
Forman, R. K. C. "Mysticism, Language, and the Via Negativa." Journal of Consciousness
Studies 1, no. 1 (1994): 38-49.
Freeman, W. J. "Self, Awareness of Self, and the Illusion of Control." Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 20 (1997): 112-13.
——. "Three Centuries of Category Errors in Studies of the Neural Basis of Consciousness
and Intentionality." Neural Networks 10 (1997): 1175-83.
Freud, S. The Major Works of Sigmund Freud. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952.
Friedman, M. "Prohibition and Drugs." Newsweek, May 1,1972.
Friedrich, O. The End of the World: A History. New York: Coward, McCann &
Geoghegan, 1982.
——. The Kingdom of Auschwitz. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.
Frith, C. D. "Attention to Action and Awareness of Other Minds." Consciousness and
Cognition 11 (2002): 481-87.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 311
Frith, C. D., and U. Frith. 1999. "Interacting Minds—A Biological Basis." Science's
Compass 286 (1999): 1692-95.
Fuller, G. E. The future of Political Islam. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Fuster, J. M. Cortex and Mind: Unifying Cognition. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
2002.
Gallup, G. H., Jr. Religion in America 1996. Princeton: Princeton Religion Research
Center, 1996.
Gallup, G. H., Jr., and R. Bezilla. The Role of the Bible in American Society. Princeton:
Princeton Religion Research Center, 1990.
Garab Dorje. The Golden Letters: The Three Statements of Garab Dorje the First
Teacher of Dzogchen together with a Commentary by Dza Patrul Rinpoche.
Translated and edited by J. Reynolds. Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1996.
Gardner, M. The New Ambidextrous Universe: Symmetry and Asymmetry from
Mirror Reflections to Superstrings. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1990.
——. The New Age: Notes of a Fringe-Watcher. New York: Prometheus Books,
1991.
——. Relativity Simply Explained. New York: Dover, 1996.
Gazzaniga, M.S. "Legalizing Drugs: Just Say Yes." National Review, July 10,
1995.
——. "The Split Brain Revisited." Scientific American Special Edition 12, no. 1
(2002): 26-37.
——, ed. The New Cognitive Neurosciences. 2d ed. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.
Gazzaniga, M. S., J. E. Bogen, and R. W. Sperry. "Some Functional Effects of Sectioning
the Cerebral Commissures in Man." Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 48 (1962): 1765-69.
Gazzaniga, M. S., R. B. Ivry, and G. R. Mangun. Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology
of the Mind. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
Gentner, D., and A. B. Markman. "Structure Mapping in Analogy and Similarity."
American Psychologist 52 (1997): 45-56.
George, L. Crimes of Perception: An Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics. New
York: Paragon House, 1995.
Gigerenzer, G. "On Narrow Norms and Vague Heuristics: A Reply to Kahneman and
Tversky." Psychological Review 103 (1996): 592-96.
Gilbert, D. T. "How Mental Systems Believe." American Psychologist 46 2 (1991):
107-19.
Gilbert, D. T, et al. "Unbelieving the Unbelievable: Some Problems in the Rejection of
False Information." journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59 (1990): 601-13.
Gilbert, M. The Holocaust: A History of the jews of Europe during the Second World
War. New York: Henry Holt, 1985.
Gilovich, T. How We Know What Isn't So. New York: Free Press, 1991.
Giovagnoli, A. R., A. Erbetta, and O. Bugiani. "Preserved Semantic Access in Global
312 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Amnesia and Hippocampal Damage." Clinical Neuropsychology 15 (2001):
508-15 [abstract].
Gleick, J. Isaac Newton. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.
Glenny, M. "Why the Balkans Are So Violent." New York Review of Books, Sept. 19,
1996, pp. 34-39.
Glimcher, P. W. "Decisions, Decisions, Decisions: Choosing a Biological Science of
Choice." Neuron 36, no. 2 (2002): 323-32.
Glover, J. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1999.
Glynn, I. An Anatomy of Thought: The Origin and Machinery of the Mind. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1999.
Goel, V., B. Gold, S. Kapur, and S. Houle. "The Seats of Reason? An Imaging Study of
Deductive and Inductive Reasoning." Neuroreport 8 (March 24,1997): 1305-10.
Goel, V., and R. J. Dolan. "Explaining Modulation of Reasoning by Belief." Cognition
87, no. 1 (2003): B11-22.
Goenka, S. N. The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation as Taught by S. N. Goenka.
Edited by W. Hart. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.
Goffman, E. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face to Face Behavior. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1967.
Gold, J. I., and M. N. Shadlen. "Representation of a Perceptual Decision in Developing
Oculomotor Commands." Nature 404 (March 23, 2000): 390-94.
——. "Banburismus and the Brain: Decoding the Relationship between Sensory
Stimuli, Decisions, and Reward." Neuron 36, no. 2 (2002): 299-308.
Goldberg, E. The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2001.
Goldberg, J. "Letter from Cairo: Behind Mubarak." New Yorker, Oct. 8, 2001, pp. 48-55.
Goldhagen, D. J. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
Goleman, D. Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. New
York: Bantam Books, 2003.
Goodenough, E. R. "Depth Psychology: Wish Projection." In Toward a Mature Faith.
Lanham, Md.: Univ. Press of America, 1955.
——. "A Historian of Religion Tries to Define Religion." Zygon 2 (1967): 7-22.
Gorenberg, G. The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple
Mount. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000.
Gould, S. J. "Nonoverlapping Magisterial Natural History, March 1997.
Gourevitch, P. "Letter from Korea: Alone in the Dark." New Yorker, Sept. 8, 2003, pp.
55-75.
Govinda, A. Lama. A Living Buddhism for the West. Translated by M. Walshe.
Boston: Shambhala, 1989.
Graham, G., and G. L. Stephens, eds. Philosophical Psychopathology. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1994.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 313
Green, D. Gold in the Crucible: Teresa of Avila and the Western Mystical Tradition.
Longmead, Eng.: Element Books, 1989.
Greene, J. D. "From Neural 'Is' to Moral 'Ought': What Are the Moral Implications
of Neuroscientific Moral Psychology?" Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4 (2003):
846-49.
Greene, J. D., et al. "An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment."
Science 293 (Sept. 14, 2001): 2105-8.
Gregory, R. L., ed. The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1987.
Griffin, D. R. Animal Minds. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992.
——. "Panexperientialist Physicalism and the Mind-Body Problem." Journal of
Consciousness Studies 4, no. 3 (1997): 248-68.
Griffiths, P. J. On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and the Mind-Body Problem.
La Salle, III: Open Court, 1986.
Guttenplan, S., ed. A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Blackwell,
1994.
Haack, S. "Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism." Skeptical
Inquirer 21, no. 6 (1997): 37-42.
Habermas, J. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Translated by F. Lawrence.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.
——. The Past as Future. Translated and edited by M. Pensky. Lincoln: Univ. of
Nebraska Press, 1994.
——. On the Pragmatics of Communication. Edited by M. Cooke. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1998.
Hadamard, J. The Mathematician's Mind: The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical
Field. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1945.
Hagen, S. How the World Can Be the Way It Is. Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1995.
Haggard, P. "The Psychology of Action." British Journal of Psychology 92 (2001):
113-28.
Haggard, P., and E. Magno. "Localizing Awareness of Action with Transcortical Magnetic
Stimulation." Experimental Brain Research 127 (1999): 102-7.
Haggard, P., and M. Eimer. "On the Relation between Brain Potentials and the Awareness
of Voluntary Movements." Experimental Brain Research 126 (1999): 128-33.
Hall, M. P. The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Los Angeles: Philosophical Research
Society, 1977.
Hameroff, S. R. "Quantum Coherence in Microtubules: A Neural Basis for Emergent
Consciousness?" Journal of Consciousness Studies 1, no. 1 (1994): 91-118.
Hameroff, S., A. W. Kaszniak, and A. C. Scott, eds. Toward a Science of Consciousness:
The First Tucson Discussions and Debates. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.
Hardcastle, V. G. "The Naturalists versus the Skeptics: The Debate over a Scientific
Understanding of Consciousness." Journal of Mind and Behavior 14, no. 1 (1993):
27-50.
314 BIBLIOGRAPHY
——. "Psychology's Binding Problem and Possible Neurobiological Solutions."
journal of Consciousness Studies 1, no. 1 (1994): 66-90.
Hardcastle, V. G., and O. Flanagan. "Multiplex vs. Multiple Selves: Distinguishing
Dissociative Disorders." Monist 82 (1999): 645-57.
Harding, D. E. On Having No Head: Zen and the Re-discovery of the Obvious. London:
Arkana, 1961.
Harman, G. "Rationality." In An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Thinking, ed. E. E.
Smith and D. N. Osherson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Harman, W. "The Scientific Exploration of Consciousness: Towards an Adequate
Epistemology." Journal of Consciousness Studies 1, no. 1 (1994): 140-48.
Hart, J., R. Sloan Berndt, and A. Caramazza. "Category-Specific Naming Deficit following
Cerebral Infarction." Nature 316 (Aug. 1,1985): 439-40.
Haught, J. A. Holy Hatred: Religious Conflicts of the '90s. Amherst: Prometheus
Books, 1995.
Hauser, M. D. Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
——. "Swappable Minds." In The Next Fifty Years, ed. J. Brockman. New York:
Vintage, 2002.
Hauser, M. D., N. Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch. "The Faculty of Language: What
Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?" Science 298 (2002): 1569-79.
Hawking, S., and R. Penrose. The Nature of Space and Time. Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press. 1996.
Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by J. B. Baillie. New York:
Harper and Row, 1967.
Heisenberg, W. Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. New
York: Harper and Row, 1958.
Hill, F. A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials. New York:
Doubleday, 1995.
Hille, B. Ionic Channels of Excitable Membranes. 2d ed. Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer
Associates, 1992.
Hitchens, C. "Mommie Dearest." Slate, Oct. 20, 2003. http://slate.msn.com.
Hobbes, T. Leviathan. 1651; reprint, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952.
Hobson, J. A. The Chemistry of Conscious States. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994.
Hoffman, B. "The Logic of Suicide Terrorism." Atlantic Monthly, June 2003, pp.
40-47.
Hoffmann, R. J., trans. Porphyry's Against the Christians. Amherst: Prometheus
Books, 1994.
Hofstadter, D. R. The Tumult of Inner Voices or What Is the Meaning of the Word
"I"?. Cedar City, Utah: Grace A. Tanner Lecture in Human Values, 1982.
Hofstadter, D. R., and D. C. Dennett. The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self
and Soul. New York: Bantam Books, 1981.
Holton, G. Einstein, History, and Other Passions: The Rebellion against Science at
the End of the Twentieth Century. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 315
Holyoak, K. J. "Problem Solving." In An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Thinking,
eds. E. E. Smith and D. N. Osherson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Holyoak, K. J., and J. E. Hummel. "Toward an Understanding of Analogy within a
Biological Symbol System." In The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive
Science, ed. D. Gentner, K. J. Holyoak, and B. N. Kokinov. Cambridge: MIT Press,
2001.
Holyoak, K. J., and P. C. Cheng. "Pragmatic Reasoning with a Point of View." Thinking
and Reasoning 1 (1995): 289-313.
Honderich, T., ed. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1995.
Hopkins, J. Emptiness Yoga: The Tibetan Middle Way. Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications,
1987.
Horgan, J. The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the
Scientific Age. Reading, Mass.: Helix Books, 1996.
——. The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication,
and Explanation. New York: Free Press, 1999.
——. Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border between Science and Spirituality.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
Horner, I. B., trans. Milinda's Questions. 2 vols. Oxford: Pali Text Society, 1990.
Howard, M. "What's in a Name? How to Fight Terrorism." Foreign Affairs 81, no. 1
(2002): 8-13.
Hume, D. The Philosophical Works of David Hume. 4 vols. 1854; reprint, Bristol, Eng:
Thoemmes Press, 1996.
Humphrey, N. "How to Solve the Mind-Body Problem." Journal of Consciousness
Studies 7, no. 4 (2000): 5-20.
Huntington, S. P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Huxley, A. The Perennial Philosophy. New York: Harper and Row, 1944.
Ignatieff, M. "Why Are We in Iraq? (And Liberia? And Afghanistan?)." New York
Times Magazine, Sept. 7, 2003.
Inge, W. R. The Philosophy of Plotinus. 2 vols. 1929; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Wood
Press, 1968.
Jackson, F. "What Mary Didn't Know" In The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical
Debates, ed. N. Block, O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere. Cambridge: MIT Press,
1997.
Jackson, R. R., ed. and trans. Is Enlightenment Possible?: Dharmakirti and rGyal
tshab rje on Knowledge, Rebirth, No-Self and Liberation. Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion
Publications, 1993.
James, W. The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. 1890; reprint, New York: Dover, 1950.
——. The Will to Believe. 1897; reprint, New York: Longmans, Green, 1919.
——. Essays in Radical Empiricism. 1912; reprint, Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska
Press.
3 1 6 BIBLIOGRAPHY
——. The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition. Edited by J. J.
McDermott. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997.
Jeannerod, M. "To Act or Not to Act: Perspectives on the Representation of Actions."
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 52A, no. 1 (1999): 1-29.
——. 2001. "Neural Simulation of Action: A Unifying Mechanism for Motor Cognition."
Neurolmage 14 (2001): S103-S109.
Jenkins, P. "The Next Christianity." Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 2002, pp. 53-68.
John Paul II (pope). Crossing the Threshold of Hope. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Johnson, E. "Grace Halsell's Prophecy and Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road
to Nuclear War." Journal of Historical Review 7, no. 4 (Winter 1986).
Johnson, P. A History of Christianity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976.
Johnson-Laird, P. N., and R. M. J. Byrne. Deduction. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991.
Jung, C. G. Answer to Job. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1958.
Kafatos, M., and R. Nadeau. The Conscious Universe. New York: Springer-Verlag,
1990.
Kahneman, D., and A. Tversky. "On the Reality of Cognitive Illusions." Psychological
Review 103 (1996): 582-91.
Kaku, M. Hyperspace. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994.
Kalat, J. W. Biological Psychology. 6th ed. Pacific Grove, Calif.: Brooks/Cole Publishing,
1998.
Kandel, E. R., et al. Principles of Neural Science. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill,
2000.
Kant, I. The Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by T. K. Abbott. Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1952.
Kaplan, R. D. The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century.
New York: Random House, 1996.
——. "Was Democracy Just a Moment?" Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1997, pp. 55-80.
——. "The Lawless Frontier." Atlantic Monthly, March 2000, pp. 66-80.
——. "Looking the World in the Eye." Atlantic Monthly, May 2001, pp. 68-82.
——. "The World in 2005." Atlantic Monthly, March 2002, pp. 54-56.
——. "Supremacy by Stealth." Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 2003, pp. 65-83.
Kaufmann, W. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: New American
Library, 1956.
——. Critique of Religion and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1958.
——. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ. Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1974.
Kellehear, A. Experiences near Death: Beyond Medicine and Religion. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1996.
Keller, B. "The Thinkable." New York Times Magazine, May 4, 2003.
Kennedy, P. Preparing for the Twenty-first Century. New York: Vintage, 1993.
Kershaw, I. Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 317
Kertzer, J. I. "The Modern Use of Ancient Lies." New York Times, May 9, 2002.
Kim, J. "Epiphenomenal and Supervenient Causation." In The Nature of Mind, ed. D.
Rosenthal. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991.
——. "The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism." In Supervenience and Mind.
Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993.
——. Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental
Causation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.
Kircher, T. T. J., C. Senior, M. L. Phillips, P. J. Benson, E. T. Bullmore, M. Brammer, A.
Simmons, S. C. R. Williams, M. Bartels, and A. S. David. "Towards a Functional
Neuroanatomy of Self Processing: Effects of Faces and Words." Cognitive Brain
Research 10 (2000): 133-44.
Kircher, T. T J., C. Senior, M. L. Phillips, S. Rabe-Hesketh, P. J. Benson, E. T. Bullmore,
M. Brammer, A. Simmons, M. Bartels, and A. S. David. "Recognizing One's Own
Face." Cognition 78 (2001): B1-B15.
Klagge, J. C. "Wittgenstein and Neuroscience." Synthese 78 (1989): 319-43.
Klein, E. Conversations with the Sphinx: Paradoxes in Physics. Translated by D. Le
Vay. London: Souvenir Press, 1996.
Korsgaard, C. M. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1996.
Krakauer, J. Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. New York: Doubleday,
2003.
Kripke, S. "From Naming and Necessity." In The Nature of Mind, ed. D. Rosenthal.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991.
Krishnamurti, J., and D. Bohm. The Ending of Time. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco,
1985.
Kristof, N. "When Prudery Kills." New York Times, Oct. 8, 2003.
Krugman, P. "'Some Crazy Guy.'" New York Times, June 13, 2003.
Kuhn, T. S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962; reprint, Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1970.
Kurzweil, R. The Age of Spiritual Machines. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Lahav, R. "The Conscious and the Non-conscious: Philosophical Implications of Neuropsychology."
In Mindscapes: Philosophy, Science, and the Mind, ed. M. Carrier
and P. K. Machamer. Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.
Lanier, J. "Death: The Skeleton Key of Consciousness Studies?" Journal of Consciousness
Studies 4, no. 2 (1997): 181-85.
Lazare, D. "False Testament: Archeology Refutes the Bible's Claim to History."
Harper's, March 2002, pp. 39-47.
Lehrer, K. Self Trust. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997.
Lelyveld, J. "All Suicide Bombers Are Not Alike." New York Times Magazine, Oct.
28, 2001.
Leslie, J. The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction. London:
Routledge, 1996.
318 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Levi, P. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Levine, J. "On Leaving Out What It's Like." In The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical
Debates, ed. N. Block, O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1997.
Levy, L. W. Blasphemy. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1993.
Lewis, B. "The Roots of Muslim Rage." Atlantic Monthly, March 1990, pp. 47-60.
——. "The Revolt of Islam." New Yorker, Nov. 19, 2001, pp. 50-63.
——. The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. New York: Modern
Library, 2003.
Lewis, D. "Mad Pain and Martian Pain." In The Nature of Mind, ed. D. Rosenthal.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991.
——. "What Experience Teaches." In The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical
Debates, ed. N. Block, O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.
Lewontin, R. C. "The Evolution of Cognition: Questions We Will Never Answer." In
Invitation to Cognitive Science. Vol. 4, Methods, Models, and Conceptual Issues,
ed. D. Scarborough and S. Sternberg. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.
——. It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions.
New York: New York Review Books, 2000.
Libet, B. "A Testable Field Theory of Mind-Brain Interaction." Journal of Consciousness
Studies 1, no. 1 (1994): 119-26.
——. "Do We Have Free Will?" Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, nos. 8-9
(1999): 47-57.
——. "'Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain': Commentary on John Searle's
Article." Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, no. 8 (2001): 59-65.
——. "The Timing of Mental Events: Libet's Experimental Findings and Their
Implications." Consciousness and Cognition 11 (2002): 291-99.
Lockwood, M. Mind, Brain & the Quantum: The Compound "I." Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
——. "Unsensed Phenomenal Qualities: A Defense." Journal of Consciousness
Studies 5, no. 4 (1998): 415-18.
Logothetis, N. K. "Vision: A Window on Consciousness." Scientific American Special
Edition 12, no. 1 (2002): 18-25.
Logothetis, N. K., et al. "Neurophysiological Investigation of the Basis of the fMRI
Signal." Nature 412 (July 12, 2001): 150-57.
Longchenpa. Kindly Bent to Ease Us. 3 vols. Translated by H. V. Guenther. Berkeley,
Calif.: Dharma Publishing, 1975.
——. The Four-Themed Precious Garland. Translated by A. Berzin. Dharmsala:
Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1978.
——. Buddha Mind: An Anthology of Longchen Rabjam's Writings on Dzogpa
Chenpo. Translated by Tulku Thondup Rinpoche, edited by H. Talbott. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1989.
Luria, A. R. The Mind of a Mnemonist. Translated by L. Solotaroff. 1968; reprint,
Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 319
Lyon, J., and P. Corner. Altered Fates: Gene Therapy and the Retooling of Human
Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Lyons, R, J. R. Hanley, and J. Kay. "Anomia for Common Names and Geographical
Names with Preserved Retrieval of Names of People: A Semantic Memory Disorder."
Cortex 38, no. 1 (2002): 23-35 [abstract].
Maclntyre, A. The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis. Bristol, Eng.: Thoemmes
Press, 1958.
Mackay, C. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. 1841;
reprint, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993.
Maguire, E. A., R. S. J. Frackowiak, and C. D. Frith. "Recalling Routes around London:
Activation of the Right Hippocampus in Taxi Drivers." Journal of Neuroscience 17
(1997): 7103-10.
Maguire, E. A., C. D. Frith, and R. G. Morris. "The Functional Neuroanatomy of
Comprehension and Memory: The Importance of Prior Knowledge." Brain 122
(1999): 1839-50.
Maha Boowa Nanasampanno. Straight from the Heart: Thirteen Talks on the Practice
of Meditation. Translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Bangkok: P. Sumphan
Panich, 1987.
——. 1988. Things as They Are. Translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Bangkok: P.
Samphan Panich, 1988.
Mahasi Sayadaw. Buddhist Meditation and Its Forty Subjects. Translated by U Pe
Thin. N.p.: Buddha Sasana Council Press, 1957.
——. Thoughts on the Dhamma. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society,
1983.
——. The Progress of Insight. Translated by Nyanaponika Thera. Kandy, Sri
Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1985.
Malachowski, A., ed. Reading Rorty. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
Manchester, W. A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1992.
Margulis, L., and D. Sagan. Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution.
New York: Springer-Verlag, 1997.
Marks, C. E. Commissurotomy, Consciousness, and the Unity of Mind. Montgomery,
Vt.: Bradford Books, 1980.
Marr, D. "Understanding Complex Information-Processing Systems." In Vision. New
York: W. H. Freeman, 1982.
Martin, J. H. Neuroanatomy: Text and Atlas. Stamford, Conn.: Appleton and Lange,
1996.
Masson, J. M. My Father's Guru. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993.
Masson, J. M., and S. McCarthy. When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals.
New York: Delacorte Press, 1995.
Mates, B., ed. and trans. The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996.
320 BIBLIOGRAPHY
McCormick, P. J., ed. Star Making: Realism, Anti-realism, and Irrealism. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1996.
McGinn, C. "Consciousness and Space." Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3
(1995): 220-30.
——. "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?" In The Nature of Consciousness:
Philosophical Debates, ed. N. Block, O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1997.
——. The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World. New York:
Basic Books, 1999.
McKenna, T. The Archaic Revival. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991.
——. Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge. New York:
Bantam Books, 1992.
——. True Hallucinations. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993.
Medin, D. L. "Concepts and Conceptual Structure." American Psychologist 44
(1989): 1469-81.
Mele, A. R. "Real Self-Deception." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1997): 91-102.
——. "Understanding and Explaining Real Self-Deception." Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 20 (1997): 127-36.
——. Self-Deception Unmasked. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001.
Melton, J. G., ed. American Religious Creeds. 3 vols. New York: Triumph Books, 1991.
Menand, L. The Metaphysical Club: The Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2001.
Merikle, P. M., and M. Daneman. "Conscious vs. Unconscious Perception." In The
New Cognitive Neurosciences. 2d ed. Edited by M. S. Gazzaniga. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2000.
Metzger, B. M., and M. D. Coogan., eds. The Oxford Companion to the Bible. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1993.
Miller, W. I. Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence.
Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993.
——. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997.
Minsky, M. The Society of Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.
——. "Consciousness Is a Big Suitcase." 1998 Interview, www.edge.org/3rd_cul
ture/minsky/index.html
Mischel, W. Introduction to Personality. 6th ed. Orlando: Harcourt Brace College
Publishers, 1999.
Mishra, P. "The Other Face of Fanaticism." New York Times Magazine, Feb. 2,
2003.
Mitchell, S. The Gospel according to Jesus. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Monk, R. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: Viking Penguin,
1990.
——. Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921. New York: Free Press,
1996.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 321
Montaigne. The Complete Works of Montaigne. Translated by D. M. Frame. Stanford:
Stanford Univ. Press, 1943.
Murphy, J. P. Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press,
1990.
Murphy, M. P., and L. A. J. O'Neill, eds. What Is Life? The Next Fifty Years: Speculations
on the Future of Biology. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995.
Murti, T. The Central Philosophy of Buddhism. London: Allen and Unwin, 1974.
Naess, A. A Skeptical Dialogue on Induction. Assen, Netherlands: Vangorcum, 1984.
Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna's Seventy Stanzas: A Buddhist Psychology of Emptiness.
Translated by D. R. Comito. Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1987.
——. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika.
Edited and Translated by J. L. Garfield. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1995.
Nagel, T. Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979.
——. The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986.
——. What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy. Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1987.
——. Other Minds. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995.
——. The Last Word. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997.
Nahmias, E. A. "Verbal Reports on the Contents of Consciousness: Reconsidering
Introspectionist Methodology." Psyche, Oct. 2002.
Naipaul, V. S. Among the Believers: An Islamic journey. New York: Vintage, 1981.
——. India: A Million Mutinies Now. New York: Viking, 1990.
Namgyal, T. T. Mahamudra: The Quintessence of Mind and Meditation. Translated
by L. P. Lhalungpa. Boston: Shambhala, 1986.
Nanamoli Thera, ed. Selected Buddhist Texts. Vol. 1. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication
Society, 1958.
——, trans. Mindfulness of Breathing. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication
Society, 1982.
Nanamoli, Bhikkhu, trans. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New
Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya. Edited by Bhikkhu Bodhi. Boston: Wisdom
Publications, 1995.
Narada Maha Thera. The Buddha and His Teachings. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist
Publication Society, 1973.
Newberg, A. B. "The Neuropsychology of Religious and Spiritual Experience." Journal
of Consciousness Studies 7, nos. 11-12 (2000): 251-66.
Newberg, A. B., A. Alavi, M. Baime, M. Pourdehnad, J. Santanna, and E. d'Aquili.
"The Measurement of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow during the Complex Cognitive
Task of Meditation: A Preliminary SPECT Study." Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging
Section 106 (2001): 113-22.
Nichols, M. J., and W. T. Newsome. "The Neurobiology of Cognition." Nature 402
(1999): SUPP,C35-C38.
322 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Niemeier, M., J. Douglas Crawford, and D. B. Tweed. "A Bayesian Approach to
Change Blindness." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 956 (2002):
474-75. [abstract]
Nietzsche, F. The Portable Nietzsche. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Viking,
1954.
——. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Penguin
Books, 1954.
——. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage
Books, 1966.
——. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Translated by W. Kaufmann.
New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
——. The Birth of Tragedy. New York: Dover, 1995.
Nikhilananda, Swami, trans. The Bhagavad Gita. New York: Ramakrishna-
Vivekananda Center, 1979.
Nisargadatta Maharaj. J Am That. Translated by M. Frydman, edited by S. S. Dikshit.
Durham, N.C.: Acorn Press, 1973.
——. Prior to Consciousness. Edited by J. Dunn. Durham, N.C.: Acorn Press, 1985.
——. The Nectar of the Lord's Feet. Edited by R. Powell. Great Britain: Element
Books, 1987.
——. The Ultimate Medicine. Edited by R. Powell. San Diego: Blue Dove Press,
1994.
Niznik, J., and J. T. Sanders, eds. Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty,
and Kolakowski. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996.
Norbu, N. The Small Golden Key. Translated by L. Anderson. New York: Jewel Publishing
House, 1977.
——. The Crystal and the Way of Light. Edited by J. Shane. New York: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1986.
——. The Cycle of Day and Night. Translated by J. M. Reynolds. New York: Station
Hill Press, 1987.
——. Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State. Translated by J. Shane. London: Arkana,
1989.
——. Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light. Edited by M. Katz. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1992.
Norbu, T. Magic Dance. New York: Jewel Publishing House, 1981.
——. White Sail. Boston: Shambhala, 1992.
Norretranders, T. The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size. New York:
Viking, 1998.
Nozick, R. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981.
Nuland, S. B. How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1994.
Nyanaponika Thera. The Heart of Buddhist Meditation. York Beach, Maine: Samuel
Weiser, 1962.
BIB L I O G R A P H Y 323
——. The Vision of Dhamma. Edited by Bhikkhu Bodhi. York Beach, Maine:
Samuel Weiser, 1986.
——, ed. The Three Basic Facts of Existence. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication
Society 1974.
——, ed. The Road to Inner Freedom: A Survey of the Buddha's Teachings. Kandy
Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1982.
Nyanatiloka. Fundamentals of Buddhism. Bauddha Sahitya Sabha, 1949.
——. The Buddha's Path to Deliverance. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication
Society 1952.
——, trans, and ed. The Word of the Buddha. Santa Barbara: J. F. Rowny Press, 1959.
Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche. Natural Great Perfection. Translated by Surya Das.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1995.
O'Brien, C. C. On the Eve of Millennium: The Future of Democracy through an Age
of Unreason. New York: Free Press, 1994.
Ojemann, G., J. Ojemann, E. Lettich, and M. Berger. "Cortical Language Localization
in Left, Dominant Hemisphere: An Electrical Stimulation Mapping Investigation
in 117 Patients." Journal of Neurosurgery 71, no. 3 (1989): 316-26.
Oltmanns, T. F., J. M Neale, and G. C. Davison. Case Studies in Abnormal Psychology.
New York: John Wiley, 1999.
Ornstein, R. The Right Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997.
Orwell, G. "Reflections on Gandhi." In The Oxford Book of Essays, ed. J. Gross.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991.
Osherson, D. N. "Probability Judgment." In An Invitation to Cognitive Science:
Thinking, ed. E. E. Smith and D. N. Osherson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Osherson. D.N., D. Perani, S. Cappa, T. Schnur, F. Grassi, and F. Fazio. "Distinct Brain
Loci in Deductive versus Probabilistic Reasoning." Neuropsychologia 36 (1998):
369-76.
Osserman, R. Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Explanation of the Cosmos.
New York: Doubleday, 1995.
Ott, H. Martin Heidegger: A Political Life. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
Ott, J. Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History. Kennewick,
Wash.: Natural Products Company, 1993.
Padmasambhava. Self-liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness. Translated
by J. M. Reynolds. New York: Station Hill Press, 1989.
——. Dakini Teachings: Padmasambhava's Oral Instructions to Lady Tsogyal.
Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Boston: Shambhala, 1990.
——. Advice from the Lotus-Born. Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Boudhanath:
Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 1994.
——. The Light of Wisdom with Commentary by Jamgon Kongtrul the Great.
Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Boston: Shambhala, 1995.
Pape, R. A. "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism." American Political Science
Review 97, no. 3 (2003): 20-32.
324 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Pascal, B. Pensées. Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer. New York: Penguin Books,
1966.
Patrul Rinpoche. The Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones with Commentary by
Dilgo Khyentse. Boston: Shambhala, 1992.
——. Kunzang Lama'i Shelung: The Words of My Perfect Teacher. San Francisco:
HarperCollins, 1994.
Pelikan, J. Jesus through the Centuries. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.
Peng, K., and R. E. Nisbett. "Culture, Dialectics, and Reasoning about Contradiction."
American Psychologist 54 (1999): 741-54.
Pennisi, E. "Are Our Primate Cousins 'Conscious'?" Science 284 (1999): 2073-76.
Penrose, R. The Emperor's New Mind. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989.
——. "Mechanisms, Microtubules, and the Mind." Journal of Consciousness Studies
1, no. 2 (1994): 241-49.
——. The Large, the Small and the Human Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1997.
Perry, J. A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. Indianapolis: Hackett,
1978.
——. Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.
——, ed. Personal Identity. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975.
Peters, E. Inquisition. New York: Free Press, 1988.
Pinchbeck, D. Breaking Open the Head. New York: Broadway Books, 2002.
Pipes, D. Militant Islam Reaches America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.
Planck, M. Where Is Science Going? Translated and edited by J. Murphy. 1933;
reprint, Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1981.
Plato. The Complete Works. Edited by J. M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.
Pollack, K. H. "'The Crisis of Islam': Faith and Terrorism in the Muslim World." New
York Times Book Review, April 6, 2003.
Popper, K. R. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. 1959; reprint, London: Routledge,
1995.
——. Objective Knowledge. 1972; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
Popper, K. R., and J. C. Eccles. The Self and Its Brain. 1977; reprint, London: Routledge,
1993.
Posner, R. A. The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory. Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1999.
Poundstone, W. Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge.
New York: Anchor Press, 1988.
——. Prisoner's Dilemma. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Price, A. F., and W. Mou-Lam., trans. The Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui-Neng.
Boston: Shambhala, 1990.
Prinz, J. "Functionalism, Dualism and Consciousness." In Philosophy and the Neurosciences,
ed. W. Bechtel, P. Mandik, J. Mundale, and R. S. Stufflebeam. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 325
Pryse-Phillips, W. The Oxford Companion to Clinical Neurology. Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2003.
Putnam, R. A., ed. The Cambridge Companion to William James. New York: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1997.
Quattrone, G. A., and A. Tversky. "Self-Deception and the Voter's Illusion." In The
Multiple Self, ed. J. Elster. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985.
Quine, W. V. From a Logical Point of View. 1953; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1994.
Quine, W. V. Pursuit of Truth. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990.
Radin, D. The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. New
York: HarperCollins, 1997.
Ramachandran, V. S., and S. Blakeslee. Phantoms in the Brain. New York: William
Morrow, 1998.
Ramachandran, V. S., and W. Hirstein. "Three Laws of Qualia: What Neurology Tells
Us about the Biological Functions of Consciousness."Journal of Consciousness
Studies 4, nos. 5-6 (1997): 429-57.
Ramana Maharshi. Talks with Sri Ramana. Tiruvannamalai: Sri Ramanasramam,
1955.
——. The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi. Edited by A. Osborne. York
Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1972.
——. Self-enquiry. Translated by T. M. P. Mahadevan. Tiruvannamalai: Sri
Ramanasramam, 1981.
Reber, A. S. "The Cognitive Unconscious: An Evolutionary Perspective." Consciousness
and Cognition 1 (1992): 93-133.
Rees, G., G. Kreiman, and C. Koch. "Neural Correlates of Consciousness in Humans."
Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3 (2002): 261-70.
Rees, M. Our Final Hour. New York: Basic Books, 2003.
Rhodes, R. Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.
Rips, L. "Deduction and Cognition." In An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Thinking,
ed. E. E. Smith and D. N. Osherson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Rorty, R. The Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,
1982.
——. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers. Vol. 1. Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991
——. "Universality and Truth." 1994 MS.
——. Hope in Place of Knowledge: The Pragmatics Tradition in Philosophy. Taipei:
Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, 1999.
Rosenbaum, R. Explaining Hitler. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
Rosenthal, D. The Nature of Mind. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991.
Roskies, A. L. "Yes, But Am I Free?" Nature Neuroscience 4 (2001): 1161.
Roy, A. War Talk. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2003.
326 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rumelhart, D. E. "Schemata: The Building Blocks of Cognition." In Theoretical Issues
in Reading Comprehension, ed. R. J. Spiro, B. C. Bruce, and W. F. Brewer. Hillsdale,
N.J.: Erlbaum, 1980.
——. "The Architecture of Mind: A Connectionist Approach." In Foundations of
Cognitive Science, ed. M. I. Posner. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.
Russell, B. The Problems of Philosophy. 1912; reprint, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990.
——. Religion and Science. 1935; reprint, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997.
——. A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945.
——. Why I Am Not a Christian. Edited by P. Edwards. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1957.
Russell, J. "At Two with Nature: Agency and the Development of Self-World Dualism."
In The Body and The Self, ed. J. L. Bermudez, A. Marcel, and N. Eilan. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1995.
Ruthven, M. Islam in the World. 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000.
Ryle, G. The Concept of Mind. 1949; reprint, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984.
Sacks, O. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. New York: Harper Perennial,
1970.
——. An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. New York: Vintage,
1995.
Saddhatissa, H., trans. The Sutta-Nipata. London: Curzon Press, 1985.
Sagan, C. The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York:
Random House, 1995.
Sagan, C, and A. Druyan. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. New York: Random
House, 1992.
Said, E. W. "The Clash of Ignorance." Nation, Oct. 4, 2001.
——. "Suicidal Ignorance." CounterPunch, Nov. 18, 2001.
——. "An Unacceptable Helplessness." Al-Ahram, Jan. 16-22, 2003.
——. "A Monumental Hypocricy." CounterPunch, Feb. 15, 2003.
Santayana, G. Skepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy.
New York: Dover, 1923.
——. Persons and Places. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1963.
Sartre, J. P. The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness.
Translated by F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick. New York: Hill and Wang, 1937.
——. Being and Nothingness. Translated by H. E. Barnes. 1956; reprint, New York:
Gramercy Books, 1994.
Saxe, R., and N. Kanwisher. "People Thinking about Thinking People: The Role of the
Temporo-parietal Junction in Theory of Mind.'" Neuolmage 19 (2003): 1835-42.
Scalia, A. "God's Justice and Ours." First Things, May 2002, pp. 17-21.
Schell, J. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
——. The Unfinished Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 2001.
Schilpp, P. A., ed. The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court,
1944.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 327
——, ed. Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist. London: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1949.
Schlosser, E. Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black
Market. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
Schneewind, J. B. "What Has Moral Philosophy Done for Us . . . Lately?'' Undated MS.
Scholem, G. Kabbalah. New York: Dorsette Press, 1974.
Schooler, J. W., and J. Melcher. "The Ineffability of Insight." In The Creative Cognition
Approach, ed. S. M. Smith, T. B. Ward, and R. A. Finke. Cambridge: MIT Press,
1995.
Schopenhauer, A. Essays and Aphorisms. Edited and translated by R. J. Hollingdale.
London: Penguin Books, 1970.
Schrödinger, E. My View of the World. Translated by C. Hastings. Woodbridge,
Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1961.
——. What Is Life, Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches. Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967.
Searle, J. R. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
——. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press, 1995.
——. "Consciousness and the Philosophers." New York Review of Books, March 6,
1997, pp. 43-50.
——. The Mystery of Consciousness. New York: New York Review Books, 1997.
——. "Consciousness." Annual Review of Neuroscience 23 (2000): 557-78.
——. "Further Reply to Libet." Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, no. 8 (2001):
63-65.
——. "Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology." 2001 MS.
Sereny, G. Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience. New York: Vintage,
1974.
Shabkar, Lama. Flight of the Garuda. Translated E. P. Kunsang. Katmandu: Rangjung
Yeshe Publications, 1986.
——. The Life of Shabkar. Translated by Matthieu Ricard. Albany: State Univ. of
New York Press, 1994.
Shafir, E., and A. Tversky "Decision Making." In An Invitation to Cognitive Science:
Thinking, ed. E. E. Smith and D. N. Osherson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Shankaracharya. The Crest-Jewel of Discrimination. Translated by Swami Prabhavananda
and C. Isherwood. Hollywood, Calif.: Vedanta Press, 1947.
——. Self-knowledge. Translated and edited by Swami Nikhilananda. Mylapore,
Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1987.
Shattuck, R. Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1996.
Sheldrake, R. Seven Experiments That Could Change the World. New York: Riverhead
Books, 1995.
——. The Sense of Being Stared At, and Other Aspects of the Extended Mind.
New York: Crown, 2003.
328 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sheldrake, R., T. McKenna, and R. Abraham. The Evolutionary Mind: Trialogues at
the Edge of the Unthinkable. Santa Cruz, Calif.: Trialogue Press, 1998.
Shoemaker, S. "Self-reference and Self-awareness." Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968):
——. "Functionalism and Qualia." In The Nature of Mind, ed. D. Rosenthal.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991.
Simon, H. A. "What Is 'Explanation' of Behavior?" Psychological Science 3 (1992):
150-61.
Simons, D. J., C. F. Chabris, T. Schnur, D. T. Levin. "Evidence for Preserved Representations
in Change Blindness." Consciousness and Cognition 11 (2002): 78-97.
Singer, P. Writings on an Ethical Life. New York: Ecco Press, 2000.
Singer, W. "Striving for Coherence." Nature 397 (Feb. 4,1999): 391-93.
Sluga, H. "'Whose House Is That?': Wittgenstein on the Self." In The Cambridge
Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. H. Sluga and D. G. Stern. Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1996.
Smith, D. W. "The Structure of (Self-) Consciousness." Topoi 5 (1986): 149-56.
Smith, E. E. "Concepts and Categorization." In An Invitation to Cognitive Science:
Thinking, ed. E. E. Smith and D. N. Osherson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Smith, G. H. Atheism: The Case against God. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1979.
Spence, S. A., and C. D. Frith. "Towards a Functional Anatomy of Volition." Journal
of Consciousness Studies 6, no. 8-9 (1999): 11-29.
Sperry, R. W. "Cerebral Organization and Behavior." Science 133 (1961): 1749-57.
——. "A Powerful Paradigm Made Stronger." Neuropsychologia 36 (1998):
1063-68.
Sperry, R. W., D. Zaidel, and D. Zaidel. "Self Recognition and Social Awareness in the
Deconnected Minor Hemisphere." Neuropsychologia 17 (1979): 153-66.
Squire, L. R., and E. R. Kandel. Memory: From Mind to Molecules. New York: Scientific
American Library, 2000.
Squires, E. J. "Quantum Theory and the Need for Consciousness." Journal of Consciousness
Studies 1, no. 2 (1994): 201-4.
Stanovich, K. E., and R. F. West. "Individual Differences in Rational Thought." Journal
of Experimental Psychology: General 127 (1998): 161-88.
Stcherbatsky, T. The Buddhist Conception of Nirvana. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1968.
Stevenson, I. Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. Charlottesville: Univ. Press
of Virginia, 1974.
——. Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy. Charlottesville: Univ.
Press of Virginia, 1984.
——. Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997.
Storr, A. Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus. New York:
Free Press, 1996.
Stroud, B. The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1984.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 329
Swain, J. The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber. New York: Dorset Press, 1931.
Swinburne, R. The Existence of God. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.
Tarnas, R. The Passion of the Western Mind. New York: Harmony Books, 1991.
Taylor, E. William fames on Consciousness beyond the Margin. Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1996.
Teilhard de Chardin, P. Toward the Future. Translated by R. Hague. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1973.
Tenzin Gyatzo (Dalai Lama). The Buddha Nature: Death and Eternal Soul in Buddhism.
Woodside, Calif.: Bluestar Communications, 1996.
——. Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying: An Exploration of Consciousness with the
Dalai Lama. Edited by F. J. Varela. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1997.
Thompson-Schill, S. L., G. K. Aguirre, M. D'Esposito, and M. J. Farah. "A Neural
Basis for Category and Modality Specificity of Semantic Knowledge." Neuropsychologia
37 (1999): 671-76.
Thorne, K. S. Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy. New York:
W. W. Norton, 1994.
Tillich, P. Dynamics of Faith. New York: Harper and Row, 1957.
——. A History of Christian Thought. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.
Tipler, F. The Physics of Immortality. New York: Doubleday, 1994.
Tononi, G., and G. M. Edelman. "Consciousness and Complexity." Science's Compass
282 (Dec. 4,1998): 1846-51.
Trachtenberg, J. The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its
Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1943.
Trevena, J. A., and J. Miller. "Cortical Movement Preparation before and after a Conscious
Decision to Move." Consciousness and Cognition 11 (2002): 162-90.
Tsele Natsok Rangdrol. The Lamp of Mahamudra. Translated by E. P. Kunsang.
Boston: Shambhala, 1989.
——. The Mirror of Mindfulness: The Cycle of the Four Bardos. Translated by E.
P. Kunsang. Boston: Shambhala, 1989.
——. The Circle of the Sun. Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Hong Kong: Rangjung
Yeshe Publications, 1990.
——. Empowerment and the Path of Liberation. Translated by E. P. Kunsang.
Hong Kong: Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 1993.
——. The Heart of the Matter. Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Hong Kong: Rangjung
Yeshe Publications, 1996.
Tuan, Y. Segmented Worlds and Self: Group Life and Individual Consciousness. Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982.
Tversky, A. "Features of Similarity." Psychological Review 84 (1977): 327-52.
Tye, M. Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal
Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
U Ba Khin. The Essentials of Buddha Dhamma in Meditative Practice. Kandy, Sri
Lanka. Buddhist Publication Society, 1981.
330 BIBLIOGRAPHY
U Pandita, Sayadaw. In This Very Life: The Liberation Teachings of the Buddha.
Translated by U Aggacitta, edited by K. Wheeler. Boston: Wisdom Publications,
1992.
Unger, P. Living High & Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence. Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1996.
Urgyen Rinpoche, Tulku. Vajra Heart. Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Katmandu:
Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 1988.
——. Repeating the Words of the Buddha. Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Katmandu:
Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 1992.
——. Rainbow Painting. Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Boudhanath, Nepal:
Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 1995.
——. As It Is. Translated by E. P. Kunsang. Boudhanath, Nepal: Rangjung Yeshe
Publications, 1999.
Van Gulick, R. "Understanding the Phenomenal Mind: Are We All Just Armadillos?
Part I: Phenomenal Knowledge and Explanatory Gaps." In The Nature of Consciousness:
Philosophical Debates, ed. N. Block, O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.
Varela, F. "Neurophenomenology." Journal of Consciousness Studies 3, no. 4 (1996):
330-49.
Varela, E, E. Thompson, and E. Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and
Human Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
Vermes, G. The Religion of ]esus the Jew. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.
Vogeley, K., M. Kurthen, P. Falkai, and W. Maier. "Essential Functions of the Human
Self Model Are Implemented in the Prefrontal Cortex." Consciousness and Cognition
8 (1999): 343-63.
Vogeley, K., P. Bussfeld, A. Newen, S. Herrmann, F. Happe, P. Falkai, W. Maier, N. J.
Shah, G. R. Fink, and K. Zilles. "Mind Reading: Neural Mechanisms of Theory of
Mind and Self -perspective." NeuroImage 14 (2001): 170-81.
Voltaire. Philosophical Dictionary. Edited and Translated by T. Besterman. London:
Penguin Books, 1972.
Wallace, B. A. Choosing Reality: A Contemplative View of Physics and the Mind.
Boston: New Science Library, 1989.
——. "Intersubjectivity in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism." Journal of Consciousness
Studies 8, nos. 5-7 (2001): 209-30.
Walshe, M., trans. The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Digha
Nikaya. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1987.
Wansbrough, H. The New Jerusalem Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
Washington, P. Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and
Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America. New York: Schocken Books, 1993.
Watson, G., ed. Free Will. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982.
Watts, A. "Psychedelics and Religious Experience." California Law Review 56, no. 1
(1968): 74-85.
BIB L I O G R A P H Y 33 1
Weber, M. The Sociology of Religion. 1922; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.
Weil, S. Waiting for God. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.
Weinberg, S. "What Price Glory." New York Review of Books, Nov. 6, 2003, pp. 55-60.
Weiskrantz, L. "Prime-sight and Blindsight." Consciousness and Cognition 11
(2002): 568-81.
Whitebread, C. H. "The History of the Non-medical Use of Drugs in the United
States." Journal of Cognitive Liberties 1, no. 3 (2000): 29-64.
Whitehead, A. N. Religion in the Making. 1926; reprint, New York: Fordham Univ.
Press, 1996.
Wiesel, E. Night. Translated by S. Rodway. New York: Bantam Books, 1960.
Wigner, E. "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences."
Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, no. 1 (1960).
Wilber, K. Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala, 1995.
Wills, G. "Before the Holocaust." New York Times Book Review, Sept. 23, 2001.
——. "With God on His Side." New York Times Magazine, March 30, 2003.
Wilson, A. N. Jesus: A Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.
——. Paul: The Mind of the Apostle. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
Wilson, E. O. In Search of Nature. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996.
Wistrich, R. S. Anti-Semitism: The Longest Hatred. New York: Schocken Books, 1991.
Wittgenstein, L. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F.
McGuinness. London: Routledge, 1922 .
——. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1953.
——. On Certainty. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, translated
by D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.
Wrangham, R., and D. Peterson. Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human
Violence. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
Wright, R. The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. New
York: Pantheon Books, 1994.
Wu, M., and P. W. Cheng. "Why Causation Need Not Follow from Statistical Association:
Boundary Conditions for the Evaluation of Generative and Preventative
Causal Powers." Psychological Science 10 (1999): 92-97.
Wyman, D. S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust,
1941-1945. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
Yakovlev, A. N. A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
2002.
Zakaria, F. The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. New
York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
Zuckerman, M. B. "Graffiti on History's Walls." U.S. News and World Report, Nov.
3, 2003.
Acknowledgments
I BEGAN writing this book on September 12, 2001. Many friends
read and commented on a long essay that I produced in those first
weeks of collective grief and stupefaction, and that text became the
basis for this book. I am very grateful for this early feedback. I am
also indebted to those colleagues and advisers who patiently awaited
my return to scientific research (and to my senses). Several of them
generously reviewed two chapters on the brain that did not find a
place in the finished book. Their comments were much appreciated.
One friend slogged through the text at every stage of its composition,
found an agent for me, and helped craft the book proposal. She
knows who to call should she ever require an organ transplant. My
stepfather also read the entire manuscript, while under considerable
time pressure, and gave very useful notes.
My agent and my editor both played an indispensable role in
getting the book into its present form and on to the far side of a
printer's press. My editor's assistant was a pleasure to work with
throughout the entire process of writing and revisions. My copy editor
at Norton performed a veritable exorcism upon the text, armed
with nothing but a red pencil.
In writing this book, as in all else, I am especially indebted to my
mother and to my fiancee. Both showed a level of dedication to the
project that no theory of genetic or conjugal self-interest can explain.
Their wise and timely interventions spared the good people at Norton
abundant horror. While they are in no way responsible for the
inadequacies of the book, it would be a far lesser book without them.
333
Index
Page numbers beginning with 239 refer to notes.
Abdullah, Prince of Saudi Arabia, 132
abortion, 165-67,177-78
Abraham, 17-18, 94, 226
adultery, 24,155,179
Afghanistan, 53,131,139,164,195,196,
198, 203, 241, 246, 261
Ahmed, Omar Sheikh, 133
AIDS, 150,167-68, 267
Akbar, Mogul Emperor, 261
alchemy, 14, 239-40, 296
alcohol, 161,163, 267, 269, 271
Allah, 14, 27, 30-31, 35
Al Qaeda, 130,141,164,197-98, 246,
261
Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant bombing
(1998), 140-41
anti-Semitism, 79, 87, 92-106,114,123,
134,135, 242, 255, 256, 257-58,
259, 262, 264, 287
Apocalypse, 15, 34, 35, 38, 66,129,180,
224, 266
Arafat, Yasir, 262, 264
Ashcroft, John, 154,155
Augustine, Saint, 85, 95, 97,188, 254-55,
257-58
Bacon, Francis, 186
Balfour Declaration (1917), 153
baptism, 15, 78, 96, 98-99,102-3,105
Baudrillard, Jean, 138-39
behavior:
beliefs as motivations for, 12, 25-30,
35-36, 44-45, 51-53, 54, 57-58,
60-61, 63, 68-69, 92, 226, 244-46,
251
criminal, 78-79,157-64, 268, 270
economic motivations for, 12,17, 27,
32, 52-53
emotional basis of, 192,196,
276-77
irrational, 69, 91-92,160,165, 223
moral, 36,176-78,191-92, 221, 226
perception and, 51, 59, 60-61
political motivations for, 27, 30, 202,
260-61
private vs. public, 44-45, 71-72,
158-60,164,171, 267
rational, 58-59, 68-69, 248, 251
behaviorism, 275, 282
beliefs, 50-79
adherence to, 61-62, 72-73,154-55
bad vs. good, 14-15, 45-46, 74,108,
179-81,184, 221, 224
behavior based on, 12, 25-30, 35-36,
44-45, 51-53, 54, 57-58, 60-61,
63, 68-69, 92, 226, 244-46, 251
"causally active," 59-60, 62-63
coherence of, 53-60, 62, 63, 65,103
common, 24-25, 74-75, 207, 247
core, 15,16-23, 29-36, 72-73, 76, 80,
93-94, 99-100,106,112-24,128,
130,148,154-55, 203, 204, 246,
257, 258, 260-61
cultural differences in, 17-21, 45, 89,
101-2,145,170-71,178-79,190,
225, 242-43
335
3 3 6 INDEX
beliefs (continued)
discourse on, 44-46, 48-49, 65, 67,
75-76, 77,136,138,150,168,176,
189, 223-26
diversity of, 13-15, 34, 51, 71-72,
77-79, 94,108,135,139,151,176,
179, 225, 301
dogmatic, 12,15, 21-22, 25, 39, 41-42,
50-51, 68, 70-73,106,165,176,
203, 220, 223, 225, 243, 260-61,
293-94
doubt and, 59-60, 61, 63, 66-67, 68,
180
education and, 21-22, 48-49, 73-74,
133,180, 224
emotional aspect of, 12, 52-53,192,
196,199, 219-20, 276-77
epistemology of, 35, 50, 60-62, 65, 74,
250-51, 252
evidence for, 26-27, 29, 38-39, 48, 51,
58-73,105,176
faith compared with, 64-67, 68
false vs. true, 51, 60-62, 68,179-80,
278-84
formation of, 50-51, 57-58, 73
inconsistent, 55-60, 63,103
inference as basis of, 54—55, 60-61
justified, 14-15, 59-60, 71-79,165
linguistic basis of, 50-51, 53-54, 56,
57-59, 61, 71,181, 245, 246-47,
248
logical basis of, 51, 52-60, 63,103,
248, 254
magical, 87-92, 97, 99, 106,150,
255-56, 258
memory and, 244-46
modification of, 17-21, 48-49, 54-59,
61, 73,184, 291
perception and, 51, 59, 60-61,198-99,
207-8, 217, 218, 301
political, 13, 27, 30, 45, 78-79,100,
135-39, 241-42, 260-61
private, 44-45, 71-72
psychological aspect of, 42, 55-57, 64,
71-73,100-101
reality represented by, 12, 58-61, 63,
68-69, 71-72,178,180-82, 248,
250-51, 260
rejection of, 61,184,196, 291-93
scientific analysis of, 74, 75-76,
249-50, 252, 271-72
spiritual, 63,181, 215, 216-17
systems of, 55-58, 93-94,103,145,
175,176,178, 248
terminology of, 50-51, 64-67, 68, 244
terrorist, 28-29, 239, 246
tolerance of, 14-15, 22-23, 101-2,115,
134,135,138-39,168,176
transmission of, 21-25, 30-31, 72-73
truth of, 22-24, 60-63, 72, 273, 284
unjustified, 14-15, 25, 51, 65-66, 68,
71-79,171-73,188, 225
utility of, 179-80
violence sanctioned by, 12-14, 43, 44,
52-53, 64, 72, 77-79,187-90,
223-25, 230, 246, 284
see also faith; religion
Berman, Paul, 134-36,138,180, 241
Bernard, Saint, 83
Bible:
authority of, 17-20, 63, 85, 94, 95,
137-38,167, 254
Buddhist texts compared with, 216-17
capital punishment justified by,
154-58, 253
evidence for, 66, 76-77
faith defined in, 64-65, 67
historical significance of, 23-24, 66
inconsistency of, 85, 104—5, 254
knowledge of, 17-18, 20, 23-25, 39,
294, 295
Koran compared with, 23, 24, 34,
35-36, 241
literal interpretation of, 17, 18-19, 34,
66, 68, 69, 82-83, 94,104,180,
240
modernist interpretation of, 16-21,
31-32, 104-5
morality of, 171-72
prophesy in, 35, 38, 95-96, 153-54,
180, 224, 266
study of, 47, 78,104, 253, 294, 295
I N D E X 337
translations of, 64, 82, 253
veracity of, 22-24, 76-77,104-5, 294,
295, 296
as word of God, 17-20, 23, 35-36,
82-83
see also New Testament; Old Testament
bin Laden, Osama:
beliefs of, 28-29, 261
education of, 133,180
hunt for, 155-56
as Islamic terrorist, 28-29, 30, 34-35,
130,133,141,142,143
Muslim support for, 117
political agenda of, 30, 261
biological weapons, 14,144,152,195
biology, 74, 76, 79,165-67,172,180, 226,
242
Blair, Tony, 142
blasphemy, 63, 70-71,155, 224, 241, 262
"blood libel," 85, 87, 97-99,102, 258
Boykin, William G., 155-56
brain:
belief and, 50-52, 54-57, 60, 244-46
consciousness and, 208-9, 213,
275-77, 289-90
embryonic stem cells and, 165-66
ethics and, 175
fly, 167
free will and, 273-74
human, 20, 39-43, 50-53, 54-60, 89,
159,166-67,175,198, 208-9,
212-13, 244-46, 250, 273-77,
288-90, 299-300
ideas and, 288
kuru and, 89
meditation and, 228-29, 299-300
memory and, 50, 243, 245
mind and, 175, 288
self and, 212, 290
soul and, 208, 288-89
"theory of mind" and, 245
vision and, 175,198, 245
Buddha, 215, 293, 296
Buddhism, 114,191, 215-17, 233, 234,
257, 284, 292, 293-94, 296, 298
Bundy, Ted, 267
Burr, William Henry, 254
Bush, George W., 46-47,142,143,155,
158,167
Campbell, Joseph, 296
cannibalism, 89, 255-56
Carlyle, Thomas, 262
categorical imperative, 186, 285
Catharism, 83-85,106
Catholic Church:
anti-Semitism of, 87,102-6, 259
authority of, 81-83
clergy of, 84-85
conversion to, 102-3,105, 242
core beliefs of, 72-73,76, 80, 99-100,
106, 258
excommunication by, 103-5
heresy suppressed by, 17-18, 45-46,
68, 80-87, 99,101, 252, 253-55
Nazi collaboration of, 102-6
papal authority in, 74,76-77, 92,
104-5,106,157
Cautio Criminalis (Spee), 90
censorship, 104—5
Centers for Disease Control, 271
"change blindness," 59
chemical weapons, 14,144,152,195
China, 79,151,184, 241-42, 243
Chomsky, Noam, 139-42,143,146-47
Christianity:
anti-Semitism in, 79, 92-106,114,
255, 257-58
biblical basis of, 17-18
core beliefs of, 16-23,154-55, 204
fundamentalist, 46-47,153-54,155,
240, 256, 271-72
Islam compared with, 32, 45,110, 111,
114,118,121,131, 257
Judaism compared with, 94, 96-97,
256, 257, 259
medieval, 21-22, 70-71, 80-92, 98-99,
101, 111, 132,150,153, 255
as missionary religion, 78, 265
mystical tradition of, 215-17, 293,
294-95, 296
political impact of, 16, 97,153-64
338 INDEX
Christianity (continued)
reform of, 86,103,148, 240, 258
sexual repression in, 95, 97,155,158,
159-60,167-68,188, 284
spiritual authority of, 13,15,16-18,
63,137, 215-17, 225
violence sanctioned by, 46, 106-7
see also Catholic Church; Jesus Christ;
Protestantism
Christian Scientists, 38, 69
civilization:
advances in, 14, 45,144-45,171, 215
"clashes" of, 130-31,135,180
survival of, 12, 26-27, 48-49,144-45,
150-52, 224-25, 227
Western, 29-33,153,179
Clinton, Bill, 141
cognition:
agency and, 173, 272-74
coherence of, 54-55, 59-62
evolution of, 51-52
introspective, 40,191-92, 205, 209-10,
217-20, 257, 274-75, 293-95,
299-301
intuitive, 20,167,171-77,182-84,
185, 226, 279
linguistic basis of, 58-59,181, 246-47,
279-82, 288, 290-91, 298-99
machine-based, 220-21
neurological basis of, 20, 39-42,
51-52, 55, 56, 58,175,198-99,
208-9, 212, 244-46, 273-77,
280-82, 288
rational, 55, 60,182-84, 247, 279, 291
reality as represented in, 60-61, 248,
278-79, 288
scientific investigation of, 51-52,
217-18
collateral damage, 142-47,194-97,198,
203, 287
communism, 79,100, 242
consciousness, 204-21
of animals, 170-71,174-75,177-78,
275-77, 281
dualism in, 207-8, 213, 214, 217, 218,
219, 294-95, 298-99, 301
emergence of, 211-14
experiments in, 204-21, 299
happiness and, 205-7, 212
loss of, 212-14, 289-90
moral understanding and, 173-76
nature of, 207-10, 216-17, 220-21,
227, 235-36
neurological basis of, 20, 39-42,175,
191,198-99, 208-9, 212, 249,
288-90
ordinary, 204, 213, 218-19
phenomenology of, 208-14, 249-50
reality as represented by, 206-8,
210-14, 278-79, 288
reportability of, 208-9, 289-90,
299-300
scientific investigation of, 39-40,
207-9, 212, 217-19, 299-300
of self, see self
subjective nature of, 40-42,177-78,
207, 208-9, 213-14, 290-91,
299-300
transformation of, 39-40, 204, 206,
209-10, 212-14, 215, 300-301
Constantine I, Emperor of Rome, 97
Constitution, U.S., 154
Darwin, Charles, 79, 85-86,105, 242
Davidson, Donald, 247, 279-82
Dawkins, Richard, 229
death:
beliefs about, 36-39, 208, 288
of children, 18, 36, 38, 49,140-41,
146-47,194-95,198, 202, 203
cults of, 123,136, 239
inevitability of, 36-39, 226
life after, 20, 25-29, 32, 36-39, 68, 74,
78, 86-87,177, 208
DeLay, Tom, 156
Dershowitz, Alan, 135,192-94,197,198
Descartes, René, 105,174, 207-8, 275
Deuteronomy, book of, 18, 82, 253
Diamond, Jared, 215, 293
dictatorship, 132, 150-51, 240
disease, 19, 36-37, 89,145,166,191, 243
Dominic, Saint, 84, 85
INDEX 339
Dominican order, 84-85
Durant, Will, 86
Dynamics of Faith, The (Tillich), 65
Dyson, Freeman, 15
Einstein, Albert, 15, 242, 271-72
embryonic stem cells, 165-67, 169
ethics, see morality
Eucharist, 72-73, 80, 99-100
evolution, 51-52,156,172,185-86,
192-99, 230, 236
Exodus, book of, 155
faith:
authority and, 74, 76-77, 254
beliefs compared with, 64-67, 68
consolation of, 39, 66-68, 69
cruelty and, 80-100
death as basis of, 36-39
end of, 23-25, 47-49, 221, 223-27,
300-301
evidence for, 26-27, 29, 38-39, 61-73,
85,105,165,176, 225
idolatrous, 65,118,120,122,160,162
as ignorance, 20-21, 65-66, 72, 89,
107,151,173, 223, 226, 254
"leap of," 23, 62-63, 96
mental illness compared with, 42, 64,
71-73,100-101
metaphysics based on, 11,14, 64-65,
68
power of, 12-49, 64, 67-68,131, 225
privacy and, 158-60,164
reason vs., 15-16,17,19, 21, 38,
43-46, 64, 71-72, 86-87, 95,137,
168, 204, 221, 223, 225, 232-33
redemption by, 15, 44, 69-71,127
as sacred, 16, 43, 46,134,177, 225,
254, 300
self-justification of, 62-63, 64, 71-79,
85
spirituality compared with, 40-41, 65
terminology of, 23, 62-67, 68, 96
truth and, 19-20, 61-63, 67-68
violence sanctioned by, 29-36, 67,
80-100,131, 230, 284
see also beliefs; religion
faith-based initiative, 155, 266-67
Falwell, Jerry, 153, 266
family planning, 150,167-68,169
Faraday, Michael, 86
fatwas, 116, 262
Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 298
First Amendment, 154
Fore people, 89, 255-56
Fourth Lateran Council (1215), 83-84, 99
Franciscan order, 253-54
Francis of Assisi, Saint, 253-54
free will, 173, 272-74
Freud, Sigmund, 37-38
Friedman, Milton, 269-70
Friedman, Thomas, 131
Galileo Galilei, 105
Gandhi, Mohandas K., 202, 287
Genesis, book of, 47
genetics, 177,186,191, 210, 220, 274
genocide, 78-79,100-106,129,134,140,
153
Gettier, Edmund, 250
Global Attitudes Project, 124
Glover, Jonathan, 151,186,195,196
God:
anger of, 70-71,154-55,159-60
belief in, 12-14, 22-23, 29, 30-31, 35,
36, 51, 62-71, 77-79,137,152,
180, 214, 227, 256, 301
as concept, 12-17, 22, 36, 46-47,
66-67, 93-94, 96
doubts about, 29-30, 66-67, 68,180
existence of, 14,16,18, 24, 62-63,
70-71, 82,159-60, 226
infallibility of, 13,16-17,172-73
laws of, 17-18, 21, 27,148,154-58,
170
obedience to, 82-83,148-49
omnipotence of, 17, 66-67, 69, 70-71,
136,173
omniscience of, 13,17,117-18,
159-60,164,173
as personal deity, 12-14,17-18, 36,
66-67, 93-94, 96,177, 226, 227
340 INDEX
God (continued)
as supreme creator, 12-14,17,19, 24,
45, 72,105,117-18,172-73,184,
226, 227
word of, 12-13,16,17-20, 23, 24,
35-36, 39-40, 45, 61, 77, 78,
82-83
Golden Rule, 186,190
Goldhagen, Daniel, 101,102,103
Gospels, 65, 66, 69-70, 82-83, 94-95, 97,
98,137, 203, 210, 241
Gould, Stephen Jay, 15,16
Greece, ancient, 46-47, 291-93
Gulf War, 132,241
Habermas, Jürgen, 181
hadith, 29,109-10,112,115-16, 261, 264
Hager, W. David, 155
Hamas, 133, 256, 260
"Heaven's Gate" cult, 69
Heidegger, Martin, 291
Henry VIII, King of England, 253
Hensley, George, 69
hermeneutics, 296-98
Hess, Rudolf, 100
Hezbollah, 133,164
Himmler, Heinrich, 100-101, 264
Hinduism, 17, 26-28, 94,114, 239, 257,
261, 293, 294
Hitchens, Christopher, 176
Hitler, Adolf, 93,100,102,105,143,173,
202, 230, 291
Hlond, August Cardinal, 259
Holocaust, 66-67, 79, 93,100-106,140,
176,177,184, 202, 259, 264, 287
homosexuality, 158,160,169, 266
honor killings, 184,187-90, 284
"host desecration," 99-100,150, 258
Hudal, Alois, 105
human rights, 18, 78-79,132,135,
192-99
Hume, David, 251
Huntington, Samuel, 32,130
Hussein, Saddam, 128,142,143,151
Hussein (grandson of Mohammed), 149
Husseini, Hajj Amin al-, 264
imperialism, 27-28, 30, 32-33,113,131
India, 26-28, 202, 205, 239, 241
Innocent III, Pope, 84
Inquisition, 79, 80-87, 88, 99,106,107,
252, 253-55, 268
Iran, 263
Iran-Iraq War, 137, 264-65
Iraq, 140,149, 233, 236
Iraq War, 128,143,146,196,198
Isis, 23-24
Islam, 108-52
accomplishments of, 108-9
anti-Semitism in, 92, 93,100,114,
123,134, 258, 262, 264
Christianity compared with, 32, 45,
110, 111, 114,118,121,131, 257
clerics of, 67, 78,116, 262
conversion to, 110,113,115
core beliefs of, 29-36,112-24,128,
130,148,154, 246, 260-61
death penalty in, 16, 24,113,115, 241,
262
economic aspect of, 109,116,133,
147-48,151-52
education and, 109,133,180, 263
fundamentalist, 28-36,110,147-48,
202-3, 240, 256
Hinduism compared with, 26-28,
114
holy sites of, 30, 46, 261
House of, 110,113,115,131
humiliation as issue for, 30,131-34,
241
intolerance by, 15, 29-35,107,109,
112-23,127,131, 225, 256,
261-62
jihad as doctrine of, 28-36,111-13,
124,128-29, 261
Judaism compared with, 32,114,118,
131, 256
law of (sharia), 46,113,115,123,131,
132, 261, 262
liberal critique of, 109-10, 111, 115,
131,134-50, 265
as military threat, 110, 128-31,
151-52, 246
I N D E X 341
as missionary religion, 30-31,110,
113,115
moderate, 31-32,110, 111, 114, 115,
132,133,150-52
in modern world, 125-27,130-31,
136,147-49
moral standards of, 143,148-49
mystical tradition of, 215-17, 293,
294-95, 296
obligations prescribed by, 111, 127
political impact of, 34,109,128,
137-41,147-48,150-52, 202-3,
241, 263
powerlessness as concern of, 130-33
reform of, 116,131,148-49,151-52,
224-25
as "religion of peace," 31-32
salvation in, 15,127
sexual repression in, 127,184,187-90
Shia, 111, 132,149, 241
social impact of, 131-32,133,150-52,
202-3
spiritual authority in, 13,17, 34,148,
215-17
Sunni, 111, 123, 241
terrorism and, 11-12,13, 28-29, 31,
32-34, 72,109,111-12,114,117,
123,180, 227-28, 246, 260-61
U.S. as adversary of, 30,128,180, 264,
265, 266
violence sanctioned by, 11-12, 29-36,
46,109,127,139,147-48,184,
187-90, 227-28, 286-87
Western culture as incompatible with,
29-33, 111, 113-15,117,130-31,
133,137-38,150-52,180, 202-3,
240-41
women in, 46,131-32,136,179,184,
187-90, 203, 224, 284
Islamic Jihad, 164, 260
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 27, 30, 31, 38,
93, 94,109,126,135,153-54, 241,
263, 264
Jainism, 108,148
James, William, 278
Jehovah's Witnesses, 69
Jesuits, 86
Jesus Christ:
apostles of, 65, 82-83, 94-98,137,
156-57,158, 241, 254
crucifixion of, 92-93
divinity of, 35, 38, 68, 74, 87, 92-96,
99,105,106, 203, 301
Jewish identity of, 94, 96-97
miracles of, 95-96
Mohammed compared with, 111
physical appearance of, 76-77
resurrection of, 87-88, 97
second coming of, 38, 97,153-54, 203,
266
transubstantiation of, 72-73, 80,
99-100, 258
virgin birth of, 16, 23, 73, 74, 76, 77,
94-95, 203
John, Gospel according to, 65, 82-83, 97
John XXII, Pope, 254
John Paul II, Pope, 105,106, 260
Jones, Jim, 130
Joyce, James, 298
Judaism:
biblical basis of, 17-18, 95
Christianity compared with, 94,
96-97, 256, 257, 259
core beliefs of, 15, 93-94, 257
God as concept in, 17-18, 66-67,
93-94, 96
intolerance by, 15,18,137, 225, 256
Islam compared with, 32,114,118,
131, 256
mystical tradition of, 215-17, 293,
294-95, 296
spiritual authority of, 13,17, 215-17
violence sanctioned by, 154-55
Julian of Norwich, 69-70
Jung, Carl, 15
Justinian Code, 97
Kabbalism, 294, 300
Kant, Immanuel, 105,186, 277, 285
karma, 202
Kennedy, John F., 189
342 INDEX
Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 116, 262,
264-65
Kierkegaard, Søren, 23, 62-63
Kim Jong II, 151, 224
knowledge:
absolute, 13,16-17, 63,106,172-73
evidence for, 19, 23-25, 35, 65, 71-72,
220
interpretation of, 73-77, 243
limits of, 35, 50, 60-62, 65, 74,
250-51, 252, 291-93
religious, 38-39, 65, 67, 70-71, 225
scientific, 21-22, 45, 89,178
sensory, 41-42, 51-52, 58, 71-72, 206,
248
transcendental, 181-82, 300-301
Koran, 236
authority of, 16, 28-36,115, 294, 295,
296
Bible compared with, 23, 24, 34,
35-36, 241
Buddhist texts compared with, 216-17
historical significance of, 23-24
inconsistency of, 23, 24, 262
infidels condemned by, 31-35,109,
110-13,115-16, 241
jihad sanctioned by, 28-36,112
literal interpretation of, 28-36,110,
115-16,117,148, 240, 294, 295
paradise as described in, 12,13, 29, 31,
33-34,113,117,124,127-28,129,
136, 263, 264
suicide discussed in, 33-34,117,123,
125
textual analysis of, 127, 263
veracity of, 16, 28-29, 31
as word of God, 16, 23, 28-29, 31,
35-36, 67
see also hadith
Kristof, Nicholas, 168, 271
Kuhn, Thomas, 75,178, 252
LaHaye, Tim, 155
Last Word, The (Nagel), 279
laws:
anti-terrorist, 192-94,197-98
criminal, 158-64, 267-71
divine, 17-18, 21, 27,148,154-58,170
Islamic (sharia), 46,113,115,123,131,
132, 261, 262
religious, 85, 97,154-58,162,170
vice, 24,155,158-60,179
Leo XIII, Pope, 104
Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, 191
Leviticus, book of, 155,158
Lewis, Bernard, 34, 111, 112-13,116
Lewy, Guenther, 103
Lindh, John Walker, 133
Lindsey, Hal, 153, 266
logic:
antithesis in, 55
beliefs based on, 51, 52-60, 63,103,
248, 254
contradiction in, 51, 85, 248, 254
evidence based on, 16, 71-72, 85, 221
language and, 249, 279-83
moral, 135,182-84,194, 226
"unfalsifiable propositions" in, 66
Lucius III, Pope, 83
Luke, Gospel according to, 94-95
Luther, Martin, 254
Lysenko, Trofim, 79
Mackay, Charles, 91-92
Mahayana Buddhism, 292
Manicheanism, 83
Mao Tse-tung, 79, 230
Marduk, 24
marijuana, 160-64,169, 267-71
Mark, Gospel according to, 95
Mass, 72-73, 99-100
mathematics, 182-83, 220, 249-50
Matthew, Gospel according to, 94-95, 98,
137, 241
Matzoh of Zion, The (Tlas), 258
Mecca, 46
medicine, 19, 22, 46, 67-68, 69, 70-71,
145,150,165-69,191, 267-68,
285
memory, 243-46
long-term vs. short-term, 50, 243-44
neurological basis of, 58, 59
I N D E X 343
Mendel, Gregor, 79, 242
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 290-91
Mills, James, 266
Mishnah, 97
Miss World Pageant (2002), 46
Mohammed, 29, 30-31, 34, 50,109-10,
111, 121, 216
Mohammed, Khalid Sheikh, 197-98
Montgomery, William, 91-92
Moore, G. E., 283-84
Moore, Roy, 154-55
morality, 170-203
actions based on, 138-47, 224, 285-87
community and, 176-78, 221
comparative, 139-40,146-47
compassion and, 106,117,171-72,
176-78,188,189-92, 223, 275
diversity in, 180-82
evil and, 130,134-35,169,170-71,
173,175,179, 223-24, 225
failure of, 178-79,189-90,199-202
false equivalence in, 139-42,192-99,
265
goodness and, 78,149,184-85, 283-84
guilt and, 80-81,193-99
happiness and, 42,160,170-71,172,
175,177,185-87,190-92, 202,
205-7, 212, 221, 225-27, 259, 272,
283-86, 291-93
intent as issue in, 138-47
intuition and, 20,167,171-77,
182-84,185, 226
liberal, 101-2,115,135,138-39,168
logic of, 135,182-84,194, 226
love and, 20, 24, 85,165,185-92,
219-20, 226, 227, 284
of pacifism, 142,199-203, 287
pragmatic approach to, 179-82, 278,
279-83
reason and, 42-44,170-71,182-84
relativism in, 178-82
religious basis of, 15, 36, 52-53,143,
149,156-58,168-73
science of, 43-44,145-46,173-76,177
self-identity and, 176-77', 185-87, 225
spirituality as basis of, 149, 204, 221
standards of, 36,135,142-47, 226,
285-87
suffering and, 80-87,106-7,117,167,
168-78,185-99, 206-7, 223, 272,
275, 286-87, 292
systems of, 149,157,167,168-71, 277,
285-87
technology and, 13-14, 47-48,142-47,
286
of terrorism, 28-29,109,130,135,
138-47,192-99
torture as issue in, 80-92, 99,105,
176,192-99, 286-87
truth of, 170-73,178-82
violence and, 15, 53,112-13,123-29,
135,142-47,157,161,162-63,
192-203, 287
Moses, 19, 94
Moyers, Bill, 47
My Lai massacre (1968), 144
mysticism, see spirituality
"Myth of the Subjective, The" (Davidson),
280
Nagarjuna, 215
Nagel, Thomas, 279, 280
nationalism, 30-31, 260-61
National Prayer Breakfast, 46-47
naturalistic fallacy, 283-84
Nazism, 79,100-106,114,134,176,177,
178-79, 202, 242, 258, 259, 264,
287
near-death experiences, 288
New Age movements, 205-6, 295-96
New Testament, 14, 64, 65, 66f 69-70,
82-83, 84, 94-96, 97, 98,137,152,
168, 203, 210, 241, 253, 254
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 257
9-11 (Chomsky), 139-41
nuclear weapons, 14, 26-28, 38,128-29,
144,152,153,164,173,195, 242,
266
oil wealth, 147,152, 240-41
Old Testament, 18, 47, 64, 82-83, 94-95,
154-55,156,158, 253, 254
344 I N D E X
Omar, Mullah Mohammed, 155-56
"open question" argument, 283-84
Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Sextus Empiricus),
291-93
pacifism, 125,142,199-203, 287
Padmasambhava, 215, 216-17, 296
Pakistan, 26-28, 241
Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey
Research, 263
Pape, R. A., 260-61
Pascal, Blaise, 62-63, 95-96, 257
Paul, Saint, 95, 96,156-57,158
Pearl, Daniel, 133,197-98, 286-87
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 278
Pentecostals, 69
"perfect weapons," 142-47, 286
Philip VI, King of France, 70-71
Pilate, Pontius, 98
Pinker, Stephen, 58,186
Pius VII, Pope, 92
Pius X, Pope, 104-5
Pius XII, Pope, 104,106
plague, 70-71
Planck, Max, 15
Plotinus, 291
Pollack, Kenneth, 116
Popper, Karl, 66, 75, 252
pornography, 158,159, 267
Poseidon, 16
prayer, 44, 47, 48-49, 63, 69,160, 261
Prohibition, 163, 267
"propositional attitude," 246
prosopagnosia, 244, 288
Protestantism, 86,103, 240, 258
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 93
Pyrrho of Elis, 291-93
Qutb, Sayyid, 123,180
racism, 27-28, 30-31,101,102,145-16
Raymond du Fauga, bishop of Toulouse,
84-85
Reagan, Ronald, 153, 266
reality:
appearance vs., 51, 59, 60-61
beliefs as representations of, 12,
58-61, 63, 68-69, 71-72,178,
180-82, 248, 250-51, 260
nature of, 180-82, 250-51
normativity in, 54-55,108
objective, 218-21
subjective, 40-42, 50, 54-55, 206-7,
278, 280
visionary, 42, 76-77, 300-301
reason:
atrocities and failure of, 55, 78-79, 259
common sense and, 74-75, 207, 274,
277, 279
cultural factors in, 242-43
faith vs., 15-16,17,19, 21, 38, 43-46,
64, 71-72, 86-87, 95,137,168,
204, 221, 223, 225, 232-33
hierarchical systems of, 145
limits of, 39-44, 55, 64,101, 259, 276
love and, 165, 226
mental models for, 50, 206-9, 248-49
morality and, 42-44,170-71,182-84
social impact of, 21, 28, 55
spirituality and, 39-46,181, 205, 221
subjectivity and, 40-42, 278
Rees, Martin, 47,152
reincarnation, 202
religion:
authority of, 34, 63, 74, 76-77, 254
conversion in, 30-31, 94,102-3,105,
110,113,115, 242
damnation in, 20, 32, 68, 74, 86-87,
177
diversity of, 13-23, 34, 46, 77-78,108,
176, 179, 235; see also specific
religions
dogmatic beliefs of, 12,15, 21-22, 25,
39, 41-42, 50-51, 68, 70-73,106,
165,176, 203, 220, 223, 225, 243,
260-61, 293-94
education and, 19, 21-22, 25, 32,109,
133,180, 224, 263
evidence for, 17,19, 23-25, 29, 31, 35,
41, 45-46, 48, 221, 225
freedom of, 51, 71-72, 77-79, 94,139,
154-55,176, 301
I N D E X 345
fundamentalist, 14,17-18, 20, 29-36,
133,168
government as separate from, 34, 39,
46-47,150-64, 241, 266-67
identity based on, 128,176-78, 225,
227
immortality in, 20, 25-29, 36-39, 78,
177, 208
intolerance based on, 13, 25-27, 86,
87-88, 93-94,106,115,131,137,
223-24, 225
knowledge derived from, 38-39, 65,
67, 70-71, 225
malignant solidarity of, 234
moderate position in, 14-23, 31-32,
38-39, 42-43,101-2,176
in modern world, 17-21, 24—25,
78-79, 94,137-38
morality based on, 15, 36, 52-53,143,
149,156-58,168-73
as mythology, 14,16, 24-26, 39-40,
46-48, 79, 296-98
persecution in name of, 17-18, 29-35,
45-46, 68, 79, 80-100,106,107,
252, 253-55, 268
political impact of, 16, 34, 39, 46-47,
137,153-64, 241, 266-67
poverty and, 32,109,133
prophetic tradition in, 32, 35, 38,
95-96,105,153-54,180, 224, 266
reform of, 22-23, 86,103,116,131,
148,151-52, 223-25, 240, 258
science compared with, 13,15-16,18,
43-44,165-69, 271-72
secularism vs., 15, 28,153-69,170,
223-24
sin as concept in, 12,19, 20, 24, 32, 68,
74, 86-87,158-64,167-68,177,
188, 236, 257, 272, 284
social costs of, 230-31
spirituality compared with, 15, 20,
214-17, 220, 221
traditions of, 14,16, 21-25, 43, 65,
72-73, 293
truth of, 16,19, 22-25, 29,45-46, 72,
85, 204, 221, 271-72, 294, 295, 296
in U.S., 17-18, 46-47,153-69
violence sanctioned by, 12-13,15, 20,
26-36,46,106-7, 223-25, 230, 284
as waste of resources, 17,147-50
see also beliefs; faith
Revelation, book of, 14,152,168
Roman Empire, 94, 97, 255, 257
Rorty, Richard, 177,179,181, 278, 280,
281, 282
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 104, 293
Roy, Arundhati, 27-28,142,143
Rushdie, Salman, 116
Russell, Bertrand, 78, 90,173, 243,
253-54, 278, 292
Ruthven, Malise, 111
Said, Edward, 130
Santayana, George, 278
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 290
Satan, 16,19, 22n, 35, 80-81, 83, 87-92,
122,155-56,163-64, 253
Scalia, Antonin, 156-58, 267
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von,
209, 293
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 291
science, 236
beliefs analyzed by, 74, 75-76, 249-50,
252, 271-72
development of, 14, 45, 85-86
ideology vs., 79, 242
intuition in, 182-84,199, 220
knowledge derived from, 21-22, 45,
89,178
methodology of, 19,133-34, 208, 220
moral analysis by, 43-44,145-46,
173-76,177
parsimony principle in, 276-77
religion compared with, 13,15-16,18,
43-44,165-69, 271-72
spiritual analysis by, 43-44, 217-18,
220
truth of, 75-76,170,172,180,181,
184, 271-72
self:
awareness of, 20, 39-40, 55, 206-7,
210-14, 217, 218, 219-20, 301
346 I N D EX
self (continued)
emergence of, 211-12
identity of, 39-40, 54,128,173,
176-78,185-87, 206, 225, 227,
272-74
loss of, 212-14
personality and, 211-12
separateness of, 37-38,189,191-92,
206, 290
Self-contradictions of the Bible (Burr),
254
self-deception, 55,134
September 11th attacks:
liberal response to, 138-42
Muslim reaction to, 28,117,127,134,
264
security concerns after, 55-58
Western reaction to, 134,139-41,196,
246
Sextus Empiricus, 291-93
Shakespeare, William, 35
shamanism, 300
Sheikh, Ahmed Omar, 133
Shiva, 24
sin, see religion, sin as concept in
Sisters of Mercy, 284
society:
authoritarian, 82,100-106,132-36,
147-51
civil, 150-52, 240, 268-69
democratic, 18,132,150,153-58, 240
freedom in, 44-45, 71-72,158-60,
164,171, 267
pluralistic, 15,138
relationships in, 186-87,192, 206,
211, 227
tribal, 89,179,187,190, 227, 255-56
Socrates, 68, 292
sodomy, 25,158,160,169
soul (spirit), 68,174-75, 207-8, 288-89
Soviet Union, 79,100,129,152,195
Spain, Muslim influence in, 108
Spee, Frederick, 90
Spinoza, Baruch, 61
spirituality, 204-21
beliefs based on, 63,181, 215, 216-17
consciousness in, 206-7, 227
definition of, 205-6
Eastern traditions of, 214-17, 291,
293, 298-301
emotional states in, 219-20
faith compared with, 40-41, 65
happiness and, 191-92, 205-7, 221,
284, 291-93
love and, 165, 284
meditation as basis of, 40,191-92,
205, 209-10, 217-20, 234-35,
293-94, 299-301
morality based on, 149, 204, 221
philosophy vs., 214-15, 217-18
reason and, 39-46,181, 205, 221
religion compared with, 15, 20,
214-17, 220, 221
scientific analysis of, 43-44, 217-18,
220
self-awareness in, 206-7, 210-14, 217,
218, 219-20, 301
teachings of, 204, 206, 214-17
visionary, 42, 76-77,181-82, 300-301
Western traditions of, 291-96, 301
Stalin, Joseph, 79,173, 230
stem cells, see embryonic stem cells
Stevens, Cat (Yosuf Islam), 116, 262
stoning, 16, 24, 25, 82,179, 253
Sufism, 294
suicide bombers, 11-12,13, 31, 32-35,
109,117,123-27,136,178,
233-34, 239, 260-61, 262, 263
Supreme Court, U.S., 156-58,165
taboos, 21, 25, 223
Taliban, 131,133,139,164, 203, 261
Tamil Tigers, 239
Taylor, Brook, 91
Ten Commandments, 154-55
terrorism, terrorists:
anti-, 192-94,197-98
beliefs of, 28-29, 239, 246
civilian victims of, 124-27,142-47,
192-99
economic background of, 13,109,133
education and, 109,133,180, 263
I N D E X 347
funding of, 163-64, 270
humiliation and, 131-34
Islamic, 11-12,13, 28-29, 31, 32-34,
72,109,111-12,115,117,123,
131-34,180, 233-34, 246, 260-61
liberalism and, 134,136,138-42
martyrdom sought by, 11-12, 13,14,
28-29, 31, 32-35, 47-48,109,112,
117,128-29,136,178, 234, 239,
260-61, 262, 263
Muslim support for, 117,123-27
political aspect of, 13, 78-79,137,
260-61
torture used for, 192-99
U.S. as target of, 28, 55-58, 67,117,
127,129,134,138-42,192-99,
246, 264
war on, 28, 53,109,151-52,155-56,
163,194-97, 202-3
weapons of mass destruction available
to, 14, 33, 47-48,107,128-29,
143,152,153,195, 203, 224-25,
266
theocracy, 132,153-58, 263
theory of mind, see brain, "theory of
mind"and
Thessalonians, Paul's epistles to, 96
Tibetan Buddhism, 233, 294
"ticking-bomb" case, 192-94,198
Tillich, Paul, 65
Tlas, Mustafa, 258
Torah, 296
torture:
the Church and, 80-81, 83-88, 90-92,
99, 252, 284
ethics of, 144,170,192-99, 286
Saddam Hussein and, 127
totalitarianism, 82,100-106, 132-36,
147-51
translatability, principle of, 280-82
trepanning, 22
truth:
accidental, 250
antecedent, 249-50
of beliefs, 22-24, 60-63, 72, 273, 284
consensus on, 181-82, 280
faith and, 19-20, 61-63, 67-68
language and, 181, 279, 280-81
metaphysical, 68, 217
moral, 170-73,178-82
nature of, 178-82, 214-15, 278-84,
291-93
preservation of, 250
religious, 16,19, 22-25, 29, 45-46, 72,
85, 204, 221, 271-72, 294, 295,
296
scientific, 75-76,170,172,180,181,
184, 271-72
transcendental, 181-82, 300-301
Turin, shroud of, 66, 251
Turing test, 209n, 265
Tyndale, William, 253
Unger, Peter, 141
United Nations, 163
United States:
anti-terrorism measures of, 129,
192-99
church and state separated in, 154—55,
241, 266-67
drug policy in, 150,152,158, 159,
160-64,169, 267-71
foreign policy of, 136,139-42
as global power, 138-39
Islam as adversary of, 30,128,180,
264, 265, 266
legal system of, 158-59,171,192-94,
197-98, 272
Middle East policy of, 30,153, 266
moral development of, 143-44
nuclear weapons of, 153, 266
public policy in, 230
religious influence in, 17-18, 46-47,
153-69, 230, 266-67
terrorist attacks on, 28, 55-58, 67,117,
127,129,134,138-42,192-99,
246, 264
utilitarianism, 179-80, 272, 278
victimless crimes, 158-64
View from Nowhere, The (Nagel), 280
vivisection, 25,174
348 I N D E X
Voltaire, 85,104
von Neumann, John, 242
Wells, H. G., 15
Wills, Garry, 47
witch trials, 87-92, 97, 99,106,150,
255
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 184, 280-81, 291,
299
Yahweh, 16,18, 24, 82
Yeats, William Butler, 180
Zakaria, Fareed, 114,115,117,131-32,
133,147-49,150-51
Zaydan (suicide bomber), 31
Zeus, 16, 47
Zia-ul-Haq, Mohammed, 137
Zoroastrianism, 83, 294
Abonner på:
Opslag (Atom)