Doubt and its religious cousin agnosticism, a word rarely heard nowadays, may have fallen out of fashion, but they have much to teach us, despite the disdain of Richard Dawkins, who famously wrote in The God Delusion: “I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.” He also quotes approvingly Quentin de la Bédoyère, science editor of the Catholic Herald, who in 2006 wrote that the Catholic historian Hugh Ross Williamson respected firm religious belief and certain unbelief, but “reserved his contempt for the wishy-washy boneless mediocrities who flapped around in the middle.”
To see doubters and freethinkers such as Herbert Spencer, Leslie Stephen, George Eliot, Thomas Huxley (who coined the word “agnostic”) and Darwin himself mocked in this way, given their intense engagement with complex human issues, only highlights the boldness of their thinking and the intellectual hubris of today’s unbridled certainty. The stridency of both Dawkins and de la Bédoyère misses how these and other Victorian intellectuals saw doubt as a creative force – inseparable from belief, thought, and debate, and a much-needed antidote to fanaticism and zealotry.
…A more astute contemporary thinker than Dawkins on the issue of agnosticism, in its broadest, existential sense, is the American playwright John Patrick Shanley. In the preface to his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt (also a film), he argues that “doubt requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is infinite – it is a passionate exercise.” While such questioning takes us past a point of comfort, he claims, it is “doubt (so often experienced initially as weakness) that changes things”, and thus represents “nothing less than an opportunity to reenter the Present”.
Hey, I’m not going to tell someone that they can’t indulge their masochistic fetish for being suspended indefinitely on existential tenterhooks, but, yuh know, on that note, it seems to this observer that those of us who have serenely accepted the nonexistence of any God worthy of the name are the ones who have moved on to the more pressing concerns of how to live in this world with only our fellow fallible humans to rely on for love, support and justice, whereas it is this particular type of doubter who wants to encase religious questions in amber, leaving them incapable of being resolved to any practical satisfaction. It’s people like Lane who dogmatically insist that anything less than 100% certain knowledge on this issue means we must remain open to the possibility that something like the Abrahamic religions just might be true after all. And I still say that if it weren’t for the oppressive, overbearing presence of a jealous, vindictive God haunting our collective cultural memory, no one would think it such a big deal to consider the matter settled for all intents and purposes and get on with it.
What I found really funny, though, was seeing yet another essay using Dawkins as the prime example of strident, intolerant atheism… with a link in the sidebar to related articles, including an interview with Dawkins on the same site that totally belies the claim.
The New Atheism is locked into a similar kind of literalism. It parasitically lives off its enemy. Just as evangelical Christianity is characterised by scriptural literalism and an uncomplicated belief in a “personal God”, so the New Atheism often seems engaged only in doing battle with scriptural literalism; but the only way to combat such literalism is with rival literalism. The God of the New Atheism and the God of religious fundamentalism turn out to be remarkably similar entities.
Etc., etc. Stop me if you’ve heard this one bef— oh, you have? Countless times already? Yeah, me too.
In case I’ve never made it abundantly clear before now, I am perfectly in sympathy with the awkwardness of the lifelong struggle to fully grasp our deepest perceptions, let alone give eloquent voice to them. But when it comes to this thing people variously call God, religion, or spirituality, it seems to me that the so-called New Atheists are merely insistently asking two questions of people who profess to be believers: What do you mean by that? And How do you know? Maybe some perceptions don’t lend themselves well to such direct statements, and would require grappling with in the form of literature, art and music. But I can’t help but think that a lot of the flustered harrumphing over the audacity of these rude scoundrels is due to the embarrassment of finding themselves unable to even stammer out a passable answer because they’ve never been challenged before and don’t even know what they think about what are supposedly the most pressing questions of our existence. Caught out in all their lazy glory.
Yeah, so I remembered seeing this earlier this month, but I was too busy to comment on it at the time:
Last night, Jon Stewart waded into the ongoing atheists vs. “9/11 Cross” debate brought on by a lawsuit by the American Atheists alleging that a cross-like beam that will be memorialized at Ground Zero doesn’t give equal representation to all faiths. The Daily Show host would have none of the atheists argument: “why do you give a s**t?” he quipped. He then added little more nuance to the sentiment: “It was found at Ground Zero, it has come to mean something to people who view it as a symbol of comfort. If it really bothers you why not just think of it as a metal T-shaped thingie?”
Well, what the fuck, you know. Constantine saw a flaming cross in the sky before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge all those centuries ago and dutifully conquered in that sign. We might as well plunk a cross down in memory of two big buildings too. Architecture, Jesus, and homicidal lunatics; they just seem to be inseparable.
Now then, I’m more atheist than all y’all, and I really don’t care about this particular issue either. I daresay I don’t want to be equally represented in a memorial to an event that will primarily be remembered as the trigger that sent us on a decade-long-and-going-strong global mass murder spree. Hell, if, as a subversive atheist, I wanted to put Myrrhkah’s infamous tartuffery on even more prominent display to further discredit Christianity, I’d be all for this.
But let’s take a moment here, shall we? In the wreckage of acouple skyscrapers, they found a piece of metal that just so happened to be in the form of across? OMG WHAT ARE THE ODDS? Clearly, as we all should have learned in geometry class, if two perpendicular steel beams intersect, therefore Jesus therefore freedom therefore war woohoo fuck yeah. Honestly, anyone who’s enough of a simpleton to be comforted by a random piece of twisted metal needs to be taken out back where George can soothingly tell them about the rabbits again, if you know what I mean.
A Celtic cross; now, that would have been impressive. But then the Druids would become insufferable assholes, I guess.
Ultimately, however, it is indifferent whether the herd is commanded to have one opinion or permitted to have five. Whoever deviates from the five public opinions and stands apart will always have the whole herd against him.
Back when I was first in punk rock, the thing that irked me the most, and finally drove me out of punk rock altogether, was the fact that the philosophy we espoused was all about questioning things. And yet you were not allowed to question punk rock itself. It was great to question Reagan and nuclear proliferation and the cops and school. But if you started asking things like, why do we all have to wear leather jackets, or why can’t we have vocal harmonies in some of the songs, or why can’t I grow my hair long if I want, that was taboo.
American Buddhism as it stands today is pretty much the same way. Buddhism isn’t that way. But the stuff that lotsa people call “Buddhism” is. It’s a subtle distinction, I know. But an important one.
So when I started calling bullshit on the idea of mindfulness, and skillfulness and “dharma talks,” the reaction was almost identical to what used to happen when I’d go onstage at hardcore shows in the early 80s with long hair and bell-bottoms. You can’t do that! We can challenge everything in the world, but don’t you dare challenge us!
If Buddhism can’t be challenged it isn’t Buddhism anymore.
I grew up with heavy metal myself, but it’s the same story. I’ll always be grateful for what that music did for me at that juncture of my life, but gods above, you couldn’t find a more cloistered, homogeneous group of people than my fellow metalheads. Unless you count the goths. Or the punks. Or any others who form a group identity based on their marginalization from mainstream society and proceed to become more xenophobic than those who provoked their rebellion.
That kind of strong identification with musical genres, like with Buddhism-as-an-‘ism’, served as a raft for me. I’m on dry land now and don’t need them anymore.
Flanagan isn’t talking about Buddhism as it’s actually practiced around the world, in a bewildering array of different traditions. His subject is “Buddhism naturalized” — that is, Buddhism stripped down to a core set of philosophical (and, crucially, non-supernatural) claims. Naturalize Buddhism, and you’re left with a basically materialist, deterministic view of the world. If it existed, the “Buddhist Credo,” Flanagan writes, would be something like: “I believe that everything is impermanent, that everything (including my state of mind) is subject to the principles of cause and effect, and that given that I am among the things-that-there-are, I am impermanent and subject to the laws of cause and effect.” Physicists, biologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists would agree. Today, it’s a scientific fact that human beings live in a material, determined world, and are themselves determined and material.
…The real value of Buddhism, in short, is that it finds moral meaning in our material world. That, Flanagan points out, makes our Western obsession with “happy” Buddhists seem pretty shallow by comparison. Buddhism isn’t about being happy, but about seeing the world as it is, and figuring out how to respond to the facts responsibly. Our Western moral systems, upended by the Scientific Revolution, are still figuring out how to do that — for Buddhists, there was never anything to upend. In fact, Flanagan argues, Buddhist tradition records 2,500 years worth of “experiments in living” with materialism.
I agree fully. My conception of Buddhism is one informed by Western scholars and practitioners of the last half-century. But that’s also why I don’t bother identifying as a Buddhist, because I don’t feel like answering for the myriad other variations on the theme, becoming some sort of multi-hyphenated Buddhist (which seems to be just another way of reinforcing the ego anyway). There was a time when I got a sense of community and solidarity from immersing myself in Buddhist terminology and symbolism, but now it’s enough for me to know that someone – doesn’t even matter who – put these ideas out into the noosphere, where they transmogrify through endless permutations to adapt to different circumstances, as they should. Me, I’m not anything. I just exist for now, and move on.
But I don’t want to be so hard on Malick’s failed comforter: there’s painfully little any of us can say to grief, or to any of the other human needs that inspire religious feeling. And I think it’s an inability or unwillingness to recognize that fact that is the deeper mistake of bad religious art: it wants to argue us into faith. It won’t rest without a moral, a message, a lesson to take home. But religious persuasion can’t work that way—because religious thought doesn’t work that way.
When we reach for our most fundamental beliefs—whether these are beliefs about a deity, or politics, or family—we aren’t likely to find words there. We’re much more likely to find images, metaphors, memories, half-felt impressions. We’re likely to find, that is, something far more slippery, more vague, more illogical than discursive argument. Words come afterwards—but the fact that they so often rest on a foundation of images goes a long way to explain why the most seemingly persuasive arguments fail so often: why we seek out evidence that confirms our beliefs; why we ignore evidence that does not; why being caught in contradictions often makes us hold on to them even tighter. Arguments rarely touch our central beliefs where they live, and the most perceptive religious thinkers understand this.
All true, and yet, and yet… I don’t think the chasm is quite so wide as all that. Arguments can serve as channels through which all that torrent of desire and emotion can be redirected. They can frame reality in a different way, even if it takes time for one’s perception to adjust, as in artwork where the figure is blended against the ground. People don’t change their minds on the spot when presented with an opposing argument, but given enough time, it may produce a subtle shift in their thinking. Persuasion is still worth the effort, is what I’m saying.
Why does music serve me in the same way as religion as described above? Why does it provide me with comfort, catharsis, inspiration, ecstasy and awe? I don’t know and don’t care, really. Those feelings don’t go away as one becomes more skeptical, and they don’t need to. But “religion” is not necessarily the answer for everything we can’t put into words. Arguments, words, as limited as they are, have made me aware of the futile, inherently confused nature of so many traditional yearnings: for gods, afterlives, and ultimate teleological meaning. I could never go back to those kind of simplistic narratives. But there’s so much more beyond those…
For me this film is about how everything is sacred. The film clearly treats every second, every person, every thing as a thing of beauty. Every fleeting moment of life, whether it be the birth of a star or a family meal is as important and intertwined into the fabric of being as everything else. All these moments have an effect on how things unfold, no matter how large or small. The fragility and smallness of human life is blown up onto a grand a scale as the creation of everything itself. The film opens with the question of grief, and responds by showing us the vast complexity of everything, by some way of a non-verbal answer.
Once you know how to spot it, “anticipated reproach” is everywhere, and it bedevils people who want to lead morally. Argue on behalf of an environmental cause, and non-environmentalists, anticipating your moral reproach, will think you’re stuck-up and self-righteous. Often, the anticipated reproach — driven, as it is, by fear — is exaggerated and caricatured: vegetarians, Monin finds, aren’t nearly as judgmental of meat-eaters as meat-eaters think they are. Unfortunately, one or two genuinely judgmental do-gooders can put everyone else on a hair-trigger, twisting discussion about moral issues into a vicious circle, in which both parties anticipate reproaches from one another, and put each other down in advance.
It’s not just taking an active stance on moral issues, though. Even passive resistance can elicit suspicious defensiveness. What’s wrong with me? Why don’t you want to do things the way I do them? Why don’t you like what I like? You think you’re better than me? So tiresome. This is why I prefer to be a hermit.
‘He forgets nothing but he forgives everything’ — in that case, he will be doubly hated, for he makes doubly ashamed — with his memory and his magnanimity.
– Nietzsche
I always wondered if he had Jesus in mind with that aphorism. And the above excerpt makes me wonder even more along those lines: how do people reconcile this deeply ingrained psychological resistance to being judged and found wanting with their professed worship of a man who supposedly embodied a “neither do I judge you” philosophy while simultaneously standing as the figure who will judge us all, and most of us harshly at that, for eternity? I wonder how much secret loathing many Christians harbor in the back of their mind for Jesus, how much of their effusive praise is merely the obsequious flattery all cringing underlings display out of self-preservation, even as they grind their teeth over the insult to their pride.
Health should manifest itself as a means to an end. We want to be healthy so we can get something practical done—or better still, something divine, something celestial. But now, since we do not know what we are doing here, do not know what we want or need, health has become an end in itself. People pursue health for its own sake. Why do you want to live? we ask the compulsive exerciser. The answer is not So that I can finish the work; so that I can make the discovery; so that I can find enduring love. The answer now—implicit, but to me, alas, unmistakable—is that I want to live simply to go on living. With the disappearance of tenable ideals, life, simple life, has become the great goal.
…All of the energy that once went into the pursuit of the ideal is now dormant, for almost no one can believe in ideals anymore. A quest for artistic perfection? Absurd. A search for true and absolute knowledge? A joke. A life’s dedication to compassion and lovingkindness? You must be kidding. So what is to be done with the power of human will that might once have sought after these things? It is redirected to more quotidian business. People now pursue a means—staying alive—as though it were an end in itself. Epic measures of energy invest a rank banality, for in truth there is no sustaining meaning to be had, no triumph to be achieved, simply in the maintenance of biological life.
I agree that the effort to simply prolong existence has become a raison d’être for many people, but I think he’s overlooking how fanatical health regimens provide one of the few socially acceptable opportunities for condescending, judgmental moralizing, at least among the class of people who have the time and leisure to carefully tailor their diet and exercise for maximum benefit. Not to mention how it allows for the reappearance of that good old Protestant work ethic, and the accompanying smug pride in knowing you’re one of the saved, the elect. The temple might be biological these days, but priests will always be with us in some form, it appears.
“The truth explains everything,” runs one of Grayling’s “Proverbs.” It’s an article of faith for these writers. But they must sense, even as they affirm it, that the real threat to the cult of human reason in the 21st Century is not the religious, but epistemological. We live today under the dispensation of what one contemporary wise man calls “truthiness.” In the great ecumenical marketplace of our culture, belief systems thrive not on compulsion, or verifiability, but on narrative interest.
I think he’s right. Religion is certainly a major repository of unreason, but it’s not the only one. More prevalent is the widespread cynicism that says no one can be trusted, that earnest truth-seeking is a quaint and outdated brand in the ecumenical marketplace, that you might as well just tell yourself whatever story flatters your vanity and seek out an echo chamber to reinforce it. It’s not even that we can’t agree on the answers of how to live, we can’t even agree on how to frame the questions, or whether to even bother asking them at all.
There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rungs; but three of these are the most important.
Once one sacrificed human beings to one’s god, perhaps precisely those whom one loved most…
Then, during the moral epoch of mankind, one sacrificed to one’s god one’s own strongest instincts, one’s “nature”: this festive joy lights up the cruel eyes of the ascetic, “the anti-natural” enthusiast.
Finally — what remained to be sacrificed? At long last, did not one have to sacrifice for once whatever is comforting, holy, healing; all hope, all faith in hidden harmony, in future blisses and justices? Didn’t one have to sacrifice God himself, and, from cruelty against oneself, worship the stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, the nothing? To sacrifice God for the nothing – this paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty was reserved for the generation that is now coming up: all of us already know something of this.
Self-immolation in the Buddhist tradition is not the same thing as political self-immolation: the mindsets and motivations involved are different, and so is the societal impact. Yet even though the importance of religious-cultural background is undeniable in the case of the Vietnamese monks, political self-immolations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have become a major symbolic gesture in their own right. Still, regardless of their different specific aims (mystical enlightenment or political protest), all self-immolators share the same desire to transcend the human body as a strictly biological entity and to turn it, through fire, into a tool for other, higher purposes.
…Martyrdom (political martyrdom included) is as much the deed of the one who performs it as it is of those who witness it. The self-immolator’s death, no matter how spectacular, will remain utterly meaningless unless it is captured by a receptive gaze—that is, unless it occurs within a community eaten up by guilty thoughts and feelings. The guilt can be due to several factors: habitual toleration of injustices, collective cowardice and ethical numbness, passivity in front of political oppression, a general sense of defeat in front of a force (totalitarian government, foreign military occupation, and so on) perceived as invincible, if illegitimate. In other words, self-immolators are effective in societies that feel responsible in part for their servitude, where feelings of complicity, mutual resentment, and distrust have not only poisoned people’s private lives, but also undermined whatever social life is left.
We seem to be somewhere between the second and third rung — we pay lip service to the idea of “future blisses and justices”, and we’re still big on renouncing the body as a biological entity for, uh, “higher” purposes, but we seem to be worshiping the entertaining spectacle rather than the nothing. Self-immolation would barely stay in the news cycle for a few days here.
No fact summarizes my argument more succinctly than this: The fastest growing category of American religion, particularly among young adults, is “spiritual but not religious.” That the land of the free gave birth to such a designation makes perfect sense, and those who identify with it should not be dismissed as frivolous or noncommittal, as certain critics have contended. They are, for the most part, serious questers who are not inclined to take on faith either religious dogma or facile secularism. They are mystics and idealists who also happen to be rational, pragmatic and independent.
They are, for the most part, privileged enough to have been raised and educated within a, uh, “facile” secular society that provides them the opportunity to subject metaphysical beliefs from around the world to rational scrutiny in pursuit of a Western concept of objective truth independent of the cultural and familial ties that might otherwise bind them to an ideal of obedience. They are often confused dilettantes who use those exotic beliefs to adorn an all-too-ordinary egocentric consumer perspective that goes unquestioned. I’m just saying.
The modern concept of the immortal soul is a Greek idea, which owes much to Pythagoras. Before that, most ancient civilizations thought that man had two kinds of soul. There was the “free-soul”, which represented the individual personality. And there were a number of “body-souls” which endowed the body with life and consciousness. For the early Greeks, for example, human nature was composed of three entities: the body, the psyche, identified with the life principle and located in the head; and the thymos, “mind” or consciousness, located in the phrenes, or lungs. During life, the thymos was regarded as more important but didn’t survive death, whereas the psyche became the eidolon, a shadowy form of the body. This distinction was not maintained beyond the sixth century B.C., when the psyche came to be thought of as both the essential self, the seat of consciousness and the life principle.
…Both Socrates and Plato shared Pindar’s idea of the divine origin of the soul and it is here that the vision took root that the soul was in fact more precious than the body.
…In fact, life after death, resurrection, judgement, heaven and paradise were all Zoroastrian ideas first, along with hell and the devil.
I just like knowing who to squarely blame for things like this.
“For all of the Catholic Church and its horrible faults, and there are many”—here, Egginton ticks off a list that includes the Church’s restricting a woman’s right to choose an abortion and proscribing condom use during the AIDS crisis—“I love the ritual of the ceremony, the smell of the incense, the stopping of time. Even though I’m a liberal and often progressive in my thinking, I’m impressed with the anchor of time that is part of religion.” It’s been more than 20 years since he took confession, but he’d like to try it again soon, he says. “I could see putting myself before the question of guilt and forgiveness.”
I wasn’t finding much of value in this article about William Egginton, but man, I just had to stop and marvel at such a potent mixture of self-unawareness and fortunate privilege. Yeah, sure, if you’re a woman, a homosexual, or a sub-Saharan African with AIDS, you might lack the necessary perspective from which to appreciate the pageantry of the Church. But if you’re a white male professor in America, you can wax rhapsodic about perverts in gowns waving incense burners and chanting in dead languages while still being taken seriously as a voice of reason. Nice work if you can get it.
Now the problem is, traditional Buddhism doesn’t actually have anything distinctively useful to teach Westerners about ethics. There’s no single ethical system in Buddhism; it has a slew of contradictory half-systems. Worse, they are mostly quite conservative, often downright horrid, unacceptable to Westerners, and overall no better than the narrow Christianity the hippies rebelled against.
So, Consensus Buddhism quietly swapped out traditional Buddhist ethics, and replaced it with “nice” vintage-1990 liberal Western ethics. Which is, roughly, “political correctness,” or the “green meme.”
This means Consensus Buddhism has more in common with progressive Christianity (Unitarian Universalism or Liberal Anglicanism) than it does with any form of Asian Buddhism. (Much of the ethical thinking that went into p.c. was done by liberal Christians. Socialism and psychotherapeutic ideology were other major sources.)
…Within Consensus Buddhism, there is a huge emphasis on emotional safety. It’s non-confrontational, unconditionally supportive, peaceful, supposedly-inoffensive. This may be appropriate for children, or for people who are severely emotionally damaged. It’s repulsive and ridiculous as an approach for grownups.
Yes. This is another reason why I will say that Buddhism has been a significant influence on me while refraining from actually identifying as a Buddhist. Much of what passes for American Buddhism bores me to tears with its relentless saccharine sweetness.
Just as Korb was once a vegan, Niebuhr had been a pacifist, but the incarnate evil of 20th-century totalitarianism convinced him that such utopianism was tantamount to standing by at Auschwitz.
Christian love, for Niebuhr, can call us to war; by similar reasoning, Korb tells us that concern for animals can coincide with eating them.
Wow. I, uh… wow. Huh. Maybe the logic would make more sense if I were as God-besotted as Schneider is, but it does seem to me that not only is he trying to imply that eating animals is the best way to show concern for them – awfully convenient, that – but that abstaining from eating them is the equivalent of, uh, failing to oppose the Nazis? And who are these Nazis who will run roughshod over a vegan Chamberlain but quail in the resolute face of a carnivorous Churchill? Somebody ‘splain this to me, please; I don’t want to be arrested and charged as a war criminal next time I buy some Morningstar veggie burgers.
(I read Korb’s essay; it seemed to me to be a very lengthy exercise in saying, “Eh, it’s a fallen world, whaddayagonnado, thank God for situational ethics,” but your mileage may vary.)
Look. I’ve long been tired of arguing about this with people; I have better things to do than try to defuse the predictable defensive/antagonistic reactions to people learning of my vegetarianism. I have no illusions that there ever was, or will be, a world in which suffering and death don’t exist. I couldn’t care less about trying to convert anyone to a meat-free existence. If that’s conciliatory enough for you two, perhaps you could reciprocate by dropping the pretense of ethical justification for your choices and just admit that you simply like eating animals, regardless of necessity.
But when I mention this view to people outside the world of philosophy, they often seem stunned that anyone could ever believe it. They are immediately drawn to the very opposite view. The true self, they suggest, lies precisely in our suppressed urges and unacknowledged emotions, while our ability to reflect is just a hindrance that gets in the way of this true self’s expression. To find a moment when a person’s true self comes out, they think, one needs to look at the times when people are so drunk or overcome by passion that they are unable to suppress what is deep within them.
For once, I don’t even know where to begin quoting Nietzsche on the idea that there even is one single “true self”, let alone one we can ever be completely conscious of. So I’ll turn my attention elsewhere, confident that you will join me in dismissing the validity of the notion.
W.H. Auden wrote about Freud’s legacy:
To us he was no more a person
Now but a whole climate of opinion.
Under whom we conduct our differing lives…
Yes, and it drives me slightly mad when confronted with the above belief, one of what I feel to be the most enduring parts of Freud’s work, even among people who who would rightly roll their eyes at the idea that they ever wanted to fuck their own mothers or that their personality quirks are derived from conflicted feelings over their excretory functions. Why does a fleeting urge count as more of an honest expression of someone’s nature than their more-or-less consistent behavior over a longer period of time? The neocortex is not necessarily the lie to the amygdala’s truth.
It reminds me somewhat of how religious apologists are always insinuating (or outright claiming) that human nature is such that, left to our own devices, everyone would really prefer to be raping, robbing or pillaging, and that’s why we need religion, or at least a belief in God, to keep us in line. Atheists wearily reply that it never seems to occur to these people that maybe we’ve considered what it would be like if we were to act on those impulses and have consciously decided against it, either because we don’t consider the consequences worth the risk, or because we value the more subtle pleasures involved in being so-called civilized over those of immediate gratification.
In both cases, there’s a core assumption that your knee-jerk impulses are more real, true, or valid, and that anything beyond them is a façade of after-the-fact rationalization, sublimation, or fraudulent deception. But they’re not necessarily any of those things; they’re just simpler. Thoughtful consideration isn’t necessarily better or worse or more right or wrong than acting on impulse; it’s just different. No one would consider a rough draft to be truer than the finished painting, novel or song; what if you attempt to cultivate your life like a work of art? What counts for more then, the inchoate jumble of competing ideas, or the realization of the overall vision?