Is There A Scientific Basis for an Adequate Theory of Morality? Part lll: Problems with Leviticus 19:18

We have determined that science cannot provide us with a moral compass.  Humankind is the source of morality.  We are free to devise the moral code we live by; the best of these systems builds on cooperation, which is, at least to some degree, innate.  Some form of the Golden Rule has been viewed as the best guide we have. However, we are free to disregard it, just as one can override the drive to procreate by a religious meme that requires celibacy under certain conditions. If such a meme is enthusiastically accepted or strictly enjoined, it can be successfully adopted by many, although nature will have her way among those who are conflicted or have less will power.

Who is to judge if one moral system is better than another?  We are, and we must.  I strongly believe that Leviticus 19:18, which commands that we love our neighbors as ourselves, is the best maxim possible.  This commandment is our best guide since, as we shall see, it most readily leads to peace and happiness, not only for the individual, but for one's neighbors as well.  

I am, of course, not alone in this assertion; there is a danger, however: the commandment can and often has become a cliché.  (A great moral axiom becomes a cliché in the mouth of those who praise it with words while flouting it with deeds.)  Written centuries ago, Leviticus 19:18 needs a new interpretation; it is the intent of this series to provide it. 

1. A Brief History of Leviticus

Leviticus is the third book of the Old Testament and the third book of the Torah as well.  It is concerned more with ritual and morality, rather than with belief; God's authority, however explicitly or implicitly, is present on every page.  The book as a whole is not easily dated; the text apparently expanded over time.  Some of the oldest sections are thought to have been written in the late seventh century, BCE; it did not reach it's final form until about 300 BCE.  Chapter 17 through 27 are the so-called "Holiness Code," sections. God wants his people to be holy and outlines the ways in which this can be accomplished. Chapter 19 contains some wise advice, such as one should not steal or cheat. Chapter  20, which deals with punishment of sins, contains a slew of barbaric injunctions, e.g., homosexuals are to be put to death, he who curses his father is to be put to death, in cases of adultery, both the man and woman involved are to be put to death, a spiritual medium must also die, if a man marries a woman and her mother, all must be burnt to death, etc. These primitive punishments have been used as ammunition by atheists, claiming that the Old Testament is rife with barbarity and therefore should be repudiated in toto.  This is an unfair criticism. The texts were written centuries before the scientific method was established; they are a reflection of their times.  In addition, Christianity asserts that Christ established a New Covenant that obviated many of the laws and customs of the Old Testament.  Rabbinical Judaism, which has a tradition of oral Torah as well as the written one, rejected these harsh laws as well.  ("What is the Torah," is a question from the Talmud.  The answer: "It is the interpretation of the Torah.")  Each generation is enjoined to interpret according to the highest moral principles of the time.  (The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who believed that the Constitution, our secular scripture,  should be rigidly followed and not interpreted, would have made a lousy Talmudic rabbi.)
How is one to decide whether a given (im)moral stance is to be superseded?  By Leviticus 19:18!   Whether a view can be burnished and supported by the fire of "Love Thy Neighbor," or whether it goes up in smoke like a paper idol, is the best way we have to judge its validity.  As an example, let us consider the injunction against homosexuality.  Leviticus 18:19 is merely a tribal prejudice if one doesn't include all human beings as the object of one's love.  Yes, love the sinner and hate the sin, but is homosexuality a sin?  It is obvious that gay people are capable of love as much as heterosexuals.  They are, therefore, morally equivalent; if one doesn't extend Lev. 18:19 to those who are different from us (however "us" is defined) but are as good as us, one is worshiping an idol.  No one is justified in judging a group the members of which are equally capable of love.  A rabbi once told me that eighty-five percent of his congregation supports gay marriage.  Why?  Because we are enjoined, he told me, to love one's neighbor as oneself.  Lev. 18:19 thus becomes the criterion by which we judge any moral position, whether that particular view has the support of tradition or not.

2. Lev. 18:19 as a Commandment

In a modern translation, the text of Lev. 19:18 is as follows: "You shall neither take revenge nor bear a grudge against members of your people; you shall love your neighbor as yourself.  I am the Lord."

It's important to note that commentary needed to improve even this sublime command.  Originally, "your neighbor" meant "your fellow Jew."  The oral Torah, the Talmud, has long since extended this to mean everyone, including the hapless stranger.

I must make clear my position at this point.  I find no evidence for a God that exists beyond human consciousness.  For me, God refers to transcendence within.  The way I see it, the use of the term is not obligatory; sometimes it's best to remain silent.  Supplying a voice to the voiceless is nothing more than ventriloquism.  Having written that, I respect those who literally believe that the commandment is of divine origin--What is most important, however, for the secular and the religious alike, is whether one's actions are in accord with the commandment or not.

I also do not believe that Lev. 18:19 works very well as a commandment.  An absent father--and God is certainly silent--who swoops down and tells humans to be good and then disappears, isn't a very good parent.  A human parent who duns Lev. 19:18 into the heads of his children without setting an example of living in accord with it, might as well tell them to be selfish as he is, because that in most cases will be the inevitable result. As Aristotle has written in his Nicomachean Ethics, if you want to do good, follow the example of one who is both wise and loving.  Otherwise, Lev. 19:18 is reduced to a harmful cliché--which, alas! often is the case.

Lev. 19:18 as a commandment can sometimes be quite harmful,  It can lead to self-righteousness when one is convinced that one obeys the injunction and that others do not.  "Those people disregard the commandment; we obey it.  We are therefore good and they are therefore evil." This view has significantly contributed to and is very much still contributing to many of the problems of society. (I will deal with this in my next essay.)  The commandment can be just as harmful by inducing guilt in people who feel inferior or who are pathologically self-critical.  "I am unable to do what I should; I am therefore no good."  I will give an example of this self-destructive tendency with the analysis of a (once?) prominent poet who suffered from this problem which significantly contributed to his death at an early age.

Lev. 19:18, therefore,  doesn't work as a commandment for two reasons: 1. Many educated people today, (I am one of them,) are quite convinced that morality can not be derived from science or from commandments from a God beyond consciousness, since there is absolutely no proof that the latter exists. 2: It can sometimes make things worse.

Lev. 19:18 needs a revision that neither depends on God or on science.  We will provide a new interpretation in Part lV, the last section of this four-part essay.  (The other three, including this one, are already posted.)  The final part will consist of two sections, in continuation of the sections of part lll: 3. Lev. 19:18 as a declarative sentence, and 4. Lev. 19:18,  The Ultimate Win-Win Equation.

Comments welcome!

Is There A Scientific Basis for an Adequate Theory of Morality? Part ll

The answer, as discussed in part l, which I posted on my blog on 2/25/2016, is a resounding no.  (Please refer to Part 1 for an in- depth discussion why this is not the case; I will provide only a brief summary here.) Research has determined, on the basis of functional MRIs,  (fMRIs,) that contemplation of a moral issue elicits a dual response in the brain.  The first, centered in the amygdala, is an immediate "gut" reaction, which is not to be trusted.  The second reaction, centered in the prefrontal cortex, involves abstract reasoning. and is considered to be a more reliable guide.  This, as we have asserted, is nonsense.  If one is convinced, for instance, that X is evil, one's abstract reasoning will readily find justification for this assertion, even though a thinker with a different belief system might be absolutely convinced that X is as innocent and intrinsically good as A.  What determines one's response is adherence to a particular belief system--an axiom such as a form of the Golden Rule-- which cannot be derived from science; it must be assumed.

Part 1 was written partially as a basic confirmation of Tasmin Shaw's article, The Psychologists Take Power, which appeared  in the February 25, 2016 edition of The New York Review of Books.   In that article, Shaw discussed five books by prominent psychologists, who at least seem to assert that experts know better.  They don't.  Shaw informs us that at least some  members of the American Psychological Association were rather easily seduced by the CIA  to assist in the torture of detainees in the wake of 9/11.  (Most of that assistance dealt with expert advice regarding how to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" effectively.  Only a few were involved in actually torturing detainees.  Money, of course, was involved, a lot of it.)  Supported by centuries of evidence, the assertion  that money and power often, quite often, corrupt experts and non-experts alike is undeniable.  If science, specifically, if psychological expertise, can't be relied on, what can?  We asserted in the first article that a form of the Golden Rule, specifically the "commandment" that one should love one's neighbor as oneself, can be relied on to judge the behavior of all human beings, whether they graduated from Harvard or not.  We will discuss why this is so in Part 111; in this article we will analyze the response of some of the authors Shaw criticized, which appeared, along with Shaw's comments, in the April 7, 2016 edition of The New York Review of Books, Moral Psychology: An Exchange.   

The authors of the response, Pinker and Haidt, are angry.  They state, "Shaw asserts that psychological and biological facts are 'morally irrelevant' and 'can tell us nothing' about moral propositions. She insinuates that psychologists lack 'a reliable moral compass' that would equip them to oppose torture."  They take this fact to be an attack against the discipline of psychology, and, especially, against adherents of Positive Psychology, developed by Martin Seligman, a system which has strongly influenced them. Feeling insulted and besmirched by Shaw's article, they respond with ad hominem insults of their own: "And she prosecutes her case by citation-free attribution, spurious dichotomies, and standards of guilt by association that make Joseph McCarthy look like Sherlock Holmes."

Ouch.

It turns out, however, that they are in basic agreement with Shaw's assertion, namely, that the discipline of psychology cannot be the source of morality. Consulting one of their colleagues, Peter Bloom, they quote him as follows: "'The fact that one cannot derive morality from psychological research is so screamingly obvious that I never thought to explicitly write it down.'"  Fair enough.  The authors, however, don't leave it at that.  They insist that, at the very least, psychological research can help invalidate a faulty moral assertion:  "Recent discoveries in moral psychology offer another point of contact.  Many ethical convictions are underpinned by strongly felt intuitions that some action is inherently good or bad. Sometimes those intuitions can be justified by philosophical reflection and analysis.  But sometimes they can be debunked and shown to be indefensible gut reactions, without moral warrant."  (That is, with help from fMRIs.) This is patently false.  Psychological research cannot determine whether a gut reaction is morally defensible or not; you need a moral philosophy to do that.  Sometimes, like the innate intuitive gut reaction against incest, the more reflexive moral response seems justified indeed.  One cannot imply, as the authors obviously do, that fMRIs can help determine the validity of a moral response.  As the authors have stated, it is "screamingly obvious" that psychology cannot produce a moral compass, and without one, morally speaking, humans don't know where they are and are thus unable to judge the validity of a specific fMRI response.

The authors, armed with the belief that psychological research can help determine whether a moral view is defensible or not, go even farther astray.  They provide historical examples of positions that psychology can help debunk by determining that they are "indefensible gut reactions."  These examples include "...outrage over heresy, blasphemy, and lèse-majesté, revulsion against homosexuality and racial mixing, callousness toward slaves and animals and indifference or hatred toward foreigners."

Are these merely gut reactions? Without a moral stance, none of these prejudices can be debunked. A simple thought experiment reveals the absurdity of the authors' claim.  If Dr. Pinker had been born in the nineteenth century, the analytical part of his brain would most likely be aglow with the production of many reasons why racial mixing is morally wrong.  If Dr. Haidt had been born in the eighteenth century, his prefrontal lobes would almost certainly have come to the conclusion that homosexuality is a crime against nature--perhaps even punishable by death.  (One can imagine, with horror, what the analytical part of their brains would have come up with if they had been alive when Leviticus was written, which among other things, prescribes the death penalty for violating Sabbath rules.)

The analytical part of the brain can be, as history has so readily proven, a "factory of idols," which Calvin correctly asserted while conveniently forgetting that his own brain was mass-producing them as well.

A good deal of the animus against Shaw contained in Haidt's and Pinker's response is the assumption that Shaw was singling out psychologists as being particularly prone to corruption.  It is indeed undeniable that some members of the A.P.A. were paid enormous sums by the CIA ($81,000,000.00 to be exact) to develop and participate in a program, informed by psychological research, of "enhanced interrogation techniques," the Bush regime's euphemism for torture.  Shaw makes a good case that Martin Seligman, a former president of the  A.P.A. whose system of Positive Psychology was widely influential, was not innocent regarding this collusion.  If some psychologists consider themselves moral experts and thus less easily corrupted by money and power, criticism, of course, is very much warranted.  Money and power, however, have a high potential to corrupt us all, rich and poor, the educated and the under-educated alike.  That it often takes a larger amount to bribe a professional than it takes to bribe a worker does not relativize the wrongdoings of either class.  Even those who are supposed to know better frequently don't.  Priests who are sexual predators; cardinals who protect them; members of the clergy who launder money for the Vatican-- these and others are notorious examples of those who preach the Golden Rule and flout it in practice.  It is safe to say that psychologists are no worse and no better than the rest of us.

If morality cannot be derived from science, are human beings, who need moral principles in order to live well, lost in the wilderness without a compass?  I think not.  Pinker and Haidt imply--falsely, I believe--that psychology is superior to philosophy since the former prefers reality over imagination.  Shaw correctly counters that "...imagination is the capacity that allows us to take responsibility, insofar as it is ever possible, for the ends for which our work will be used."  This is correct as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough.  Shaw, as a scholar of Nietzschean philosophy, knows that human beings are free to devise moral principles to live by.  Nietzsche believed that the morality of Christianity was the morality of slaves; their 'superiors' could and should follow their will to power without being bound to a form of the Golden Rule.  This may be true, but the history of the last century readily illustrates where this truth can lead.

I assert that that some form of the Golden Rule must be assumed as an axiom--an axiom, of course, by definition cannot be proved. More than assumed, the validity of "Love Your Neighbor as Yourself" can be intuited.  Two roads lead to the highest morality, one paved with the silver of wisdom, the other paved the gold of love.  As Aristotle taught in his Nicomachean Ethics, all one needs to do is to follow the examples of those who are intuitively and widely acknowledged to moral leaders.  (Al-Ghazali, the great Sufi leader of eleventh century Baghdad, famously put this principle into action.)

No, one can't prove that, say, Leviticus 19, is the best moral guide.  Similarly, as deconstructionists would have it, one can't prove that Shakespeare is superior to Alice Walker or that Bach is superior to Burt Bacharach.  Intuition and experience, however, can convince us that some moral compasses are indeed better guides than others.

In the third part of this four-part series, I will examine why I believe Leviticus 19 to be not only the best moral guide we have, but, as we shall see, if practiced, it has psychological benefits as well.

My Second Childhood or Mi Seconda Infancia

l.

Coleridge once wrote that "the combination of the imagination of a child and the power of an adult is the true task of genius."  At least I think he wrote that; I can't find the quote anywhere.  In any case, if he didn't write it, he should have; the statement is concise as it is accurate.

I think that Coleridge's dictum is too restrictive; it needs to be extended.  "The combination of the imagination of a child and the power of an adult is the touchstone of a lively mind," is more inclusive and turns the statement into a useful prescription for leading an interesting life.  You don't have to be a Coleridge; you can go right on being anyone at all.  But you will surely have more fun while gaining a deeper understanding of what is truly important, if your inner life is as familiar with the seriousness of Dr. Martin Luther King as it is with the jabberwocky of Lewis Carroll. (No need to frown--this article will concentrate, more or less, on the latter.)

Coleridge's aphorism applies generally to us all, but specifically to us poets.  Houdini-like acts of legerdemain fascinate the child and adult in us all; Coleridge-like feats of "legerdebrain," as it were, can be even more magical.  An astonishing production of live rabbits made entirely of words is the task of the poet; pulling them out of one's head is never old hat for a poet.

Neither a genius nor a major writer, I, like every poet, am able to illustrate what Coleridge said by what I write.  I will  provide an example, a poem I wrote nearly a half century ago:

Requests

Since you are absolutely nothing,
why not sit up and get dressed?
Here are no hat and non-pearls,
just for your head that's not there.

And what a tip-top absent body haven't you got!
Such towers of hair aren't there
over such lovely eyes--
Such beauty I never have seen.

So let me unmake not a promise:
come out from wherever you're not,
there, don't come here straightaway,
for I've nothing for you: do hurry,
it's heavy.

I will leave it up to the reader to find several illustrations of the Coleridge duality in this poem.  I will point out two.  When the adult in us reads the line, "Such beauty I never have seen" he takes it figuratively, that is, as meaning: "Wow! You're really beautiful."  The child in us takes the sentence literally, as meaning "I've never seen your beauty since you aren't there." When an author uses (plays around with) the literal and the figurative in a way we're not used to, we are surprised and amused; this sort of fun keeps us young.


For a child, nouns tend to be concrete depictions of something  tangible.  "Nothing" becomes a "something."  Using "nothing" in this way brings out the adult's inner child.  Things become delightfully ambiguous in the poetic world on the other side of the looking glass.  "Heavy" to the child means something physically difficult to carry; "heavy" in this context for the adult means something difficult to bear--emotionally.  Poetry, where would we be without you?

2.

Another good way to stay young is to be around children.  I remember an old TV show entitled, "Kids Say the Darndest Things."   They do, usually because of their concrete thinking and relative inability to think abstractly.  An example is the  dialogue between mother and toddler, which my wife's niece, the mother of two precocious kids, posted on social media:

Toddler: I'm hungry!
Mother: You can't be hungry.  You just brushed your teeth.
Toddler (very confused)  But toothpaste isn't food??

The mother was speaking figuratively  What her sentence means is  something like "You're all ready for bed; it is not time to eat now."  The toddler takes it literally.  He thinks he can't be hungry because he just brushed his teeth.  He didn't think toothpaste is food, but his mother apparently does.  He is therefore confused; we are thereby amused.

Delighting in a child's innocence and naivete certainly--it has been demonstrated--has a positive effect on adults.  Our pleasure comes from witnessing childish and child-like behavior, not from becoming one again.  If we did, no one would be laughing, quite the contrary.

What if the exact same dialogue took place between two adults?  An example: My wife's niece has a father just a bit younger than I am.  Let's imagine this vignette:

Father: I'm hungry!
Daughter: You can't be hungry.  You just brushed your teeth.
Father: (very confused) But toothpaste isn't food??

Comedy is thus turned into tragedy; the humor of the first turns into the horror of the second vignette simply by changing the ages of the speakers.  The fear of Alzheimer's disease among people my age--the eighth decade--is often even greater than the fear of cancer. And with reason; the loss of reason while the body vegetates on is nothing to look forward to. The inability of an adult to think abstractly means she has become, tragically, a child again.  It isn't funny.

This is not the way to preserve one's inner child.  I have found a way--at least it works for me--to regain some of the wonder and imagination of childhood without doing any harm to one's inner adult.  In fact, with this method, some of the best characteristics of childhood combine with some of the best characteristics of adulthood and thus result in a sanier, brainier and zanier adult.

It entails an activity high on the list of proven ways to keep the mind vibrant: learning a foreign language.  But you have to do it the right way!  I highly recommend that you give your inner child an executive role while your inner adult assumes the role of executive assistant. . The latter will like that.  So will the former.

3. An Interlude

Before we discuss what I think to be the right way to learn a language, I would like to present two anecdotes that happened to me.  When one is learning a foreign tongue, one is apt to make mistakes, much as a toddler would. It's all part of the fun, along with the embarrassments,  of growing up--again.  Here are two examples:

I spent my junior year of college (1965-66) in Germany. I had just arrived.  I was staying in a Catholic dorm called "The Thomas Morus Burse."  My room was in the male section--there were separate buildings for males and females--how times have changed!  (Perhaps not in Catholic dorms, though.)  I was walking to the tram stop from the Burse, in the company of two pretty young women my age.

"Where are you staying?" one of them asked me.  "Wo wohnen Sie?"
I replied, "Im Menschengebäude."

Both of the young ladies laughed for some time.  I had obviously made a joke.  Since I didn't know it, the joke was on me.  I turned red.

What I wanted to say was, "I'm staying in the guy's building of the Catholic dorm."  But that's not what I said. In German, der Mensch (die Menschen) means "human being."  Each German noun is either of the masculine, feminine or neuter gender--you can tell which gender a noun belongs to by the  form of the definite article. In German dialect, however, das Mensch means something very different.  (I was a nineteen year old German toddler just learning how to talk; mistakes will be made.

This is the correct translation of the brief exchange:
"Where are you staying?"
"In the whorehouse!"

The second anecdote occurred a dozen years later, in 1977.  My wife and I, accompanied by her sister and brother-in-law, were in India.  Nirmala and I wanted to adopt an Indian child.  Nirmala's sister was helping us.  We were on our way to see the medical doctor on-call in a hospital in the Kilpauk section of Chennai,  a city then known as Madras.

Romy said something like this, "It's almost lunch time.  We've got to hurry to see the buffalo now."
I was flummoxed, but didn't say anything.  As we walked on, she said, "I hope the buffalo is in his office!"
I had to find out why she thought the medical officer was a beast.  I said to my wife in a loud voice so everyone could hear: "Why is Romy calling the medical officer a buffalo?"  Romy gave Nirmala one of those looks as if to say, "I told you not to marry him.  This guy is nuts!"
I soon discovered my error.  I had just learned the Tamil word for buffalo, erama.  In Indian hospitals the doctor on call is called the Resident Medical Officer, or R.M.O.  When she said, "I hope the R.M.O is in his office," I heard it as "I hope the eramu is in his office!"  (The erama we eventually met was quite friendly and weighed only about 70 kilos.)

Such toddler-like mistakes are funny, but they sometimes make the mistaken adult feel like an idiot.  It's a way to stay humble, sure, but no one really likes to be laughed at.  The method of learning a language that I will now discus enables one to rediscover one's inner child to the amusement of one's inner adult.  It is a win-win way to learn a new language.

4.  The Modified Schliemann Method

Many years ago, (around 1960), my brother, who is five years older than I, had a girlfriend named Sylvia P.  One day she was at our house studying for a few hours while my brother was working.   She was studying a text in German which had been assigned.  Over nearly every word of the text she had penciled in the English equivalent. If the teacher ever called on her to translate, she would have get an A.  She, however, deserved an F.  This is not the way to learn a foreign language.  From the onset, you have to begin trying to think in the language you're studying.  That's the only way to make progress.  I have discovered what I think is the best way to do this.  It works well whether you're living in your native land or are living in a country that speaks the language you want to learn.   I call it (somewhat pompously, I must admit) the Modified Schliemann Method, an explanation of which is the "take home message" of this essay.

Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) was a German businessman and pioneer of archaeology, famous for his discovery of the site of Troy and notorious for his destructive methods of excavating it.  He was multi-lingual, to put it mildly--by the end of his life he could read, write and converse in at least a dozen languages. How did he do it?  It was his wont to compare a novel, word by word, in a language he knew with the translation of the same text, in a language completely foreign to him.  He proceeded to memorize the text in the new language.  He was able to memorize up to twenty pages a day!  He is said to have memorized the entire text of The Vicar of Wakefield and other writings!  He did not use a dictionary very much; he never studied grammar.  As he memorized and read aloud texts in a new tongue, the grammar eventually became innate.  He insisted on thinking, conversing and writing in the language of any county he happened to be in.  He claimed to learn a language in six weeks!  (I remember buying a little booklet with the laughable title of "Learn Malayalam in 30 days."  Even the linguistic genius Schliemann would have needed a lot more help to learn a language  in 30 days this way--a little booklet will not do.)

It can't be said that he learned languages without the help of native speakers, however.  He sometimes hired tutors and used every opportunity to speak with native speakers of the language in question.  It's safe to say, however, that the bulk of his proficiency was acquired by private study.

Very few of us possess such a prodigious ability to memorize.  His method is basically sound, however. Hence the need for a Modified Schliemann Method (MSM) adapted to the more humble abilities of the rest of us.

Here are the principles of the Modified Schliemann Method. ( First an axiom: You must be interested in learning a language and be willing to keep at it.  It's well worth it--as Goethe said, leaning a new language is like learning a new world. It is also a proven way to keep the mind vigorous as one ages.)

1. Get yourself to the  early toddler stage of language proficiency in the new language you are learning. A few weeks of casual  listening to introductory language lessons, such as the Pinsler Method, is all you need.  However, taking a basic language course for a few weeks will do just as well. At this stage, one should have some vocabulary and some idea of sentence structure.    (In this article, I will illustrate the MSM with the learning of Spanish.)  It doesn't take much knowledge to graduate from this stage. You are about three years old again, and can say things such as, "Mamá, tengo hambre!"--"Mommy, I'm hungry." You don't have to be able to say a lot; just a few of the basics.

2.  The second stage is the most important one. Find something that you know well in English, such as a favorite passage from the Bible or the Gettysburg Address.  Read the text several times.  Then read that same text--many times--in Spanish translation.  Important: just like a child learning a language, you don't have to understand every word.  Since you know the meaning in English, the meaning in Spanish will eventually be clear--or at least clearer.  Do not use a dictionary!  It's O.K. not to know everything!

In this way, you'll learn to begin thinking in the new language.  You will be able to read the text without thinking of the English equivalent.  Don't try to learn a language like my brother's old girl friend!  I've come across persons, unfamiliar with MSM principles, who have taken several years of language in high school and now, years later, just about the only thing that they can say, is ¡Hola!  

It's important, of course, to keep the practice up.  You will soon be able to handle longer and more complicated texts.  Always begin with uncomplicated passages.  For instance, the French of Camus's The Stranger is simple and direct.  If you have a working knowledge of French, read paragraphs, pages or even the whole text in French and then start reading the Spanish translation--this way you surely won't be thinking in English.  (If you don't know French, the English translation will also work well.)

It's important to hear the new language spoken.  Living in the United States, one has many opportunities to hear Spanish.  For instance, I listen to the news in Spanish several times a week; nearly all cable programs include at least one Spanish station. Another example: when at the ATM machine, I choose Spanish; I choose the Spanish-language option at the check-out computer at the grocery store as well.  The opportunities are myriad.)  For languages less popular than Spanish, the Internet is there--cyberspace is very multi-lingual.(The ideal way of learning a language is, of course, living in a country that speaks it.  This is not practical for many of us.   A vacation or a business trip to that country helps a lot--but it is not necessary.)  Important: Insist on speaking the new language whenever possible.  A tourist trip to Spain with a group of Americans and a tour guide that talks only in English?  As far as language learning goes, you might as well stay home listening to re-runs of The Big Bang.

3.  Now you're ready for the third stage.  Choose novels, stories or non-fiction that are not too complex.  Read them in your new language without referring to a dictionary--one can look something up when one is really stuck--but if one gets stuck too frequently, one needs to choose something simpler. Then, as we say in medicine, "advance as tolerated."

This is a wonderful stage to be in.  You're a kid again, but you're growing up rapidly  It's a good feeling to experience growing mastery in a new language; the wonder of childhood and the power of adulthood are combined in a very good way.

I remember reading an article by James Thurber long ago; he was going blind, but put a humorous and positive light on his darkening affliction.  The gist of the article: Normal people may see a mailman across the street, for instance; Thurber just might first see a unicorn to the delight of his inner child.  At close range, the unicorn would morph into a mailman to the delight of his inner adult, who discovers that he still has his feet on the ground of an objective world.

This is the stage of Spanish I am currently in.  I just read my first novel in Spanish,  Isabel Allende's Maya's Notebook, or in my version, El Cuaderno de Maya.  I will present a few Thurbian blurs I experienced, which began to resolve as my mind's eye cleared.

Example one: "Los que fumaban marihuana y los que patinaban tenían su sector." "Those who smoked and those who skated had their own sector,"  Now there's a unicorn for you!   I guessed that "patinaban" means "skated" since I knew "patiner"  means "to skate" in French.  I was confused, so I took it up with the Translator in the Sky.

Thomas:  What does skating have to do with smoking marijuana?
Sky:        Ho, Ho, Ho!  Think.  In Spanish, skating can figuratively                  mean gadding about aimlessly.  Here skating refers to                     those without purpose, slackers.  Ho Ho Ho!--That's                       funny, Son--and I'm laughing with you.
Thomas: Thanks, Dad!

Example two: "Mi Nini publicó una carta en The Berkely Daily Planet proponiendo que el grupo LGBTD  (lesbianas, gays, bisexuales, tranasexuales y dudosos) agregara una H al nombre para incluir hermafroditas." "My granny wrote a letter to The Berkeley Daily Planet suggesting that the letter H for hermaphrodite be added to the LGBTDD (lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals and dudosas) group."
 Dudosas?  What are they?  Some form of duds?  Deviants?  Dodos?  Dentists?  The Translator in the Sky began to laugh again.  Figure it out, Thomas.  You know the word dudar, to doubt.  Dudosos are the doubtful ones, those that are not classified; in other words, they're in a category that includes all the sexual minorities that aren't mentioned in the acronym!  I was learning, I was growing up as Tomás, an Hispanic youth.

There are many such examples--With one book, Tomás, to his delight,  approaches puberty! (By the end of the novel, by the way, he could translate into Spanish the vulgar sentence that the angry president of Mexico said, in English, regarding paying for Trump's infamous wall.)

If you are basically a self-learner and want to learn a new  language, trust me: the MSM works well. (I'm an autodidact interested in languages as well.)  Since what works for me will most likely work for you, I will conclude with a brief account of the progress I've made, which I hope will encourage you to become fluent in one or more foreign languages:

Thomas and Tomás are enjoying very much the MSM of learning Spanish.  The main advantage is that little Tomás is now able to think fairly well in Spanish.  El niño is growing up.

Thomas, Thomas, Thomas and Tomás now can read novels in English, French, German and Spanish.  Isn't this enough?  After all, the original Thomas is an older, average guy with limited neuronal storage ability--I'm afraid (time is passing!) Thomas will attempt to scoot over to a new bowl of verbal pablum in an attempt to be a little kid once again--Will his fifth childhood be Japanese?