The Asymmetry of Compassion
I have been extremely busy as of late, what with traveling from Michigan back to California, visiting cities along the way, and stopping en route to set up a life in central Colorado. While I could use all of this as an excuse for why I haven't been writing on here, that isn't actually the truth. As any creative person knows all too well, the struggle with any creative endeavor is that the work produced is never as good as the vision in one's head. The painting, the sculpture, the composition in the mind's eye, none of these can be materialized in reality with the perfection and detail with which it was spawned in the brain. Perfectionism is one of my struggles, and since I'd like to consider myself good, perfect is my chief enemy, as the old saying implies. With this entry, I put such perfectionist tendencies in my cross-hairs.
To write about religion is something of a cop-out. One cannot be told they are completely wrong, since the subject itself is outside of the bounds of what can be empirically known. Plato wrote about politics for many years, but his opinions eventually landed him in trouble with political authorities, and jeopardized his very life, at which point he decided to switch his focus to metaphysics, since this was less likely to ruffle feathers. (Naturally, writing about religion can get you in trouble with the powers that be, as he must have learned all too well from what happened to Socrates.)
I have to preface the quote that I'd like to share in this post with a brief excursion into my own position on religion. I do this because the idea I want to share is infused with Christian overtones, and I'd rather what I quote have a chance of landing with any reader, whatever their religious orientation might be. If the reader must know my own position in brief: I can't really call myself "religious" with a straight face, particularly not to those of fundamentalist or orthodox stripes, but nor do I make the obstinate mistake of atheism. (If this self-summary suffices, you may skip the next few paragraphs.)
As anyone reading this likely already knows, I spent a few years attempting to be a practicing Christian of sorts, and then a few years dabbling in the philosophical positions of atheism. Neither of these satisfied me completely. The debates between atheists and the defenders of religion, as they play out in the public sphere, are difficult for me to watch, since both sides seem like they are talking around each other, instead of at or to each other. When people come to blows, it seems that the strikes don't land where they should.
Here's an example: it is considered clever to point out that the origins of the ancient religions might have a simple explanation that is based in reality. Joe Rogan (whose podcast probably rose to prominence with about as much intentionality as Rebecca Black's "Friday") has claimed on numerous occasions that the experience of Moses and the burning bush was based on the acacia bush, rich in a psychedelic called DMT, which when burned may have produced a hallucinatory vision of an encounter with God. (One such claim. Also: the debate in this entire video is worth watching if you have the time.) The implication is simple: we have found a purely material explanation for the origins of Mosaic Judaism, so there is no need to resort to discussions about God, metaphysics, etc.
Religious people respond to this claim by denying the facts behind the assertion: there's nothing in scripture to suggest that Moses was tripping balls, Moses wouldn't be doing drugs because he was virtuous and drug use is forbidden by modern religious systems (and it must have been same back then), the materialistic claim is a heresy meant to denounce God, and so on. They don't offer the simplest rejoinder, which is to say that asserting material causes of religion isn't actually eliminating the metaphysical problem. It's simply shifting it from one domain to another. Let's suppose the DMT version of the story is true. There is certainly nothing in scripture to suggest that this isn't what happened. But even so, if true, who created the acacia bush? Who put a psychedelic like DMT into it? Who had Moses come across the bush? Who had Moses consume the drug and have the vision? And so on. If the Mosaic God existed, then it stands to reason these things could all have been part of His plan to reveal Himself to mankind.
This is not to say we must conclude that God exists and that the stories are true. I'm simply saying that the atheists who argue against the veracity of religion because there are alternative, material explanations are not as half as clever as they think they are. The same can be said of the religious people who attempt to refute their arguments by quibbling over the truth of the material facts, and in doing so give privilege to materialism and concede any ground they might otherwise occupy. Even if it could be shown that mankind completely invented God and religion for some self-interested reason that has been lost to us to history, it would be anathema to assert that God works everywhere in the universe save for the human mind and the ideas that proceed from it. If there's a way out of this stalemate, I haven't yet found a convincing argument.
Hence my claim that religious debates between believers and non-believers seem to resemble shootouts in many action movies: the characters stand at point-blank range from each other, and despite emptying seemingly endless clips of ammunition at one another, somehow no one ends up getting shot. So how do we get ourselves on solid ground?
For me, the answer itself came from the writings of Carl Jung. I've stated it before, but someone pointed me to the writings of Carl Jung just before the COVID-19 pandemic forced all of us into social isolation. I will remain in this person's debt for the rest of my days, since it made my time in isolation exponentially more fruitful. The process of becoming acquainted with one's inner life, and the means by which to do this productively, is something I took from Jung and found incredibly useful while under pathogenic house arrest. Since I couldn't go out, I decided to go "in", and introspectively banter with my own demons.
As much as I have talked about Jung and his work in the last year and a half, I do feel the urge to defend myself against the claim that I'm a fanboy who has drunken the Jungian Kool-aid and is simply peddling the stuff he said as a bunch of easy answers to hard questions. Anyone who has read anything by Jung knows that nothing he wrote was simple. Among his earliest accomplishments in medical psychiatry were the codification of the use of the word association experiment, which allowed for insight into complexes in the patient, and the creation of the lie detector. (Which he later abandoned at Freud's behest, since it couldn't distinguish between unrelated feelings of guilt from actual guilt.) From his dabblings in these activities he concluded that to understand the human mind, in its entirety, one couldn't restrict themselves to the empirical sciences, since the insight to be had from these areas was severely limited. This is when he started his foray into the occult, parapsychology, astrology, alchemy, and so on. Regarding my opinion of him: I respect that he had the foresight and the courage to make this leap, especially as a public figure in the spotlight who drew criticism for doing so. This has prompted me to accept the limits of science in understanding the world, and to begin my own investigations into the nature of things. Nullius in verba.
About a year ago, I heard an evolutionary biologist named Bret Weinstein describe his position on Jungian psychology, which adequately summarizes my own sentiment:
"I would say Jungian psychology is a useful myth. I don't mean that to sound pejorative. I think it's not true in a narrow, literal sense, but many Jungians have made progress because there's something to it." (source)
One of the first major paradigm shifts in my understanding that came from Jung was the idea that modern field of medical psychology arose because of the vacuum left behind by organized religion. He compares this to the dearth left behind by the outlawing of slavery and the industrial revolution. Hero of Alexandria invented a toy steam engine two thousand years ago, but the applications of this to laborious processes wasn't realized at the time due to the readily available supply of human slaves being made to do the labor. It wasn't until we cast off the atrocity of slavery that a void was created in the available labor pool, at which point alternative mechanical means of labor had to be invented to bridge the gap. In much the same way, modern psychology was invented in the wake of civilization casting off its Christian mythology. In the annals of human history, it took so long for psychology to be invented, Jung says, because prior to its creation there was a religious answer for every psychic problem. As these religious systems lost their value to people, we had to compensate by devising a new way of dealing with these psychic problems.
He recognized that society was become increasingly secular, and that by casting off the problematic shackles of Christianity, it was throwing away the baby with the bathwater, so to speak, and tossing out the solutions to life's problems. This isn't necessarily a voluntary abandonment. The modern person cannot force himself to believe in a religious system if it does not resonate with his rational understanding of the world. And so the intent in his writings, it seems to me, was to translate the principles of major religions (in particular of Christianity, of which he was a believer his whole life) into a set of practices and values that could be utilized and embraced even by those who had shed their religious faiths.
The point of this brief post is not to weigh the relative merits of Jungian psychology. Jungian constructs are things I find useful tools in understanding the world, but I do not call myself a Jungian. In the very essay that I am preparing to quote from, titled "Psychotherapists or the Clergy", Jung wrote the following: "It is no easy matter to live a life that is modelled [sic] on Christ's, but it is unspeakably harder to live one's own life as truly as Christ lived his." (CW 11, par. 522) The Christians running around with the mantra of "What Would Jesus Do?" are little more than mimics in word and deed. A nobler aim would be to reconcile oneself with one's own true nature and live in harmony with that. I may be a sheeple that got myself vaccinated against the coronavirus as soon as the shots were offered to me, but I'm trying to leave the terrible habit of unquestioning adaptation of the life principles offered to me by others behind with my youth.
Compassion is the darling workhorse term of most schools of Buddhism that the West currently embraces with alacrity. Compassion-focused therapy is one of the modalities of modern therapy that I believe to be one of the most effective, a position I take largely due to the benefits that I myself have directly derived from its application. This has been spearheaded by Dr. Paul Gilbert, as well as many others, under the general heading of "self-compassion". The basic idea is that while we show understanding and patience with others when they make mistakes, when this same perspective is turned on ourselves, this very understanding and patience devolves into merciless criticism and self-reproach.
The idea that we should be gentle with ourselves is an old one, going back to at least the Stoic philosophers. Despite this, our tendency to condemn and castigate ourselves in the face of personal failure or askance looks from others is one that insidiously persists in our society. That the idea of self-compassion is now used to therapeutic effect is (surprise surprise) something that we can attribute to the ideas of Jung. While he did not originate this particular idea, to him must go the credit for channeling the idea into modern psychological practice. I quote him here for the same reason I relish all of his ideas, even those he borrowed from other sources: as a writer, he had a flair for expressing simple ideas in words that pack a powerful punch and resonate with me. The medium isn't the message, but without the proper medium, the message may be more easily lost or ignored. What gets remembered gets incorporated, and what is incorporated has a chance to bring about lasting change.
The passage I quote below is about much more than having compassion for our failures, but for having compassion for our own demons. I mentioned above that I "bantered" with my inner demons during pandemic introspective. Language is critical here. I very intentionally did not say "silence" or "confront" or "destroy". While "banter" isn't quite right either, it's the closest term to "playful acquaintanceship at arm's length" that I could muster. Our demons are ours. We must own them. To disown them is to disown ourselves. This defeats the purpose of attempts at self-acceptance.
What I quote here comes from the Collected Works, Volume 11, paragraphs 519-520:
"People forget that even doctors have moral scruples, and that certain patients' confessions are hard even for a doctor to swallow. Yet the patient does not feel himself accepted unless the very worst in him is accepted too. No one can bring this about by mere words; it comes only through reflection and through the doctor's attitude towards himself and his own dark side. If the doctor wants to guide another, or even accompany him a step of the way, he must feel with that person's psyche. He never feels it when he passes judgment. Whether he puts his judgments into words, or keeps them to himself, makes not the slightest difference. To take the opposite position, and to agree with the patient offhand, is also of no use, but estranges him as much as condemnation. Feeling comes only through unprejudiced objectivity...
"We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses. I am the oppressor of the person I condemn, not his friend and fellow-sufferer. I do not in the least mean to say that we must never pass judgment when we desire to help and improve. But if the doctor wishes to help a human being he must be able to accept him as he is. And he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is.
"Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple, and so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one's whole outlook on life. That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ--all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend himself--that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved--what then? Then, as a rule, the whole truth of Christianity is reversed: there is then no more talk of love and long-suffering; we say to the brother within us 'Raca', and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide him from the world, we deny ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves, and had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form, we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had crowed."
A mainstay quote on the Internet (whose original source I have never been able to substantiate to my satisfaction) admonishes us to be kind to others, always, for everyone is fighting some secret battle that we know nothing about. The thing most unknown to each of us is our very selves, as well as the inner battles even now being waged.
To write about religion is something of a cop-out. One cannot be told they are completely wrong, since the subject itself is outside of the bounds of what can be empirically known. Plato wrote about politics for many years, but his opinions eventually landed him in trouble with political authorities, and jeopardized his very life, at which point he decided to switch his focus to metaphysics, since this was less likely to ruffle feathers. (Naturally, writing about religion can get you in trouble with the powers that be, as he must have learned all too well from what happened to Socrates.)
I have to preface the quote that I'd like to share in this post with a brief excursion into my own position on religion. I do this because the idea I want to share is infused with Christian overtones, and I'd rather what I quote have a chance of landing with any reader, whatever their religious orientation might be. If the reader must know my own position in brief: I can't really call myself "religious" with a straight face, particularly not to those of fundamentalist or orthodox stripes, but nor do I make the obstinate mistake of atheism. (If this self-summary suffices, you may skip the next few paragraphs.)
As anyone reading this likely already knows, I spent a few years attempting to be a practicing Christian of sorts, and then a few years dabbling in the philosophical positions of atheism. Neither of these satisfied me completely. The debates between atheists and the defenders of religion, as they play out in the public sphere, are difficult for me to watch, since both sides seem like they are talking around each other, instead of at or to each other. When people come to blows, it seems that the strikes don't land where they should.
Here's an example: it is considered clever to point out that the origins of the ancient religions might have a simple explanation that is based in reality. Joe Rogan (whose podcast probably rose to prominence with about as much intentionality as Rebecca Black's "Friday") has claimed on numerous occasions that the experience of Moses and the burning bush was based on the acacia bush, rich in a psychedelic called DMT, which when burned may have produced a hallucinatory vision of an encounter with God. (One such claim. Also: the debate in this entire video is worth watching if you have the time.) The implication is simple: we have found a purely material explanation for the origins of Mosaic Judaism, so there is no need to resort to discussions about God, metaphysics, etc.
Religious people respond to this claim by denying the facts behind the assertion: there's nothing in scripture to suggest that Moses was tripping balls, Moses wouldn't be doing drugs because he was virtuous and drug use is forbidden by modern religious systems (and it must have been same back then), the materialistic claim is a heresy meant to denounce God, and so on. They don't offer the simplest rejoinder, which is to say that asserting material causes of religion isn't actually eliminating the metaphysical problem. It's simply shifting it from one domain to another. Let's suppose the DMT version of the story is true. There is certainly nothing in scripture to suggest that this isn't what happened. But even so, if true, who created the acacia bush? Who put a psychedelic like DMT into it? Who had Moses come across the bush? Who had Moses consume the drug and have the vision? And so on. If the Mosaic God existed, then it stands to reason these things could all have been part of His plan to reveal Himself to mankind.
This is not to say we must conclude that God exists and that the stories are true. I'm simply saying that the atheists who argue against the veracity of religion because there are alternative, material explanations are not as half as clever as they think they are. The same can be said of the religious people who attempt to refute their arguments by quibbling over the truth of the material facts, and in doing so give privilege to materialism and concede any ground they might otherwise occupy. Even if it could be shown that mankind completely invented God and religion for some self-interested reason that has been lost to us to history, it would be anathema to assert that God works everywhere in the universe save for the human mind and the ideas that proceed from it. If there's a way out of this stalemate, I haven't yet found a convincing argument.
Hence my claim that religious debates between believers and non-believers seem to resemble shootouts in many action movies: the characters stand at point-blank range from each other, and despite emptying seemingly endless clips of ammunition at one another, somehow no one ends up getting shot. So how do we get ourselves on solid ground?
For me, the answer itself came from the writings of Carl Jung. I've stated it before, but someone pointed me to the writings of Carl Jung just before the COVID-19 pandemic forced all of us into social isolation. I will remain in this person's debt for the rest of my days, since it made my time in isolation exponentially more fruitful. The process of becoming acquainted with one's inner life, and the means by which to do this productively, is something I took from Jung and found incredibly useful while under pathogenic house arrest. Since I couldn't go out, I decided to go "in", and introspectively banter with my own demons.
As much as I have talked about Jung and his work in the last year and a half, I do feel the urge to defend myself against the claim that I'm a fanboy who has drunken the Jungian Kool-aid and is simply peddling the stuff he said as a bunch of easy answers to hard questions. Anyone who has read anything by Jung knows that nothing he wrote was simple. Among his earliest accomplishments in medical psychiatry were the codification of the use of the word association experiment, which allowed for insight into complexes in the patient, and the creation of the lie detector. (Which he later abandoned at Freud's behest, since it couldn't distinguish between unrelated feelings of guilt from actual guilt.) From his dabblings in these activities he concluded that to understand the human mind, in its entirety, one couldn't restrict themselves to the empirical sciences, since the insight to be had from these areas was severely limited. This is when he started his foray into the occult, parapsychology, astrology, alchemy, and so on. Regarding my opinion of him: I respect that he had the foresight and the courage to make this leap, especially as a public figure in the spotlight who drew criticism for doing so. This has prompted me to accept the limits of science in understanding the world, and to begin my own investigations into the nature of things. Nullius in verba.
About a year ago, I heard an evolutionary biologist named Bret Weinstein describe his position on Jungian psychology, which adequately summarizes my own sentiment:
"I would say Jungian psychology is a useful myth. I don't mean that to sound pejorative. I think it's not true in a narrow, literal sense, but many Jungians have made progress because there's something to it." (source)
One of the first major paradigm shifts in my understanding that came from Jung was the idea that modern field of medical psychology arose because of the vacuum left behind by organized religion. He compares this to the dearth left behind by the outlawing of slavery and the industrial revolution. Hero of Alexandria invented a toy steam engine two thousand years ago, but the applications of this to laborious processes wasn't realized at the time due to the readily available supply of human slaves being made to do the labor. It wasn't until we cast off the atrocity of slavery that a void was created in the available labor pool, at which point alternative mechanical means of labor had to be invented to bridge the gap. In much the same way, modern psychology was invented in the wake of civilization casting off its Christian mythology. In the annals of human history, it took so long for psychology to be invented, Jung says, because prior to its creation there was a religious answer for every psychic problem. As these religious systems lost their value to people, we had to compensate by devising a new way of dealing with these psychic problems.
He recognized that society was become increasingly secular, and that by casting off the problematic shackles of Christianity, it was throwing away the baby with the bathwater, so to speak, and tossing out the solutions to life's problems. This isn't necessarily a voluntary abandonment. The modern person cannot force himself to believe in a religious system if it does not resonate with his rational understanding of the world. And so the intent in his writings, it seems to me, was to translate the principles of major religions (in particular of Christianity, of which he was a believer his whole life) into a set of practices and values that could be utilized and embraced even by those who had shed their religious faiths.
The point of this brief post is not to weigh the relative merits of Jungian psychology. Jungian constructs are things I find useful tools in understanding the world, but I do not call myself a Jungian. In the very essay that I am preparing to quote from, titled "Psychotherapists or the Clergy", Jung wrote the following: "It is no easy matter to live a life that is modelled [sic] on Christ's, but it is unspeakably harder to live one's own life as truly as Christ lived his." (CW 11, par. 522) The Christians running around with the mantra of "What Would Jesus Do?" are little more than mimics in word and deed. A nobler aim would be to reconcile oneself with one's own true nature and live in harmony with that. I may be a sheeple that got myself vaccinated against the coronavirus as soon as the shots were offered to me, but I'm trying to leave the terrible habit of unquestioning adaptation of the life principles offered to me by others behind with my youth.
Compassion is the darling workhorse term of most schools of Buddhism that the West currently embraces with alacrity. Compassion-focused therapy is one of the modalities of modern therapy that I believe to be one of the most effective, a position I take largely due to the benefits that I myself have directly derived from its application. This has been spearheaded by Dr. Paul Gilbert, as well as many others, under the general heading of "self-compassion". The basic idea is that while we show understanding and patience with others when they make mistakes, when this same perspective is turned on ourselves, this very understanding and patience devolves into merciless criticism and self-reproach.
The idea that we should be gentle with ourselves is an old one, going back to at least the Stoic philosophers. Despite this, our tendency to condemn and castigate ourselves in the face of personal failure or askance looks from others is one that insidiously persists in our society. That the idea of self-compassion is now used to therapeutic effect is (surprise surprise) something that we can attribute to the ideas of Jung. While he did not originate this particular idea, to him must go the credit for channeling the idea into modern psychological practice. I quote him here for the same reason I relish all of his ideas, even those he borrowed from other sources: as a writer, he had a flair for expressing simple ideas in words that pack a powerful punch and resonate with me. The medium isn't the message, but without the proper medium, the message may be more easily lost or ignored. What gets remembered gets incorporated, and what is incorporated has a chance to bring about lasting change.
The passage I quote below is about much more than having compassion for our failures, but for having compassion for our own demons. I mentioned above that I "bantered" with my inner demons during pandemic introspective. Language is critical here. I very intentionally did not say "silence" or "confront" or "destroy". While "banter" isn't quite right either, it's the closest term to "playful acquaintanceship at arm's length" that I could muster. Our demons are ours. We must own them. To disown them is to disown ourselves. This defeats the purpose of attempts at self-acceptance.
What I quote here comes from the Collected Works, Volume 11, paragraphs 519-520:
"People forget that even doctors have moral scruples, and that certain patients' confessions are hard even for a doctor to swallow. Yet the patient does not feel himself accepted unless the very worst in him is accepted too. No one can bring this about by mere words; it comes only through reflection and through the doctor's attitude towards himself and his own dark side. If the doctor wants to guide another, or even accompany him a step of the way, he must feel with that person's psyche. He never feels it when he passes judgment. Whether he puts his judgments into words, or keeps them to himself, makes not the slightest difference. To take the opposite position, and to agree with the patient offhand, is also of no use, but estranges him as much as condemnation. Feeling comes only through unprejudiced objectivity...
"We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses. I am the oppressor of the person I condemn, not his friend and fellow-sufferer. I do not in the least mean to say that we must never pass judgment when we desire to help and improve. But if the doctor wishes to help a human being he must be able to accept him as he is. And he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is.
"Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple, and so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one's whole outlook on life. That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ--all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend himself--that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved--what then? Then, as a rule, the whole truth of Christianity is reversed: there is then no more talk of love and long-suffering; we say to the brother within us 'Raca', and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide him from the world, we deny ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves, and had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form, we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had crowed."
A mainstay quote on the Internet (whose original source I have never been able to substantiate to my satisfaction) admonishes us to be kind to others, always, for everyone is fighting some secret battle that we know nothing about. The thing most unknown to each of us is our very selves, as well as the inner battles even now being waged.