Transcription
So then I learned about P, and P had some very interesting ideas. And I think I've told you already what P was up to. He wasn't a developmental psychologist; he didn't even regard himself as a psychologist. He wanted to reconcile science and religion; that's what he was doing through his entire bloody life, because it drove him crazy when he was an adolescent, and he didn't think that he would be able to survive unless he could bring those two things together. So he's working on the same problem. And so one of the things that P, who was very prone to observation—he was, um, an ethologist of human beings—that's a good way of thinking about an ethologist: a scientist who studies animals by watching their behavior rather than studying them under laboratory conditions—and he got very interested in the spontaneous emergence of morality in the play of children. It was so smart, so smart, that idea—that you know, when kids come together and unify themselves towards a particular goal, so in play, that a morality emerges out of that. And that that morality—and I've mentioned this before—there's a morality in game one, there's a morality in game two, there's a morality in game three. What's common across all those moralities is a meta-morality. And so the meta-morality emerges from the particular moralities that are embedded in particular cooperative situations. We could say cooperative and competitive situations. You can expand that out to—thy—you can expand that out biologically to some degree to the idea of the dominance hierarchy. Right, every social animal, and even many animals who aren't social, are embedded in a dominance hierarchy. The dominance hierarchy has a structure. We couldn't call it a dominance hierarchy; dominance hierarchy A, B, C, D, E—thousands of them across thousands of years. You extract out from all of them what's central to all of them; that's the pyramid of value. What's the—what's the qu—question do you need answered about the pyramid of value? What's at the top? Because that's the ideal; that's the I at the top of the pyramid, or the Golden Buddha in the Lotus; it's the same thing. It's the same thing as the crucifix, paradoxically enough. And that has to do—it has to do with something like the voluntary acceptance and therefore transcendence of suffering. It's something like that. These are not arbitrary ideas; they're deeply—that's my case, anyways—they're deeply, deeply, deeply rooted in biology and culture. They're—they're as deeply rooted in biology as the dominance hierarchy is rooted in biology. And we already know the answer to that: the dominance hierarchy has been around for 350 million years. It's a long time; you don't get to just brush that off and say, "Well, morality is some sort of second-order cognitive problem." It's like, no, it's not. I mean, I can—I can tell you something about its instantiation in your nervous system. You have a counter at the bottom of your brain that keeps track of where you are in terms of your status, and it blood-well regulates the sensitivity of your emotions. So if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy, barely clinging on to the world, everything overwhelms you. And that's because you're damn near dead, and so everything should overwhelm you; you've got no extra resources; any more threat, you're sunk. So you become extremely sensitive to negative emotion and maybe also impulsive, so that you grab—well, the grabbing is good. And if you're near the top in the dominance hierarchy, and your counter tells you that, then your serotonin levels go up; you're less sensitive to negative emotion; you're less impulsive; you live longer; like everything works in your favor; your immune system functions better, and you're oriented, at least to some degree, towards the medium and long-term future. And you can afford that because all hell isn't breaking loose around you all the time.
And so then the question is, is there a way of being that increases the probability that you're going to move up dominance hierarchies? Well, that doesn't seem to be a particularly provocative proposition unless you think that it's completely arbitrary and random. And that you can think that if you want, but I don't think there's any evidence for that whatsoever. I mean, we certainly have—even for sexual selection—we impose criteria; they're not random and arbitrary. So okay, so back to Jung. So what was Jung trying to do? Well, he was trying to see—see, Jung believed that once we had stopped populating the cosmos with gods, that they went inside. That's a good way of thinking—well, think—think about it this way: you know, an archaic person looks at the sky and uses his imagination to populate the sky. What's the sky? Well, it's the constellations; it's the do—domain of the gods. Well, why? Well, because the gods are what are—be—are out there beyond your understanding. Well, that's what you see when you look up at the sky. So you populate the night sky with figures of your imagination. So the gods are the things that you broadcast out of your imagination and see spread over the world. It's like the contents of your unconscious are manifesting themselves when you encounter the unknown. It's exactly what it is; that's exactly how—how else could it be? Right, you're projecting your fantasy onto what you don't understand. That's how you start to cope with what you don't understand; you populate the unknown with deities. Where did they come from? They came from your imagination. Well, what happens when you take them out of the world? Do they disappear? No, they just go back into your imagination. So that's where Jung dug down to find them. That's the same motif as rescuing your dead father from the—from—or rescuing your father from the belly of the whale. It's the same idea: is that the corpses of the gods inhabit your imagination. So where do you go if you need to revivify them? You go into your imagination. And that's exactly what Jung did. And that—I mean, this is no secret; if you read Jung, he tells you that's what he did; he tells you that's why he did it. It's not an interpretation on my part. Well, so then—then the question is, what's down there? Is it just mess and catastrophe, or is there something in it that's patterned? Well, Jung's proposition was that you—you rediscover the great archetypes that guide human beings by investigating the structure of your imagination, when he thought about the imagin—in some sense, at least in part—as a manifestation of your—of your biology. Well, yes, what else would it be? You know, and I told you that story about my nephew, I believe, right, about him running around as a knight and then going off to have a combat with the dwarves and the dragons. It's like, well, where did that come from? Well, partly it came from his culture, right, because he was a knight, and—and so obviously that's a cultural construct. But the thing is is that his imagination—it's this struct—that's looking for things to fill itself with, just like your predisposition to language. You have a predisposition to language. What is that? We don't know. What does it do? It looks for things in the world to fill itself with. Right, and if you're—if you—first of all, when you start to learn how to speak, you babble every phoneme. Did—did you know that there's—there's—lots—there's—if I was learning to speak an Asian language, there would be phonemes I couldn't pronounce, and vice versa. An infant—all of them—they babble all the phonemes, and then as they start to learn the language, they lose the ability to say a bunch of them and only retain the ones that are relevant to that language. So a baby babbles all lang—all possible languages; that's a way of thinking about it—and then loses the ability. So that's a manif—that's—you can see there—so you could say, well, you manifest the potential to be possessed by all the set of all possible archetypes; it's built into your biology. And then as you're enculturated in your own culture, the set of archetypes that manifest—manifest themselves in that culture are the ones that you pull in for your own use. So my—my nephew is running around like a knight. Well, you know, if he would have been born in the middle of the Amazon, he would have been running around with a bow and, you know, a poisoned arrow and a bow. It's the same thing; it's the same idea; it's just trapped out in—in different cultural dress. And he—his little imagination was trying to solve the problem: how do you deal with the unknown? Well, what's the unknown? It's these little devils that keep biting—jumping up on you and biting you, and they come out without end. So just killing them—it's like cutting the head off the Hydra; right, seven more grow. Well, what the hell good is it to solve one problem when there's just a bunch more problems that are com—going to come after you? And that's everyone's question; that's the ultimate question of nihilism: right, why bother solving a problem if all that's going to happen is that 20 more problems are going to come your way? Why not just give up and die? Well, right, it's a good question; it's the—it's a good question. Right, is the suffering so intense that the whole game should just be brought to an end? That's another fundamental question of existence. And people who become truly malevolent answer that question in the affirmative; they say it's too much; we should destroy it now. I wouldn't say they're precisely doing it only for humanitarian reasons, but you have to understand and appreciate the logic; it's not irrational. That's the other thing; it's not irrational to work for the destruction of being; it's not irrational; in fact, it might be the most rational thing you could come up with—depends on your initial—initial set of presuppositions. So Jung—down into the belly of the beast, so to speak—to—to—to—to see what lurks in the imagination. He sees the birthplace of archetypal ideas. Well, what are archetypal ideas? They're—they're patterns of—a—you could think about them as—as representations of patterns of adaptive behavior. And so then you might ask, well, where did they come from? Well, that's part of what I've been trying to—to—to teach you about: they evolved, as far as I can tell. Right, they evolved collectively. Is that our society—and this is the dominance hierarchy idea—dominance hierarchies set themselves up as a matter of course; they're the standard way that animals organize themselves in a territory. Well, okay, human beings are watching those dominance hierarchies since we became self-aware—thinking, "What the hell are we up to? What the hell are we up to?" What's—and there's a question that lurks in there: what constitutes acceptable power? What constitutes acceptable sovereignty? Who should lead? Who should rule? What should be at the top? Well, we talked about that; the Mesopotamians figured that out: speech and vision—that's Marduk: speech, vision, and the willingness to confront the terrible unknown—that's what should rule. Well, what is that? An arbitrary idea, or is that a great idea? How could it be any other way? Well, that's what human beings are like. And I—I don't think that you can read the Mesopotamian story and understand the reference, which isn't an easy thing to do, and fail to draw that conclusion. Marduk has eyes all the way around his head; he speaks magic words; he goes off to fight Tiamat, the dragon of chaos. Well, what's that? That's the reptilian predator that lurks in the unknown. Well, is any of that—is there anything about any of that that stands in opposition to what you would presume if you were just analyzing our situation from a purely biological perspective? We're prey animals; we're predators; we've been threatened by reptiles forever. Why wouldn't we use the predator that lurks in the dark forest or the water as a representative of the unknown? Why wouldn't we harness that circuitry? We already have it at hand. And even more to the point, how could we do anything else? It makes perfect sense. Well, so then you might say, well, what would you want to be king? You could say king of the world or king of your own soul. What do you want to subordinate yourself to? How about your heroic willingness to encounter the unknown and articulate it and share that with people? There's no nobler vision than that. And I—I don't say that it's merely arbitrary. And so—and it's not merely arbitrary, too, because if you do that—to the degree that you do that—assuming your society isn't entirely corrupt—you will be successful; it will actually aid you practically; you'll rise up above men; you'll be selected by women; you'll be admirable; you'll be valued. And—and you know that because if you look at the people that you admire and value—again, unless you've taken a detour into dark places and are—are—are—are possessed with admiration for people who are working for malevolent purposes and for destruction—you just have to watch the people that you admire and try to figure out what's common across them and draw your own conclusions. And you can ask yourself, too, when you're torturing yourself with your conscience because you're not doing what you should be and you know it—what is it that you're torturing yourself in relationship to? You have a vision of your own ideal, and you torment yourself if you're not matching it. What's the ideal? Well, you don't know; right, it's—it's kind of incoherent and—and poorly articulated, but that doesn't mean it isn't trying to manifest itself and—and make itself known to you. It's really the purpose of religious education is to make that ideal articulated.