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ubi_cover2

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/pandemic-personals-wanted-small-guaranteed-basic-income-needy-person/"></div><blockquote>Many of you live from day to day, without any type of legal guarantee to protect you… You have no steady income to get you through this hard time… This may be the time to consider a universal basic wage which would acknowledge and dignify the noble, essential tasks you carry out… It would ensure and concretely achieve the ideal, at once so human and so Christian, of no worker without rights.
—Pope Francis, Easter Letter, accompanying his traditional “Urbi et Orbi” address from the Vatican on Easter Sunday, April 12, 2020</blockquote>
Pope Francis is the latest convert to the idea of a basic income as an economic safety net to provide a floor for the most marginalized in society. The idea of the state providing a guaranteed minimum wage has been kicking around since <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advocates_of_basic_income">the time of Thomas Paine in the 18th century</a>. Now, the idea has resurfaced with a vengeance as we face the 21st century’s global pandemic, which has shuttered and shattered markets worldwide, socialist and capitalist alike. The Pope, as he typically does on Easter Sunday, was <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2020/04/12/easter-message-pope-francis-proposes-universal-basic-wage">preaching</a> a global message, this year to the “invisible” global poor on the peripheries of societies, unreached by market solutions or state protection.
The target of the Pope’s appeal is not the sophisticated urban office worker in the developed world who can now work “remotely” from home with a guaranteed paycheck until the pandemic is over; it is, instead, the grassroots economy, the large population of informal workers on the margins who live from day to day without any guaranteed income or wage protections.
Nevertheless, since we live in a society that contains all these heterogeneous levels of employment and compensation, all the way from the corporate CEO to the street beggar, the Pope challenges us to face this pandemic not as individuals in our own private little worlds, but as fellow human beings striving for the kind of common justice and dignity owed to all God’s creatures.
In sum, Pope Francis is reiterating one of his frequent universalist themes: the adequate provision of the three Ls — “land, labor, and lodging” — which are fundamental to justly-ordered modern, industrial societies. It is no coincidence that these themes are also hot items in the 2020 presidential campaigns in the US, with candidates Warren and Sanders particularly fierce advocates for justice in jobs, housing, education, and environment.
The nuggets of wisdom in the Pope’s Easter address have preoccupied economists, political scientists, and sociologists for decades. One of the major proponents of the idea of a basic income, for instance, is Belgian Professor Philippe Van Parijs, author of Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy (2017).
Building on the work of European colleagues Claus Offe and Jurgen Habermas, Van Parijs offers a very simple <a href="http://bostonreview.net/forum/ubi-van-parijs">proposal</a> to improve the human condition: namely, that “everyone should be paid a universal basic income (UBI), at a level sufficient for subsistence.” That is, “an income paid by a government, at a uniform level and at regular intervals, to each adult member of society. The grant is paid, and its level is fixed, irrespective of whether the person is rich or poor, lives alone or with others, is willing to work or not.”
Making arguments of inclusion used by both the Pope and Senator Sanders, Van Parijs thinks that modern western nations have the resources necessary to support a UBI: “a basic income would serve as a powerful instrument of social justice: it would promote real freedom for all by providing the material resources that people need to pursue their aims. At the same time, it would help to solve the policy dilemmas of poverty and unemployment, and serve ideals associated with both the feminist and green movements.”
As a libertarian, Van Parijs wants not only to foster and protect the three L types of rights, but also to add real worth or value to those rights in the form of increased access to the material or financial resources needed for their practical exercise. He therefore favors a Rawlsian interpretation of equality of opportunity, such that “the distribution of opportunity… be designed to offer the greatest possible real opportunity to those with least opportunities…” In other words, having an abstract right to jobs or housing needs to be instantiated by giving people the financial wherewithal to be able to exercise those rights meaningfully.
Some ambiguities in Van Parijs’ definition of the distribution of opportunity need to be resolved to understand whether he is talking about rights or options. A right to a minimum wage is admirable but one would still need to have a job to make it meaningful; similarly, for affordable housing, one would still need enough cash to pay the rent. As for health coverage as a basic right, we are only too familiar with the American practice of chaining health insurance to employment wages. No job, no coverage.
Therefore, UBI enhances the distribution of opportunity by enhancing options: it promotes the dignity of choice versus the indignity of coercion — i.e. being forced to live in a slum or work in a menial job because you have no other options. Van Parijs would agree with this liberating role of a UBI which is to be preferred for giving “every person the possibility of taking up gainful employment in which she can find recognition and accomplishment…”
Thus, UBI provides an economic cushion that confers the privilege of choice on those otherwise too poor to have that luxury. The whole concept of the state providing basic income for its citizens raises all kinds of political, economic, and moral questions about its implementation and goals. For example, what should be its scope, size, and timing? Should it be universal (Van Parijs’s preference) or targeted to only the most needy? At what age should it begin, and how long should it last? How much should it be, and should its provision be conditional or means-tested to make sure that only real cases of need are addressed to minimize abuse. Who decides?
Boston Review <a href="http://bostonreview.net/forum/basic-income-all/claus-offe-pathways-here">hosted</a> a Forum on Basic Income to give other academics a chance to debate Van Parijs’ proposals. On the question of scope and timing, Claus Offe weighed in with his opinion that the implementation of a UBI “should be governed by principles of gradualism and reversibility.” Offe likes the idea of a “participation income” as a “gradualist strategy” that could support non-market labor activity (e.g. child-rearing by single mothers), whilst he also proposes a “sabbatical account” as a form of temporary basic income which would have a draw down period, in chunks of time, over ten years, beginning after age 25. Offe argues that this would help “humanize” work by allowing employees to resist “particularly undesirable jobs and working conditions,” while providing “opportunities and incentives to restore skills and other aspects of human capital.”
World-famous French economist Thomas Piketty has proposed a comparable solution of basic income to current inequity dilemmas. Piketty’s latest book Capital and Ideology (2020) is a sequel to his blockbuster thesis on the roots of inequality, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (2014), and continues his incomparable <a href="http://.https:/ces.fas.harvard.edu/recordings/capital-and-ideology-an-address-by-thomas-piketty">analyses</a> of the dynamics of wealth and inequality around the globe.
Like another prestigious economist, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, Piketty argues that we can no longer rely on capital market discipline as an organizing principle for the whole of society. Instead, he proposes an alternative paradigm of “social federalism,” or “participatory socialism,” built around three concepts.
First, we need “educational justice” as the main channel for reducing inequality and creating economic prosperity. Next, “social property” invokes progressive taxation to make wealth circulate equitably across society. Third is “participatory socialism,” which would permit conditional capital markets whose functioning is contingent on binding and accountable obligations to social, economic, and environmental justice.
There are noteworthy parallels between Piketty’s proposals and those of both Stiglitz (“<a href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/the-economy-we-need-by-joseph-e-stiglitz-2019-05?mod=article_inline&amp;barrier=accesspaylog">progressive capitalism</a>”) and Sanders, whose signature agenda calls for a similar re-ordering of society based on justice. In fact, Piketty recently <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2020/03/">endorsed</a> Sanders’ platform in Le Monde, claiming that “Sanders has come to the aid of democracy in the USA.”
A major component of “participatory socialism” is Piketty’s UBI proposal to use wealth and inheritance taxation to provide a grant of 100,000 Euros to everyone at age 25, as a way of re-distributing wealth more equitably across society to achieve a transformation and rebalancing of bargaining power.
Thus, once again, UBI is invoked as a remedy to optimize life options and choices. It could promote social justice and egalitarianism in lop-sided societies whose asymmetries of wealth and income create such a gulf between the haves and have-nots as to make them unstable and dysfunctional. And nothing has exacerbated that instability and inequality in the US more than the current pandemic, which has led the federal government to create what I would call “faux UBI” by injecting stimulus checks, increased unemployment benefits, and massive amounts of capital liquidity into the economy, akin to throwing a lifebelt to a drowning person.
Only time will tell if the survivor will recover, but it is safe to say that we will never be the same again. The time is ripe for a social, economic and cultural metamorphosis to change us back into the egalitarian country that we once had the potential to become. A guaranteed basic income might just be the dusting of pollen needed for that beautiful new flowering.
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Photo credit: Gabriel White / Flickr
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Pandemic Personals: “Wanted — small guaranteed basic income for needy person”

cults

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/case-cults/"></div><blockquote>See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.
<blockquote>Colossians 2:6-12</blockquote>
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<blockquote>— <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Little-Sister/Patricia-Walsh-Chadwick/9781682617823">Little Sister</a>. Patricia Walsh Chadwick. Post Hill Press, 2019.
— <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/feb/19/kibbutz-child-noam-shpancer">“Child of the collective.”</a> Noam Shpancer. The Guardian, February 18, 2011.
— <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/06/my-childhood-in-a-cult">“My Childhood in a Cult.”</a> Guinevere Turner. New Yorker, May 6, 2019.
— <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631492136">American Messiahs: False Prophets of a Damned Nation</a>. Adam Morris. Liveright Books, 2019.</blockquote>
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The books and articles above represent a recent flurry of disclosures about what cults are all about and what it is like to grow up in one. The three fascinating autobiographies by Chadwick, Shpancer, and Turner paint a mixed picture of the joys and sorrows of growing up in a communal society during their formative years. The more biographical book by Morris is more of an academic review of the major cult figures in American history, but it provides some useful generalizations about the cultural and sociological forces that led to the emergence of cult leaders, and how they attracted a following. Further, it helps identify group characteristics and practices common to the various cults the three autobiography authors grew up in.
In a <a href="http://nlcommunitychurch.org/sermon/colossians-26-12-how-to-avoid-joining-a-cult/">recent sermon</a> on the dangers of cults, California pastor Rev. Stewart Perry uses the above quote from Colossians to exhort his congregation to avoid joining one: “see that no one takes you captive… cult leaders are dangerous when they think they have no sin — that’s ‘manipulative crazy’… anyone who thinks they never need forgiveness is very, very dangerous.” Further, he advises his congregation that “Jesus is the antidote to cults… Jesus is enough.”
Perry’s sermon reminded me of another pastor who similarly warned his flock about the dangers of a cult just prior to WWII. Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer cautioned his fellow Germans in a national radio broadcast in 1933 (cut off by the government) that they too risked being taken captive through “empty deceit.” He <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/opinion/trump-religion.html%25252523commentsContainer">warned</a> that “they were falling for an idolatrous personality cult,” in the form of Hitler and the Nazi Party. Sadly, Bonhoeffer’s warnings went largely unheeded, and he was executed for his trouble by the Nazis in 1945.
Morris introduces us to some of the more significant messianic or charismatic cult figures in American history, all the way from Jemima Wilkinson in 1776 to Fr. Divine in Harlem in the 1930s, then on to that “visionary with stunning charisma” and a “holy-rolling Marxist” Rev. Jim Jones in the 1970s, whose followers ended up in a mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978. A comparable fate befell David Koresh, leader of an apocalyptic religious sect known as the Branch Davidians, when he and 75 followers perished in a firestorm in April 1993, while their compound in Waco, TX was under siege by FBI and ATF agents. Morris uses these examples to argue that American messianic movements represented quasi-biblical communalism — the practice of communal living which is a “repudiation of the values and institutions that Americans hold dear” (e.g. the “sacrosanct individualism on which American culture thrives, but also the nuclear family unit that evolved alongside industrial capitalism”). This kind of cultish communalism, Morris points out, was often associated with celibacy, a rejection of marriage, childbearing, and traditional kinship structures.
Breaking with traditional social customs is common to many cults. When Governor Ronald Reagan began cutting social services in California in the 1970s, Rev. Jones’ Peoples Temple members earned a charitable reputation for housing foster children. Morris is less sanguine about the underlying motivation, believing that Jones’s objective was to “undermine and then delegitimize the nuclear family….” Jones discouraged most marital unions as “counterrevolutionary and bourgeois” and too “possessive”; as a result, “he began to take many sexual partners besides his wife.”
The nuclear family structure, however, remains resilient. It has endured for millennia despite numerous attempts by disenchanted messiahs and self-proclaimed prophets to replace it with something else. Some of those attempts have been relatively innocuous, like the Hippie movement of the 1960s, which used the Timothy Leary mantra of “turn on, tune in, drop out” to form “druggie” communes in places like Vermont, where they practiced communal living and child rearing in a nose-thumbing, anti-establishment gesture. Other attempts at replacing the emphasis on nuclear families with communal living and child rearing would include the semi-official, more socially sanctioned kind of communalism practiced in Israeli kibbutzes after WWII. As Noam Shpancer interprets his growing up in a kibbutz, it was “born of an exuberant meshing of Marxist and Zionist passions” in Israel, with widespread economic, political, and cultural influence. Ideologically, kibbutz members wanted to break away from “old Jewish-European traditions… They wanted to demolish the nuclear family structure in favour of the group… There was also a feminist motive, as communal sleeping [for children] was supposed to free women to participate equally in community life.”
The separation of parents and children was hard for Shpancer, as it was for Chadwick and Turner:
<blockquote>As children, we spent most of our time in the children&#8217;s house with our peers. We ate, played, studied and slept there. We would visit our parents every afternoon between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., then they would return us to the children&#8217;s house to sleep. Our Jewish mothers never cooked us a meal, never washed our clothes or sang us a lullaby. The kibbutz system sought to limit private intimacies in case they diverted members&#8217; energy from the communal project.</blockquote>
There was a darker side to Kibbutz life, too — “the pressure to conform was relentless.” Like Morris’ observations, “individuality and competition were looked down upon,” claims Shpancer.
Not every heavenward gazing cult was without sin, and instances of very earthly abuse (physical, psychological, or sexual) are found in all three autobiographies. As Shpancer relates, “Years later it also came out that a girl a few years ahead of me had been molested repeatedly by one of the members, the father of another girl.” For the introverted kibbutz, evil was something outside, like capitalism or the corrupt world. Using words that ring awfully true in the 21st century, Shpancer claims that if anyone suspected any wrongdoing, they probably chose to look away: “When a dream is prized, we often look away from any reality that threatens to undermine it.”
Shpancer points to another commonality shared by children of cults, even those as enlightened as kibbutzim — no graduate or survivor wants to repeat the experience with their own nuclear family. By the 1990s, “most kibbutzim had already turned away from communal sleeping. The move was in large part driven by women who grew up in the children&#8217;s house and, having become mothers, refused to let their children experience that same system.”
In her recent New Yorker “True Confessions” revelations, Guinevere Turner also recounts her lifelong struggle to come to terms with her cult upbringing: “I was born into a family of a hundred adults and sixty children in 1968, and spent the first eleven years of my life among them.” That family was the Lyman Family, under the leadership of yet another charismatic male, Mel Lyman, who had Family compounds all over the United States. Turner spent much of her childhood in old buses, crisscrossing the country.
An older member later explains the “mooney” Lyman Family rationale to a 12-year-old Turner: “We work at it, striving for inner consciousness, self-development on the inside instead of the outside. This life we live is not for everyone, only if you have Mel inside of you.” The Family also preached that the apocalyptic “Big Confrontation” was coming when a spaceship would arrive to take all the members to Venus.
Her single mom birthed Turner into the Lyman cult at age 19, and she stayed until age 11, when she was kicked out to join her mother, who had left the Lyman compound in Manhattan to rejoin her own mother in New Jersey. At the time, Turner was in another Family compound in Kansas: “Children and their biological parents tended to be separated early on in the Family, and I was no exception. My mother and I were rarely on the same compound, and I didn’t know her very well.”
Turner was heartbroken to leave her childhood friends and the only family she had ever known. She was traumatized by the thought of having to interact with the “soulless” World People outside. It was only much later, after high school and college, that being a writer helped her confront the darker side of the Lyman Family. Once again, familiar trends and patterns are revealed.
For one thing, Tuner finally recognized the patriarchal nature of the Family, where women waited on the men, and the latter often took 13-year-old girls to be their own private concubines. And, as in other cults, Turner experienced severe physical and psychological punishment, negative experiences which she conveniently repressed for many years while fondly remembering the better times.
From the perspective of 50 years of age, Turner concludes: “There will always be people in search of what cults have to offer — structure, solidarity, a kind of hope.”
Perhaps the most remarkable of the three autobiographies is Chadwick’s Little Sister, written, like Turner’s, from the perspective of age and acquired wisdom. Like Turner and Shpancer, Chadwick has fond memories of the friendships she made inside the Catholic cult where she spent most of her formative years, until at age 18, after finishing high school, she too was kicked out because she did not have “the makings of a nun.”
What is remarkable about Chadwick’s memoir is that there was no need to find or invent an ideology to rationalize the cult’s existence, as Morris argues for many of the cults he reviews. The religious ideology came ready-made in the form of the teachings of the Catholic Church. Nor were the members illiterate, uneducated “moonies” who would have followed their charismatic leaders anywhere, unquestioningly. Instead, they were academics and intellectuals from Harvard, Radcliffe, and Boston College in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s who made a conscious decision to transform their nuclear family lives immutably to follow their own charismatic leader, Fr. Leonard Feeney, a Jesuit priest and mesmerizing orator..
The Catholic cult of Chadwick’s childhood began in the St. Benedict Center in Cambridge, MA, just across from the Catholic Chaplaincy in St. Paul’s Church in Harvard Square. Established in 1940 by a staunch Catholic, Mrs. Catherine Clarke (later to be known as Mother Catherine), the Center became a popular meeting place for young students. She was soon able to obtain the services of renowned Jesuit writer, Leonard Feeney, as the Center’s spiritual director. Before long his weekly lectures at the Center were attracting SRO crowds of hundreds of young people, Catholic and non-Catholic alike. Chadwick’s parents met and married at the Center in 1947, and over the next eight years she and her four siblings all started life within the ambit of the Center.
But Feeney’s public views on non-Catholics and Jews soon got him into trouble. He preached a doctrine of “No salvation outside the Church” and was virulently anti-Semitic in his claims that the Jews killed Jesus. By 1949 the Vatican had had enough, and Boston’s Cardinal Cushing excommunicated Feeney in April, 1949. That same year, 51 followers of the Center, including students and parents like the Walsh’s, established themselves as a religious order, with Feeney as their spiritual director. They called themselves “Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary” and pledged blind obedience to their charismatic leader.
Between 1949 and 1954, membership in the St. Benedict Center expanded to 100 members, including single men and women, as well as married couples who brought and raised 39 children within its orbit. Those members unselfishly sold homes and personal property to donate to the cause, enabling Mother Catherine to buy a compound of seven houses on Putnam Ave., just a few blocks from Harvard Square. That compound became the first incarnation of the St Benedict Center as a cult community. Adults began to dress alike in black suits and dresses, changed their names to saints’ names, and soon (like Shpancer’s kibbutzim) children were separated from their families, assigned to sleep in dormitory-style rooms inside the compound. Their “angel” or supervisor was Sister Matilda (a mother with five children) who did not hesitate to belt her charges across the face with her open hand as a punishment for alleged infractions.
For the children, things went further downhill when, in 1958, Mother Catherine purchased a farm out in the Still River community in central Massachusetts, with eight acres of property stretching down to the Nashua river. This became the permanent home for the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and still exists to this day.
The space and the isolation of the Still River farm allowed Mother Catherine to run the Center as the little fiefdom she had always wanted. Feeney left all the administration to Catherine, and she ran it with an iron fist. She quickly became Chadwick’s nemesis; they argued on issues ranging from personal freedom to communication with her parents, which was forbidden, except for one weekly “family time.” Eventually brothers were separated from sisters, parents from children, and husbands from wives via vows of celibacy.
At times, Little Sister reminded me of Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell, where a group of lay people in England try to lead a more ascetic Catholic life in the grounds of a convent occupied by cloistered nuns. But Murdoch’s characters maintain a healthy relationship with the outside world, while the Still River community (like Turner’s) regarded the outside world as apostates and “pious frauds” to be avoided.
Little Sister is primarily a book of description, not explanation. Halfway through, I kept wondering why such highly educated people were playing at being nuns and monks in such an ascetic, self-negating way. We must wait until Chadwick’s parents’ 25th wedding anniversary before their daughter asks them the same question. Their weak response is that they were being true both to their Catholic faith and to the vows of obedience they had made to Fr. Feeney.
Two-thirds of Chadwick’s book centers on her struggle to maintain a sense of identity inside a cult which, like Shpancer’s kibbutzim and Turner’s Lyman Family, tried to erase any sense of personal identity or individualism for the good of the common cause. When she finally leaves Still River at age 18 and goes back to establish a life in Cambridge, she has to find herself all over again. After collective childhoods which stressed conformity of behavior and unity of belief, all these authors attest to their later difficulty in acquiring a healthy sense of self.
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A Case of the Cults

2-26-mccaffrey-helminiak

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/thinking-consciousness-conscious-thinking/"></div>“The now is that unexpected, unanticipated place where the mind and the body and the emotions all meet in a proper season, destroying identity, leaving only an intensity of pleasure that celebrates all parts of that triad: body, mind, and spirit.” -Travis McGee, in Free Fall in Crimson by John D. MacDonald
Are you ever aware of being aware, able to stand outside of yourself and watch yourself think? Have you ever experienced a transcendent level of consciousness that makes you feel connected to the universe? Such conscious reflection is a very human &#8220;self appropriation,” according to Bernard Lonergan, a famous theologian at Boston College (called by some a “modern Aquinas”). As part of his work on the philosophy of science, Lonergan (1904-1984) advocated generalizing the empirical methods of the natural sciences beyond exterior sensory-perceptual data to the internal data of consciousness.
One of his students, Daniel A. Helminiak (Professor of Psychology at the University of West Georgia, Atlanta), has set himself the task of introducing Lonergan&#8217;s philosophy to a wider audience in his latest book, Brain, Consciousness, and God: A Lonerganian Integration. This ambitious work takes us on a journey through the dark woods of consciousness, with Lonergan playing Virgil to our Dante.
If you are human, you have consciousness, and that capacity for reflection and exploration of your mental life can be a gateway to spirituality. If you prefer your spirituality “lite,” then visit the PBS program The Future of God, where Deepak Chopra tries to add a layer of scientific respectability to his popular musings by claiming that there are neuro-biological correlates of meditation, mindfulness, and conscious awareness.
If you prefer a full bodied pint of wisdom, Helminiak’s book offers a more scientific, scholarly, and well researched approach to understanding the nature of consciousness. He tackles the perennial psycho-biological challenge of relating organic matter (brain) to non-organic mental experience (mind), asking how we account for spiritual or transcendent experience. To find out, and to lay out Lonergan&#8217;s epistemology in the process, Helminiak devotes early chapters to assessing which disciplines might be best suited to the study of uniquely human consciousness — neuroscience? psychology? theology?
Spiritualogy
Brain, Consciousness, and God would make a worthwhile contribution to the field just for its comparative exegesis of the contributions of these different disciplines to the study of mind. But, dissatisfied with their limitations and theoretical contradictions, Helminiak invents another &#8216;&#8211;ology&#8217; to deal with the &#8216;non-physical&#8217; component of mental experience — “Spiritualogy” — to study human spirituality both in its everyday forms and in its higher evolution as &#8220;self transcendence,&#8221; the expansion of our awareness and understanding. Helminiak thinks that our interest in and commitment to enhancing our spiritual sensitivities is a built-in and defining facet of humanity — part of our natural drive as it were. So (despite the misleading “God” in the book’s title) there is no need to call higher consciousness a divine encounter: while the divine can be spiritual, not everything spiritual is divine. Transcendent experience, as articulated through Spiritualogy, is fully human.
Yet, if physicists can talk fluently about invisible quarks and particles, how does Spiritualogy propose to talk respectably about equally invisible subjective mental experiences?
First, Helminiak offers the basic justifications for Lonergan’s thesis, followed by an elaboration of the theoretical principles.
Basic Assumptions
The first basic assumption is that self-knowledge (consciousness) is a composite of experience, understanding, and judgment, which are legitimate objects of study. While the data may come from subjective experience, they are still amenable to rigorous scientific study, argues Lonergan. Analyzing the data of consciousness requires attention to our experience of inner mental life. Just as natural science attends to physical realities, the study of consciousness permits us to know our own, non-physical minds by attending to them. Because of self-consciousness, we have the ability to reflect back on ourselves and turn even our insights into objects of awareness and thought.
The science of human knowing thus becomes isomorphic with the pattern of knowing built into the human mind. We are both the knower and the known, but that should not make our study of consciousness any less rigorous or respectable vis-a-vis the other sciences.
The Lonergan Solution
How does Heminiak respond to predictable challenges from the hard sciences whose data are objective, observable, measureable, while the messy study of consciousness is subjective, introspective, with self-reported data rather than numbers, readings, measurements, etc.?
Shouldn’t we just treat transcendent experiences as biological processes, so that even higher consciousness experiences of God and the universe are ultimately reducible to neural function?
In response, Helminiak claims that Lonergan epistemology provides a rationale and a methodology for the systematic study of non-physical realities, such as emotions, ideas, thoughts, decisions, reflections, and insights. Certainly (as Chopra might claim) there may be a neural substrate contributing to many of these phenomena; that may create an interdependency between the physical and the mental, but does not nullify the latter&#8217;s existence as an independent reality.
Consciousness and Human Knowing
In order to to put the study of consciousness on a sound, empirical footing,Helminiak needs a taxonomy, a set of descriptors for non-physical realities. He turns to the Lonergan lexicon to describe the scientific study of human knowing.
Lonergan begins with a fundamental question: &#8220;What am I doing when I am knowing? His answer is that the data of human consciousness fall into universal categories called “Levels of Knowing,” represented by three cognitive “levels of consciousness”:
1) first there is Experience, empirical knowing, which provides the data that understanding attempts to explain. At this level we become aware that there is something to be understood;
2) then comes Understanding, an intellectual knowing experience which discerns intelligibility in, or explains, data;
3) finally there is Judgment, or rational knowing, which evaluates or truth-tests the validity of what is presented by the first two levels.
How do we acquire these universal habits of consciousness? Helminiak argues that this process of knowing is spontaneous and built into the human mind. Yet, paradoxically, real life experience is a necessary pre-condition for knowing, providing the initial input that triggers “meaning making”: &#8220;Before learning language and entering the world mediated by meaning, infants live in a realm of sensate immediacy.”
But if the infant path to knowing is still dependent on plenty of experiential learning, how much is innate? Just how spontaneous is this operation of knowing? If life experience is necessary for the development of consciousness, then how does an allegedly built-in apparatus mature and evolve into the levels and kinds of intellectual knowing that Lonergan posits?
Nature vs. Nurture
The book is raising a nature vs. nurture controversy here with claims for an innate origin of conscious knowing which still needs an experiential trigger — claims which Helminiak fails to substantiate, leaving Lonergan theory to stand on its own without the benefit of other available supportive evidence. For example, he could have appealed to the distinction between “innate structure” and “innate process” that is readily available in modern cognitive psychology, where “process” is less deterministic than “structure,” and may need some experiential triggers to jumpstart its preconstructed functions. The nativist cognitive-linguistic explanations of mental development provided in Chomskyan philosophies of language and mind could also have furnished supporting evidence here. In particular, when Lonergan posits the acquisition and operation of conscious knowing as a universal feature of human nature, it almost sounds like consciousness is an innate &#8220;faculty&#8221; akin to Chomsky’s Moral Faculty, or Language Faculty, or especially his Science-Forming Faculty — which, in fact, sounds curiously close to what Lonergan is offering, namely, a Consciousness-Forming Faculty.
Sadly, there is no mention of Chomsky’s work anywhere in this book, nor apparently in Lonergan theory either.
Transcendence
The most exciting, but also the most controversial, proposition in Brain, Consciousness, and God is the conception and role of “Transcendence” as a higher level of consciousness. It does not help that Helminiak seems to use the term with different meanings at different times.
First, there is the use of Transcendence to denote a universal human capacity comprising three inherent requirements of human knowing — “be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable.” Lonergan labels these as “Transcendental Precepts” or principles which apply across the board to any and every human endeavor, wherever human consciousness is operating.
The Transcendental Precepts describe the minimal operations prerequisite for the development and use of the tools of consciousness. Using Transcendental Precepts to exercise consciousness becomes the “Transcendental Method,” which captures all the key operations in Lonergan’s three levels of human knowing, via:
1) Appeal to the relevant evidence (experience)
2) Proposal of alternative interpretations (understanding)
3) Confirmation via revision that one interpretation better accounts for the relevant evidence (judgment)
The result is the spontaneous functioning of human consciousness on its three interrelated levels: &#8220;this functioning is a built-in method of knowing within us.” So, at the very least, the Transcendental Method is universal and innate, but Helminiak goes further to claim that it is normative also: when you follow the discipline of exploring consciousness the Lonergan way, it will lead you to &#8220;authentic, correct knowing.” Transcendental Precepts &#8220;elucidate the essential ideal nature of the human being; they anticipate the goal and present the guiding principles of authentic human development.&#8221;
Therefore, with an implicit nod to Natural Law theory (as elaborated in Catholic theology), Helminiak claims that if you obey Lonergan&#8217;s Transcendental Precepts while investigating consciousness, you cannot help but find the real, the truth, the good. Thus, Lonergan’s cognitive theory is both empirical (process experience through the Transcendental Method) and normative (by allowing the Transcendental Precepts to operate honestly, our knowing becomes virtuous). Put most simply: there is a right way of thinking and knowing — if you follow Transcendental Precepts faithfully you will be rewarded with the highest level of consciousness honesty can buy.
The next meaning of Transcendence is encountered later in the book where Helminiak examines the arguments for and against treating Mind as separate from Brain. Here we encounter the more traditional notion of Transcendence as higher-order consciousness, or expansion of our awareness, or what Chopra and others in the personal growth movement might call “enlightenment.”
The Mind-Brain chapter makes this a big, bold, brave book, as Helminiak challenges the establishment in both natural science and social science, taking on all comers, from the naysayers (like the professional atheist Dennet) who deny the existence of a separate faculty of consciousness, to the reductionists (like Churchland and Tanzi) who think that consciousness can be reduced to organismic neurological functioning. Helminiak is at his most erudite in this dense, complex chapter, dealing with the diverse array of points of view on consciousness, but always circling back to Lonergan theory and methodology for a proper humanistic, naturalistic treatment of consciousness as a legitimate object of study in its own right. For the non-specialist, many of Helminiak&#8217;s common sense rebuttals of non-sequitur theorizing by neurologists, neurobiologists, and neuropsychologists will seem compelling, while graduate students in these fields should profit from Helminiak &#8216;s comparative synopses of competing views.
Mind and Brain
If Mind is the seat of consciousness, how does it relate to Brain? While current consciousness studies use the terms mind and brain virtually interchangeably, the Lonergan vision is much more highly structured and differentiated. If the mind is a non-physical reality in its own right, conscious transcendent experiences could well be just the mind’s experience of itself. Then, without invoking God or other entities, transcendence would be a natural human phenomenon. So while mind emerges from brain, and has an organic interaction with it, it is still a distinct entity.
The Lonergan “mind” has non-physical structures and functions which Helminiak identifies as psyche and spirit (or consciousness). Psyche provides data (emotions, imagery, memory) at a first sensate, perceptual level of consciousness derived from experience. This creates input for a second level of intentional consciousness — Spirit — where inquiry and insight operate to create a transcendent experience of self-consciousness. This is Helminiak’s Spiritualogy at work, where psyche and spirit combine to facilitate natural human growth towards enlightenment. Helminiak insists that this experience is fully human, an aspect of psychology, not theology. Lest we get lost in fragmentation of functions, he also stresses that it is the person, composed of body and mind, who acts; mind may be a real, separate, immaterial, spiritual entity, but it is the whole person who acts. Thanks to the built-in Transcendental Precepts, the mind is endowed with its own particular self-intelligibility; this makes the person capable of spiritual acts, such as insight, which transcend space and time.
This holistic emphasis on the person rather than on a substrate of neural activity is intentionally anti-reductionist, reflecting the Catholic philosophy of both Lonergan and Helminiak (a trained theologian and ex-priest): &#8220;It is mistaken for the study of humanity and its distinctive feature, intellectual consciousness, to focus on neurons, transmitters, nuclei, tracts, brain networks, and their computer modeling and not first and foremost on the person as a functioning whole. Such an approach ignores the data on consciousness and then finds itself unable to account for consciousness.&#8221;
In short, if you want to understand consciousness don&#8217;t start with the brain, start with the person! Thus, while modern neuroscience and psychology both continue to speak of the mind as one undifferentiated whole, this book offers an alternate, very differentiated model, with multiple levels of consciousness and multiple faculties of mind. If consciousness equals psyche plus spirit, then human spiritual enhancement can be cultivated and grown; Lonergan’s “self appropriation” — thinking about thinking — can be taken to the highest levels of consciousness, where we become capable of unbounded, infinite, transcendent thought.
Helminiak champions a Psychology that attends to the spiritual dimension of mind, capable of accounting for transcendental experience, without any need to invoke God-in-the-brain (despite the book’s title). The thesis that mind is non-physical and distinct allows him to treat spirituality as a fully psychological phenomenon — humanistic, naturalistic, non-religious, non-theological, and non-other-worldly. In sum, a proper object of scientific study, motivated by Lonergan theory.
Brain, Consciousness and God makes an erudite, honest attempt to consider and critique both the contributions and limitations of neuroscience and psychology for constructing an adequate foundation for a science of consciousness. It is a very rewarding introduction to Lonergan’s rationalist, humanist theory of consciousness.
However, theologian-psychologist Helminak shortchanges his own discipline by manufacturing too stark a contrast between the richness of Lonergan epistemology and the impoverishment of a modern Psychology preoccupied with only sensate-perceptual phenomena. This is too simplistic and anachronistic. While it lets him present Lonergan&#8217;s as the only fully developed, more “cognitive” theory of immaterial mind and consciousness, the only “cognitive” psychologist he invokes for historical support is 19th century’s William James.
The validation of Lonergan’s theory would have been greatly enhanced by allying him with more modern, compatible cognitive theorists (like Chomsky), instead of presenting him as a solo performer on the stage of consciousness.
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Thinking About Consciousness or Being Conscious About Thinking

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mccaffrey-wills

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/will-one-rid-meddlesome-priest/"></div>Back in the analog ages of 1955, Frank Sinatra produced his first 12-inch LP album, In the Wee Small Hours. It included a popular song, &#8220;I Get Along Without You Very Well,&#8221; which is the song Garry Wills is singing in his latest book Why Priests? A Failed Tradition. Wills claims that some of his best friends and teachers have been priests, and he does not feel any animosity, but &#8220;the fact that I can get along without them very well does not mean that I expect them to disappear, or even that I advocate that.” Wills aims only to assure his fellow worshipers that “as priests shrink in numbers […] congregations do not have to feel they have lost all connection to the sacred just because the role of priests in their lives is contracting. If Peter and Paul had no need of priests to love and serve God, neither do we.&#8221; <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/will-one-rid-meddlesome-priest/#more-5317" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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Will No One Rid Me of This Meddlesome Priest?

Historical Institutional Abuse inquiry

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/new-genre-civic-literature-official-reports-government-inquiries-international-cases-abuse-institutionalized-children/"></div>By <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/dr-arthur-mccaffrey/">Arthur McCaffrey</a>
This is a story about institutional crime and social justice. At times, it may seem there is too much of the former and not enough of the latter. That’s the bad news. The good news is, when the institutional crime involves the abuse and exploitation of children, a number of different governments, in different countries, in different parts of the world, are finally beginning to do something. Unfortunately, the US government is not one of them.  <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/new-genre-civic-literature-official-reports-government-inquiries-international-cases-abuse-institutionalized-children/#more-3769" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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A New Genre of Civic Literature: Official Reports of Government Inquiries Into International Cases of Abuse of Institutionalized Children

Dr. Arthur McCaffrey is a&nbsp;retired Harvard University psychologist and research scientist. In addition to writing for LARB, he writes frequently for national and international media, including: The Tablet (London), Open House (Scotland), Boston Globe, Boston Herald, New York Daily News, USA Today, Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and San Francisco Chronicle. He can be reached at amccaffrey@post.harvard.edu.

Arthur McCaffrey

A Public Voice for Private Grief

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Around the World

"You always admire what you really don't understand."
— Blaise Pascal

Religion

"You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." — Molly Ivins