Ubi Caritas

What I Should Have Said

2008-05-05T10:19:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Lynden LaRouche Street Team Spokesman with whom I conversed outside of the post office this afternoon:

As I said, the problem with LaRouche is not his policies. Not that I think they’re good policies: I think they are such that reasonable people might advocate for them, though they are not particularly revolutionary or well thought-through. The problem is the man. The problem is that he says that he alone can predict the future of the economy, that his policies alone can save us, and that everyone else is not only wrong but conspiring. That, my friend, is the voice, not of reason and reform, but of a cult leader.

You say: But he predicted the current economic downturn.

I say: Hardly. LaRouche predicted that a second Great Depression would be upon us two years ago. Whatever pace to which our economy has recessed, this is not so bad as the Great Depression. The unemployment rate is currently at 5%. In the 1920s it was at 25%. And of course, lots of economists predicted the current economic downturn, i.e. as the correction resulting from the bursting of the housing bubble.

Of course, even those economists who did predict it were unsure—or disagreed among themselves—about the degree of the downturn. And why? Because these things are extremely difficult to predict, not because it takes special wisdom to predict them, but because there are so many variables, so the whole system behaves chaotically. And this is the real point. Imagine if one meteorologist said that he alone could predict the weather, or could predict it far better than anyone else. Let’s even say he is a generally reliable predictor. The problem is that there is no special metric for predicting the weather; it’s a chaotic system on anybody’s watch. Nothing short of psychic foresight could give one skilled meteorologist a major edge over another.

And that is essentially what LaRouche is claiming. Now, I’m no enemy of mystical authority. But it’s not a small claim. You mentioned Socrates as an example of a man with a unique claim to knowledge and authority. (In fact, he disavowed all knowledge, but that’s no matter.) But Socrates claimed to be God’s gift to Athens, to have a ‘divine sign’ that inspired him. Even if you think he was an intelligent gentleman, it hardly follows that he was the prophet of God that he claimed to be.

Or, think of Jesus Christ. C.S. Lewis is exactly right to say that we can’t dismiss the audacity of the claims he made about himself. Either he was a liar, a lunatic, or a divine representative. Whether you agree with his moral teachings or not is such a small matter.

So, why don’t I trust LaRouche? Because I don’t think he’s divine. And, given the statements he makes about his own powers of prediction, that’s the only alternative to his being a liar or a lunatic. I’d rather not call him a liar. So I’ll just conclude that he’s crazy.

I know, sir, that I came across today as a bit abrasive. It’s really not like me. But in this case, I’m soundly convinced that I’m right and that he’s dangerous. So get out while you can.

Theoretical Knowledge vs. Acquaintance Knowledge

2008-04-20T15:00:00.000-07:00

Please forgive my egregiously lengthy silence. As you may know, I began a doctoral program in philosophy this past August, after 2 years out of school. My blog was a way to continue intellectual pursuits while in academic limbo, and now that I’ve emerged from that limbo I have another release valve for my pent-up thoughts, not to mention a whole lot of work.

I want to continue blogging, though. There are too many ideas I have that don’t ever get expressed in my papers, and too few readers of my papers. So, for whatever narcissistic reasons people keep blogs, I intend to resume regular posting.

My brother Will suggested that I use my blog for popular “riffing” on otherwise esoteric, technical philosophical topics. That sounds about right. One thing I should note, though: earlier, my blog posts were largely in response to social, political and religious issues that concerned my community. My focus, then, is likely to change somewhat, since I’m in a different intellectual community now with somewhat different concerns. So much for meta-blogging, then. On to the ideas.

Awhile back, my wife pointed out to me her observation that when she used the air conditioning in her car, her gas mileage went down. I scoffed. “How is that possible?” I asked. “The air conditioning is an electrical system, but the gas mileage derives from a mechanical system. It isn’t the drive shaft that’s powering the A/C. You must have been mistaken.”

I mentioned it to a friend who knew a bit more about machines. He told me that my wife was absolutely right. Yes, the A/C is an electrical system powered by the alternator. But the alternator generates current by the motion of the drive shaft. Put a load on the drive shaft—even an electromagnetic one—and it will take more energy to turn it: i.e., more gas per mile. Voila.

The argument is made by psycho/physical dualists that it is impossible to reduce conscious mental states to physical brain states, because physical things just don’t have conscious mental states. How could they, after all? We have no theory that could explain how physical things could have mental properties. Hence, mental properties are properties of nonphysical things; the mind is nonphysical.

Richard Taylor argued to the contrary: physical things can and do have mental properties. This we know because human beings are, quite clearly, physical things. Sure, we don’t have a theory for why some physical things have mental properties, but it’s plain that some do.

Jesus put mud on a blind man’s eyes and his sight was restored. The religious leaders were vexed. They knew that Jesus was not a godly man; he didn’t obey Sabbath regulations. So they put it to the ex-blind man: there’s something fishy about your story, since this Jesus is a sinner. The man replied: "Whether he is a sinner or not, I don't know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!"

I intend these three examples to illustrate the distinction between theoretical knowledge and acquaintance-knowledge. In each case, an empirically manifest fact is challenged because the currently held theory can’t account for it.

This is the reason I’m inclined not to believe in ghosts. What, after all, is a ghost? A thing that can interact with matter, clearly; a thing that can reflect light, typically; a thing that is spatially located, and so on. But that’s silly. What we really have in mind is a diaphanous, vaporous material thing; “spirits,” whatever those are, can’t make stairs creak. That is all to say: ghosts don’t coherently fit into my best theory of the material world. (And this is not to mention theological problems I might have.) And yet…and yet…people very frequently claim to see ghosts. What if I’m just stubbornly clinging to an incorrect or incomplete theory?

It has frequently been observed throughout the modern period that miracles represent “a violation of the laws of nature.” This is problematic, of course, if the laws of nature are never violated—if the physical forces acting on a particle uniquely and exhaustively determine its behavior. Thus it is not particularly controversial, in academic circles, to chuckle at reports of the miraculous as so much superstitious wish-fulfillment. But I say, not so fast. I know those (not ordinarily known to lie or to be excessively gullible nor with any particular motivation to lie or to be excessively gullible) who attest to witnessing dramatic, miraculous healings. Which is more rational: to say (with me, with the dualists, with the Sanhedrin) that the observer must have been mistaken—nothing of the kind can happen, because it would contradict our best theory; or to say (with my wife, with Professor Taylor, with the ex-blind man) that we know what we know, by acquaintance, whether or not we’ve got a theory for it?

I think it is for this reason that, at the end of the day, I go home with the mystics, rather than with the academicians. Our best theories are nothing to be trifled with. But it would be very foolish to insist that the wisest among us, who have direct access to the truth, whether or not they can explain it, don’t really know what they know, because we can’t currently account for it theoretically.

Head-Scratching about Post-Modernism

2007-11-27T09:10:00.000-08:00

Post-modernism, they say, is upon us: science, the modernism’s locus of authority, has been dethroned, by virtue of the fact that we humans have finally learned the limits of our rationality. The universe is not the machine we thought it was—it is fundamentally mysterious. The deeper we plumb its depths, the less we really understand—especially when we look at the smallest building blocks of creation, and when we look at the largest objects in the cosmos. We have occasion to notice just how much of the human experience we have neglected, by exalting science above all other sources of belief. Religion may be entering a renaissance of sorts.

I think there is something to this talk. But it’s terribly simplistic. The truth is that, while the scientism of the Positivists—the insistence, e.g., that only scientifically verifiable statements count as meaningful—has waned in the last fifty years, particular branches of science have hit their stride, such as linguistics, cognitive science, and molecular biology. What has happened in the last fifty years is not the collapse of the scientific enterprise. I think what we’ve realized is that the Positivists were never really justified in what they said. There has been a correction, a new realism about what science is capable of. But insofar as science has maintained that degree of modesty, it remains as powerful as ever.

One particular trend seems to go against the popular picture of the rise of post-modernism. The so-called “continental” philosophers (who are usually associated with post-Modernism) tend to remain skeptical about meaning and reference and translation. This is one of their primary objections to modernity, that modernity assumed an ease in communication that simply does not square with reality. On the contrary, we speak and listen in the context of our own enculturation. Understanding each other is a far more complex business than moderns thought, if it is possible at all.

But here’s the odd thing: this is, in fact, the conclusion that W. V. O. Quine, the most scientifically-obsessed analytic philosopher of all time, reached. His reasoning goes like this: if all we have to go on in translating a foreign language is the observable utterances of the native speaker, then there are infinitely many consistent translation manuals we could construct. When we conclude otherwise, we are importing our own concepts into the translation process, assuming that the speaker is going to say the same sorts of things that we are likely to say, in the same sorts of situations. But we can’t assume that.

That is, Quine’s indeterminacy thesis is strikingly similar to what the so-called post-modern philosophers say about language—and Quine was as modern as they get! Now, he understood himself as correcting the Positivists, who were overly optimistic about communication. But he wasn’t showing their assumptions to be flawed; he was showing that they weren’t taking their assumptions to their logical conclusions. He took scientism to the next level, and arrived at something very post-modern sounding.

In fact, it took the dethronement of Positivism, and a turn back toward common-language philosophy, to resurrect accounts of meaning and reference that didn’t fall prey to Quine’s argument. We can communicate, after all: and the reason we can is that we use more than the scientific method to interpret another person’s expressions. We use intuitions and tacit knowledge and the like.

In other words, it is scientism that threatens the viability of communication. When we allow other modes of belief-formation to enter the picture, we discover that we do communicate relatively well a lot of the time. And this is not what we would expect, on the common understanding of the post-modern critique. In fact, it looks, on my picture, that the post-modern critique of language is a hyper-modernism that we need to get beyond.

The story of the rise of science, and the rise of the cultural influence of science, is a long and complicated one, and the so-called post-Modern turn is just another part of that story. We’re not entering a new phase of history, any more radically than we always are. (What a particularly modern thing to do, to carve up history according to periods and movements and phases!) It’s just not that easy. Instead, we’re continuing to explore nature, to discover what’s real and what’s superstitious, what are reliable sources of knowledge and what aren’t, and so forth.

Instead of talking about phases of history, and of ideological movements that we accept or reject, why don’t we just stick to talking about the particular ideas that we think are good or bad, and explore reasons for thinking so? This is what intellectuals have been doing for two and a half millennia, and will continue to do till as long as curiosity continues to compel us to try to understand ourselves and our world.

On Biblical Inerrancy, Part I

2007-07-08T17:39:00.000-07:00

My purpose here is not to show that Biblical inerrancy is false, but to show its limits—that ultimately, I don’t think it provides, for those who operate within it, what they are looking for. Biblical inerrancy means something different to many people—anything from historical literalism (including a seven-calendar-day creation), to adamant application of the Sermon on the Mount, to the Bible as the ultimate authority for faith and life. The view that I want to explore could be called the ‘fell from heaven’ (henceforth FFH) view—that the Bible contains precisely those words and phrases that God wished. The common tag phrase for this view is ‘inerrant in the original,’ to acknowledge the fact that textual discrepancies exist today; but to insist, at the same time, that the original writers were inspired, in the fullest sense. Soften this view a bit, and my arguments still apply, though to a lesser degree, perhaps.

1. The Argument from Context.

Biblical inerrantists take Scripture ‘at its word’—if the plain sense of the text says it, then it is true. But this is far easier said than done, because of the difference between the context of today’s readers and the historical context of the writers—and this for two reasons.

First, there is the problem of language drift. Translation is a tricky business in any context, even today; there is no guaranteeing that two words, of roughly equivalent meaning in two different languages, in fact pick out the same concept to the two cultures. Often, they do; but when they do not, it can be very difficult to tell, except by examination of multiple usages of the terms in each language. When we are talking about translating ancient texts, the process becomes more difficult. For one thing, the further removed we are from the historical context in which the text was written, the less we can be sure that we have access to the relavent concepts. (When Paul writes of ‘law,’ or ‘justification,’ or ‘redemption,’ for example, it is not obvious that he means to invoke concepts that we are familiar with today, or at least, concepts whose nuances we are familiar with today.) For another, because ancient texts are relatively scarce, it is more challenging to verify, by way of examining multiple usages, that we have a handle on what a particular term means. The point is this: given that the Bible contains God’s very prose, that prose is still written in a particular language at a particular time, and language is slippery. Understanding Scripture’s meaning will rarely be as straightforward as translating it into roughly equivalent English words. At best, it will require a lot of work, and may sometimes be impossible.

Second, there is the problem of cultural context. Part of the meaning of an instruction is the context in which it is given—which, presumably, is not stated in the instruction. Imagine that a choir director jots a note to an assistant, to this effect: “The tenors need to sing out. And tell the sopranos to stop talking in class.” Now, imagine that this note were found, a thousand years hence, as one of very few sources of information about choral music in the 21st century. An unsophisticated reader might conclude that performance practice in our era included disproportiately loud tenor sections, and that sopranos were treated in a demeaning way, forbidden to speak in rehearsals. Of course, we know the context: presumably the tenors were singing in a timid manner and the sopranos were chatting excessively. The point is that one can’t discern these contextual matters from the texts themselves. Unless the author is intentionally gearing the writing toward those unfamiliar with a culture (which may be the case in some of the historical Biblical books), then much will be left out—most frequently, the basics, the most fundamental aspects of the culture, which no one even thinks about, let alone questions.

So, whether or not the text was dictated by God originally, it was created in a particular context, rendering the instructions given a bit idiosynchratic. This doesn’t mean that we cannot apply them to our time; it just means that doing so will be a tricky business, and will require looking outside of the text itself for contextual information. The most obvious application of this principle concerns the instructions in Ephesians 5 for wives and husbands. Perhaps Paul is, in fact, describing God’s eternal model for marriage, in the abstract. But that isn’t immediately obvious; the instructions could be idiosyncratic, responding to a particular set of circumstances, and nevertheless be ‘inerrant’ or ‘inspired.’ ‘Wives, submit to your husbands’ could read along the lines of ‘Johnny, stop hitting your sister!’ It makes all the difference in the world whether wives in Ephesus were typically demur or typically defiant, and the text can’t tell us that.

On Biblical Inerrancy, Part II

2007-07-08T17:34:00.000-07:00

2. The Argument from Testimony.

Let us suppose that FFH is true, that the Bible contains a set of dictated revelations from God, and was henceforth passed down from generation to generation by the Church. If this is so, then the Church is the caretaker of a truly wisdom of a unique sort—wisdom that cannot be ascertained merely by common sense or reason, but a wisdom of the sort that can only be passed from person to person, in the manner of a secret. If the Church has this secret wisdom, the culture would do well to listen to it, to put itself under the tuteledge of the Church, to listen to the very words of God. But the culture doesn’t do this; by and large, the Church is seen as inhabiting a private realm (however important), largely irrelevant to public life, rather than being seen as holding the secret wisdom desperately needed by every person.

I think it would be easy for an inerrantist to point to this state of affairs as a bit of a scandal. God has given us God’s very words. And yet, as a culture, we don’t listen to those whom God has appointed as the caretakers of those words. Given that the Bible is inerrant, all who dismiss it are culpable before God as defying God’s revelation. Right?

Certainly not. The reason has to do with the nature of testimony and the nature of a pluralism. A thousand years ago, every child born in Europe was taught that the Bible consisted of God’s special message to the world, and that the Church existed to keep that message from being lost. But now, pick a dozen children born in Europe, and they will have been told a dozen different things about the Bible, and about where to find God’s special message to the world. The Bible may not have changed; the Church may not have changed; but the epistemic (read: pertaining to acquiring knowledge) environment has changed, and that dramatically. Children still rely on the testimony of their parents and communities to learn who to trust. But they are not all told the same thing.

The point is that, even if the Bible is inerrant, we still have to come to know that it is before we can trust it, because just as many would-be authority figures are telling us not to trust it as are telling us to trust it. And it’s hard to know how exactly one can come to know that the Bible is inerrant, aside from being told that it is from someone who knows that it is. But it’s equally hard to know if a person who claims to know that the Bible is inerrant can be trusted to know this information. And so on.

In other words, the Bible’s being inerrant doesn’t do any work in getting the world to believe that it is; in fact, it shouldn’t. If it did—if someone came to believe in the Bible on the basis that it is inerrant—that would be like trusting that someone tells the truth because she told us that she tells the truth, even though lots of people say otherwise. There are more or less healthy and virtuous ways of coming to believe things, ways that often involve a good deal of skepticism. It would be silly if people were reproached for employing a healthy and virtuous belief-forming process about the Bible of all things.

In sum: even supposing the Bible is inerrant, God’s very syllables, we still have the rather major problems a) of understanding it, given that it originated in a different language and culture from ours, and b) of ever finding out that it is inerrant, given the plurality of testimonies about it in our culture. Biblical inerrancy doesn’t provide us with a clear road map for our culture. At best, it provides us with a remarkable, miraculous text, that, if we can somehow learn to trust it, may give us hazy glimpses into the very mind of God.

Ad Hoc Foreign Policy

2007-06-04T12:53:00.000-07:00

I recently read The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama. I opened it skeptically, but closed it enthusiastically. His pragmatic, nuanced approach to policymaking really resonates with me. I’ve been meaning to compile my favorite quotes from the book as examples of charitable public discourse.

But here, I want to use a quote from his book to pick a bone with him and the other Democratic presidential contenders. Obama writes about post-9/11 foreign policy—how, after the ousting of the Taliban in Afghanistan, he

"waited with anticipation for what I assumed would follow: the enuncation of a U.S. foreign policy for the twenty-first century, one that would not only adapt our military planning, intelligence operations, and homeland defenses to the threat of terrorist networks but build a new international consensus around the challenge of transnational threats.

"The new blueprint never arrived. Instead what we got was an assortment of outdated policies from eras gone by…

Instead of an honest accounting of … pros and cons [of the invasion of Iraq], the Administration initiated a public relations offensive: shading intelleigence reports to support its case, grossly underestimating both the costs and the manpower requirements of military action, raising the specter of mushroom clouds."

His critique seems to be that the invasion of Iraq was a bit ad hoc—it was as though, in the absence of any comprehensive foreign policy doctrine, the Bush Administration put all their political might behind this one idea of invading Iraq. I think it’s a really good point. Radical Islam has been spreading for several decades, largely unseen, thoughout much of the eastern hemisphere. What is the West going to do about it? Invade Iraq? Whether or not it was a good idea, it certainly wasn’t the cure-all for every case of anti-American extremism.

Now Obama and the other Democrats have their chance to cast that broad vision for foreign policy, but all we’re getting is something equally ad hoc: pull troops out of Iraq. Again, whether or not it’s a good idea, it’s simply not a guiding doctrine for global U.S. engagement. Edwards and Obama talk more broadly about ‘restoring America’s moral authority’ in the world, and as important as that may be, it’s more about what we shouldn’t do than what we should do.

What captivated me about Obama’s book was that he was willing to admit the complexity of policy issues, going so far as to say about Iraq, “When battle-hardened Marine officers suggest we pull out and skeptical foreign correspondents suggest that we stay, there are no easy answers to be had.” I expected to hear more of this even-handed, case-by-case discourse from Obama in his campaign. To my surprise, in yesterday’s debate of the Democratic presidential hopefuls, it was Clinton, not Obama, who spoke of the diciness and complexity of foreign policy decisions. “I refuse to talk about hypotheticals,” she said, indicating that foreign policy is an art, not a science, and certainly not a sound-byte.

Staying in Iraq seems to be solving little. Pulling out of Iraq will solve little as well. We need bigger and better ideas from our politicians.

Vali Nasr, Marva Dawn, and a Deficit of Imagination

2007-04-30T09:38:00.000-07:00

Here I present two very different examples of controversies, and then use them to make a broader point.

1. I recently heard Vali Nasr, an expert on the Middle East, speak at Seattle Pacific University. I found his presentation highly lucid and instructive. One point struck me as particularly helpful. In the West, he pointed out, secularism is associated with international clout and public welfare. We call our era of theocracy the ‘Dark Ages,’ and the foment of ideas that led to the separation of church and state, ‘the Enlightenment.’ The triumph of science, the end of slavery, the possibility of upward social mobility—these all came about as clerical power diminished in the West.

But in the Middle East, the opposite is true. Ever since the incorporation of Western political ideas, the clout of Middle Eastern governments has waned. The era of political might and cultural flourishing took place under the leadership of the clerics. So it is no wonder that secular democracy takes hold in the Middle East only with great difficulty and much dissension. It symbolizes not the triumph of reason over superstition, but rather a kind of surrender, an acquiescing of power to the West.

2. In her book A Royal ‘Waste’ of Time, Marva Dawn weighs, as she sees them, the pros and cons of using hymnals vs. projectors in church. (This discussion will mean little to those who haven’t experienced the petty squabbles in American churches these days about worship, often referred to as ‘the worship wars.’) As an advantage of using projectors, she writes, “Many of the songs on the screen are texts from the Bible, so learning the songs in this way promotes memorization of Scripture.” As a disadvantage, she writes, “Words on a screen do not entail much learning of doctrine;” and, “Usually these songs are composed of only one or two Scripture verses, and they are often taken out of context.” Dawn is responding to a context in which many churches are singing aesthetically and theologically impoverished worship songs, and wants to call the church to do better. But her critique itself doesn’t make sense. The fact that many churches that use projectors also sing flimsy worship songs doesn’t mean that these things have to go together. Churches could project aesthetically and theologically sophisticated songs, just as easily as hymn books could (and often do) contain inferior songs.

What do these two issues have in common? In both of cases—the West’s endeavor to bring progress to the Middle East, and Dawn’s endeavor to bring substance to singing in church—there exists a dangerous lack of imagination, an inability to see new possibilities beyond the current state of things. In recent experience in the West, where you find progress, you also find secular democracy. In recent experience in the American church, where you find flimsy worship songs, you also find projectors. But there is no logical connection between these things. Their connection has been one of historical accident. Operating as though their connection were that of logical necessity will lead to absurdity at best, and catastrophe at worst.

These two examples help me get my mind around the problem, but they are by no means the only examples. I think that just about every controversy in the public sphere today suffers from it. If we took public rhetoric from Washington as exhaustively delineating the ideological options for us, we would come to the conclusion that there are only two: Democrat and Republican. But of course, Democrats used to argue for things now associated with Republicans, and vis versa.

Clearly, a little dose of history and/or global awareness will help stimulate our imaginations. (Another example comes to mind: in China, Christianity—which is growing at record rates—is associated with liberalism, whereas in America it is often stereotyped as backward and reactionary.) But there will not always be obvious historical parallels to our current controversies; where we can draw parallels, they may be only partial, and misleading as a result. So we just need to think more clearly, to investigate whether the ideas we associate with each other are really wed to one another, or if they only happen to correspond, for historical or cultural reasons. If we can cultivate this creative thinking, we will find new options, new ways out of currently deadlocked controversies.

Justice, Entitlement & Compassion

2007-04-21T13:33:00.000-07:00

In my social circles, I hear a lot about justice. There are several reasons for this. It’s central to the mission of liberal democracies (at least, of 21st century liberal democracies); it’s especially a favorite concern among bleeding-heart liberals; and it directly resonates with a Biblically-informed Christian mission to the poor and suffering.

I have trouble with the term sometimes. It is not because I don’t care about injustice. When the innocent are treated as though they were guilty, when people groups are hated and excluded for reasons completely outside their control, when power and influence is used to funnel basic necessities away from unsuspecting citizens—these states of affairs cue my sense of indignation.

These miscarriages of justice are easy to spot. But it seems to me that the cry for justice is used to appeal to a wide range of social phenomena, and I start to wonder if we’re all using the term the same way. Consider the issue of illegal immigration. I recently visited the website of a church in San Diego. They had devoted a web page to each of their core values. ‘Justice’ is one of them. On the page devoted to ‘justice’ is a picture of protesters waving a sign that reads, ‘Immigration is Not a Crime.’ And I respond, that depends what you mean. From one very obvious angle, illegal immigration is a crime precisely because it’s illegal. I assume that the implication of the sign’s message is more along the lines of, ‘immigration should never be viewed as a crime.’ Or, more fully, no one should ever be prevented from crossing the border in the United States, nor punished for having done so. And why? Given that the the picture was located on the ‘justice’ page, it would seem that the answer is something like, because justice demands this, that denying someone entrace into our country is unjust.

The first thing to notice here is that ‘injustice’ in this sense has nothing to do with laws as they currently stand; it has everything to do with some transcendent sense of the ‘just’ society. Perhaps it could be argued that the just society is one that allows an unlimited stream of immigration. I’m skeptical that that could ever be a sustainable policy. I’m even more skeptical that ‘the just society,’ as such, could not do otherwise.

So when we call a situation ‘unjust,’ and mean something other than ‘laws were not properly enforced,’ we must be appealing to some abstract notion of the truly just society. There is nothing wrong with this; obviously there is such a thing as an unjust law—laws are meant to reflect justice, not the other way around. But it seems to me that this ideal picture of ‘the just society’ needs some spelling out. We’re not just going to agree on it. Alisdair MacIntyre invokes this sentiment in the title of his book, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? The extraordinary thing is not that people routinely make reference to transcendent justice. The extraordinary thing is that they assume we all agree on what that refers to. The English word certainly has its origins in proper legal proceedings, where the guilty are punished and the innocent go free. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the term has more to do with personal moral uprightness. It seems to me that most references to justice these days have at their core a notion of rights—that people, in virtue of something, have certain entitlements, from fellow citizens, from the state, etc. ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ are acknowledged as such in our country’s founding documents. But contrast this with Plato’s notion of justice: for him, the just society was one where everyone did his or her duty, fulfilled the proper need in society. It had to do with duties, not entitlements. At any rate, a philosophical concensus is not forthcoming.

I think the notion is particularly problematic when it is employed as the driving force behind do-gooding for Christians. We care for others because we seek justice, we say. This must mean that the unfortunate state of affairs in which others find themselves is a miscarriage of justice. If so, then whatever they lack—food, water, immigration, education, clothing, dignified treatment, freedoms of speech or religion, etc.—are a matter of distributive justice: these are things to which every person is entitled.

But I understand neither a) in what sense everyone is entitled to these things, or b) how we could know to what people are entitled and to what they are not. Is everyone entitled to relatively accessible water? To running water? To purified water? To unlimited, running, purified water, for free? In virtue of what are these entitlements bestowed, and how do we find out what they are? It seems to me a discussion that leads to absurdity, based on a supposedly shared intuition about natural rights.

But this intuition—which, in some fashion, is no doubt shared by many who live in 21st century liberal democracies—is only a few hundred years old, if that. As best I can tell, ‘entitlement’ language was meant, by the 18th century thinkers who employed it, to guarantee genuine well-being for the common folk, over against the wealthy and powerful—who, more than not, tended to be associated with institutional religion. So ‘natural rights’ serve as an alternative to religion-based doctrines of societal good. But this is totally unhelpful. ‘Natural rights’ are at least as abstract and elusive a concept as religious notions of ‘the good’. Why not say that institutional religion simply failed to actually take care of people? It’s not that we need a non-religious reason to do good to the poor and suffering. It’s that we need to actually do good to the poor and suffering.

I propose that we reserve ‘justice’ language for its rightful place: a) the courtroom, in terms of punishing only the guilty; and b) the metaphysical discussion about the nature of the ideal society. When it comes to doing good to the poor and suffering, let’s just say that we’re doing good to the poor and suffering, not because we know that they are entitled, in some obscure sense, to X, Y and Z; but because we care about them.

After all, compassion, as an alternative to ‘social justice’, seems so much warmer and personal, reflecting the genuine motivation behind work of this sort. Ultimately, the activists who oppose the deportation of illegal immigrants don’t hold their position because it violates their notion of the ideal society in the abstract. Rather, they know and care about these people, these hard-working men and women who have struggled to make a life for themselves, albeit by sneaking across the border.

We don’t know, ultimately, what the ideal society looks like; nor do we know the list of things to which every human is entitled, whatever that might mean. Let’s stop pretending that we do. It’s not only philosophically convoluted, it’s also a bit pretentious. So let’s dump the ‘entitlement’ language and just do what we know: love people. Doing so doesn’t give us obvious policy answers. But it has been our true motivation from the beginning, so we might as well admit it.

The Melting-Pot vs. the Mosaic

2007-02-26T08:50:00.000-08:00

I recently attended a day-long workshop on Gospel music. It turned out to be a remarkable immersion into a genre I have really failed to understand. Seeing four of the leading practitioners in this field really going for it—and go for it they certainly did—was a somewhat tranformative experience.

The oft-imitated vocal styling of Gospel music is about as full-bodied as anything you’ll hear. Deep, warbly, sometimes even growly or shrill, this is the voice of those who are expressing profound longings in song. The reaction among us phlegmatic Caucasians was, “How did you learn to sing like that?” Their answer was that, as children, they sat next to their parents and grandparents in the pew at church, and they sang along with them. They were so deeply immersed in the culture of the black church, that they couldn’t help but mimic its primary art form.

I was reminded of a curious and often forgotten tension regarding cultural engagement. There are many Christians who point out that the Church is the last institution in the West to desegregate, and want that to end. By and large, ethnic groups stick together in worship, and this seems pretty poor form, given the Gospel’s emphasis on the welcome of all and the insignificance of divisions. But as a result of the segregation, a powerful art form has emerged in the form of Gospel music. I think the reason my appreciation for this genre has grown slowly is that I have primarily heard white choirs singing it. This is a delightfully multi-cultural thing to do, but it takes the music out of its contexts, out of the mouths of those who really know how to perform it, and the result is something much less culturally expressive. Or, to put it another way: because black churches have been remained cultural separate for so long, a unique art form has emerged; desegregate them, and the kids aren’t going to learn the powerful way their parents used to sing. We see this sort of thing happening already, as the result of radio: kids aren’t so down with their parents’ music. It seems plausible that, in a desegregated church, they might not be so down with their culture’s music.

A parallel and perhaps more pointed example comes from a presentation I heard at an undergraduate research symposium a couple of years ago. In Seattle’s International District, I learned, efforts were being made to preserve the Chinese heritage of the people there by constructing major public art pieces that reflected the Chinese tradition. In a sense, the Chinese-Americans were claiming a street as their own. In the same action, these people are reclaiming and celebrating their ethnic heritage, and also building cultural walls around their neighborhood. Now, they are not building actual walls; people of other ethnic groups are perfectly free to roam the neighborhood. But it seems safe to say that these two impulses are, at least sometimes, at odds with each other—claiming my own heritage, and sharing in the heritage of others.

Someone recently described to me the difference between American and Canadian multi-culturalism as the difference between “the melting pot” and “the mosaic.” Americans, he claimed, want everyone to throw their heritage into the mix along with everyone else, expecting something new to emerge; Canadians want everyone to retain their heritage uniquely, creating a diverse society that coheres culturally once you take a step back. It sounded a little cliché and oversimplified to me, but I get the point. What I want to emphasize is this: it is the melting-pot that is truly desegregated, where not only do I live in geographic proximity to people of other cultures, but we are free to influence each other culturally, allowing new cultural expressions to emerge. In the melting-pot society, Chinese art pieces get installed simply because somebody likes them, not because they represent someone’s core identity.

So what’s the right option? Because I want to value relationships above cultural heritage, my instinct is to opt for the melting-pot. But is it worth it, if cultural expressions such as Gospel music get dilluted beyond recognition? I don’t think I know the answer to that.

Conscience and the Rule of Law

2007-02-08T12:42:00.000-08:00

For some time now, the news (especially in Seattle) has followed the story of a Fort Lewis officer who has refused to follow orders to serve in Iraq because he believes the war to be illegal. Some see this as the epitome of acting on conscience in the face of corrupt leadership; others see it as the epitome of individualism and self-righteousness. Which is it? To evaluate this, I'll begin with some qualifications, launch into my analysis, and then return to some more qualifications.

Qualifications, part I: This is a case of civil disobedience, or the conscientious transgression of offical law or policy; and civil disobedience is notoriously difficult to evaluate. To oversimplify: we tend to evaluate civil disobedience based on whether we agree with the cause or not, not because we can appeal to abstract principles regarding law and morality and conscience. We applaud Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on the bus; but if the roles had been reversed--if the act of conscience had been, say, someone refusing to allow a black woman to sit in the front of the bus, because, however legal that may be, he or she believes it to be unconscionable--we consider it outrageous. Other cases prove a bit more disputable: marxists raiding and looting because they don't believe in private property; pro-life activists preventing entrance to an abortion clinic; or even, dumping all the cargo of a tea-ship into the Boston Harbor to protest subjugation to British imperialist overlords. The point is this: sometimes we can only distinguish between acts of patriotism and acts of anarchy in retrospect.

My analysis: So, the question must be, can we evaluate whether or not this officer is justified in his civil disobedience? Chances are, if you disagree with his rationalale, you'll say that he's not justified, and if you agree, you'll be more likely to defend him. But I want to argue that it doesn't matter whether his rationale--that the war in Iraq is illegal--is defensible or not. His action is irresponsible regardless, because of the nature of the American political system and the nature of the military. (This analysis is similar to what I wrote earlier about activism and tax evasion.)

The U.S. Constitution intentionally disseminates power. It does so in two ways: first, by ensuring that the masses choose their leaders, so any one politician's power derives from his/her ability to speak for the people; and second, by splitting the government into three branches that can check and balance each other. In order for an idea to become law, the majority of elected lawmakers have to agree to it, and the other houses of government have to be okay with it, as well. Lawmakers can vote in ways that do not reflect their constituents' views, of course. But if they do, they won't get elected for another term, and they will be replaced by those who will vote in a way that reflects their constituents' views. All of this is based on the assumption that things go better when power is spread thinly. It's an assumption worth questioning, I think: do we expect that the majority of people will know better than a select few? Plato, for one, thought that the wise should rule, rather than the masses. But how do we get the wise to rule? Power corrupts, plain and simple. The wise may not want to rule in the first place; and once they are given power, they may cease to be wise. So democracy--that clumsy, bumbling ogre of a political system--seems our best bet.

The military plays a curious role in this process, because where American politics is democratic, the military is autocratic. One man stands at the top of the chain of command, and he can expect that his orders will be carried out, all the way down the chain to the lowly enlisted soldier on the ground. Many have asked recently why the executive branch has so much power over the military. I haven't asked Constitutional experts about this, but the answer seems obvious to me: Presidents don't lauch coups-de-tat against themselves. If Congress or the Judiciary gave orders to the military, then they might be inclined to order a march on the White House to topple the President and establish new rules. Other than establishing a monarchy, Presidents have nowhere else for their ambition to take them; they've reached the top of the ladder. And, of course, the President's control over the military is far from absolute; he can't declare war unless Congress agrees to it.

Let's return to the present case. The President makes a case for war on Iraq. Congress votes to proceed. (Let's not forget that!) There are strong minority voices against the decision. The war proceeds badly. It becomes increasingly clear that Congress had insufficient--if not outright falsified--intelligence. Popular support for the war wanes. The American public votes out of office the party that led the vote for war. And in the midst of this, a senior officer refuses to follow orders because he believes the war is illegal.

In my view, this is a success story for the democratic process. Republicans got voted out of office. If Bush was granted an inordinate amount of power and secrecy, the next president will be on a much shorter Congressional leash. The American people have the power here.

Who should never have the power? The military officers, because no one elects them. Because they have (by and large) followed orders in Iraq, they have shown the Bush Administration's foresight for what it is. We elect our commander-in-chief, and we need to know that the military that we don't elect will follow the orders of the man we do elect. A single officer should not have the power to decide against a military operation any more than he should have the power to decide to commence a new military operation. When he says, "I will not follow orders because they are illegal," think of the enormity of what he is claiming:

-That he knows better than his superiors, who have a much higher security clearance;
-That he knows better than his superiors, who have been democratically elected;
-In effect, that he, rather than the American people, knows what is best for the country.

But what if he's right? What if he actually knows that the war is illegal? He has to proceed with his orders anyway, because the health of the system demands it. Military officers follow orders even when they believe the orders are misguided, for precisely the same reason that defense attorneys argue on behalf of defendents that they believe are guilty. Counterintuitively, defense attorneys must ignore conscience because they are one piece of a system that maximizes justice. Likewise, and also counterintuitively, military officers must ignore conscience because they are one piece of a system that maximizes the rule of law. If a defense attorney were to announce, "He's guilty!", he or she may be defending justice, but is actually sabotoging the system that maximizes justice. And that's exactly what happens when an officer refuses orders. Either you believe in the system of democracy, separation of powers, the rule of law, and the desemination of power, or you don't; and if you do, you can't have military officers defying orders, even if you believe that their rationale is correct.

Qualifications, Part II: I realize, though, that I am naturally inclined to abide by authority structures. I expect that systems will correct themselves, if processes are transparent enough and good intentions are allowed to run their course. But it makes me a lousy prophet. In those rare but catalytic moments when one person's act of defiance has the power to bring injustice to its knees and raise up the lowly, I won't be the man for the job. I have a hard time imagining that that moment had come for this officer; but I need to learn to listen to those with better prophetic discernment than I have.

The Case for Globalization

2007-01-27T14:25:00.001-08:00

I want to lay out the case for free trade. I do so for three reasons: first, because the economic issues involved are at the backdrop of so many political debates, yet very few of us took a course in macroeconomics; second, because liberals take it as axiomatic that free trade causes harm, and that’s at best a grievous oversimplification; and third, these issues are just so darned interesting. So, understand that I’m taking a side here for the purposes of discussion, not necessarily because I’m totally sold on this. It’s just that I interact very frequently with people who have already taken a stance against free trade, and I want those folks to engage with me.

Here’s the basic idea. It is well known that the United States and Japan are fierce rivals when it comes to auto manufacturing, so let’s use this rivalry as an example. Suppose GM sells a standard commuter vehicle for $20,000 and Honda sells a comparable vehicle for $15,000. GM will suffer here, because Americans are much more likely to buy the cheaper vehicle, all other things being equal. Let’s say it actually costs GM $17,000 to make each vehicle, so each car sold returns a profit of $3,000. In order to compete with Honda, GM would need to sell cars at below cost, and that means losing money. Or, they would need to cut wages in order to lower cost. Neither of those sound like good options. So instead, they could ask the federal government to create a tarriff on Japanese auto imports, effectively raising the price of Hondas to $20,000, and the playing field is levelled. GM can compete again. Sounds like a good idea, right?

Well, let’s consider the trade-offs. GM gets to compete, so that’s good for them. But who loses? Honda, obviously. Instead of representing the obvious choice for American consumers, Honda becomes one of two equal options. And that’s good for Americans, right? Absolutely not: Americans now have to pay $5000 more for their cars. Think about the other things that an American family could spend $5000 on—education? Travel? Art? Retirement investment? So protectionism—the creating of tarriffs to create life-support for one particular industry—results in an America—not to mention a Japan—that’s less wealthy.

Let’s say that the federal government recognizes this, and so refuses to create a tarriff that protects GM. What will happen? Obviously, GM will have trouble selling cars. One of two things will happen: GM will either find a way to manufacture cars that can compete with Honda, or GM will go under. The first option is exactly the progress that capitalism encourages. It could mean that GM designs more efficient equipment. Or, GM could just manufacture better cars, cars that are worth $5000 more to Americans.

Let’s suppose that this doesn’t happen—that GM is unable to find a means of competing with Honda. The reason, let’s say, is because Honda’s factory workers are content to work for $20/hr, while GM can’t hire anyone for less than $20/hr. GM continues to lose money, and risks going bankrupt. The company now has two options. The first is to fold completely—sell the factory, and start doing business in a different industry. The second is to continue to manufacture automobiles, but to use factories in parts of the world where workers are willing to get paid $10/hr, as in Japan. This latter option is exactly what fuels globalization—where “multi-national corporations” spread the various operations of their company to the parts of the world where they can be carried out most inexpensively.

In both these cases—bankruptcy and outsourcing—Americans lose jobs. And when we’re talking about a big company like GM, the job losses would be extensive. So does that hurt the American economy? Again, let’s look at the trade-offs. Michigan suffers, no question: towns whose economic base has been auto manufacturing will be hard-pressed to survive. (I believe Michael Moore has made a documentary about one such Michigan town.) But America’s economy as a whole will grow: first, because cars will be cheaper; but also, because GM will have stayed in business and maximized its profits—its shareholders will be receiving a larger return on their investment.

Now, I believe that this represents the most controversial step of the argument. The objection goes like this. Great, the total amount of money made by Americans (i.e. gross domestic product, or GDP) is maximized. But look who makes the money: it’s the wealthy investors. The working class just lost thousands of jobs; now there are more workers on the job market, so wages will go down. So we’ve increased total profitability, but only by increasing the divide between rich and poor. If the working class cannot make a decent living, then who cares if wealthy investors have doubled their profits?

I think the argument reflects both astute thinking and noble sentiments, but I think it fails because it does not take into the consideration the nature of wealth in a capitalist system. It is easy to think that “the wealthy” as a class somehow hoard their returns—under their mattresses, as it were, or in enormous treasuries of gold. But of course, that is not how the system works. No one—except for children with piggy banks—hoards money. Anyone with a substantial amount of money (I mean, more than a hundred dollars) does one of three things with that money: saves it, invests it, or spends it. Let’s consider these options in turn:

- When we save money, we are putting it in the bank, and the bank lends it out to others. The more money in the bank, the less risky it is for a bank to lend it out. That means that the more money that gets saved, the easier it is for anybody to get a loan with a low rate of interest. That means that when some corporate executive puts his $10 million bonus in his savings account, it’s easier for me to get a manageable home loan.

- When we invest money, we are helping someone start or continue their business, creating the potential for more profits and hence more jobs. It’s an extraordinary system: if a wealthy person has no concerns whatever except for making more money, his investments will still create and sustain businesses that provide jobs for people. He’s a social benefactor even if he had no intention of being one.

- And when we spend money, we are of course supporting the businesses with which we do business. When the wealthy go out to eat, they are securing jobs for restauranteurs, chefs, waitresses and busboys. When they go to the opera, they are providing struggling musicians with a living. And so on.

The counterintuitive conclusion is that, so long as the wealthy are trying to make more money, they are literally incapable of hoarding their wealth—they inevitably spread their earnings around. Yes, the wealthy have more money than the poor; but money is only shorthand for all the things that it can buy, and when they buy those things, the money changes hands. There is something that the wealthy do not share with the poor—namely the power to make decisions about where the money goes. This is the unique prerogative, for better for worse, of the wealthy. But economically speaking, more money for the wealthy means more money for everybody, regardless of whether that money gets saved, invested or spent.

So: globalization, or the outsourcing of labor to other parts of the world, does cut American jobs, but it creates the potential for prosperity among Americans to a much greater degree. When American companies maximize profits, we all benefit—not just the shareholders and CEO. The laborers who lots their jobs do not benefit—not in the short-term, at least—and that does seem significant. I, for one, have trouble imagining that guaranteeing jobs for these relatively few Americans is worth putting on the brakes for America as a whole. (I’m not alone in this, even among the left—the Clintons are notable free-trade Democrats.) And this is not to say that there is nothing government can do to take care of these people. The typical policy suggestion has been to provide state-funding job retraining for those who lose their jobs to global outsourcing. This doesn’t solve every problem, but it does seem like an appropriate gesture of compassion.

There is another side to the globalization equation, though—the effect on the economies of the nations where jobs are created. Let us suppose that GM moves its factory to China, where unemployment is much higher than in the United States, making demand for work higher, and hence driving down wages, so GM doesn’t have to pay each worker as much. Or, put another way: The Chinese are in more dire need of work than Americans, so they’ll work for less. It is in this context that the “E” word is often pulled out by opponents of globalization—I refer of course to “exploitation.” The argument is that multi-national corporations are exploiting the sour economies and high unemployment rates of the countries where they build their factories, so they pay workers less than they’re worth.

This is a complicated issue, but I don’t think entangling it is impossible. We just need to get clear on what would constitute “exploitation” and what would not. Exploitation, I take it, is using someone’s disadvantage to your own advantage, putting him or her in a position where he or she is unable to say no to an otherwise undesirable situation. On the face of it, employment isn’t exploitation, since it’s optional: I (the employer) set the terms, and then you decide whether or not you like them. The important thing to realize is that people will only sign up for a job if it’s going to be in their benefit—that is, if it’s better than the other options. It’s just common sense: I’m only going to move my factory to China if the Chinese will sign on to work there, and they’ll only do that if what I’m willing to pay them is more than they were making anyway. In general, I think that this line of thinking is basically right, and that, in most cases, globalization is economically beneficial for all parties.

Could there be cases of exploitation? Certainly. One case would be if companies created working conditions that were both undesirable and mandatory. For example, GM might say to would-be Chinese employees, “We’ll pay you $10/hour. But only if you work 80-hour weeks with no breaks and you never complain.” That seems to me just as exploitative as when a supervisor tells an underling that she’ll get a promotion if she sleeps with him: sure, it’s up to her, but it there are serious consequences for saying no to a rather undesirable situation. Another possible example of exploitation (which I consider a little less clear) would be if the wage GM offers is a) better than what anyone was making before, but b) still not enough to live on.

In both cases, it seems appropriate to challenge the corporation ethically. An important point to realize is that, even in cases of exploitation, the situation still benefits both countries economically, so protesting or boycotting does not actually help raise the Chinese standard of living. But most importantly, the case has been made—and I tend to find this plausible—that the burden is really on the Chinese government to make sure that its citizens are being taken care of, by legislating and enforcing a length for the work-week, a minimum wage, or whatever it feels is necessary. We as Americans may be concerned about the lack of care being given to workers overseas; but we don’t write China’s labor laws. The problem is not, ultimately, with global capitalisim, which slowly and steadily makes the world wealthier. The problem is with weak, incompetent, or corrupt governments that fail to provide protective economic legislation.

Confessing our Trash Addiction

2007-01-18T18:38:00.000-08:00

The modern capitalist economy works something like this.

Someone invests money in a new business—selling shoes, let’s say. Could be the shoe salesman’s money, could be somebody else’s (the bank’s, for example). The shoe salesman makes shoes and tries to sell them. If they sell, he turns a profit, and gets wealthier.

Imagine our shoe salesman is working with minimal technology—selling to homesteaders on the frontier in the 18th century, say. He makes a few shoes a week by hand. As a result, he has to charge a lot of money for each shoe—$300 (in today’s currency). Frontier families really have to save up.

But suppose he invents a shoe manufacturing machine that allows him to make shoes ten time as quickly. He’s putting a lot less time into each shoe now. He has two options: he can continue to sell his shoes at $300 apiece and take a lot of vacation time, or he can reduce his prices, continue working as hard, and sell a lot more shoes. The first is really only an option if he’s got a monopoly on the technology (which would be pretty unlikely). So let’s say that he has a competitor across town who has also dicovered manufacturing. So they lower their prices to $30/pair and sell more shoes.

It should be clear why everybody wins in a case like this (that is, when productivity increases). Making shoes is faster and less expensive, so business is better for the shoe salesman. But it’s also good for the homesteaders. When families don’t have to spend $300 on a pair of shoes, they can spend that money elsewhere. In fact, it is fairly clear that this is the reason why the standard of living is so high in places like the United States. The basics are not very expensive, so we can afford other things—real estate, travel, personal electronics, etc. (The only obvious loser in these situations is the shoe salesman who doesn’t buy the manufacturing equipment, and is still stuck making shoes by hand.)

But there’s a problem. When shoes cost $300/pair, families didn’t buy them very often, and salesmen didn’t need them to. But at $30/pair, not only can we afford to buy them more often, salesmen have to sell more in order to cut a profit. More goods have to change hands in order to sustain the same level of economic activity. The result: we generate a whole lot more trash than we used to. And there’s no incentive not to. Think about computers: the first transister invented must have lived a very long life, because it was so expensive to produce. But now computers are so inexpensive that they rarely get used for more than a decade, and their parts are hardly ever salvaged. Innovation makes them cheaper and faster, but makes old models obsolete. Or another example: My grandparents purchased heirloom furniture. But I can buy a similarly-functioning piece of furniture from Ikea for a fraction of the price. I don’t bother hanging onto it when I move, since I can just buy a replacement.

I don’t often see much reporting on the state of our landfills, so I don’t know if we’re reaching a critical mass of garbage yet. But that’s not the point. The point is that our economic system is set on an irreversable course of ever-increasing trash-production.

So, we should all “reduce, reuse, recycle,” right? Maybe, but if accelerated-trash-production is an inevitable result of economic development, then cutting down on trash will likely slow economic development. This is a no brainer: if I consume less, then I’ll buy less, making business worse, making the economy slower. The best thing we could all do for the economy would be to buy things, destroy them, and go buy more things. Doing exactly the opposite—buying things, keeping them as long as possible, and hence not buying more things—would be rather painful economically. (How well would software developers do if everybody stuck to the current version of Windows?)

Can anything be done? Something is already, namely recycling. When we recycle, we continue to cycle materials through the manufacturing process, but we don’t have to generate new raw materials. At least to a point. Currently, recycling generates a lot of waste of its own. In some cases, it’s not even obvious that it’s better for the environment. But it’s a step in the right direction, and that direction is the economical viability of a salvage industry. If it were economically prudent to convert trash into usuable material rather than to use new materials, then we might be able to solve our trash problem economically. But that will only happen when new materials are more expensive than recycled materials. Someday that will happen of its own accord—namely, when we’ve used all or nearly all of our natural resources, making new materials ridiculously expensive. But I’m not willing to wait till then, and I think there might be another option.

Here’s my simple proposal: heavily tax the usage of new materials, and give massive tax credits to businesses that use salvaged materials. It would hurt the economy in the short-term, no question. But might it not give rise to a whole new economic sector, the “salvage sector”? Right now there’s very little market for used computer parts. But if a new capaciter cost twice as much as an old one, then there would be good money in scouring junked computers for reusable capaciters.

I have no idea whether it would work, but at least it’s an idea of how we can end our trash-production-addiction without completely derailing our economy. Anyone have a better idea?

Jesus, History and the Postmodern Mold

2007-01-09T18:24:00.000-08:00

I wish to expand on a discussion from the comments to one of my earlier posts.

There are many treatments of Jesus that make him strikingly pallatable to the 21st century social reformer: he is regarded as some combination of a seeker of social equality, an opponent of harsh and legalistic religion, an advocate of nonviolence, a critic of imperialism, and a teacher of love. Recently I leafed through a book by Morcus Borg entitled Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings. My impression is that Borg intends more than a quirky textual exercise, but rather the implication that Jesus and Buddha are somehow cut from the same cloth--teachers of timeless, pan-cultural truths, bearers of a universal spirituality to humanity in their unique contexts. The traditional Christian teaching is of course more specific than all of this, and maybe significantly divergent at points; so the next step of the argument has to be that the early church (at best) greatly misunderstood Jesus, or (at worst) began a great and scandalous conspiracy that continues to this day.

I have been reading N.T. Wright’s sizable volume Jesus and the Victory of God. In a matter of sentences, he writes off almost the entirety of the politically correct contemporary Jesus scholarship, not for its conclusions, but for its methods. Generally, these scholars line up the teachings of Jesus, analyze them for their core messages, and then reach conclusions about Jesus’ mission. This process is fundamentally flawed for two reasons. First, it assumes from the get-go that Jesus was essentially a teacher and that the best way to understand him is to analyze his sayings, rather than, say, his actions, movements, allegiances, and so on. Second, it fails to adequately examine Jesus’ unique historical situation. We can translate Jesus’ words into English, but this doesn’t guarantee that we have understood what they would have meant to first-century Jews. More to the point, it doesn’t give us any information about which teachings of Jesus would have fit with the status quo and which would have raised eyebrows. Wright’s own analysis yields surprising results. It is common knowledge that Jesus frequently denounced the Pharisees, a religious sect of his day. But what was the nature of the conflict? Not, it turns out, that Jesus was advocating a religion of love over against the legalism and harshness of the Pharisees: if we read up on Pharisaic teaching, we find that they would have grumbled at very little of Jesus’ teachings. The controversy must have been about something else—something, Wright would say, more foundational.

The picture that emerges from Wright’s scholarship is that Jesus, far from teaching timeless moralisms, was identifying himself and his movement as the fulfillment of the Jews’ very unique nationalistic hopes, albeit in a manner that totally redefined those hopes. Yes, he taught a message of peace; but that message was against a very particular backdrop, made sense for particular reasons—very uniquely Jewish (or Christian, depending on how you look at it) reasons. Calling Jesus a spiritual teacher for the ages is like calling a golfer a hater of little white balls. It misses the internal logic of his vocation.

If I want to better understand Lincoln’s second inaugural address, I don’t just get out my microscope and set to analyzing that speech; I widen the lense, and start to learn more about the Civil War, American culture and politics at the time, and so on. So why this tendency to treat Jesus in a way we wouldn’t treat other historical figures? I think the answer is that we’re looking for a savior, a savior fit to the mold created by the needs of our own day and age. That mold amounts to someone who can finally show us how to stop dividing over ideology, to finally make peace, to transcend our sectarian strife. And if we look through the right lense, we can find just enough words of Jesus to fit our mold. We can make him out to be the prophet and exemplar of the “Kingdom of God”—a realm in which all people find acceptance and learn to love one another. The trouble is that (according to Wright, at least—and he makes a formidable case) Jesus meant something very specific by “Kingdom of God,” something substantially different from the post-ideological 21st century utopia we have in mind.

What do we do with this? Several points come to mind. First, understanding Jesus will take a bit of work. If we want to see if he has anything to offer us, we’ll first have to ask what he wanted (or wants) to offer us. Second, if I’m right that we modern/postmodern Western people are often motivated, more deeply than by anything else, by a deep desire to finally get along, then it seems worth asking how much we are willing to sacrifice on that altar. Historical accuracy? With regards to Jesus, the temptation is clearly there. Deep convictions? I worry that they are often thought of as the real enemy, and that would be a mistake. (Just how deeply convicted are we that they are the enemy?) And lastly, if the deep desires of our age are different from those in Jesus’ age, whose are better?

Reflection on 'Jesus Camp' - An Essay

2006-12-10T13:33:00.000-08:00

This one is considerably longer than most, and I've chosen not to break it up. (Some issues just can't be sufficiently explored in half a page.) I would be much obliged if you took a few minutes out of your busy day and read the whole thing.

I recently saw a documentary called “Jesus Camp.” It tracks the stories of a number of children involved in a Bible camp sponsored by a church in Missouri. It’s a solid but not a stellar documentary (it has some pacing problems, I think), but it has received some attention for its provocative subject matter—the indoctrination of children by fundamentalist Christians. Go to youtube.com and type in “Jesus Camp,” and you’ll find several trailers as well as a wide range of responses to the film.

I didn’t know whether to be more upset at the filmmakers or at the people depicted by them. Yes, there is clearly a failure among these ministers to grasp the progress of developmental psychology, the potential for manipulation, the complexity of theological and social issues. A number of times their behavior made me furious. But the documentary genre can be at least as manipulative as these camp planners, and this film pulls out all the stops. The hours of footage have been distilled into the most troubling bits; and they are strung together in ways that hint at conclusions that I find totally inappropriate. For example, the featured children’s pastor describes how Islamic children are taught to give their lives for their faith; in a camp worship service, the children lay their hands on a cardboard cut-out of Bush to pray for him; and then one of the children quips, “We’re being taught to be warriors for God.” The implication is that this religious group is the Christian equivalent of Islamic extremism and that it is being used to fuel Bush’s militant crusade. But of course none of that follows. The pastor’s point is that children matter and we need to teach them well; the kids are praying for their president (not “worshiping to a picture of George Bush,” as some of the film’s reviewers have said); and the metaphor of being a soldier for Christ dates back well before Christians ever fought militarily (read Ephesians 6). The filmmakers take these isolated bits and string them together, adding spooky music over the top, and it all ends up appearing very sinister.

One of the broadcast news networks ran a story on “Jesus Camp.” They asked a feminist what she thought of the so-called Evangelical youth movement, apparently depicted in the film. She responded by saying that she disapproved of the movement, owing to the fact that it is unbending in regards to issues like abortion and gay marriage. I find this response very strange, yet remarkably typical. Essentially, this response evaluates the movement not by its metaphysical claims—its claims about the nature of the Universe—but by the peripheral social norms it comes to. In other words, it is as though the feminist in question were saying, “I don’t care what these kids get taught about God and all that—I just care that they end up with enlightened views on women and homosexuals.” I once read a similar critique of the Pentecostal movement among teens: that anything that results in kids’ sobbing on the floor must be unhealthy. I think, in fact, that the makers of “Jesus Camp” meant to make just this sort of critique. They never mean to question whether the Spirit of God is present in the lives of these children; just whether these kids are being “indoctrinated,” being pulled to the political right, etc. No one is asking whether these kids are being taught THE TRUTH. And I don’t mean the truth about George Bush. I mean the truth about the nature of reality. Social issues have been assigned a higher priority than has metaphysics. The implication, I think, is that what one believes about the fundamental nature of the universe is a “private” affair, and doesn’t directly relate to one’s social and political views. But that’s absolute nonsense, and Jesus Camp provides us with the perfect demonstration that this is so. You can’t just step in and tell these kids that, given that the Bible is authoritative and American culture lives in rebellion against it, we should legalize abortion and homosexual marriage. Their views on abortion and gay marriage directly stem from their belief that the Bible is authoritative and American culture lives in rebellion against it. If the conclusion is wrong, the premise must be wrong. (If the argument follows, that is—which is certainly worth asking.) If you want to convince a fundamentalist that homosexuals should be allowed to marry, you’re going to have to do a lot of talking about the nature of marriage, the purpose for human beings, the manner of God’s revelation to humans, and so on. And that’s as it should be. That’s what it is to have a worldview. The conclusions regarding social issues can’t just be swapped out.

The talk about “public” and “private” issues, evaluating a position by the sorts of political views it generates, all of this—I think I know where it comes from. We moderns have learned the hard way twice that nasty things can result form the political expression of metaphysical ideology. The first time came in the wake of the Protestant reformation, when Protestants and Catholics shot and burned each other in the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. The result was the Enlightenment of the 18th century—when we pulled power away from the Church, emphasizing “liberty, equality, and fraternity” and putting stock in the concrete deliverances of reason, rather than the volatile abstractions of religious dogma. I’m not sure that the ideal of “liberty” had ever really been upheld before: that is, the idea that things go better not when everybody does what’s right (and government tries to make that happen), but when people are allowed to do whatever they want (within certain constraints—especially, the constraint of not getting in the way of other people’s doing of whatever they want.) Think of the notion of “religious tolerance” from a pre-Enlightenment perspective. I can imagine someone reacting, “What are you talking about? I don’t want a bunch of heretics spouting lies to my children.” But the Enlighten response is this: “Do you want the entire Continent of Europe to destroy itself? Or do you want peace? If you want peace, then learn to tolerate heretics.”

The second time came in the wake of the two world wars of the last century. Instead of religion, nationalism and race-superiority stood as the ideological backdrop for these wars. And in the place of the Enlightenment, we got Post-Modernism as result. We concluded, the stories cultures tell to give themselves legitimacy—these are interchangeable and ultimately cannot be evaluated. But acts of human decency—respect, acknowledging human rights, working for justice—these things are nonnegotiables.

So it is not surprising that we hear discussions these days along the lines of, “Is Islam a religion of peace?” Because that has become the primary measure of the acceptability of an ideology. But this could all backfire. It is true that great evil can about when people act out their strongly-held ideologies. But great good can come from it as well, and we risk rendering the salutary ideologies ineffectual. The obvious example here is the abolition of slavery—a movement fueled almost entirely by religious dogmatists. If we banish religious conviction from public discourse and public policy, we may be casting aside one of our most powerful weapons for good.

But there is a much deeper problem here than the potential for emasculating religious social activists. The problem is that this modern secularism obviously gets its priorities wrong. Social issues just aren’t more important than metaphysics. If we get along nicely but don’t have any idea what the meaning of life is, we’ve gained the world but lost our soul. The quest to know the truth is the fundamental thing, and should be regarded as such. We don’t talk about the existence of God in schools, for fear that doing so might cause conflict. I conclude that we’re just obviously biting the wrong bullet. If we can’t hash it out about the foundational truths, what’s the point?

And there is a deeper irony here. You can’t have social issues without metaphysics; there’s a metaphysic built in to every social norm. The religious right makes recourse to its religious ideology; but to what does the secular left make recourse? Where do concepts like “human rights,” “justice,” “tolerance,” and so forth come from? Are even these concepts part of the power game, or can we genuinely say that they constitute the real good for humanity? To eschew metaphysics is ultimately to undermine these noble concepts, to render them mere social constructs. Social reformers need to be able to reference the good for society. If you want to free the slaves, you need to have an answer for someone who asks you why slavery is so bad. What we call ideology is just conviction about the nature of the universe. And every bleeding-heart liberal has those convictions, and should, and should talk about them—maybe even proselytize. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if everybody understood why slavery is wrong?

I affirm the sentiment that we need to stop killing each other over religion. But I do not affirm the conclusion that we need to stop believing strongly, or stop talking about our beliefs publicly. It seems to me that there is an obvious middle way here: rigorous public debate about the great questions of life, conducted with civility. We need to be able to say to our neighbor that we think he’s wrong (for the same reason that school teachers need to tell kids to keep their hands and feet to themselves). But that’s not the same thing as blowing him up.

Socialized Medicine, U.S. vs. Canada

2006-11-12T09:53:00.000-08:00

A Canadian described to me recently how no serious Canadian politicians--evenly the most fiercely conservative of them--question the wisdom of Canada's government-sponsored health care, available to all citizens for free. In the U.S., things couldn't be more different: only our most fiercely liberal politicians have seriously proposed it, and the idea has been soundly shot down. This leads me to a conclusion and a question.

The conclusion: Americans tend to evaluate ideas based on their source, not their merit. (And that's lame.)

The question: We've already got socialized education, police and fire fighting; why not think seriously about socialized medicine? (The typical answer is that it will cost too much. Could be--but remember that employers currently bear the majority of the cost of health care. Employers could simply redirect that money to the government, rather than to private health care providers, or the money could be found elsewhere, relieving employers of that enormous burden.)

Science and Chinese Medicine

2006-10-20T12:37:00.000-07:00

I recently watched an ancient (that is, mid-eighties) PBS special on Chinese medicine. It was part of a series exploring the relationship between mind and health. It included the standard "alternative" medical practices: herbs, acupuncture, massage, meditation, etc. All of these practices depend on the existence of "chi," or life-energy. The most fascinating segment depicted a Tai Chi master who could more or less subdue would-be assailants by wiggling his finger: in his words, directing his Chi outside of his body, overcoming his opponents by life-energy alone.

I have puzzled over these things before. I know quite a number of people who swear by "alternative" (they call it "complementary") medicine. One friend of mine leads yoga classes and uses the Chinese vocabulary constantly. I instinctively ask two questions: First, does this stuff actually work, and second, if so, how?

The fact that I raise these questions gives rise to accusations along the lines that I am terminally Western and that, as such, I demand that everything fit into my perfect scientific picture of the world. Are such accusations founded? Yes and no,I think.

Yes, in the sense that we modern Westerners do tend to ignore things that our scientific picture of the world cannot explain. I recall as a teenager relating a story about someone I know well who claims he used to practice sorcery: he would summon demons, he claims, and then order them to perform tasks for him (such as puncturing someone's tires while driving), and they would do his bidding. The person to whom I was telling all of this exclaimed, "I would bet my life that never happened." His reason? "Believing in that stuff is irrational." By "irrational" I assume he meant "unscientific," or even "against science." He had been trained by modernity to count as outright lies any claims that didn't fit into his worldview. I fully admit that I share this same tendency. To a certain extent, we moderns can't help it: we've seen what an incredibly good job science does in debunking superstitions; we can't help believing that science will eventually debunk ALL superstitions. But we have to do something incredibly irrational in order to hang on to that hope--deny or ignore the countless, perfectly credible reports of phenomena not currently explained by science. It's a kind of scientific fundamentalism.

But with all that said, I think the allegation that I am an imperialistic Westerner simply for raising the questions I raise is too strong. The reason is simple. I need not patronize the Chinese by insisting that Chi is a figment of their imagination. (Frankly, while skeptical, I am also kind of excited about the prospect of their existing a life-energy whose physical effects could actually be measured.) But I cannot patronize Western science, either. The discipline that has mapped the Universe, split the atom, vaccinated disease, and made possible lasers and computers is nothing to be trifled with. When I ask that Chinese medicine be put to the scientific test, I am dignifying both. I refuse to choose between them. Chinese medicine is too fascinating to dismiss; Science is too powerful to patronize.

American Christians and the Republican Party

2006-10-07T23:12:00.000-07:00

In light of past misunderstanding, let me precede this post with the observation that I do not mention my “personal views” here (assuming I have any). I am processing ideas, some of which I may espouse, and some I may not, and my espousing or not espousing doesn’t alter the point of the post.

American Christians tend to vote Republican. The trend is so strong that, in some circles, it is basically assumed. (In other Christian circles, the opposite is assumed, but these circles tend to comprise smaller and less vocal communities—never matching the numbers of the Evangelical megachurches.) I want to challenge the correlation on two counts. I know the issues I raise here constitute nothing new or revolutinary, but I’m surprised how infrequently they are brought up.

First of all, it is almost cliché by now that the Republican platform scores points with Christians by way of two issues, almost exclusively: gay marriage and abortion. Specifically, most American Christians believe that homosexual marriage goes against God’s intentions, and that abortion constitutes ending a life that God created, and they tend to vote for politicians who express these sentiments. But it is not often brought up that the question of whether or not God condones gay marriage or abortion does not answer the question of whether or not they should be illegal. Obviously there are lots of actions Christians deem immoral that they wouldn’t want criminalized. Below the surface of the political maneuvering lies a very complicated and puzzling issue, namely, the appropriate relationship between religion and politics, between morality and law. A Christian, it seems to me, could have a view of this relationship such that she could morally disapprove of both gay marriage and abortion, yet wish to keep them legal. In other words, just because you’re against something doesn’t mean you want there to be a law against it. If Christians considered this principle more often, I think their relationship with politics might become more interesting and more varied.

Second, and more broadly, it seems fairly obvious to me that the Republican Party INTENDS for Christians to base their votes on only two issues. I’m not sure that a majority of American Christians really understand the conservative political platform, and if they did, that they would choose it. There is no intrinsic connection between religious faith and the desire for a smaller government. (Nor between religious faith and big government, as dissenters have sometimes maintained.) The Republican Party has wooed Christians on a conservative social program, obscuring the fact that the vast majority of legislation that is passed has nothing to do with these social issues. I know some Christians who will choose their Governor depending on whether he or she is pro-life, forgetting that a Governor has zero power to reverse Roe vs. Wade.

One thing is clear: American Christians believe that politics matters. It is time, I contend, for them to become savvy, educated voters—to take up the reins that are theirs by rights, rather than become political marionettes, made to dance by shrewd party leaders—even if, after becoming empowered, they continue to vote Republican.

Religion and Picture-Thinking

2006-09-24T11:18:00.000-07:00

It has been quite some time since I posted. I have a pretty major excuse: my recent wedding, honeymoon, etc. I fear, though, that my readership has given up on me. We'll see. In any case, two new posts follow. I hope you'll take the time to read both.

A few days a go I parked behind a car with a license plate cover that read “[Something-or-other] Unity Church: Many Paths to God.” This “many paths” language has always struck me as simplistic, and I think I’ve beginning to tease out why.

First of all, I think I understand the sentiment behind this language, and I want to dignify it. Folks hear Christians say, or at least insinuate, things like, “Those who don’t believe in Jesus are going to hell.” It’s not only a pretty repugnant statement; it also seems to emphasize a kind of luck of the draw, an absurd good fortune by those who went to Sunday school. It occurs to me that “believing in Jesus”—more precisely, believing certain things about Jesus—is just way too culturally determined to be the thing on which eternal salvation rides; it’s strikes me as too “outward-appearance-ish” for a God who “looks at the heart.” Furthermore, for all Christians’ talk of salvation by grace, not by works, a lot seems to be riding on one particular work: namely, believing certain things about Jesus.

The picture is that of a hill, on the top of which God sits; the only path to the top, according to the Christians, is the one marked “Jesus.” In light of this picture, it makes lots of sense to say, “Now, wait a minute. There could be lots of paths up the hill.” The problem is not with the sentiment behind this conclusion: it seems both plausible and respectful. The problem is that it affirms the primitive picture of religion as a path up a hill. Why think that primitive picture-thinking of this sort will accurately portray our relationship to God?

What picture serves as an alternative? It’s not obvious to me; many have been proposed, and they all likely fail to some extent. Here is one: what if religion is a lot more like answering the doorbell than like going for a hike? What would happen if we were off hiking when the doorbell rang? In that case, the “many paths” of liberal religion wouldn’t lead anywhere worth going.

The President's Rhetoric

2006-09-24T11:14:00.000-07:00

“In a new century when we meet and master new forms of aggression and hatred, ignorance and evil, our vigilance in the face of oppression and global terror will be unequalled by any moment in human history. And to the enemies of freedom, the enemies of democracy, the enemies of America, the enemies of humanity itself, we say here tonight with one voice: There is no corner of this earth so remote, no cave so dark, that you will not be found, and brought to light, and ended.”

These words from the President frustrate me. First of all, he lumps together the disparate groups throughout the world who resort to terrorism. Doing so ignores the fact that these groups are motivated and managed very differently from each other, and failing to notice nuance makes the U.S. look neither in command of the facts nor particularly bright. Second, the President’s rhetoric emphasizes violent intervention over and above dialogue and cultural understanding. In fact, it seems very likely that military action alone, without better cultural engagement, will lead to more terrorism, not less.

But which President said these words? Not George W. Bush, in fact. No, these words come from the mouth of President Josiah Bartlett, the fictitious Leader of the Free World in the television series The West Wing. The quote comes from Bartlett’s State of the Union address, part of an episode that aired in January 2002.

The curious thing—and herein lies my point—is that Bartlett is a Democrat. And he is depicted as spouting rhetoric that virtually no Democrat today would use—rhetoric, in fact, that sounds much more Republican, and hawkish at that. The West Wing’s creator, Aaron Sorkin, is not the ultimate authority on political issues; with that said, no screen writer working today would put those words in the mouth of a Democrat president. And especially not if the writer were a lefty himself, as Sorkin clearly is. The implication is that Democrats used to be quite a bit friendlier with hawkish language of this sort—and not that long ago, either.

Policy talk is partisan, fickle, and reactionary. Republicans and Democrats are not ideologically opposed along eternally existing fractures; they just divide along the latest controversies. Politicians swing their rhetorical pendulums based on what is popular. It is up to citizens to place their rhetoric in historical and philosophical context.

The Gospel & Family Systems Theory

2006-06-03T20:21:00.000-07:00

Christianity, the critics say, derives its power from its exclusiveness. Christians teach that those who believe in Jesus and are sorry for their sins are part of “the kingdom” and make it in to heaven; those who don’t believe or who aren’t sorry for their sins don’t make the cut. This dividing line creates fear, magnifies guilt, suppresses doubt, and perpetuates judgmentalism toward those who want none of it.

In fact, I think this is a very valuable critique, both of the social structure of Christian institutions and of the theology that supports them—that is, it seems strange that God would create a world full of people and then damn most of them. If God loves everyone, will God not bring about redemption for all? A God who condemns his creatures to eternal torture just because they failed to believe in him—it would seem that such a deity ought to be brought before a war crimes tribunal, not adored by all creation.

While I find this kind of thinking plausible and provocative, I think it ultimately misunderstands Christian teaching. Most Christians realize that they are being misunderstood when they hear these arguments, but they tend to defend themselves using the same old jury-and-defendant metaphors for salvation that dominated the Middle Ages and that strike the modern ear as barbaric. I believe there are alternative metaphors that can more adequately communicate the deep logic (or deep magic?) of grace to the contemporary listener. What follows is one metaphor that I find particularly illuminating.

According to family systems theory, we learn how to relate to others based on the relationships we had as children to our family members. If we have learned to differentiate—that is, to empathize with others while remaining emotionally independent—then we will be able to build healthy relationships with others in the future. If not, then we will develop co-dependent relationships with others, where our emotional health is dependent on how they think, feel, and act. A common kind of codependent relationship is an abuser/victim relationship, where the abuser needs to dominate in order to feel in control, and the victim endures the abuse for fear that he or she will no longer be accepted if it is not tolerated. One moves from codependence to differentiation by learning how to set boundaries—that is, to freely and confidently insist on being treated appropriately. Those who fail to set boundaries for fear of hurting others can become enablers—in other words, they end up perpetuating the destructive behaviors of those close to them.

Some say that a God who spurns his creatures for their misdeeds is no God at all. But family systems theory leads us to a totally different conclusion. Expecting God to throw the doors of heaven open to every soul, saint or sinner, is like expecting a wife to endure every kind of abuse from a husband and never do anything about it. This is God’s universe, and he sets his boundaries. Abuse, betrayal, slander, rebellion, and addiction will not do. God won’t have it. He draws the line and says, “Act respectfully in my house, or leave.”

Of course, he doesn’t stop there. In fact, he offers himself in Jesus in order that we might be renewed from within and made ready to come back into the house. He is not only the differentiated family member, but also the therapist and the friend who comes alongside (a mixing of roles of which only God is capable—the experts say that we humans should never attempt it).

Everybody's Burden

2006-06-03T20:19:00.000-07:00

The Church gets heat in the press for its suppression of science for the sake of its ideology. Christians, fearing that Darwinism will contradict their sacred texts and undermine their fundamental convictions, attempt to censor scientific education. Of course, this all backfires, because it makes the Christians look ignorant and the Darwinists look learned, and evolutionary theory further extends its influence on the cultural consciousness.

I do think that Christians need to realize that what they are doing is not only academically irresponsible, but also bad P.R. But at the same time, I think they are shouldering a burden on behalf of the whole culture and getting no credit for it. That is, the philosophical implications of Darwinism do not just undermine the Christian understanding of human nature. They undermine just about everybody’s understanding of human nature. It strikes me as very strange that so few people outside the Church acknowledge this problem.

What I mean is this: just about all of us (religious or no) believe that a person has a nature—that is, that Alvin has a personality that is distinctly Alvinian and not Calvinian or Baldwinian; that a person has a life—that is, that a succession of configurations of Alvin’s body and mentality add up to a story that is in some way about Alvin; and that this nature and this life matter for something, that they are somehow worthy and good, and that the forces that would undermine them are ugly and vile. I cannot make an extensive case here that these convictions are shared by just about everybody. I’ll say just this by way of example: it seems to me that any talk of “human rights,” “human dignity,” “the sanctity of human life,” or even “justice” utterly depends on these convictions about human life. Or again, it seems to me that anyone who believes herself to have fallen in love with someone holds these convictions about the object of her affection. In fact, I believe that these convictions are so foundational to our society that we never think about them.

But, I contend, Darwinism at least appears to contradict them. On Darwinism, a person does not have a nature; quite to the contrary, a person is a mechanism, a process, an entropy-generator, a mere cranking of gears in the cosmic machine—or, drearier still, a mere vehicle by which genes—the real players in the biospheric drama—propagate themselves, virus-like. And if a person does not have a nature, a person certainly cannot have a life, any more than a ball bearing can have a career. If stripped-down, bald-faced, naturalistic Darwinism is true, then we—who believe ourselves extraordinary creatures—are the great dupes of the Universe. Building civilizations, investigating nature, raising children, building healthy relationships, defending the oppressed—it’s all for naught, all dependent on falsehoods about beauty and meaning.

Maybe it really is all for naught. But, I insist, we don’t live as though it’s all for naught. Yet we criticize the Christians for wanting to defend what we all believe, for shouldering what is really everybody’s burden. It’s time we give them a little more respect.

Lewis on Reason vs. Seeming

2006-05-21T10:24:00.000-07:00

At the end of his book Miracles, C.S. Lewis describes what he takes to be the most subtle force against his case:

“And yet…and yet…It is that and yet which I fear more than any positive argument against miracles: that soft, tidal return of your habitual outlook as you close the book and the familiar four walls about you and the familiar noises from the street re-assert themselves. …The moment rational thought ceases, imagination, mental habit, temperament, and the ‘spirit of the age’ take charge of you again. …‘Belief-feelings’…do not follow reason except by long training: they follow Nature, follow the grooves and ruts which already exist in the mind.”

Lewis contends that we have little reason to expect that the way things seem have much to do with the way they are. As much as we would like to think that we espouse well-reasoned worldviews, we actually espouse them out of habit more than anything. I am reminded of another passage in Lewis, this from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in which Peter and Susan seek council with the Professor about their sister, Lucy, who has been reporting stories about fantasy worlds.

“‘Does your experience lead you to regard your brother or your sister as the more reliable? I mean, which is the more truthful?’

‘That’s just the funny thing about it, sir,’ said Peter. ‘Up till now, I’d have said Lucy every time.’

‘And what do you think, my dear?’ said the Professor, turning to Susan.

‘Well, said Susan, ‘in general, I’d say the same as Peter, but this couldn’t be true—all this about the wood and the Faun.’

‘That is more than I know,’ said the Professor… ‘Why don’t they teach logic in these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.’

The Professor points out here that the children have every reason to believe Lucy, yet they cannot because her story just seems absurd. And if Lewis is right, we are all in a similar situation to the children—we all resort to habit in lieu of reason, and we very likely miss out on the deep truths of the world. I had a friend once who told me that I was irrational for believing first-hand accounts from trustworthy people about witchcraft. In fact, it was my friend who was irrationally discounting these accounts, because they didn’t fit into his customary view of the world. (Who taught him, I wonder, to consider dissenting views irrational? What power of condescension we moderns have.)

If we really are in this predicament—in which we have little reason to trust the way things seem to us—what can we do about it? I would suggest two things. First, we can lay bare our customs of mind before the community and let it point out irregularities. For example, I am terrified of aging and death, and take them to be intrinsically disturbing. A friend of mine, however, sees aging as an adventure, and calls into question my habit of mind surrounding these issues. And second, we can actively take on a posture of epistemic humility and teachability.

But if I am right, don’t we find ourselves in a rather neurotic state, unable to trust our feelings, and doesn’t that seem unnatural? Indeed, I think Lewis would say it is most unnatural, and that is exactly the point. The goal is that one day our reason and our instincts will align completely, and we will be able to trust ourselves in everything. (In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the pilgrim finds himself in a state of absolute self-trust similar to what I am describing, when he completes his assent of Mount Purgatory, and is told, “Follow desire.”) But it seems of no surprise to me that, in a culture whose primary indoctrination comes from television, that we would find ourselves rather unable to distinguish appearance—or seeming—from reality.

Hating Christians

2006-05-12T10:16:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I saw a bumper sticker in the window of a quirky Seattle gift shop with the word “hypocrite” in the midst of flames surrounded by the shape of the “Jesus fish”. I chuckled at the cleverness, the shock value, and the degree of truth portrayed.

…And then it dawned on me how incredibly offensive this little icon was: a religious symbol, co-opted and parodied with the express intent of denigrating the religious community it represents. Imagine an equivalent parody of a crescent or a star of David—the public would be outraged! In fact, the store owners had posted next to the sticker a newspaper article indicating that offense had been taken. So not only did they continue to stock the sticker, but they found additional comedic potential in the thought that someone had been offended. It is as though there is an assumed irony at the thought that Christians might take offense, since Christians are the truly offensive ones.

We live in a country where Eminem can freely rag on women and homosexuals and glorify violence, Alanis Morisette can describe the new freedom she found in Hinduism, Disturbed can speak about a syncretistic, pluralistic spirituality baptized in darkness, but if a Christian uses radio airtime to express her faith in Jesus, her sentiments are considered quintessentially offensive, or at best, totally out of place.

Am I paranoid, or do Christians constitute the one demographic that it’s socially acceptable to hate?

The Universal Spirituality

2006-05-03T09:05:00.000-07:00

“I’m spiritual, just not religious.” This credo has only seemed to gain momentum in recent years. It stems from a variety of sources, I think: a distaste for anthropomorphic theological language, ranging from male pronouns to divine caprice; disgust at hypocrisy and ignorance within the churches; dismissal of sacred texts as ancient superstition; weariness of squabbling between and within religious communities; longing for universal salvation; and awareness of the plurality of mystical experience, which seems to transcend human categories. If I understand it, the Bahai faith (“faith” should perhaps be in scarequotes) epitomizes and canonizes these sentiments, but the liberalest arm of every major religion looks something like it these days. About this movement away from religious categories and toward a universal spirituality, I want to say three things.

First, that the mystics, whose experiences we catalogue and use as a pluralizing starting point, have each had theological frameworks within which they understood their spiritual practices and mystical experiences, and we patronize these theological frameworks when we identify experiences with each other across religious lines. Perhaps that’s okay: perhaps they ought to supply the experience, and we ought to interpret it. But it seems of no small consequence to me that, if Teresa of Avila knew the manner in which her mystical memoirs were being interpreted today, she would vehemently protest. “No,” she would say, “Jesus is absolutely central—take him away and you’ve got nothing but vague feelings.” And so, I contend, it would be with mystics across the board.

Second, that one doesn’t have to give up on any particular theology in order to validate the mystical experiences of those with a different theology. I spent a month with Cistercian monks whose Catholic theology is orthodox to a T, but who nevertheless read the writings of the Hindus and Buddhists and employ their spiritual practices.

Third, that this universal theology is not “post-theological” or “pan-theological,” but simply theological in its own new way. God, we have to say, manifests Itself regardless of what is believed about It; It isn’t personal, It embraces sinner and saint without qualm, etc. Maybe these statements get it right theologically, maybe they don’t: the point is that they are theological statements that can be true or false, and worth discussing as such.

Here is what Lewis says about the whole trend:

“When [people] try to get rid of man-like, or as they are called, ‘anthropomorphic,’ images they merely succeed in substituting images of some other kind. ‘I don’t believe in a personal God,’ says one, ‘but I do believe in a great spiritual force.’ What he has not noticed is that the word ‘force’ has let in all sorts of images about winds and tides and electricity and gravitation. “I don’t believe in a personal God,’ says another, ‘but I do believe we are all parts of one great Being which moves and works through us all’—not noticing that he has merely exchanged the images of a fatherly and royal-looking man for the image of some widely extended gas or fluid. …If a man watches his own mind, I believe he will find that what profess to be specially advanced or philosophic conceptions of God are, in his thinking, always accompanied by vague images which, if inspected, would turn out to be even more absurd than the man-like images aroused by Christian theology. …If God exists at all it is not unreasonable to suppose that we are less unlike Him than anything else we know.”

And again:

“[God] is unspeakable not by being indefinite but by being too definite for the unavoidable vagueness of language.”

Those Damned [Republicans/Democrats], Part I

2006-04-27T19:29:00.000-07:00

I have been blogging more about politics recently. This is not because I think salvation is to be found in politics, nor because I have recently developed particularly strong opinions about politics. Rather, my increasing interest has to do with 1) the fact that I know 100% more about politics than I did about a year ago, owing to the television drama The West Wing, National Public Radio, and a book called Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan (which is brilliant), and 2) what I perceive to be a strong lack of charity and increasing divisiveness in political discourse.

We hear a lot of very fiery political talk; the opposition, we are led to believe, is not only wrong but sinister—to be counted among the damned, even, and likely to drag the rest of us down with it. I think this apocalyptic rhetoric is misguided, for two reasons.

First of all, we often forget just how similar the parties are to each other. Think about it: both advocate a minimum wage; both desire a welfare state of some stripe; both wish to tax on a sliding scale; both support responding to aggression militarily; both wish to provide financial incentives to curb industrial pollution; both condemn human rights atrocities at home and abroad; both support economic globalization; and so forth. These policies are never in dispute; rather, their degree is in dispute. Democrats are not communists and Republicans are not libertarians. And this all makes perfect sense: when you’ve got a nation whose partisan divide is nearly 50/50, each party has to win the center. So they all huddle around the center. (Every other political party in the U.S. is more radical, in one direction or the other.) Of course, there’s a far right and a far left; but a centrist Democrat and a centrist Republican may have more in common than a centrist Republican and a radical Republican. For better or for worse, the radicals won’t be in power any time soon. (You say, “But Bush is a right-wing extremist!” If you think so, then the Democratic party is surely too conservative for you.)

The second reason I find the extreme political rhetoric over the top is that it assumes that society’s evils have a political solution. Why think that? Crime, disease, natural disasters, broken homes, etc. are not politically generated. Of course, we can talk about policies that prevent and redress ills; but there are some things that just lie outside the purview of political or financial incentives--virtue is a great example. Remember, communism didn’t fail because it was a bad idea. It failed because people are lazy and selfish.

Those Damned [Republicans/Democrats], Part II

2006-04-27T19:28:00.000-07:00

So the question remains: If the two parties aren’t that different from each other, and society’s health or ailment doesn’t depend on creating the right policies, why do we hear such extreme language when it comes to politics?

The answer is simple. In a democratic system, politicians do not derive their power from a divine mandate, their bloodline, their wisdom, or their virtue; rather, they derive their power from their ability to convince the electorate that they will serve the electorate’s interest better than anybody else—in our two-party system, better than that one other person who represents the other party. It’s a brilliant system, because a corrupt or ineffectual politician gets the rug pulled out from under him every four (or six, whatever the case may be) years. If you get elected, and you suck (or your electorate thinks you do), then you lose your power. The unhealthy side of this otherwise fantastic system is this: one gains power when one demonizes the opposition. And this problem trickles down into our public discourse. I can disagree with you on just about any issue and it makes for an interesting discussion; but if I disagree with you on [you name it—The War, fiscal policy, health care, what have you], then we just about have to part company. (I have lost friends over these issues.) In other words, in politics, charity begets losers. That’s no good.

The real trouble comes when we start hyperbolizing. Bush, folks have been saying lately, has been taking on inappropriate—illegal, even—executive power, and we call him a tyrant, a despot, the would-be self-proclaimed emperor of the New Rome, etc. Look: I don’t care one way or the other about defending Bush. But I do care to respect the experiences of the people who have lived under real tyrannical despots—who have been afraid for their lives, who have been unable to say a word against the government, who have spent years in political prisons at the hand of their own state, and so on. When we speak in hyperbole—when we presume to compare our experience with those who know real political oppression—we mock the real suffering of the world. Guantanamo Bay is not America’s Goulag, where perished millions of Russians; 9/11 is not America’s Holocaust, where perished millions of Jews and other Europeans. Language of this sort is offensive and completely irresponsible.

Black and White and Tasteless

2006-04-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

A Seattle-area church has as its slogan “Black and white in a grey world.” (I remember distinctly that the word “grey” was spelled with an “e”.) I find this slogan exasperating, for a range of reasons. First, its most apparent interpretation sounds completely ridiculous, namely, that the world really is grey, but they choose to deny that fact and see the world in black and white. Obviously this can’t be what they mean.

Part of what bothers me is that they seem to think that they slogan communicates a particular idea, and I think it does nothing of the sort. But what do they take this cliché to mean? Perhaps by “the world” they mean contemporary secular culture with its insistence on the relativity of truth, a culture into which they want to speak absolutes. But I don’t see how anyone who pays attention to cultural dialogue could imagine that modern secular people believe (or at least operate out of the belief) that truth is relative. People have strong opinions; in Seattle, they’re often strong negative opinions about church. What’s grey about it? For better or for worse, this is a dogmatic town.

Perhaps they mean something different. Perhaps contemporary culture is “grey” in the sense that it reads complexity and ambiguity into issues that really have clear answers, answers that the church can supply. (To be honest, I wish contemporary culture was able to see complexity and ambiguity. I think that’s a large part of the problem.) But what sort of issues are we talking about? We’re left guessing, but judging from what I know about the church in question, issues like sexuality (especially homosexuality) and the authority of Scripture seem likely.

But here is what I fail to understand: what sense does it make to try to rout out the complexity and ambiguity of these issues? Consider sexuality. The only cut-and-dried conception of sexuality that I know of is a completely reductionistic one—that sexuality is nothing but an amoral evolution-generated reproductive instinct. But once we start talking about human intimacy, the spiritual dimension of sexuality, etc., we start getting rather complex and ambiguous. And even for those who declare “homosexuality is wrong,” there is a good deal of complexity and ambiguity to what "homosexuality" means. We get nowhere by replacing nuance with dogma.

And the issue of the authority of Scripture is no different. The more we look into the origins of this document we call The Bible, the more we find mystery and unanswered questions and layers of meaning. The interpretation of Scripture is a living, rigorous, mystical art. Why deny that? Why does the Church think that shouting louder than Biblical scholars is going to get anywhere?

One final interpretation comes to mind. The church in question is, as I understand, multi-racial, so it could be that “black and white” has a double-meaning along these lines. But I sure hope that’s not what they’re going for. What is a racially grey world? That makes no sense.

What all of this reveals is the tastelessness of sloganeering. Slogans will always advertise half-truths, delineate party lines, identify groups of people with particular controversial beliefs, etc, without resulting in any meaningful discussion. “Drop Bush, Not Bombs,” I see pasted up around Seattle. Is the claim really that insofar as Bush mobilizes the military, he is failing as a president? Slogans like these preach to the choir and piss off the opposition. What’s the point?

Activism and the Balance of Power

2006-03-31T11:18:00.000-08:00

I recently picked up a copy of Seattle Conscious Choice magazine, a repository of Seattleite wisdom on organic food, alternative medicine, spirituality, environmentalism, and the like. The issue contained an interview with Julia Butterfly Hill, who has recently informed the IRS that she would be paying the taxes she owed (an enormous sum of $150,000) to environmental and social programs, rather than to the government. In her letter to the IRS she explained that “I’m not refusing to pay my taxes…I’m paying them where they belong because you refuse to do so.” She adds, “For me, it was important to take the conscientious, political stand—not to work ‘within the system’ but to say that the system is inherently flawed.”

Hill defends her civil disobedience biblically, citing God’s mandate in Genesis to care for Creation and Christ’s care for the poor. She does not lack vision, goodwill, or courage. Does this young environmentalist set a prime example for us of how one person can change the world?

I think not. Consider the presumptions implied by her actions: First, that tax dollars ought to go to social and environment programs; second, that tax dollars should not be going where they are now; third, that the process of democratically electing lawmakers is not to be trusted; and fourth, that one citizen—in this case, Julia Butterfly Hill—has the authority to step in and make corrections when that democratic process fails to satisfy her. The first two claims constitute controversial political philosophies. The second two constitute something else entirely: namely, a repudiation of the Constitution of the United States. Hill wants to do away with the balance of power and instead let powerful individuals make the decisions. That’s called dictatorship.

This leads me to another critique of the language we use in public discourse. What exactly is meant by activism? If Hill is a quintessential activist, then we must recognize that activism is not a part of our political process but in fact the very defiance of our political process. And this is not to say that political processes never need defying. Ours, though, has been set up with the extraordinary capacity to be renewed from within if ever it begins to droop: bills have to pass through both houses of Congress, the branches of government can veto each other, and politicians have to please their constituents in order to get reelected. Hill may see herself as taking on the powerful institutions of our world, but in fact, she is the one who is claiming absolute power here. The government derives its power from a democratic electorate, and as a result its power is always provisional, temporary, and contingent. But if the likes of Hill begin running the show, we’re in real trouble. In that case the decision-makers would have nothing and no one to keep them accountable.

What is activism, then, within our political system? I’m not sure exactly, but I can think of at least two examples: lobbying and informing citizens. Both actions seem slow, dependent on the goodwill of the listener, and liable to degenerate into manipulation and propaganda. (It is presumably for these reasons that Hill takes the more direct approach.) But the only alternative to a slow and steady bureaucracy, I contend, is centralized power of a sort that the founding fathers vehemently rejected.

Lewis on Immaturity

2006-03-13T22:50:00.000-08:00

Some quotes from C.S. Lewis:

“‘You mean,’ said the Tragedian, ‘you mean—you did not love me truly in the old days.’

‘Only in a poor sort of way,’ she answered. ‘I have asked you to forgive me. There was a little real love in it. But what we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved. In the main I loved you for my own sake: because I needed you.’”

– The Great Divorce

“I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

– Till We Have Faces

“No human is ever very honest.”

– The Screwtape Letters

For Lewis, the great farce of human life is that we are far less mature than we think we are. Our noblest love is only baby steps from self-pity; our most righteous idignation differs little from the tantrums of a little child; our self-knowledge rarely rises above self-justification. The remarkable thing is that Lewis doesn’t see this as a great Tragedy, but more like a great Joke (and he would indeed capitalize it—he was terribly fond of doing that). The most productive response to our own immaturity is to laugh at it. It seems that, for Lewis, an indication that one has had an authentic religious experience is a sense of one’s own ridiculousness. And this is not at all to belittle the majesty of humanity’s potential: on the contrary, we look ridiculous precisely when our current self-image is pasted up alongside the glory for which we were intended.

Words We Toss About, Part I

2006-01-17T09:48:00.000-08:00

I have an interest in the way we use words in public discourse—especially, words that are morally loaded but of vague definition. Two of these have come up recently and I want to explore them. Please let me know if you agree or disagree with my assessments.

Fundamentalism. We all know it’s bad; we all know specific examples; but do we know what the label means? I’m not sure we do. Does it mean “considering a sacred text epistemically prior to other knowledge sources”—that is considering a sacred text authorititative? If so, I’m not sure what’s so appalling about it. I might disagree with someone that one ought to hold the Bible up as a source of scientific knowledge; but to call that person a bloody fundamentalist takes my assessment a step further. We all pick and choose which sources we’ll consider authoritative and which we won’t; is it really appropriate to denigrate someone simply for choosing one source over another?

But perhaps to be a fundamentalist is to unite that belief that a certain text is authoritative with another belief—say, that everyone else should believe that same thing. But what’s the scandal in that? If I think I’m right, and I want others to believe the truth, I’ll want them to believe the same thing as I do.

So maybe it’s not that a fundamentalist wants everyone else to believe what she believes—after all, most people want everyone else to believe what they believe, since they think they’re right; maybe it’s that a fundamentalist is somehow nasty about it: aggressive, manipulative, even violent. If so, we’re applying the term too broadly. Recently, at the University of Washington Undergraduate Research Symposium, I heard a student compare Osama bin Laden as the leader of Islamic fundamentalism with some Evangelical Christian pastor in Colorado Springs as the leader of Christian fundamentalism. That comparison either greatly plays down bin Laden’s atrocities or greatly exaggerates the offenses of Evangelical Christians. As Josh Lyman points out in The West Wing, Islamic violent extremism is comparable not with Christian Evangelicalism—which, after all, was the energy behind most social justice movements of the 19th century, including the abolition of slavery—but with the KKK.

So what is “fundamentalism”? Do we really mean “committed religious devotion,” because we consciously or subconsciously blame religious devotion for the evils of our world? Let’s be a little more frank about this, lest suspicion lead to slander, slander lead to marginalization, and marginalization lead to the eroding of religious freedom.

Words We Toss About, Part II

2006-01-17T09:33:00.000-08:00

Consumerism. Again, we know that it’s bad, and that it is behind much of what is wrong with our society. But what is it? Is it the American tendency to buy things instead of making them? That is just the essence of a market economy—that we’re more productive when we turn to what we’re good at, and pay others to do what we’re not good at. Is it the amount of money we “waste” on consumer goods, instead of giving to the poor? There may be some scandal here; but before we get too up in arms, we need to remember that the money we spend goes back into the economy; it doesn’t go down the toilet. If we hoard rather spend, the economy slows down, leading to higher unemployment and poverty. Is “consumerism” the mechanisms of supply and demand, where excellence is sacrificed on the altar of the bottom line, such that the food we produce is tasteless, the music we produce is tasteless, the clothes we produce fall apart, etc.? As I take it, the problem is that we aren’t sufficiently savvy consumers. If we were, we would buy good food and good music and good clothes. Consumers get ripped off by not doing their homework, not simply by being consumers.

Or is “consumerism” the tacit belief that products will make us happy? If so, it is indeed idiotic and problematic. It comes in degrees, I know: on the extreme, there are those who struggle with compulsive shopping; more subtly, many (especially the young) feel the need to purchase their way into social acceptance. Advertisers exploit sexuality to inspire a sense of neediness among consumers; the media begin to create culture, rather than track it. All of this is troubling. But it is not, as best I can figure, an essentially economic ailment, the inevitable outcome of capitalism. Instead, it is the pathology of an insecure, fractured, bewildered, and ultimately lazy citizenry. In a market economy, the consumers have the power, but they have given it over to the ad industry by neglecting to think for themselves. As a friend of mine said recently, “The problem with freedom is that it exposes our laziness.” Or, as the early environmentalists quipped, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

This is not to say that advertisers are impotent bystanders. They have a strong financial incentive to exploit every weakness in society, use sexuality as a tool, and twist the facts about their products. But we have the power to remove their incentive. These days, we let advertisers tell us what we want. If we would all stop that, and instead carefully reflect on what we want, then we could relocate the financial incentive, encouraging the production and advertising of products of quality and taste.

Pacifism and the Christian West

2005-12-04T17:11:00.000-08:00

Jesus said, “Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the left cheek, turn to him the right as well.” That’s nonviolence if I’ve ever heard it. When Peter tried to resist those who arrested Jesus, Jesus responded, “Put your sword away! Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” He proceeded to be brutally executed on false charges, never resisting. And, according to Christian teaching, it was by this peaceful, willing submission to the evils of the world that he “disarmed the powers and the authorities…[making] a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” (There are other moments in the Gospels that strike a somewhat less nonviolent chord; see John 2:15 and Luke 22:36-38.)

The earliest Christians continued this trend. Because its allegiance was to Jesus and not to Caesar, the Christian movement essentially subverted the status quo of the Empire. Rather than asserting their rights or trying to find a sustainable place in a pluralistic society (with Acts 16:37 as an interesting counterexample), the Christians refused military service and submitted to violent deaths at the hands of the Caesars.

Then the unthinkable happened. The ruling powers—in the form of Emperor Constantine—embraced the faith and made it the official religion of the empire. It was not so much that Christians became mighty but that the mighty became Christians. The faith gained so many adherents that it no longer constituted a minority movement. Suddenly the Church had to deal with its strange status as powerful and influential. And the Church has been trying to figure out its relationship to governments and armies ever since.

Throughout the centuries, the call to nonviolence has returned in various forms. Ever since the powerful examples set by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., the probing question has again disquietened us, inside and outside the community of Faith: Has the West lost something of great value from its past? Is pacifism the answer after all?

Pacifism and Law Enforcement

2005-12-04T17:09:00.000-08:00

Just what is pacifism? We often hear pacifism contrasted with “just-war theory.” But nonviolence isn’t just an opposing view to war, and this is a crucial point. It also opposes pretty much every model of law enforcement we have. Imagine a civilization with a nonviolent police force. (Or, better yet, watch Hotel Rwanda. In the film, the U.N. Peacekeepers are not permitted to fire their weapons.) Someone is caught stealing. An officer can…what?—recommend that he get in the squad car? He refuses. And that’s the end of the story; thieves go free, the law against stealing avails nothing. In other words, law enforcement requires the real potential for ill consequences. Or, more precisely: there are two reasons why citizens obey laws: 1) conscience, or 2) potential ill consequences. Banish the latter, and all you’ve got is the former; banish the former, and you’ve got chaos.

A pacifist might argue (though I admit I’ve never heard one argue this way) that there are nonviolent forms of ill consequences. For example, police might somehow spread word about the thief, and until he stands trial (of his own free will), no one may sell him or give him any food. But I’m not sure that this even is a nonviolent alternative: not selling food is a means to physical harm. It seems to me that every end-of-the-line deterrent will be of necessity something related to physical harm. The only alternative I can see here is that there is some distinction I’m missing—say, that killing is always unacceptable, but maiming (bruising? causing slight discomfort?) isn’t. Or that we may inflict emotional pain (by being intimidating?) but not physical. I’ve never thought that any of these tamer options squared with the spirit of nonviolence. Even if they do, I have at least shown here that pacifism doesn’t seem to be the cut-and-dried theory that it appears to be at first glance.

This leads us to a rather remarkable conclusion. Laws mean nothing unless they can be enforced. Enforcement means nothing unless it involves the real possibility for physical harm. In other words, governments only mean anything unless they’re willing to hurt people who disobey. Pacifism is essentially anarchistic.

Pacifism and the Pragmatic Thesis

2005-12-04T17:08:00.000-08:00

There’s a broader point here. It seems to me that pacifism takes the form of two different theses at different times: 1) Hurting (or killing) other people is wrong; or, 2) Hurting (or killing) other people is never necessary; nonviolence is always an option. The first thesis is hard to evaluate; as I have described, it has a long and noble legacy in the West. The Second thesis (which I’ll call the "Pragmatic Thesis") is much easier to evaluate: it has got to be false. How do I know? Because not everyone has a conscience. The British in India did; Americans during the civil rights crusade did; but did Hitler? Do thieves and murderers?

The Pragmatic Thesis maintains that nonviolence works; I say no, there’s no reason to think it will. If we line up and let the brutal tyrants of the world enact their violence on us, they will kill us and remain in power. That is all we can expect. When someone treats an abusive or manipulative family member in a “nonviolent” way—that is, when she offers herself sacrificially, trusting that the family member will come around—we call that person an “enabler.” When the Western powers appeased Hitler by handing him Czechoslovakia, we called that pathetic. Why? Because we know intuitively that the Pragmatic Thesis is false.

An odd irony in the contemporary political landscape is that many of those interested in fighting injustice are inclined toward pacifism. But that is confused. Jesus “humbled himself and became obedient to death”—nonviolence par excellence—and has been criticized ever since (see Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor”) for failing to fight injustice, for allowing the world to destroy him, thus prolonging evil. If we—I mean, our whole society, including our military—espouse nonviolence, we die. The bad guys win. For real.

The Pragmatic Thesis is nonsense. But that doesn’t mean pacifism is nonsense. I still wonder if, deep down within the Christian message, the call to nonviolence still resounds. I can’t help sensing that Jesus believed in its counterintuitive wisdom: that violence will only be able to keep evil at bay; that it is only in sacrifice that humanity can be rebuilt from within, eradicating the deep-down evil once and for all.

But in the meantime, ye pacifists: can you face the implications of your view? Can you concede that it doesn’t work? Are you willing to make your bed with anarchists? When evil threatens to destroy every good thing in the world, is violence still wrong?

To My Concerned Readers

2005-12-04T11:14:00.000-08:00

I’ve received a surprising number of concerned comments regarding my latest post, “Tackling Abortion.” These comments came both from those to my right and those to my left on this issue. (Those of you who know me know that I take that as a something of a badge of honor; I do feel a bit misunderstood, however.) The thread common to these comments is more or less as follows: “You don’t come out and say what you think; you appear wishy-washy; perhaps you’re losing your footing on the slippery slope toward [the left or the right, depending]”. If you are one of my concerned readers, know that I appreciate your concern and careful thinking, and if I have not already, I will personally respond to each of you. I also want to post a word of explanation here for those who felt the same concerns but did not voice them.

The tools of philosophy have their limitations—a fact that philosophers admit too infrequently. Specifically, I mean that the philosophical method isn’t suppose to supply us with our most core convictions—that racism is wrong, that the Bible is trustworthy (or untrustworthy), that I am my parents’ son, or what have you. Instead, philosophy deals with the coherence of ideas and their compatibility with other ideas. Philosophy is a really marvelous process: I begin with my convictions, I bring philosophy to bear on them, and then I go home again with my convictions, perhaps modified to a certain extent. As a professor of mine said, “To get to the truth, aim for consistency.”

I operate with the assumption that philosophical rigor would aid public discourse tremendously. So I ask questions on this blog as follows: What does [some idea] mean? Does it make sense? Among those people who believe it, what other ideas are taken for granted? Is there consistency among them? What are the implications of these ideas? On a couple of occasions, I have gone ahead and volunteered my own convictions. But doing so isn’t the point here. I’m trying to get people who typically dismiss each other before understanding each other to listen, understand, help each other think clearly, work together to understand the intellectual options and where they lead, and then go home with their (presumably divergent) convictions, having been treated respectfully. It’s not the only kind of talk that people need to be having with each other. But it’s one kind that doesn’t happen enough.

The reason why it’s an uphill battle is that we’ve had such poor role models. The American political process takes it for granted that the best way to make progress is for opposing factions to fight for their own agendas, creating a brutal battle out of which something reasonable emerges. It may be a good way to make laws. But it’s a lousy way for citizens to interact with each other. The beautiful thing is that when you’re really convinced of what you believe, you don’t have to be a jerk anymore. Defensiveness is rooted in insecurity. Charity is possible when we’re not afraid.

Tackling Abortion

2005-11-01T17:26:00.000-08:00

With Supreme Court nominations come rhetoric, especially about abortion law. Even the tags “pro-life” and “pro-choice’ intend to provide rhetorical spin. The language from the Left that I’ve been hearing refers to “a woman’s fundamental right to choose.” I want to look into this phrase.

The issue of abortion is perhaps THE most polarizing issue in politics today. A pro-life Democrat is only slightly more rare than a pro-choice Republican. As with every issue in the air in public discourse these days, I contend that the abortion issue is complicated, and that very few people care to look at it with the care and the caritas it deserves. I’ll give my own very cursory point/counterpoint.

On the one hand, aborting fetuses is just about the most nauseating medical procedure out there. There is no doubt that the procedure means ending the life of an organism. And to suggest that that organism qualifies as a human as soon as the umbilical cord is severed, but not a second before, is at best a horrendous oversimplification and at worst a very offensive falsehood. Child Protection Services can take custody of a day-old child being physically abused by its mother, but no government agency can intervene on behalf of a fetus if the mother wants to kill it. Clearly an argument can be made that there are inconstancies in the law here. And finally, it seems to me that, while the Left often talks about empowering and dignifying women, that it is the birth-process, and not the abortive process, that is the glory of womankind.

On the other hand: 1) In the past, women have been treated as mere baby-generators for their husbands, and have had no say in the matter, even though it is they who go through the turmoil and risks associated with giving birth. It does seem noble to try to provide them with a voice and put them back in a position to make decisions about what happens to their bodies. 2) In cases of rape and incest, women have pregnancy forced on them, and that seems incredibly unjust. 3) Women have been aborting fetuses since time immemorial and always will; decriminalizing the procedure means that it can be done safely, under the supervision of trained experts.

…But none of that adds up to “a woman’s fundamental right to choose.” This is what I want to know: who says that a woman has a fundamental right to choose whether to carry a fetus full-term? Do advocates of this phrase think that it follows from the U.S. Constitution—from, perhaps, Jefferson’s triad of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” That would be quite an argument, indeed. But if they don’t think it follows from the Constitution, what do they think it follows from? Is it a secular article of faith? If so, we had better be clear about it. It’s the Right that gets flack for invoking religion to defend policy. In this case the Left would be invoking something even more abstract.

I think, in fact, that we can’t talk about this issue without talking about metaphysics. What does it mean for a person to have a “right” to something? Under what circumstances does a person acquire that right? These questions can’t be answered outside of the realm of “values,” “religion,” “personal opinion,” etc. I put these terms in quotes to emphasize how arbitrary I take the divide between the “public” and the “private” to be.

I don’t know what to think about this issue. (And saying that will scandalize my various readers for opposite reasons.) But I do want to throw out this question. What if it turns out that women just don’t have the right—I mean, if it turns out the universe just isn’t built that way—to abort their fetuses, that it is their duty to carry newly conceived humans full-term? How should the law respond to that? What is the relationship between rights, moral duties, and the law?

The Legacy of the Saints, Part I

2005-10-17T16:06:00.000-07:00

I have been interested recently in the Saints. Defining who these people are is tricky, and probably unnecessary. Protestants often point out that the term “saints” has been used to pick out an elite group, when it was always intended to mean all of the faithful, all of those in God’s family. I think this is a very important observation. Nevertheless, the virtues and graces of saintliness come in degrees. The Saints are those who have them in very high degrees. Some of the churches have canonized a litany of individuals who they call Saints. I most certainly mean a broader class, if for no other reason, at least for this one: that since humility is a saintly virtue, it seems very likely that some of the great ones are people we’ve never heard of.

So from whence cometh my interest in the Saints? I think the answers are multiple, but the core of it is something like this: The Saints capture my imagination, and that part of my imagination captured by them seems to be a righteous part. In other words, they awaken in me a longing for things that seem utterly worth longing for. (Unless I am really embracing a mental construction of ideal humans who are strong where I am weak; a good friend has suggested as much.)

Consider this passage from Lewis’ The Great Divorce, describing the character Sarah Smith (ironically, the only character besides Lewis and his guide that is named in the book, yet her name is as ordinary as any):

“Every beast and bird that came near her had its place I her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them…. Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.”

I recently found myself so captivated by this passage that, while I felt an uncommonly strong summons to write a song about it, I had no idea where to start.

The Legacy of the Saints, Part II

2005-10-17T16:04:00.000-07:00

I think the longing I am describing picks out a number of features of a soul such as the one described by Lewis. I’ll address a number of them briefly.

1. Stable faith. The Saints are very capable of doubt. St. Therese of Liseaux goes as far as to say, at one point, that “I feel no joy; I simply sing of what I want to believe.” I have heard that Mother Theresa described much of her life’s worship in similar fashion. But the general tone is that these are people who know God, and out of that knowledge, can speak wisdom into other people.

2. Wisdom. There is something so commanding about the character of Father Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The power of his presence has absolutely nothing to do with intimidation, and everything to do with the fact that he can somehow read souls, understand their dings and kinks, and speak incisive words that, although brief, produce lasting impact. A book I read recently called Father Arseny reprints memoirs about a real-life orthodox priest with this same command of presence.

3. Security. Here’s a big one that I’ve only come to understand recently. Security, it seems to me, is a necessary step in healing from emotional wounds and learning to manage anxieties and phobias. But where does security come from? For the Saint, it comes from nothing other than this: that God loves her. And this quite literally makes the saint immune to emotional abuse. We get “put-down,” it seems to me, when we believe—even if only to a tiny degree—what our enemy says about us. But the Saint knows from whence her worth derives, and will simply not buy into the slanderous words of others. And so, when St. Therese of Lisieux says that she cherishes being falsely accused, she is not at all masochistic; on the contrary, these experiences only serve to remind her not to derive her security from human praise.

Again, describing Sarah Smith in The Great Divorce: “The Happy Trinity is her home; nothing can trouble her joy…Falsehoods tricked out as truths assail her in vain: she sees through the lie as if it were glass.”

4. Knowledge of God. The Saints seem to be the ones who really experience St. Paul’s promise that “The Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.” These are the folks who hear, as Thomas Merton puts it, “the clean voice of God,” who see the world as God sees it.

5. Serenity and purity of heart. The Saints are undivided; they are not easily swayed by interruptions in their routine. I think, in fact, that it is this quality that makes possible both their security and knowledge of God (which are, of course, related). One gets the impression that, if one brought to one of the Saints an extensive, provocative argument against God’s existence from the premises of the reality of sin and suffering, she might respond, “that’s all very interesting. I’ll be back in a moment to talk about it further, but right now I need to go commune with God.” The Saints remind us that there actually are people in the world who (by God’s grace) are able to sort through their mixed motives and live undividedly. Again, as Thomas Merton puts it, “The quietness and hiddenness and placidity of the truly good people in the world all proclaim the glory of God.”

The Legacy of the Saints, Part III

2005-10-17T16:03:00.000-07:00

But there is something else to keep in mind here, a principle that dawned on me recently that has helped me out of quite a number of dilemmas. The principle is this: sainthood and good ideas don’t always go together.

On the one hand, saints are not always abundantly creative or clever. Sometimes they miss theological fine points when interpreting their experiences. They do not always make the best sociological assessments. Their art can fall short of sublime. And we need to keep all this in mind, lest we think that we ought to bag education and just seek hermitage someplace. A friend has pointed out that we think of Forrest Gump as “too stupid to sin,” as though the simpleton has a better chance of purity than the philosopher. But it isn’t so. There is a point at which saints could fall short of saintliness by virtue of their foolishness. But it could very well be that a given non-saint could be a better thinker, innovator, or artist than a given saint.

On the other hand, those who excel in creativity and cleverness are not necessarily the best mentors in virtue. I think this is especially important when it comes to schools or movements where new trends emerge and supplant old ones. Perhaps some fascinating new art movement displays an unspeakable genius; that doesn’t mean that the artists behind it are better people—perhaps not even better artists. Let me learn theology from the Oxford dons; but let me learn virtue from the cloistered monks and nuns and the great, grizzled, pew-dwelling parishioners in the twilight of light.

And individuals will have their own odd mix of virtue and talent. There are areas where I am immensely pure but terribly inept, and areas where I excel but do so viciously. There are role models of different sorts. We do well to note of which sorts our own role models are.

Religious Belief, Power, and Ideological Hospitality

2005-10-02T10:11:00.000-07:00

Are the religious people the bad guys?

There are many great reasons to think so. Here are just a few: 1) Islamic extremists blow people up for their faith. 2) Christian fundamentalists try to subvert contemporary science by edging evolutionary theory out of public education and replacing it with Creationism or something like it. 3) Catholic priests sexually abuse people. 4) Africans are killing each other because of religion. Irish people are killing each other because of religion. India and Pakistan divided because of religion. Europe was one big bloody mess for 200 years because of religion.

Recently, a lot of people have been making arguments along the lines of this one: Religion has a track record of violence and subjugation. Where you find religious people, you find other people getting marginalized or put down. Religious beliefs—and other ideologies—have essentially been ways of invoking power over other people. The path to peace is either to 1) avoid religious belief altogether, or 2) keep it as private as possible, out of reach of all power structures. And “institutional” or “organized” religion—be very wary. Chances are, it’s trying to subject you somehow.

I think this argument is very well-intentioned, but leads us to an unacceptable place, namely this: it suggests that there is something wrong with believing something strongly. It turns us all into foggy agnostics. My impression is that people who make this argument think that there are things that fall outside its influence—science, say. But there’s no reason to think that we should be confident in the public square about all things scientific and totally wishy-washy about all things spiritual.

I don’t think the problem has been that people have believed things strongly. Rather, I think there is this other element, this power element, which is a piece of human depravity, not an essential component of religious conviction. We do indeed have a heinous history of people using religious dogma to invoke power over each other. The solution is to stop using religious dogma to invoke power, not to avoid religious dogma.

We need to learn the skill of ideological hospitality. It works like this. I interpret the world in certain ways, with varying degrees of conviction. You interpret it in other ways. I invite you to come into my house—maybe even literally—and describe your worldview. I am not afraid of you; what could you do to me, except perhaps try to persuade me that your way of interpreting the world really gets it right? And you are not afraid of me, either. I very well may try to persuade of you my view. Why? Well, I may desire you to know the truth, strongly convinced that I know the truth. I may think that knowing the truth brings with it certain merits. I may think that the beliefs you hold will get you or others into trouble. There may be other reasons. But none of this has anything to do with invoking power over you.

And there may be times when I do feel threatened by you. In that case I will ask you to leave my house. But I will not bind and gag you. And I will not water down my convictions for fear that I might be tempted to use them to abuse you.

The Ambiguity of Simplicity

2005-09-19T22:01:00.000-07:00

I live a relatively simple life. I ride the bus and my bicycle; I don’t own a car. I venture outside my neighborhood infrequently. I spend a good deal of time in the kitchen cooking and in the park reading. My room is fairly small and modestly adorned.

I think that there is quality in the simpleness, for a number of reasons. For one thing, I produce fewer wastes than other people—I don’t burn fossil fuels, I don’t buy a lot of packaged food, etc. I also have space to cultivate community, to be creative, to know my neighbors and neighborhood, to read, think, and discuss, etc.

But I am left wondering this: I don’t make many purchases. But does that help the world? Am I actually hurting my local economy when I cook for myself instead of eating out? Am I hurting the global economy when I purchase fewer clothing items?

A friend of mine was telling me about some really appalling statistics he learned in a course he took. They went something like this (surely I’m getting the figures wrong): there are 4 acres of usable land for every living human. Americans consume the produce of 14 acres per year apiece. Conclusion: we’re the problem. And my natural thought is that my simple way of life is the right sort of response to the statistics.

It’s one thing to say that we’re consuming an inordinate amount of stuff every year. But it’s another thing to say that if we just stopped consuming as much, there would be more for other people. The problem, it seems, is not that we got to the pie first. It’s that we have money and they don’t. If we don’t spend, it doesn’t mean they’ll have more money. On the contrary, I am becoming increasingly intrigued by the idea that it is not less spending, but rather intentionally-directed spending, that makes all the difference. Maybe I need to buy more stuff, not less—but just buy it from the people who don’t have the money. Could it be that my simple way of life is actually the stingiest, most self-absorbed, and least helpful in raising the poor out of their poverty?

I could use all the help I can get on this one. Please, chime in, whether or not you’ve got a B.A. in economics.

Twisted Indignation

2005-09-17T16:04:00.000-07:00

A lot of people are indignant about a lot of things. We’re indignant about whatever obscene amount of money is being spent in Iraq. We’re indignant about the federal government’s slow response to Katrina. We’re indignant about the gap between the wealthy and the poor. We’re indignant about abuse in all its forms. We’re hurting people. We’re victims of and witnesses to injustice. And—as I heard a representative of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation assert—when we combine our anger with hope, the result is that things can start to change.

Our outcry against injustice is beautiful, powerful, and holy. But I believe I’ve seen it twisted. In some forms—and this is what I want to explore here—this noble impulse can become quite sinful. Here are some ways I’ve witnessed it become so.

1. When it includes a refusal to forgive. The best definition I’ve heard of forgiveness came from Jami Fecher: the possibility of a future not predicated on the past. That is, when we forgive, we are choosing to join with the sinner in hope for a fresh start. It’s not about enabling abusiveness by taking away any consequences for it. I’ve encountered people whose indignation is a sort of life-force for them, and forgiving would take it away.

2. When it includes a resistance to the complexities of the situation. In other words, when it includes a deficiency of the charity I am advocating throughout this blog. Alongside our anger, we ought to ask questions of this sort: what factors have led to the injustices we abhor? What all has been involved? Are there healthy impulses that have been twisted, or have merely fallen short? When we refuse to ask these questions, it suggests that we care more about having an object for our anger than for bringing about redemption.

3. When it includes projected anger. I think this happens more often than we realized. We are all scandalized by the sexual abuse that has gone on in the Catholic Church. I wonder, though, if some of the energy that fuels some of the anger derives from other resentments about church. For some, these scandals serve to confirm what they always suspected: that the church is the bad guy.

I think there is a common thread in each of these cases: the indignant person somehow wants or needs the anger. In a twisted way, it justifies us, even soothes us.

So, I exhort you, gentle reader: enter into the indignation you feel. But also observe how it cues your points of depravity.

The Intelligent Design Controversy, Part I

2005-09-05T14:33:00.000-07:00

Recently, I have heard multiple discussions on NPR over the current push for including the so-called “Intelligent Design” movement in public school curriculum on the origin of life. The I.D. movement, if I understand it, is spearheaded by the thesis that some transitions in the course of the evolutionary story can a) best be explained by appealing to intelligent intervention, or b) only be explained by appealing to intelligent intervention. Some respond, “Hurray, we’ve got God back!” and others respond, “Good grief, they’re trying to bring God back.” Some folks want this movement covered in schools, and some folks want it kept in homes and churches. This is the first of two posts on the topic.

One contributor to the on-air discussion was Ken Miller, professor of biology at Brown University, and a practicing Roman Catholic. (I have read his book, Finding Darwin’s God.) One of his statements was to this effect: anti-evolutionists found that Young Earth Creationism (that is, the thesis that God created the universe somewhere around 10,000 years ago) was losing credibility, so they went searching for a new strategy, and landed on Intelligent Design—which, consequently, should be treated with the same incredulity with which Youth Earth Creationism has been. I’ll show my cards: I’m skeptical about the I.D. project. (And intrigued at the same time.) But that kind of cynicism—suggesting that someone’s view is really just a battle tactic—is totally inappropriate.

More importantly, I think that, while Miller is patronizing the I.D. folks, it is his own view that appears to suffer from confusion. According to Miller, religious people have a habit of throwing around the language of “God’s will” or “God’s hand at work”—in reference to meeting a future spouse, landing a new job, finding a worshiping community, etc.—when they know perfectly well that the occurrence in question was a product of chance. And so, he argues, they ought to have no problem saying that evolution is a mechanism of blind chance, and yet, at the end of the process, God’s design is made manifest.

No, no. Miller has reminded us just how nonsensical religious people can be; he has not shown us that God can be uninvolved in the process of creating human beings AND, and the end of the process, have God’s design made manifest. Look: if God has been causally uninvolved in the evolutionary process, then God is no more responsible for the fact that I have two legs than I am responsible for who wins the Super Bowl. Or, more accurately: suppose I create a computer program that uses random algorithms to splash paint on a canvas. Given Miller’s view, God can no more be said to have designed the biosphere than I can be said to have had the design of the painting in mind ahead of time. It’s the I.D. folks, not Miller, who are including God in the creative process. There’s nothing adolescent about saying that, if God was involved, then God was involved at particular times and particular places, and we ought to be able to find evidence of those actions in the fossil record.

The Intelligent Design Controversy, Part II

2005-09-05T14:32:00.000-07:00

On a different NPR program, a science teacher called in and explained why she opposes the inclusion of Intelligent Design in her classroom. I.D., she says, is not science. Science employs “methodological naturalism”—that is, scientists only look for physical explanations of things. It’s not up to them to decide whether or not there are supernatural beings or events; they simply leave that topic alone, and only deal with explanations within nature. Intelligent Design holds that some Intelligence—that is, something outside of the physical realm—is necessary to explain steps in the evolutionary process. Hence, I.D. violates methodological naturalism and isn’t science.

Some I.D. folks would respond by saying that they don’t specify whether the intelligence is supernatural or not; some have suggested that an alien intelligence could just as well explain the phenomena. I don’t think too many educators take this rebuttal seriously, however.

My problem with the “it’s not science” objection is as follows. When your water heater acts up, you call a repairman, not an exorcist. Why? Because you intuit that this problem has a run-of-the-mill physical explanation. And it is precisely the same intuition that drives the evolutionary theorist. When we come across a transition in the evolutionary story that’s difficult to explain, we shouldn’t suddenly turn superstitious and call it an act of God. Instead, we should look at it carefully and thoughtfully and see if a physical explanation emerges. Isn’t the advocate of I.D. just as superstitious as the person who calls an exorcist to fix the water heater?

Yes. Unless it’s actually a demon. In that case, calling on a repairman is a waste of time. And the same thing applies when it comes to human origins: if there were, in fact, events that God brought about, science will get nowhere in assuming that a physical explanation exists. But isn’t that proposal outside the realms of science? Perhaps; but that just goes to show that the issue of human origins might fall outside the realm of science. So long as scientists say, “Human origins is our business exclusively” in connection with “We only deal in physical explanations,” then they’ve ruled God out from the very get-go, even if God is, in fact, part of the equation.

One further point. It could be that in the upper echelon of the Academy, practitioners are able to divvy up the work of research so that each field has its clear parameters and never oversteps them. (And I have my doubts about that.) But in elementary school? Not a chance. It seems to me that we ought to encourage kids to work through the religious, ethical, social, and ideological implications of the science they’re studying, not tell them “That’s not science; save it for your language arts class.”

Exploring the Boring

2005-08-31T17:45:00.000-07:00

I recently saw Taproot Theater’s production of The Fantasticks. I saw the show a few years ago and was really entranced; this time around proved just as good. They say that it is the longest-running show on Broadway. It hardly seems likely, since it has a cast of seven and few really memorable tunes. But it is SO good. And apparently folks have kept coming back to it.

It is definitely clever. I saw a staging of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat a few weeks ago, and the contrast couldn’t have been more stark. Where Joseph returned again and again to predictable rhymes and phrases, The Fantasticks wields witticisms left and right. The opening lines themselves are worth noting, and they are by no means the most clever (though perhaps the most tender):

Try to remember the kind of September when life was slow and oh, so mellow
Try to remember the kind of September when grass was green and grain was yellow
Try to remember the kind of September when you were a tender and callow fellow
Try to remember, and if you remember, then follow.

But what I like most of all about the show is its exploration of the relationship between the epic and the mundane. We are all drawn to great stories of disaster and restoration. They are always, to some extent, our own stories. But sometimes I wonder if we return to them because they give us a hit. After restoration—or sometimes, before disaster—comes boredom. Increasingly, I’m realizing that that’s where so much of life happens. We love ecstasy. But can we stand tedium? We like wedding nights. But we’re not so good at the long-haul.

So here’s a show that’s full of poetry about the mundane. There’s also a very significant exploration of pain, and how pain, maturity, and tedium all fit together. It’s a show for real life that explores highs, lows, and plateaus. I’m not into having favorites, but this is one of the best works of art we’ve got.

Economics, Poverty, and the New Testament, Part I

2005-08-05T16:30:00.000-07:00

What follows is one train of thought, in three distinct sections. I would appreciate comments on any of the sections, but would certainly encourage the reader to engage with all of them.

I have spent a good deal of time recently thinking about economics. This is a new thing for me. It is part of a broader shift in my life that includes increasing awareness of current events and things political. I know how little I know. (I suspect that many who think they know much really know little as well.)

One recent conversation in particular fueled and directed my thinking on the subject. A friend of mine has spent awhile in Haiti, a country whose unemployment rate sits at an unbelievable 85%, and where uncontaminated water is exceedingly rare. My natural response to these dismal statistics was to ask, “Well, what can we do about it?” It certainly struck me as feasible to install water filters and teach the Haitians how to support themselves and stimulate their economy. My friend’s response was that, unfortunately, it’s very difficult to do those things, for several reasons. First, they tend to resent any assistance that we Americans supply them. (In fact, I observed myself how, when I was in Honduras, as soon as concerned white folk came in and provided relief, it created an instant power hierarchy, even though that’s not what the white folk intended.) Second, when the Haitians receive gifts from the Americans such as water filters, they tend to a) let the gifts spoil, since they have little investment in them, and b) come to expect gifts and, as a result, work less. The highly counterintuitive conclusion is this: the best thing for the Haitians is to sell them water filters (or, better yet: set up a water filter business that a few of them can run), and bring in a multinational corporation to set up a factory and provide them with jobs. (My friend noted the irony of the term “sweat-shop”: in Haiti, you’re sweating no matter what you’re doing.)

There’s a broader principle at work here. Communism fails, as well all know, because humans are so prone to looking at their own self-interest. If they get the same ration no matter how hard they work, they’ll likely not work as hard. And social charity can lead to the same problem. (Critics of welfare like to point this out.) It’s true in Haiti, it was true in the U.S.S.R., it’s true in the U.S., and it’s probably true everywhere poverty is found. The catch 22 is that, in our desperate attempt to help the poor, we end up perpetuating the poverty cycle. “Forgive Third World Debt” is a great slogan, and sounds noble to every caring person; but what if it doesn’t work, but instead increases corruption and strengthens the dependence poor countries have on wealthy ones? What if we discover that the best way to get people out of poverty is to teach them how to get themselves out of poverty, and refuse to give them any gifts in the meantime? Communism—where everyone works on behalf of the whole and everything is shared—can sometimes sound like heaven, and capitalism—where everyone fights with each other to win a share of the goods—can sometimes sound like hell. Could it be that the poor need to go through the hell of capitalistic competition in order to end the poverty cycle? (I wonder if we might call someone who thinks this way a “bleeding-heart conservative.”)

Economics, Poverty, and the New Testament, Part II

2005-08-05T16:28:00.000-07:00

I immediately think of all the Biblical injunctions to take care of the poor, and they usually sound pretty socialistic. In the early chapters of the book of Acts we see a group of people who share everything. Moreover, the wealthy sell their property and give their money to the poor. The mandate to give to the poor comes from Jesus himself: “Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.” It sounds straightforward enough. One thinks of the bishop in Les Miserables who insists, after Jean Valjean is caught stealing the silver, that he in fact gave the silver to Valjean, who becomes a new man as a result of the experience. One gets the feeling from the New Testament that if we could just stop holding onto our possessions—if we could learn to give freely, as we have received freely—that we could change the world.

But this is not the only picture that the New Testament gives us. Paul strongly criticizes those without a work ethic. "If a man will not work, he shall not eat,” he says. That doesn’t sound terribly gracious. So we are to give to the diligent poor, but not to the lazy poor?

In fact, I think there is a much deeper irony at work here, one that will take some theological burrowing to unearth. According to Christian teaching, Jesus is God’s very presence among humans, God’s way of regenerating corrupt humanity from the inside out. What is both compelling and bewildering about God’s manner of acting is that it is so subtle. God doesn’t wipe away all evil and suffering with a lightning stroke; instead, in Jesus, God comes in the midst of the evil and the suffering, takes the blame for it upon himself, and calls people to join his new way of living. Throughout the centuries, many have been angry about this. They say, why can’t God rescue us in the meantime? Why won’t God do away with famine and war and abuse and loneliness, since God can? In effect, they are asking God for assistance that God is not supplying. It would seem that Jesus is denying his own principle, “Give to the one who asks you.” Think of Haiti: God isn’t, if you will, giving away water filters right and left. Instead, God is working alongside individuals and communities in subtle ways that will last. God appears to be a sort of “bleeding-heart conservative;” God gives everything, but only subtly, quietly, relationally, and in the meantime, can easily come across as miserly or unconcerned.

(I use the world’s most polarizing term here—“conservative.” I trust that my right-leaning readers will think no more of my theology because I use it, and my left-leaning readers will think no less of it for that reason.)

Economics, Poverty, and the New Testament, Part III

2005-08-05T16:15:00.000-07:00

Let’s take a step back. What I’m really doing here is elevating the value of caring for the poor, and attempting to build an economic system of some sort around that value. (I’m sure there are those who think that that’s a bad way of developing an economic system.) Or, perhaps more precisely, I’m attempting to build a system of economics ethics: whether multinational corporations ought to build factories in poor countries; whether we ought to forgive third world debt; and so on. But this raises two very important questions.

First, it is clear that I am evaluating these ethical questions in terms of what works, not in terms of my ethical duties per se. For example, I am suggesting that giving money or food to the poor is not necessarily the best way to take care of them, because they will likely react irresponsibly and we will have gotten no further in lifting them out of poverty (and perhaps have taken a step backward). But what if my duty to give has nothing to do with their duty to react responsibly? Perhaps my duty is to give regardless. Pacifists seem to see things this way—that we are never to harm another, regardless of the consequences. (Just before saying, “Give to the one who asks of you,” Jesus says, “If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”) Perhaps giving is like that: we’re called to give and give and give, even if it hurts us, and even if the receiver doesn’t receive well.

To me, at least, it sounds foolish to give and give and give, if it doesn’t actually help the poor. That is, it seems to me that it is a question of what works, and not just what my duties are. But whether giving works or not depends on how responsible the receiver is. That’s a problem, because we can’t always tell. Think of panhandlers: if the wiseness or foolishness of giving money to them depends on whether they’ll use it responsibly, and I can’t possibly know if they will…well then, how can we know whether it’s wise or foolish to give them money?.) And that leads us to the second question. I’m looking for the right system, the right policy. But what if there just isn’t one? Capitalism doesn’t take care of the poor if the business owners are cruel and exploitative; socialism doesn’t take care of the poor if the poor are lazy and irresponsible. But couldn’t either work if everyone did what was good?

Poverty is not a problem with the system. Or, it is: but its solution will involve a good deal more than a new system. It is a problem that stems from the problem of human messed-up-ness.

And Paul, who knew this all along, wrote, “If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.” Those who seek to change the system but do not love the poor accomplish nothing. Those who love the poor can appreciate the messiness and complexity of poverty, and then begin to offer their resources and creativity in the endeavor to bring relief and change.

The Paradoxical Hope of Heaven

2005-07-27T22:44:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking about death recently. The reason that it comes up is that it is the most obvious place for questions of transcendence to come up. It is also perhaps the most obvious place where the materialist/scientific worldview and the religious worldview part ways.

Here’s my cynical read of the religious worldview, from the materialist perspective that I am prone to adopting. Human beings cease functioning just like every other organism. Their bodies disintegrate into particles that are caught up into the lives of new organisms that will themselves die. But because humans get attached to each other, they want to hold out hope that they’ll see their departed friends again someday. And because human life is not just short, but also nasty and brutish, humans dream that the afterlife is free of all the agonies and frustrations of earth. But this makes them confused. Somehow they think that death is bad, but, at the same time, it ushers in a much more pleasant existence. So in their hope of experiencing pain-free existence, they not only deny that their existences will come to a definite end, but they render the meantime a futile waste. Why not just die and get the pain over with? Why not rejoice at murder? Why mourn over unjust killing? Why not celebrate it, since it really brings people in contact with heaven? Why not practice systematic, universal euthanasia?

But today I read an account of someone learning that his younger brother had been killed on the front lines of WWII, and in the simplicity of the story I felt the paradoxical logic of hope for heaven. Somehow, this man’s death was a dreadful loss, worth weeping over. And also, it signaled magnificent hope, also worth weeping over. The two kinds of weeping intermingle and become one.

Those who weep in this paradoxical way are either the most delusional or the most clear-headed people alive.

Monasticism Minus Metaphysics

2005-07-27T15:17:00.000-07:00

I’m disappointed.

I’ve been reading Thomas Merton’s autobiography entitled The Seven Storey Mountain, and it’s been a remarkable read. At the same time, he upholds all the things about monasticism that I find fascinating and compelling, while insisting that the monastic experience is no walk in the park or sustained emotional high. It has fueled my desire to visit a monastery, so I did some searching online to see if I could find out about monastic communities around the Pacific Northwest. I found some information; but continually, I came across language like this:

“The [unnamed Spiritual Center] is an ecumenical Christian Ministry that encourages people of all faiths to seek and discern the voice of God in their lives and in the world. We offer a peaceful and contemplative setting for personal reflection.”

It sounds nice. But it’s so spineless, and it has so little to do with what I read about in Merton’s book. I don’t want to go study under those who tell me that the spirit of all religions is identical and it doesn’t matter what I believe. I want to learn from those who really know the truth and want me to know it, too. Anybody can pat me on the back and tell me to keep seeking my own inner, personal truth. And who knows, maybe the truth is there inside me, to be found. But that kind of search has to be held right up next to frank, honest, rich metaphysical inquiry.

I know those who consider faith something of an entrance ticket to heaven. It seems to me that there are loads of philosophical and theological problems with that view, all of which I can get into at some point. For me, faith is like this: I’m on a journey. So I gots to know which way to walk. I don’t until I know the deep nature of things, or at least catch a glimpse of it, or know who to trust as I pursue it. Metaphysics matters. Without it, prayer is nothing but an attempt to find psychological serenity, not the humble pursuit of my true place in the order of things.

So, for all you monastic communities listening to my little rant, please don’t think that you’re doing the world a spiritual favor by tiptoeing around dogma. If you’ve found the key to the meaning of the universe, don’t keep it a secret. You really do have a unique gift to give the world (unless you have actually drifted from the Vocation and Rule around you which you were established).

Two Views on Harmony in Nature

2005-07-19T23:17:00.000-07:00

Celtic spirituality is known for its nature-based prayers and blessings, things of this sort: “The peace of the oceans to you.” There is an awareness in Celtic spirituality of the harmony and rhythm in nature that ought to orient us toward the supernatural.

But does nature really have this harmony? I was running around a lake today, and I noticed a flock of geese gliding along the water with their miniature wakes trailing behind them. It was a picture of serenity, and it evoked feelings of wonder and transcendence in me. But then I thought, these geese are part of the food chain; no doubt their behavior has much more to do with their survival than with peaceful feelings. And the on which they glide is host to countless microbes competing for existence. So the serenity we find in nature has a lot more to do with our psychology than it does with nature itself. There really isn’t anything like “the peace of the oceans” that I would want imparted to me. The reality is more like “the primordial chaos of the oceans” or “the vicious life-and-death struggle of the oceans.”

But I also sympathetic to an entirely different interpretation, something along these lines: nature does indeed seethe with competitive fury, and there is nothing harmonious about, except that it appears harmonious at the macro level, that is, to the human psyche; and indeed, it was designed for this very purpose, to provide a serene-feeling environment for humans. This is a strongly anthropocentric (that is, human-centered) view. But honestly, doesn’t it feel that way sometimes—that nature is there for the purpose of being marveled at and enjoyed by us humans? Could it be that, when I feel a sense of peace, meaning, and grace when I go for a walk through the woods, that the woods were indeed intended to provide me with that sense?

Science, Theology, and the Ambiguous “Why”

2005-07-08T16:06:00.000-07:00

There are those who say that science cancels out or supercedes theology—that they essentially conflict. There are those who say quite the opposite—that science and theology cannot conflict, because they deal in different realms of knowledge or provide answers to different kinds of questions. I agree with neither of these views. I will deal with the former at length later on. For now I’ll try to tackle the latter.

Those who hold this view say that science deals with “hows” and theology deals with “whys.” That is, science comes up with models and equations that describe the behavior of reality, while theology describes the purpose of reality. But I think that is false: science does deal with “whys.” That is, there are two kinds of “whys”: there is the “why” of purpose—the goal to which a thing is aimed, its intended use, etc. It seems correct that science isn’t suppose to—and presumably cannot—answer this kind of “why.” But there is a second kind of “why”—that is, the “why” of causation. (The question “Why is the pen on the table?” has two kinds of answers: first, a purposive or “teleological” answer such as “for use in writing a letter;” and second, a causative answer such as “Because I put it there.”) And science certainly does ask this kind of “why.” A whole branch of science—namely, medical research—seems to me to be devoted to nothing else. Whenever a lab scientist tries to figure out what causes cancer, she is asking a “why.”

Someone will respond, “Yes, of course. There are two kinds of ‘whys.’ Science only deals with the causative sort and theology only with the purposive sort. They don’t overlap.” But theology does deal with the issues of causation, and that’s precisely where the rub is. Classical theism (which is not, of course, the only theological act in town) typically includes a doctrine of Providence of some sort or another—that is, the claim that God somehow directs things to some degree or another—and also a doctrine of Creation, that God brought things into being somehow. These doctrines are essentially claims about causation. If, for example, a theist thinks that her meeting a future spouse was in some way orchestrated by God, this view of things could potentially conflict with a scientific explanation that holds that the meeting was random, or necessitated by prior states of the universe, or something like that. So both science and theology offer causal explanations for things, and these explanations can potentially conflict.

Trust and the Ad Hominem Fallacy

2005-07-08T16:05:00.000-07:00

Someone commits the “ad hominem” fallacy by responding to an argument with an attack on the arguer, rather than pointing out a problem with the argument. (Hence the name: “ad hominem” means “against the man.”) For example, I remember hearing a presentation that made a philosophical case that killing any animal is unethical. One audience member asked, “So do you follow this code?” The lecturer responded (as he ought, I think), “My behavior doesn’t make a difference one way or the other on the validity of my argument.” Ad hominems get thrown around in public discourse all the time, and avoiding doing so is one key element in learning to be intellectually charitable. (Just this morning I heard someone interviewed on NPR saying that the so-called “Intelligent Design” movement came about when anti-evolutionists realized that Young-Earth Creationism was foundering and decided they needed another plan of attack. I think this is a form of ad hominem: the speaker is dismissing the central theses of the I.D. movement by saying, “You’re just a bunch of anti-evolutionists.”)

But here’s the deal. We live in a world (to quote Phil Eaton) of unparalleled ambiguity, of epistemic hostility, of bewildering pluralism. Quite frankly, it’s really difficult to be right, and even harder to know you’re right. We hear arguments for conflicting views all the time, and sometimes even the best and brightest among us can’t make heads or tails of the conflicts. What we need, I think, are not more arguments, but rather role models and authorities whom we trust. If education has been as objective and emotionally detached as possible in the recent past, I think it needs to become deeply personal in the near future. And that means that the ad hominem fallacy may not be too far off. I can’t always evaluate an argument; but if I trust the person behind it, then I may be more able to embrace its conclusion. We’ve got to be careful, of course, since there are lots of nice and wise-seeming people who believe loads of nonsense. But I think there is something to the instinct that says, “That argument sounds plausible, but I don’t trust you!” Or, “I’m uncomfortable with this conclusion. But I trust you, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.” In fact, I think these psychological dynamics are inescapable in education, and we should begin to embrace them, not pretend that we can somehow rise above them. We can’t rise above them. Not because we’re weak or foolish, but because we’re never going to have the intellectual capacity, the expertise, or the time to evaluate every argument we come across.

Darwinism & Environmentalism

2005-06-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

I saw a fairly common bumper sticker yesterday that got me thinking: it said "Love Our Mother" and had a picture of the globe. I think what it represents is a kind of merger of New Age mysticism and Darwinism. They're strange ideological bedfellows, but I think there really are quite a few people who think that Darwinism is some sort of nonteleological or nonreligious explanation for the beauty and mystery of the world. I have a feeling, in fact, that many of the loudest voices for environmental concern speak out of precisely this conception.

I was involved in an extensive conversation in college over a Christian take on environmentalism. It has been common for Christians to have an utterly anthroprocentric approach: that is, human beings are here to love and serve God, and the rest of the created order is just here to support us in that endeavor. Insofar as hurting the environment hurts us (and pretty frequently, hurting the environment hurts us), then we shouldn't hurt it; but we don't have any sort of obligation to preserve the biosphere for its own sake. Our consersation was to see if this really ought to be the Christian position. Our conclusion was something like this: we're supposed to love creation and do justice to it. That means a lot of different things at different times, but it does indeed mean more than just tending to creation for our own sustainable use.

The stereotype has been, in other words, that Christians aren't good environmentalists, and I don't think that's the case. But here's the deal: since when do Darwinists have any reason to be good environmentalists? How does a Darwinist have anything beyond anthropocentric agendas to which to appeal? In short, why should we "Love Our Mother," which was blind in the first place? On Darwinism, our emergence as a species is dependent on our ability to beat out other species. It's all about competition. Love isn't about competition at all. How are they compatible? Are far as I can tell, Darwinists shouldn't care a hoot about extinction, except in the cases where it hurts humans. Perhaps someone might make appeals to aesthetics: biodiversity is beautiful and fascinating, they might say. And that is indeed an anthropocentric argument. But come one, we'll plaster the world with paintings of extinct birds, and we'll make up for it aesthetically. What reason could a Darwinist possibly have for avoiding a species' extinction for the sake of that species?

The Turin Shroud & Darwinism

2005-06-23T16:19:00.000-07:00

I read a fascinating book on the Shroud of Turin--the alleged burial shroud of Jesus--recently. There is no doubt that the Shroud is difficult to explain by way of hoax: its weave is typical of 1st century Middle East, but not typical of medieval Europe; its image is a photographic negative and contains X-Ray and 3-D information; there are no traces of paint on the shroud, but there are traces of blood and dirt; pollen samples well nigh prove that the shroud has been in Palestine at some point, etc. But then there's the nasty bit about its radiocarbon date: the late Middle Ages. (The book I read suggested a very plausible theory as to why the dating may be flawed, but I need not get into that.) It has been suggested that the radiocarbon date clears up the mystery of the shroud. Ian Wilson, the book's author, reaches quite the opposite conclusion: if it turns out that the date is correct, that only serves to make the shroud more mysterious. If it really is a medieval hoax, how the heck could that have been pulled off?

It occurred to me recently that that's precisely how I think of Darwinism. Darwin was a creative and biological genius. It has been suggested that evolutionary theory is one of the best ideas that humans have ever come up with, and that just may be right. But what Darwinism doesn't do is clear up the mystery of human existence. Here we are, having mystical experiences right and left, thinking, loving, creating, and--maybe most mysterious of all--knowing--and we are a cosmic accident?

I think Young Earth Creationists look at all this and conclude, "The theory has got to be false." (Well, maybe they're looking at the Bible first and foremost. Nevermind--they might as well be looking at all this other stuff too, and if they don't, they're foolishly ignoring an awful lot that could build their case.) But many naturalists look at the theory of evolution and conclude that anything mysterious or mystical has got to be illusory. I don't want to do either: I just want to try to work through the bewilderment and seek coherence and consistency.

Pluralism in Religious Experience

2005-06-20T20:53:00.000-07:00

I have been reading Thomas Merton's autobiography, "The Seven Storey Mountain." In it he relates how he changed from a cosmopolitan intellectual into a Catholic monk of just about the most austere variety. It has been tremendously stimulating and inspiring, and occasionally bewildering.

I am not a Catholic. I have a deep admiration for the Catholic church. But I have always been bewildered by Maryan piety. Merton definitely emphasizes Mary's role. It helps me to understand it, but it doesn't make it seem any more orthodox. Yes, Mary plays a powerful and mysterious role as the bearer of Christ, the incarnate deity. But she still is the one through whom God chooses to offer graces to the world? And she hears ours prayers? Where'd we get that?

And yet, Merton makes sense of his very profound transformation by reference to Our Lady. And that raises a broader concern. Merton's story is so bewildering because it really seems to record one man's mystical journey into communion with God, and yet his creed makes reference--pretty centrally, in fact--to doctrines that seem suspect at best. In fact, I feel the same bewilderment when I hear other stories of mystical encounters by any number of people with differing beliefs of various sorts.

It seems to me that there are three obvious responses. First, I can deny the validity of Merton's experience. He's just a loony Catholic after all, we might say; he's just making this all up. WE, on the other hand--those who haven't espoused pagan beliefs and practices--can regard our religious experiences as genuine, but we know that his must be false. (I trust the reader can detect the sarcasm of my tone: this route just seems dismissive to me.) Second, we can relegate doctrine to a position of secondary significance. Merton's experiences are clearly authentic; this just goes to show that God is found by people with less than perfect theology, and, after all, we're all heretics to some degree or another. Third, we might just get cynical about religious experience in general. People find what they're looking for, no matter what they believe; they just conjure up fluttering feelings and call it whatever they want.

In fact, I think the charitable response is the second one. As I have hinted, it is a comforting suggestion to some degree: it means that we don't have to be flawless theologians before we get to commune with God. But, on the other hand, it feels both patronizing and a little alarming--patronizing, because Merton would stand by his doctrinal interpretation and wouldn't want it relegated to secondary importance; and second, because it perhaps opens the door to the suggestion that knowing the truth about things doesn't really make any difference.

For now, I'll go with charitable + patronizing & alarming, rather than dismissive or cynical. But I'm still a little unsettled.

Plato's Famous Statement

2005-06-06T16:59:00.000-07:00

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

It comes from The Apology (better translated "The Defense"), Plato's record of the trial of Socrates. A couple of years ago I wrote the sentence along the underside of the brim of a baseball cap that I wore frequently. I understood it to be a sort of philosopher's mission statement.

But now I'm not so sure. Now I almost feel that the examined life is not worth living. There's a lot behind this thought, so I'll do my best to explain.

There's a lot of talk these days about post-modernism. The gist of the idea is that the Modern Era supplanted the Medieval Era (which supplanted the Ancient Era), but now our culture is moving past modernism into the Post-Modern Era. I do think that there is some truth to this, and it can be seen in a whole bunch of areas. But there is something ironic going on, too. Post-modernists often speak of the modern era as emphasizing analysis, and the post-modern era as emphasizing intuition. But there is nothing more analytical than giving a name to an Era.

In fact, I think we're in the most analytical era ever. Everything has an "ism." Have you noticed this? No matter what opinion I have about an issue, it can be easily catalogued with an "ism." (Are you a memorialist? A consubstantiationist? A transubstantiationist?) Furthermore, demographic analysis can explain to me why I hold every opinion I hold.

I feel like the writer of Ecclesiastes. It's impossible to be original, intuitive, impulsive. Everything has been said, everything has been done, and most of it has been somehow explained.

And that makes me long for the unexamined life--the life of lived at the human level, in community, delighting in the world, following my curiosities. In fact, I think this is where we're supposed to live. Yes, we must examine our lives when questions arise. But the examining itself is tiresome, and, if it becomes the center point of life, it makes for a life not worth living.

The goal--and I do think that this is indeed something of a post-modern value--is to get past the analysis to the point where we can be humans again, with righteous instincts that we can trust. Ethics, metaphysics, theology, epistemology, psychology, etc. all have their place. But just as a one doesn't go to counselling for its own sake, so we don't examine our lives for the sake of examining. We do so so that we can trust ourselves.

(This should probably take up a separate post, but I'll include this comment in brief here: I don't think everything having to do with post-modernism is good, nor do I think it's all bad. In fact, I do find a lot of promising aspects to it. The problem is that I don't think its goodness or badness has anything to do with whether we can give It--the Era, I mean--a name, or whether we can figure out what It is. If it's good to be intuitive, then let's advocate being intuitive; let's not say that it's good to be post-modern, and being post-modern means being intuitive.)

Beethoven's 9th and The Brothers Karamazov

2005-06-06T16:39:00.000-07:00

The following discussion will sound kind of snobbish. Bear with me. I don't actually think that symphonies and classic novels are the only sort of works worth learning from.

I just saw/heard Beethoven's 9th Symphony last night, performed by Orchestra Seattle at Benaroya Hall. I had studied the work in my music history/lit class my sophomore year of college, but had never heard it in its entirety. It occurred to me that Beethoven is doing something in it very similar to what Dostoevsky is doing in The Brothers Karamazov. I think both explore the problem of evil in some fashion. Dostoevsky's version of the problem is very explicit; Ivan Karamazov says something like, "I don't reject God, just his world," a world in which innocent children suffer. For Beethoven, the problem is more existential, something like this: given that life can be so dreadful, what makes it worth living? He explores the height and depth of human experience in the first three movements in order to fight for an answer.

Ultimately, both works come to the same conclusion: if you learn to love, to rejoice in your brother and in the world around you, then heaven is already here. You can know heaven--know God, I think--right in the midst of this dreadful world, and it's really as simple as can be. It's the children, the monks, the poets that get it. It can be found in the simplest of melodies.

Unbelievably, I've really only been bothered by the problem of evil for a few months. Last fall I was required, as part of the philosophy senior capstone course, to write answers to a number of "Big Questions," including the problem of evil. I wrote about free will and redemption and turned it in, and, to my surprise, my professor's response was, "This is totally unsatisfying." And for the first time, I think, I really felt the existential angst that people feel when they shake their fists at God for creating a world filled with so much pain. And since then I've been aware of a sense of fatalism about the whole issue. When it comes down to it, folks are saying, we don't know why God allows evil, but just that God is in the process (very slow-feeling, sometimes) of rescuing us from it.

So is the conclusion provided by Beethoven and Dostoevsky an answer to the problem of evil, or a change of subject? I'm not sure, but I think it does seem to be the direction taken by the great saints and mystics, something like this: "That's all very interesting, and indeed a bit troubling, but I really don't have time or energy to get worked up over that; I'll be over here communing with God, tasting heaven, and learning to love."

Philosophy & Therapy

2005-05-30T17:51:00.000-07:00

I recently attended a presentation at Seattle Pacific University that consisted of a series of research projects, conducted by undergrads, regarding the AIDS crisis. There's quite a bit of activism among SPU students on this issue, and it's very encouraging. Especially encouraging to me was that a number of the students were philosophy majors. I think that's cool for two reasons: first, it means that philosophy students are getting their noses out of books and taking on practical issues; and second, it means that philosophy students are bringing their precision thinking to bear on ethical issues. (I hear an awful lot of sloppiness out there in public discourse, sloppiness that some good analytic philosophy could clear up in a hurry.)

One of the projects was a philosophy paper whose aim was to discredit the "punishment theory" of disease, arguing that such views "are incoherent and must be abandoned." It's an intriguing project; but it occurred to me that there is something a little bizarre about it. Perhaps the "punishment theory" is incoherent; I'm not sure. But it's definitely despicable: it's awful to suggest that someone's debilitating illness is God's special curse on him or her. Now, it could be that the students who gave the presentation were really motivated to condemn the theory because of its incoherence; but I doubt that. I think they find it despicable. But, since ethical arguments are tricky and lengthy, require particular metaphysical assumptions to make sense, and ultimately depend on emotion and intuition as they do argument, the presenters decided to go with a much simpler challenge--the challenge of incoherence. (If I were to show a flaw in their argument, such that their project really failed to demonstrate the theory's incoherence, I'm sure they would be 0% more likely to embrace it than if their project were water-tight.)

What I am getting at is this: supposedly philosophical discourse ought to be disinterested, unimpassioned. But I only have strong opinions about the things that interest me and about which I feel passionately. I want to interweave dialogue about puzzles and dialogue about passions. I want philosophy to become deeply personal, and for philosophers to acknowledge all the undercurrents that motivate them. To put it another way, I want the language of counseling and the language of critical thinking to mix together. If this happens, I think we'll end up doing philosophy better and doing human relating better.

Imagine how much progress we would make if our conversations went as follows: I declare that I don't adhere to a certain view. You ask me why not. I explain how my history and development have led me to come to that conclusion. Then together we begin to take on (philosophically) the assumptions I've made as a result of my history and development. I emerge from the process understanding myself AND the issue better.

Plato suggested that the ideal society would be one in which either philosophers become kings or kings truly philosophize. I want to suggest that we'll see some amazing growth and community once philosophers become therapists or therapists truly philosophize.

Protesting Linguistic Lame-ation

2005-05-25T14:54:00.000-07:00

I finished "The Little Prince" yesterday and found it inspiring. I find many episodes of The West Wing inspiring, "Let Bartlett Be Bartlett" perhaps most of all. I also find Mike McGill inspiring. (Take a look at www.ashaforum.org). But these days, I'm not sure if I've just paid this book, TV show, and friend a compliment or not.

English-speakers (and -writers) of late have manhandled the term "inspirational." Not too long ago I purchased a copy of one of my favorite books, "The Great Divorce" by C.S. Lewis. It's Lewis' nod to Dante, in which Lewis records--in the first person--a fanciful journey through heaven and hell and is assisted by his own Teacher (George MacDonald, rather than Dante's Virgil). The book records a series of dialogues between Ghosts from hell and Spirits from heaven. The purpose of the dialogues is to reveal why some people, given the choice between joy and misery, choose misery. It's brilliant, insightful, provocative, and, as all of Lewis' books, marvelously written.

And it was categorized, in Barnes & Noble, as "Christian Inspirational." They could have labelled it "Christian Sentimental" and the effect would have been the same.

In fact, I do find "The Great Divorce" inspirational. That is, it inspires me, it breathes new life into me. I feel more awake and aware after I read it. And why? Because of its content. I find it inspiring the way I find Plato's writing inspiring. "Inspirational" is not a literary genre! That which inspires us does so (or ought to) because of its content--that is, because it aims at something other than inspiring us.

If I call something "inspirational" (read: life-breathing), that ought to be a testiment to its excellence, integrity, truth, and power. These days, it's almost an insult. We've turned a powerful term into something lame. Ya no mas.

Why I Like Monasticism

2005-05-23T19:02:00.000-07:00

I find myself thinking about the monastic tradition more and more. That may sound odd for a socially-engaged urbanite in a serious romantic relationship. But I keep coming back to it, and, increasingly, I find that others in a similar situation keep coming back to it, too. I imagine I'm going to be posting a lot about it. In fact, I feel some sort of calling to figure out what urban monasticism might look like, as a long-term project.

Here's a list of things that attract me about monasticism, each of which I could (and maybe will, soon) post about individually:
Shared resources
Success measured qualitatively, not quantitatively
No corporate ladder
Daily corporate prayer
Solitude
Self-sufficiency
Communal living
Intellectual engagement set against the backdrop of prayer and camraderie (There's an entire book about this, part of which I have read, called "The Love of Learning and the Desire for God")
Mutual interdependence

And as I look at this list, I see that a major factor here is the absence of competition--the freedom for each person to cultivate his or her soul while giving what he or she can to the community and knowing that his or her needs will be met. Right now, I think the context best suited for this sort of living is the undergraduate university education. But herein lies an irony. To a large degree, my desire for the communal life developed via my undergraduate education, which meant that I was finally ready to give a try as soon as it was all over. And I think many of my friends underwent that same developmental process. So now we're out of school and we have to figure out how to do it for ourselves.

Partisan Economics, Part II

2005-05-23T18:52:00.000-07:00

In response to my most recent post, my brother (the almanac-savvy one, who also happens to have a degree in economics) writes this:

"The reason why liberal and conservative policies ARE ethical issues and not (just) practical ones is that there are value judgements to be made, not just empirical estimates of success.

"Imagine a society of two people, one with an income of $100 and the other with an income of $10. The latter is poor; we would like to see him make more. The conservative says, let's keep taxes low, and both individuals will benefit. Sure enough it works, the economy grows. Now the wealthy individual earns $200 and the poor earns $20.

"But I can do better, says the liberal. He raises taxes on the wealthy, and creates some kind of redistributive program (food stamps, education subsidy, etc). The economy still grows, but not as much: now the wealthy individual earns $150 and the poor earns $30.

"What's the better system? The latter has most benefit to the poor, but the former has increased total income the most. Deciding between the two is a question for an ethicist, not an economist."

I honestly don't know which is the right way to go. Perhaps the difference between staunch liberals and staunch conservatives is that the liberals think that it's obviously right to assist the poor as much as possible, and the conservatives think it's obviously right to boost the economy as much as possible. It's not obvious to me.

And that raises another issue. I know those of my friends who are Republicans and those who are Democrats, and in that sense I know the difference between the parties--that is, I know that urban artsy twentysomethings tend to be Democrats, and evangelical Christian suburbanites tend to be Republicans. But I had no idea that the former group thinks it's better to assist the poor at the expense of the economy at large, and the latter group thinks it's better to assist the economy at large at the expense of the poor. And maybe they have no idea either: I mean, maybe taking sides politically is as much about the bandwagon as it is about anything else.

(My brother would want me to add this: it's not really about whether we should assist the poor at the expense of the economy at large or vis versa; it's really about whether we think the GOVERNMENT should be doing that.)

Partisan Economics

2005-05-05T15:04:00.000-07:00

First off: I'd like to thank my Almanac-savvy brother for correcting my statistics in my last post. 81% of adult blacks in America have high school diplomas. I either got the number really wrong, or I was remembering some other, related, statistic. The latter seems more plausible.

Now: I've been trying to gain a little more knowledge of the American political system of late. I have never had a very good sense of the differences between the political parties, except for a few banner issues each espouses. I also have a feel for which demographics opt for which party, but I'm not sure I could do a very good job of explaining why that is. (Sometimes I suspect that an awful lot of people vote the way they do because that's the way their demographic votes.) I think I'm getting a little better feel from watching The West Wing, but perhaps not as good of a feel as I would have hoped.

Here's one dividing line between the parties that I HAVE picked up: Democrats tend to think that the best way for the government to take care of the poor is to tax the people and then use the money toward relief programs. Republicans tend to think that the best way for the government to take care of the poor is to reduce taxes so that people put more money into the economy, which will subsequently flourish, resulting in a higher standard of living for everyone. If I'm not really getting that right, I'd appreciate some correction.

My reason for bringing this up is as follows. It seems to me that this is a practical issue, not an ethical one. Everybody wants the same thing--a better life for the poor. The question is not, which policy is most ethical? The question is, which policy works? And that doesn't have to divide us, does it? I mean, isn't it an issue for historians and economists to resolve, not politicians? My reaction is this: Okay, fine, just let me know which method works, and I'll vote for the folks who support it. So why do we hold to divergent opinions on this issue? Let's just get the question "what method works?" answered, and then move on.

Urban Aesthetics and Gentrification

2005-05-02T16:03:00.000-07:00

Us middle-class white folk are often accused of committing the sin of "gentrification." The process goes something like this: I'm young, perhaps starting a career and a family, and I can't afford--or desire not to afford--housing in the classiest parts of town. Nevertheless, I'd rather not head out into suburbia and 1) contribute to loathsome suburban sprawl and 2) commute for two hours a day. So instead, I choose the low-income part of town. This is the first step in gentrification: by purchasing real estate in the neighborhood, I drive up the cost of real estate for the current neighbors. Next, the house I buy is a fairly dingy, so I spruce it up, making it my own. This is the second step in gentrification: I contribute to a general shift in the neighborhood aesthetic, making it more conducive to my demographic and less conducive to the demographic that currently occupies it.

Here's the deal. The first step is inevitable, it seems to me. Maybe there are ways to get around it--perhaps by not offering any more money for the house than the neighbors could afford; maybe that wouldn't work. I don't know. But the second step: why is it the case that we think of poorer neighborhoods as ugly and filthy? What's the connection there?

I'm becoming more and more aware of the power of the urban aesthetic. Just as I am more psychologically stable when I keep my room in order, so citydwellers feel more security, peace of mind, and sense of purpose when their city looks nice. I have heard that gangs and drug dealers like garbage-filled streets and will move along if a place gets cleaned up. Do poor people like crime? It would be an awful stereotype to say that they do. So why wouldn't they want to improve their aesthetic? One doesn't have to be rich to be clean.

I could imagine being challenged at two levels. First, maybe the organized aesthetic that suits me does not suit everyone. Maybe the dingy aesthetic is what people actually prefer. Two responses: First, I frankly doubt that. Second, if that's true, great. Let's cultivate it. My point is that poor people can cultivate AN aesthetic, whatever that aesthetic is. We tend to think that they don't and can't have one. But I think they can, and whatever it is, it'll help them live better.

Second, it could be argued that, for many minority populations, this stuff smacks of whiteness, and hence is frowned upon. Okay, but we just need to get over that, because it doesn't ACTUALLY smack of whiteness, just civilization. The high school graduation rate for African Americans is painfully low--I think the number I recall hearing is 16%--and I've heard that a reason for that is that some black kids who work hard in school are made to feel bad, as though they're disowning their upbringing and turning white. But that's so backward! Much better to encourage the black kid to work hard in school to show that academic achievement ISN'T an issue of ethnicity! My conclusion is this: if ethnic minority groups think they are maintaining their identity by neglecting the aesthetic of their neighborhood, then they are really slandering their ethnicity, not affirming it.

So, is there a way to cultivate a low-income neighborhood's aesthetic without patronizing it or gentrifying it? I'm not sure, but it seems like a really good thing to try to figure out.

Foray into Miracles

2005-04-27T17:05:00.000-07:00

I guess the broad heading for this is What Science and Reports of The Miraculous Have to Do With Each Other. If that doesn't sound at all interesting to you, stop reading. If it does, keep reading, and let me know your thoughts, since I don't feel that I've gotten very far in my thinking on the topic.

In the Bible miracles are reported as demonstrations of God's power over the natural world. David Hume defined them as violations of the laws of nature. Some theologians seem to be articulating a compatibilist view of miracles--some way in which the laws of nature are upheld and yet God is acting powerfully. The scientific community deems talk of miracles out of its field--if there were any miracles, they say, science wouldn't have anything to say about them: as soon as one posits a miracle, the research stops, because science investigates natural causes for things. I've certainly gotten the sentiment from the scientific community that belief in the miraculous is essentially irrational. (In fact, I recall a conversation from a few years back in which I was called irrational, because I evidenced a willingness to trust a friend who reported experience of the supernatural.)

I have a couple of comments on all of this. First of all, I find myself continually puzzled by the notion that miracles are evidence of God's power over nature--or, at least, that they are so in some exceptional way. If, as theists tend to hold, God sustains all things in their being, such that the laws of nature operate as they do because God wills them to, then God is no more powerful when God orders things in an anomolous way than when God orders them the way they usually go. If God were a part of the natural order, then when God were to flex God's muscles, as it were, and overcome nature, then we ought to be impressed. But that's not what's going on. It's all at God's beck and call, right? Miracles should serve to remind us that 1) God is real and doing things, and 2) the laws of nature work for God and not the other way around; but miracles aren't exceptional demonstrations of power.

Second, we tend to think that because we live in a scientific era and have learned about the universe's mechanisms, then miracles don't square with our worldview the way they did at one time. I certainly carry this sentiment around with me. Someone supposedly gets miraculously healed: so, the conservation of energy was suspended momentarily? New atoms burst into existence out of nowhere? That doesn't happen! But then I realize: the principle of regularity--that is, that the universe behaves in predictable ways--is not a new idea. Sure, we describe the universe's predictible behaviors by way of equations, and that seems to be fairly new. (Although I think the Greeks might have done a little bit of that.) But everyone has always assumed that when you drop things, they fall; when you get fatally ill, you die; when night falls, one only has to wait several hours before it gets light again, and so on. And alleged miraculous phenomena have always defied regularity, right? So maybe, instead of insisting that miracles can't happen now that we have science, we should go back to the ancients and figure out how they made sense of a world that 1) exhibits an exceeding degree of regularity, and 2) sometimes (allegedly) breaks out into strange and wonderful behavior.

Any thoughts on this?

A Word About Charity

2005-04-22T17:38:00.000-07:00

My emphasis on this blog is the need for charity. So what do I mean by this? I mean a couple of things. As an academic virtue, charity means reconstructing a position in its most favorable light before critiquing it. (The opposite of a charitable interpretation is called a "straw man," in which a position is constructed in a form that makes it easy to refute.) Charity of this sort takes a lot of work, and I don't see very many folks putting in the effort. Second, charity involves ascribing good motives to those who hold a position. When creationists dismiss evolutionary theory by asserting that evolutionary scientists are blinded by their anti-religious agenda, creationists are failing to be charitable. When evolutionary scientists dismiss critics of evolution by asserting that they are blinded by their pro-religious agenda, scientists are failing to be charitable. This move from examining a position to criticizing the motives of the one who holds it is exceedingly prevalent in our society. (In academia the move is called an "ad hominem"--that is, an attack on the person.)

In addition to this, I mean something else, something that I should more precisely label "epistemic humility." I mean something like this: sometimes, when we make controversial assertions, we make up for our lack of certainty with emotional punch. We just shouldn't do that. Instead, we should only offer the degree of conviction that we really have a right to maintain. And a lot of that comes from acknowledging how many people there are whom we respect who disagree with us. This comes from personally engaging those people with whom we disagree. My experience at college was that, if I didn't know and respect a professor, and he/she presented something I disagreed with, I would dismiss it; but if I knew and respected him/her, I found myself unable to be dismissive. Instead, I allowed myself to feel the bewilderment of having a trusted authority figure believe rather differently about something. It really comes down to be willing to say, "This is what I believe, but I could be wrong, so I want to engage with those who believe otherwise so I can get a better idea."

So much of our public discourse has to do with power, and I want that fight for power to be replaced by charity.

Critics or Heirs?

2005-04-21T14:14:00.000-07:00

There is an inherent irony--and arrogance, I think--when someone decides to proclaim him- or herself a critic of an institution of which he or she is a part. As a recent attendee of Seattle Pacific University, I experienced this first-hand. (In fact, I think I embodied it for awhile.) I knew quite a few students who would say things like, "The SPU community is so apathetic! No one cares about [the poor, politics, the arts, or whatever]." But here's the deal: the speaker is himself a member of the SPU community, and hence his generalizations apply to himself. He is railing against apathy, yet, presumably (if he is well motivated and not just a complainer) he is not himself apathetic. My response to such a person is this: "Very well. But aparently that's not the whole truth: you yourself are the counterexample."

The response of such a person might well be this: "True, but the fact that I care doesn't have anything to do with the fact that I'm a member of this community." And here's the real issue I want to press. At SPU I sensed this very attitude among a large number of very thoughtful, concerned students. But I believe it was fairly obviously false: I, for one, certainly became more concerned about social justice as a result of my time at SPU. It seems to me that it is these students who are catching onto the very spirit of the institution, and hence do rightly to call other students to account--but it would be incorrect (not to mention arrogant) to suggest that their pull toward activism had nothing to do with the institution and everything to do with their own virtue.

Let me relocate the discussion. Last week, my father (a professor at SPU) gave a lecture on the real possibilities and real limitations of the American dream. Dr. Richard Hughes from Pepperdine University gave a brief talk in response, providing a somewhat different emphasis: the American dream, he said, is broken. It has continually trampled on the marginalized and led to arrogance and domination. But I wonder: does Dr. Hughes' disappointment with the track record of American history really have nothing to do with the American dream? I have the feeling that Dr. Hughes is really a sort of heir to the American dream--one who can help show us what it really means. In other words, he doesn't come to this stuff in a vacuum; he comes to it in the context of our American society that values justice and inclusion, and is still trying to discover what those things mean. (Yes, we were slave owners. And then we abolished slavery.) And of course, Hughes is not the only voice. In some circles, his voice might be considered the majority voice. Could it be that it is, in fact, the most truly American voice out there?

We all need to be careful when we protest against those institutions that reared us. Perhaps our criticisms are justified. But it could yet be the case that it was precisely these intitutions that supplied us with the tools to be able to formulate our criticisms. In that case we need to become humble reformers rather than arrogant protestors. We need not stand in judgment over our parent-institutions, but rather call them to return to their true nature. That kind of reform is an act of love and respect, rather than an act of bitterness and rebellion.

2005-04-20T14:14:00.000-07:00

Third, this whole business about "public fact" and "private opinion" undercuts our ability to have a hearty argument. I remember hearing someone make the claim, "Calling someone's religion wrong is just as bigoted as racism." Now, I don't quite know what it would mean to call someone's religion wrong. Immoral? That would be weird. (Though not unimaginable.) False? Well, I'm not sure that religions are essentially sets of beliefs--at least not equally--and even if they were, they would comprise dozens of them. So there a bit of nonsense going on here regardless. Nevertheless, I think the general sentiment was discernable: one's religion is a personal matter and hence it is offensive to speak against it. Is religion a "personal matter"? I'm not sure what that would mean, but it seems incorrect on two counts: first of all, religion is usually about "something bigger than oneself," and hence involves some measure of commitment to something other than self; and second, most religious people want to learn from religious authorities--not just from their own internal thoughts and sentiments--and hence need a community of some sort around them. But most importantly, religion has to do with the overarching way we see things. If I think (to borrow from Newbigin) that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the centerpiece of history, and you don't, then we disagree about the way the world is, and at least one of us believes a falsehood. We have a couple possible courses of action: 1) we could talk about it, 2) we could decide not to talk about it, 3) we could try to kill each other. But an option that is not available is to pretend we don't disagree about the facts.

2005-04-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

Second, "values" don't constitute a separate realm of knowledge from "facts." Michael Polanyi has made this point abundantly clear in his book Personal Knowledge. Science, Polanyi insists, involves making commitments to theses about which one could be wrong. First of all, the scientist has to commit to the worth of whatever it is she is studying. Second, she has to commit to trusting the authority of her educators. Third, she has to commit to trusting her senses, skills, intuition, and creativity. And finally, she has to commit to her conclusions, even if challenged by her peers. And that all sounds like the rest of life--making decisions, reaching conclusions, making sense of things, even while admitting our enormous capicity for botching it. Suppose someone comes to some religious conviction--say, that transcendental meditation is the primary mode whereby humans come to understand their purpose. It's precisely that sort of doctrine that we have been taught to label "private opinion." But what makes it an "opinion" more than any other concept anyone might believe? And why would it be kept private? For goodness sakes, if that's true--that transcendental meditation is the primary mode whereby humans come to understand their purpose--then I want to know about it!

Is there, then, any distinction between facts and values? I think there is, and that is when "values" refers to "matters of taste," such as prefering one aesthetic to another, one vegetable to another, and so on. (It is by no means clear where the boundaries lie. Lots of people think that some art is good and some art is bad, and it's just a matter of fact.) But do religious matters constitute matters of taste? Hardly! If I think one religion is more comforting than another, then that's a matter of taste. But if I hold some belief that is at odds with some other belief system, that's just a disagreement, and we can't both be right.

2005-04-20T13:53:00.000-07:00

First of all, you can't have a society without values. In order for people to live together, they have to agree, to a certain extent, on what's good and what's not good. A total value nihilist--someone who doesn't think that anything matters--is not welcome in a society. Consider our generic liberal post-enlightment western society. We tend to think that it's better for there to be some degree of religious pluralism than for there not to be--that is, it's good if Christians and Buddhists (or whoever else) can live next door to each other and not kill each other or exile each other. One might think that that means that, in western society, we don't have corporate ideology and that's precisely what's distinctive about western society. But that's nonsense. Our corporate ideology is that it's better for there to be some degree of religious pluralisim than for there not to be. And people who think otherwise--say, terrorists of the Islamic fundamentalist variety--are not welcome as part of our society. If I think that people who like to eat lentel soup deserve to die, then I'm not welcome in this society. Or, I am, so long as I don't act on my belief. And people hide behind this little proviso all the time. "Sure," they say, "You can believe that. You just can't act on it." As though that's any comfort. That's just a disguise for "That's unacceptable."

And we hear our politicians talk about values all the time. The value of human life. The value of human rights. Our whole political system is ethically charged--and right it should be! But that means that values 1) ought to play an enormous role in public life, and 2) already do.

Facts and Values

2005-04-20T13:39:00.000-07:00

I was raised on the fact/value dichotomy. I recall an exercise I did in fourth grade or thereabouts that required us to label each statement in a list as either a "fact" or an "opinion." The criterion we were given for determining which was which was something like "facts can be proven true or false, and opinions can't." I can remember one of the statements quite clearly--something like "I think it's going to rain today." This was meant, of course, as an opinion of the quintessential sort. It's easy to see that it's not, even on the criterion given: if I in fact think that it's going to rain, then it's a fact that I think it's going to rain. But even if we chop off the "I think" at the front of it, we're still left with a fact--that is, it either is going to rain today or it isn't, and if it does in fact rain, then the statement is a true statement of fact, and if it doesn't, it's a false statement of fact.

This is all to say that I was indoctrinated into a very silly dogma very early on, and don't think I was at all unique in that. Lesslie Newbigin talks at great length about this in his book The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Our society lives with the assumption that there are facts--most distinctly, that body of information to which we have access through the sciences--and values--most distinctly, that body of information pertaining to religious practice--and that these things do not overlap; facts belong in the public sphere and values belong in the private sphere. This doctrine is so woven into the fabric of our society that it may be difficult to see how it could be false. But I think there are a number of obvious reasons why it is, which I will explore in successive posts.