I’m in the process of thinking through my next column for 3 Quarks Daily. I’ve given it a provisional title: “My New-Found Patriotism: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, Music, and Apollo.” I’ll probably include something from a letter I wrote to the late Mary Douglas some years ago. As you may know, she a well-known anthropologist best known for her book, Purity and Danger (1966). She’d been kind enough to blurb my book about music, Beethoven’s Anvil (2001). Once the book was out my editor, William Frucht, gave me her email address and we began corresponding.
While the book was reviewed in both Science and Nature, and other places as well, it was not the smash success I’d hoped it to be. But it did get me some speaking invitations, one of them at Goshen College, which is a Mennonite College in Indiana, Pennsylvania. The Mennonites are conservative Christians. How do I, an atheist, talk to devout Christians (about music)? Since Douglas was a devout Catholic, I asked her about it in a letter I wrote in October of 2002. I’ve appended my letter in full (though I’ve corrected a typo or two) along with her brief response.
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Dear Mary,
I feel the need for a different kind of conversation. I’ve been asked to deliver an address at Goshen College in Indiana in the Spring of 2003 and I’ve accepted the invitation. Goshen College is a small school (c. 1000 students) affiliated with the Mennonite Church. Music is very important to the Mennonites, which is I why I’ve been asked to deliver an address. I can speak on any musical topic I wish but, given the nature of my book, on the one hand, and the importance of music to the Mennonites, on the other, the whole confused business of science and religion is going to be lurking in the background.
I don’t know much about the Mennonites, but I’ve been doing a bit of reading. As I said, music is important to them; they see it as a way to communicate to God. In particular, they have a long tradition of a capella four-part singing. This music is relatively austere. I note, however, that Charlie Keil has heard recordings of African Mennonites who sound like they’ve just invented four-part harmony. There are about 1,000,000 Mennonites world-wide, with c. 450,000 in North America and c. 350,000 in Africa.
Mennonite doctrine is fairly conservative. In particular, they believe in the “literal” truth of the Biblical account of creation. They are pacifists and also believe in a strict separation of church and state, so, for example, they refuse jury duty. They look at the world rather differently than I do. But the professor who made the invitation observed: “While I simply accept your scientific arguments on faith, I am entirely convinced that you and I 'hear' music the same way.”
When I say, in the first chapter of B’s Anvil, that I’m firmly anchored in the Western scientific view of the world, I am, of course, quite serious. When I said that, however, I was quite aware that I spend a great deal of time in the book discussing experiences that have little “purchase” within that worldview. I think that’s a real problem and that not only do such experiences need to be discussed, but that we need to reconsider how we think about cultures and groups. To the extent that that book is “science” (not something I fret over) science is seeming stranger and stranger to me.
When I started writing the book I wasn’t looking for the attractor stuff that I eventually put into it. That came late in the process, and something as a surprise. But it does mean that things like “group minds” are no mere metaphors; they are entities as real as quarks and dark matter, and equally strange. I can almost see my way to saying that, when Leonard Bernstein “becomes” Mozart, Mozart’s soul is, in fact, taking up residence in Bernstein’s body. If I admit of that, then it’s but a step to say that the same pretty much happens when anyone performs Mozart well, or listens to such a performance. As the same line of reasoning pretty much suggests that nothing remains of Mozart’s wife, not even her soul, I doubt that it would bring much comfort or satisfaction to a standard sort of religious.
“If we are his creation, we should be this complicated and exciting, especially the brain.”
But nonetheless I find it a rather striking and remarkable argument to make. In part what makes it so remarkable is that it follows directly from my insisting on treating the brain as a physical phenomenon, albeit an astonishingly complex one. Those musical attractors are beings most strange, remarkable in that once they come into existence, they can be passed down from person to person, group to group, generation to generation, yet they are, by nature, fluctuating and evanescent in the extreme. How can we comprehend that, when first a group of apes began to dance, they changed the world forever and began the trek to us?
And I find myself feeling a bit of sympathy with those fundamentalists who’ve been battling for years to have their view of human history presented in the schools, alongside Darwin’s view. It seems to me that one thing that’s going on is that they look out on the world in a commonsense way and see that man is quite different from animals. When they look at science, they see science telling them that, no, man is an animal, no more and no less. They cannot reconcile these views and so they reject science. I think that the science they are rejecting is wrong on that point and so I’m sympathetic with their rejection, even if I’m not sympathetic to creationist biology. And, given the time and energy this particular conflict has taken in America over the last century I’d be seriously inclined to allow creationism into the public schools, along side modern biology, just so we can stop wasting time with this particular squabble.
As you know, there is a well-established body of thinking on the vexed relationship between religion and science. I’ve read a little of this, and dip into it every now and then. But don’t mind much there to engage me. But those musical attractors, they are strange things to form in groups of human brains. As strange as spirits and gods.
I have no idea what I will tell the Mennonites about music. But whatever it is, I’ll be most interested in what they have to tell me in return.
Regards,
Bill B
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Good luck with the Mennonites.
I don't really see the problems that loom in your mind about science and God. If we are his creation, we should be this complicated and exciting, especially the brain.
Have you come across the poetry of Fred Turner? especially a book of essays on Beauty. I find it inspirational about your kind of work.
Thanks for writing,
Mary
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