23 Minutes from Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief
Hi, I'm in the dressing room at the Palace Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky, on June 14th, 2018, and I thought I'd read you an excerpt from Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, which is a book I published in '99 with Routledge. It's been the basis of my YouTube lectures, and I would say also Twelve Rules for Life. A lot of the ideas in Twelve Rules for Life were first worked out with Maps of Meaning.
I just recorded an audio version of the book that was released two days ago, June 12, 2008, and it's available from Penguin Books on Audible. I'll put the links in the description of the video. I'm hoping that the audio version, with its careful intonation, will be easier to understand. Maps of Meaning is a rather difficult book, in any case.
I'm going to read you an excerpt from it today, and that'll serve as a bit of an introduction to the book. I'll make some more excerpts over the next coming weeks, I think, as well, but we'll start with this one.
I was reading Jeffrey Burton Russell's Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World when I came across his discussion of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Russell discusses Ivan's argument for atheism, which is one of the most powerful ever mounted. Ivan is one of the brothers in The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan's examples of evil, all taken from the daily newspapers of 1876, are unforgettable: the nobleman who orders his hounds to tear the peasant boy to pieces in front of his mother; the man who whips his struggling horse on its gentle eyes; the parents who locked their tiny daughter all night in the freezing privy while she knocks on the walls pleading for mercy; the Turk who entertains a baby with a shiny pistol before blowing its brains out. Ivan knows that such horrors occur daily and can be multiplied without end.
I took the case of children, Ivan explains, to make the case clearer. Of the other tears with which the earth is soaked, I will say nothing. Burton Russell states the relation of evil to God has, in the century of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, once again become the center of philosophical and theological discussion. The problem of evil can be stated simply: God is omnipotent, God is perfectly good. Such a God would not permit evil to exist. But we observe that evil exists. Therefore, God does not exist. Variations on this theme are nearly infinite.
The problem is not only abstract and philosophical, of course. It is also personal and immediate. Believers tend to forget that their God takes away everything that one cares about: possessions, comforts, success, professional craft, knowledge, friends, family, and life. What kind of God is this? Any decent religion must face this question squarely, and no answer is credible that cannot be given in the face of dying children.
It seems to me that we use the horrors of the world to justify our own inadequacies. We make the presumption that human vulnerability is a sufficient cause of human cruelty. We blame God and God's creation for twisting and perverting our souls, and claim all the time to be innocent victims of circumstance. What do you say to a dying child? You say, "You can do it. There is something in you that is strong enough to do it," and you don't use the terrible vulnerability of children as an excuse for the rejection of existence and the perpetration of conscious evil.
When I wrote Maps of Meaning, I did not have much experience as a clinical psychologist. Two of my patients, however, stayed in my mind. The first was a woman about 35 years old. She looked 50; she reminded me of a medieval peasant, of my conception of a medieval peasant. She was in dirty clothes, her hair and teeth dirty, with the kind of filth that takes months to develop. She was unbearably shy. She approached anyone who she thought was superior in status to her, which was virtually everyone, hunched over, with her eyes shaded by her hands, both hands, as if she could not tolerate the light emanating from her target.
She had been in behavioral treatment in a Montreal hospital before as an outpatient, and was, in fact, a sight known to the permanent staff at the clinic. Others had tried to help her overcome her unfortunate manner of self-presentation, which made people on the streets shy away from her, made them regard her as crazy and unpredictable. She could learn to stand or sit up temporarily with her eyes on guard, but she reverted to her old habits as soon as she left the clinic.
She may have been intellectually impaired in consequence of some biological fault. It was difficult to tell because her environment was so appalling. It may have caused her ignorance; she was illiterate as well. She lived with her mother, whose character I knew nothing about, and with an elderly, desperately ill, bedridden aunt. Her boyfriend was a violent alcoholic schizophrenic who mistreated her, psychologically and physically, who was always muddling her simple mind with tirades about the devil and the worship of Satan. She had nothing going for her: no beauty, no intelligence, no loving family, no skills, no employment, nothing.
She didn't come to therapy to resolve her problems, however, nor to unburden her soul, nor to describe her mistreatment and victimization at the hands of others. She came because she wanted to do something for someone who was worse off than her. The clinic where I was interning was associated with a large psychiatric hospital; all of the patients that still remained after the shift to community care in the aftermath of the '60s were so incapacitated that they could not survive on the streets.
She had done some volunteer work of some limited type in that hospital and decided if she could maybe befriend a patient, take him or her outside for a walk. I think she got this idea because she had a dog, which she walked regularly, and what she liked to take care of. All she wanted from me was help arranging this, help finding someone who she could take outside, help finding someone in the hospital bureaucracy who would allow this to happen.
I was not very successful in aiding her, but she didn't seem to hold that against me. It is said that one piece of evidence that runs contrary to a theory is sufficient to disprove that theory. Of course, people do not think this way and perhaps should not. In general, a theory is too useful to give up easily, too difficult to regenerate, and the evidence against it should be consistent and believable before it is accepted.
But the existence of this woman made me think she was destined for a psychopathological end from the viewpoint of biological and environmental determinism, fated as surely as anyone I had ever met. And maybe she beat her dog sometimes and was rude to her sick aunt. Maybe I never saw her vindictive or unpleasant even when her simple wishes were thwarted. I don't want to say that she was a saint because I didn't know her well enough to tell.
But the fact was that in her misery and simplicity, she remained without self-pity and able to see outside of herself. Why wasn't she a criminal, cruel, unbalanced, and miserable? She had every reason to be. And yet she wasn't. In her simple way, she had made the proper choices. She remained bloody but unbowed, and she seemed to me, rightly or wrongly, to be a symbol of suffering humanity, sorely afflicted, yet capable of care and love.
God justifies his creation in Milton's Paradise Lost: "Such I created all the ethereal powers and spirits, both them who stood and them who failed. Not free, what proof could they have given? Sincere of true allegiance? Constant faith or love where only what they needs must do appeared not what they would. What praise could they receive? What pleasure I from such obedience? Paid when will and reason reason also his choice? Useless and vain of freedom both despoiled; made passive, both had served necessity, not me. They therefore, as to right, belonged; so were created; nor can justly accuse their maker or their making or their fate as if predestination overruled their will, disposed by absolute decree or high foreknowledge. They themselves decreed their own revolt, not I. If I foreknew, foreknowledge have no influence on their fault, which had no less proved certain, unfair known. So, without least impulse, or shadow of fate, or ought by me immutably foreseen, they trespass authors to themselves in all, both what they judge and what they choose; for so I formed them free, and free they must remain; till they enthralled themselves. Else must change their nature and revoke the high decree unchangeable, eternal, which ordained their freedom. They themselves ordained their fall."
The other patient I wish to describe was the schizophrenic in a small inpatient ward at a different hospital. He was about 29 when I met him, a few years older than I was at the time, and had been in and out of confinement for seven years. He was, of course, on antipsychotic medication and participated in occupational therapy activities on the ward, making coasters and pencil holders and so on. But he could not maintain attention for any amount of time. He was not even much good at crafts.
My supervisor asked me to administer an intelligence test to him. The standard ways are more for the sake of my experience than for any possible diagnostic good. I gave my patient some of the red and white blocks that made up the block design subtests. He was supposed to arrange the blocks so they matched a pattern printed on some cards. He picked them up and started to rearrange them on the desk in front of him while I timed him, stupidly, with a stopwatch. The task was impossible for him, even at the simplest of stages. He looked constantly distracted and frustrated.
I asked, "What's wrong?" He said, "The battle between good and evil in heaven is going on in my head." I stopped the testing at that point. I didn't know exactly what to make of his comment. He was obviously suffering, and the testing seemed to make it worse. What was he experiencing? He wasn't lying, that's for sure. In the face of such a statement, it seemed ridiculous to continue.
I spent some time with him that summer. I never met someone who was so blatantly mentally ill. We talked on the ward, and occasionally I would take him for a walk through the hospital grounds outside. He was the third son of first-generation immigrants. His firstborn brother was a lawyer, the other a physician. His parents were obviously ambitious for their children, hard-working and disciplined. He had been a graduate student working toward a degree in immunology. I don't precisely remember; his brothers had sent him a daunting example, and he felt pressured to succeed.
His experimental work had not turned out as he had expected, however, and he apparently came to believe that he might not graduate, not at least when he had hoped to. So he faked his experimental results and wrote up his thesis anyway. He told me that the night he finished writing, he woke up and saw the devil standing over him at the foot of his bed. This event triggered the onset of his mental illness, from which he had never recovered.
It might be said that the satanic apparition merely accompanied the expression of some pathological stress-induced neural development, whose appearance was biologically predetermined, or that the devil was merely a personification of his culture's conception of moral evil manifesting itself in imagination as a consequence of his guilt. Both of these levels of description have their merits. But the fact remains that he saw the devil, and that vision accompanied or even was the event that destroyed him.
He was afraid to tell me much of his fantasy, and it was only after I had paid careful attention to him that he opened up. He was not bragging or trying to impress me. He was terrified about what he believed, terrified as a consequence of the fantasies that impressed themselves upon him. He told me that he could not leave the hospital because someone was waiting to shoot him—a typical paranoid delusion. Why did someone want to kill him?
Well, he was hospitalized during the Cold War—not at its height, perhaps, but still during a time when the threat of purposeful nuclear annihilation seemed more plausible, more likely than it does now. Many of the people I knew used the existence of this threat to justify to themselves their failure to participate fully in life—a life which they thought of romantically as doomed and therefore as pointless. But there was some real terror in the pose, and the thought of the countless missiles pointed here and there around the world sapped the energy and faith of everyone, hypocritical or not.
My schizophrenic patient believed that he was in fact the incarnation of the world-annihilating force, that he was destined, upon release from the hospital, to make his way south to a nuclear missile silo on American territory, that he was fated to make the decision that would launch the final war. The people outside the hospital knew this, and that is why they were waiting to shoot him. He did not want to tell me this story and, consequently, although he did, because he thought that I might then want to kill him too.
My friends in graduate school thought it ironic that I had contact with a patient of this type. My peculiar interest in Jung's ideas regarding the collective unconscious was well known to them, and it seemed absurdly fitting that I would end up talking to someone with delusions of this title. But I didn't know what to do with his ideas. Of course, they were crazy, and they had done him in. But it still seemed to me that they were true from the metaphorical viewpoint.
His story, in totality, linked his individual choice between good and evil with the cumulative horror then facing the world. His story implied that because he had given in to temptation at a critical juncture, he was in fact responsible for the horror of the potential of nuclear war. But how could this be? It seemed insane to me to even consider that the act of one powerless individual could be linked in some manner to the outcome of history as a whole. But I have no longer been so sure.
I've read much about evil and its manner of perpetration and growth, and I'm no longer convinced that each of us are so innocent, so harmless. It is, of course, illogical to presume that one person, one speck of dust among six billion motes, is in any sense responsible for the horrible course of human events. But that course in itself is not logical, far from it, and it seems likely that it depends on processes that we do not understand.
The most powerful arguments for the non-existence of God, at least a good God, are predicated on the idea that such a being would not allow for the resistance of evil in its classical forms: natural diseases, disasters, moral wars, pogroms. Such arguments can be taken further; even atheism can be used to dispute the justice of the existent world itself. Dostoyevsky states, "Perhaps the entire cosmos is not worth a single innocent child's suffering." How can the universe be constructed such that pain is permitted? How can a good God allow for the existence of a suffering world?
These difficult questions can be addressed in part as a consequence of careful analysis of evil. First, it seems reasonable to insist upon the value of the natural moral distinction: the tragic circumstances of life should not be placed in the same category as willfully undertaken harm. Tragedy, subjugation to the mortal conditions of existence, has an ennobling aspect, at least in potential, and has been constantly exploited to that end in great literature and mythology. True evil, by contrast, is anything but noble. Participation in it, whose sole purpose is expansion of innocent pain and suffering, destroys character.
Forthright encounter with tragedy, by contrast, may increase it. This is the meaning of the Christian myth of the crucifixion. It is Christ's full participation in and freely chosen acceptance of his fate, which he shares with all mankind, that enables him to manifest his full identity with God. And it is that identity that enables him to bear that fate and which strips it of evil. Conversely, it is the voluntary demeaning of our own characters which makes the necessary tragic conditions of existence appear evil.
But why is life tragic? Why are we subject to unbearable limitation, to pain, disease, and death, to cruelty at the hands of nature and society? Why do terrible things happen to everyone? These are, of course, unanswerable questions, but they must be answered somehow if we are able to face our own lives.
The best I can make of it is this: this has helped me. Nothing can exist without preconditions. Even a game cannot be played without rules, and the rules say what cannot be done as much as what can. Perhaps the world is not possible as a world without its borders, without its rules. Maybe existence wouldn't be possible in the absence of our painful limitations.
Think of it this way: if we could have everything we wanted merely for wishing it, if every tool performed every job, if all men were omniscient and immortal, then everything would be the same. The same all-powerful thing. God and creation would never exist. That is, the differences between things, which is a function of their specific limitations, allows them to exist at all.
But the fact that things do exist does not mean that they should exist, even if we are willing to grant them their necessary limitations. Should the world exist? Are the preconditions of experience so terrible that the whole game should be called off? And there is never any shortage of people working diligently towards this end.
It seems to me that we answer this question implicitly but profoundly when we lose someone we loved and then grieve. This is a very common experience. I don't think we cried because they existed either, but because they are lost. This presupposes a judgment rendered at a very fundamental level of analysis. Grief presupposes having loved; it presupposes the judgment that this person's specific bounded existence was valuable, was something that should have been, even in its inevitably imperfect and vulnerable form.
But still, the question lingers: why should things, even loved things, exist at all? If their necessary limitations cause such suffering, perhaps we could reserve the answer to the question of God's nature and his responsibility for the presence of the evil in creation until we have solved the problem of our own. Perhaps we could tolerate the horrors of the world if we left our own characters intact and developed them to the fullest. If we took full advantage of every gift we had been granted, perhaps the world would not look horrible then.
That was from pages 343 to 347 from Maps of Meaning, published in 1999, audio version released June 12, 2018. I'll read some more excerpts in the coming days and weeks. Thanks very much. Bye-bye.