Coffee & Wisdom

David Breeden is speaking all week about the problem with language.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden…. This is Coffee and Wisdom, and thanks for joining us today. We have gone to a live-on-Tuesday-and-Thursday format for summer Wisdom. And this week we’ve been talking about The Problem With Language. What is the problem? Well, as I mentioned the other day, one thing is that it’s really, really old thing. It’s probably about two million years old, and it probably occurred before either of the Neanderthals or the Homo Sapiens, probably Homo Erectus was the first speaking human type animal. And therefore, this is a very, very old and imbedded form of communication, the way we talk to each other. And so it’s almost instinctive in that way, which… that’s pretty cool, except that we don’t always know exactly then how this works. And it’s a little hard to figure out how it works, actually, I mentioned on Tuesday that Daniel Everett has written a book back in 2016 called How Language Began, The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention. It’s a little bit controversial, but I think he’s on the right track to talk about Homo Erectus and how we developed language. And he says a human language has three properties. One is arbitrariness, one is intentionality, and one is the word he kind of makes up, which is conventionalization, which I have a hard time saying. But here’s how it really goes. Number one, the sounds that we make are completely arbitrary. That’s why different languages have different words in them. So the word tree is absolutely arbitrary in the way that that sound comes out. Other languages have other words for it. English has other words for different kinds of trees. So it’s arbitrary. We just have to remember that. But it feeds into intentionality. At least two people have to agree that a particular sound means some particular thing or we couldn’t have any kind of communication. And then from that we get the conventionalization idea that we, a larger and larger group, begins to agree on some sort of meaning for this language. That’s all very great and cool, except it doesn’t always work that way, as we will talk (about) today. Number one is Epimenides, who is really an unknown philosopher at this point, except for one very famous paradox in which, he was from Crete, and he said all Cretans are liars. Okay, well, was he telling the truth or was he lying then? And this is the paradox. And we suddenly realized that language sometimes breaks down. Sometimes what we say and what has to be real, whatever that means, is in some way disagreement or we can’t figure it out. And that’s what I want to look at today. I mentioned on Tuesday a simple phrase like “God exists” suddenly has some problematic things to it, if those arbitrary sounds begin to mean different things to different people. We’ve talked a lot about the concept of God in Coffee and Wisdom. There are lots of ways to define God. One is a very Theistic, that God is outside the universe and some sort of throne or in the sky. Also, though, we have Pantheism, in which God is exactly, matches the universe, no more, no less. And then there is Panentheism, in which there is a God and the universe. The universe is in God, but God is larger than the universe. And then a Process-Relational idea, it’s kind of a little bit panentheistic, a little bit pantheistic. But this is the idea that all the processes of the universe, including the expansion and an accelerating expansion, are all parts of the creativity of something that we can call God. So we can mean a whole lot of different things by this arbitrary sound. And again, we can say God exists,

David Breeden is speaking all week about the problem with language.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is coffee and wisdom in our summer form when we are live on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9 a.m. Central Time. This week, I’m going to be looking at the problem with language. So one thing we have to think about is when writing began. And you may or may not remember the first author ever, the first person to name herself, was Enheduanna in the 23rd century BCE. She was a Sumerian in the city of Ur and a priestess of Inanna, one of the gods of the Sumerians. She wrote, “I the high priestess,I,Enheduanna! I carried the ritual basket, I intoned the acclaim.” And she wrote. We have about 12 to 15 poems that she wrote that were put in cuneiform on clay tablets. And so she is the first named author in human history. And then, you know, after that we’ve had several of them. But we do need also to think about something a little bit before writing. We do know that writing appeared apparently more or less simultaneously in Mesopotamia, the Tigris and Euphrates area, China and in Mesoamerica. But where did language come from? While this is still very controversial, but it probably began somewhere around 2 million years ago, which would put it before the Neanderthals, before Homo sapiens, back to Homo erectus.

So most estimates right now are between 1.5 and 2 million years ago, and definitely in a different human type. Now, how do we know that? Well, it’s a little bit complicated, but for one thing, Homo erectus was able to sail miles and miles to islands on boats that they made that didn’t sink. And it takes about 20 people to start a new colony, if you’re going to go out and people something. And so probably they were the ones who did it, and probably they were able to talk because they would have had to cooperate building the boat. They would have had to figure out where to go and how, and they would have had to keep rowing or sailing, or something. So they probably were able to communicate. Also, we do have Venus of Berekhat Ram, which is something between 500,000 and probably 225,000 years old. It is the oldest religious, we think – a religious symbol that humanity has created. And it also would be dating back to Homo erectus, well before Homo sapiens came along. Well, this is still controversial, as I say. A recent book, “How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention,” by Daniel Everett, began to work on this idea of Homo erectus and how they probably developed language.

And then that language usage then goes into other human types. He says communication is the transfer of information, and language is the transfer of information by symbol. Now symbols then become writing, as we know, which is something probably around 50,000 years old, but maybe newer. It’s according to how you you cut the deck on that particular thing. But he thinks how language began was communication, transferred information, and then language was an information transfer of symbols into how we began to communicate with each other. Now what he says is that symbols have three properties. Now we’re talking about symbolic language, not writing at this point. One is arbitrariness. Wait, how does that work, right? Then intentionality, and then kind of a made up word, but “conventionalisation.” All right. What are those? Well, first off, with language is arbitrariness. These sounds that we make to do certain kinds of communication have no real connection to anything except themselves. So dentro is the word for tree in Greek.

David Breeden is speaking all week about hidden knowledge.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation, and this is Coffee and Wisdom. We are in summer wisdom now in which we’re live on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9:00 a.m. Central Time. And this week we’ve been talking about Mystery and the Inner Sanctum. That is, the idea that there are mystical things that can be discovered within certain wisdom traditions. We believe that the truth is out there, has to be, and as this magazine says, the Hunger for Secret Knowledge. But, of course, the question is, is there any? And that’s not such an easy question to answer. I mentioned on Tuesday that there’s one thing we have to remember when we talk about mystery religions, and that is that mystes in Greek didn’t mean what we mean by mystery these days. The mystes was an initiate into a mystery religion and then the mystical part of the mystery religion meant “that which awaits disclosure or interpretation.” So the mystery is not a mystery for those who are initiated into these particular cults, mystery religions. Some existed apparently in Egypt and then most in the Greco Roman world, first in Greece and then on over into Rome when the Roman Empire defeated Greece. Now, one thing we have to remember is that, in the ancient world, people thought that even more ancient wisdom was the best sort of wisdom. So the oldest traditions were the ones that must be closest to the truth. Now, why this would be true is a question that we have to beg, but this was definitely a belief in the ancient world. That’s one reason that Judaism was very much respected in the Roman Empire period, because the Romans knew that this was a very old religion. But the Romans also knew that it probably the oldest oldest, at least in the Mediterranean basin, is going to be in Egypt. So we’re going to have to go to Egypt to find out some things. But first, yes, we’ve got to talk about a civilization that probably didn’t exist at all, and that is Atlantis. Atlantis has been a mythical thing for a very long time. The idea here is an ideal Greek civilization on a continent called Atlantis, somewhere in the Atlantic that was somehow sunk into the sea, it disappeared. But it was one of one of the great civilizations. And, of course, as you know, there’s all kinds of books, movies, etc., about Atlantis. Now, where does this even come from? Well, Atlantis is first described in writing by Plato in a book called The Timaeus that he wrote in 360 BCE. Socrates is talking, but as we know, Plato fictionalizes Socrates’ language. So this is part of the description of Atlantis, this ideal civilization. “They despised everything but virtue…” (Now, those of you who have been following, along with Coffee and Wisdom, know that this virtue is the main good thing in Greek philosophy.) “…They despised everything but virtue, not caring for their present state of life, and thinking lightly on the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtuous friendship with one another, and that by excessive zeal for them, and honor of them, the good of them is lost, and friendship perishes with them.” So in Atlantis, the people put their priorities properly in the world, that is, friendship, goodwill and virtue are the good things. Money, luxury, gold. No, we don’t treasure those. Now you can see why this is an ideal situation. I think it’s probably fairly clear from the text itself that Pl...

David Breeden is speaking all week about hidden knowledge.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is Coffee and Wisdom and the first of our summer wisdom in which we will be here on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This week, I want to look a little bit at Mystery and the Inner Sanctum. What’s that? Well, there is this persistent idea among human beings that there is some kind of “mystery”. The truth is out there somewhere. And if we just keep digging, we can find it. Although a contemporary guru will say, “Truth is not hidden, you’re hiding from it.” Well, I don’t know which of those two is true, but. Or maybe both. Who knows? But there has been a lot of search for hidden things over time within a spiritual religious realm. You can get out your crystal ball and and talk to the crystal ball of people who can tell you something. Look, here it is. “The Lost Principle kept hidden from humanity”, the real law of attraction, by golly. And it’s right there. And apparently, I guess you need to pay something probably to access this knowledge. I don’t know about that. Of course, the tarot cards are always a very popular way of talking about that, which is hidden. And you can pay certain people to reveal those truths to you. And there’s all kinds of things like this when you start digging around the real story of the stunning discovery of hidden knowledge in the first five books of the Bible, “Cracking the Bible Code”, whatever could that mean? Well, actually, numerology and counting the letters of the Bible in various languages has been around for a very long time. And also we’ve got “5 Hidden Magical Secrets That Can Transform Your Life”. Again, one assumes there’s something to do with paying somebody something or buying something when this is involved. Of course, there are very old ones such as the Kabbalah. The Kabbalah is ancient mystic Jewish religion and is very much part of the tradition, but also has some kind of new age elements to it, too. It’s according to who you talk to, Alister Crowley, famous romanticist, “And the Hidden God”, again all kinds of hidden knowledge out there that you can find out all you gotta do is buy the book. Well, there’s also hidden knowledge that is very much hidden in plain sight. This is from a late 19th century painting. John Collier’s “The Priestess of Delphi”. He had studied the actual historical way. We think this actually worked. The Pythia this is the woman in the chair sat on a tripod chair holding laurel reeds and a dish of spring water. There she is. And you see the gas emanating from the bottom under this big crack and that has been studied over time. Did this really occur? What kind of gas was it? Was it hallucinogenic in some way? We don’t really know. There’s also some ideas that it was snake venom that was used to cause some kind of hallucinogenic state, or maybe it was a group of women who were out of power, obviously in a very patriarchal Greece of the day, and that they were stacking those cards by deciding what kind of fortunes they were going to tell at as the Oracle of Delphi.

It was a sisterhood of women who were brought in. They had to fast, they had to ritually bathe, and to get into the sisterhood. And then they became for a very short time, one of the Priestesses of Delphi. We don’t really know. We do know that the Oracle at Delphi was the most long lived of all the real, actual Greek religious sites. Over time, it’s mentioned by Socrates, it’s mentioned by Plato,

David Breeden is speaking all week about the common task.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden. I’m Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom, when we try to think about where religion and philosophy has been and where it is and where it might be going. This week we’ve been looking at something I’m calling the Common Task. That’s been looking at some ideas about what will happen when the Western world goes into secularity, when most people become secular. There has been a lot of angst and discussion around those questions. And so I’ve been trying to think this through a little bit. Just as a quick recap, yesterday I brought up the idea from Alec Ryrie, who is a professor with the ideas of Protestantism, probably the greatest scholar in the world at the moment on Protestantism anyway. His latest book is called Unbelievers, an Emotional History of Doubt, in which he says, “In light of all this history, the secular surge of our own times does not represent any kind of intellectual breakthrough. Instead, in the wake of two world wars and social revolutions which followed, our society no longer measures its morals by the old religious yardsticks.” Now, in his book Protestants, and in this book, he does trace the ideas of agnosticism and atheism all the way back into the Middle Ages and says, wait a minute, this is not really an intellectual movement so much as it is a movement of people rethinking how their morality and ethics comport with ideas that are in Christian religion. “Most of us,” he says, “…from the Middle Ages to the present, have always made the great choices— about our beliefs, values, identities and purposes— intuitively and emotionally with our whole selves. That applies to religious faith, which, as we all know, is often chosen for instinctive, inarticulate, intuitive reasons, but it is just as true of unbelief.” Again, undercutting the idea that unbelief or secularity is about making choices that are in some way rational, that are reading books on atheism and that kind of thing. No, probably not so much, because those books didn’t even exist when this movement began in the Western world that he traces. Yesterday, I asked some questions based on these ideas. Is religious thinking a different way of thinking from other ways of thinking? If so, how is it different? And if not, what is it like in other forms? And also I mentioned yesterday one of the central philosophers of secularity and religion, Charles Taylor, a Roman Catholic Canadian philosopher who talks about the “social imaginary,” which by which he means it’s “a matrix or web of stated and unstated assumptions that create the illusion of a particular society.” When we talk about “American society,” it is the social imaginary of American society that we are discussing. Yes, that varies among individuals. But there are certain strands that we pull together and say this is what American society is like. So my question: Are religious and secular imaginaries fundamentally different? superficially different? Or not actually different, but expressed in very different ways? I think this is a very central question. As a humanist myself, I really don’t see a huge difference between religious and secular thinking in terms of moral and ethical terms. So how does this happen? Well, my answers are that religious thinking is intuitive and emotional. Alec Ryrie, the professor, said this, and I think he’s absolutely right. But I also think what we call reason and rationality are also intuitive and emotional thinking. In addition, religious is, in fact much older than any human religion that now exists.

David Breeden is speaking all week about the common task.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is coffee and wisdom. Got a reminder for you. We are going to summer wisdom next week. So next week we will be going to a live on Tuesdays and Thursdays schedule. Just as a reminder, we’ll be live at 9:00 a.m. Central Time on Tuesdays and Thursdays beginning next week for our summer wisdom. So we get out into the world a little bit more. This week. We have been looking at the idea of a common task, and specifically I’m looking at how can a nation that is increasingly secular stick together and have a task to do. And I’ve been looking at ways in which a lot of religious people would argue that we can’t because you have to have a common religious heritage. Well, that’s not going to happen in the U.S. So how are we going to do this? Other thing is the question I’ve been talking about Charles Taylor, a very important Roman Catholic philosopher from Canada. His central book is A Secular Age from the from twenty seven. The central question of that book is, why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, fifteen hundred in our Western society? Well, in 2000, many of us find this not only easy, but even in escapable. That’s the central question of the book. Again, Charles Taylor being a religious person, but is he’s taking secularity very seriously in the way that he is considering how we are changing in the Western world, what he calls the the North Atlantic states.

This is a common critique of secularism from Charles Taylor. Quote, The dark side of individualism is a centering on the self which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer and meaning and less concerned with others or society. Very common critique. And he does go into some ways that’s not the case. But that is a central thesis of the book that secularity equals concern for self and unconcern for others and for society. I mentioned this book yesterday. It’s an earlier book, Charles Taylor A Sources of Self. He says that we have so many options that we have become perpetual seekers and that is the reason for. He argues that what we call identity politics that is occurring certainly in the US but also in Canada. And his argument is that identity politics, this idea of being perpetually seeking for the self, the authentic self, then produces this extreme individualism and it can be politically divisive. But also, he says, and I agree, that it can also function to call us to our better selves as we examine and reexamine our attitudes, our prejudices, where we’re coming from and why we think certain things. So here are some questions that I want to ask that I don’t necessarily know the answers to.

Those are the right kind of questions. First is, is religious thinking a different way of thinking from other ways of thinking? Because Charles Taylor certainly is saying, yes, it is. But is that the case? If so, how is religious thinking different than secular thinking? And if not, what is it in other forums? What is religious thinking from a secular standpoint? I think these are central questions to ask. A lot of philosophers and theologians are thinking about these issues these days. There are lots of answers floating around out there. But the real answer, I don’t know, it may still be eluding us. But these are very, very good questions to be asking. I think another book that Charles Taylor wrote is called Modern Social. Imagine areas. He didn’t make up this term. He didn’t coined the term, but he uses it a great deal.

David Breeden is speaking all week about the common task.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden. I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom. We are in our last week of Monday through Friday Coffee and Wisdom. Starting for our summer season, we will be going to live on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But there’s lots of content available on the Din of Conversation YouTube channel. So definitely check that out. But yeah, we will be trimming things back for the summer starting next week. On so, Tuesdays and Thursdays starting next week. This week we’ve been looking at the common task, looking at the idea of secularity and the civil responsibility which many religious people have argued can’t be done in a secular society. So we have been kind of considering how we might do that going forward. One of the central thinkers in the idea of what secularism means in the 20th and into the 21st century is Charles Taylor. His book, “A Secular Age” is considered by many to be the book about this. It came out in 2006. In that one, he says, the dark side of individualism is a centering on the self which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer and meaning and less concerned with others or society. This is kind of the common way that the idea of secularity and individualism is being dealt with these days. But Charles Taylor is quite the thinker and he has made this a little bit more complex than merely saying that secular people are all individualists.

So I take a little bit of a deeper look into some of what he has to say today. And he has himself said that his philosophical project, the main thing that he wants to talk about, is he wants to develop a convincing philosophical anthropology. What is a human being like in our secular world? It’s not as easy as it looks at first. He does claim and I have a suspicion that he’s probably right. One thing he says is the Enlightenment conception of the individual is based in assumptions of hierarchy. That so to treat people with dignity and respect, we need to take full account of their varied social situations. He says, you know, we have to think back on this Enlightenment idea of the worth of the individual. The individual meant a very different thing in those days. So we need to think about that. He sets up this conversation in a book called “Sources of the Self.” It’s an expensive book to acquire. It didn’t come out as a huge press run, but it is available at many libraries. So the Enlightenment conception that one of the individual is based on conceptions of the hierarchy. He has some other ideas about the Enlightenment and areas that it pushes us into, to make mistakes as well, one being language. In the Enlightenment period there was the printing press and there was the spoken word and that was about it. Well, that’s not how language works nowadays.

And also, Taylor talks a little bit about what the concept of the soul was about, coming out of the Protestant Reformation into the Enlightenment period and how we consider the soul nowadays. Yes, some religious people still talk in terms of the soul. And, yes, we even use it in popular parlance. But the idea of the soul, as it once was, is no longer how we think of the authentic self or the authentic individual. And this affects the way we approach the socialization of human beings. We have so many options, he says, that we are perpetual seekers nowadays, and that that is one of the reasons for what we call identity politics, the rise of identity politics. So this can produce extreme individualism, says Taylor. And it can be politically divisive, but it can also serve to call us to our better selv...

David Breeden is speaking all week about the common task.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation, and this is coffee and Wisdom. This week we are considering the idea of a common task. Yesterday, I was talking a little bit about how many people of a religious bent argue that it’s impossible to have a common task if we don’t have a common religious heritage within a country. Well, that’s not going to work out here in the US for various reasons. One, there’s a whole lot of religions here. And, two, there are a lot of us also who are secular people who don’t buy into a particular religious bent. So is there a common task? What can we look at outside of the traditional way of seeing this? I do want to mention Nikolai Fedorov, 1829 to 1903, a futurist, a Christian mystic, a friend of Leo Tolstoy. He famously wrote a book, “What was Man created for? The Philosophy of the Common Task.” And you’ll find him pretty easily if you begin to do a little Web search on this idea of a common task. Again, he’s coming out of a Christian viewpoint, and so he thinks that Russia would do well to follow a common Christian path, in his case, certainly Eastern Orthodoxy. And his friend Leo Tolstoy and he eventually fell out because Leo Tolstoy became less conventionally Christian as his life progressed. Eventually, Tolstoy says, “In affirming my belief in Christ’s teachings, I could not help explaining why I do not believe and consider as mistaken

the Church’s doctrine, which is usually called Christianity.” Leo Tolstoy later becomes a pacifist, a Christian pacifist, and much more of a Christian socialist pacifist than was popular during his lifetime. He was reading some Unitarian and Universalist writers from the U.S. to get at these ideas, famously. But back to Fedorov, who says this about the common task: “Must man be the exterminator of his own species and the predator of nature, or must he be its regulator, its manager and the restorer to life of his own kin, victims of his blind unruly youth, or his past – that is, of history as fact?” As a futurist, Fedorov thought that we could be good stewards of the land and take care of ourselves, but we would have to face up to historical wrongs that had been going on within various national states. And that brings me to the current cover of the Atlantic Monthly: “Return the National Parks to the Tribes,” an article written by David Treuer. This is called, by the way, “vicarious intergenerational moral responsibility,” a Fedorov term translated from Russian, but a vicarious intergenerational moral responsibility. That is what Fedorov was talking about people needing to take up. And that indeed is what The Atlantic Monthly is talking about this particular month. David Treuer has written a book called “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America 1890 to the Present.” And he was recently interviewed on National Public Radio. “No one’s seriously just suggesting, why don’t we just grant the entire country back? But what I am saying is that this kind of reparation is a chance for the country to put into practice its best ideals, its noblest impulses.

America needs to be reminded of its capacity for justice, fairness and compassion. And so for that reason and even that reason alone, I think this is an idea worth considering.” That is, returning the national parks to native peoples. And if you’re interested, do find the Atlantic Monthly from this month. But “vicarious intergenerational moral responsibility,

David Breeden is speaking all week about the common task.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden and the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is coffee and wisdom. We’ve been going five days a week in recent months, but starting in May, we’re going to be going live on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have lots of prerecorded content if you’ve got to do something in the morning at 9:00 a.m., but we will be live on Tuesdays and Thursdays through the summer season, and then we will begin a new program year after the leaves begin to turn. This week. I want to look at the question of a common task, and this is a major point of discussion right now in our culture. I want to go back to someone I’ve mentioned several times, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. His book from 2007 “A Secular Age” is considered game changing in terms of secularity and theological speculation. He has this to say about our contemporary era, “The dark side of individualism is a centering on the self, which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others or society.” This is a constant within the more theologically inclined philosophers to say that secularity is about me, me, me, and that the more religious aspects of culture are about us. So that’s what I want to kind of think about this week is, is that true? And if it is true, what does that mean, etc.? So that’s kind of the starting point on our theological and sociological speculations for the week.

One of the right wing think tanks does a an online magazine called “First Things”. It calls itself “America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life”. And one of the things that came out a couple of years ago was a manifesto from this group called “Against the Dead Consensus”. And this is a conservative Christian speaking. And they say, “We believe home matters. For those who enjoy the upsides, a borderless world brings intoxicating new liberties. They can go anywhere, work anywhere. They can call themselves ‘citizens’ of the world. But the jet-setters’ vision clashes with the human need for a common life, and it has bred resentments that are only beginning to surface. We embrace the new nationalism insofar as it stands against the utopian ideal of a borderless world that in practice leads to universal tyranny. Whatever else might be said about it, the Trump phenomenon has opened up space in which to pose these questions anew. We will guard that space jealously and we respectfully decline to join with those who would resurrect warmed-over Reaganism and foreclose honest debate.” So here is a right wing think tank group of a lot of ministers and Christian thinkers saying that the new nationalism is a good idea. It’s putting us back in a an “us” phenomenon that has been ignored within secular humanism, as they would call it. Yesterday’s New York Times for April 24, 2021. Ross Douthat, one of the opinion columnists, he is a Roman Catholic and conservative thinker, said “The Two Crises of Conservatism”, He headlines things yesterday. “The GOP doesn’t know how to win majorities. The right doesn’t know what it’s conserving any more.” Well, that’s an interesting that kind of argument. He says, “But beneath this party crisis, there is the deeper one having to do with what conservatism under a liberal order exists to actually conserve.” Two weeks ago, for Coffee and Wisdom, we did discuss this idea that liberalism doesn’t mean being liberal, as it does in the U.S., entirely.

David Breeden is speaking all week about Naive Optimism

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden. I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we’ve been considering the ideas of naïve optimism and the truth shall set you free. What are the differences and what’s the reality of all of this? Naive optimism, just as a reminder, is the belief that your chances are always better than 50/50. We’ve been bouncing that off against a very old idea. Veritas liberabit vos: “The truth shall set you free” a saying of Jesus that’s reported in the Gospel according to John. Well, how does this comport with the idea that naïve optimism is good for you? Well, that’s always been a good question. Here’s just the opposite meme. The strongest weapon in the world is truth because truth is indestructible. Well, that’s a very nice thing to think. But is it true? Here we have a poor fellow handing to a woman he is about to date, apparently, a bouquet of flowers, to which he says, “Here I found some beautiful things and killed them so you can watch them decay.” Well, yep that’s one way to look at the situation of handing someone’s beautiful bouquet of flowers. Is it perhaps the best way to express this particular truth? Also, we have to keep in mind always an idea that is fairly recent in the psychological literature and in studies that are going on, something called the illusory truth effect. The more you hear it, the more you believe it, even if it’s false. So the illusory truth effect, something becomes true because it is endlessly repeated. Also, another part of the illusory truth effect is that, even though, after we hear it over and over again, we take it on as truth if it is easier for us to process, because it already fits into our world views. So the illusory truth effect, it is a real thing. Here we have Donald Trump talking with the philosopher Plato. Donald Trump is saying, “But surely you agree that truth can be created by the repetition of a lie?” Well, Plato wouldn’t agree with that, but Plato didn’t know about the illusory truth effect. And so Plato would be confused by what’s going on in our world today. He didn’t know the psychology as well as we do. Here is some research by Dr. Patrick R. Heck, who says, “65% of Americans believe they are above average in intelligence: Results of two nationally representative surveys.” The abstract from this research is, “Psychologists often note that most people think they are above average in intelligence. We sought robust contemporary evidence of this “smarter than average” effect by asking Americans in two independent samples …whether they agreed with the statement, “I am more intelligent than the average person. After weighing each sample to match the demographics of U.S. Census data, we found that 65% of Americans believe they are smarter than average, with men more likely to agree than women. However, overconfident beliefs about one’s intelligence are not always unrealistic: More educated people were more likely to think their intelligence is above average. We suggest that a tendency to overrate one’s cognitive abilities may be a stable feature of human psychology.” Meaning, yeah, we all think we’re a little bit above average, sometimes at least, don’t wait. And I’ve been bouncing that off against an idea that Friedrich Nietzsche had in the last two centuries ago in the 80s from his famous book, The Gay Science. In The Gay Science, he is leading up to the argument that God is dead and we have killed him.