(As noted on the Blogmandu roundup for October 30) The author of Open Letter to Rational Pundits takes the atheists to task for their efforts to convince Christians of their folly by rational arguments. In an ironic way, the rant demonstrates both irrationality and a very limited “stage of development,” at least in this post. There’s little intellectual content presented, just the teenage overuse of the “f” word as if its shock value will somehow carry weight. On the the development scale, we’re probably at a preteen level. If that’s what Wilber’s integral philosophy produces, then it’s more bankrupt than I’ve thought.

“Development” is the global panacea offered in place of rationalism as the cure for fundamentalism and all its ills. At this point, it is the wispiest of ideas, without any practical implications. My first criticism of developmentalism is that it has no content. It is simply a word strung around a problem, as if coding it somehow resolves the issue. It is not a course of action. It is not a means of helping people change. It has no message to reach the audience that is presumed to be in dire need of its message. Shouting at a five year old to “Grow up” when he acts like a five year old only has potential to harm. Harassing people in the interest of development has no more value than shouting “Behave rationally” to someone who is mentally ill. Neither approach penetrates to where people are actually living, and where they need to start their journey to change.

Nor am I persuaded by the rationalists. H.L. Mencken’s Treatise on the Gods would have convinced the world long ago, if sardonic rationalism were effective in dealing with this issue. Rationalism, like Mencken’s book, never reaches the audience it needs to reach to be effective. Rationalism does have the advantage of reason on its side. Periodically men have returned to reason as a means of lighting the future, and particularly in scientific form, it does have a credible track record of success that developmentalism does not. But in the end, it too fails to reach people.

The religious quest is an integral part of the human psyche that will not be denied or bounded by the materialism of science. Science and rationalism cannot answer deep questions about the worth of life, its meaning, or the values that underpin it. “Thou shalt not kill” in rationalist terms becomes “Thou shalt not get caught.” The only consequences materialism recognizes are scientific ones. Life has no moral consequences beyond those realized before one dies. If one escapes to death with bounty one has looted, and has managed to live a resplendent life at the expense of another’s hardship, the materialist has to rationally conclude, “Job well done.” Engineering human life is a thing to be done because it can be done; there is no irrational musing about whether or not man has the wisdom to do anything he can set his mind to do.

Rationalists have no lack of surety about values, though rational thought has never provided a system of ethics that was not arbitrary or malleable with the times. In the early twentieth century, rationalists championed eugenics enthusiastically. Scientific studies provided ample data for the racist conclusions supporting it. Over and over again, scientific rationalism has wreaked havoc on mankind; it too needs a brake - a restraint.

Most fundamentalists derive a worthwhile sense of meaning and often community from their religion. Religions answer questions about what the purpose of life is, why it has value, and what those values are. Many naively believe fundamentalism has to be destroyed. It does not. Some of its more virulent destructive beliefs do have to be altered and restrained. It is a much easier and more productive task to target and change those few beliefs than it is to tackle religion as a whole, particularly with things as morally sterile as rationalism or as nebulous as developmentalism.

My own personal answer to the situation is Buddhism, fully recognizing that Buddhism is a religion, not a philosophy. Buddhism asserts that actions have moral consequences; a materialistic philosophy does not. This does not imply that philosophy is amoral, that atheists are amoral, or that a religious philosophy is required for people to have values that are noble. There is overwhelming evidence that a religious philosophy is not required for a sense of morality or values. But the basis for those values is not a rational one. The human psyche is deeper than that, and the basis is invariably an amalgam of that deep intuition and the culture in which the individual was formed. Many atheists also believe in moral consequences, though they are hard pressed to acknowledge or demonstrate any scientific basis for it. Though I cannot rationally defend it, I’ve come to accept that actions have moral consequences.

With this context in mind, I’ve concluded that acculturation, supplemented by very limited improvements in law, is probably the best approach. Both are very practical, and reach beyond the immune system that excludes rationalism and the wisp of “developmentalism.” Racism in America was not eradicated by the civil rights legislation in the 60’s, but its cultural basis was severely eroded and changed. Walking through the Deep South these days, one finds that whites and black interact amicably and socially in ways that could never have been tolerated in the culture of segregation. To be sure, there are racists and racism, but even a lot of racism rings hollow these days. People who claim to be racists, when caught off guard, find themselves chatting comfortably with those they claim to despise. (It must be those “other” ones they don’t know that are the problem.) As one Southerner I knew stated, “It was a huge monkey off my back to not have to invest any more energy in maintaining the barriers of segregation that my parents had insisted on.” Canada’s hate speech law is another example. No one has gone to jail in Canada because of it, yet its mere presence has invoked an era of secular tolerance that is unknown in United States.

A key part of acculturation is a change in the individual. That’s an aspect of Buddhism that is also practical. If you want to evoke nobility in others, the most important requisite is to be noble yourself. If you can’t achieve it, why would you think that others can achieve it by means of your ranting? And why would they want to follow an obviously defective path? It has always been puzzling to me that some of the most dour people on earth are religious people exhorting others to live the teacher’s miserable life in the pursuit of happiness. If one can achieve a measure of nobility in his own life, then deliberately associating and discoursing with the “enemy” can also be an effective means of acculturation.

P.S. My posting is, of course, not a rant, but rational discourse important to the development of mankind.