WHAT HUMANS MEAN

Human knowledge consists of three levels of raw material: the concrete sensory world, the cultural world that is constructed by and shared with other people -- at least those of the same culture -- and the private pre- or sub-verbal world of the individual.

A special dimension to all these levels of experience is the Holy. When it is recognized in the concrete world, we describe the sensations involved as Sacred, giving access to a special depth. When the Holy is part of culture, we call it religious and often identify it with an institution, a structured group of people who agree on a description of what is Sacred. Weaving in and out of all these aspects is the private world of images, yearning, and identities that make a person uniquely human and guide their behavior.

If all three levels of human experience are congruent, or at least complementary, the human being is freed -- though within the givens of the system -- to explore, to dare, to persist, to love, and to create. If the three levels are contradictory, or if there are double-binds within the levels, or if any level is confused (if any of the three levels is totally destroyed, the being will not survive), then the human being is exposed to a unique kind of anguish: a loss of meaning. Every resource will be thrown into an attempt to seek or create a new meaning, even if it is a limited -- even painful -- one.

Ray Rappaport (Ecology, Meaning & Religion, 1979) reflects in a calm and useful way on religious meaning in communities. For a person or organization to persist (survive) it must manage on two levels:

1. Survive short term environmental fluctuations by adapting. (drought)

2. Survive long term by transforming themselves. (global climate change)

Crucial variables must stay within a range of variability that is survivable or the entity will disappear. But as variables continue, at what point is this a new organism? (My great-grandfather’s ax has had the head replaced three times and a new handle attached five times. Is it the same ax?) The criteria is not consistency with the past, but rather whether the usefulness of the conviction remains and leads to survival, if not of this species then one derived from it. This allows for evolution of religious thought -- in fact, encourages ideas that preserve survival. What those ideas are specifically is open to argument.

But there are, after all, some principles of survival that derive from the discipline of ecology:

1. Immutability: Which is the crucial part that cannot change without ending the organism as itself? (Like church dogma. If Christ is not divine, is Christianity no longer the same religion?)

2. What operations can reverse damages? (Thoughts? Ritual?)

3. Time-dependent regulation counts (How quick, how long)

4. Variables in the organism change the environment. They may be cumulative, they may fit into changes by another organism, they may change the organism’s connection to the larger environment. (Consider that until there were plants producing oxygen, there could be no mammals.)

How do these adaptations proceed? Revolution or Evolution? As usual, both are important. Orderly sequences of response can be predicted:

1. At first they will be energetically and behaviorally expensive -- the starving fox expends greater effort over larger areas in an attempt to find mice. This is quickly ended when the stress ends. (Fox catches mouse, takes nap.)

2. In the longer term, things get more irreversible, there is less flexibility, and more specialization. (Die-off of mice means a die-off of foxes, unless a new source of food arises such as hen houses. Religious humanism arises when miracles are no longer convincing.)

In the body or in society there are interlocking loops, not necessarily with a centralized control. One small change in one loop may be an opportunity for change in another loop. Accumulations of small change or even a single shift may create a sudden reorganization. (Introduction of the Internet and smart phones to the Middle East. Invention of the contraceptive pill.) There are “think tanks” for denominations that constantly work to identify and respond to these loops. (Congregational growth in the face of immigrants who are very different might be addressed by adding classes that teach language. In the current recession churches respond with classes on seeking jobs or simply support groups for the unemployed.)

To say that humans are animals is not to say they are not special animals with advantages. Because patterns of behavior in humans are not much specified by genetics, they can change quickly by adjusting memes (strategies) instead of genes, and because they have so many ways of compensating for environment restraints, there is much more resourcefulness -- but also more chance of chaos. The controller is VALUES or what we might even call SANCTITY , that is, the invariant, the one thing that if it were changed would eliminate humans as we understand them. Humans would become something else, by definition possibly monsters. But on the other hand saints, if they supply a new higher invariant value that defines humans. (Greater compassion)

“Although the discursive content of higher order meanings may be less than that of lower order meanings, higher-order meanings may well be affectively more powerful, which is to say more meaningful. It is significant that representations of art, poetry, and ritual rely heavily on metaphor and that primary process thought is largely metaphorical.” (Rappaport, pp. 156- 157 )

Primary process thought is the most basic level of organizing things in the mind that psychoanalysis tries to understand. That is probably what the neural brain platform is using to bring order out of many small patterns. It would be experienced by the person as TRUTH, the way things really are.

The meanings prevailing at higher and highest levels are diminishingly discursive, increasingly affective, and, perhaps increasingly archaic and decreasingly distinctive of humanity. Be this is it may, the objectification of self and the world, and the concomitant language, may be overcome for the nonce by the sense of identity with self and the world. (See Van Baal) that constitutes highest level meaning. This is mystical.” In other words, “felt” meaning rather than the rational discourse we are used to in theology.

Whether this is “felt” about negatives (evil) or about positives (love and salvation) is less relevant than the question of whether it is a “felt” meaning. The opposite of “felt” religious meaning is apathy, non-feeling, indifference. The vehement denials of some atheists gives them away as highly religious. Their raging indignation at the failures of the supposedly “good God” is as faithful as the allegiance of the faithful. In fact, some “God apologists” are so bloodless that from this point of view they are betrayers.