Truth
SQ and the Meaning of Spiritual
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 17 June 2007
SQ?
Mark Vernon is a journalist with an interesting website about science, religion and human sociabilility, which has in it a test called the “spiritual intelligence test”, bizarrely called the SQ test, not the SIQ test, leaving you wondering where the “intelligence”, the “I”, went! The SQ or SIQ test is not a quotient, and so there is no need for the Q at all, and it seems to be meant simply to draw attention to the supposed parallel with IQ. Someone else, trying to be a management guru, called Lavinia Gavrila writes on the web, capitalizing the word “spiritual” whenever she uses it as if it were a God:
We used to believe that IQ, the intelligence quotient, (logical analytical intelligence) would determine success. In the mid-90s, Daniel Goleman, popularized the notion of another quotient—EQ, emotional intelligence and now, a third wave of scientific research suggesting SQ, the spirituality quotient. Traditionally, spirituality had no place in management concepts. At our current stage of human development, we face a new challenge; we need to integrate spirituality into management…
Is it true that businessmen will be paying large fees to confidence tricksters to waste the time of them and their staff with all this guff? Should anyone need to point out this is all hogwash? Apparently so, and it bodes ill for our place in the world. “SQ” is not a third wave of scientific research, it is just another wave of New Age pseudo religious garbage and has no relationship to science except that these gurus like to present their cons as being scientific. Professor, Dr William R Clough of the School of Professional Psychology & Behavioral Science, Argosy University, Sarasota, somewhere in Fantasy Land, it seems, is desperate to explain to us all about spirituality and how to measure it. Its meaning “includes the idea of transcendence”, not a lot of help in measuring it, one would think. In fact, Clough on the internet goes on at some length to explain spirituality without in the end doing it. Yet, psychological crooks like him pretend to a gaping audience of god-botherers that they have “instruments designed to measure more of the fine distinctions in religion and spirituality”. It is con-trickery for people eager to have their religious prejudices confirmed by science. It is not science.
IQ to SQ!
IQ itself is hardly scientific even though it does crudely measure something we can recognize—intelligence. IQ is the abbreviation for intelligence quotient, a quotient or ratio. It is the mental age of a child divided by the actual age, and so shows whether they are ahead or behind the average in mental or intellectual development. It is meant as an educational aid, a measure of progress as children developed by being educated. Mental age was worked out as the statistical average of tests carried out on a representative sample of children of a particular age using tests that purported to be culture free. It is doubtful that any succeed in this ambition, but they ought to work reasonably for people brought up in a common culture. For adults it simply shows whether they are above or below average intelligence on the basis of standardized tests.
IQ certainly correlates with intelligence variously defined to some degrees, but when ability is divided into different subject skills, the correlations vary. It shows that intelligence is not monolithic and is comprehensively undefinable and so the scientific measurement of it is unsatisfactory. It makes scientists chary about trying to measure anything even less definable about human personality like emotions, but does the opposite for pseudo-scientists like self-designated “transpersonal psychologists”.
In the last decade of the second millennium, a Dr Daniel Goleman introduced us to EQ, supposedly the Emotional Quotient, or rather again not a quotient at all but an inadequately defined and even less understood novelty called emotional intelligence, with EQ seeming to make it measureable, whatever it is. Various New Age gurus liked it, and started conning the gullible with the money to pay for their wisdom. As Ms Gavrila says, the gurus are moving on, and aiming to con gullible businessmen and managers with their new mirage. EQ turns out, according to the gurus, to be “people skills”. The people who have it seem to be the manipulaters, charmers and confidence tricksters who get promoted to a high level of incompetence where they sit in grand offices moving around the furniture—just like the gurus, in fact!
Now, spirituality comes into it, to take it a stage further, we are told. Ms Gavrila implies that there have been empirical studies of spirituality in the workplace, and she now reveals that the single best word meaning “spirituality” is “interconnectedness”. A humble scientist fooled by the appearance of a world, might have believed the best single word meaning “spirituality” is “spirituality”, but there you go. Spirituality is the ability to connect with everything! It must be the conviction that you are God.
Spirituality in Psychology?
When you have done Vernon’s spirituality test, you discover that it is really a test of humility, the scores of 0-100 apparently being on a scale from humble to overweening arrogance. My own score, answered as honestly as possible, which meant several answers could not be given because none of the three choices were adequate, was 45. Answering them all in what I thought was an obsessively scientific way gave me a score of 52, and answering in the way I thought religious believers would answer gave me a score of 72. So a score of 0 makes you Christ, and a score of 100 makes you God, and 0 = 100, according to believers! Doubtless, it is all meant as a bit of fun, and not to be taken seriously, but such bits of fun have a way of being taken seriously by half the population, notably the half with IQs below 100, and the rogues with high IQs intent on defrauding the first lot.
Whether that is so or not, it is true that a large number of people think that “spiritual” is a meaningful word. It is a word that everyone wants to use, largely to show their anti-reductionist credentials, but few can agree upon when it comes to discussing meaning. A definition from a dictionary has it that “spiritual” means pertaining to the human spirit as opposed to the material or physical. So, it seems to be equivalent to imaginary, for what is not material or physical other than thoughts in the mind? It is a certain bet that most religious people would not count spiritual as meaning imaginary. No, religious people, think spiritual things are somehow real, even though they are not physical or material. In other words what is spiritual is somehow supernatural. Spirituality, to the believer, is supernaturality. Those who claim not to be religious but nevertheless believe that spiritual things are real in some such supernatural way are secretly religious.
Unlike IQ, which computers have, and EQ, which exists in higher mammals, SQ is uniquely human and the most fundamental of the three.L Gravrila
Any student with a modest IQ ought to be able demolish this garbage that top managers apparently pay to hear. We are told it is SQ not IQ that makes us want to understand things, to have ambitions and fulfil our potential. The authority on this pseudo scientific drivel turns out to be Frances Vaughan, PhD, “author of several books integrating psychological and spiritual development”. Apparently, she has spent many years working at the interface of psychology and spirituality. She sounds as though she ought to have been certified as insane but has taken to psychology so that she can do the certifying, having decided the opportunities in religion were not too good unless she wanted to be a nun. She explains, according to Gavrila, what spiritual intelligence constitutes.
- “It concerns the inner life of mind and spirit and its relationship to being in the world”
- “It implies a capacity for a deep understanding of existential questions and insight into multiple levels of consciousness”
- “It implies awareness of spirit as the ground of being or as the creative life force of evolution. If the evolution of life from stardust to mineral, vegetable, animal, and human existence implies some form of intelligence rather than being a purely random process, it might be called spiritual”
- “It emerges as consciousness evolves into an ever-deepening awareness of matter, life, body, mind, soul, and spirit”
- “It appears to connect the personal to the transpersonal and the self to spirit”
- “It goes beyond conventional psychological development”
- “It opens the heart, illuminates the mind, and inspires the soul, connecting the individual human psyche to the underlying ground of being”
- “It can be developed with practice and can help a person distinguish reality from illusion.”
All this is as scientific as claiming a wafer is the body of Christ. “Spirit”, like “spiritual” is impossible to define let alone measure, so all of these categories that mention it are empirically unprovable and unsupported by science. So too is any “understanding of existential questions”, and anyone who did understand them would be God. Spirit is not the “creative life force of evolution”, and the claim that it is is ancient and religious, not scientific. Evolution does not have any “creative life force”, nor is it “purely random”, and it does not “imply intelligence”. The suggestion that evolution “implies intelligence” shows this woman believes in Intelligent Design not science and should be sacked if her position is supposed to be a scientific one. If her position is religious, she should be honest and hold a job in a religious department. “Soul” and the “underlying ground of being” are meaningless unscientific jabber. Finally, if people need help to “distinguish reality from illusion”, then they probably need treatment, and ought to seek it. She should. She is a fraud, pretending to speak scientificially when she is a god-botherer in drag.
How do these people get away with the pretence that they are psychologists? How do hard nosed businessmen in an age when business utterly depends upon science fall for this self serving crypto religion? Where is the experimental evidence for all this New Age burbling? Gavrila mentions empirical studies in the workplace but a miasma of incoherent guruspeak follows. An internet Christian talks more sense when he writes:
It’s a mistake to assume that Christians with big heads are more spiritual than quieter, less confident ones.
Perhaps the management guru should take that on board and see whether it is in the same ballpark at the close of play, though said with management metaphors more appropriate for the spiritual New Age in management.
Another one on this juggernaut is someone called Danah Zohar who punctuates her New Age blandishments with Philosophy, Religion & Psychology learnt, it seems, at Harvard University. Now she is bribed by Christian gold to confuse people at Oxford’s Templeton College. Her husband and fellow confidence trickster is Ian Marshall, though he freely admits to it, being a psychiatrist. She began by discovering the word “quantum” and milking it as much as she could in books like The Quantum Self and Quantum Society. Gurus like to use notions that are hard to understand like “quantum theory” or have no measurable content at all like “spirit” and “soul”. Dr Zohar noticed that quantum theory was difficult, but it impressed people, so if you seemed to know something about it you had a head start in the phoniness stakes. She is now doing the same with spirituality, an empty word with no meaning, as Ms Gavrila showed above by using it for anything she liked. Thus we read:
We specifically say in our book (Spiritual Capital: Wealth We Can Live By) that by spiritual we mean the access to and pursuit of meaning, vision, value and deep purpose. It’s nothing at all connected necessarily with religion.
Boringly dull scientists might like to know why she has to use the word “spiritual” when she means these other things, that are therefore inevitably confused with traditional meanings of the word that are specifically to do with religion. Indeed, the main meaning of it is synonymous with the word “religion”! There are few that would not agree that capitalism would be a lot nicer if it were more lovable and cuddly but wishing will not change it, and nor will inventing pseudo scientific theories meant to do nothing but attract Christian gold into your purse while defrauding the general public with pseudo scientific dog poo.
Scientists ought to outlaw these frauds who ought to be in departments of religion not psychology. The fact is that in the USA, and increasingly in the UK, unfounded fancies are driving out science, and the outcome cannot be good for either society. If scientists do not take a stand and assert themselves more, then who will. Both countries are led by doctrinaire sociopaths and the crisis has worsened. Who will speak out? Of prominent scientists, only Dawkins is. Are the rest so beguiled by Christian gold that they will take the Devil’s shilling before asserting what is true and right?
What then is Spirituality?
There is a feeling, often described as awe, not meaning pure fear as it once meant, but a frightening sense of wonder, that people sometimes get and often when they see something entirely wonderful in nature, such as a stunning vista or spectacle, or a wonderful event, such as the birth of a child, a ferocious storm, and so on. The same feeling can come about unexpectedly, when it is called mystical, and is attributed, for no sound reason, as signifying the nearness of God, though it is more likely to do with a discharge of adrenaline or some such physiological agent. The feeling is utterly natural, and most people have had it in its milder form. According to surveys, even about a third of people have had the mystical experience itself. There is absolutely no reason why God or spirituality should be associated with this feeling. It merits attention, certainly, but is much more likely to be the sense of unity suddenly felt of ourselves with the world we live in.
Usually, we think purely selfishly. Self is a characteristic which has evolved to help us survive. If we did not have it, we would be much more altruistic if simply because we would realize how unimportant each of us individually is in the vast scheme of things. Self makes us seem more important than anything else, and therefore worth preserving. That explains what spirituality is. It is a moment in which the sense of self dissolves leaving us knowing how wonderful the totality of Nature is. It is related in a sense to schizophrenia, when the self breaks down pathologically leaving us unable to even function as ourselves! In a temporary, or better still, if it is possibile, in a controlled, way it is a marvellous feeling that makes us appreciate God in the purely Einsteinian sense of the wonder of Nature. We are truly humbled before this purely natural interpretation of the divine. The opposite is to put yourself, or your beliefs, which are simply part of yourself, before it. Spirituality, then is the sense humans have of kinunity. The whole world is kin. That being so, the spiritual person is the one who does least to harm the world we live in. It is the basis of Adelphiasophism. To harm it is to harm ourselves.
