9 Awesome Coolness

to have that glitter of us all, though, we'll have to have to recognize that culture is an alloy, a melding of traditions and peoples and their insights and experiences. It's not all gold or all silver.

At least James R. Walker and the Lakota Sioux shamans of South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation were some who made such an the attempt. Not many recall Walker and the Pine Ridge shamans today. But they achieved a remark­able synthesis.

Walker was a physician and he came to Pine Ridge in 1896, the only Western-trained doctor for its seven thousand residents. Pine Ridge was one of the remaining shards of the Great Sioux Reservation, which at the time of its establishment in 1868 encompassed the entire western half of South Dakota. Already by 1877 the US Congress had taken a third back, and then took back another third in 1889, allotting the land in 320-acre gifts to White settlers. Needless to say, the Sioux felt deeply betrayed. It got worse. The next year a hundred fifty-three Lakota men, women, and children were slaughtered in the snow by the 7th US Cavalry Regiment, using rifles and Hotchkiss guns, an early form of machine gun. The horror took place in a small canyon on Pine Ridge named Wounded Knee, and was thereafter called the Wounded Knee Massacre. The Lakota had been dancing the Ghost Dance, a semi-Christian ritual that was supposed to lead to the coming of an Indian messiah who would sweep Whites from North America, restore the buffalo herds, and bring peace throughout the land. The White authorities got nervous and called in the cavalry to put a stop to the dancing and to disarm the Indians.

The effects of the tragedy and the land loss were still everywhere to be seen when Walker arrived on the reservation six years later.¹ The Lakota were in rough shape—economically, emotionally, culturally, physically. People were poor and sick, hopeless and neglected. Many were near starvation. Nearly all were in desperation.

Tuberculosis was especially rampant. Walker couldn't handle all the neces­sary medical work alone, so he decided to try a novel approach: training tradi­tional medicine men to treat tuberculosis. The medicine men agreed to learn Walker's techniques, but on one condition. He also had to learn theirs. Walker agreed in turn, and after many years of instruction the medicine men inducted him into the Buffalo Society as a full Lakota shaman. Not many Whites of James Walker's time could have won this kind of trust and acceptance from a people who had every reason to suspect his intentions. He must have been a remarkable man, as remarkable as the Lakota medicine men must have been to connect across the horrors of their encounters with Whites.

It was not only a matter of trust and appreciation of difference, though. The medicine men were worried that their wisdom would soon be lost. The younger generations were all adopting Western dress and turning to Chris­tianity, due both to cultural pressure from missionaries and to a sense of cultural vacuum from the pervasive feeling that the Christian god must be stronger than the native ones. So in addition to training him, the medicine men asked Walker to record what they knew. Walker spent years interviewing the local shamans and published several articles and one book. Decades after his death, other scholars compiled four further books based on his careful notes and transcripts.² His writings are the main source we have today on much of tra­ditional Lakota belief.

Walker might have given us even more, but in 1913 another Western doctor visited Pine Ridge and was shocked by Walker's approach. Walker defended himself as best he could to his superiors back in Washington. Nonetheless the US government summarily retired him from service. He left the reservation on April 1, 1914, never to return.

Before he left Walker dedicated himself to learning what more he could. He was particularly concerned about his understanding of a central feature of Lakota belief—indeed, the very centermost feature: the meaning of Wakan Tanka. So he decided to visit a shaman called Finger, an “old and conservative”

man, as Walker described him.³ It didn't go well. They sat awkwardly together long into the night, not saying much. Walker eventually decided to head home to bed, stood up, and started walking back to his quarters. Suddenly, a brilliant meteor streaked across the sky.

“Wohpe!” Finger cried. “Wohpe-e-e-e!”

Walker came back and watched Finger burn sweet grass over a fire and intone some prayers which Walker, himself now a Lakota shaman, still didn't know. Walker asked the meaning of the prayers. Finger agreed to explain it all to him, but some other evening, it being quite late.

A few weeks later they got together again—just five days before Walker was due to leave the reservation.⁴ This time they talked all night. Finger explained that a shooting star is an appearance of Wohpe, another name for the Beautiful Woman, and is a form of Wakan Tanka. The Beautiful Woman is set in motion by Skan, the force that sets all motion into motion. Skan is another manifesta­tion of Wakan Tanka. So too is the Rock, the Earth, the Moon, the Wind, the Winged, and the Sun—all told, eight manifestations of Wakan Tanka.

Walker was baffled. Let me quote from Walker's transcript of his conversa­tion with Finger.⁵

“Then there are eight Wakan Tanka, are there?” asked Walker.

“No, there is but one,” Finger replied.

“You have named eight but say there is but one. How can this be?”

“That is right. I have named eight. There are four: the Sun, Skan, the

Rock, and the Earth.”

This was head-spinning. Eight had become one and then immediately became four. “[But] you named four others, the Moon, the Wind, the Winged, and the Beautiful Woman, and said they were Wakan Tanka, did you not?”

“Yes. But these four are the same as the Wakan Tanka. The Sun and the Moon are the same, the Skan and the Wind are the same, the Rock and the Winged are the same, and the Earth and the Beautiful Woman are the same. These eight are only one. The shamans know how this is, but the people do not know. It is wakan”

And then, suddenly, at least a little, Walker understood. The answer was both easier and harder than he imagined. For what wakan means in direct transla­tion is “mystery,” and what Wakan Tanka means in direct translation is “great mystery.” This direct translation is exactly what the Lakota Sioux medicine men meant, Walker finally realized. The heart of everything—both before and after everything, in everything, and setting everything into motion—was that which, as Finger put it, “has no birth” and “has no death:” the Great Mystery.⁶

Religious scholars call what Finger described to Walker a form of pantheism: a sense of a divine that suffuses the universe and provides a oneness to the diversity of the all. For Finger, that suffused diversity included manifestations of nature, supernature, and the human, a pagan entanglement of difference that is nonetheless unified. Yet not only pagan. There is widespread unity in this unity of the widespread. Closely related ideas can be encountered in tra­dition after tradition, from pagan to bourgeois. Walker eventually got what Finger was talking about because, I imagine, he had already gotten it before.

Some aspects of Finger's formulation sound characteristically pagan. The Great Mystery of Wakan Tanka manifests the forces of ecology and suste­nance: the light of the Sun and the Moon, the materiality of the Rock and the Wind, the fertility of the Earth and the Beautiful Woman, all enlivened and motivated by Skan and the Wind.

Crucially, all of these traditions find as well an unknown quality to this unifying divine presence. Yes, they offer an explanation for our experience— an explanation for the unexplained—by pointing to a kind of transcendent immanence, a motivating presence, in the all. But there the explanation stops and the adherent is invited into wonder, divine wonder.

And how different are any of these ideas from the Buddhist's sense of anat- man, the fundamental lack of distinction between self and other—the inher­ent unity in and of the all? Or how different are any of these ideas from the Abrahamic religions and their sense of the universe as God's creation? Yes, the Abrahamic vision sees this holiness as stemming from a discrete entity, a transcendent god, a supernature. But the hand—if it is indeed a hand, as Michelangelo's ceiling for the Sistine Chapel suggests—of this unifying divine can be felt intimately and immanently in the workings of the world and all we experience. To the Jew, the Christian, and the Muslim, it is all God's work.

However transcendent YHWH, the Father, or Allah may be, the adherent also has a strong sense of the everywhereness and everythingness of the divine, and an explanation of everywhere and everything thereby. So too for a Baha’i, a Unitarian, a Theosophist, or a Transcendentalist. Yet as well, the adherent gains a wonder for what is not known along with a reverence for what all faiths variously contend is known.

Many centuries of scholars have reflected on these parallels across tra­ditions. Recent writers like Karen Armstrong, Robert Forman, Harry Old- meadow, Sayyed Nasr, Huston Smith, and William Stoddart all try to point out these resonances to a world that often seems more intent on its differences. Writers like Aldous Huxley, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, and Frithjof Schuon tried to do so for mid-twentieth-century generations. If we go back to 1540, we can find Agostino Steuco calling it the “perennial philosophy” in his ten-volume treatise De Perenni Philosophia. As Steuco put it, there is “one principle of all things, of which there has always been one and the same knowledge among all peoples.”⁷ Steuco’s term was revived by Aldous Huxley in an influential 1945 book and is still widely used today.⁸

Some writers have sought a basis for universal religious truth in these simi­larities. That is not the sociologist’s task. Rather, the sociologist looks for both similarities and differences in our varying beliefs and considers their social conditions and possibilities. And when we look with the sociologist’s eye, we readily find that a sense of the everywhereness and everythingness of a divine that can never be fully known is indeed very common—although understood in many varying ways, from Wakan Tanka to Brahman to the Dao to YHWH, Pateras, Allah, and more. As I’ll come to, I don’t think “perennial philosophy” is the best term for this diverse commonality. But let’s go with it for now.

A case can also be made that something like perennial philosophy also ex­tends into a realm of thought we typically do not regard as a kind of religious tradition: scientific studies of nature. At least Gottfried Leibnitz, the Renais­sance polymath and co-inventor of calculus, thought so. He even used the phrase “perennial philosophy” in some of his later writings.⁹ Leibnitz was a rationalist, but he found the mind of the divine everywhere. In his view, all materiality could be reduced to infinitesimal bits he called “monads” that acted out the “pre-established harmony” established by the divine. Why do things act as they do? Because God set them up that way. Why did God set them up in this way? We don’t know. That’s a mystery. But it’s a good mystery, thought Leibnitz. He is famous for arguing that, although we do not understand the course of things, we may rest assured that it is all actually for the good, even when it seems evil and wrong to us.

Baruch Spinoza, a contemporary of Leibnitz, had a broadly similar but significantly drier view. He and Leibnitz got together to debate the issue in 1676, near the end of Spinoza's life. Spinoza had just published his principal work, Ethics. Leibnitz loved its rationalism and hated its distant conception of an indifferent divine. They apparently argued for three days in Spinoza's room in a redbrick house beside a canal on the outskirts of The Hague, where Spinoza earned a meager living as a lens grinder. Spinoza contended that God thoroughly imbues the material world, and indeed that the material world is God. Or perhaps that the material world is part of God, God being some­thing larger—a view technically called panentheism, meaning everything in God, rather than pantheism, meaning God in everything. But that was a fine point of their argument. The main disagreement was Spinoza's view that this divinely imbued logic determines everything almost as a kind of ineluctable mechanism. God does not make moral choices along the way about what is the best outcome, he contended. Rather, God is the deep logic that makes the outcomes, all set in motion long ago and still ticking along, but with no moral judgment. Crucially for Spinoza, articulating an assessment familiar to pagan traditions, those outcomes are not necessarily for the good. The good just isn't relevant here. Leibnitz couldn't go along with that, calling such a view “horrible,” “terrifying,” and “intolerably impudent.”¹⁰

Yet despite all their rationalism, neither Leibnitz nor Spinoza professed to really understand the deepest what and why of the universe. They just dis­agreed on where to draw the line between what we can know and what we can't. For Spinoza, it stopped at the point where we note that the universe is extraordinarily ordered and conclude that such ordering indicates a divine actor in and behind it all. Leibnitz contended that we can know more than that: we can also know that the divine actor does everything for the good, even if we are often puzzled and distressed because of our own small understanding of the good. Yet for both, you eventually hit a point of deep and great mystery.

Science today generally doesn't bother to engage questions of the in it all, behind it all, and possible good of it all. But that doesn't mean that individual scientists don't. A 2009 Gallup Poll in the United States, for example, found that 51 percent of US scientists believe a divine actor or some kind of higher power put (and, for some, still puts) the universe into motion.n

Albert Einstein is a famous case in point. Commentators have long hung on every word of Einstein, as the leading icon of scientific thought in the modern era. Einstein was as much a humanist as a physicist, and in a 1940 paper pre­sented at a symposium on “Science, Philosophy, and Religion in their Rela­tionship to the Democratic Way of Life,” he wrote, in a line that has become canonical for many, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”¹² By that he meant we should look to religion for our ends, but to science for our means. In Einstein’s words, “Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set upTh

Einstein’s comfort with talking in religious terms remains controversial to this day among scientific proponents of atheism like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. His theory of the “selfish gene” brought Dawkins to schol­arly prominence. More recently, his 2006 best-seller The God Delusion brought Dawkins to popular prominence as probably the best-known proponent of atheism today, and especially of an activist version of atheism often referred to as the “new atheism.’^⁴ That Einstein—that this idol of science—was com­fortable with religion troubles the new atheist position.

Seeking the grace of Einstein’s cultural authority, Dawkins argues that Ein­stein in fact really was “atheistic,” even though Einstein described himself as an agnostic and toyed with calling himself a pantheist. In a 1930 interview, Einstein said, “I’m not an atheist. I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.”i^s In a 1950 letter, after another twenty years of reflecting on the matter, he wrote, “My position concerning God is that of an agnostic.’i⁶

But Einstein also was very firm in rejecting theism, the idea of a monotheis­tic god who directs and intervenes in our personal lives, and who is some form of person: what is often called the idea of a “personal god.” As Einstein wrote in a letter in 1952, “The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive.’i⁷ But in that 1930 interview where he declared he was neither an atheist nor a pantheist, Einstein went on to say something that Lakota Sioux would very much understand:

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.¹⁸

Here Einstein sounds the theme of the mysteriousness of the universe, and how wonderful a marvel it is, closely akin to the notion of Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery. In so doing, Einstein makes plain that agnosticism—which comes from the Greek for “not knowing”—is not necessarily a lack of com­mitment to any position, a sort of theological fence sitting. Many agnostics contend, quite committedly, that the question of god or gods is something we simply can't answer, and maybe a question we don't even know how to ask. The shaman Finger would understand. For agnostics like Einstein, though, this mystery isn't just a mystery. It's a holy mystery. That is, the mysteriousness is exactly what we should be worshipping. We might call this view “spiritual agnosticism.” Here's how Einstein described it:

If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it?⁹

For Einstein, then, scientific discovery does not disenchant the world. It does not take away the mystery. Rather, it reaffirms the mystery, for it is truly incredible, the most incredible thing we can know, that such a structure has come into being. Figuring out or discovering a scientific answer always raises more questions about that structure and how it could possibly have come to be. The questioning, the recognition that there is so much that we do not know, never stops. Rather, it ever grows, eliciting continual amazement and awe that is deeply meaningful to scientists, as it is to non-scientists. Let me quote Einstein one last time:

The most beautiful and deepest experience [anyone] can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science. [Anyone] who has not had this expe­rience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to accept humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that is there.²⁰

Dawkins quotes much of this passage in The God Delusion.²¹ And Dawkins immediately follows it with a rather spiritual statement of his own: “In this sense I too am religious, with the reservation that ‘cannot grasp' does not have to mean ‘forever ungraspable.”²² Dawkins is not an agnostic. He is absolutely certain there is no god or gods, especially a personal or theistic god. He thinks the question of the existence of god or gods can be asked and answered, and the answer is a resounding no. That is the defining belief of atheism: It is a-theistic. But even though Dawkins is an atheist—he calls himself a “staunch” atheist in his book—Dawkins as a scientist has clearly often found himself overwhelmed by how truly amazing it all is, an amazement that even his level of commitment to strong atheism does not defuse?³

Ronald Dworkin calls this view “religious atheism,” in part to criticize Dawkins.2⁴ And indeed, Dawkins doesn't like such language to describe his views. Despite his grudging response to Einstein that “in this sense I too am religious,” Dawkins says, “I prefer not to call myself religious because it is mis­leading.’^⁵ So let's not call him religious. Let's take him at his word, unless we want to start calling science a religion—which perhaps in some senses it is, as many have suggested, or should be, as many others have suggested?⁶ But scientists, even religious ones, usually don't like to see the scientific endeavor that way, as least not publicly. So maybe we could ratchet down the point a bit and call Dawkins's reverence for the “beauty and sublimity” of the all a “spiritual atheism,” in parallel with spiritual agnosticism. My guess is that Dawkins wouldn't like that term either, though. It implies an unseen presence, a spirit, that Dawkins would not be able to detect in any meter or test tube.

Nor would Dawkins likely be any happier about calling his view part of the perennial philosophy, for the uses of this term have also always implied the presence of a spirit—and not just a spirit, but a guiding spirit. I would add as well that perennial philosophy is, like Axialism, a rather evolutionist and civilizationist term, hinting at a kind of unfolding sequence and a moving up from paganism to what I have been calling bourgeois faiths. It is thus poten­tially chauvinistic. Plus to call one of these various views of the unknown a “philosophy,” let alone a common and perennial “philosophy,” seems to rush to a confidence that anyone has this all worked out. Rather, it seems to me that the point is no one does.

May I hazard a different term, then—one that I think embraces pantheism, perennial philosophy, spiritual agnosticism, and Dawkins's passion for the dis­passionate? Perhaps we could call it, with both humor and seriousness, the recognition of the AWESOME COOLNESS of the universe.

At least this is a term that I have been tossing around in conversations and lectures in recent years. My students love it. I confess that some people have told me they get the point, but would rather I used a more technical sounding term. I'm going to go with the students, though, in part because I like the term's lightheartedness and the unifying chuckle of recognition it generally elicits. But I don't care what anyone calls this recognition—as long as they do indeed get the point.

To help people get the point, maybe I ought to define awesome coolness. But I think it would be internally contradictory to do so. Instead, I'll describe it: However dull and dismal we may often find the cold truths of logic, it is quite mind-blowing to consider—to deeply consider—just why it is that 1 plus 1 equals 2, here, there, and everywhere. Yes, we can imagine dope smokers sitting around in bell bottoms contemplating that fact. But it really is the sort of thing that would break your brain if you tried—deeply tried—to puzzle it out. Or consider that 2 is the only prime number that is even. That makes 2 pretty odd. Or consider that n is 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939 93751058209749445923078164, and on and on and on ad infinitum, until you decide that your circle is as round as you'll be able to get it in this life.

Or consider that all our cells contain in them these incredible little power plants we call mitochondria that break down nutrients and make chemical energy and that seem to have begun eons ago in evolution from a bacterial invasion into some cell that craftily captured the invader and put it to work, making that cell so successful that it passed this amazing feature on to the trillions of cellular progeny that make up each one of us.

Or consider that the ruby-throated hummingbirds I may be fortunate enough to admire flitting around my garden in the summer in Wisconsin, where I live, may spend the coldest months of the year in Central America, and may get there by flying up to five hundred miles across the Gulf of Mexico at the speed of a galloping horse, through wind and rain, all in a single twenty- hour flight—even though an adult ruby-throated hummingbird weighs only about three and a half grams, lighter than a nickel coin.

Or consider that if you fill in the piano keys around an A-major chord with the notes of a G-major-seventh chord you get a clashing dissonance that makes you want to run from the room, unless you are a fan of the abstract and harsh in music, but if you stack the notes of a G-major-seventh chord in the register up from the A-major chord you get the resonant vibrancy of an A-thirteenth chord, so loved by jazz musicians, tickling the cilia of your labyrinths and echoing from the sonorous air into the inner receptivities of your imagination.

Or consider that there are reaches and reaches and reaches of space and time out there, showing that the form of our world and the homey confines of our solar system are part of a vastness of possibilities, and that something, someone, or some somehow must have brought this immensity into being and motion, whether you call it Wakan Tanka or another name or maybe no name at all.

These are awesomely cool facts, every one.

“And if you don't think so, well, tough luck, Buster,” as my daughter Eleanor put it to me, looking over my shoulder as I was typing a draft of this chapter. “You go find another planet, another social system, another galaxy, another universe that's cooler and more awesome and show it to us all.” Exactly.

Surely this is something we can agree upon—even if we don't agree on the terms for it. I say can because we apparently do, from atheist to agnostic to bourgeois to pagan. So why do we fight so much about it? Can't we just live with the thought that others have different languages for trying to describe the indescribable? After all if life, the universe, and everything are indescribable it should be no surprise that people in all their variety would try to describe them differently.

But we humans do not find it easy to hold on to a common recognition of our common recognition. Faced with questions we think we need to answer, we lose our openness to wonder and replace it with absolutes that divide the world and its peoples into disturbingly clear categories. Why? Because ideas are never only about the ideas themselves. They are also about the social relations in which those ideas are embedded, and the social relations that these ideas put together and hold apart.

I went back and forth in my mind for a day before I settled on the word “never” up above. At first I had it as rarely only about the ideas themselves. But I couldn't think of an instance in which it wasn't so, and I still can't. Then I tried rarely, if ever. That seemed unnecessarily tentative. If the water's clear and your nerve is up, you might as well dive. What makes that water clear is what others often regard as the basis of its murkiness: The recognition that ideas always emerge from a social context, oriented toward a social context. How could it be otherwise? Ideas must come from somewhere and some people, directed toward other wheres and other people. Or we would never have heard of them.

The main factor in this turbidity, argued Michel Foucault across his vast oeuvre, is that any social context always has power relations—power relations that yield the ideas and ideas that yield the power relations. “Power-knowledge” is what Foucault called it. It's an awkward term, and maybe appropriately so. It makes an awkward point: Knowledge isn't neutral. It comes from people, with all their foibles and ambitions. Plus the problem is recursive, said Foucault. Our foibles and ambitions come from our knowledge and how it leads us to organize our lives as much as the other way around. There’s no easy exit, he contended, and maybe no exit at all.

Such a recognition can yield a sourness in our political thought. There is much cause for this caustic view. Social life and its politics give us plenty to be sour about, maybe even more than we are generally aware of. (Foucault thought, like fish and water, we aren’t aware of most of it.) But the relationship between knowledge and the power relations of social context is not wholly negative. We want our ideas to relate to our contexts. That’s why we think of them. And not all our interests are bad. Nor is it bad to have the power to implement the ones we regard as plausibly good—as long as we remain open to challenge about that plausibility, challenge from others and challenge from our own selves, continually invigorating and developing our reasoning.

It’s also very helpful to know where and whom ideas come from, for know­ing their social location helps us judge the plausible goodness of ideas pre­cisely by identifying their social relations, and therefore their power relations too. We know others see things differently because we know that we see things differently. That too is not necessarily bad. The difference of others is why it is so often so very rewarding to talk to them and to find out what they see. They have had experiences that we have not as surely as we are not them. The trouble comes when we see things differently so that we may be seen differently. The trouble comes when we bound our ideas so we may bound our groups. The trouble comes when our ideas and ideals yield a natural we and a natural them.

As the sociologist of religion Paul Lichterman notes, “People, however, also use religion to define collective identities. Public groups, for instance, often use religious language to understand who they are, and how they relate to insiders and outsiders, apart from justifying opinions on specific issues or group goals.”²⁷ We use our ideas about nature this way too, whether those ideas come from a scientist’s lab or from the lab of everyday life. We’re never just talking about nature or religion. We’re also talking about community. We’re talking about the ancient triangle.

What we know is who we are, and who we are is what we know. To be someone is to have knowledge, both knowledge that others have and knowledge that others don’t. That commonality of knowledge connects us to others and that difference of knowledge gives us our sense of individuality—which in turn also connects us to others, for without individuality there would be nothing to connect from, or to. We would already be connected, and community would not be such an ever-present issue for humankind, and such a source of both our joys and our disappointments.

We need to seek that connection because most of what we know we gain with the assistance of others. Who has time to do all one's own experiments on what is the truth of the world? Besides, others have learned valuable things, sometimes even through tragedy. Why repeat those misfortunes just to see if you really will hit the pavement hard if you jump out of a tall building, attempt­ing to fly by flapping your arms? Do you really need to try every mushroom species for yourself? Does no one have any worthy advice for us? Actually they do, as we have all learned, often to our chagrin. So we turn to others, others we trust because of our sense of communion with them, to gain knowledge that we don't have the time, skills, or opportunity to determine on our own. It's an ongoing process that brings us into the cultures of our communities, and that I like to call knowledge cultivation.²⁶ To put it in language like Foucault's, it's a matter of power-knowledge-identity. But that's even more awkward to say. So I like to use the metaphor of cultivation, a cultivation that runs very deep.

There's a subtle and powerful corollary to how we cultivate knowledge. Even more than turning to others for knowledge, we turn to others for guid­ance about what we can safely avoid learning about. We have to. Every moment of every day when we are awake, we are attending to some possible sources of information about our world and situation, and simultaneously not attending to an infinite amount of other possible sources. Some of those sources of infor­mation we evaluate on our own because they are right around us, streaming into the senses: light, sound, smell, taste, feel. But also we are making decisions about whom to talk to and listen to, and what to read and watch—and, what is a far larger category, whom and what not to. You won't have time to peruse the Huffington Post on your tablet if you have just devoted your fifteen minutes of reading time at breakfast to reading Le Monde, the New York Times, or the latest postings from Fox News. There is simply way more to read than you can get through. If you check out a book from the library today, or maybe even a half dozen, that's great, but there are tens and tens of thousands of others you will never read. You won't live that long. Plus about another two million new ones are published every year around the world.²⁹ If you take a few courses at your local university, wonderful, but then you can't take any of the hundreds of others that are probably on offer at the same times. How will you know if those sources and courses you did not attend to were safe to ignore? Maybe they contained some vital information that is very relevant to your life and where it could be heading. But you can't know for sure, because you haven't looked or listened. And you can't. There is way, way, way too much out there.

So how do you decide? Through the same cultivations of social trust and identity that bring knowledge to you and help constitute your social identity. But in this case, they are not cultivating knowledge. They are helping us with a necessary problem of daily life: the cultivation of the ignorable, our sense of what is safe to disregard.³⁰ To gain some knowledge we have to ignore a whole lot more. The ignorable is thus constitutive of knowledge.

The ignorable is not ignorance, though. I'm trying to tread carefully around the way we use the word ignorance as a put-down?¹ Let me try putting it this way. The ignorable is not necessarily something that others think one really ought to know, which is what I think we really mean by the word “ignorance.” Rather, the ignorable is what others think we don't need to know, others that we trust to guide us rightly. The ignorable is what we trust we may screen out, largely tacitly, in order to focus on what our limited understanding of our context makes seem more relevant. And maybe it is. Maybe it's not. We don't know, and indeed we can't fully know. We can't know everything and be everywhere. Unlike some conceptions of the divine, we not omniscient and universal. And so we look to trusted others to guide our sense of what is germane to our lives and needs.

Thus the ignorable is also constitutive of community. You have to situate yourself within tissues of trust that help form you as a self that knows some things, and is known for knowing them, but also must rely on others for a whole lot more—even if our individualism sometimes makes this reliance hard to admit. These tissues are not easy to sever, once we are connected with them. I am talking here about who our friends are and who our friends are not. I am talking here about who we care about and who cares for us. These are closely held bonds that we neither make nor cut easily. Which means we often find ourselves similarly holding tight to our sense of knowledge and the ignorable that come from these bonds, and that create them, solidifying social relations by freezing knowledge and the ignorable into absolutes.

We hold particularly tightly when we think those bonds are under threat— or have been led to believe that they are. For as many a political leader has discovered, one of the surest ways to unify people is to divide them. The sociologist Howard Becker suggested a term that aptly describes this social process: “moral entrepreneurs.’^² Behind every sharp community boundary of the absolute good stand people who gain social position by carving that line into society. The absolute good then becomes the goodness of the group—a natural we divided from a natural them—and the goodness of the moral entre­preneur. Numerous are those who have figured out that one can make others feel good about themselves by using absolutes to encourage them to think ill of others—and who then feel good about those that showed them to this tragic satisfaction.

Some moral entrepreneurs become highly successful by choosing the right moment to play our uncertainties away from awesome coolness into a fearful hotness toward a natural them, hardened into absolutes about nature, religion, and each other. This phenomenon is familiar not only to the grand politics of the front page, but also to the micro-politics of our daily lives. Indeed, I sus­pect that all of us have at least on occasion tried our own moral hand at this regrettable kind of entrepreneurship. In quiet moments, I recognize that I’ve done it myself sometimes.

The scriptures of bourgeois faiths unfortunately provide some scope for a moral entrepreneur to encourage a fearful hotness from absolutes, just as they can also provide scope for appreciation of awesome coolness. These works were all written a long time ago, even comparatively recent religious texts like the New Testament or the Talmud or the Qur’an or the Bhagavad Gita. That age in itself provides a moral argument for reading scriptures as yielding abso­lutes beyond politics, and thus a basis for nonpolitical politics. Not only do bourgeois scriptures describe a divine that is beyond politics, the implicit logic goes. Their very age means that the reader from the present had no hand in crafting those scriptures, no intent in selecting their words. Thus the politics of the present cannot impugn them—or so we often accept in moments of fearful hotness, easily waving aside objections that a text must always be interpreted by someone to have any meaning. Otherwise every word is just a splash of ink on the page or of light emitting diodes on the screen.

That authoritativeness in hand, the next step for the moral entrepreneur is to encourage reading scriptures selectively in some particular moral light of the present, rather than the moral light of the context that gave rise to them. One does not have to deliberately omit or rewrite passages to merely emphasize some over others and to present their meaning with very different illumina­tion from that which shone on the papyrus and pen of the original writers. In moments of present conflict, we lose patience with subtler readings that point out contradictions and how little we really know about the context of the past.

Consider the appalling violence in much of the Old Testament. As I argued in chapter 4, there is no particular pretense to the good in the Old Testament, especially in the earlier books. (It does tend to happier passages in the later books.) It's not a bourgeois work. It's pagan monotheism, and you don't have to look deep into other pagan traditions to find plenty of divinely inspired atrocity, as in the Popol Vuh and Gilgamesh. Yet there's an important difference in the character of these pagan divinities and their violent passions: They're powerful, but you can disagree with them. They can be wrong and you can try to get them to change their minds. You can confront and contest them, as Moses, the Divine Twins, and Gilgamesh all did. You can sometimes even defeat them. There is plenty of horror in pagan traditions, but that horror is not absolute. This may seem a fine point, but it's one that bourgeois moral entrepreneurs looking back at their faith's more pagan earlier writings have often conveniently ignored, as they sought to encourage an absolute reading of some violent passage.

The bourgeois moral entrepreneur can, of course, also try to decontex­tualize a faith's more recent scriptures. Consider the shocking language of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament. The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse ride out swinging swords, and Jesus and an angel swing sickles, dealing judgment on the sinfulness of the people of Babylon. The angel throws the fallen “into the great wine press of the wrath of God. And the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the wine press, as high as a horse's bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles.”³³ Satan fights back in the form of a dragon, leading the remaining forces of evil, and assisted by a scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns—a beast that doesn't have a name, only a number: six hundred sixty-six. Riding the beast is a woman bedecked in jewels and purple and scarlet clothes. She does have a name, and it is written on her forehead: “Babylon the great, mother ofwhores and of earth's abominations.”3⁴ Then Jesus, “clothed in a robe dipped in blood,” rides out on a white horse. Even more fearsome, “from his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations.’”³⁵ An angel calls for birds to “Come, gather for the great supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of the mighty, the flesh of horses and their riders—flesh of all, both free and slave, both small and great.”3⁶ The forces of God kill the dragon and the beast, and Jesus gives the birds plenty to eat: “And the rest were killed by the sword of the rider on the horse, the sword that came from his mouth; and all the birds were gorged with their flesh.”3⁷

Revelation certainly does not offer a peaceful image of a compassionate Jesus. The theologian Gregory Stevenson notes the danger here. “Historically,” he writes, “Revelation has played a role in the perpetuation of violence, the jus­tification of warfare and genocide, the stoking of vengeful fantasies, and the cre­ation of a militant perversion of Christianity that trades in self-glorification.”³⁸ The perpetuators, justifiers, stokers, and self-glorifiers don't stop to note that it was written for a very different purpose in a very different time.

What was Revelation's purpose and time? We don't need to know for sure to confess that it was assuredly different from ours, given two thousand years of distance. But here's what religious scholars think.

Elaine Pagels persuasively argues that Revelation was a coded call to the Jewish followers ofJesus to continue to resist the Roman Empire in the after­math of the destruction ofJerusalem and the Jewish diaspora?⁹ When John of Patmos—not to be confused with the author of the Gospel ofJohn—set down these fiery lines around 90 CE, Christians were only just beginning to think of themselves as separate from Jews. Pagels suggests that Revelation gave a fantasy of hope to those who longed for the overthrow of the Baby­lon of Rome and still burned over the seven emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty that seem to be have been symbolized by the seven-headed beast. Although we cannot be certain, some scholars suspect that the beast's number, six hundred sixty-six, was a numerological reference to the emperor Nero. (The ancient Jewish practice of gematria assigns a numerical value to every Hebrew letter. Using gematria, the Hebrew phrase for “Emperor Nero” yields the number 666.) Nero was the last of the Julio-Claudians and the emperor who began the First Roman-Jewish War, resulting in the destruction of Jerusa­lem and the Second Temple in 70 CE, two years after Nero's death by suicide in 68 CE. There is also some evidence that Nero banned the John who authored Revelation to the island of Patmos—a tiny place, just thirteen square miles, twenty miles off the coast of what is now Turkey. John had plenty of personal reason to fume about Nero and the Roman-Jewish conflict.

Many Christians rightly argue, therefore, that Revelation cannot be taken out of context. Stevenson agrees but also suggests that, despite all its necessary contextuality, Revelation still has moral value—the moral value of “challeng­ing our thinking, calling us to account, and questioning our allegiances.”⁴⁰ He implies a crucial point here: we don't necessarily have to agree with everything in a scriptural tradition to value it and identify with it. Who agrees with every­thing their parents, spouse, and children say, even as they love them dearly and see them as themselves? Who agrees with everything that their favorite teachers and friends say, even as they revere, respect, and care for them? (Indeed, who even agrees completely with their own self?) The value of a text and of an inter­locutor is as much the thoughtfulness of the disagreements they inspire in us as the qualities of the agreements. There is much potential wisdom in both. It's a matter of dialogue, not monologue. But dialogic readers of Revelation need to be wary lest, despite identifying with the text critically, they nonetheless add further fuel to the two millennia of Christian moral entrepreneurs who have used Revelation’s scriptural authority for far less subtle and gentle ends.

Perhaps one might also argue that Revelation is really the pagan part of the New Testament, and that the peaceful Jesus is to be found elsewhere—that this is not a bourgeois problem. There would be a bit of truth to such a view. Revelation does at least pay attention to ecology, mainly using it as a form of punishment, as is common with pagan traditions. Pestilence, beasts, carrion­eating birds, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and more all make fearsome appearance in Revelation. But the divine is also presented as absolute good, albeit a terrifying absolute good. Plus Revelation shows great concern for both forms of evil, disloyalty and desire. It singles out 144,000 chosen ones as the true dedicated followers of God. And it phallocentrically reviles the corrupt­ing power of women’s sexuality as embodied by the image of Babylon as a whore. Revelation plainly manifests deeply bourgeois moral disquiet.

Moreover, Revelation is not the only book of the New Testament to pres­ent a warlike Jesus. Some chapters ago I mentioned Matthew’s controversial report of Jesus saying “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”⁴¹ There is also Luke’s account ofJesus telling his followers, “But as for these enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them—bring them here and slaugh­ter them in my presence.’^² Do these lines have to be appreciated within their context to be understood? Definitely. But it is also the case that, like the Old Testament, the New Testament provides the bourgeois moral entrepreneur with plenty of material for fearful hotness about a natural them.

Muslim moral entrepreneurs have used some of the Qur’an’s bloodier pas­sages to similar effect. Like the Bible, the Qur’an contains much that is as beautiful, noble, and inspiring for the worries of the present as it was for those of the past. But it also—again, like the Bible—contains many lines that can be decontextualized and marshaled in horrific and abusive ways. In the current political moment, much has been made of passages like “Let those of you who are willing to trade the life of this world for the life to come, fight in God’s way. To anyone who fights in God’s way, whether killed or victorious, We shall give a great rewardTh Or “Those who wage war against God and His Messenger and strive to spread corruption in the land should be punished by death, cru­cifixion, the amputation of an alternate hand and foot, or banishment from the land: a disgrace for them in this world, and then a terrible punishment in the Hereafter.”⁴⁴ That passage does not actually advocate starting a war, and it continues to say “unless they repent before you overpower them—in that case bear in mind that God is forgiving and mercifulTh Nonetheless, this section of the Qur'an gives plenty of scope to the moral entrepreneur seeking justification for violence.

The Qur'an does indeed contain much that urges its readers to greater gentleness and mercy. Take the much-admired line that “if anyone kills a person... it is as if he kills all mankind, while if any saves a life it is as if he saves the lives of all mankind.’^⁶ Even the controversial term jihad, which means to strive or to struggle, mainly occurs in contexts that would be difficult to take as implying “holy war” against nonbelievers/⁷ Rather, the Qur'an's intended meaning usually is pretty clearly about striving and struggling to serve God in the face of one's sinful inclinations, as well as striving and struggling to defend Islam from its detractors. That doesn't stop the determined moral entrepre­neur from cherry-picking—cherry-picking not the sweetest but the sourest and bitterest lines. And, as with the Bible, there are plenty to pick from. Even the famous line that killing-one-is-killing-all has an important caveat where I inserted ellipses above: “If anyone kills a person—unless in retribution for murder or spreading corruption in the land—it is as if............................. ” The absolutist

hunting ammunition for some nonpolitical politics can do a lot with that qualification.

Such fruit can be found in the scriptures of other traditions too. There are sour and bitter cherries to be picked out of the Talmud, the Hindu canon, and even the generally pacifist Buddhist canon. At least militant Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists have often claimed to have found them.

Nature, too, can be cherry-picked for the sour and bitter, and then taken out of context and served to a natural we to motivate their displeasure. The moral entrepreneur seeking to create fear, anger, and disregard for a natural them can selectively find such fruit in nature because our ecological relations are complex and indeed sometimes quite unpleasant.

One example of such selectivity that has always given me pause is Ells­worth Huntington and his effort to connect the degree of civilization in an area with its climate/⁸ Huntington was a professor at Yale in the early twen­tieth century. Like all Yale professors of the time, he was a White man. I'm a White man too, and a professor. Plus I have several degrees from Yale. And like me, Huntington seems to have considered that the association of White­ness with elite places like Yale might manifest patterns of social injustice.

But Huntington felt that we can put aside our moral concern about these associations, for he believed that he demonstrated them to be due to nature, not politics.

Huntington was a geographer, so he liked maps. He sent a survey to “widely informed men” all around the world, asking them to rate the level of civili­zation they experienced in their locality so he could plot their results. The resulting map showed “very high” levels of civilization in rather unsurprising regions: Central and Northern Europe; the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast of the United States; and along the temperate southeast coast of Aus­tralia, from Sydney over to Melbourne. Basically, his widely informed men found that civilization was highest wherever there was the highest proportion of White people like themselves.

Huntington’s respondents also gave a few regions special downgrades that fit the common prejudices of White elites at the time. Ireland, Spain, southern Italy, Greece, Eastern Europe, and southern Canada all rated “high” instead of “very high,” despite their overwhelmingly White populations. And the widely informed men rated most of Africa, South America, and Asia as “low” or “very low” in civilization, with a few “medium” scorings around areas where some Whites had settled, such as South Africa and central India, and a small zone of “high” around Buenos Aires in Argentina, a region with considerable White immigration. Japan and eastern China rated a “medium.” They rated much of Africa as having no civilization at all—just a blank space on the map, the same as most of Greenland.

Huntington then compared the map of civilization to a map of what he termed “human energy according to climate.” He reasoned that wherever the climate was unpleasant—wherever it was too hot or too cold for human comfort—people would be lethargic and unable to advance much in civili­zation. And he found the highest levels of beneficent climate pretty much wherever the highest proportion of White people lived. His conclusion: “The climate of many countries seems to be one of the great reasons why idleness, dishonesty, immorality, stupidity, and weakness of will prevail.”⁴⁹ In short, White people are not to be blamed for dominating others. It’s just their good fortune to have been so favored by the nature of climate.

This was considered real science at the time. Huntington’s 1915 book on the subject, Climate and Civilization, won him much praise. The Geograph­ical Society of Philadelphia awarded him its Elisha Kent Kane Gold Medal in 1916. In 1917, Huntington served as president of the Ecological Society of America, and in 1923 he served as president of the Association of American Geographers. And maybe no wonder: at the time, almost all the members of these academic societies were White as well.

I say “maybe no wonder” because, even setting aside the shoddy and selec­tive methods, the line of reasoning is incredibly sloppy. It can readily be turned around to say exactly the reverse. Wouldn't it make just as much sense to say that easy climates encourage laziness, stupidity, and weakness of will? Difficult climates must exert greater selective pressure for a strong will and high intel­ligence, because survival is more difficult. So civilization should be highest where the climate is the most challenging. Indeed, in my view, the accom­plishments of the Inuit, the Yanomami, the Maasai, and Aboriginal Australians must count among the most innovative applications of strong will and high intelligence to the challenges of ecological context. But such a line of reasoning would not have done the moral work Huntington and his many fans needed: the justification of racial inequality as not due to politics but due to a power they felt to be outside of politics. Nature.

The absolute does not absolve. It does not absolve because it does not resolve, much as we might hope it would. Indeed, it commonly gets in the way of re­solving by shutting down conversation, mistaking closing for closure. Alas, some­times the closing is no mistake. It is the intent. Nature and religion treated as absolutes become creators and demarcators of borderlines. They become boundaries of cultivations of knowledge and the ignored—boundaries that we create and that we push each other into. We go looking for the world but find instead our own identities, formed in opposition to others instead of in dialogue with others, especially in troubling times.

I say Allah and you say Jesus. You say evolution and I say Adam and Eve. I say women's rights and you say honor and obey. You say LGBTQ rights and I say holy matrimony. I say climate change and you say God's plan.

You say Halloween is fun and I say paganism is wicked. I say sex is joy and you say sex is sin. You say science is authority and I say scripture is authority. I say equity is justice and you say equality is justice. You say we are one and I say God is one.

I say racism and you say 9/11. You say choice and I say murder. I say Black lives matter and you say all lives matter. You say the rule of law and I say the rule of the Ten Commandments. You say rights and I say the market. I say care for the environment and you say care for creation, if you say anything at all.

These, then, are the social uses, and the social abuses, of the absolute. Our certainties shape our identities, and our identities shape our certainties. We go blundering ahead, convinced that the solution to our conflicts lies in estab­lishing the one right way for everyone—one right way that we believe is not based in our own interests, even though it happily does serve our interests. For it is, after all, everyone’s one right way, we contend.

But at the same time that we go grasping for this elusive release into a non­political politics, the oldest questions of the ancient triangle come right back to us, ever unanswered in the continued unfolding of time and surprise. In that unfolding, it seems to me, we can discover space for optimism about human cooperation and justice. While the origins of nonpolitical politics and fearful hotness lie in our thirst for certainty, for really knowing, the origins of political politics and awesome coolness lie in our appreciation for enigma, for never really knowing. Herein lies the most awesome and cool power of the Great Mystery: the way it encourages us to be forever open to further experience of the world and to further experience of each other.