Some Mormon Mysteries

I interrupt a long hiatus to offer the following responses to two simple questions: (1) What is God to you?  (2) Are families forever?

(1) I would say that God to me is uncertainty, probability, unpredictability, the blind spot in my human mirror onto the vast thing that is reality. I am a machine for looking into reality and seeing discrete variables causally: I see X, and I see Y, and when one follows the other I can always tell you why. Unfortunately, I will not always be right. But this does not mean that life is utterly purposeless (or utterly random: we experience things that are regular all the time, even when there is no possibility of doing a scientific study to rule out coincidence as ultimate "cause").

I can do many things with my blind spot. I can paint it to look friendly or scary. I can personify it, pray to it, wear little trinkets and whatnot to remind me of it, or I can take an opposite route--depersonifying it, refusing to pray to it, finding some other reason for whatever little trinkets I want to wear. The approach I take is heavily influenced by my personal history. Who are my mentors? What books do I read? What music do I know? Do I interact more with Jesus or the Pharisees in my particular faith tradition? (Every cultural tradition includes people focused on broad principles, that can become too broad to make useful sense, and people focused on narrow laws, that can become too narrow to be useful. If I am poisoned by hippie Jesus' lackadaisical approach to life, then I am likely to react by running towards a more strict Phariseeism to correct my fault, whereas if I am poisoned by strict Phariseeism, I become more likely to course-correct by running towards hippie Jesus. I am in the latter category, but I have met quite a few people on the opposite trajectory.)

Eternal families? I don't really know what eternity is. If it is temporal, then it is just time going on and on and on without stopping (physicists, is that really even possible? I doubt it, since time is something that exists relative to other things that change, e.g. when universes bang in and out of existence). What would one do forever? How would one live (without going insane)? I don't know. I like some change, some narrative, some regrets, and an end to life's story (with possibilities for new stories: who knows what comes after my story? not me, surely). When I see "the eternal perspective" invoked in Mormonism, I also note a disturbing trend towards preserving some (galling) injustice in the status quo: "From an eternal perspective, it does not matter so much that you are currently unsuccessful (unmarried, female, black, enslaved, etc.). Just live with that, and God will eventually set it all right" (by having some king and priest who isn't a loser like you look after it? this isn't what is meant always by any means, but it is often the message transmitted, unfortunately).

The useful eternal perspective for me exists outside time. Eternity is not time going on with no end, but a space outside time, a metaphorical space where possibility exists untapped, unexhausted, unreached (and in some sense unreachable) by human understanding. It is what Buddhists call emptiness (not nothingness, but the indefinite possibility that something might happen--or not). Instead of inspiring us to come up with self-serving stories to justify evil in the status quo ("blacks are roughing it here because they were fence-sitters in the pre-existence, women because Eve ate that damn apple," etc.), it reveals to us the poverty of material success. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, and I choose to love him (and life) anyway. Replace "the Lord" with Nature if you like. Feminize him (it, them). Do whatever you like! It is your life's work to make art of your religion. But you will not exhaust reality; you will not escape the blind-spot built into your humanity. That is not a bug, I fear, but a feature--and the only cure we have found is death (not really so bad, when one approaches it correctly: I can have really happy thoughts about rotting somewhere in the ground, providing nourishment to the biota all around me--the same way so many other beings have died to keep me alive through my mortality; I want to give something back).

(2) Families? I don't know how they exist or last universally (for all observers everywhere). I don't think I ever will, but I know that I love mine. I know that I value them in a way that I cannot value others (not because I have no use for non-family, but because I cannot be that intimate with all humanity, let alone all sentient life). In the context of my own life-story, they are essential: they are the people who hear my story, who share it, who find meaning in it, and who enrich me with their own stories--stories that contain meaning I can see (because I am close to them, for whatever reasons). I don't know how we are together. Forever? What would that mean? My sons eternally in diapers? Eternally squabbling because someone threw up or punched someone? Eternally meeting with relatives each Thanksgiving to spread diseases (and good cheer)? I prefer to think that we are together now, and that I hope to remain with them for the duration of my story: no matter what happens, they will always be important to that story. That is all I can say.

The Epicurean Paradox

Here is one version of an insight (or cluster of insights) that really threw me as I examined my religious faith rationally.

What is Intelligent Design?

This screed came out of my pen in reaction to an article on Intelligent Design theory, which was sent to me by a very good friend.

I have believed both sides of this argument: I started out believing in Darwinian evolution, converted to ID, and have re-converted to belief in evolution.  To me, it seems abundantly clear (1) that change happens all the time, (2) that there is a significant degree of randomness involved in change, and (3) that people systematically underestimate the randomness (or overestimate their ability to understand it).  This does not mean that I think that everything Darwin said is true: it isn't, and current ideas about biological evolution look significantly different from what he put forward in On the Origin of Species.  In the future, theories will continue to evolve: it is not in the nature of things for permanent knowledge to exist.  Real knowledge depends on context, which is constantly changing.  Useful knowledge does not assert itself as something absolute, unchanging, non-evolving.

One problem that people on the ID side have (from my perspective) is that they fail to understand how design really works.  Take Paley's analogy: you find a watch on the beach (watch = universe) and presume that some watchmaker (= God) made it.  In real life, however, watchmakers don't make watches on their own, with untutored intelligence!  The original watch was a clock, which came into existence at multiple times in history in various formats: engineers took those formats and tweaked them, and tweaked them, and tweaked them, and continue to tweak them, creating all kinds of different watches.  No one individual ever invented a Platonic form of the watch ("one watch to time them all").  Someone came up with a gizmo that gave someone else an idea for another gizmo, and so on.  The watch is evolving as I write this.  Watchmakers are noticing random things in their old blueprints, in their customer base, in the work of other watchmakers, and they are building new watches (including some very different from an early Benedictine clock).  The original watchmakers did not come up with their watch out of thin air: the gizmos they built were likewise inspired by earlier gizmos (and a crowd of engineering ideas that no single historical individual is responsible for).  The way that "intelligent design" actually works in human terms is actually very much like the way modern biologists imagine biological evolution taking place.  Engineers share ideas and create multiple gizmos (which become prototypes for more gizmos) just as organisms share DNA and create multiple offspring (which become prototypes for more organisms).  One person is not responsible for creating watches (which are a collective phenomenon).  One thing is not responsible for creating biological life (which is a collective phenomenon).

Another problem with ID is that it does not really say anything about how we are to understand things.  The modern biologist's story of evolution doesn't just give you a fun myth for science class: it explains how diseases happen (as bacteria and viruses evolve to become better predators), how speciation happens (as isolated pockets of organisms develop apart from their parent populations), how ecosystems exist (as multiple populations of living things evolve together) -- and thus how our actions as human beings influence the prevalence of disease and living species.  It gives practical answers (that actually work sometimes!) to practical questions (should I build a house here? what kind of house? should I have a pet? what kind? what should I eat? what medicine should I take for a particular illness or infection?).  ID, on the other hand, just points out that the whole thing is a mystery.  "The universe is the product of an otherwise unknown and perhaps unknowable intelligent designer" (who for some reason left no business card on the beach with Paley's watch).  Can I ask the designer what to do when I am sick, when I want to build a house?  I can.  What does he say?  Nothing at all, until I remember that he is also known as God.  Then he says all kinds of stuff: 

"You are sick?  Sacrifice a lamb, or a goat, or two turtle doves, and leave an offering of incense with the priest (who must be paid handsomely to officiate).  That didn't work?  Well, maybe you can try dedicating a small statue of me (complete with thunderbolts in hand) at your local temple?  That didn't work?  How about a cast of the affected body part?  Still no dice?  Well, I suppose you could try burning or cutting yourself: remember that weird dream you had about being on fire the other night?  I sometimes talk to people in dreams.  Maybe you should ask the local madman what he thinks; I love schizophrenics: they always hear me so loud and clear!"  

Historically speaking, God has many conflicting faces (all of them suspiciously human, to my eye), and he offers all kinds of contradictory prescriptions for human life, contradictory prescriptions that are about as reliable as medicine before germ theory.  (By saying all kinds of different things over time, God occasionally offered somebody something that worked, much as some pre-modern doctors occasionally cured people with panaceas like quinine.  If I give quinine to every sick person I meet, the malaria patients will be cured; some people will get better on their own; and everyone else will die.  Old time medicine, like old time religion, worked, but it was not really reliable.  Sometimes, avoiding the consumption of pig meat may help society prosper; other times, not so much.  God is either really bad at seeing the difference or really bad at communicating it to his acolytes.)  The ID people have no practical advice to offer except the outworn ideas presented by God: some of these ideas work (perhaps even very well), and others don't, but it takes an evolutionist to see the difference.  The evolutionist may give you some of God's medicine, but he will follow up with you when it doesn't work, and will even invent new medicine (which won't always work, either).  The ID guy just hands you over to the priest, who gives you the divine panacea du jour and then lets you survive or die without bothering to think of anything new (and heretical: we have to stick to the tried and true, even when history shows us that it doesn't really work). 

Evolution is practical because it changes (mimicking the growth we see in life, and in God, for that matter).  ID is impractical because it does not change (mimicking the stagnation we see in death, and in many churches).  The people who believe in evolution are engaging in useful thought whenever they ask how changes occur.  The people who believe in ID are not, since they have no positive theory of change.  I reconverted to belief in evolution when I realized that in my experience (1) change is real, and (2) engaging it practically requires something more than uncritical acceptance of ancient mythology.  This is not because the mythology is worthless, but because it contains a lot of chaff mixed in with the wheat, chaff that needs to be sifted out if I am to avoid poisoning myself every time I take something from God's medicine cabinet (which we all do at some point: no one claims to know everything, except for some crazy fanatics, and we all fall back on "common sense" whose usefulness is open to question).        

Questioning the Prophet

Richard Lyman Bushman.  Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling.  New York: Knopf, 2005.  ISBN 1400042704.  

Todd Compton.  In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith.  Salt Lake City: Signature, 1997.  ISBN 156085085X.

Will Bagley.  Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows.  Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.  ISBN 0806134267.

I encountered these three books in the order I have listed them here: first Bushman's, then Compton's, then Bagley's.  They have profoundly impacted my view of LDS church history.  The picture of the pioneer church that they paint individually and cumulatively is much more vivid and real than anything in the church manuals.  Unfortunately, it is also much more disturbing if (like me) you grew up accepting the maudlin stuff in the manuals as an essential part of your faith.  In the next three posts, I will discuss my reaction to each book; this essay will deal with Bushman.

My hunger to know more about church history goes back at least to the mission field, where I distinctly remember questioning my church-manual testimony of the prophet Joseph for the first time.  While I had read Hugh Nibley's apologetic screeds (especially the hilarious Myth Makers) thoroughly enough to get a basic sense of the controversies surrounding the origins of Mormonism, I had not made any detailed study of church history and was largely uninformed.  I was with a fellow missionary en route to a special zone leaders' conference in Leon, on the other side of some really impressive mountains in northern Spain.  We wiled away a good bit of the drive (with him at the wheel, since I did not have a viable driver's license) by listening to a series of lectures on the Prophet Joseph by the late Truman Madsen, who was still alive back then.  Gazing out over the wild Spanish countryside (so beautiful and so empty of humanity), I listened to Madsen narrate the official story of Joseph, loading the prophet with every virtue known to man in the superlative degree, and found myself wondering, against my will even, whether it was all empty words.  Did Joseph really see God in the flesh, live a practically perfect life (committing only a few sins that most people could not care less about, like letting Martin Harris keep some pages of the first Book of Mormon manuscript overnight), and then die a martyr?  I wondered, and I had no immediate answer.  I resolved that I would look into the matter when I got back.

Fast forward several months, and I am sitting around the table with a lot of older undergraduates (returned missionaries like myself) listening to a professor mention Richard Bushman's biography of Joseph Smith with approval.  I am interested.  Then the book appears at my parents' house, at my fiancee's house.  Pretty soon, I have read it. In some ways, it is much more satisfying than Madsen's portrait; in other ways, it is profoundly more troubling.  Madsen's Joseph is the church-manual prophet: a perfect gentleman who embodies an exact contrast to the kind of loose morals that are often associated with frontier America in the nineteenth century.  Madsen's Joseph is a kind, gentle soul, but a lusty wrestler and no stranger to hard work; he talks to Jesus and plays with children before being hauled off to court on trumped-up charges to face a band of illegal executioners instead of a lawful trial.  Bushman's Joseph, on the other hand, is a lot less immediately prepossessing: he drinks, fights, and has this thing for women (including other men's wives: polyandry was a much greater shock to me than polygyny, which I already knew something about thanks to Nibley).  On top of that, his revelations are a lot less "inspired" (than that of his official counterpart) when considered from a purely practical point of view: many (some would say most) of the ventures he launches in the name of God (the United Order, Zion's Camp, Kirtland Safety Society, the Nauvoo Legion, the New and Everlasting Covenant) fail with ambiguous moral consequences for those involved.  (Did losing all their property in the Kirtland Safety Society prepare people to be righteous leaders, the way failing to save the church's property with Zion's Camp did?  Did Emma's endurance of what she perceived as her husband's ongoing infidelity provide a necessary test of character, or was he just a cad?)  Finally, instead of delivering himself up as an innocent lamb to the slaughter, Bushman's Joseph dies in a gun fight brought on as much by his own antisocial posturing as that of his enemies, reminding me more of Billy the Kid than Father Imbert (who made no active effort to defend himself: I freely admit I would probably go down shooting, much like Joseph).  The "martyrdom" of the Prophet is a really morally ambiguous event for me in the wake of reading Bushman.  How would you react if local law enforcement were erratic and someone showed up threatening to take over your county for God and his chosen people?  My thinking is that many of us, myself included, might have acted just like some of the "mobocrats" in Missouri and Illinois, who responded by taking the law into their own hands.  Joseph Smith himself was not above such behavior: witness his destruction of the Expositor press in Nauvoo.  The fact of the matter is that the American frontier was a savage place in the nineteenth century: rule of law was weak enough to accommodate the destruction of an annoying printing press or the execution of a notorious criminal.  In the absence of strong military and police forces, the only thing that separated crimes from acts of civic heroism was courtroom rhetoric, which either side could command at will. 

Bushman makes an effort to contain his problematic prophet, pointing out that Mormons have never been told their prophet is perfect.  (For more from Bushman in this vein, listen to his interview with John Dehlin.)  This defense does not sit well with me, largely because I see it belied in the educational effort that the church puts forth: in the mission field, we did not warn investigators that prophets might occasionally go off the deep end (trying to cheat people of their property or take advantage of their wives, activities just as illegal in the nineteenth century as in the twenty-first); we told them to pray, and that if they prayed with real intent they would know that following the prophet is always the right thing to do.  When a modern prophet remarks that "one modest pair of earrings is sufficient" (Gordon B. Hinckley, "A Prophet's Counsel and Prayer for Youth," Ensign, January 2001), the righteous are supposed to interpret this as a test of their obedience: a virtuous woman will doff her excess ornaments, demonstrating her ability "to promptly and quietly obey the counsel of the prophet in all things and at all times" (quoted from current LDS apostle David Bednar, "Quick to Observe," BYU Devotional, 10 May 2005).  What kind of behavior does such rhetoric train if not unquestioning, fanatical obedience? Where is the place for personal revelation (on the part of the individual church member) and prophetic fallibility here?  I do not see it.

Sacred Mystery

Thomas Merton.  New Seeds of Contemplation.  2nd edition (originally published in 1961).  New York: Abbey of Gethsemane, 2007. ISBN 081120099X.

This book was a real treat to read, providing the kind of "spiritual nourishment" that I used to find in scripture before my Mormon worldview collapsed.  Taken as a whole, the book seems random and resistant to facile analysis; the author himself characterizes it as "a volume of more or less disconnected thoughts" (xix).  Nonetheless, I found it a very rich exploration of the unknown (and unknowable) God I had met before in the work of Thomas Merton.  Rather than attempt to cover the whole thing in this brief review, I will quote a few passages that speak to me and summarize why I think they are important.

(1) The following is one of the best attempts I know of to express what I mean (and have always meant) when talking about "spiritual experiences":

Contemplation is the highest expression of man's intellectual and spiritual life.  It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive.  It is spiritual wonder.  It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being.  It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being.  It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source.  It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes beyond reason and beyond simple faith...It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images, in words or even in clear concepts.  It can be suggested by words, by symbols, but in the very moment of trying to indicate what it knows the contemplative mind takes back what it has said, and denies what it has affirmed.  For in contemplation we know by "unknowing."  Or, better, we know beyond all knowing or "unknowing" (1-2).

This kind of "obscure knowledge" (which is really an awareness more than any kind of certainty) is still available to me, and I continue to cultivate it as I can.  Unfortunately, I am increasingly uncomfortable speaking about it openly in the LDS church, which seems afraid of it (and reacts to it officially with anger, condemnation, or lack of understanding).  The only rhetoric of belief welcome at fast and testimony meetings is a kind of absolute certainty which I have outgrown (inasmuch as it is founded on experiences I have not had as reported by people I can no longer find any compelling reason to trust).

(2) Elsewhere, Merton captures how the kind of obscure knowledge he embraces presupposes and demands skepticism and openness to reform:

Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt.  On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding.  For every gain in certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial "doubt."  This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious "faith" of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.  This false "faith" which is what we often live by and which we even come to confuse with our "religion" is subjected to inexorable questioning.  This torment is a kind of trial by fire in which we are compelled, by the very light of invisible truth which has reached us in the dark ray of contemplation, to examine, to doubt and finally to reject all the prejudices and conventions that we have hitherto accepted as if they were dogmas...What a holocaust takes place in this steady burning to ashes of old worn-out words, cliches, slogans, rationalizations!  The worst of it is that even apparently holy conceptions are consumed along with all the rest.  It is a terrible breaking and burning of idols, a purification of the sanctuary, so that no graven thing may occupy the place that God has commanded to left empty: the center, the existential altar which simply "is" (12-13). 

This captures exactly how I have felt over the last few years, as my "obscure knowledge" of God has eroded and destroyed my testimony of the restored gospel (as taught by the LDS church).  My desire has consistently been to eradicate my prejudice, to break my passion, and to exist at last as a freer man.  Under pretense of helping me fulfill this desire, the church has taken hold of my passion and prejudice and tried to make them permanent instruments with which to control me in life (and perhaps beyond): they want to establish themselves (and their image of God) on that altar where I am determined (with Merton) to put nothing.

(3) Why nothing?  Again, Merton has a thought-provoking answer:

In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is.  He may or may not mercifully realize that, after all, this is a great gain, because "God is not a what," not a "thing."  That is precisely one of the essential characteristics of the contemplative experience.  It sees that there is no "what" that can be called God.  There is "no such thing" as God because God is neither a "what" nor a "thing" but a pure "Who."  He is the "Thou" before whom our inmost "I" springs into awareness.  He is the I Am before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo "I am" (13).

So "god" is a term we use to mark reality as a whole: it is necessarily larger than any description anyone tries to make of it.  To define something that is by definition indefinite is to lose touch with the reality after which one is reaching.  Instead of leading to knowledge of God (who is infinite), such misguided efforts merely create an idol, a finite imitation that is now almost completely unconnected to the reality it affects to describe.  I think the LDS portrait of divinity, when conceived dogmatically, is such an idol.  It is wrong to say that the Mormon myth of the divine is demonstrably more "true" than the Catholic, or the Jewish, or the Islamic, or the Hindu, or the Buddhist, or the ancient Greek.  Instead of being "truer,"  it is just different, with a unique set of strengths and weaknesses.  Until this is acknowledged, it is impossible to really learn from other faith traditions: what can the man who knows everything (or at least, everything really important) learn?

Since I have more passages to put up and this post is already long, I will end here for the present, saving the rest for a future post or posts.

Confession of a Dumb Bird-Watcher

Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.  New York: Random House, 2004.  ISBN 0812975219.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.  New York: Random House, 2007.  ISBN 1400063515.

This essay takes me a little distance down memory lane, since I encountered Nassim Taleb before my crisis of faith had become truly critical.  Still not really concerned by the cognitive dissonance that would eventually become unbearable, I was happily engaged in my graduate school work, taking classes and preparing for examinations.  As an outlet for stress, I maintained an active lifestyle and sought the best information I could find on human health and performance.  I had knocked around enough to know that the people from whom I had the most to learn were older athletes who maintained high activity levels: they had something I wanted.  So I found myself visiting the web site of Clarence Bass, who introduced me (figuratively speaking) to economist Arthur De Vany and his brain-child "Evolutionary Fitness".  De Vany's ideas about complex systems (of which the human body provides one instance) are very interesting and changed my thinking in many ways (before his blog became available by subscription only; as a poor student, I have little cash to spare).  It was on De Vany's blog that I first learned of Taleb, whom (as I recall) De Vany approved as presenting a useful model for understanding how the real world works.  I was intrigued enough that I tracked down some cheap copies of Taleb's books and began reading.

In both of his books, Taleb outlines a world very different from the over-determined one in which I grew up.  Who can say when my dalliance with determinism began?  I remember my mother putting me to bed one night, back when I was about four years old.  I looked up at her and asked, with real emotion, "Mama, why does everybody do what they do?"  Maybe that was the beginning.  In any case, I spent the next several years learning from a deterministic point of view.  When I studied palaeontology as a nine-year-old, I tended to assume that dinosaurs (and other extinct life-forms) evolved a certain way out of necessity, adapting in some definite way to meet a definite need.  When I read the Book of Mormon as an eleven-year-old and experienced a very powerful emotional conversion, dinosaurs and evolution receded into the background (for several years I rejected evolution entirely!), but deterministic thinking remained: God had a plan which he played out in human life; free will in this plan existed from our point of view (since we were not coerced into making decisions), but not really from his (since he knew in advance what decisions we would make).  So life was controlled by prophecies.  There was the uncomfortable fact that many of these prophecies seemed to come "true" in so many different times, and in so many different ways.  Could God really have deliberately intended so much?  Taleb makes it really hard to think he did, particularly if you think of God as a glorified man, which as a good Mormon (and Christian, though some will doubtless protest) I once did.

Instead of writing about "the great chain of being" in some form, with all life ultimately determined by some Aristotelian unmoved mover (whether God or "nature" or anything else you please), Taleb writes about man, i.e. homo sapiens, though when you are knee-deep in Taleb's work he looks a lot more like homo stultus.  For Taleb's man is not the pinnacle of evolutionary history or the capstone of God's creation.  He is a garrulous fool with a penchant for telling stories to explain why things happen.  Caught between a rock and a hard place, Taleb's man does not reason our way out step by logical step: like any good cowboy, he takes a gut check and gets the hell out of Dodge!  Then, seated at a cozy table with friends, he tells the story of his escape as though he had calculated every step precisely, as though his salvation were determined by consummate skill (or calculated divine intervention) instead of dumb luck.  The rational element is here completely subservient to the emotional, which provides the real, unexamined, unexplained source for human action.  I was fascinated by this (for me) new vision of humanity, to the point that I decided to follow a hint from Taleb and take a special examination in ancient astrology, comparing it to modern economics as practiced by the big-shots that have been going broke recently (and using the government's muscle to take food from my children's mouths to get back on their feet). It is uncanny to me how similar ancient astrologers (still extant in old manuscripts that few people read) are to modern economists: both use the language of science (geometry, mathematics) to speak a kind of hyper-articulate gibberish that always makes perfect sense of the (determined) past but cannot say anything really telling about the (undetermined) future. The bogus nature of their predictions is revealed when something really unexpected happens (the unfolding economic crisis, for example): Taleb refers to these unlooked-for events as "black swans", drawing on the old European notion that all swans are white, a notion which persisted until the late 17th century, when black swans were discovered in western Australia. 

Someone has come up with a nice parable that illustrates what reading Taleb did for me.  Imagine the human mind as a house full of windows to the outside.  As long as you are in the house, your understanding of the outside is dependent on your access to the windows.  Assuming the outside is important to you, would you not want access to as many windows as possible, preferably clean ones?  Reading Taleb showed me (1) that there were many windows in my house, not just the one or two I had been using, and (2) that all of them were very dirty, such that it was better to talk about the potential rather than the actual when speaking of things outside.  Essentially, reading Taleb turned me into an epistemological agnostic: I became more aware of the powers and limitations of my mind, and consequently less certain of everything; some things dropped off my radar almost entirely.  Why talk seriously about saving the universe or some eternal essence of me long-term when I do not even know how to save the bacon here and now?  I began to shut up and listen even more than I used to; other points of view became valuable when they disagreed rationally with an emotional judgment of mine, and useless when they made emotional appeals against my rational judgment.  Returning to the parable of the house helps make sense of what was going on.  Before I knew about the multitude of windows, I had only one or two (that were really dirty, remember), so when someone said, "Look, there's a little pink unicorn in the garden!" I would peer through the glass, get a glimpse of something and think to myself, "Yeah, that could be a unicorn, and it does look rather pink."  After Taleb took me on the grand tour of the house, the process of verification became more complicated.  I had to visit all the windows before making a pronouncement.  Comparing one view with another, I would say something like this: "Yeah, the smudge on this window creates a blotch that makes whatever-it-is look horned, and the tinge of the dirt makes it seem pink, but that other window upstairs has a different pattern of smudges in different colors, and everyone up there is convinced we have a brown rabbit in the garden, rather than a pink unicorn.  Seen from the west wing it looks more like a blue panda."  A quicker way to convey this shift in perspective is to emend the famous quote from Descartes, who should have said cogito, ergo idiota sum ("I think, therefore I am an idiot").  Thinking no longer confirms what I already know (in my gut); instead, it provides evidence that I don't really know anything (because gut-sense is really nonsense; unfortunately, it is also the inalienable factor in most human decisions).

So, there you have it.  Before reading Taleb, I was living out my life as just another philosophical footnote to Plato, chasing a vision of "absolute truth" whose reality I was prepared to rationalize any way I could.  After reading Taleb, "absolute truth" disappeared as a meaningful variable on my epistemological map of the world. Though I still went through perfunctory motions of "believing" in it, I ceased using it as a heuristic in dealing with new data input: it became the relic of an irrecoverable past.  Little by little, I shed the persona of the know-it-all expert, crafted in the image of God with clear insight into eternal reality, and recognized that I was just a dumb bird-watcher with a knack for leaping to unjustified (and unjustifiable) conclusions.  Like many prognosticators before, I looked around and saw omens: eagles, meteors, planetary conjunctions, stock quotes, sacred books, a burning in the bosom, etc.  Sometimes I read the omens "correctly" (meaning I got the outcomes I wanted after seeing the holy birds and making the proper sacrifices), and sometimes I did not.  Then one day I saw a black swan.  I have never really looked at the world the same way since.