Internal Alchemy Part Five: Interior Life and Social Context

(Warning! This post has content that includes graphic images of human misbehaviour!)
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In previous posts about Internal Alchemy I showed how important it is for people who follow a spiritual path to develop a strong ethical compass. And in the last post, I showed how Buddhism has traditionally attempted to inculcate one in its followers. Unfortunately, I also showed how it, and other religions, have failed to created an adequate mechanism to get practitioners to overcome a bias towards passivity and conventionality in that ethical compass. I also suggested that the reason why religions fail to produce ethically-advanced individuals is because they are afraid that chaos would result if people were encouraged to think for themselves.

This last issue is not trivial. There has been a lot of misery associated with spiritual innovation. One need only contemplate the escapades of the group known as ISIS to see how badly things can go wrong when religious people escape ecclesiastic control.

Yet One Example of Religious Innovation by ISIS

In fact, a great deal of horrific human history has been created by spiritual innovation among large groups of people. So it isn't enough to just "Let every flower bloom"---there also has to be some way of differentiating between good and bad ideas.

An absolutely key element is the need for some sort of formalized structure. To understand this point, it might be useful to consider two of the intermediate steps in the creation of the modern European justice system:  trial by combat and trial by ordeal.

Trial by Combat and Ordeal
Until the popularity of "Game of Thrones", I suspect that many people didn't realize that at one time there were several ways of settling disputes besides judge and jury. The most well-known one was trial by combat. This involved actual fights between people over a dispute where there was neither a witness nor a confession.

Not Fiction, an Actual Trial by Combat

Less well known were the trials by "ordeal". These were mechanisms to settle legal disputes where one or both of the parties were not warriors and who therefore didn't have recourse to trial by combat. But in some cases, the sovereign brought in ordeal as a mechanism to discourage trial by combat. The ordeal could sometimes be absolutely horrific---such as asking people to grab a red hot iron bar or pull a stone out of boiling water. The idea was that if the burns inflicted became infected, the person was guilty, whereas if they healed cleanly they were innocent. Other ordeals were a lot less awful---these included seeing if someone choked while eating the Host or who could hold their hand up longest in front of the Cross. (This reminds me of the test on the television show "Survivor" where people were tested to see who could keep their hand on a post the longest.)

Trial by Ordeal of the Red Hot Iron Bar

This system of setting disputes and criminal cases seems absolutely bizarre to modern people. Why would anyone support such an absurd system? The thing to remember is that there were few other options---and some of them were far worse.

Prior to the establishment of any sort of legal system, people had the option of either ignoring any sort of harm done to them or taking the law into their own hands. If they opted for the first, then they ran the risk of being identified as "easy pickings" for any individual or group that wanted to abuse them. This meant that in most cases, individuals and groups tended to retaliate. And because the important issue for long term survival is not revenge, but rather deterrence, the retaliation tended to be disproportionate or "massive". You can't allow someone to think that the punishment for getting caught is just "the price of doing business." Because the retaliation tended to be disproportionate to the original insult, this invited an even more massive tit-for-tat response. The result could be an escalating vendetta or feud that could cause massive misery for all and sundry.

If you want to understand the situation, consider the sort of spectacular violence that occurred between gangs of bootleggers during prohibition. If someone stole from a gang, there was no option of going to the police. Moreover, the gang cannot really afford to have hired protection for every stage of their enterprise. So, instead, they create "examples" of anyone who is foolish enough to try to cause them problems. And because the price for being humiliated was so high, retaliatory responses also called for a response---which then escalated into an on-going feud or vendetta. This sort of thing creates a very horrible problem for society.

St.Valentines Day Massacre: Dispute Without a Mechanism for Settling

The value of trial by combat or ordeal is that it allows the authorities to settle disputes cleanly and finally. To use a modern hypothetical example from Mexico, if the leader of Los Zetas accuses the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel of hijacking a shipment of illegal drugs, they currently have no other mechanism for settling disputes than a war. This will kill lots of innocent bystanders and weaken both organizations to the point where one or both might be vulnerable to being taken over by a third group, such as the Gulf Cartel. So it's actually in the best interests of everyone to have the dispute settled cleanly and quickly by an all-powerful third party---no matter what the outcome. This is because in many cases, it is better for a clan to lose the case---without appearing weak---than to win after a protracted war. This means that if there were a powerful sovereign who was able to introduce trial by combat or a trial by ordeal, it would be in the best interests for all the cartels to adopt them and abide by the results.

Of course, the important issue is that trial by combat or ordeal have bugger all to do with "justice". But in many societies a nebulous concept like justice isn't very important compared to the necessity of keeping the peace. And, truth be told, our present civil and criminal systems really don't have much to do about justice either. If they did, there would be no "too big to fail", "too big to jail", "SLAPP" lawsuits or prosecutors pressuring innocent people to plead guilty. In actual fact, I suspect that many poor people would be objectively be better off if their criminal or civil cases could be settled by combat or ordeal than by a legal system that is so driven by money.

Hearsay Evidence
I've pursued this digression into the criminal justice system in some detail because I wanted to make a point about how important society at large is to "spiritual" ideas like "guilty" and "innocent". Trials are dispute settling-mechanisms that are so ingrained into our collective psyches that many people labour under the assumption that when someone has been found guilty in a court trial, that means that they have been proved guilty---when in fact nothing of the sort has happened. Our prisons have many innocent people, and anything like an objective look at the system shows this.

I also wanted to use the example of trials before a judge and jury to introduce another important idea: rationality comes from culture.

Generally, people have a naive belief that we are all atomic individuals who use their minds to make decisions about the world around them. But the fact is that our culture controls both the content and structure of our thought processes. I think the best way of explaining this comes from the way people are allowed to present evidence during court proceedings, as expressed in the pop culture.

Take the example of "hearsay". Generally speaking, what is inadmissible as hearsay in a court turns on the issue of whether or not the person giving the evidence is available to be cross-examined. This is because people are notorious in their ability to confuse and ball-up information when it is transmitted from person to person. Consider the game of "telephone".

No Ability to Cross Examine in this Chain of Evidence!

In the Norman Rockwell painting above, each person in the chain of transmission has an opportunity to "degrade the signal" as it were. This means that the story can be changed from the original. These changes amplify with each link in the chain of transmission, because the odds of the story going back to the original are almost nil. The problem from a legal standpoint is that the last person in the chain doesn't have any real knowledge of the actual event being discussed, so there is no way a skillful questioner can ferret out the truth of what really happened.

This is important, as people routinely have a hard time being precise in their language and thought processes. And a lot can depend on precise language. To cite a non-legal example, at work I once got sent off to cut holes in a carpet in order to access electrical outlets in the floor. I was given a map by one of the staff members that showed the system by which all the outlets installed in the building could be located. This woman swore up and down that all the floor outlets in the building were all in exactly the same places on the floor. I went, didn't find any outlets and came back twice to double check with her because I was having no success. The first time I came back, she was adamant that the entire building was all the same. The second time she still insisted on this but after further prodding she added "except for the first floor"---which was where I was working. 

This woman wasn't trying to be a pain in the butt, but her mind is laid out such that she does this sort of thing fairly regularly. On top of that, she lacks the self-awareness necessary to have some humility about her ability to think things through and express herself clearly. As a result, every statement she makes is "absolutely right". If someone like this came into a court of law and was allowed to make statements without skillful cross-examination, she could create an enormous amount of chaos in people's lives (e.g. "I am absolutely sure that the accused is the person I saw standing over the body with a knife in his hand".)

The legal system deals with this problem in several ways. First of all, it creates an aura of fear and awe that forces most people to take the issue more seriously than they normally do with anything else. That's why judges wear robes and decorum is usually enforced in a way that rarely happens anywhere else in our society. Secondly, the laws of evidence exclude most evidence sources that cannot be subjected to cross examination. In the case of my carpet cutting exercise, a skillful cross-examiner would simply have reminded my co-worker that there are penalties for not being accurate and asked her "Are there any exceptions?" Finally, there is an appeal process if there is suspicion that there were errors in the first trial.

The important point to understand about the above is that the rule about hearsay is just one example of a collective process that is designed to force people to be better at reasoning than they would be if they were left to their own devices. And this process hasn't come about because some genius devised the system. Instead, there has been a process of trial and error over hundreds of years where some spectacularly unjust ruling was over-turned and a "legal precedent" was set that governs all future trials. These decisions have built up over time and help make decision-making at trials more and more logical and fair.

The same trial and error process has worked in other fields to create collective systems to ensure that competent thinking takes place. One simple example comes from aviation. When the B-17 bomber was first introduced prior to WWII, there was a spectacular crash that destroyed the prototype shortly after take off. When investigated, it was deemed as being caused by pilot error---even though the people at the controls were some of the best test pilots available. This raised concerns about whether the bomber was simply too complex for human beings to fly. After a careful investigation, it was decided that it wasn't, but it was too complicated for pilots to be able to consistently remember everything that they needed to remember to do before take off. (The original crash was caused because the pilot forgot to turn a switch that would remove a locking mechanism on one of the flight controls.) The solution was to create a checklist of things to do on a clipboard, which solved the problem. Only recently have the same issues been identified in medical situations and the checklist has created similar improvements.  A book titled The Checklist Manifesto has been published that shows how a simple idea like this can have tremendous results.

Of course, probably the most well-know cultural construct that improves the ability of human beings to think clearly is the scientific method. Basically, it is a cultural mechanism which helps humanity formulate hypotheses about how the universe works, and decide which are correct and which are false.

There is No Hard Division Between the Interior and Social Life
This post has been trying to point out a very controversial position that I have never seen once expressed in writings about spiritual practice, namely that there is no hard and fast division between the "internal life" of someone who practices something like Internal Alchemy or various forms of meditation; and, the social life they live as a member of a specific society. Even someone who practices as a recluse and stays away from all other human interaction still carries with him the culture that he was exposed to up until the time he decided to walk away from the "land of dust". The books you read, the stories told to you by your parents, the schooling your received---and most assuredly the rituals and teachings of the religious tradition you follow---all have a "social" impact. If you want to understand how spiritual practice like internal alchemy works, you have to allow for the impact that society has on the minds of followers. And I would argue that the morality that we need to develop hand-in-glove with spiritual practice comes from this social dimension. In a future post I will develop this and link it to the concerns I have about the need for developing a moral basis to spiritual practice.