"Conspirituality" is not all it cracks itself up to be

Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Public Health Threat by Derek Beres
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Ultimately, a mini-memoir rather than a sweeping observation, and simply wrong on all New Age conspiracy thinking coming from wingnuts.

Not bad but not new, other than the new name, the priority of which is disputed by a musician whose Twitter account reflects to a T ideas in this book — wingnuttery, conspiracy thinking, and appropriation of American Indian imagery.

Back to the “not new.” As I told two of the three authors on Twitter, this is to fair degree a narrow version of something I wrote about several years ago, how conspiracy theories are the new Gnosticism. Writing before Trump and COVID, the only thing I didn’t cover is a riff on Naomi Klein’s “Disaster Capitalism” to cover the money behind the new Gnosticism. The folks even mention “hermetic” near the end, but don’t tie things together to the degree they could.

Otherwise, the merger of New Ageism and right-wing authoritarianism is not a surprise, even if the book kind of presents it that way. Authoritarian gurus have been here in the US for 50 years. And, given the quasi-libertarian angle of much New Ageism, it shouldn’t be a surprise this authoritarianism is often winger. Quite possibly majority winger. But by no means only so.

Next? The authors dismiss with a rhetorical trope the number of left-wing conspiracy thinkers. Having been a Green Party voter for years, on things like 5G and antivaxxerism, I think they’re very much wrong. Of course, I also see a narrowness to their focus by this point in the book.

(The "spoiler" isn't so much that, as I've given the big picture, with the conclusion below, as it it the more extensive "receipts" supporting the conclusion.)

(view spoiler)[I’ve also seen “Jungian” pop up fairly early, as part the description of the teacher that misinfluenced one of the three authors, but it was not itself used negatively. Then, by page 65, I see “archetype” and my antennae are higher. And I see it again later in the book.

While ritual Satanic child abuse claims may all have become wingnut-weaponized, they weren’t originally that way.

Then, several more chapters of “yogaworld.” On Modi, I know enough about the RSS that I hadn’t paid attention to his attempts to weaponize yoga during the pandemic, but I don’t doubt it.

Being anti-materialistic as true yogis may be isn’t necessarily right-wing. It’s not necessarily left-wing either. It’s anti-humanistic, and not all anti-humaism is right-wing. At some point, yes, you get to horseshoe theory.

Beyond this, New Ageism covers much more than “yogaworld.” Think Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Bright-Sided” about believing your way out of cancer. (And, that’s not all wingnuts who were pushing that.) Or, to turn this back to politics and someone definitely not right-wing, and also since the authors focus on politics AND mention “A Course in Miracles,” Marianne Williamson.

I started heavy grokking at this point.

Page 223? Battling Bob La Follette was NOT a socialist. He was a Progressive. (hide spoiler)]

Kudos to the three for discussing their personal histories early on. But that’s the entire basis of the book — their personal histories, not a broad overview of New Ageism.

And, in fact, the skeptical self suspects, reading between lines, that they're gaslighting themselves on the claim that modern New Ageism is all wingnut. The one explicit "Jungian" reference, plus two "archetype" references I saw (and could have missed others, the amount I grokked, skimmed and outrightly skipped in the last half of the book) makes me think they're all earnest, left-of-center, and at least open to Jungianism. None strikes me as a Skeptics™"scientific skeptic," let alone a broader philosophical one. You will find "critical thinking" referenced in the conclusion, but neither variety of skepticism is mentioned anywhere.

I do note in the spoiler the short chapters come off as podcast episodic in length. And, speaking of that, I don't have much more need to listen to their podcast than I need to listen to the video of "History for Atheists" Tim O'Neill.

View all my reviews

Contra Barbara Ehrenreich, et al, on mysticism and ineffability

This is both a highly condensed and refocused version of an obit I wrote about Barbara Ehrenreich on my main blog, one that I had not intended to become a "takedown" obit, but ultimately did.

It will focus on one half of one of her books, out of the three whose reviews I extracted for the starting point of that piece.

Sadly, she had a cropper with "Living with a Wild God." Given specifically her take on New Ageyness, and in general, given the appearance that she seemed to be some sort of non-metaphysical secularist, the fact that that wasn't the total case with her personal life, plus her hinting that there were things hidden behind a thick, heavy curtain that she wouldn't talk about, left this book well short of others.

Excerpts from my review will illustrate, along with observations about an interview she had with Harper's about the book, and an even worse one with Religious News Service and Fakeist (sic) Chris Stedman.

Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything by Barbara Ehrenreich
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Call this book review "The deep loneliness of Barbara Ehrenreich" or maybe "The Tragedy of Barbara Ehrenreich."

I wrestled with exactly how to rate this book. Her alleged metaphysical experience as a teen, and her return to it at late-midlife crisis time? That part's a 1-star, and I knew that when I had read an excerpt online. She even admits that, as William James notes, the physical "symptoms" she had of her mystical experience are not uncommon. Yet, she wants to mystify them, rather than noting that hypoglycemia, sleep deprivation of a moderate sort and stress could easily have caused her own version of a common experience. (Update: With excerpts from two links at the bottom, it now IS a 1-star.)

That's especially true in light of her history of depersonalization and disassociation. There's fairly solid evidence that some people are by nature more susceptible to such things. Or -- by childhood. As in, things like child abuse, which by happenings in her childhood she acknowledges, but refuses to identify as such.

Here's the basics on her childhood:
1. Two alcoholic parents, with an emotionally manipulative father and an emotionally unavailable mother.
2. A physically abusive mother. (Yes, Barbara, that's what "slapping in the face" is, especially when done with some regularity.)
3. Frequent moves. (She notes that a stay of 18 months in Lowell, Mass., was longer than usual.)
4. Marital trauma that eventually led to divorce not too long after Barbara's "experience," both remarrying, dad divorcing a second time and mother near that point before her suicide.
5. Some history of mental health problems on her mom's side of the family.

Well, depersonalization/dissociation is a kind of common "defense mechanism" in such cases. And, perhaps she had some inherited susceptibility, too.

The "solipsism" she later on discovers in her teenage and college self is another defense mechanism. So, too, in all likelihood, are some of the ritual behaviors of her pre-teen life she describes but fleetingly. So, too, as an adult, is writing about your own life in a semi-detached, semi-third-person style.

And yet, she can be "hard" toward others who have as many, or more, depersonalization experiences than her, even referring mockingly to a self-help website for depersonalization.

It's very hard to believe that the author of Bright-Sided could have written this. Unless, again, this is seen as cri de coeur first, paean to mysticism a distant second. But, her later interviews make clear that that is NOT the case.

View all my reviews

==

And now, that Harper's interview.

She owns up to lifelong atheism, even telling her undergrad alma mater she was a "fourth generation" atheist, but yet takes her high school experience as not just "mystical," but, if you will, a "theophany." I quote:

After a night spent sleeping in a car, she went for a morning walk in the woods and felt the presence of another being — she later said she “saw God” — then spent the next several decades ignoring the experience and hoping it wouldn’t recur.

Somehow, I missed in my review that she actually said she had "seen God." I might have 1-starred the book instead (while still being sympathetic to her as a child abuse victim).

Harper's interviewer Ryann Lieberthal then asks her:

What would you attribute those experiences to now? If you saw something there in Lone Pine, what was that thing?

And, Ehrenreich simply refuses to give a straight-up answer.

The interview about the rest of her work, beyond and based on the previous books she had written? Very good stuff. This?  Even though the rest of the part of the interview that talks about "Wild God" only has her talking about consciousness of other animals, that's bad enough. A PhD scientist (she was, and in cellular immunology, a biological field, no less) strawmanning biologists as claiming that about all of them don't talk about, or even reject, consciousness in other animals. 

And, behind that, since she didn't answer Lieberthal straight up? I sense a hint at the same New Ageyness that she excoriated elsewhere. Even worse, since she read the old journals, that led to the book, while being treated for cancer — the sidebars to all of that treatment and other patients having led directly to the "Bright Sided" attack on New Ageyness.

Oh, but wait, Googling, or Duck Ducking, "Barbara Ehrenreich" + "mysticism" leads me to find out that she even had an interview with RELIGION NEWS SERVICE about this, and there claims MULTIPLE mystical experiences. 

Since millions of Theravada Buddhists are also atheists, not believing in a personal deity, I now wonder just what she meant by "atheism." Was she rather just more "irreligious," like many "Nones" of today?

And, oh fucking doorknob, this gets worse yet!!!!

The interviewer is Minnesota Nice Piety Brother Atheist Lite, or rather, Fake Atheist, Chris Stedman. And, her fuzziness level on responses goes WAY beyond the non-responsiveness to Lieberthal. Extended excerpt:

CS: You’re speaking at the third “Women in Secularism” conference this weekend. Over the last few years there has been a lot of discussion about sexism among nontheists, and this conference seeks to continue that. Why do you think the atheist community is struggling around issues of sexism and harassment? 

BE: I don’t know. I don’t spend a lot of time in what you might call the atheist community. It’s not a word that I think would adequately describe me—it’s just a starting point. I don’t believe, but that doesn’t exactly define a community, except in some circumstances when we’re up against real discrimination, which we often are. So I can’t say I know much about sexism in the atheist community. Certainly the very prominent atheists have been white men, and I don’t know what to do about that. We need to add some women to the list. 

CS: What will you be talking about at “Women in Secularism”? 

BE: I’ll base my remarks on Living with a Wild God, and I’ll talk about growing up as an atheist and coming to question some of the foundations of the science I had been taught. I hope to emphasize that atheism in itself is not a complete answer. That’s just where we start from—we don’t start with any belief. We’re still trying to figure things out. 

CS: You say that atheism is a starting point. What comes after? 

BE: Anything you like. As an atheist, you don’t start by saying, “There is a God and he or it has arranged everything as it is.” Every question is open once you put aside beliefs like that.

"Just wow." Or, since we're headed that way? To riff on an old cliché? "Oleaginous is as oleaginous does," for both of them. Or, "Oleaginous knows oleaginous."

But, the Harper's interview, revealing the mindset behind "Wild God," led me to all of Ehrenreich, not just her most famous class-based book, or class and sociology ones.

Maybe Laura Miller at Slate gets it right — as with Dostoyevsky (and St. Paul), we can blame temporal lobe epilepsy. Only problem? Ehrenreich has never said she had any type of epilepsy. On the third hand, in the book, she never made clear what the family tree of mental illness was or was not.

So, intellectual dishonesty? Yes. First, on Ehrenreich's part for not offering straight answers to straight questions on mysticism and related metaphysical issues, and what got me started on "Wild God," for not being totally forthright on childhood history.

In July, on vacation, I had what I have already called a "secular spiritual experience." For part of it, see the "Split the Log" blog post of last week. That said, I found none of it mystical. Nor "ineffable," which is where I think Ehrenreich was headed, though weirdly, she never used that word. Nor did I find any of it "metaphysical."

Third, as far as the alleged inexplicability of such events? In a word, tosh. A better word to tackle? "Ineffable." In that RNS piece, especially, I think Ehrenreich was trying to insinuate her experience was "ineffable" but she didn't want to use that word because she was already standing on two stools.

Anyway, I'll take two angles on this.

The first part is from the actual science world, the world that Ehrenreich dissed in her strawmanning of biologists. (And, per feedback, that's part of her intellectual dishonesty.) Neither the quantum physics world nor the cosmology world knows which of the two, quantum mechanics or gravitation, wins out in the final shot at a "grand unified theory," let alone what's on the other side. But, nobody this side of Deepak Chopra claims that makes a claim that any of this is "ineffable."

DON'T even think about going Deepak on me. I'll kick you hard and after that, the conversation is over.

Second angle comes from philosophy of language, primarily Wittgenstein, but also a hat tip to ideas of self-referentiality from Kurt Gödel et al as explicated by Douglas Hofstadter in "Gödel, Escher, Bach."

To be blunt?

If a person were (note the subjunctive) to have an experience that they alleged was "ineffable," they could not use the word "ineffable" to make the claim that the experience was "ineffable." And, it's not just the word "ineffable" as a word, but as a signifier; plug in any close synonym and you'll fail again.

Per Gödel, there's the self-reference issue, but that's secondary.

Per Wittgenstein or related, there's the linguistic discourse issue. If the idea of "ineffable" / "ineffability" is that an experience cannot be described, then that apples to the two actual words (concepts). Ergo, one cannot talk about what it is to be "ineffable" as THAT would be indescribable. This takes us to Hofstadter and one of the GEB essays, where "GOD" is defined by the acronym of "God Over Demons." What we have, of course, is an infinite regress, a cousin of self-reference. And, trying to say something is indescribable when you can't describe what it means to be indescribable falls in the same class.

And, this is not just in public discourse.

Individuals cannot tell themselves that, in private mental languages. You cannot, not without remaining kiloparsecs away from knowledge as philosophically defined as justified true belief.

'Breath' is metaphysical New Age bullshit

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This book is ultimately New Agey, yogic-breath metaphysics peddling cultic bullshit.

Note: As is sometimes my wont, I expand reviews of books I do on Goodreads for either this or my primary politics blog. This one has critical religion elements involved, and wrongly framed so here it is. As usual, additions are italicized.  

Pure and simple, based on the end of this book, and what I’ve glommed on reviews of other books, this is a vehicle to promote yogic breathing practices AND the metaphysics behind them, disguised as a vehicle of a “better breathing” book. That part is addressed more below, as is the classism.

It’s quackery and cultism right there. Beyond that, it promotes pseudoscience elsewhere as well as potentially unhealthy and even dangerous practices.

It seems to have lots of interesting insights, but they’re largely anecdotal. It does have lots of problems. These are mostly at the end, but there’s a few early on, and more pile up in the middle of the book even before Nestor goes New Agey.

He does mention the domestication of fire, eons before refined foods, was the first major jaw-shrinkage time. But, he doesn’t go back older, far far older, to our australopithecine ancestors walking upright, and how that affected sinus drainage (as well as backs and fallen arches). More here, in a review of a great book about how fucked up we are.

Nestor also, although he talks about how the change in the larynx affect our possibility of choking, doesn't talk about how the post-infancy descent of the epiglottis, in conjunction with that, puts reverse pressure on the nasal passages, also increasing the tendency toward mouth-breathing. See here. At that link, Dr. Gelb, a dentist, also notes our nasal passages are too small for an animal our size. Don't forget that "Lucy" was under 4 feet tall, and less than 100 pounds by a fair shot. Our upright posture plus our big brains combined to squeeze those nasal passages. Dr. Gelb also speculates, with an actual scientific mindset, that epigenetics may play a role in our problems.

The non New Agey pseudoscience starts on page 60 with emphysema, which, first of all, is not the medical term used to day, rather, of course COPD.

The claim that emphysema is mainly due to poor breathing rather than cigarettes is a howler. So is the hint that COPD is curable. It is not. Its progression can be slowed and some of its symptoms can be ameliorated, in part through breathing exercises and related items, yes. But it can’t be cured.

From here, Nestor drops hints, while carefully avoiding direct statements, that other medical maladies can be cured just by breathing right.

The bad stuff is when he goes New Agey on yoga 30 pages before the end. And yes, dude, that’s what it is.

He talks about the “invisible energy” of our breath called prana in Sanskrit, etc., which he equates to chi and other things, which (setting aside the New Agey bullshit that any of this is real), no, they’re not the same.

He next raves about acupuncture. Reality? As Western medicine, starting in the 1700s, started making scientific discoveries, it started replacing acupuncture in China, which only rose again with the aid of the Great Helmsman (Wrecking the Ship of State), Mao.

Beyond that? China and India didn't even communicate 1500-500 BCE. Certainly not religiously and philosophically, and qi or ch'i as a metaphysical idea has been documented at circa 200 BCE. Ergo, Vedic religion or Brahmanism/Epic Era pre-Hinduism did not lead to qi. After all, Buddhism didn't go "over the mountain" for another 800 years.

He then talks about the spiciness of Chinese and Indian food. In reality, Chinese food, especially, was pretty bland before the Columbian Exchange. Beyond that, a lot of Chinese and Southeast Asian food today isn’t that hot. (Contra the claims of someone on Quora, Szechuan pepper is NOT “hot.” Indian long pepper, of the same genus as black pepper, is somewhat hotter, but not that hot.

And, the idea of heat or not in food is in both India and China's traditional beliefs a highly metaphysical, and pseudoscientific, idea.

He then gushes about Swami Rama, ignoring that good skepticism has shown with other yogis, they’ve never been able to actually stop their heart for more than a second or two; rather, they’ve used body control to muffle their heartbeat and other things. …. And ignoring that outside of that, he behaved like many another modern Indian guru, complete to the point of losing a sexual assault lawsuit.

He then says rocks differ from birds and bees based on the level of energy or “excitability of electrons.” This of course ignores uranium and radium ore rocks in his attempt to put a pseudoscience veneer on things.

After that, no, the Indus Valley Civilization of Harappa et al has nothing to do with pre-Hindu Aryan religious ideas. Since we still can’t translate their language, in fact, we don’t know what it has to do with anything! And, calling the Aryans “black-haired barbarians from Iran” is all wrong. They came from today’s central Asian “stans,” first of all, not Iran. The Indo-Aryans split from Iranians before this migration. And, of course, we have no way of knowing their predominant hair color. And, if this was an attempt to separate Indo-Aryans from Nazi ones, well, the Hindutva-fascism of today’s RSS, the backbone for the BJP political party of Indian PM Narendra Modi, has muddled that back up.

Beyond that? Contra Nestor, though all the main types of yoga may not have evolved at once, ancestors of all of them were in place, not just the postures one, by the time of the turn of the Christian era. 

The postures yoga may have been brought by the Aryans completely, in part and merged with the Harappa civilization, or it may have been a pollination synthesis after the Aryans were on the ground. We do have some good evidence that the postures were originally used by priests as part of sacrifice. (Yep, just like the Israelite cult in Jerusalem and Samaria, and Greeks at Olympos etc., pre-Hindu Indian religion involved bloody killing of animals. The New Agers won't tell you that!)

In addition, the use of the scientific-sounding word "pulmonaut" seems deliberate hand-waving to obscure the yoga background.

One further science-based note. I noted that he doesn't account for upright posture's effect on our sinuses. He does talk about American Indian, Indian and Chinese accounts emphasizing the value of nasal breathing. These were long before white flour, etc., especially in the New World. Why would such emphasis be needed unless mouth-breathing were already a partial problem back then?

As for the actual breathing ideas? Why precisely 5.5 seconds? What makes this better than either 5 or 6 seconds? Outside of a modern “app” (the stress of whose use might negate breathing benefits) who’s counting half-seconds?

Beyond that, Nestor misses an even simpler exercise that I’ve known about for years: the 8-8-8 breathing. Breathe in for 8, hold for 8, out for 8, preferably nasally in and orally out. Maybe the orally out doesn’t address mouth breathing, but that’s only one part of his breath focus, so I can go beyond that, too. It does “ground” one by doing it this way, both on the counting which is full seconds (or if you count a bit fast, still 6 seconds or so), and on focusing on breathing by alternating the nasal in and oral out. In addition, the ‘hold’ part mimics Nestor’s push for a long exhale.

Pursed-lip breathing is something else simple, but non-New Agey connected, that Nestor doesn’t mention. Wiki specifically says, per one health thing that Nestor does hammer, that pursed-lip breathing works on the parasympathetic nervous system.

That then said? There’s little controlled evidence for benefits of alternate nostril breathing, and very little for one nostril controlling one nervous system, and the other the other. Most studies that DO claim benefits are of yogic-influenced alt-med research, and are of the same line as "you're only using 10 percent of your brain."

Other things not mentioned? Many of Wim Hof’s records have been broken by others. Multiple people have died following the Wim Hof method.

That said, the subtitle of his “Deep” book containing the phrase “renegade science” should say something.

So, I won’t even recommend this book for the breathing exercises. (Part of them are yogic, to boot.) Find another.


View all my reviews

More problems for reincarnationists

Stimulated by reading a book Michael Shermer wrote last year, I've identified two more explanatory problems for the people who tout reincarnation.

I'm talking primarily about those who tout traditional religion-based reincarnation, whether the personal soul version of much of Hinduism and Jainism, or the impersonal life force version of Buddhism.

I'm not talking about the New Ager distortionists who believe all their past lives were as the king, queen, or mighty warrior, because they're wrong even within the world of reincarnation.

Anyway, the actual reincarnation world of Hindus, Jains and Buddhists says you may come back not as the  king or queen, but as the peasant shoveling shit out of the king's stables, or, much more importantly for this, a dung beetle in that shit in the stable.

We have, a la ideas explored by and generated from Thomas Nagel's famous, or infamous, "What Is It Like to be a Bat," (text here) a mind-mapping problem. This is more a problem for the personal soul type of reincarnation; obviously, an impersonal life force doesn't have human personal soul characteristics. Whether early Buddhists thought of this as a way to explain, or explain away, this issue, I don't know.

Anyway, Nagel argued that we can't understand bat consciousness because of its subjectivity and its different sensory basis, and went from there.

Well, except for Hindus and Jains, many people, whether of professional biological bent or not, would have difficulty extending consciousness at all to a beetle. Plus, the difference between its sensory interactions with the world and ours is orders of magnitude different from the human-bat difference.

So, if karma is an iron law of rewards and punishments, beyond the well known difficulties with people (if we're all being reincarnated) not remembering past lives, how can it even be a punishment to be reincarnated as a beetle? How can the "beetle-self" feel punished? Since as far as we know, beetles don't have emotions, period, along with not having consciousness, how can they feel anything, as in feeling as emotional affect and not sensory input?

This has a flip side. If, especially if you're a Jain who takes consciousness of some sort down to what most of us would call inanimate objects, what if a, say, an ameba is being rewarded by getting promoted UP to being a beetle for being an incredible ethical and altruistic ameba?

Does that sound as silly to you reading it as it did to me, typing it?

That leads to what I see as the even larger problem. (Yep, the above is the lesser problem.) And this one hits the Buddhist types as well.

While Charles Darwin wasn't around 2,500 or more years ago, nonetheless, these ideas of reincarnation and the karma behind them seem based on a "progress" misunderstanding of evolution, and of biology in general.

Who says it's "worse"being a beetle than a shoveler of the king's shit or even the king? I suppose a "good Buddhist" might use this as a wedge to claim that the whole idea of karma is itself maybe maya, but in that case, he or she is already lighting the fuse on their own petard. From that, they're making themselves even more irrelevant to the discussion.

So, we move forward. Given that the planet would soon be run over with shit, if we had no dung beetles, whereas the world might be quite good had we no more Homo sapiens, if I were to engage a progress-based version of zoology, I'd argue the dung beetle is superior. (And, we haven't even talked about the myth of cockroaches surviving nuclear war.)

That's bad enough. Let's take it inside the human world.

Here, of course, the claim is that being the shoveler of the king's shit is worse than being the king.

Says who? Per the French Revolution, we could stand to get rid of yet more kings. Per the labor theory of value, the shoveler of the king's shit is more important whether the king is alive or shat mat.

In other words, karma and reincarnation, taken as a unit, are ultimately part of the classism of the Hindu caste system. And, as I see it, here, Buddhism talking about only an impersonal life force being reincarnated is still a Social Darwinist failure too. It still based karmic reincarnation cycles on the idea that some humans are, by group sociological observations, superior to others.

On the third hand, the British Raj intensified and codified the caste system, as part of the old divida et impera.

Accept failure! Accept half-empty glasses

Boy, a great column here from The Guardian, and what looks like a book that might be even better at undercutting the New Agey myths about the unstoppable power of blind optimism than Barbara Ehrenreich's "Bright Sided."

With a column title like "Happiness is a Glass Half Empty," followed by references to Stoicism, among other things, we've got real meat.

And, the book title, by the column's author, goes even further than Ehrenreich, in noting such potentially harmful thinking must be fought. Indeed, we need an "antidote" for such ideas.

The column delivers a good foretaste of this, including noting how it's OK to fail, and better than OK to accept the idea of failure.

The Museum of Failed Products

The column starts with a great "hook": a visit to a museum of failed products. It then notes that many companies, fearful of accepting failure, don't keep such products themselves.

But, Burkeman notes, products fail even more often than small-business start-ups. So, why can't we accept these and other failures?

He says that it's in part because we've forgotten some good wisdom from the past.

He doesn't specifically say this is connected to the relative ease of modern life, but maybe it is. Anyway, here's his dive into Stoic ideas:

Behind all of the most popular modern approaches to happiness and success is the simple philosophy of focusing on things going right. But ever since the first philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, a dissenting perspective has proposed the opposite: that it's our relentless effort to feel happy, or to achieve certain goals, that is precisely what makes us miserable and sabotages our plans. And that it is our constant quest to eliminate or to ignore the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, sadness – that causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain or unhappy in the first place.

If you know philosophy, you know his idea, though he doesn't use the actual word: "ataxaria." It's more, less and different than detachment or dissociation. The idea of "acceptance" might get closer.


And lest one draws the wrong ideas from Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus, he steps in:

Yet this conclusion does not have to be depressing. Instead, it points to an alternative approach: a "negative path" to happiness that entails taking a radically different stance towards those things most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. This involves learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity and becoming familiar with failure. In order to be truly happy, it turns out, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions – or, at the very least, to stop running quite so hard from them.

Indeed. And, with some variations, beyond his hangups with sex and repression (while ignoring sexual abuse's connection to hysteria!) Freud talked about this to some degree. So, too, in yet another vein, Miguel de Unanumo arguably did this in "The Tragic Sense of Life." (To me, every Gnu Atheist who wants to bash religion in general should have Unanumo on his/her required reading list.)


Anyway, what about recent claims that blind optimism can improve one's actions in life? Not so fast, Burkeman says. Research shows that things like visualizing positive outcomes can actually backfire, by practitioners often refusing to do the work to get to those outcomes. Ahh, magical thinking, new variety.

And, there's other twists from the glass half empty. Here's one:

Psychologists have long agreed that one of the greatest enemies of human happiness is "hedonic adaptation" – the predictable and frustrating way in which any new source of pleasure we obtain, whether it's as minor as a new electronic gadget or as major as a marriage, swiftly gets relegated to the backdrop of our lives: we grow accustomed to it, and it ceases to deliver so much joy. It follows, then, that regularly reminding yourself that you might lose any of the things you currently enjoy can reverse the adaptation effect. Thinking about the possibility of losing something you value shifts it from the backdrop of your life back to centre stage, where it can deliver pleasure once more.

Burkeman then morphs back to the failed products. He says the flip side of not being realistic about failure is being unrealistic about the causes of success, including believing we have a lot of control over causing success when that's often not that true.


Or, if you want more reason to try to change your viewpoint, here's one:

Perfectionism is one of those traits that many people seem secretly, or not-so-secretly, proud to possess, since it hardly seems like a character flaw. Yet, at bottom, it is a fear-driven striving to avoid the experience of failure at all costs. At the extremes, it is an exhausting and permanently stressful way to live: there is a greater correlation between perfectionism and suicide, researchers have found, than between feelings of hopelessness and suicide. 

That ... the last part ... I did not know. Being somewhat pessimistic and a "negative" thinker, yet a bit of a perfectionist at times, that's words to take to heart ... accept failure! Failing at something doesn't make me a failure, does it?


There's plenty more ideas like this salted through this long column. Here's a good short one for conclusion:

Happiness reached via positive thinking is fleeting and brittle; negative visualisation generates a vastly more dependable calm.

Go read the whole thing and, like me, keep an eye out for this book.

Hindus want to reclaim yoga

A group of ardent Hindus, some called "Hindu nationalists," want to reclaim yoga to what they claim are its Hindu roots. An eclectic group of opponents, ranging from Deepak Chopra to religious scholars, says it's not Hindu but pre-Hindu.

Is yoga from before Hinduism? Well, I think that it depends on part what you call Hinduism.

Western critical religious scholars, for example, call everything in the Bible before the Babylonian exile "Israelite religion," reserving "Judaism" only for post-Exilic religion.

If that standard is followed, AND if roots of yogic practice can be traced back that far, then, no, it's not Hindu.

That said, conservative Christians and Jews alike, today, reject the scholarly distinction mentioned above. I'm sure the "nationalist Hindus" do the same. (That said, I think it's fair to say Hinduism is not "just" a religion, but, more than any other world religious tradition, a sociology as well.)

That said No. 2, folks like Chopra have good financial reasons for denying the Hindu roots of many religious practices from India that have become relabeled as "spiritual." Per the story, even if you're not a conservative Baptist minister who believes yoga is of the devil, telling many practitioners that they're engaged in a Hindu religious exercise will surely drive them off.

But, package it in smiley New Age wrapping and ...

Science briefs – when Stonehenge and why our blind eyes but not baseball managers?

When was Stonehenge built and why?

The latest research team that plans to tackle details of the when believe it has an answer on the why: a health spa.

“This was a place of healing, for the soul and the body,” said Tim Darvill, (archaeology professor at Bournemouth University). “The Presili Hills is a magical place. The stones from there are regarded as having healing properties.”

I’m a bit leery of how Darvill uses the word “magical”; it halfway sounds like he believes in it and is ready to consecrate the beliefs of neo-Druids, other neo-pagans and various other, undifferentiated, New Agers.

Miss three changes in the “six changes” puzzle?

Maybe you’re not alone, whether it’s something like that, or more commonly, not a quiz, but an altered photo where you’re not told of any specific type or number of changes. Our brainpower may just not have the resources to keep up with modern demands on our eyes. Beyond that, such “top-down” viewings aren’t qualia, percepts or whatever other philosophical terms you prefer — they’ve been extensively massaged en route through the brain until the point “we” view “them,” whoever “we” and “they” are.

Can you measure a baseball manager?

Going beyond Billy Beane’s “Moneyball,” Sabermetrics or anything else, mathematician Steve Wang says you can, by doing an analysis of human faces. But Washington Nationals manager Manny Acta has a caveat:

Managers’ tendencies were often a reflection more of the players on the roster than of the manager’s personal inclinations. While the Mets speedster José Reyes cannot decide to hit 50 home runs and the Red Sox slugger David Ortiz cannot will himself to 50 stolen bases, managers can and will shape their decisions around the tools at their disposal.

Good point. As a St. Louis Cardinals’ fan, I expect to see a different Tony La Russa face this year, at least until Mark Mulder and Chris Carpenter are back on the roster.

It was/wasn’t “meant to happen” — I think not

A few weeks back, I posted about how karma might be worse than Christian fundamentalism.

On the same axis, but “neurotic” to karma’s “psychotic,” would be the New Age idea that things are/aren’t “meant to happen.”

Meant by whom? And, unchangeable by us?

Now, I firmly believe I can be an atheist of some sort and still appreciate life’s mystery, dynamism, ebbs and flows of time and more. But I don’t have to believe in something like this, which is almost as cruel as karma, but as the death of a thousand New Age cuts.

Call it “karma light,” perhaps.

Two observations on religion from the national parks

I saw two conspicuous examples of religion in national parks while on vacation, both disconcerting, but for different reasons.

Both were in California’s redwoods country.

The first, in a coastal section of Redwoods National Park, was a cross about 6 feet high, made out of two pieces of steel I-beam. The cross appears to have no historical significance itself, nor does it commemorate a historically significant site; no marker, plaque or other object is at the site.

The second, at the adjacent Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, was a string of Tibetan prayer flags wrapped around a redwood fern. New Ageism (assuming an Ager and not a Tibetan lama left the string of flags) no more should be commemorated in national parks than orthodox Christianity. Plus, leaving prayer flags like that is, by legal definition, littering.

New Agers have been angering American Indians by doing this at places like Sedona for years. Stop it.

Besides, it’s metaphysically illogical. If you’re really into “detachment” as a metaphysical principal, it’s illogical to consider one place “sacred” over another; in so doing, you “attach” to that place.