Ingenuity and Iniquity

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/24/how-creativity-connects_n_1450099.html?ref=religion&ir=Religion

Of the things one could connect to dishonesty, the characteristic of being creative is probably the last we’d even consider.  A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that people who require more creativity in their jobs are more likely to engage in underhanded behavior at work. It’s commonly harmless or at least mitigated compared to tax fraud or such things, but the idea is that those with a tendency to be inventive also can find ways to justify their behavior. This is, however, highly correlation based. There are plenty of creative people who most likely don’t behave like this and many who aren’t creative that do. The inverse may be the case: doing immoral things may lead to more creative thinking in the future by virtue of going outside expected norms and laws. This could be a good thing, but the potential abuse still remains. If being creative is a quality of any person, the more they have, there is a higher chance they may have a habit of being unethical, even if it’s simple things like skimping on a tip.  These two relations pose a question of how our ethical behavior is related to creativity and vice versa. Are we ethical because we lack creativity or do we become more creative by breaking ethical norms?

Ethics could conceivably emerge from our ignoring creativity and seeing what is predictable and what is practical, benefitting the whole instead of the parts. This is not to say we can’t appreciate innovation, but it still has to be within boundaries of some sorts. Art schools won’t let a student just go anywhere with their ventures, especially when religion or politics are concerned. If you go too far with them, you’re threatening stability and offending people. While the former might be grounds for genuine ethical concerns, the latter is guaranteed with any endeavor in the arts or just in conversations. Someone will find your opinions unbelievable and strive to change your ways. So ethics, in this theory, serve as a safeguard against people breaking out of the limitations society implicitly places upon the arts, so as not to disrupt order. Of course there is the possibility that this isn’t ethics so much as tradition, norms and mores, all of which are prone to be shattered in one way or another and a common perspective is that these don’t really hurt the common good, since they aren’t automatically galvanizing people to action, but bringing things to the surface that were once hidden. In that sense, creativity and ethics can coexist in this model, which is hopefully what can be accomplished with the other.

Creativity may emerge from ignoring the mundane and seeing things in a new light, breaking down boundaries and limits we put on ourselves. In this context, creativity is more beneficial than ethics, at least in the sense that new things can aid us with time and experimentation. Of course with any such novelty, especially scientific discoveries, one should be careful, which is applying a sort of ethics to the process. But to prohibit new ideas because they threaten a status quo or the like under the guise of ethics or morals is where such things as censorship arise from. This is where creativity is good, but like ethics before, there is the potential for abuse in creativity for its own sake instead of benefitting society with discoveries in medicine, or even mere aesthetic appreciation in the arts. But to have some kind of message behind our creations is important as well even if it is simply observing something already presented by others. To put a new spin on it is where imagination can bring new vigor and awe to life that we became accustomed to. Those that are abnormal can many times have a view on things that is not damaging, but actually edifying and building us up more by bringing together so many myriad vantages and resulting impressions. This is not to say there isn’t a point where we cut off the genius from the insane, of course. But the potential for creativity’s abuse should not make us stifle it entirely for the sake of security either.

Creativity and ethics can coexist, but it remains difficult to focus entirely on one or the other without recognizing a need for both depending on context and circumstance. Being creative might be a way people justify their otherwise unethical actions or it might simply be a consequence of the imagination going wild and people motivated by their ingenuity to go outside the norm, which doesn’t always equal being immoral, but heterodox at best. Creativity has potential for corruption, but is not evil in itself. Ethics benefit us, as well as possessing potential for excess or deficit as with any good thing. And immorality is sometimes only judged as such, but is not necessarily evil at all, but merely pushing boundaries beyond stiff and resistant traditions and normalcy. Fundamentally, equity and moderation are necessary to maintaining a cohesive and dynamic whole person, which includes both being civil to other human beings, but also realizing that you can’t please everyone and someone at sometime is going to be offended by you and there’s nothing that can be done except move forward. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Why Religion May Never Disappear (Entirely)

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/12/religious-belief-is-human-nature-huge-new-study-claims/

This topic tends towards some polarization, from what I’ve seen, so I’ll try to be as balanced and concise as possible. The ideas of determinism and essentialism always present some controversy anyway, so with that in mind, onto the topic.
When one looks across the world, there isn’t as much evidence of the hypo/thesis of this conglomeration of studies as there might’ve been centuries ago. The idea from all these investigations is that any claim that the world is becoming more secular is mistaken. The reasoning behind this is that there is still a strong presence of religious tendencies across various cultures as different as Japan and America and everything in between. This is ironic, since there was a study suggesting that at least “organized” religion would die out in 9 countries across the world though some might suggest secularization applies to religion as a whole. While the presence of religion in concentrated areas suggests religion exists in some organized fashion, the personal aspects of religion are less clear. If you polled a large sample of each major continent and merely asked if the person considers themselves “religious” then the results might reflect the presence of religiosity in the world more than the less accurate methods such as checking lists at churches of people baptized, both because of potential for lapsed believers that might return and those that have basically abandoned the beliefs of the church entirely. In the first case, the individual might still be religious, but in the other case, the individual may very well not be religious at all in the traditional understandings that involve a belief in the afterlife or deities/agents behind supposedly miraculous events. Studying cultural propensity is one thing, but on a psychological level, this is more difficult to defend.

Much of this seems to hinge on a centuries old debate: whether humans naturally possess the religious drive or if that drive is developed over time through education and culture; basically the nature/nurture dichotomy. An argument can be presented for humans being essentially religious animals. One might argue from a neurological perspective that our brains are hard wired to seek out God, the so called God-shaped hole thesis one hears many times, myself included. The problem with that thesis is pretty evident, though; it dehumanizes any skeptic, disbeliever or even doubter, since any of those people can be argued to be a deficient human being when one persists in spite of religious believers all around you, even being raised in a religion as many people are in an American culture. Instead of treating us with understanding, believers unintentionally treat us with contempt and pity as if we’re lesser people. Humans being religious by nature doesn’t mean humans should always follow that primal urge; any more than we should follow our animal impulses to rape and pillage.

The other end of the spectrum is equally troubling in saying religion is part of ancient human history; and since we have advanced to a more modern and intellectually sophisticated culture, we should abandon religion entirely. Not to sound like an apologist for religious people; considering I’m not really one of them myself in the sense of believing without hard evidence in something supernatural; but religion does have a place in modern day culture, at least in a sense of studying it as a cultural phenomenon that influences people in their everyday life. This is not to say we should try to apply these religious laws to a religiously diverse populace, but only that we should try to understand religion’s historical influence on people, with obvious examples like whether the U.S. is a Christian nation and the explosion in America of Islamaphobia. If we don’t research religion as an academically pertinent subject, we risk believing in unjustified claims about religion ranging on either end of the spectrum. Believing we are destined to be religious is just as absurd as saying that being religious is equivalent to being mentally insane. Religiosity in the sense of fidelity to your fellow human is hardly a sign of mental illness, is it?
A great deal of our predilection to seeing purpose in life as well as alleged NDEs (Near Death Experiences) that popularize some kind of evidence of the afterlife, can be connected to psychology and neurology respectively. Seeing purpose, as well as patterns, in seemingly random events in life, is a result of two related tendencies humans have in their mental makeup: apophenia and pareidolia. Apophenia, seeing patterns in unrelated phenomena, exists in various religious contexts, such as people believing God protected a church from a tornado or that God protected their home from a tornado while destroying everything else around the house. A simpler example would be people seeing certain events as evidence of answers to their prayers. Pareidolia is more commonly manifest with people seeing sacred images in what are initially random arrangements; like the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast or a pancake.
Any kind of apophenia people manifest, especially in a religious context, is defended on the grounds that it makes people feel secure and comfortable, even if life is by all definitions, random and inconstant. A tornado, fire, or other disaster can strike at any moment, taking people away from us; a twist of fate can make us rich and successful and another can turn all that into failure and throw us into despair. Religion can be said to potentially never go away for the same reason that people will always insist that it is not only in our nature to arrange and pattern the randomness in life, but that it is also beneficial to us. Any endeavors of great academic and public significance involve this sort of thinking; natural and social sciences, history, and even fine arts take what seem like unrelated phenomena and connect them in ways we wouldn’t originally think.

It’s ironic for me, an Aspie, to criticize this kind of thought pattern, when a thesis has been put forward, with a mountain of evidence to justify it, that Aspies are actually more prone to finding patterns than even neurotypical people. I don’t deny that you can say I’m a hypocrite or have misguided attention towards something that I have a stronger potential for. But my experience is not necessarily atypical for Aspies. As I’ve blogged over a year ago in “Aspergers and Atheism” at least one study has suggested that even if Aspies have a greater tendency to see patterns in events or data sets, it doesn’t mean that they see agency in those events. This is an important distinction to set up in a conclusion. People do have a tendency to find patterns in things and this isn’t always a negative trait. The fact that we observe patterns and laws in nature is how we grew to scientific thought. But when you begin to see conscious agency behind everything, such as when a person is “miraculously” healed from cancer or other debilitating illnesses, you not only get into the obvious category of “superstitious” but you go beyond our natural and beneficial tendency to see patterns and consistency as valuable and begin to become fixated on patterns and consistency in order to keep yourself from going insane. I may not be religious in believing that God or any supernatural force is involved in my life, but I am religious in the deeper sense that all humans can be said to have questions about life. I simply don’t take it so seriously that I feel a need to have some overarching answer to everything. Sometimes silence and ignorance are the path to fulfillment and enlightenment. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.