The Irrational Core

Sophisticated, urbane, typically liberal and secular, modern man has done a masterful job of convincing himself that he lives a life based on rationality and has no need for the irrational belief system known as religion.  He may have some passing belief in the existence of God, but his God takes no particular interest in him or the workings of his world.  His God is unnecessary and often thought of as detrimental.  Books have been written by prominent atheist/scientists, quite well reviewed, proclaiming that those benighted and misguided people who do believe in God are mentally unbalanced and need to be confronted.  The beauty of the Secular Rationalist is how well he has convinced himself of his belief structure even while we are learning that large parts of that very structure are based as much on faith as any religion.

Psychoanalysis has been controversial since its inception, not just because some of its proponent's theories have been found to be less than consistent, but because it challenges our notions of how our minds work.  Most people find it unsettling, and occasionally terrifying, to imagine that they are not fully in control of their own mental apparatus.  Yet recent developments in the neurosciences have been building a very convincing edifice of data that supports the contention that much of the time our conscious minds are mere spectators to the behaviors that emerge from the workings of our vastly larger and deeper unconscious minds.  The persistence of the irrational at the very core of our mental life has powerful effects on our conscious mind and should give one pause when making definitive statements about the world of reality.

One important implication of the existence of such unconscious depths is that a mind which has an irrational core is of necessity going to be subjected to constantly shifting states composed of instincts, varied self and object representations, related affective states, and a host of other variables that must be integrated into a reasonably stable dynamic equilibrium in order for optimal functioning to take place.  Only when the inner world is as quiet as possible can one make best use of our most precious, most fragile, and most recently developed higher cognitive functions, our rational abilities.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross recently wrote a powerful piece describing what happens when a young man lacks that inner peace and yearns for it:

When Faith Goes Too Far
Seduced by radical Islam, I became everything I once despised.

Before I was an FBI informant, an apostate and a blasphemer, I was a devout believer in radical Islam. That meant I had to remember a lot of rules. I could never pet a dog or shake hands with a woman. I could eat only with my right hand, and before prayer, I had to roll my pant legs above my ankles. I accepted all this.

And more. I believed that non-Islamic governments were illegitimate, that jihadists were brave holy warriors carrying out the will of Allah, that Jews and other non-Muslims were inferiors who had to be conquered and ruled. Funny thing, I was born Jewish. At 23, with my nose in a wool prayer rug, I found myself praying for the humiliation of my parents because true Islam demanded it, or so I believed.

This is the story of how I was seduced by radical Islam -- and how, over time, I embraced a worldview that I had once abhorred.

I grew up in Ashland, Oregon, the only son of parents who were nontraditional, to say the least. They were sort of Unitarian Jews who esteemed a mishmash of religious figures from different faiths -- a spiritual patchwork that I found unfulfilling.

It was during my junior year at Wake Forest University, in 1997, that I first learned about Islam. One friend in the dorm was a moderate Muslim whose faith led him to become a campus activist, fighting religious prejudice and homophobia. His convictions appealed to me, and I was envious of the spiritual anchor in his life. [Emphasis mine-SW]

The entire article is well worth reading for its description of how a young man, who lacks a clear,  internalized spiritual anchor, can find himself drawn slowly, almost imperceptibly, into evil.  His indoctrination into a fanatical cult, identified by its adherents as true Islam, follows a familiar course in which he is taught to stop questioning himself or his colleagues.  Dissent is dangerous, apostasy is literally punishable by death.  Small sacrifices for his religion slowly accrue to larger sacrifices.  (How any religion can eschew music and still claim to be connected to the divine is beyond me to understand.)  It is only when Gartenstein-Ross moves away from the embrace of his fellow Jihadists is he able to apply his native intelligence and skeptical mind to the problems he had been suppressing until that point. 

Of greater interest to me is his description of the motive force behind his conversion.  He describes an inner lack, a spiritual emptiness, that in a person brought up with more traditional religious training and belief, is filled with God.  (I have seen and heard just such descriptions form many patients whose lack of religious belief is conflated with an internal instability that leads to serious distress.)  There are certainly other ways to fill that inner void, that need for meaning and a sense of order out of chaos that God provides, however, that set of needs exists, even in the most refined and rational of human beings. 

We see the need for such a belief structure, to order the frightening world around us, everywhere.   What is most interesting is the certainty that those who do not believe in God bring to their arguments.  This is matched by the certainty of certain types of religious fundamentalists who believe that all questions have been answered and further inquiry or dissent is evil.  Such fundamentalists are much more prevalent in the world of Islam than in Christianity or Judaism (where their certainty of God's word does not extend to the certainty that they know enough to force it upon everyone else). 

As an example, one important area where such secular fundamentalism appears is in the misunderstanding of science that is at the core of the Global Warming controversy.  The efforts to silence Global Warming Deniers is exactly analogous to any other religious effort to silence apostasy.  It reflects a "religious" misunderstanding of science and how science works.

Science is fueled by skepticism.  Scientists doubt everything!  They doubt their data; they doubt their conclusions.  Scientists tell you that they believe, at the 95% or 99% confidence level that their results contradict their null hypothesis; this is a far cry from claiming that computer models based on changing and incomplete data represent truth.   Scientists believe their results must be replicated by an independent actor before they can be accepted as accurate reflections of the small piece of reality at issue. 

We live in a frightening world; mankind has always lived in a frightening world.  Oftentimes, our inner worlds are more frightening than our outer world.  I described our dilemma in Political Deification:

We are better equipped than our distant cave dwelling ancestors to understand the world, but on an individual level, we remain surrounded by monsters and magic.  Fate can separate us from our loved ones in an instant and we have no mommy or daddy who will hug us and tell us everything will be all right (which our children  might believe; even if someone tries to reassure us, we can not even comfort ourselves with the reassurance because we know better.)  The only way we can keep our irrational (and sometimes rational) fears from destabilizing our minds is to find something more powerful than ourselves to believe in; we need God, and in the absence of God, we will invent the equivalent to protect us. 

Being a leftist and/or a liberal in the modern world means we are smarter, more ethical, more caring (holier than thou, even); more importantly, if we can only share our innate goodness with other rational people, and try to help them solve the root causes of their distress, (send them money because they are poor, give up our rights so they won't feel offended) they will see we are friends and will no longer try to harm us.  The fact that none of this works is irrelevant; it is not meant to work in reality, but to make us feel more comfort and security.

Thus, in the absence of God, we create him out of our ideas.