William James

“To my mind a current far more important and interesting religiously than that which sets in from natural science towards healthy-mindedness is that which has recently poured over America and seems to be gathering force every day....to which, for the sake of having a brief designation, I will give the title of the 'Mind-cure movement.'....The mind-cure principles are so beginning to pervade the air that one catches their spirit at second-hand. One hears of the 'Gospel of Relaxation,' of the 'Don't Worry Movement,' of people who repeat to themselves, 'Youth, health, vigor!' when dressing in the morning, as their motto for the day."

 The latest fad to be discussed on Oprah? The new bestseller in the self-help section of Borders? Nah. William James brings it up in Varieties of Religious Experience, leading to a larger, more serious, and interesting discussion about temperament, psychology in religion.

In the Varieties, which is a compilation of his Gifford lectures, James addresses some of the trends of his time such as transcendentalism, spiritualism versus religion, and this mind-cure movement, among others. He brings up these topics as part of his main exploration of the relationship between psychology and religion.  So many of those “trends” he discusses are still with us today, of course – either they never left completely or were recycled. Furthermore, we are still often very confused about the relationship between psychology, spirituality, and religion. For example, in today’s contemporary self-help speak: if mental health is about feeling good about oneself – well, is that the same as what religion is about? Do we do mitzvot because they make us feel good about ourselves?

 The “religious experiences” that James examines are those of conversion, saintliness, and mysticism.  In James’ view, examples of each experience are those that involve various altered states of consciousness – hallucinations, convulsions, visions, and so on. Each experience is sudden onset, usually without precedence. The point James makes (and he provides a ton of personal testimonies, which gets really tedious, by about the 4^th or 5^th one) is that these experiences seem to be just psychological aberrations, of the kind that a medical doctor might have to treat in his office.  And so what is the difference? James approaches the question from an angle: What does it matter? Whether the experience is some chemical aberration in the brain, or really a supernatural being intervening in someone’s life, the only question we can really be fit to ask it what the fruits of the experience are. “The real witness of the spirit to the second birth [he’s talking about conversion] is to be found only in the disposition of the genuine child of God, the permanently patient heart, the love of self eradicated. And this, it has to be admitted, is also found in those who pass no crisis…”

  I don’t entirely disagree. I sure wouldn’t discount extraordinary visions, miracles, etc as integral parts of someone’s conversion or mysticism. At some point in the book (which I forgot to mark) James reminds us all that just because it hasn’t happened to you doesn’t it mean it can’ happen at all. So true. That’s always been my beef with people who say they have a hard time believing in, say, the splitting of the Red Sea. It’s supposed to be hard to believe, and seem extraordinarily abnormal. That’s the point, people!

My hang up is that this method of evaluation makes religion into something that is purely practical or useful. Good thing James makes an attempt to address this too: “Abstractly, it would seem illogical to try to measure the worth of a religion’s fruits in merely human terms of value. How can you measure their worth without considering whether the God really exists who is supposed to inspire them….” James dances around the edge of all this but it seems he just can’t quite commit to actually believing in one God. He sincerely believes that different people – and different temperaments – can find different religions to suit them, as though these were like differences in palate.  But he keeps trying: “How, you say, can religion, which believes in two worlds and an invisible order, be estimated by the adaptation of its fruits to this world’s order alone? It is truth, not its utility, you insist, upon which our verdict ought to depend. If religion is true, its fruits are good fruits…”

 He gets close to saying that religion is beyond simply a useful function of psychological survival – but I was disappointed to see that his insight was only that religion may be somewhat biologically ingrained in us. Hmm. Oh.  James blithely admits that he has skipped over some important religious experiences – like prayer. Ya think??? How about charity, study, etc. 

Early in the book, James presents a thesis of dividing the world into two groups of people: optimistic people, and pessimistic people. One’s temperament at birth will be the main determining factor on how one approaches and receives religion. This can lead to extremes – Whitman being an example of the excessively “healthy-minded” who refuse to acknowledge or see evil. Well, we certainly have our fair share of those today. James had some strong words which are highly relevant to a certain strand of idealism which runs rather strongly amongst those who believe, for example, the anti-Semitism is only a problem of the extreme right Nazis, who are long dead anyway:

 “To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard for our imagination – they seem too much like mere museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that did not daily hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to their victims fill the world today….”

 I was a bit surprised at the vehemence with which James attacks the bromides of Walt Whitman, the “supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil.” While the Greeks and Romans were “pagans” like Whitman, James admits, “they neither denied the ills of nature…nor did they, in order to escape from those ills, invent another and a better world of the imagination…this integrity of instinctive reactions, this freedom from all moral sophistry and strain, gives a pathetic dignity to ancient pagan feeling. And this quality Whitman’s outpourings have not got.” And so on. I suppose Whitman’s poetry could be seen in the same light as excessive environmentalism today.

 Tolstoy and Bunyan are presented as examples of people who were not optimistic to the point of oblivion: both struggled with deep melancholia, but found a form of salvation – mainly in the form of recognizing the infiniteness of God – that allowed them to see the happiness and fruitfulness of life.  I am not so sure what James is really getting at with his temperance division tack. I have the feeling it was some sort of medical/psychological thing or trend that has fallen out of our contemporary vocabulary. I can’t believe he meant to get so reductive as to say, some people are just naturally happy and so religion works for them. But others are deeper and more profound and depressed and disturbed and see the real truth of the nihilism, or something. I hate when people romanticize depression.

 Anyway, switching gears: “For him who confesses, shams are over and realities have begun, he has exteriorized his rottenness. If he has not got rid of it, he at least no longer smears it over with a hypocritical show of virtue – he lives at least upon a basis of veracity.” I’m pretty sure James is referring to Catholic confession. I thought James was making a good effort at giving respect to this ritual, rather than, as he so easily could and probably wanted, to make fun of it.

On the whole, James is more condescending to Catholicism than he is to any variety of Protestantism, as I would have expected. He grudgingly admits that Catholicism may be pleasing to some because, basically, it’s so dang pretty. But James, perhaps falling prey to yet another religious fad that certainly hasn’t left us, is quite enamored with Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, to the point that he doesn’t seem to appreciate the sharp distinctions between these and Judeo-Christian beliefs. They’re all just different flavors of religion. James rarely speaks of God but instead refers to “the more.”  For example: “In answering these questions that the various theologies perform their theoretic work..they all agree that the ‘more’ really exists; though some of them hold it to exist in the shape of a personal god or gods, while others are satisfied to conceive it as a stream of ideal tendency…” A few pages later he writes that the real importance is in the “consequences in the way of conduct” of “regenerative change” [general communication with God.] I think that an essential component is not fully explored here: the differences in the way people understand the “more” are extremely important and do have actual consequences in behavior. If James does not take these differences very seriously then does not, it seems, on the whole take religion itself very seriously in the end, either.

In the beginning of the book he admits that he is only going to look at extreme cases, citing some sort of doctrine about how examination of the extremes leads us to better understand the “normal.” But I don’t think this technique is successful in this book. He ignores so many aspects of religion save for the experiences of those who may indeed be prone to psychic disturbances that he misses some of the bigger points of religion. His refusal to get specific about doctrines or the nature of different religions also indicates condescension toward religion, regardless of his acknowledgements that religion can indeed be very useful.

Closing Random Bits:

 William James and Black Hawk Down

“Is not the exclusively sympathetic and facetious way in which most children are brought up to-day in danger, in spite of its many advantages, of developing a certain trashiness of fibre?” – the Varieties, in the chapter “The Value of Saintliness”

 My aforementioned Sunday School teacher handed me a paperback on my way out, entitled Leadership and Training for the Fight by MSG Paul R. Howe, a retired Special Ops guy. I’ve only flipped through it, but I’m guessing that this is going to be my favorite quote:

“Rule No. 6: It’s not your parents’ fault. If you screw up, you are responsible. This is the flip side of “It’s my life,” and “You’re not the boss of me.” Don’t whine about it, or you’ll sound like a baby boomer…

Rule No. 7: Before you were born your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. And by the way, before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasite of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your bedroom.”

 MSG Howe wrote most of his book in response to what he saw in Somalia 1993. I think the juxtaposition of the James and Howe is clear enough.

 William James and Eddie Murphy

I couldn’t get a good YouTube clip of the scene in the excellent movie Bowfinger in which Eddie Murphy has to go to his Mindhead (obviously a spinoff of Scientology) handler. But if you have seen the movie, and refer back to the first quote of this whole shebang, then you will probably connect the dots as I did.

Obviously, Mindhead = Mindcure, and "keep it together = youth, health, vigor!" Now Eddie Murphy and William James have achieved far less than Six Degrees of Separation.