The End of Faith (25 page)

No, there is no ethical difference to be found in how the suffer- ing of the tortured or
the collaterally damaged appears.

WHICH way should the balance swing? Assuming that we want to maintain a coherent ethical
position on these matters, this appears to be a circumstance of forced choice: if we are
willing to drop bombs, or even risk that pistol rounds might go astray, we should be
willing to torture a certain class of criminal suspects and military prisoners; if we are
unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage mod- ern war.

Opponents of torture will be quick to argue that confessions elicited by torture are
notoriously unreliable. Given the foregoing, however, this objection seems to lack its
usual force. Make these con- fessions as unreliable as you likethe chance that our
interests will be advanced in any instance of torture need only equal the chance of such
occasioned by the dropping of a single bomb. What was the chance that the dropping of bomb
number 117 on Kandahar would effect the demise of Al Qaeda? It had to be pretty slim.
Enter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: our most valuable capture in our war on terror. Here is a
character who actually seems cut from Dershowitzian cloth. U.S. officials now believe that
his was the hand that decapi- tated the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Whether or not this is true, his membership in Al Qaeda more or
less rules out his

“innocence” in any important sense, and his rank in the organiza- tion suggests that his
knowledge of planned atrocities must be extensive. The bomb is ticking. Given the damage
we were willing to cause to the bodies and minds of innocent children in Afghanistan and
Iraq, our disavowal of torture in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed seems perverse. If
there is even one chance in a million that he will tell us something under torture that
will lead to the fur- ther dismantling of Al Qaeda, it seems that we should use every
means at our disposal to get him talking.

IN ALL likelihood you began reading this chapter, much as I began writing it, convinced
that torture is a very bad thing and that we are wise not to practice itindeed that we are
civilized, in large mea- sure, because we do not practice it. Most of us feel, intuitively at least, that if we can't quite
muster a retort to Dershowitz and his ticking bomb, we can take refuge in the fact that
the paradigmatic case will almost never arise. From this perspective, adorning the
machinery of our justice system with a torture provision seems both unnecessary and
dangerous, as the law of unintended consequences may one day find it throwing the whole
works into disarray. Because I believe the account offered above is basically sound, I
believe that I have successfully argued for the use of torture in any circumstance in
which we would be willing to cause collateral damage.36 Paradox- ically, this equivalence has not made the practice of torture seem any more
acceptable to me; nor has it, I trust, for most readers. I believe that here we come upon
an ethical illusion of sortsanalogous to the perceptual illusions that are of such abiding
interest to scientists who study the visual pathways in the brain. The full moon appear-
ing on the horizon is no bigger than the full moon when it appears overhead, but it looks bigger, for reasons that are still obscure to neuroscientists. A ruler held up to the sky
reveals something that we are otherwise incapable of seeing, even when we understand that
our eyes are deceiving us. Given a choice between acting on the basis

A SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL l99

of the way things seem in this instance, or on the deliverances of our ruler, most of us
will be willing to dispense with appearancespar- ticularly if our lives or the lives of
others depended on it. I believe that most readers who have followed me this far will find
them- selves in substantially the same position with respect to the ethics of torture.
Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our war on terrorism, the practice
of torture, in certain circumstances, would seem to be not only permissible but necessary.
Still, it does not seem any more acceptable, in ethical terms, than it did before. The
reasons for this are, I trust, every bit as neurological as those that give rise to the
moon illusion. In fact, there is already some sci- entific evidence that our ethical
intuitions are driven by considera- tions of proximity and emotional salience of the sort
I addressed above.37 Clearly, these intuitions are fallible. In the present case, many innocent lives could
well be lost as a result of our inability to feel a moral equivalence where a moral
equivalence seems to exist. It may be time to take out our rulers and hold them up to the
sky.38

The False Choice of Pacifism

Pacifism39 is generally considered to be a morally unassailable posi- tion to take with respect to
human violence. The worst that is said of it, generally, is that it is a difficult
position to maintain in practice. It is almost never branded as flagrantly immoral, which
I believe it is. While it can seem noble enough when the stakes are low, pacifism is
ultimately nothing more than a willingness to die, and to let others die, at the pleasure
of the world's thugs. It should be enough to note that a single sociopath, armed with
nothing more than a knife, could exterminate a city full of pacifists. There is no doubt
that such sociopaths exist, and they are generally better armed. Fearing that the above
reflections on torture may offer a potent argument for pacifism, I would like to briefly
state why I believe we must accept the fact that violence (or its threat) is often an
ethical necessity.

I WAS once walking the streets of Prague late at night and came upon a man and a young
woman in the midst of a struggle. As I drew nearer, it became obvious that the man, who
appeared to be both drunk and enraged, was attempting to pull the woman into a car against
her will. She was making a forceful show of resistance, but he had seized her arm with one
hand and was threatening to strike her in the face with the otherwhich he had done at
least once, it seemed, before I arrived on the scene. The rear door of the car was open,
and an accomplice had taken a seat behind the wheel. Several other men were milling about,
and from the looks of them, they appeared to approve of the abduction in progress.

Without knowing how I would proceed, I at once found myself interceding on the woman's
behalf. As my adrenaline rose, and her assailant's attention turned my way, it occurred to
me that his English might be terrible or nonexistent. The mere effort to under- stand me
could be made so costly that it might prove a near-total diversion. The inability to make
my intentions clear would also serve to forestall actual conflict. Had we shared a common
language our encounter would have almost certainly come to blows within moments, as I
would have thought of nothing more clever than to demand that he let the woman go, and he,
to save face, would have demanded that I make him. Since he had at least two friends that
I could see (and several fans), my evening would probably have ended very badly. Thus, my
goal, as I saw it, was to remain unintelligible, without antagonizing any of the assembled
hooligans, long enough for the young woman to get away.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I seem to have lost my hotel, my lodging, my place of residence,
where I lie supine, not prone. Can you help me? Where is it? Where is it?”

“Sex?” The man asked with obvious outrage, as though I had declared myself a rival for his
prisoner's affections. It now occurred to me that the woman might be a prostitute, and he
an unruly customer.

"No! Not sex. I am looking for a specific building. It has no alu-

minum siding or stained glass. It could be filled with marzipan. Do you know where it is?
This is an emergency."

In an instant, the man's face underwent a remarkable transfor- mation, changing from a
mask of rage, to a vision of perplexity itself. While he attempted to decipher my request,
I threw a conspiratorial glance at the womanwho, it must be said, seemed rather slow to
appreciate that the moment of her emancipation was at hand.

The man began to discuss my case in fluent Czech with one of his friends. I continued to
rave. The woman, for her part, glared at me as though I were an idiot. Then, realizing her
opportunity for the first time, like a bird that had long sat within an open cage, she
suddenly broke free and fled down the street. Her erstwhile attacker was too engrossed by
his reflections even to notice that she had left.

Mission accomplished, I at once thanked the group and moved on.

While my conduct in the above incident seems to meet with the approval of almost everyone,
I relate it here because I consider it an example of a moral failure. First, I was lying,
and lying out of fear. I was not lost, and I needed no assistance of any kind. I resorted
to this tactic because, quite frankly, I was afraid to openly challenge an indeterminate
number of drunks to a brawl. Some may call this wis- dom, but it seemed to me to be
nothing more than cowardice at the time. I made no effort to communicate with these men,
to appeal to their ethical scruples, however inchoate, or to make any impression upon them
whatsoever. I perceived them not as ends in themselves, as sentient creatures capable of
dialogue, appeasement, or instruc- tion, but as a threat in its purest form. My ethical
failure, as I see it, is that I never actually opposed their actionshence they never received any correction from the world. They were merely
diverted for a time, and to only a single woman's advantage. The next woman who became the
object of their predations will have little cause to thank me. Even if a frank
intercession on the woman's behalf would have guaranteed my own injury, a clear message
would have been sent: not all strangers will stand idly by as you beat and abduct a woman
in the street. The action I took sent no such message. Indeed,

I suspect that even the woman herself never knew that I had come to her aid.40

GANDHI was undoubtedly the twentieth century's most influential pacifist. The success he enjoyed
in forcing the British Empire to with- draw from the Indian subcontinent brought pacifism
down from the ethers of religious precept and gave it new political relevance. Paci- fism
in this form no doubt required considerable bravery from its practitioners and constituted
a direct confrontation with injustice. As such, it had far more moral integrity than did
my stratagem above. It is clear, however, that Gandhi's nonviolence can be applied to only
a limited range of human conflict. We would do well to reflect on Gandhi's remedy for the
Holocaust: he believed that the Jews should have committed mass suicide, because this
“would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence.”41 We might wonder what a world full of pacifists would have done once it had grown
“aroused”commit suicide as well?

Gandhi was a religious dogmatist, of course, but his remedy for the Holocaust seems
ethically suspect even if one accepts the meta- physical premises upon which it was based.
If we grant the law of karma and rebirth to which Gandhi subscribed, his pacifism still
seems highly immoral. Why should it be thought ethical to safe- guard one's own happiness
(or even the happiness of others) in the next life at the expense of the manifest agony of
children in this one? Gandhi's was a world in which millions more would have died in the
hopes that the Nazis would have one day doubted the good- ness of their Thousand Year
Reich. Ours is a world in which bombs must occasionally fall where such doubts are in
short supply. Here we come upon a terrible facet of ethically asymmetric warfare: when
your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand.

It is, as yet, unclear what it will mean to win our war on “terror- ism”or whether the
religious barbarism that animates our ene-

mies can ever be finally purged from our worldbut it is all too obvious what it would mean
to lose it. Life under the Taliban is, to a first approximation, what millions of Muslims
around the world want to impose on the rest of us. They long to establish a society in
whichwhen times are goodwomen will remain vanquished and invisible, and anyone given to spiritual, intellectual,
or sexual free- dom will be slaughtered before crowds of sullen, uneducated men. This,
needless to say, is a vision of life worth resisting. We cannot let our qualms over
collateral damage paralyze us because our enemies know no such qualms. Theirs is a
kill-the-children-first approach to war, and we ignore the fundamental difference between
their vio- lence and our own at our peril. Given the proliferation of weaponry in our
world, we no longer have the option of waging this war with swords. It seems certain that
collateral damage, of various sorts, will be a part of our future for many years to come.

Experiments in Consciousness

A T THE CORE of every religion lies an undeniable claim about the human condition: it is possible to
have one's experience of the world radically transformed. Although we generally live
within the limits imposed by our ordinary uses of attentionwe wake, we work, we eat, we
watch television, we converse with others, we sleep, we dreammost of us know, however
dimly, that extraordinary experiences are possible.

The problem with religion is that it blends this truth so thor- oughly with the venom of
unreason. Take Christianity as an exam- ple: it is not enough that Jesus was a man who
transformed himself to such a degree that the Sermon on the Mount could be his heart's
confession. He also had to be the Son of God, born of a virgin, and destined to return to
earth trailing clouds of glory. The effect of such dogma is to place the example of Jesus
forever out of reach. His teaching ceases to be a set of empirical claims about the
linkage between ethics and spiritual insight and instead becomes a gratu- itous, and
rather gruesome, fairy tale. According to the dogma of Christianity, becoming just like
Jesus is impossible. One can only enumerate one's sins, believe the unbelievable, and
await the end of the world.

But a more profound response to existence is possible for us, and the testimony of Jesus,
as well as that of countless other men and women over the ages, attests to this. The
challenge for us is to begin talking about this possibility in rational terms.

The Search for Happiness

Though the lilies of the field are admirably clothed, you and I were driven from the womb
naked and squalling. What do we need to be happy? Almost everything we do can be viewed as
a reply to this question. We need food, shelter, and clothing. We need the company of
others. Then we need to learn countless things to make the most of this company. We need
to find work that we enjoy, and we need time for leisure. We need so many things, and
there seems no alter- native but to seek and maintain them, one after the next, hour after
hour.

But are such things sufficient for happiness? Is a person guaran- teed to be happy merely by virtue of having health,
wealth, and good company? Apparently not. Are such things even necessary for hap- piness ? If so, what can we make of those Indian yogis who renounce all material
and familial attachments only to spend decades alone in caves practicing meditation ? It
seems that such people can be happy as well. Indeed, some of them claim to be perfectly so.

It is difficult to find a word for that human enterprise which aims at happiness
directlyat happiness of a sort that can survive the frustration of all conventional
desires. The term “spirituality” seems unavoidable hereand I have used it several times in
this book alreadybut it has many connotations that are, frankly, embarrass- ing.
“Mysticism” has more gravitas, perhaps, but it has unfortunate associations of its own.
Neither word captures the reasonableness and profundity of the possibility that we must
now consider: that there is a form of well-being that supersedes all others, indeed, that
transcends the vagaries of experience itself. I will use both “spiritu- ality” and
“mysticism” interchangeably here, because there are no alternatives, but the reader should
remember that I am using them in a restricted sense. While a visit to any New Age
bookstore will reveal that modern man has embraced a daunting range of “spiritual”
preoccupationsranging from the healing power of crystals and colonic irrigation to the
ardors of alien abductionour

discussion will focus on a specific insight that seems to have special relevance to our
pursuit of happiness.

Most spiritual teachings agree that there is more to happiness than becoming a productive
member of society, a cheerful consumer of every licit pleasure, and an enthusiastic bearer
of children dis- posed to do the same. Indeed, many suggest that it is our search for happinessour craving for knowledge and new experience, our desire for recognition, our
efforts to find the right romantic partner, even our yearning for spiritual experience
itselfthat causes us to overlook a form of well-being that is intrinsic to consciousness
in every present moment. Some version of this insight seems to lie at the core of many of
our religions, and yet it is by no means always easy to discern among the articles of
faith.

While many of us go for decades without experiencing a full day of solitude, we live every
moment in the solitude of our own minds. However close we may be to others, our pleasures
and pains are ours alone. Spiritual practice is often recommended as the most rational
response to this situation. The underlying claim here is that we can realize something
about the nature of consciousness in this moment that will improve our lives. The
experience of countless contempla- tives suggests that consciousnessbeing merely the
condition in which thought, emotion, and even our sense of self arisesis never actually
changed by what it knows. That which is aware of joy does not become joyful; that which is
aware of sadness does not become sad. From the point of view of consciousness, we are
merely aware of sights, sounds, sensations, moods, and thoughts. Many spiritual teachings allege that if
we can recognize our identity as conscious- ness itself, as the mere witness of
appearances, we will realize that we stand perpetually free of the vicissitudes of
experience.

This is not to deny that suffering has a physical dimension. The fact that a drug like
Prozac can relieve many of the symptoms of depression suggests that mental suffering can
be no more ethereal than a little green pill. But the arrow of influence clearly flies
both ways. We know that ideas themselves have the power to utterly

define a person's experience of the world.1 Even the significance of intense physical pain is open to subjective interpretation.
Consider the pain of labor: How many women come away from the experi- ence traumatized?
The occasion itself is generally a happy one, assuming all goes well with the birth.
Imagine how different it would be for a woman to be tortured by having the sensations of a
normal labor inflicted upon her by a mad scientist. The sensations might be identical, and
yet this would certainly be among the worst experiences of her life. There is clearly more
to suffering even phys- ical pain than painful sensation alone.

Our spiritual traditions suggest that we have considerable room here to change our
relationship to the contents of consciousness, and thereby to transform our experience of
the world. Indeed, a vast lit- erature on human spirituality attests to this.2 It is also clear that nothing need be believed on insufficient evidence for us to look
into this possibility with an open mind.

Consciousness

Like Descartes, most of us begin these inquiries as thinkers, con- demned by the terms of our subjectivity to maneuver in a world that appears to be
other than what we are. Descartes accentuated this dichotomy by declaring that two
substances were to be found in God's universe: matter and spirit. For most of us, a
dualism of this sort is more or less a matter of common sense (though the term “spirit”
seems rather majestic, given how our minds generally com- port themselves). As science has
turned its reifying light upon the mysteries of the human mind, however, Descartes'
dualism (along with our own “folk psychology”) has come in for some rough treat- ment.
Bolstered by the undeniable successes of three centuries of purely physical research, many
philosophers and scientists now reject Descartes' separation of mind and body, spirit and
matter, as the concession to Christian piety that it surely was, and imagine that

they have thereby erased the conceptual gulf between consciousness and the physical world.

In the last chapter we saw that our beliefs about consciousness are intimately linked to
our ethics. They also happen to have a direct bearing upon our view of death. Most
scientists consider themselves physicalists; this means, among other things, that they believe that our mental and spiritual lives are
wholly dependent upon the work- ings of our brains. On this account, when the brain dies,
the stream of our being must come to an end. Once the lamps of neural activ- ity have been
extinguished, there will be nothing left to survive. Indeed, many scientists purvey this
conviction as though it were itself a special sacrament, conferring intellectual integrity
upon any man, woman, or child who is man enough to swallow it.

But the truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death. While there is much
to be said against a naive conception of a soul that is independent of the brain,3 the place of consciousness in the natural world is very much an open question. The idea
that brains produce consciousness is little more than an article of faith among scientists at present, and
there are many reasons to believe that the methods of science will be insufficient to
either prove or dis- prove it.

Inevitably, scientists treat consciousness as a mere attribute of certain large-brained animals. The problem, however, is that nothing about a brain,
when surveyed as a physical system, declares it to be a bearer of that peculiar, interior
dimension that each of us experi- ences as consciousness in his own case. Every paradigm
that attempts to shed light upon the frontier between consciousness and unconsciousness,
searching for the physical difference that makes the phenomenal one, relies upon
subjective reports to signal that an experimental stimulus has been observed.4 The operational defini- tion of consciousness, therefore, is reportability. But consciousness and reportability are not the same. Is a starfish conscious? No sci-
ence that conflates consciousness with reportability will deliver an answer to this
question. To look for consciousness in the world on

the basis of its outward signs is the only thing that we can do. To define consciousness in terms of its outward signs, however, is a fal- lacy. Computers of the
future, sufficiently advanced to pass the Tur- ing test,* will offer up a wealth of
self-reportbut will they be conscious? If we don't already know, their eloquence on the
matter will not decide the issue. Consciousness may be a far more rudi- mentary phenomenon
than are living creatures and their brains. And there appears to be no obvious way of
ruling out such a thesis experimentally.5

And so, while we know many things about ourselves in anatom- ical, physiological, and
evolutionary terms, we currently have no idea why it is “like something” to be what we
are. The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand, the fact that your
thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character, is an absolute
mysteryrivaled only by the mystery, famously articulated by the philosopher Schelling,
that there should be anything at all in this universe rather than nothing. The problem is
that our experience of brains, as objects in the world, leaves us perfectly insensible to the reality of
consciousness, while our experience as brains grants us knowledge of nothing else. Given this situation, it is reasonable to
conclude that the domain of our subjectivity constitutes a proper (and essential) sphere
of investigation into the nature of the uni- verse: as some facts will be discovered only
in consciousness, in first- person terms, or not discovered at all.

Investigating the nature of consciousness directly, through sus- tained introspection, is
simply another name for spiritual practice. It should be clear that whatever
transformations of your experience are possibleafter forty days and forty nights in the
desert, after

* The mathematician Alan Turing once proposed a test for the adequacy of a com- puter
simulation of the human mind (and this has since been promoted in the liter- ature to a
test for computer “consciousness”). The proposed test requires that a human subject
interrogate another person and a computer by turns, without know- ing which is which. If,
at the end of the experiment, he cannot identify the computer with any confidence, it is
said to have “passed” the Turing test.

twenty years in a cave, or after some new serotonin agonist has been delivered to your
synapsesthese will be a matter of changes occur- ring in the contents of your
consciousness. Whatever Jesus experi- enced, he experienced as consciousness. If he loved
his neighbor as himself, this is a description of what it felt like to be Jesus while in
the presence of other human beings. The history of human spiritu- ality is the history of
our attempts to explore and modify the deliv- erances of consciousness through methods
like fasting, chanting, sensory deprivation, prayer, meditation, and the use of
psychotropic plants. There is no question that experiments of this sort can be con- ducted
in a rational manner. Indeed, they are some of our only means of determining to what
extent the human condition can be deliberately transformed. Such an enterprise becomes
irrational only when people begin making claims about the world that cannot be supported
by empirical evidence.

What Are We Calling “I”?

Our spiritual possibilities will largely depend on what we are as selves. In physical terms, each of us is a system, locked in an unin- terrupted exchange of matter
and energy with the larger system of the earth. The life of your very cells is built upon
a network of barter and exchange over which you can exercise only the crudest con- scious
influencein the form of deciding whether to hold your breath or take another slice of
pizza out of the fridge. As a physical system, you are no more independent of nature at
this moment than your liver is of the rest of your body. As a collection of self-
regulating and continually dividing cells, you are also continuous with your genetic
precursors: your parents, their parents, and back- ward through tens of millions of
generationsat which point your ancestors begin looking less like men and women with bad
teeth and more like pond scum. It is true enough to say that, in physical terms, you are
little more than an eddy in a great river of life.