Living with a Wild God

Review of Living with a Wild God, by Barbara Ehrenreich.

In a nutshell: Living With a Wild God is the story of a rational, scientific-minded atheist wrestling with the meaning of a personal mystical experience.

Ms. Ehrenreich is an atheist, has been all of her life. And she is from a lineage of atheists that goes back to her great-grandmother (the great-grandma was Catholic and the priest wouldn’t show up when her father was dying unless they paid him $25; a few years later she was dying in childbirth, when the priest showed up, put a crucifix on her chest and started administering the last rites she hurled the crucifix against the wall.) 

But as a young teen-ager Ms. Ehrenreich was obsessed with the quest to find the “Truth”; in other words to find answers to such questions as why are we here, what is the point of life? At the same time she started having experiences where her perception would dissolve, like all the boundaries around separate objects disappeared. She had trouble putting the experiences into words in the journal she kept at the time, and the best word she could come up for it was “disassociation.”

Then one day when she was 17 she had a profound experience, which, again, she struggles to express. Her best metaphor is of fire: 

the world flamed into life…There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with ‘the All,’ as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, and one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it.

Because she had no framework for this experience, in the ensuing months she struggled to keep her equanimity. She worried she was mentally ill. Soon she left for college and the existential crisis passed.

Her father was a scientist, and she assumed from an early age she would become a scientist. She ended up getting a PhD in biochemistry, although she has never worked in the field. Instead she became a political activist and social scientist, writing such books as Nickel and Dimed about her attempts to live on minimum wage (imagine, a social scientist who experiments on herself).

An Objective Morality

I’ve been involved in a couple of forums where the subject of morality has come up. In one, the members are interested in spirituality. Some of these people seem to think that non-dualist spirituality means there is no such thing as bad or good. Everything’s perfect so morality is basically meaningless.

On the other forum, most of the members are atheists, and they’re trying to understand how an objective morality could exist. The question is, without a God imposing morality on humanity, how can a human system be anything but relative?

I’m not an atheist, but I don’t think God intervenes in the evolution of the universe. In other words, I think the unfolding of evolution proceeds in an inevitable fashion. So I like to find ways to explain phenomena like “morality” and “love” without recourse to metaphysics (although I think there can be an explanation from an underlying ground of consciousness, see note at end).

This question of the objectivity of morality is important. By objective I mean something that can be agreed upon by other people. If morality is subjective, that means you can just do what you like; there would be no difference between saving someone from drowning and cheating that person out of their life’s savings. Any society that adopted that ethos would quickly descend into chaos. 

Last year I read philosopher Alexander Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality and enjoyed it quite a bit more than I thought I would. I think part of the reason is that Rosenberg attempts to understand concepts such as morality as evolved behaviors.

Evolutionary biologists propose that a special dynamic of evolution called “group selection” has brought about altruism in humans: groups in which the members cooperated and could trust each other did better than groups in which there was a lot of infighting and deceit (see this blog post). This process led to the development of moral attributes.

Rosenberg asserts that there is a core morality that all human societies share, and the most basic components of that morality are: reciprocity, fairness/equality, trustworthiness/honesty, and caring for your children. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind (you can read chapter 9 free online which discusses morality) has identified six candidates: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. Other possibilities, he says, are property, honesty, and a dislike of wastefulness.

Rosenberg writes, “All societies and cultures have words for anger, disdain, shame, and guilt, and in each, they name roughly the same set of bodily feelings.” Shame is the feeling we get when we go against core moral principles, and blushing is a signal to the others in the group that we realized we made an error.

When it appears that other cultures don’t share this core morality, Rosenberg says it is because of the interference of beliefs (see this post for more on beliefs):

The next step in understanding moral disagreement involves recognizing that such disagreements always result from the combination of core morality with different factual beliefs. When you combine the uncontroversial norms of the moral core with some of the wild and crazy beliefs people have about nature, human nature, and especially the supernatural, you get the ethical disagreements that are so familiar to cultural anthropology.