The body/soul gap
Human beings are dualists from the start, developmental psychologist Paul Bloom argues in Edge: The Third Culture.We believe in our bodies as things, and we believe in our "selves" as an ephemeral entity separate from our bodies.
Such dualism might be learned, Bloom says. But he believes it's a by-product of two separate "systems of core-knowledge--knowledge of the material world and knowledge of the self/soul/mind.
And those systems of core-knowledge have important consequences for moral reasoning:
- When we conceive of another person primarily as a soul, we tend to care more about that person.
- When we conceive of another person primarily as a body, it's easier to feel disgust toward that person and thus exclude him/her/similar others from our circle of care.
Bloom seems to be a materialist. He believes biology [and brain science] can account for all of human being, that mental life originates in our physiology.
But he also believes the every-day, common-sense gap between body and soul won't go away, even if it can be scientifically disproven.
This prompts me to wonder: If Bloom is correct, would we want our body/mind dualism to go away?
If body/mind dualism is implicated in moral reasoning as Bloom contends, we might do well as pastoral theologians to think of it as an intentional part of God's creation--serving an important and pragmatic role in culture, religion, and the realization of the commonwealth of God, to use a Christian metaphor.
Theologically, I don't much like body/soul dualism when carried to extremes. But Bloom might have described one of its important functions in the physical and mental life of humanity.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Temperament
Party animal or wallflower--you can tell at four months. And things aren't likely to change.As the Boston Globe succinctly stated: "You can't turn a screamer into a cool customer."
At least, that's the gist of psychologist Jerome Kagan's recent argument that we're born with temperaments that shape our personalities in essential ways, regardless of environment, parenting, and other factors.
[No word on whether he engages an important question: Has anyone proven that "personalities" exist, anyway?]
I'm delighted that Kagan's reductionist account of human behavior rejects attachment theory, a darling of contemporary culture and counseling psychology.
But I wonder how he would respond to recent writings on resiliency and the idea that people can change in important ways?
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Monday, August 30, 2004
Free will
"Neurobiology tells us that there is no centre in the brain where actions are planned and decisions made. Decisions emerge from a collection of dynamic systems that run in parallel and are underpinned by nerve cells that talk to each other--the brain."Has science proven that free will is an illusion?
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Monday, August 23, 2004
Elvis and Uncle Joe
My wife's Uncle Joe had a fight with Elvis.These days, Joe's fighting cancer. But he had enough energy this weekend to tell my brother-in-law the story--so here it is, cut-and-pasted from Jim's e-mail about his trip to visit Joe in Memphis:
"Elvis had his pink Caddie. Uncle Joe had a 1956 blue, white and red Ford convertible. They were the only cars in a parking lot when a snowball fight broke out.
"Elvis threw one, missed his target and hit Uncle Joe's car. He came over and apologized. Elvis threw another, and again hit Uncle Joe's convertible. He came over to apologize again. Uncle Joe socked him with a snowball.
"He said they saluted one another after that, when they met on the street."
Fifteen years of marriage and I've never heard the story. Who says you can't learn new things about your spouse?
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Saturday, August 21, 2004
Is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis dead?
"Language opens up possibilities of perceiving," Phillip Marchand writes, "but even it is not everything. Reality sometimes intrudes from outside language and changes things, and the person aware of more than one language can often spot this before others."Fifteen bilingual writers relfect on how language shapes reality and reality shapes language . . . .
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Monday, August 16, 2004
Therapy: art or science?
"Good therapists," reports The New York Times today, "usually work to resolve conflicts, not inflame them. But there is a civil war going on in psychology, and not everyone is in the mood for healing. [Sorry, registration required.]"On one side are experts who argue that what therapists do in their consulting rooms should be backed by scientific studies proving its worth.
"On the other are those who say that the push for this evidence threatens the very things that make psychotherapy work in the first place."
The Times suggests that the debate may shape how future therapists are trained, and it would be interesting to see how many pastoral counseling programs--given the dominance of psychodynamic psychology in pastoral counseling--are engaging the debate in the classroom and in curricular decisions.
At any rate, the piece is a good summary of the "art vs. science" argument in the American Psychological Association.
I wonder, though, how helpful it is to take such a dualistic view; good therapy, it seems to me, is both art and science, not either/or.
And for pastoral counselors, the healing that comes through psychotherapy--and the skills that make for a good therapist--are a charism of the church, gifts from God that can be strengthened by the social sciences and research outcomes, but certainly not replaced by them.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Melting pot or Cobb salad?
Academics are busy deconstructing what it means to be American, and Samuel Huntington thinks that's a very bad thing."The deconstructionist coalition," he writes in One America at The American Enterprise Online, ". . . does not include most Americans. In poll after poll, majorities of Americans reject ideas and measures that would lessen national identity and promote subnational identities. Everyday Americans remain deeply patriotic, nationalistic in their outlook, and committed to their national culture, creed, and identity. A major gap has thus developed between portions of our elite and the bulk of our populace over what America is and should be."
Focused on the future impact of Mexican American identity on life in these United States [which will have "deep consequences for Hispanics--who will be in America but not of the America that has existed for centuries"], Huntington's patronizing article deserves a response from Latino/a theologians and others who know "American values" have never been as monolithic as he suggests.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Wild thoughts
"I am sick of nature. Sick of trees, sick of birds, sick of the ocean," David Gessner writes in the Boston Globe at Boston.com."Too often when I flip through the pages of contemporary nature books the tone is awed, hushed, reverential," Gessner continues. "The same things that drove me away from Sunday School. And the same thing that drove me, unable to resist my own buffoonery, to fart loudly against the pews."
Much writing in spirituality and theology falls into the same trap, whispering about the beauty of Spirit while ignoring raw physicality. If only my parishioners would fart loudly in the pews!
While Gessner primarily offers Thoreau (whose Walden was published 150 years ago yesterday) as an antidote to his personal sickness, I would suggest readers with a spiritual bent look at Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild, a collection of essays on wilderness, freedom, and grace, saturated with Zen Buddhist thought.
We are wild creatures ('though not Wild at Heart in the ways John Eldredge's essentialist, Evangelical tome on men suggests), and I suspect God appreciates it when we show it.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, August 10, 2004
A trinitarian consciousness?
Body, brain and environment converge to create consciousness--but there's nothing "spiritual" about it, one scientist says."The brain is embodied and the body is embedded in its environment," Gerald Edelman, director of the Neurosciences Institute, says in New Perspectives Quarterly. "That trio must operate in an integrated way. You can’t separate the activity and development of the brain from the environment or the body. . . .
"Is consciousness the same as spirit? If you want to call the uniqueness of each individual consciousness a soul, that is all right with me. But there is a problem none of us likes to face. When the body goes, we go."
Edelman here is arguing for the inseparability of soul and matter--a position not entirely inconsistent with Jewish and Christian scriptures.
Within that created matrix, it is the brain's ability to recognize patterns, select specific sequences, and put them together in unique ways that gives rise to the higher levels of human functioning.
"It is this selectional repertoire in the brain that makes each individual unique, that accounts for the ability to create poetry and music, that accounts for all the differences that arise from the same biological apparatus—the body and the brain," Edelman argues.
"There is no singular mapping to create the mind; there is, rather, an unforetold plurality of possibilities."
Research like Edelman's--and that of pastoral theologians David Hogue and Andrew Lester--make it clear that any theological account of what it means to be human in the 21st century must wrestle seriously with the doctrine of embodiment and new understandings of how the brain participates in consciousness.
Simply put, "created, fallen, and redeemed" no longer suffices as a theological anthropology. There's got to be meat on those bones. And that, too, opens a "plurality of possibilities."
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Monday, August 09, 2004
Race, faith, and coping with tragedy
Most American college students turned to prayer to cope with the 9/11 terrorist attacks.It helped everyone--but non-Anglo students suffered even less emotional distress because of their faith, a new study reports.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Thursday, August 05, 2004