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Sixth in my series of talks for the Unitarians. |
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(Spirituality and the Rational Temperament) |
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It has been said that we humans are the only animals that actively think about such things as where we came from and why we’re here. It’s at least true that some of us spend more time than others thinking about such abstract ideas. Judging by membership in religious organizations, it would appear that many people find answers to those questions that satisfy them, or they at least quit thinking about them. Yet, some of us are harder to satisfy. Why is this? We humans are each wonderfully unique. Unfortunately, many seem to regard uniqueness as a not-so-good situation. A great deal of human energy is spent trying to change others to be like us, perhaps because conflicting ideas and ways of being force us to consider the possibility that we’ve been misguided all our lives. We want to convince other people as well as ourselves that we have it all figured out. Of course, after you’ve lived awhile, if you’re honest about it, you begin to see that many basic things about people aren’t going to change in spite of all our efforts. That old pond sitter Thoreau said as much in his essay, “Higher Laws” like this:
Though we are all unique, there are ways we can be grouped together because of some similarity. For example, we can group people by physical differences, like eye color, or height, or width. We can also group people by mental differences. There’s actually been a great deal of pondering about the different ways we think, enough for a whole major branch of philosophy, but today I’ll settle for a fairly simple concept known as temperament. Grouping people by temperament began with Hippocrates in ancient Greece, who characterized people as belonging to one of four basic groups, choleric (hot-tempered), phlegmatic (apathetic), melancholic (sad), and sanguine (cheerful). If these terms mean something to you, please speak up now. They’re Greek to me. Several twentieth century psychologists have put their own spin on this concept, choosing slightly different descriptive words. The most widely used version of this idea is known as the Myers-Briggs type indicator. For those of you not familiar with temperament typing, a widely used modern version of the four basic temperaments describes people as guardians, artisans, idealists, and rationals. Although it sounds suspiciously like some form of astrology, it is uncanny how well people can be classified into these groups. Guardians, making up about 38% of the population, place great value on security, duty, ritual, and stability. More than any other type, they want the world to stay the same and for the people in it to think just like them. They just know that there are tried and true ways to do everything worth doing. They inhabit corporations and bureaucracies, where they can count on tomorrow being the same as yesterday. They also fill our traditional churches and civic organizations. Artisans, who also account for about 38% of the population, value freedom, spontaneity, and fun. They are impulsive and have little use for security and stability. They have a need to express themselves creatively with their own impressions of reality, having a keen sense of beauty and hidden meaning. They are often uncomfortable in structured organizations, and are regarded as flighty and not serious enough. Artisans may wander around religious groups, not so much searching for truth as for momentary excitement, artistic expression, or inspiration. Idealists, representing only 12% of the population, are searching for inner meaning, and becoming. They need to make a difference in the world. They desperately want to help people become better than they are, regardless of whether those people want to change or not. They are heavily represented in the ranks of social activists, teachers, missionaries, and religious leaders. Finally, there are the Rationals. At only 12% of the population, rationals value knowledge, understanding, and ultimate truth above all else. They find beauty in logic, seeing patterns and interrelationships everywhere. They are heavily represented among philosophers, scientists, and computer experts. They have little regard for tradition and rules, so their religious thoughts tend toward the independent and non-conformist. They are occasionally known to join offbeat groups like the Unitarians. Does one of these groups sound like you? Can you guess which one I am? This primer on temperament is to help you appreciate that while you may not understand why other people think differently, perhaps you can at least accept that their way of dealing with the world is just as valid to them as yours is to you. They are passionate about entirely different things, so their entire value system is unlike yours. Attempts at conversion of temperament are always futile. This usually holds true for spiritual ideas as well. Which brings me to what I really wanted to talk about today - spirituality and the rational temperament. We Rationals usually cause lots of cluck clucking and head-shaking among the guardians with our tireless questions about the basis for religious beliefs. Others don’t understand our low regard for faith as a valid means of choosing a belief system. Yet, like everyone else, there seems to be an instinctive need for spiritual meaning within us. Rationals need objective evidence before accepting something as factual. As a group, we usually excel at science and math, since these subjects place great value on truth and objectivity. A math teacher who asked students to simply have faith in a theorem in trigonometry class would be laughed out the door. Likewise, a student who offered faith as a proof of a theorem on a test would probably get an F. Where Rationals part company with most other people is in our insistence that the methods that work so well for math and science must be applied to all of life. We can’t think one way about math and another way about religion. Based on people I’ve met, it’s not unusual for a child of rational temperament to have a spiritual epiphany (isn’t that a neat word?) around the onset of adolescence, say 12 to 15 years old. By that time, their mind has gathered enough data to see that the dogma of traditional religious belief is littered with inconsistencies and is based on almost no objective evidence. Being in a small minority among their faith-touting peers, most Rationals keep their questions to themselves until they can find like-minded people with whom to discuss them. Heretics are not treated very well, even in modern times. If they have rejected traditional religious belief, that instinctive spiritual need creates a void, and a Rational will likely spend more time actively contemplating those big questions than the more traditional religious believer, who is content with assigning anything worrisome to an omnipotent deity or deities. Deity-assigners, or theists, come in many flavors. There are monotheists, like Christians, Muslims, and Jews, or polytheists like Hindus or Druids. Theists want to call everyone else a-theists, but that isn’t quite right. If a theist believes in some form of deity, and an atheist explicitly rejects any form of deity, there is a large group of people who simply admit that they don’t know, and may never know whether a deity exists or not. They may hedge their bets, just in case, and keep one foot in the door of traditional religion. Thomas Huxley coined the term “agnostic” in 1870 to distinguish this group from the atheists. Rationals are quite often in this “unknowable” category, whatever they may call it. So where does a Rational find spiritual fulfillment? I know that I’ve always felt at a spiritual peak on my journeys in the wilderness. I wasn’t always entirely sure why, since I don’t fancy myself a nature worshipper like a pagan. Reverence yes, worship no. I am filled by a sense of wonder at the inner workings of nature. When I see how such a complex thing works so well because of the amazing simplicity of the basic parts, I am filled with awe. I eventually came to find out that this special appreciation for the workings of nature is common to the rational temperament, when I happened to read a book by one of the greatest rational thinkers of all time. I picked up a little book somewhere a few years back by Albert Einstein, called The World As I See It. The book is a collection of speeches, letters and essays that describe how he felt about things other than math, physics, and cosmology. In fact, it turns out that Einstein had quite a bit to say about many things other than science. Everyone knows that Einstein was a genius. What you may not know is how far his intellect soared above his peers. In a documentary for The PBS television series Nova, Tom Levinson writes:
We’ve established that Einstein was without equal in modern times. In fact, many of those end-of-century lists named him as the most influential person of the 20th century. Even so, why should we care what he thought about spirituality? Well, another trait of us Rationals is that our respect for a person’s ideas is in direct proportion to their demonstrated competence in thinking tasks. Einstein epitomized rational thought. You may put no value on such things according to your temperament, so adjust your personal input filter accordingly. Like all of us, Einstein was shaped in his opinions by the events around him. He experienced the horror of the First World War from within Germany. When he was identified as an ethnic Jew in 1932 he fled Berlin for Princeton. How ironic that the Nazis, through their ethnic persecution, sowed the seeds of their own destruction by chasing the brightest minds in the world out of Germany. As Einstein saw the world headed for war once again, he became an outspoken champion of human rights. Einstein was also very aware of the anti-scientific, puritanical mindset of the religious establishment in the U.S. of the 1930’s. Remember, Prohibition didn’t end until 1933, and he felt compelled to defend science to the suspicious religious establishment, to establish a common ground where religion and science could coexist and complement one another. In order to do so, he had to expose his own unorthodox spiritual thoughts. Here is a slightly abridged version of Einstein’s 1930 essay, “Religion and Science”, written for the New York Times Magazine:
And now I know why I am so overwhelmed when I awaken in the middle of the night, lying warm in my sleeping bag on the bank of some stream high in the mountains, under a perfectly clear, cold sky, to find the Milky Way stretched from horizon to horizon in all its glory, almost bright enough to read by. And I think about the enormity of the universe and the absolutely magnificent way it all works. It’s just that old cosmic religious feeling.
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Last Update 4/6/04 |