Slightly behind the curve as usual, I just realized yesterday evening (through watching Bill Mahrer’s “Real Time” on HBO) that Sam Harris has a new book out as of last month.  The subject matter is in many ways what my blog entry of two weeks ago was about—spirituality as a universally available human attribute, not necessarily requiring one’s involvement in organized religion to cultivate.  

I have not yet read Harris’s new book, but I anticipate encountering (yet again) some of the most articulate, insightful prose penned by an American author today on how we can enhance our awareness and appreciation of life’s great intangibles (my definition of spirituality), and live lives of much greater meaning, clarity, compassion, and purpose as a result.  None of this requires taking on-board additional, scientifically unverifiable assumptions about the nature of the universe.  Rather, Harris outlines time-honored practices which have been shown to bring such capacities--lying dormant with the human psyche itself, regardless of one's worldview--into fuller fruition.        

Sadly, I missed Harris’ live conference event in San Francisco just last month where he presented a series of lectures on the subject to a sold out audience.  Fortunately, these lectures were recorded and should be available online soon.  I’ll be buying my own copy of the book shortly, and I encourage those reading this blog to do the same.  Harris rarely (if ever) disappoints.     

I wrote the entirety of Objectification Spectrum while sitting at my desk, either at home or the university.  Unfortunately for me, given that I had no outside funding for the project, I didn't engage in any research travel.  The book came straight out of my head, after twenty years of reading many other books on human destructiveness and enlightenment. Surely there's value in conceptualizing about the problem of evil and the processes of enlightenment; but done this way, it's all a rather safe and tidy business. My life has been, in many ways, a sheltered one, lived among mostly well-meaning, conventionally moral people who epitomize those George Elliott described in Middlemarch when she said, 

...that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.  

The same cannot be said, however, about the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton.  Few of you are likely to be familiar with Dr. Lifton's work, but he's one of the few remaining articulate voices of his generation (1926--  ) who actively sought out the worst of what was happening on the planet in order to document and understand the verities of evil up close and personal, both from the standpoint of victims and victimizers.  

Lifton's remarkable work began with his interviews of American servicemen who had been held captive during the Korean conflict and undergone "thought reform," along with some Chinese nationals who had similar experiences of "brainwashing" in Mao's China. Lifton realized that regimes like Mao's had a psychology all their own which he called totalism:  The effort of a powerful few to rigidly explain and control the complexities of life for others in such a way that all needful questions are answered; all relevant behaviors are prescribed or tabooed; and all this is targeted toward some glorious, transformational end.  In addition to his "eight characteristics of totalistic regimes" (see http://www.ex-cult.org/General/lifton-criteria), perhaps my favorite aspect of this line of inquiry includes what Lifton called the thought terminating cliche'.  Lifton explained that totalistic environments encourage the use of trite terms and phrases where 

...the most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed.  These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis (Lifton, Robert J. (1989). Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China. UNC Press. p. 429).  

Some of you are likely to recognize such cliche's in the speech emanating from various political and (especially) religious contexts.  Some examples from the religion I was raised in would include such oft repeated phrases as "...the enabling power of the atonement of Christ..." or "knowing the Church is true." These cliches' are used as punchlines to explain complex phenomena in ways that don't invite further questions or scrutiny.        

Lifton then went on to turn turn his attention to the survivors of the bombing in Hiroshima, noting that "...one of the troubles with people's attitude toward nuclear weapons is that they are simply unable to imagine the consequences of such weapons..." (Lifton,. Robert J. (2011)  Witness to an Extreme Century:  A Memoir.  Free Press, p. 101).  Those pitiful few who were able to survive such an ordeal manifested what Lifton came to call  psychic numbing, where a survivor's emotions seemed to literally be switched off, despite--or perhaps because of--the grotesque dying and devastation all around them.  Indeed, Lifton came to realize that it was not only survivors who experienced this numbing, but he himself experienced the anesthetizing effects of psychic numbing resulting from mere interaction with such individuals.  Lifton later studied Viet Nam veterans who has either witnessed or committed wartime atrocities.  They too exhibited this same sort of numbing. But here again, Lifton elucidated a further nuance contributing to the commission of evil--the atrocity-producing situation.  These are circumstances which are structured, both militarily and psychologically, such that an average person--"no better or worse than you or me", as he was fond of putting it--upon entering it, could be capable of committing atrocities (Lifton, 2011, pg. 171). Certainly, Milgram and Zimbardo's work were informative here, but Lifton spoke of these phenomena with a freshness and clarity that seemed to bring a new appreciation to the problem of toxic situations.   

Finally, and perhaps most substantially for my work in Objectification Spectrum was Lifton's study of Nazi doctors--those who has sworn an oath to protect the dignity and alleviate the suffering of all human beings.  Yet, these same individuals played an instrumental--even vital--role in the implementation of the Third Reich's Final Solution, in which over six-million Jews were murdered.  In his The Nazi Doctors:  Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986), Lifton underscored the essentially biological rationale for such a genocidal project:  killing in order to heal.  On an emotional level, this book was indeed a difficult read, one which led to a number of bad dreams, as I recall.  At the outset, I had assumed that at least some of the individuals Lifton interviewed at great length--men who had acted as doctors in concentration camps, men who had repeatedly engaged in the dreaded "medical experiments" and "selections", men who had decades to self-reflect and experience the world's outrage over Hitler's campaign of systematic murder--would have broken down in front of him and wept great tears of remorse and guilt. This was not at all the case.  Lifton said it this way:

[Alexander Mitscherlitch] said that most Germans of his generation--the Nazi generation--could not psychologically confront the evil they had been part of, that the human psyche is incapable of inwardly experiencing its own involvement in evil of that magnitude.  [...]Alexander accurately anticipated my experience with the Nazi doctors.  It turned out that not one of them was able to say to me that he had been part of something evil that he deeply regretted (Lifton, R. J.  (2011).  Witness to an Extreme Century:  A Memoir.   New York:  Free Press, p. 244, emphasis added).  

This speaks to a chilling truth about us as a species, I think (and perhaps about the male gender in particular):  We are capable of such air-tight compartmentalization and rigidified self-boundaries that decades of time for potential self-reflection, and millions of voices consistently condemning our actions, may not be enough to penetrate the protective edifice built around the self.  Lifton's work helps us appreciate this depressing reality more deeply, and provides further evidence that genuine change is a very complicated, difficult process.      
                         

The word spirituality needs to be understood as a character attribute available to all people, regardless of profession of belief or non-belief, because--I submit--it really has nothing to do with belief at all.  I propose the following definition of spirituality: Heightened awareness of, and appreciation for, life's great intangibles, such as beauty, truth, love, and peace. 

When understood in this way, we immediately realize it's possible to be very religious, but not spiritual (my father is a good example of this), or quite spiritual, but not at all religious (my mother-in-law is like this); and of course, it's possible to combine characteristics of both.  

We also see that spirituality has much to do with one's capacity to be present in life--that is, to pay close, non-judgmental attention to what's actually happening via one's immediate experience of the body, on a regular basis (as most of you may know already, this kind of awareness is called mindfulness). 

Finally, being mindful helps us realize that we are not the same thing as our thoughts, nor the feelings that attend them. Indeed, spiritual people recognize that they can actually be the observer of their thoughts and feelings (suggesting that their "selves," whatever that is, comes from an even deeper level of conscious awareness).  This increases their equanimity or even-mindedness, allowing them to avoid being held hostage to whatever thoughts come careening into consciousness.  In short, spirituality doesn't necessarily have anything to do with any religious doctrine or dogma; rather, it has to do with one's state of being.                   

One month ago today, my wife Kirsten and I moved from Southeast Idaho where we have lived for the past twelve years to Merced, California, where I'm now a psychologist at the University of California's Merced campus (yes--there really is a UC Merced.  BTW, Kirsten is "between teaching jobs" for now).  For those of you who haven't moved in a while, it's easy to minimize or even forget just what a prolonged, stressful, disorienting experience it can be (in truth, I've felt like I have a generalized anxiety disorder for the last three months). This is especially true when the move comes after a long interval of prosperous stability, where relationships have accumulated and settled into a relaxed complacency, and the inexorable acquisition of material goods has expanded to fill almost every corner of the living space.  Such moves epitomize the typical "mixed bag" of adulthood, where no major decision is a slam dunk of positives with no negatives attached. 

While Rexburg was becoming increasingly uncomfortable for a variety of reasons, it had its up-side (especially for me):  proximity to extended family, our lovely home and yard, and my university faculty status which provided me with engaging work combined with substantial time off during holidays and summers. Most of that has changed now. This indeed is a new life chapter for us, wide with possibilities, but there have also been loses--loses I've so far struggled to accept.

After my last client yesterday, I was passing time before feeling comfortable enough to walk out of the office a bit early; I decided to check my book's sales for the first time on Amazon.com.  What did I find?  Nine. That's 9...  Nine hardback copies of my book have sold since it became available in early July of this year.  I paused for a moment, and realized that I probably knew personally each of my nine customers.  This was indeed a reality check about myself, and book writing in general--it will take you years, and most likely, won't change a thing about your life.       

Despite this realization, I've decided to make an attempt to encourage further conversation about life's ultimate questions (some of which were raised in my book) via this blog post (Confession: before today, I've never written nor even read a blog). This seems especially appropriate on this day, the 13th anniversary of the September 11th terrorists attacks.  I think it appropriate to pause for a few moments to remember the thousands of victims who met a catastrophic and premature end on that day. In the spirit of Objectification Spectrum, the renowned author Ian McEwan put it all succinctly, and I'll let him be today's final word: "If the 9/11 hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed.  It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim.  Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity.  It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality."  (from Only Love, and then Oblivion, The Guardian, Sept. 15, 2001)