It might have been noticed that James maintains a healthy distance from “–isms.” IMO, he keeps them at arms length, eying some with a conditional admiration, as the case with Emerson and even Plato. His asides are most interesting and for me, they are certainly the meat of the matter for this book – not who he quotes. As a pragmatist, he looks for results within the domain that is active – be it religion, morality, science or horticulture. Results in the domain of religion are hard to ferret out since they can become confused with other human intentions. Is a man good because he does good acts, or is he good because the results of his actions are efficacious for the broader area of humanity? Or, put another way, is “goodness” some kind of universal state to which one can aspire because it IS good and therefore desirable? Or does it, on the rare occasion, boil out of the human spirit as a unique thrust of some kind of cure-all that is manifestly efficacious as it is practical? These are the questions he seems to be dealing with. As for the visions and other manifestations signaling the “presence of another in our psyche, I believe he sees such phenomena in the context of a scientific and psychological milieu of human behavior, but not to the point (and here is a sort of kind nod to the “believers”) of disavowing the value and verity of the “religious experience.”


But while he is asking these questions, he gives no answers – it is not his mission to do so. A good question, a really good question. is as valuable as a good answer because it makes the reader and the listener probe the depths of the possibilities and that probing is what’s important. I find the same kind of psychological ambivalence in the writings of his brother, Henry – he gives out those complex intertwining of human relations and yet lays out no prescription for who is good and who is right – although I found myself siding with the naive and more undirected characters of his novels -- probably because they, like I, am pin balls in this life! This all sounds like what I have taken from James (both brothers) is moral relativism, and perhaps it is. I cannot find it in myself to latch on to some absolute surety in the matter of what is best for humanity. It is in the hands of moira, and that is not some “god” but rather where the chips fall – as they may.


One thing strikes me as telling in James’ account of what is a religious experience: he says: “There must be something solemn, serious and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious.” Doesn’t this seem a bit telling as to what he personally feels about religion, above and beyond his more erudite and clinical descriptions? After all, he is a human who has an opinion and a feeling about religion as HE sees it. But if I consider the great religious leaders and founders of religion in the past, solemnity and tenderness do not have to have applied – do they? When reading the Quran, or certainly the Bible, one might be drawn to solemnity or tenderness out of their personal interpretations, but not necessarily from the text. When reading the history of the Buddha, neither of these attributes need apply – what needs application is the cold blooded realization (in the case of Buddha) that to exist as a human is to suffer – this is neither solemn nor tender, but rather simply factual and stark. So, we see that James does have a personal stake in all this, or rather a personal take on the deep underpinnings involved. Solemnity, seriousness and tenderness are all states of mind HE associates with the religious experience – but this need not be the case. Surely there can be the Bacchanalian. fun loving, orgiastic, wildness that can be connected to the religious experience, leaving solemnity, seriousness and tenderness far behind as necessary ingredients.


                         


Early in the lectures, James makes it clear that he will be dealing primarily with personal versus institutional religion – this is easy to understand since he is a psychologist who is more concerned with personal or subjective human religious behavior than he is in religious dogma, doctrine and history. While I certainly have no problem with this approach, and agree with his reasons, it brings to mind the idea of being born into a religious faith (i. e. and its corresponding belief system) as opposed to creating one out of either whole or partial cloth. In the case of the great “founders” of faiths, Christ, Buddha and Mohammed (the ones James mentions, omitting Abraham and Moses for reasons I think I understand) the cloth was not whole. Buddha came out of the Hindu religious background and practices; Christ from the Jewish, and Mohammed also mainly from the Jewish. All three supposedly had revelational experiences that elevated them above simple believers and followers of a faith. I imagine that there are religious experiences that are completely unique in the sense they have no dependence whatsoever on the system they are born into – and what about those “seers” who are not born into any system, or perhaps an atheistic one? Therefore, unless I have yet to find it, I don’t see James dealing with the differences in these types. If one has a religious experience that is adjunctive to scripture or dogma that is one thing; if it is entirely outside that system, that is another – a distinction I think important.


Since James admits to the confusion and the agreement between the terms “religious” and “moral,” he admits to the inclusion of a secular dimension, or secular partaking of the religious question when it comes to the management of human affairs vis-à-vis the transcendent management from a “divinity.” His referencing the “Emersonian religion” as demonstrated by the Emerson quotation, demonstrates this. But this brings up the whole question of “morality” as to be distinguished from “religion” in human terms and in human applications. (And recall that he lumps in morality with religion) There are “good men” who do not accept a god; and there are “bad men” who do. “Morality” as he sees it, is bound to be something malleable in the hands of good and bad writers and thinkers, and something tortuously complex in the hands of theologians and philosophers. I think he is wrestling with the line of division between the secular and the non-secular pre- and proscriptions of how men must behave to their betterment. (And all this without any theory of his own since he eschews such theories – thus, the heart of his brand of pragmaticism)


I am forced to think about this line of demarcation between these two – the purely secular and the unquestionably religious take on how we should behave. Getting to the heart of his first few lectures, regarding revelation and the intrusion of the divine on one’s thinking, if they are a “seer,” I cannot think of a secular “seer” unless one might call Freud or Jung or Nietzsche examples. (Perhaps even the Buddha?) Unless we could find such a secular seer who might compete in the world of the fantastic revelations that pave the way for truth and goodness and the right values for living, then such revelations are left to the “religious” ones – and granted, they seem to have more power over the minds of the vulnerable and the innocent and the uninformed (i. e. the vast majority of the population) than do those who might preach what I would call the common sense and practical forms of morality. It seems that the outlandish forms of “truth” that arrive from the “pathological” regions of the mind strike home more quickly, effectively and permanently than do those that rely on the simple arrangements of the facts of life – like those that determine when an egg is cooked, or a bridge stable, or a stomach full. Give me a blessed seer (such as Fox) who can make my day easier and my nights more peaceful in sleep – there won’t be any. On the contrary, I would guess that the more fantastical and fearful the visions of the seer and the preacher, the more I would have terrible dreams and fears that would not leave me alone in the simple duties of my life.




In the second lecture: Circumscription of the Topic, James says:

“There must be something solemn, serious and tender about any attitude we denominate religious….. I propose to narrow our definition once more by saying that the word “divine” as employed therein, shall mean for us not merely the primal and enveloping and real, for that meaning if taken without restriction might well prove too broad. The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual fells impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.”

Thus James shows his bias toward a particular emotional requisite for being called religious – one can neither be light and silly nor angry and mean spirited and have that called a religious attitude. This flies in the face of some Zen Buddhist attitudes that embrace a lighthearted, if not silly, outlook on life and yet must be called religious in nature. In addition, if his criterion for divine must contain solemnity, seriousness and tenderness, cannot one attaché those feelings toward many things other than the profound questions of existence and religious belief – such as feelings towards others, toward a project or belief that is clearly outside of the “divine” such as a science, for example? Many times throughout the first few lectures James has to pull himself back from assigning the divine or godlike or religious to such a broad spectrum of human behavior and enterprise that they loose their meaning and drift far out of the context suggested by the title of the lectures. Perhaps this in fact points out the futility of dealing with such an abstraction!


                         


Some thoughts on morality


Who remembers (or who knows of it) the earthquake in Iran, no long ago, that killed over 30,000 people? (Certainly very few in the USA) But here, the memory of 9/11 and the death of 3,000 at the hands of terrorists is burned into our minds as some kind of seminal event that demands special attention – special moral attention. It is the attention of moral indignation, that we should be attacked stealthily by Islamic hoodlums who hate us for such irrational and unfounded reasons! And the earthquakes and floods and AIDS epidemics that plague the earth are pushed to the back pages of our moral consideration. As I read what William James thinks about the religious experience, I find very little in the way of defining what morality is as applied in the world – not that which is argued over in academe or in lectures. All of us humans deal with morality in terms of distance – both geographical, political and racial – even linguistically. The black folk who die by the thousands each month in Africa due to AIDS are separated by a moral space that is four-fold: race, color, language and nationality – not to mention wealth and the possibility of national resources, such as gold, diamonds or oil. I have written about what I call the “circles of empathy” with which we all deal on a daily basis, in all walks of life. Our (that is the white, anglo, English speaking and nationally wealthy, mostly protestant) people are at a great distance in terms of our “circle of empathy.” We do not give a shit for those who die horrible deaths ten thousand miles away – what does this say about morality? It simply says that morality, like politics, is local. It says that our circle of empathy has a very small radius, limited by our history and the requirements of our personal and family daily lives.

Why is this? Should not morality have a larger dimension of inclusion if it is to have value and meaning? If we care much less about the painful death by starvation of a thousand African children than we do about the death of a single person who is murdered by a jealous spouse just around the corner, what does this say about not only what morality means, but what it is for us as a people? I believe that I must rethink this whole matter of morality. I am beginning to believe that it is an abstraction that has no reasonable foundation, or usefulness in society. We stand on the soap box of our righteous faith in “goodness” and our comprehension of “badness” and yet, when stretched to the farthest corners of the earth in all the different colors, faces and beliefs of our human brethren, we cannot take it much further than our family or our neighbor or someone of our nation. There is apparently an admixture of nationality, politics, religion and personal belief in all this. But what it adds up to just a terribly selfish perspective. The broader sweep of what morality might mean is always lost in the particulars of what it ends up being in the case at hand – if it deals with something very “foreign” it is diminished in its force and is easily shucked off as too slight and distant to take much to heart. Doesn’t this demean the whole meaning of “morality?” Are not we all drawn into a small world of selfness and parochialism that makes morality not only relative, but proportional to its immediacy as relates to our person, our neighborhood and our country? Is this not, on the face of it, absurd if morality has any meaning at all?

Richard E. Sansom