Artists observe one another, and they
observe people. Then they represent what they see, and transmit the
message of what they see, to us. That teaches us to see. We don’t
necessarily know what it is that we’re learning from them, but we’re
learning something—or, at least, we’re acting like we’re learning
something. We go to movies; we watch stories; we immerse ourselves in
fiction, constantly. That’s an artistic production, and, for many
people, the world of the arts is a living world. That’s particularly
true if you’re a creative person.
It’s the creative, artistic
people that move the knowledge of humanity forward. They do that with
their artistic productions, first. They’re on the edge. The dancers,
poets, visual artists, and musicians do that, and we’re not sure what
they're doing. We’re not sure what musicians are doing. What the hell
are they doing? Why do you like music? It gives you deep intimations of
the significance of things, and no one questions it. You go to a
concert; you’re thrilled. It’s a quasi-religious experience,
particularly if the people really get themselves together, and get the
crowd moving. There’s something incredibly intense about it, but it
makes no sense whatsoever.
It’s not an easy thing to understand.where does the information in dreams come from? I think where it comes from is that we watch the patterns that everyone acts out. We watch that forever, and we’ve got some representations of those patterns that’s part of our cultural history. That’s what’s embedded in fictional accounts of stories between good and evil, the bad guy and the good guy, and the romance. These are canonical patterns of Being, for people, and they deeply affect us, because they represent what it is that we will act out in the world. We flesh that out with the individual information we have about ourselves and other people. There’s waves of behavioural patterns that manifest themselves in the crowd, across time. Great dramas are played on the crowd, across time. The artists watch that, and they get intimations of what that is. They write it down, tell us, and we’re a little clearer about what we’re up to.
A great dramatist, like Shakespeare — we know that what he wrote is fiction. Then we say, ‘fiction isn’t true.’ But then you think, ‘well, wait a minute. Maybe it’s true like numbers are true.’ Numbers are an abstraction from the underlying reality, but no one in their right mind would really think that numbers aren’t true. You could even make a case that the numbers are more real than the things that they represent, because the abstraction is so insanely powerful.
Once you have mathematics, you’re just deadly. You can move the world with mathematics. It’s not obvious that the abstraction is less real than the more concrete reality. You take a work of fiction, like Hamlet, and you think, ‘well, it’s not true, because it’s fiction.’ But then you think, ‘wait a minute—what kind of explanation is that?’ Maybe it’s more true than nonfiction. It takes the story that needs to be told about you, and the story that needs to be told about you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and it abstracts that out, and says, ‘here’s something that’s a key part of the human experience as such.’ It’s an abstraction from this underlying, noisy substrate. People are affected by it because they see that the thing that’s represented is part of the pattern of their being. That’s the right way to think about it.
With these old stories—these ancient stories—it seems, to me, like that process has been occurring for thousands of years. It’s like we watched ourselves, and we extracted out some stories. We imitated each other, and we represented that in drama, and then we distilled the drama, and we got a representation of the distillation. And then we did it again, and at the end of that process—it took God only knows how long. They’ve traced some fairy tales back 10,000 years, in relatively unchanged form.
It certainly seems, to me, that the archaeological evidence, for example, suggests that the really old stories that the Bible begins with are at least that old, and are likely embedded in prehistory, which is far older than that. You might say, ‘well, how can you be so sure?’ The answer to that, in part, is that the ancient cultures didn't change fast. They stayed the same; that’s the answer. They keep their information moving from generation to generation. That’s how they stay the same, and that’s how we know. There are archaeological records of rituals that have remained relatively unbroken for up to 20,000 years: it was discovered in caves, in Japan, that were set up for a particular kind of bear worship that was also characteristic of Western Europe. So these things can last for very long periods of time.
We’re watching each other act in the world, and then the question is, how long have we been watching each other? The answer to that, in some sense, is as long as there have been creatures with nervous systems, and that’s a long time. That’s some hundreds of millions of years, perhaps longer than that. We’ve been watching each other, trying to figure out what we’re up to, across that entire span of time. Some of that knowledge is built right into your bodies—which is why we can dance with each other, for example. Understanding isn’t just something that you have as an abstraction. It’s something that you act out. That’s what children are doing, when they’re learning to rough-and-tumble play. They’re learning to integrate their body with the body of someone else in a harmonious way—learning to cooperate and compete. That’s all instantiated right into their body. It’s not abstract knowledge, and they don’t know that they’re doing that. They’re just doing it. We can even use our body as a representational platform.
We’ve been studying each other for a long time, abstracting out what is it that we’re up to, and what should we be up to. That’s an even more fundamental question: if you’re going to live in the world, and you’re going to do it properly, what does properly mean? How is it that you might go about that? It’s the right question; it’s what everyone wants to know. How do you live in the world? It’s not what the world is made of; it’s not the same question. How do you live in the world? It’s the eternal question of human beings.
I guess we’re the only species that has ever really asked that question. All the other animals just go and do whatever it is they do. Not us. It’s a question, for us. We have to become aware of it. We have to speak it—God only knows why. But that seems to be the situation. So we act, that acting is shaped by the world and society into something that we don’t understand, but that we can model. We model it in our stories and with our bodies, and that’s where the dream gets its information. The dream is part of the process that’s watching everything, and then trying to formulate it. It’s trying to get the signal out from the noise and portray it in dramatic form, because the dream is a little drama. And then you get the chance to talk about what that dream is. You have something like articulated knowledge, at that point.
I would say the Bible exists in that space that is half into the dream and half into articulated knowledge. Going into it, to find out what the stories are about, can aid our self-understanding. The other issue is that, if Nietzsche was correct, and if Jung was correct, and Dostoevsky, as well…Without the cornerstone provided by that understanding, we’re lost. That’s not good, because then we’re susceptible to psychological pathology. People that are adamant anti-religious thinkers seem to believe that, if we abandoned our immersement in the underlying dream, we’d all, instantly, become rationalists, like Descartes or Bacon—intelligent, clear thinking, rational, scientific people. I don’t believe that for a moment. I don’t think there’s any evidence for it. I think we would become so irrational, so rapidly, that the weirdest mysteries of Catholicism would seem positively rational by contrast—and I think that’s already happening.
You have the unknown world. That’s just what you don’t know, at all. That’s outside the ocean that surrounds the island that you inhabit. Something like that. It’s chaos itself. You act in that world, and you act in ways that you don’t understand. There’s more to your actions than you can understand. One of the things that Jung said—I loved this, when I first understood it. He says that everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is. You should know what your myth is, because it might be a tragedy, and maybe you don’t want it to be. That’s really worth thinking about, because you have a pattern of behaviour that characterizes you. God only knows where you got it. It’s partly biological, and it’s partly from your parents; it’s your unconscious assumptions; it’s the way the philosophy of your society has shaped you; and it’s aiming you somewhere. Is it aiming you somewhere you want to go? That’s a good question. That’s part of self-realization.
We know we don’t understand our actions. Almost every argument you have with someone is about that. It’s like, ‘why did you do that?’ You come up with some half-baked reasons why you did it; you’re flailing around in the darkness; you try to give an account for yourself, but you can only do it partially. It’s very, very difficult, because you’re a complicated animal, with the beginnings of an articulated mind, and you’re just way more than you can handle. So you act things out, and that’s a kind of competence. Then you imagine what you act out, and you imagine what everyone else acts out. There’s a tremendous amount of information in your action, and that information is translated up into the dream, and then into art, mythology and literature. There’s a tremendous amount of information in that, and some of that is translated into articulated thought.
I’ll give you a quick example of something like that. I think this is partly what happens in Exodus, when Moses comes up with the law. He’s wandering around with the Israelites in the desert. They’re going left and going right, worshipping idols, having a hell of a time, and getting rebellious. Moses goes up in the mountain, and he has this tremendous revelation in the sight of God. It illuminates him, and he comes down with the law. Moses acted as a judge—I know this is a mythological story—in the desert. He was continually mediating between people who were having problems, and he was constantly trying to keep peace. What are you doing when you’re trying to keep peace? You’re trying to understand what peace is. You have to apply the principles. What are the principles? Well, you don’t know. The principles are whatever satisfied the people enough to make peace.
Maybe you act as judge 10,000 times, and then you get some sense of the principles that bring peace. One day it blasts into your consciousness, like a revelation: ‘here’s the rules that we’re already acting out.’ That’s the Ten Commandments. They were there to begin with. Moses comes forward, and says, ‘look, this is basically what we’re already doing, but now it’s codified.’ That’s all historical process condensed into a single story, but, obviously, that happened, because we have written law. In good legal systems, that emerges from the bottom up. English common law is exactly like that: it’s single decisions, that are predicated on principles, that are then articulated and made into the body of law.
The body of law is something that you act out. That’s why it’s a body of law. That’s why, if you’re a good citizen, you act out the body of law. The body of law has principles. Ok, so the question is, what are the principles that guide our behaviour? Well, that’s something like what the archaic Israelites meant by ‘God.’ It’s not a good enough explanation, but imagine that you are a chimpanzee, and you have a powerful dominant figure at the pinnacle of your society. That represents ‘power’—more than that, because it’s not sheer physical prowess that keeps a chimp at the top of the hierarchy. It’s much more complicated than that.
You could say there’s a principle that the dominant person manifests, and then you might say that principle shines forth even more brightly, if you know 10 people who are dominant and powerful. Then you could extract out what ‘dominance’ means from that. You can extract what ‘power’ means from that, and then you can divorce the concept from the people. We had to do that, at some point, because we can say ‘power,’ in the human context, and we can imagine what that means. But it’s divorced from any specific manifestation of power. How the hell did we do that? That’s so complicated. If you’re a chimp, the power is in another chimp. It’s not some damn abstraction.
Think about it. We’re in these hierarchies, many of them across centuries. We’re trying to figure out what the guiding principle is. We’re trying to extract out the core of the guiding principles, and we turn that into a representation of a pattern of being. That’s God. It’s an abstracted ideal, and it manifests itself in personified form. That’s ok, because what we’re trying to get at is, in some sense, the essence of what it means to be a properly functioning, properly social, and properly competent individual. We’re trying to figure out what that means. You need an embodiment. You need an ideal that’s abstracted, that you could act out, that would enable you to understand what that means. That’s what we’ve been driving at. That’s the first hypothesis. I’m going to go over some of the attributes of this abstracted ideal that we’ve formalized as God, but that’s the first hypothesis: a philosophical or moral ideal manifests itself, first, as a concrete pattern of behavior that’s characteristic of a single individual—and then it’s a set of individuals, and then it’s an abstraction from that set, and then you have the abstraction, and it’s so important.
Here’s a political implication: One of the debates, we might say, between early Christianity and the late Roman Empire was whether or not an emperor could be God—literally to be deified and put into a temple. You can see why that might happen, because that’s someone at the pinnacle of a very steep hierarchy, who has a tremendous amount of power and influence. The Christian response to that was, ‘never confuse the specific sovereign with the principle of sovereignty itself.’ It’s brilliant. You can see how difficult it is to come up with an idea like that, so that even the person who has the power is actually subordinate to a divine principle, for lack of a better word. Even the king himself is subordinate to the principle. We still believe that, because we believe our Prime Minister is subordinate to the damn law.
Whatever the body of law, there's a principle inside that even the leader is subordinate to. Without that, you could argue that you can’t even have a civilized society, because your leader immediately turns into something that’s transcendent and all-powerful. That's certainly what happened in the Soviet Union, and what happened in Maoist China, and what happened in Nazi Germany. There was nothing for the powerful to subordinate themselves to. You’re supposed to be subordinate to God. What does that mean? We’re going to tear that idea apart, but partly what that means is that you’re subordinate—even if you’re sovereign—to the principles of sovereignty itself. And then the question is, ‘what the hell is the principles of sovereignty?’ I would say we have been working that out for a very long period of time. That’s one of the things that we’ll talk about.
