Selected excerpts from Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences:
My study of the failure of most Utopian efforts has taught me to ask the basic questions themselves in a more practical and researchable way. "How good a society does human nature permit?" and, "How good a human nature does society permit?" [p.xiv]
It is the second question that I have focused on for the last several years. The answer: Lousy. In fact, so lousy that very few have ever considered the question, let alone the answer.
It is because both science and religion have been too narrowly conceived, and have been too exclusively dichotomized and separated from each other, that they have been seen to be two mutually exclusive worlds. To put it briefly, this separation permitted nineteenth-century science to become too exclusively mechanistic, too positivistic, too reductionistic, too desperately attempting to be value-free. It mistakenly conceived of itself as having nothing to say about ends or ultimate values or spiritual values. This is the same as saying that these ends are entirely outside the range of natural human knowledge, that they can never be known in a confirmable, validated way, in a way that could satisfy intelligent men, as facts satisfy them.
Such an attitude dooms science to be nothing more than technology, amoral and non-ethical (as the Nazi doctors taught us). Such a science can be no more than a collection of instrumentalities, methods, techniques, nothing but a tool to be used by any man, good or evil, and for any ends, good or evil.
This dichotomizing of knowledge and values has also pathologized the organized religions by cutting them off from facts, from knowledge, from science, even to the point of often making them the enemies of scientific knowledge. In effect, it tempts them to say that they have nothing more to learn.
But something is happening now to both science and religion, at least to their more intelligent and sophisticated representatives. [Keep in mind that this was a tiny sub-set that might even be tinier today.] These changes make possible a very different attitude by the less narrow scientist toward the religious question, at least the naturalistic, humanistic, religious questions. It might be said that this is simply one more instance of what has happened so often in the past, i.e., of snatching away another territory from the jurisdiction of organized religion.
Just as each science was once a part of the body of organized religion but then broke away to become independent, so also it can be said that the same thing may now be happening to the problems of values, ethics, spirituality, morals. They are being taken away from the exclusive jurisdiction of the institutionalized churches and are becoming the "property," so to speak, of a new type of humanistic scientist who is vigorously denying the old claim of the established religions to be the sole arbiters of all questions of faith and morals.
This relation between religion and science could be stated in such a dichotomous, competitive way, but I think I can show that it need not be, and that the person who is deeply religious -- in a particular sense that I shall discuss -- must rather feel strengthened and encouraged by the prospect that his value questions may be more firmly answered than ever before.
Sooner or later, we shall have to redefine both religion and science. [pgs.11-13]
This has happened on a small scale and there seems to be a demand for it as witnessed by the popularity of the Dalai Lama. To my knowledge, he is the only living religious leader who has stated that if science shows us that our "story" is wrong, we will change the story.
When all that could be called "religious" ( naturalistically as well as supernaturalistically) was cut away from science, from knowledge, from further discovery, from the possibility of skeptical investigation, from confirming and disconfirming, and, therefore, from the possibility of purifying and improving, such a dichotomized religion was doomed. It tended to claim that the founding revelation was complete, perfect, final, and eternal. It has the truth, the whole truth, and nothing more to learn, thereby being pushed into the position that has destroyed so many churches, of resisting change, of being only conservative, of being anti-intellectual and anti-scientific, of making piety and obedience exclusive of skeptical intellectuality -- in effect, of contradicting naturalistic truth.
Such a split-off religion generates split-off and partial definition of all necessary concepts. For example, faith, which has perfectly respectable naturalistic meanings, as for example from Fromm's writings, tends in the hands of an anti-intellectual church to degenerate into blind belief, sometimes even "belief in what you know ain't so." It tends to become unquestioning obedience and last-ditch loyalty no matter what. It tends to produce sheep rather than men. It tends to become arbitrary and authoritarian. [p.13-14]
If you look closely at the internal history of most of the world religions, you will find that each one very soon tends to divide into a left-wing and a right-wing, that is, into the peakers, the mystics, the transcenders, or the privately religious people, on the one hand, and, on the other, into those who concretize the religious symbols and metaphors, who worship little pieces of wood rather than what the objects stand for, those who take verbal formulas literally, forgetting the original meaning of these words, and, perhaps most important, those who take the organization, the church, as primary and as more important than the prophet and his original revelations. These men, like many organization men who tend to rise to the top in any complex bureaucracy, tend to be non-peakers rather than peakers. [p.25]
This is interesting as some analysts have diagnosed today's highly-paid CEO's as sociopaths. The local Jesuit school installed a "right-winger" rather than a "left-winger" as President of the University in the late '90's. They judged -- probably accurately -- that the latter would not be able to lead them to more success in their commercial endeavors.
...for most people a conventional religion, while strongly religionizing one part of life, thereby also "dereligionizes" the rest of life. The experiences of the holy, the sacred, the divine, of awe, of creatureliness, of surrender, of mystery, of piety, thanksgiving, gratitude, self-dedication, if they happen at all, tend to be confined to a single day of the week...[p.30-31]
And then they spend the other six days shaking their heads at the relatives who don't buy into the one day a week routine.
I hope that we are all aware that it is easier to be "pure" outside an organization, whether religious, political, economic, or, for that matter, scientific. And yet we cannot do without organizations. Perhaps one day we shall invent organizations that do not "freeze"? [Footnote on p.33]
That's the goal.
These dochotomizing trends -- making organized religions the guardian of all values, dichotomizing knowledge from religion, considering science to be value-free, and trying to make it so -- have wrought their confusion in the field of education, too. The most charitable thing we can say about this state of affairs is that American education is conflicted and confused about its far goals and purposes. But for many educators, it must be said more harshly that they seem to have renounced far goals altogether or, at any rate, keep trying to. It is as if they wanted education to be purely technological training for the acquisition of skills which come close to being value-free or amoral (in the sense of being useful either for good or evil, and also in the sense of failing to enlarge the personality). [p.48]
One has to wonder if this lack of "far goals" in education has led to the current economic and ecological mess. Of course, those without values will not even recognize that we are in a mess.
...it is also increasingly developing that leading theologians, and sophisticated people in general, define their god, not as a person, but as a force, a principle, a gestalt-quality of the whole of Being, an integrating power that expresses the unity and therefor the meaningfulness of the cosmos, the "dimension of depth," etc. [Thank god.] At the same time, scientists are increasingly giving up the notion of the cosmos as a kind of simple machine, like a clock, or as congeries of atoms that clash blindly, having no relation to each other except push and pull, or as something that is final and eternal as it is and that is not evolving or growing. [p.55]
What is the practical upshot for education of all these [unity/integration/evolving] considerations? We wind up with a rather startling conclusion, namely, that the teaching of spiritual values of ethical and moral values definitely does (in principle) have a place in education, perhaps ultimately a very basic and essential place, and that this in no way needs to controvert the American separation between church and state for the very simple reason that spiritual, ethical, and moral values need have nothing to do with any church. [p.57]
The state of valueness has been variously described as anomie, amorality, anhedonia, rootlessness, emptiness, hopelessness, the lack of something to believe in and to be devoted to. It has come to its present dangerous point because all the traditional value systems ever offered to mankind have in effect proved to be failures (our present state proves this to be so). Furthermore, wealth and prosperity, technological advance, widespread education, democratic political forms, even honestly good intentions and avowals of good will have, by their failure to produce peace, brotherhood, serenity, and happiness, confronted us even more nakedly and unavoidably with the profundities that mankind has been avoiding by its busy-ness with the superficial. [p.82] [bold emphasis mine]
If this doesn't sum up our current predicament, I don't know what does.
The cure for this disease is obvious. We need a validated, usable system of human values, values that we can believe in and devote ourselves to because they are true rather than because we are exhorted to "believe and have faith." [p.83]
