By Kamran Nayeri, October 19, 2019
 |
| A family photo with my mother, Nezhat Nikrad, and my father, Asghar Nayeri, and my two -years old sister, Zhilla. I was about four years old then. Tehran, 1954. |
The question of human nature has occupied philosophers and utopians of all kinds, including Marxists, for a long time. There is considerable doubt about the proposition that there is a bundle of characteristics such as feelings, thinking, acting that is collectively shared by all humans that we can call human nature. For those who beleive there is a human nature, the simplistic view that human nature is either entirely culturally formed or entirely due to our biology has been discredited. With the advance of biological sciences and social sciences, we know that what we may call human nature is a complex interaction of biological and environmental factors historically formed. The recent discovery of the human microbiome and that each person’s body includes ten times more bacteria than "human cells" and that our microbiome is crucial in our well being and even in the formation of our personality further blurs the boundaries of what we may call nature and nurture in the formation of human nature. We are indeed a multi-organism species as are all complex species in the world. In a real sense, we possess an ecological nature and our bodies are themselves an ecological niche!
In what follows I will tell the story of how I became an atheist even before I learned how to read and write to demonstrate this nature and culture dynamics. First, I will relate how a certain sense of justice and a yearning for “philosophical questions” have been part of my make up as long as I can remember or have been related to me by adults who observed my childhood. Then, I will relate a specific life event that made me decide that atheism would be my choice for dealing with the question of a deity. The reader would rightly wonder how reliable is my recalling of such circumstances more than sixty years later and why I attribute them in part to personality traits. To be sure, my remembering them in such a clear cut form as I am relating here would not do justice to how I actually related to them as a child. A child would feel much less self-assured as an older man who is now telling this story. But my remembering of these circumstances has been with me over the intervening decades as I have been thinking about them from time to time. So they have the character of a story being told and retold. And in some instances, what I remember has been confirmed by others who knew me as a child. Finally, I attribute my childhood considerations and actions in part to my own inborn traits because my siblings who shared the same biological parents and similar circumstances have not share these same traits (as they had their own individual traits). One specific outcome was that I rejected the existence of a deity before I entered elementary school.
A sense of justice
One of the stories of my childhood my mother told me was about how on a shopping trip to a stationery store with her I ran back to it return a pencil sharpener that had attracted my attention in the store and I had mindlessly carried with me without having paid for it. Apparently, I after realizing that we had not paid for it a sense of right and wrong kicked in and I felt I must return it immediately. Part of my thinking and action might have been caused by my cultural upbringing but certainly my own idea of fairness and justice had something to do with it. At least that was what impressed my mother who remembered this incident and told me about it a number of times over the years.
No one had taught me about the problem of gender inequality. In fact, culturally speaking, it was commonly accepted that women and girls would do the housework. But still, as a child I was disturbed by the fact that my younger sister had to stay in the house to help my mother in the kitchen while I was free and even encouraged to go play. I knew my sister would have liked just as much to go to play. In fact, the preferential treatment afforded me annoyed my sister enough that she took it on me by beating me. Once she was so enraged that she banged on the door I had closed on her to protect myself that the glass broke and some glass shards tore into her skull requiring medical attention.
I also felt deep empathy for beggars, especially their children who lacked warm clothing in winter and sometimes were bare-footed and obviously were malnutritioned.
My childhood sense of empathy extended to non-human animals who were mistreated. It hurt me deeply when a man, himself in poor conditions, had placed an obviously too heavy load on the back of a donkey hitting her with a stick to force her to carry it forward. Or to see children hitting feral dogs with stones just for fun. My father’s hobby to keep canaries who lived their entire life in a cage bothered me.
Clearly, most of such feelings were not culturally-induced in me. There was some inborn sensitivity to the subordinated or miserable condition of others.
The problem of determinism
My reaction to these social issues was not simply emotional; I tried to make sense of them. The idea of a creator—God—was, of course, dominant in society and I absorbed it as part of my sense of the world; that there is a God who is the creator of all and everything in existence.
The problem I faced was how to reconcile the attribute of such God and the misery and injustice I saw all around me. In the Islamic culture that I was raised—although my family was not religious except in the most general sense of the word—taught me that God was all-knowing, all-powerful, and all compassionate. I understood that the circumstances we are born into from our own physical existence including "deficiencies" and disabilities, to our socioeconomic position in society to where we happen to be born, city or countryside, in Iran or in Europe, or elsewhere in the world, all determined the mix of opportunities and challenges we faced. Soon I convinced myself that there was no free will and we lived in a deterministic world. I reasoned that even our own “free decisions and actions” are influenced by all-pervasive circumstances of our existence all beyond our own control.
From this standpoint, I reasoned that if in fact there was a God he would not be at all compassionate because he has created so much misery for so many of his creations and even the more fortunate of his creations had no free feel, as we are all simply his toys.
Epistemology
As I was thinking about the problem of the God or deity, I was also concerned with the problem of knowledge: how do we know, how much can we know, and how certain can we be of what we think we know. This line of thinking occurred to me as a four or five years old boy watching the goldfish in five feet deep concrete pond in our house in Narmak. As I was watching the fish swim around the pond, it occurred to me that the fish might consider the pond to be the entire existence. I reasoned that in all likelihood, the fish had no idea of the vastness of the world outside of the pond because they had no way of knowing it. I then asked: Are we really much different from the fish? The blue dome above us looked much like the edges of the pond that enveloped the fish. Although we have more means of knowing than the fish, I reasoned, perhaps our idea of existence also is limited by the human capacity for knowing.
Of course, I already had a sense that human society has been developing ways that made it possible for us to peer further into existence. But I also thought perhaps we are limited by the inherent limits to our ability to know. Later in life, I was taught about human exceptionalism, a variety of anthropocentrism, which I uncritically accepted for decades. Still, such childhood musings helped develop a lifelong interest in me in philosophy and science.
A circumcision that changed my view of the world
Being her first child, my mother was excessively concerned about my well being. An unfortunate result was (I benefitted from her loving care in many ways) her decision to delay circumcising me which is usually done in Iran, a mostly Muslim country, very soon after birth. Thus, I spent my first few years of living in fear of the day when someone would take a knife to cut off part of my penis. That fateful day arrived when I was about five years old and we were visiting my aunt Raffat’s family in Shiraz over the summer. Unbeknown to me, she and my mother had arranged with a family friend, Dr. Mottaghian, to circumcise me. One late afternoon, aunt Raffat drove me under false pretenses to his medical office after he had seen his last regular patient. He laid me down on an examination table, removed my pants while my aunt held me firmly in place. It was only then that she told me about why we were visiting Dr. Mottaghian and that "it would not hurt!" I do not remember any details except that I experience sharp enough pain to have inflicted a few bruises on my poor aunt's arms.
That experience—the years anticipating it in terror and the surgery itself--made me realize that there was no God. Why would he give male children the foreskin and then order his followers to cut it off? This conflicted with the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and compassionate God. Meanwhile, I knew that boys whose parents followed the Christian religion, like Armenians in Iran, did not have to be circumcised. I realized that the Islamic prescription for circumcision was just a particular religious edict. Thus, I also concluded that religion was not “the way of God” but a cultural heritage. Not only there was no God but it was a mistake to follow any religion which was, in fact, just a cultural baggage.
My ethics
Defenders of religion view it as a necessary moral compass. My life experience and careful consideration suggest that living an ethical life can be entirely consistent with a scientific view of the world that precludes the existence of a deity or acceptance of religious heritage of any kind. When I was 21 years old, I read Erich Fromm’s Marx’s Concept of Man (1961). I immediately found in Marx’s critique of capitalism and his theory of socialism a systematic ethical perspective about the social world. Later in life, I extended this to our relationship to the rest of the natural world. I am happy to have lived an ethical life that does not rely on a church, or a text, of a belief in the supernatural. Nature itself has been my church and the source of my spirituality.
Related writings
Related writings
No comments:
Post a Comment