I broke shelter-in-place yesterday and went walking up to Coit tower, atop Telegraph Hill, later in the evening. It felt good to plow up the Greenwich steps, which left me winded and exhausted, since it was the first real outdoor exercise I have done in over two months. Then I was left to overlook the night lights of the Bay and the city from one of its premiere vantage points. I forgot how great it can feel to be alive.

So, I've made a resolution to go out walking throughout the city, every single night, from now until the end of the pandemic. Or, until things get so bad that I have to board my door completely shut. As long as I observe social distancing, this seems to be the equivalent of staying cooped up the way I have been, which is beginning to really bum me out.

Life's a tad too short to play by the strictest possible version of the rules. I needs me my exercise.

Shelter-in-place has opened up a couple of new worlds to me, which I find incredibly exciting. I have, as anyone who has read my stuff on here knows, written extensively about religion, religious belief, and, in particular, about the Christianity that is so fashionable in my home country. I haven't spoke of it fondly. This has been a necessary step in my evolution of understanding the world. For a long time, I avoided getting too deeply into political thinking, because the best way for me to come to understand the whole situation is to adopt the views of one side and hold them as my dogma for a while. Then, adopt the views of the opposite side for a time. After doing this, only then can you transcend both viewpoints and adopt a moderate middle ground, in light of the perspective of either viewpoint.

So it was with religion. Many years ago, I was pretty sure that, in order to understand Christianity the proper way for myself, I was going to have to practice it, as a believer, for a non-trivial duration of time, and then practice the rantings of the atheist that believes religion is always a wholesale evil. There is no deeper understanding (at least for me) without stepping into the shoes of both sides and seeing the world through their eyes. I must understand why it is that religious people hate atheists with such vitriol and why athiests are so kind to return the favor to the devout believers, and to do so requires an immersion in both camps. To ascend to the summit of the peak across the valley, one must first descend into the depths below. Such is required to attain any understanding of merit.

Publicly, I still take the hard line of arguing against religious belief. If I'm talking with someone who is defending the virtues of faith, having a debate, and there is an audience of people who might be influenced by our discussion, then I'm taking the hard line against religion every single time. Religious faith has enough blood on its hands, from the time it has spent as a tyrannical authority when it acquires political power, that it needs no more defenders. Whatever evil has come from separating church and state in secular societies pales drastically in comparison to the evil that comes from the fusion of the two.

Privately, though, my opinion has always been far more nuanced and complicated to articulate. Up until recently, the only person I knew of who was making any effort to give voice to my own perspective was Jordan Peterson, the professor of psychology from Canada who specializes in understanding how mythology reflects and affects human psychology, but who is best known for pissing off a generation of transgendered people.

I've had religious people defend Jordan Peterson to me as an advocate for religious practice in society, because he advances the Nietzschian idea that completely tossing out Christianity would result in nihilism and lead to the collapse of Western civilization. However, Peterson freely admits when asked directly that he doesn't think the stories in the bible are literally true, only that they contain metaphorical truth. I'm pretty sure the same people I've talked to who would defend him would take exception to this point of view. To those who would bemoan the death of organized religion in our society, the fact that someone like Peterson, who can hardly be described as a believer, is now the most prominent defender of religion to atheists, but purely on utilitarian grounds, should be cause for concern. That this is the strongest defense that can be mounted to a generation of increasing non-believers should desperately worry those believers who seek to preserve the faith.

Though I often disagree with him, I find Peterson to be incredibly articulate at times, even if a tad rambly, and so I have spent some time following him around on YouTube to get his perspectives on a few things. When it comes to religion, however, I see the points he's trying to make, but he almost always fails to make them persuasively or cogently. He is clearly incredibly smart, and he does a better job of speaking from the hip in public than I could do at this point, but the perspective he is trying to get atheists to see doesn't come into focus clearly enough. This is probably by design; as a practicing therapist, Peterson must know that simply handing people the answers to difficult questions isn't doing anyone any favors.

Outside of this, I have been largely attempting to construct my own opinion about religious belief that falls somewhere between fundamentalism and anti-theism. I've done a poor job of coming up with answers, not least of all because the questions I've sought to answer have been poorly posed and constructed. Recently, I found a good deal of help.

Carl Jung, one of the patriarchs of the modern field of psychology alongside Sigmund Freud, is where I take my inspiration from. I discovered the writings of Jung very recently when someone, knowing full well that I am an intellectual who values philosophical knowledge, encouraged me to start reading them for a deeper understanding of the world. I think she understood exactly the path she was putting me on when she made this suggestion, and knew full well that he would resonate with me. He most certainly has.

Over the course of his life, Jung wrote literally thousands of pages about analytical psychology, therapy, dream analysis, and much more about the field that he had a large hand in establishing. His works go far beyond this. He was, without exaggeration, one of the greatest intellects of the 20th century. He might be the greatest intellect of the 20th century. In my mind, he is almost certainly one of the greatest minds that our species has ever produced.

Jung was possessed of a mind that was quick to absorb, long to retain, hesitant to dismiss, and slow to judge. He seemed to carry around incredible sums of knowledge about most of philosophy, history, mythology, comparative religion, art, literature, mysticism, spiritualism, and many other fields. When he chooses to write about a topic, he does so in a non-linear fashion that draws up all of these fields and synthesizes them into a singular roundabout dance that circles the very point he is trying to articulate. He doesn't so much spell out what his point is, as much as draw upon examples from several disciplines to construct a picture that leaves the reader to infer his point from the negative space that it creates. Open any one of his works to any random page and start reading, and you're sure to find a set of insights that would be hard won for any of us. He seems to have just had a brain that could effortlessly conjure up these brilliant thoughts.

He is not an easy read. Much of my reading material de rigueur is philosophical works that discuss ethics and epistemology in the most inaccessible fashion, and I struggled to get through one of the few books he wrote for the layman on his field: Modern Man in Search of a Soul. This is absolutely a book I would recommend to anyone who wants deeper insight into their own psychology, and a deeper understanding of the psychology of the world. It was a slow read for me, in part because he has such a sophisticated style of writing, but also because each chapter must be consumed slowly, methodically, and should be carefully reflected upon at length in order to glean all of the insights from it.

This is, perhaps, a bold claim to make, and one that demands a defense. I'm quite fond of making claims on here without substantiating them, as most Internet bloggers are prone to doing, but let me try and outline some of the more interesting points. I'll touch upon the chapters of the aforementioned title above, namely, Modern Man.

In the chapter "Psychological Types", Jung lays out the different functions of personality and how they combine to form a discrete number of possible forms. At the heart of this is a conflict between his mentor, Freud, and another massively influential psychologist named Alfred Adler. Freud believed that human beings are driven by sexual desires, and more generally by the pursuit of pleasure, as driven by the attachments we formed with our parents in our youth. In this way, human beings are obsessed with external objects, the relationships they have with the world around them. We use our parental relationships to understand and relate to the world and the other people around us.

Adler, on the other hand, believed that human beings were driven more by a will to power, which he felt was compensatory to inner feelings of insecurity. The individual is aware of his own inadequacies and thus seeks to behave in a way that overcomes these, if not in actual fact, then merely in appearance to his fellow humans. It is the focus on the interior life that drives him.

Freud and Adler insisted that each of their interpretations was correct to the complete exclusion of the other. Jung believed that there was merit in each approach, but in differing degrees for any individual patient. He therefore sought to create a rubrik under which both approaches were valid in their respective contexts. With the externally focused individuals of Freud at the one extreme, and with the internally focused individuals of Adler on the other, we get the gradient of extroversion versus introversion, on which any individual may lie at any given time. Their position will fluctuate throughout their life. Thus, Jung created the extroversion-introversion spectrum to resolve a conflict between two of his peers.

There are three other functions of personality described: thinking, feeling, and sensing. Jung took the inspiration for these three functions directly from the early Gnostics, a sect of Christianity that flourished in the centuries right after Jesus, but has all but died out now. The alert reader will have already realized that what Jung established by doing this is the embryo that later yields our Meyers-Briggs personality type indicator tests.

In another chapter, "The Stages of Life", Jung contrasts the psychology of youth with that of old age. In his practice as a therapist, he found that he could account for the neurosis of his patients by considering how his older patients were obdurately, or perhaps ignorantly, attempting to apply the solutions of their youth to their time in old age. The function of an individual, both for themselves and for the world they live in, should be radically different in the second half of life than in the first. To try and be old too quickly, or to attempt to be young in one's later years, is to court disaster. The manner in which this is described and laid out is very eloquent, and if there is one chapter of the many that I encourage you to read above all others, it is this one, particularly if you are approaching or have passed middle age.

The chapter on dream analysis is more interesting than you might believe, especially if you are of the cynical variety that believes dreams are nothing more than the noctural, random firings of the brain which offer no insight. Jung does make a compelling, albeit not altogether scientific, case that the wise men of ancient tribes were those who had learned to properly read the symbols presented to us in dreams, and who were able to interpret these as sages of the tribe. This is not mere superstition, according to Jung, and it is not an accident that modern psychologists now act as these ancient shamans once did in interpreting what the unconscious, through dreams imagery, might be trying to communicate to us.

The last point I'll offer is about the relationship between psychology and religion. He uses the example of Hero of Alexandria, who 2,000 years ago used to create various mechanical wonders and clockwork toys to delight audiences in what was a kind of circus in the ancient Hellenistic world. Hero created, as a toy marvel, a precursor to the modern steam engine. Those in the ancient Hellenistic world never developed this and used it for any mechanical advantage, because, according to Jung, there was no need. It took the Industrial Revolutions of the 19th century, specialization of labor, and modern economics to not only invent the solution, but more importantly to promulgate it to practical effect. Only when the void in our world was gaping and large enough did the idea expand to claim substantial space. The same is likely true for the Antikythera mechanism, which was an ancient analogue computer of the Greeks. This didn't give birth to better and more powerful computers, because the zeitgeist of advanced computation had not yet developed in the societies that used it.

The idea of the zeitgeist can be extended to science versus religion, and it is this idea that I will embellish in the rest of this post. Jung was an ardent student of Nietzsche, and noticed that, in his proclamations of "God is dead", Nietzsche was certainly not being celebratory. He was, instead, lamenting the fact, and expressed concern about what impact the death of God would have on people en masse. To trace a chronology of a few hundred years: Martin Luther starts the Protestant Reformation, which paves the way for divergence of thought, which gives birth to Enlightenment thought, which gives birth to the scientific way of interpreting the world, which gives birth to the establishment of secular government in a society that has recently thrown off its subservience to the British crown, which gives birth to a nation of people who are free to intrepret the world without the construct of God without political consequences. This is the geneology of the Western world that Nietzsche inhabited. God was killed by a long sequence of events that leads to the rise of secularism.

If organized religion is the manner in which mankind connects to the inner world of the psyche and allows it some intuition of understanding about it, then it is precisely at the point that this construct begins to wane in our civilization that Freud conceives of the modern "scientific" field of psychology that is meant to give human beings insight into their own inner minds and psychic processes. Jung did not think this was an accident; he thought it was simply a restoration of balance. Rationality and spirituality may be regarded as yin and yang, that must exist in balance opposite each other. In light of this, as society became more and more intellectual and rational in its perception of the world, as religion was in decline, it needed to establish some ostensibly rational way to connect with the spiritual. Modern psychology is invented by mankind right at the time that there is a large enough void that must be filled.

Early on in his career studying psychology under Freud, he and Jung had a falling out that was centered around the topic of religion. Freud would be right at home with the "new atheists" of our day. He believed all religion was little more than a delusion, a set of constructs artificially created by human beings in order to cope with the harsh realities of the world. Jung felt that there was some objective reality underlying all world religions. It is Jung who found that the same symbolism occurs in different religions throughout the world, that each symbol serves the same function in different cultures, and that this came about in the different cultures independent of each other. It was largely this that led him to develop the idea of the collective unconscious, namely, the idea that there is some part of our minds, not directly accessible to our conscious minds, that all human beings are born with. This contains the archetypes and the symbols universal to all people, everywhere, which invariably end up serving as the basis of any given mythology that a tribe or group creates in order to make sense of the chaos of the world.

The American mythologist Joseph Campbell was one of Jung's more famous students, and he took up the investigation of this latter point as his life's work. Campbell is, I'm willing to wager, the man who served more than any other as the inspiration for Dan Brown's character of Robert Langdon.

While Freud believed it was modern man's duty to throw off the shackles of religion, Jung felt that there was an innate function that religious mythology served, and that we shouldn't be so flippant about throwing it away. The manner in which Jung makes this case is persuasive. It is this perspective that Jordan Peterson is attempting to present to a modern-day audience, but he does not, in my immodest opinion, do it with the force or eloquence of Jung.

I recently saw the old 1973 film The Wicker Man. This movie stands out, in my mind, as one of the greatest horror films of all time. Without violence, without gore, it manages to disturb us by putting our own values up for self-criticism. It is about a police officer who is sent to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. He travels to the place this has been reported, an isolated British isle, where the locals practice an archaic form of paganism. The story is restrained in building tension, and it is careful to draw parallels between the officer's own devotion to Christianity and the paganism of the people he visits. When the final scene arrives, it is difficult to sit in judgment of a ritual of human sacrifice from the standpoint of a culture where we revere the tenets of our own cult of human sacrifice, namely, that of the Christ. In one scene, a woman sneers at the officer's criticisms of their way of life, saying to him, "You know nothing of sacrifice." Perhaps she is right. It may be that we in the Western world are all cheating by finding our spritualism by accepting a savior god who has reputedly made the sacrifice of himself for us.

What all of Jung's discourse has made me recognize is the manner in which I have sought to understand the world for the last several years. I came to religion in an effort to improve myself. When I had a falling out with my own faith, I was propelled me to seek a rationalistic, intellectual, philosophical means of understanding the world. Both of these perspectives, both religious and scientific, resonated with me. I felt they each contained their own variation of the truth. The itch in my mind was comparable to that of Jung comparing the psychologies of Freud and Adler discussed earlier. I felt that both of them needed to be brought under a larger rubrik, where both are valid in their own way, but mutually exclusive to each other on some spectrum. This is what Jung attempted to do in his writings on religion: establish that science and religion are simply mutually exclusive psychological modes of interpreting the world around us.

I have always sought to understand the world psychologically, even if this is not the word I would have used five years ago. I sought to improve my own personality, mental health, my way of relating to people around me, and a more complete understanding of the world. This happened at a time when I had just spent years absorbing the principles of computer science, computer engineering, chemistry, physics, biology, botany, and so on. The seesaw in my brain was heavily tilted towards the intellectual, and so I seek out religion in an effort to rebalance the scales. As I plunged myself deeper and deeper into a purely religious understanding of the world, I found that this was also not sufficient on its own, and that it estranged me from the world I found myself in. Disillusioned, I yo-yo'd back to a philosophical worldview, which shone light on so much I formerly misunderstood but, like its predecessors, was incomplete for my own purposes. The point is not to figure out whether the extreme of rationality or the extreme of spirituality better suits me, but to balance the two extremes in harmony with each other.

The underlying motivation of all of this is to understand the psychology of myself, the psychology of those around me, the psychology of a group, and the psychology of a civilization. Religion is a kind of Rorschach test that allows a person to assess what is going on in a person's head. In the Western world, where the dominant religion is that of the Christ, the figure of Jesus is the symbol of the ideal man that we should strive to be like. This was encapsulated, in my youth, in the slogan "What Would Jesus Do?" Answer that question for yourself in several contexts. Read the Gospels, and answer the question: what acts of Jesus resonate with you? Which do you seek to emulate in your own life? The shapeless blob of paint on the paper doesn't change, but the object the individual perceives the paint to resemble tells you what might be lurking in their head. Ask these questions of yourself, or of someone else, and the answers will tell you a great deal about who the person is.

So it is with a civilization. The best, and probably the only, means of analyzing the dreams of a culture in order to figure out what spectres are haunting it is to assess the symbols and motifs of the religious mythology it has embraced. The Christianity of any age, in any location in the world, is always distinct to its time and place. Even if the founders of the United States were Christians, they almost certainly embraced it in ways that would seem foreign to our understanding of the world, so much so that it would make little sense to say we ought to be Christians simply because they were. The shape of the void they were filling, while it might somewhat resemble our own, is distinct enough that we should be careful about drawing comparisons. And how the United States of today seeks to force its will back on its religion, and mutate the Christian mythology, is indicative of who we really are.

The book I'm currently reading by Jung is called Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seens in the Skies. What is delightful about the book is that Jung resists any temptation to make any conclusion about whether or not there really are flying objects that people are seeing in the skies. As a psychologist, he probably well understood that this question is irrelevant. If a patient comes to a therapist claiming that there is an evil leprechaun living in their basement, the therapist is justified in dismissing this claim as objectively false inside of their own head. Indeed, this objective understanding is necessary for dealing with the matter at hand. But pointing out that the patient's perception is true, simply stating this fact to them, does not sufficiently address the matter. The patient believes that it is true, and so it must be treated as true in this regard in order to explore what is really going on with the patient.

This is a perfect analogy for my stance on organized religion. Let me take this on first from the religious perspective, and then from the atheist perspective. There is a commonly offered objection to religious belief, which I happen to agree with. Religious people often claim that they have had a feeling of God, a feeling of the Holy Spirit moving through them, which they claim validates their belief in God objectively, but in a way that they cannot demonstrate objectively. In other words: they feel it, but cannot prove it to anyone else. As a matter of religious dogma, I claim this is invalid according to the Lutheran maxim of sola scriptura. God only speaks to human beings through His prophets, and since all the prophets are dead or inaccessible to us, the only thing we have is their prophecies as written in the Holy Bible. Any claims of subjective feelings of God are therefore invalid, since anyone claiming to have felt the touch of God, or experienced an intervention from God in the course of their lives, is claiming to be a prophet, which, from a fundamentalist perspective, I can only reject as a heresy.

More problematically, if you claim belief in something that you feel to be true subjectively, but insist that is must be treated as objectively true by others, then you set a dangerous precedent. If I accept the belief in the Christian God from someone as operative fact, then what is to stop me from accepting that al-Qaeda flying planes into buildings because Allah wills it? What is to stop me from accepting Charles Manson killing celebrities because he thinks there's a hidden message in the music of the Beatles telling him to do so? In forcing your own subjective feeling on the world on externally valid fact, you wall yourself off from the rest of the world and everyone around you. The subjective is valid for you, in your own affairs, but only the objective must be true for us, collectively.

This logic cuts both ways. The corollary objection, which I offer here regards the modern-day atheist position. Typically, the atheist argument goes something like this: if you believe in something like a religion, some kind of mythology, that cannot be established scientifically, or empirically, then you are laboring under a delusion that poses a threat to the collective well-being. There is something to this, as noted above, but if you come back to the flying saucers, then you must consider that there are a great many people who do believe in the very real existence of God, and so, whether or not it is objectively real, it is very real to enough people that it will have the force of objective fact in our world. If you simply dismiss all of these people as being deluded, then you are walling yourself off from a great majority of your fellow human creatures, and you immediately preclude yourself from attaining any kind of psychological understanding about the what is going on with religious believers.

There is something to be said for both of these perspectives, and it not immediately clear how the two might be reconciled. Reconciliation might be besides the point; nature likes to disperse her seeds widely. In evolutionary terms, the natural world favors diversity, since either worldview or state of mind might convey a survival advantage on the human beings holding it in different contexts. To insist that we try and force a monoculture on the psychology of all human beings globally is to make us all susceptible to the same adversities, just the way genetically cloned crops make the entirety of our food supply easily decimated by a single pest or pathogen.

There is also something to be said for the matter of balance. The ancient Greeks had these very same debates. Rough drafts of the notions of evolution and atomic theory existed in the writings of Empedocles and Epicurus over 2000 years ago, and they debated their materialistic philosophies of the natural world with others, those Greeks who felt that there must be a driving metaphysical force behind our world, animated by gods of the Greek theology of the day. The "science versus religion" debates, as they exist today, go back at least this far. One could argue that the rationality of the Enlightenment, as described above, was simply a collective attempt to restore balance to the Medieval world which had gone too far in its embrace of the religious and the transcendent.

I abstain from reaching any concrete conclusions about the necessity of religion, and in particular, of Christianity, to Western civilization. It was argued by Jung, and is now being argued by Jordan Peterson, that we cast off the mythologies of the Judeo-Christian tradition at our peril. If we did so, the argument goes, social structures would decohere and things would go to chaos very quickly. My question: if the tendancy to mythologize and create religious systems is not only inherent to human beings, but that the structure of the archetype that underlie all of them is present and identical in all human beings in the collective unconscious, then if we were to dispense with our ancient mythologies, wouldn't human beings inevitably establish new mythologies that capture the values we currently practice? It seems to me that things may destabilize temporarily, but we would eventually reintroduce a stable replacement system.

It's very possible that this would be a good idea. Atheists are fond of opening the Old Testament, finding a passage that is morally reprehensible, and expressing their disgust at the immorality of God. They reject any notion of truth in the book because they don't like something they found in it. As I'm fond of pointing out, this is a philosophical fallacy; the truth isn't only those parts of the world that you are comfortable accepting. In turn, the religious defend them by pointing out that these are passages that we no longer live by. Fortunately, we no longer stone children to death for disobediance, for example, because our own culture has a different understanding of discipline and means of keeping order. It is anathema to apply our modern-day ethics to the wisdom of the ancients, just as it is anathema to use the wisdom of the ancients to derive modern-day ethics.

However, there is an important point to draw out here: if you think that civilization is predicated on the writings of the Bible, then you're claiming that, in the event of the collapse of civilization, the Bible itself could be the thing we use to start over. While our current culture has learned to ignore some of the more grotesque rules you find in the Old Testament, if you start over from scratch, with the Bible as the initial boundary conditions, you're not guaranteed to end up in the same place. You may not have Christianity develop as a force in the world in quite the same way, or an Enlightenment, which provides the model for democracy, which gives us the wonderful world we now live in. Chaos theory suggests we'd probably end up in a radically different place. If you think of scripture as the bootloader, then civilization is the operating system that has been created for us to function under. If civilization is wiped out, then you don't necessarily get the same operating system re-created with scripture as first principles.

But then, maybe the entire point is that don't actually have any control over how things will play out, and so it is silly to attempt to play that game. Human beings the world over will not dispose of religion because we all get together and decide, collectively, that it would be good to do so. Any doomsayer that claims we're courting disaster by moving away from religious belief is gaurding against a contingency that none of us, as individuals, can actually control. As a culture, we may continue to embrace the world more and more scientifically, but once we go too far in that direction, we'll find a way to restore our connection to the numinous and the transcendent. Collectively, our mass psychology will insist on restoring the balance.

The overall message I take from Jung is that a scientific understanding of our world is simply one psychological mode of viewing our reality, and it is only one among many. There is more to the world than the simply the material, but since the material is the only thing that can be established scientifically, it is the only thing that can accurately guide us collectively. Politicians and leaders should act according to these principles and understandings. However, as individuals, we should seek to figure out what spiritual and metaphysical truths manifest themselves to us, and let these guide us as best we can, without insisting that others go along with us. We may seek out others who connect to the metaphysical in the same way we do, and form groups around them. Thus the balance of the individual, as well as the collective, is maintained in a stable state. The empirical understanding in us must not reject the subjective metaphysical, and the metaphysical must not insist on being regarded as empirical.

What most young men seem to seek out is a mentor, a teacher that can illuminate how the world works and give us understanding that guides us through the course of our lives. I've often wondered which Greek school of philosophy I would have gravitated towards if I were living in Athens in the centuries after Socrates was executed. Would I be a Cynic? A Stoic? A Skeptic? An Aristotelian? I've only been reading Carl Jung for the past couple of months, digesting his ideas and letting them steer my own understanding for the duration of the coronavirus quarantine, so it may be too soon to reach any definitive conclusions. But Jung seems to be the teacher that I have always been looking for, the rare man who offers a cohesive and accurate perspective on a world that is too complicated for most of us to make sense of on our own, as well as a rough sequence of guideposts for how to navigate it. I have more than half a mind to pursue graduate school so I have an excuse to keep studying Jung full-time, with the intent of one day making a career out of applying his wisdom to help others.