Spirituality & Development

Friday, 26th Jan 2017: Lecture by Dr. Asad Zaman, VC PIDE to students at University of Cambridge, Center of Development Studies for Religion & Development paper The lecture was in two parts. This is an outline of the first part: Spirituality & Development: Part I: What is Spirituality? Video (40m)

Part 1: “What Is Spirituality?”: Modern Secular thought takes spirituality and religion to be diseases which affect weak minds not properly trained in the scientific method. Part I of this lecture explain why this view, which is based on positivist ideas, is seriously mistaken. OUTLINE of this lecture is given below

The second part — Spirituality & Development: Part II: What is Development focuses on how spirituality affects how we think about development and how to achieve it — this will be posted here later.

OUTLINE of Part I: What is Spirituality?

A: Standard Modern Answer

1. Spirituality is a literary term, used to spice up poetry and novels.
2. It is like Phlogiston, Unicorns, Ghosts, Souls, God
3. It is one among many medieval beliefs, like flat Earth, which have been proven wrong.

B: Why don’t we understand spirituality?

1. Because we have been trained to think like Logical Positivists, EVEN though this philosophy has been proven wrong! Key wrong positivist beliefs:
2. Unobservables do not matter for science
3. Science explains the observable patterns. It may postulate things like atoms, gravity, but this is just for convenience. Existence of gravity is not part of scientific assertion.
4. Kant: Thing-In-Itself is not knowable, not relevant for science. Wittgenstein: Wherof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. ALSO, The human body is best picture of the human soul (That is, observables matter, unobservables don’t)
5. SCIENCE is the ONLY source of valid knowledge.

C: Million Dollar Question: What is Knowledge?

• Modern Definition of Knowledge arrived at by a revolutionary paradigm shift over pre-modern ideas. Understanding spirituality requires another revolutionary paradigm shift.
• To shift paradigms, we need to change perspectives, point of view. For example, shifting from seeing the young lady to the old lady — Reason or Logic cannot help us achieve such shifts or help us to decide which picture is “right”. (see also: Radical Paradigm Shifts)

1. Knowledge is True, Justified, belief — that is, it should be possible to prove using facts and logic.
2. What about Intuition? hunches, guesses are not knowledge and certainly not scientific knowledge
3. What about unverifiable statements? Visions for the future, that if we all cooperate on plan X, we can create a better world? Again, since truth value cannot be verified, this is not knowledge.
4. According the modern understanding, Intuition and unverifiable statements are: NOT knowledge, NOT scientific, NOT important

D: Current Dominant Positivist Paradigm (articulated)

1. Central positivist idea: sentences must be true or false, in order to be meaningful. If sentences cannot be assigned truth values using empirical methods, they are MEANINGLESS.
2. Intuitive and Un-Verifiable statements with unknown and unknowable truth values are MEANINGLESS.
3. Spirituality, Soul, Morality, God, Angels, Heaven, Hell are all meaningless concepts.

Illustrative Quote from AJ Ayer (1936) prophet of Logical Positivism

We can now see why it is impossible to find a criterion for determining the validity of ethical judgements … because they have no objective validity whatsoever . . . They are pure expressions of feeling and as such do not come under the category of truth and falsehood. They are unverifiable for the same reason as a cry of pain … is unverifiable.

• “Cry of Pain” is meaningless to Ayer, but the most meaningful thing in the world to ordinary human beings !
• We have been trained to believe in OBJECTIVE reality, and to denigrate, de-emphasize, and treat as secondary, SUBJECTIVE realities. “Just give me the facts — I don’t want your opinions.”

E: BUT: The World we live in is our subjective reality

1. I live in a world in which civilization started along the rivers of Euphrates and Nile.
2. There was global conquest and colonization by Europe, two world wars in the 20thHiroshima & Nagasaki were bombed.
3. Global Financial Crisis occurred in the 21st
4. I did not experience any of these events — they have been reported to me.

F: My experience of the world is mediated by my recreation of a picture of the world within my mind. This picture is HIGHLY subjective.

1. Objective and Subjective: “Inextricably Entangled”
2. How do we taste food, drink? Chemicals in food, taste buds in tongue, interpretative apparatus in brain, and Social Norms.
3. How do we see the world? Replication of picture (inverted) on our retina, interpretation using brains and experience!
4. The reality we live in cannot be partitioned into a subjective part and an objective part, and separately analyzed.
5. This is even true in Quantum Physics. Our Observation is entangled with the Observed. I am an integral part of the objective reality out there, my observation of this reality shapes reality, just as reality shapes my observation of it. The two — observer and observed — cannot be neatly separate.

F: Fabric of our personal lives woven with: Intuitive & Unverifiable Knowledge

1. Communication skills: “What do you think about what I am saying?” — I make guesses about this, as I lecture, based on experience
2. We got dressed, cleaned up, took care of our appearance: what other people think about us is of extreme importance in our lives.
3. I can never know or verify how you feel about me. Yet it can be of supreme importance to me in conduct of my life.

G: Uncertain, Unverifiable Knowledge of Essential Importance:

1. I have never met you, BUT I know a lot about you!
2. I know that you enjoy laughing.
3. I know the kinds of things that can make you happy.
4. I know about the things which can make you sad, angry, excited.
5. Under suitable circumstances, I could use this knowledge to build a deeper relationship with you.
6. The bonds of humanity we share are very powerful, very strong. Just the knowledge that you are a human being means that you and I share a huge amount of common thoughts and feelings.

H: Human Knowledge is built on Paradoxes — these cannot be assigned truth values.

1. Vast majority of humans on the planet live, laugh, cry, love, hate, despair, hope and die. We are all the same.
2. Each human is completely unique — no one like her/him ever before or ever after.
3. Snowflakes — all the same, and all completely different.
4. Our human lives are built around understanding the SIMULTANEOUS truth of our sameness and our uniqueness. Zen Koans designed to teach us these truths which go beyond the capabilities of binary logic. The truth/false binary is completely incapable of capturing human knowledge about the complexities of our self-awareness, and our entangled web of relationships with others and our environment.

I: Search for certainty & truth (Science) can blind us to our infinite potentials

1. Every moment in time is unique, ephemeral, transient
2. Offers possibilities which shimmer with the possibility of being realized. Rare, exceptional, once in a billions years opportunities
3. Reach out to grasp these possibilities requires intuitive hunches, BUT if we think about our experience, use logic, reasoning, we will never see the unique.
4. How many possibilities came up, and vanished, unseen, unrealized, unappreciated?? Science is based on replicable patterns in the past, and fitting the future onto these patterns. Science cannot deal with unique, rare, exceptional events.

J: What makes us human? A thought experiment

1. Would you kill a baby for a million dollars? [No one will know]
2. I would bet a huge amount, that you wouldn’t. That is, I (know) that you won’t.
3. Why? It is totally irrational for me (and also for you).
4. I cannot JUSTIFY this knowledge. Empirical evidence, Real Politick, human experience, teaches us otherwise — People have killed others, even mothers have killed their own babies, for little or no gain — happens every day.
5. Not justified, Not provable/verifiable. Yet I would still stake my life on it.

K: MORE STRINGENT Thought experiment: so would you

1. Consider the following (difficult) situation: You have to guess what a stranger offered this choice (kill a baby for a million dollars) will do? If you guess wrongly, you will die!
2. I think that you will bet that stranger will not kill baby for a million.
3. We all believe in the humanity of others, despite our bitter experiences to the contrary on numerous occasions.

L: WHY do I believe in you? Why do you believe in me? This (knowledge) is not based on logic, empirical evidence, and cannot be verified. We will never know whether it is true or false, because the experiment will not be carried out.

It is not so much that I have infinite trust in you. For me, it is part of what it means for me to be human. To continue to believe in humans, despite repeated experiences to the contrary, is not rational, but is very human (Charlie Brown kicks the football for the 1000th time, as Lucy pulls it away).

M: Knowledge: Uncertain, Unprovable, Feelings: not Justified, Not True/False

1. To love, care for and believe in the infinite potential of all human beings — this is an essential part of being human.
2. Uncertain, Unverifiable, Unjustifiable knowledge makes us human
3. Knowledge about how others react to us — uncertain, unverifiable — is central in our lives.
4. Sometimes, we guess at our own internal psychological state.
5. OFTEN, these guesses are not justifiable, and not true/false.
6. Our lives are CRUCIALLY and CENTRALLY dependent on this knowledge. This knowledge differentiates us from “Siri” and “Alexa”
7. AJ Ayer eventually realized that logical positivism was “all wrong”. Emotions of others are unobservable, and positivists deny existence of emotions, and of our own sensitivity to the emotions of others. Which is equivalent to “feigning anesthesia”.

N: This knowledge is not confined to personal realm. Our Decisions and Actions depend on guesswork about future possibilities.

1. Choices we make depend on our Visions — Imaginary Futures.
2. “I have a dream” — many have died for these dreams.
3. Vision of Marx for a classless society, where laborers would not be exploited by capitalists, shaped the twentieth century
4. Our dreams, entirely without material substance, are very powerful in shaping the world.

O: What is spirituality?

1. It is a capacity of the heart to feel for others.
2. This allows us to sense our collective humanity.
3. Joins us at the root, allows us to rise above individuality, selfishness.
4. Like other human capabilities, requires nurturing
5. With growth, spirituality can sense the presence of God.

P: Love, Courage, Strength: Spiritual Qualities: Unmeasurable, Unquantifiable, Unobservable

• “The believer loves, and is loved” Prophet Mohammad peace & blessings upon him.
• “Being deeply loved gives you strength, Loving gives you courage” Lao-Tzu
• How can we have the strength and courage to love and be loved?
• Directly in conflict with Lord Kelvin’s dictum that knowledge is based on measurability and quantifiability. This poisonous and wrong idea influenced psychologists to try and measure emotions, intelligence etc. putting them on the wrong track about what it means to be human.

Q: Multiple Stages of Spiritual Growth

1. Primitive Egotism — (homo economicus). Conventional economic theory is about world of spiritually stunted people — midgets.
2. Awareness of others. Concern about doing things which please others. Guilt and shame when doing actions (like theft) which are individually pleasing but socially harmful.
3. Empathy, Compassion.
4. Feeling of Unity with the Creation of God
5. Feeling of Union with God
6. Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy — introduction to spirituality for rational skeptics.

End of Part I of talk

I hope that we have provided an answer to the question of “What is Spirituality?” And differentiated it adequately from Phlogiston, Ghosts and the theories that the Earth is flat.

We move on to the question of What is Development? (and also how spirituality matters for understanding development) In the second part of the talk.

Ending Notes: Not relevant for present topic, but very important. It is widely believed that science leads to Knowledge (JTB style) In fact, science is also based on intuition, and un-verifiable hunches. Think about Newton’s apple — intuition about gravity. Plus, since it is unobservable, it can never be verified. Similarly, Godel’s Theorems on Undecidability show that the set of provable statements is much smaller than the set of truths. Only intuitions can guide us about mathematical theorems which are true but unprovable. Knowledge about mathematics is also based on unprovable intuitions.

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