Yesterday I found myself inspired to comment on a blog post, "Re: Homophobia," on the blog of Fuller Seminary New Testament Professor J.R. Daniel Kirk, Storied Theology. Prof. Kirk suggests that the use of the term "homophobia" (and its cognates) is generally unhelpful in promoting civil discourse in what is so often an angry debate. Since this concept of homophobia (its use and allegations of misuse) is a topic I was working on just before I started writing Is God a Delusion? (a project I abandoned in order to finish the book), I couldn't resist saying a few words. Maybe I'll be inspired to take up the project again--after That Damned Book is finished, of course.
In any event, the discussion thread has gotten quite lengthy but many of the comments are well worth reading if you are interested in the subject. I've made a few additional comments since my original, but must now restrain myself so that I can focus on such things as grading and finishing Chapter 7 of That Damned Book. My original comment, for those interested, is reproduced below:
Since I think that the analogy between “homophobia” and “racism” is right on in terms of actual usage, I want to explore the analogy just a bit to see what it means.
In its root meaning, “racism” refers to the systematic marginalization of one racial group by another. But the term does not merely have a descriptive meaning. It also makes a strongly negative evaluative judgment. Thus, the term binds together systematic oppression based on race with the judgment that such systematic oppression is wrong. By extension, lots of things—acts, people, beliefs, attitudes—can be called racist insofar as they are the kinds of things that serve to perpetuate the social marginalization of racial minorities. A belief would do this if, were it true, it would JUSTIFY the practice of social marginalization.
As such, in calling a belief “racist” one is not merely casting a pejorative label on it but offering a reason to reject it. One is saying, in short-hand, that this belief implies that the social marginalization based on race is just; but it is not just; hence, the belief implies something false and so must itself be rejected as false.
That one can say all of this with a word rather than an argument both reinforces and expresses the appropriateness of binding together the descriptive and normative senses connoted by the term. That is, in using the term, one expresses the fittingness of treating a certain moral judgment as presumptively correct.
Now if you think it is indeed fitting to condemn the systematic exclusion of gays and lesbians from full access to crucial social goods (marriage), then you will find it fitting to use the term “homophobic” to label beliefs, attitudes, and practices that contribute to such social exclusion. For example, it will be judged fitting to label as homophobic the belief that all homosexual acts are wrong (since this belief justifies what one takes to be clearly unjust practices and policies, the belief is therefore judged false).
If, however, you think that all homosexual acts are wrong, you will by implication think that the systematic social marginalization of sexual minorities is not wrong, and so you will find the homophobia label unfitting—since this term attaches a negative judgment on something you do not think warrants such a judgment. And you are likely to bristle at the use of the term, because its use takes for granted a moral perspective with which you do not agree.
Such bristling CAN be an impediment to productive dialogue—but it can also serve other purposes. There is a tendency for many in the dispute about homosexuality to assume that there is only one locus of moral debate: namely, over the morality of homosexuality. They think that only once THAT matter is settled should we look at whether excluding sexual minorities from access to marriage is unjust. But the homophobia label can serve as a potent reminder that there are two loci of moral debate—one over the morality of homosexuality, one over the morality of systematically marginalizing gays and lesbians. Since how we answer one has implications for how we answer the other, to set aside consideration of the ethics of socially marginalizing gays and lesbians until we’ve settled whether homosexuality is wrong may be to unfairly exclude from the moral discourse one of the most compelling reasons to think that homosexuality is NOT wrong. Shouting “homophobia!” may, it seems to me, be a way for marginalized gays and lesbians and their allies to demand due attention to the social justice issue.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Matters of Life and Death: A 2003 Reflection on the Invasion of Iraq
Today is Veteran's Day. Facebook is dominated by status updates reminding us to honor the soldiers who sacrificed and often died because their country called them to fight. The elementary school where my wife teaches and my children go to school is festooned with stars--each with the name of a student's family member who has or is serving in the military.
My personal relationship to this holiday has always been conflicted. It simply isn't possible for me to just repeat the common platitudes that dominate this day. Although I admire the courage and dedication of so many soldiers, and although I honor their willingness to sacrifice so much for the sake of what they take to be their duty, I'm not at all convinced that the wars this country has fought over the last half century should have been fought at all. And although I know that the history of the world would have been far more grim than it was had allied soldiers not ultimately waged war against the axis powers in World War II, I also see the descent into that war as the long culmination of an international war system in which national pride fueled needless conflict, inspired punitive treaties on the losers, and blocked the efforts to establish an international community governed by principles instead of power.
It is one thing to say that the allies did what they had to do given the circumstances. It is something else to say that the circumstances themselves were unavoidable. In my judgment, they were not. But to avoid the conditions which give rise to the necessity of war, peoples must commit to a trasformation of the character and structure of international relationships--and this simply won't happen so long as we uncritically revere the existing system or armies poised to strike.
All of this expresses matters in an abstract, intellectual way. But as I was thinking about Veteran's Day this morning, I recalled a more personal reflection that--although it wasn't written in response to Veteran's Day--really captures the essence of my conflicted relationship to the military and to the soldiers who are so often separated from their families for the sake of risking themselves on foreign soil. Shortly after the US launched its invasion of Iraq, I was invited to give a talk about my perspective on the war. At the time, my wife was only weeks away from giving birth to our first child, and so I couldn't help but reflect on the war in terms of this momentous event in my life. Here, then, in honor of Veteran's Day, is an essay from April 2003, "Matters of Life and Death":
My wife and I are expecting our first child in about a month. While American soldiers march through the sands of Iraq, risking death and shattered innocence far from the comforts of home, while Iraqi civilians huddle in terror as American troops rumble into their cities and rain death from the sky, the promise of liberation a pale hope in the face of the grim realities of war—as the terrible tragedy of war shatters the lives of so many, Tanya and I are nesting: putting up a “moose” border in the nursery, shopping for baby clothes, imagining what little Evan Alexander will look like.
There is a guilty strangeness to this juxtaposition. A week ago I read the troubled words of an American soldier who had learned, after participating in a battle in which hundreds of Iraqi attackers died, that many of those attackers were fighting for only one reason: troops loyal to Saddam Hussein threatened the lives of their wives and children if they refused to take up arms. And now that young soldier must live his life haunted by the image of women and children waiting hopelessly for their husbands to come home. Perhaps he is reminded of his own family waiting for his return, and feels a terrible solidarity with the men he has killed.
At moments I am ashamed to be happy. And then I think: No, I must be happy, now more than ever. I must let the joy descend all the way to my bones.
Somehow I must find a way to be true to both realities: the terrible reality of war, and the joyous reality of new life. I must find a way to honestly express what each of these realities means for me. But such honesty is hard. For me, as a pacifist who does not believe in war, and especially not in this war, such honesty is particularly hard. It was easier before the war began. I could oppose the war in the slim hope of persuading the U.S. government not to send our soldiers into harm’s way. Now, once they are there, I am torn between the conviction that we should not be there, and the realization that nothing good could come from abruptly turning on our heels, heading home, and leaving Iraq in ruins. This war violates some of my most sacred principles. It violates my understanding of what it means to be a Christian in this world. And yet I am paradoxically thinking that it would be best for all if we won quickly so that we could begin the difficult task of healing and rebuilding a shattered nation.
What should I say and do at such a time as this? My opposition to this war is not just theoretic. I live in fear of what it will mean for my son. Despite the promises of this government I can’t bring myself to believe that this war will make things better for him. I have long opposed wars on principle, based on my philosophical and religious commitment to nonviolence. I have long believed that wars contribute to ongoing cycles of violence, and that the only hope of escape from the scourge of war lies in creating and nurturing effective institutions of international law.
But when this country fought the first Gulf War I slept comfortably at night. Now I lie awake. Now I pace the house raging at the television, the blood pulsing in my temples. At the same moment that I am full of joy and anticipation at the prospect of being a father, I find myself full of anxiety and dread, full of fear for the future prosperity of the nation in which my child will grow. My opposition to this war has become very personal; it has become almost indistinguishable from my love for the child who is kickboxing Tanya’s bladder every night. The war has come to symbolize every fear I have about my son’s future. As I imagine anti-American sentiment spiraling out of control in the wake of this war, as I envision an American future punctuated with terrible repeats of 9/11, I want to scream out No! No! Please don’t feed that hungry spiral of violence! Please keep my baby safe!
That is part of my reality, a part that I must express if I hope to live with integrity.
A few weeks ago, when our country began its invasion of Iraq, our neighbors across the street promptly put up an American flag on their lawn. Being so new in our home, my wife and I haven’t gotten to know our neighbors very well yet, but we had a nice visit a few months back with those neighbors across the street. They’ve called us a few times since then. I think they want to be friends. A few days after the flag appeared on their lawn, an acquaintance gave me a small poster to put in my window. The poster says, simply, “No War Against Iraq.” I didn’t put the poster up.
Why not? Was it because I think that now that war is underway the best thing to do is win quickly so that we can get to work cleaning up the mess? A part of me wishes I could say that. It would make the fact that the poster lies facedown in the back of my car more honest than it is.
I’ve tried to convince myself that there is something honest about my failure to put up the poster. I know how hard it must be to have a loved one facing injury and death in a distant place. I know it not by experience, but because I feel Evan’s little hands and feet moving underneath my palm when I lay it against my wife’s abdomen, and I know how much I want to keep him safe. One day he will be eighteen, a soldier’s age. I imagine what it would be like to think of him, not only in harms way, but in service to an unjust cause. To think that would make the anguish all the more unbearable. So much better to think that his sacrifice serves some grander purpose, and if he dies he will have done so defending values I hold dear.
Perhaps those neighbors across the street have a son in Iraq; perhaps they remember when their child was kicking in the womb, and now recall with poignant fondness that time when they could keep their child safe within their own flesh. What would it do to them to see that poster in our window, to know that their neighbors think their son is a pawn in an unfair and unnecessary war? Perhaps the reason I don’t put up that poster is because I don’t want to risk challenging what I imagine to be their comforting illusions.
But that’s not it. In the long run, I think that such comforting illusions only reinforce the war footing that makes harmful cycles of violence more likely. So why don’t I put up the poster?
Here in Oklahoma, support for the war is strong, and the response to opponents of the war is often hostile. When I first moved to Oklahoma a couple of years ago I felt very out of place. Among other things, I don’t think that I had ever deliberately listened to a country song from beginning to end. A few months ago I finally began to feel my first glimmer of real connection to Oklahoma culture, or so I thought. I found a country music act that I really liked, that I actually looked forward to hearing on the radio: the Dixie Chicks. And then, just a few weeks ago, I witnessed footage of Oklahomans furiously crushing Dixie Chicks CD’s under their heels.
Whatever connection I thought I had with Oklahoma culture cracked beneath those angry feet. Their rage was inspired by Natalie Maines, the lead singer of the group, expressing open opposition to President Bush’s war policies. The feeling she expressed was a familiar one to me. “I am ashamed,” she said, “that the President of the United States is from Texas.” I am not from Texas, but I know the shame she was talking about. At a time when this nation is rallying behind the flag and expressing patriotism at a fever pitch, it is very alienating to feel ashamed of my country—to stand apart as the masses rally together crying “Yes! Yes!” when all I want to do is weep, cry out at what my beloved country is doing in the world.
I pass a kindly older man in WalMart, and he smiles. Beneath the smile I sense an expression of solidarity: at this time of war, we must stand together as Americans. I like the man instantly, but I wonder what he would think of me if he knew my opposition to the war. I wonder if his smile would transform into an expression of dismissal and contempt. I witness the growing patriotism around me, and I look in on it from the outside—and think of Hans Christian Andersen’s fable of the Little Match Girl, shivering in an alley as she magically sees into the warmth and comfort of a nearby home with its radiant Christmas tree. As long as she keeps her matchsticks burning, she is almost there, almost inside. As long as I keep silent, as long as I keep that poster facedown in my car, I can almost join in the star-spangled solidarity.
At a time when young men and women from all over this country are risking their very lives in a foreign land, I fail to honestly express my convictions because I am afraid—afraid I might alienate my neighbors; afraid that kids might see it and egg my home, or worse: leave the gleaming shards of Dixie Chicks music scattered on my lawn; afraid of what this poster would do to the safe little nest my wife and I are creating for our child. I am in awe of the kind of courage and sacrifice our soldiers are showing in Iraq. I grieve that this sacrifice is for a cause I cannot believe in.
As I live my life, anticipating with joy and hope and some fear the birth of my first child, as I put together the crib carried in by a deliveryman bubbling with enthusiasm over his own experience with new fatherhood (and showing us pictures of his baby), as I rub Tanya’s pregnant abdomen and sing to Evan through her belly button—as I live my life of comfort and joy, American soldiers are far from their families, far from the comforts of climate-controlled homes and spaghetti dinners and walks at the lake with the dog. They are off in a distant desert with sand chafing in their boots and at their necks, acting not out of their own self-interest, but because their nation has called them to serve. Some of those soldiers will not return home alive. Some will sustain physical injuries they will never fully recover from. Others will be haunted for the rest of their lives by things they have seen and done in the name of service to their nation. I can hardly imagine what that kind of sacrifice is like.
There are those who say that opponents of this war should keep quiet, out of respect for these soldiers. It would be easy for me to say that the reason I failed to put up that poster in my window is because I agree with this sentiment. But how can I honor these brave young men and women if I remain silent when I sincerely believe that their lives are being put at risk to no good end? Worse, how could I claim to honor their courage if I refuse to show even a fraction of that courage in my own life by openly expressing my convictions?
I have a son on the way. My friends tell me I will be a good father. I hope that when the time comes for me to share with him, in love, my honest understanding of the truth, I will do so without fear, rather than hide it facedown in the back seat of my car. If there is one thing that each of us can do, one thing to make this world a better place, it would be to speak the truth in love, and give others the space to do the same. Ultimately, I think that’s what fatherhood is supposed to be about.
My personal relationship to this holiday has always been conflicted. It simply isn't possible for me to just repeat the common platitudes that dominate this day. Although I admire the courage and dedication of so many soldiers, and although I honor their willingness to sacrifice so much for the sake of what they take to be their duty, I'm not at all convinced that the wars this country has fought over the last half century should have been fought at all. And although I know that the history of the world would have been far more grim than it was had allied soldiers not ultimately waged war against the axis powers in World War II, I also see the descent into that war as the long culmination of an international war system in which national pride fueled needless conflict, inspired punitive treaties on the losers, and blocked the efforts to establish an international community governed by principles instead of power.
It is one thing to say that the allies did what they had to do given the circumstances. It is something else to say that the circumstances themselves were unavoidable. In my judgment, they were not. But to avoid the conditions which give rise to the necessity of war, peoples must commit to a trasformation of the character and structure of international relationships--and this simply won't happen so long as we uncritically revere the existing system or armies poised to strike.
All of this expresses matters in an abstract, intellectual way. But as I was thinking about Veteran's Day this morning, I recalled a more personal reflection that--although it wasn't written in response to Veteran's Day--really captures the essence of my conflicted relationship to the military and to the soldiers who are so often separated from their families for the sake of risking themselves on foreign soil. Shortly after the US launched its invasion of Iraq, I was invited to give a talk about my perspective on the war. At the time, my wife was only weeks away from giving birth to our first child, and so I couldn't help but reflect on the war in terms of this momentous event in my life. Here, then, in honor of Veteran's Day, is an essay from April 2003, "Matters of Life and Death":
My wife and I are expecting our first child in about a month. While American soldiers march through the sands of Iraq, risking death and shattered innocence far from the comforts of home, while Iraqi civilians huddle in terror as American troops rumble into their cities and rain death from the sky, the promise of liberation a pale hope in the face of the grim realities of war—as the terrible tragedy of war shatters the lives of so many, Tanya and I are nesting: putting up a “moose” border in the nursery, shopping for baby clothes, imagining what little Evan Alexander will look like.
There is a guilty strangeness to this juxtaposition. A week ago I read the troubled words of an American soldier who had learned, after participating in a battle in which hundreds of Iraqi attackers died, that many of those attackers were fighting for only one reason: troops loyal to Saddam Hussein threatened the lives of their wives and children if they refused to take up arms. And now that young soldier must live his life haunted by the image of women and children waiting hopelessly for their husbands to come home. Perhaps he is reminded of his own family waiting for his return, and feels a terrible solidarity with the men he has killed.
At moments I am ashamed to be happy. And then I think: No, I must be happy, now more than ever. I must let the joy descend all the way to my bones.
Somehow I must find a way to be true to both realities: the terrible reality of war, and the joyous reality of new life. I must find a way to honestly express what each of these realities means for me. But such honesty is hard. For me, as a pacifist who does not believe in war, and especially not in this war, such honesty is particularly hard. It was easier before the war began. I could oppose the war in the slim hope of persuading the U.S. government not to send our soldiers into harm’s way. Now, once they are there, I am torn between the conviction that we should not be there, and the realization that nothing good could come from abruptly turning on our heels, heading home, and leaving Iraq in ruins. This war violates some of my most sacred principles. It violates my understanding of what it means to be a Christian in this world. And yet I am paradoxically thinking that it would be best for all if we won quickly so that we could begin the difficult task of healing and rebuilding a shattered nation.
What should I say and do at such a time as this? My opposition to this war is not just theoretic. I live in fear of what it will mean for my son. Despite the promises of this government I can’t bring myself to believe that this war will make things better for him. I have long opposed wars on principle, based on my philosophical and religious commitment to nonviolence. I have long believed that wars contribute to ongoing cycles of violence, and that the only hope of escape from the scourge of war lies in creating and nurturing effective institutions of international law.
But when this country fought the first Gulf War I slept comfortably at night. Now I lie awake. Now I pace the house raging at the television, the blood pulsing in my temples. At the same moment that I am full of joy and anticipation at the prospect of being a father, I find myself full of anxiety and dread, full of fear for the future prosperity of the nation in which my child will grow. My opposition to this war has become very personal; it has become almost indistinguishable from my love for the child who is kickboxing Tanya’s bladder every night. The war has come to symbolize every fear I have about my son’s future. As I imagine anti-American sentiment spiraling out of control in the wake of this war, as I envision an American future punctuated with terrible repeats of 9/11, I want to scream out No! No! Please don’t feed that hungry spiral of violence! Please keep my baby safe!
That is part of my reality, a part that I must express if I hope to live with integrity.
A few weeks ago, when our country began its invasion of Iraq, our neighbors across the street promptly put up an American flag on their lawn. Being so new in our home, my wife and I haven’t gotten to know our neighbors very well yet, but we had a nice visit a few months back with those neighbors across the street. They’ve called us a few times since then. I think they want to be friends. A few days after the flag appeared on their lawn, an acquaintance gave me a small poster to put in my window. The poster says, simply, “No War Against Iraq.” I didn’t put the poster up.
Why not? Was it because I think that now that war is underway the best thing to do is win quickly so that we can get to work cleaning up the mess? A part of me wishes I could say that. It would make the fact that the poster lies facedown in the back of my car more honest than it is.
I’ve tried to convince myself that there is something honest about my failure to put up the poster. I know how hard it must be to have a loved one facing injury and death in a distant place. I know it not by experience, but because I feel Evan’s little hands and feet moving underneath my palm when I lay it against my wife’s abdomen, and I know how much I want to keep him safe. One day he will be eighteen, a soldier’s age. I imagine what it would be like to think of him, not only in harms way, but in service to an unjust cause. To think that would make the anguish all the more unbearable. So much better to think that his sacrifice serves some grander purpose, and if he dies he will have done so defending values I hold dear.
Perhaps those neighbors across the street have a son in Iraq; perhaps they remember when their child was kicking in the womb, and now recall with poignant fondness that time when they could keep their child safe within their own flesh. What would it do to them to see that poster in our window, to know that their neighbors think their son is a pawn in an unfair and unnecessary war? Perhaps the reason I don’t put up that poster is because I don’t want to risk challenging what I imagine to be their comforting illusions.
But that’s not it. In the long run, I think that such comforting illusions only reinforce the war footing that makes harmful cycles of violence more likely. So why don’t I put up the poster?
Here in Oklahoma, support for the war is strong, and the response to opponents of the war is often hostile. When I first moved to Oklahoma a couple of years ago I felt very out of place. Among other things, I don’t think that I had ever deliberately listened to a country song from beginning to end. A few months ago I finally began to feel my first glimmer of real connection to Oklahoma culture, or so I thought. I found a country music act that I really liked, that I actually looked forward to hearing on the radio: the Dixie Chicks. And then, just a few weeks ago, I witnessed footage of Oklahomans furiously crushing Dixie Chicks CD’s under their heels.
Whatever connection I thought I had with Oklahoma culture cracked beneath those angry feet. Their rage was inspired by Natalie Maines, the lead singer of the group, expressing open opposition to President Bush’s war policies. The feeling she expressed was a familiar one to me. “I am ashamed,” she said, “that the President of the United States is from Texas.” I am not from Texas, but I know the shame she was talking about. At a time when this nation is rallying behind the flag and expressing patriotism at a fever pitch, it is very alienating to feel ashamed of my country—to stand apart as the masses rally together crying “Yes! Yes!” when all I want to do is weep, cry out at what my beloved country is doing in the world.
I pass a kindly older man in WalMart, and he smiles. Beneath the smile I sense an expression of solidarity: at this time of war, we must stand together as Americans. I like the man instantly, but I wonder what he would think of me if he knew my opposition to the war. I wonder if his smile would transform into an expression of dismissal and contempt. I witness the growing patriotism around me, and I look in on it from the outside—and think of Hans Christian Andersen’s fable of the Little Match Girl, shivering in an alley as she magically sees into the warmth and comfort of a nearby home with its radiant Christmas tree. As long as she keeps her matchsticks burning, she is almost there, almost inside. As long as I keep silent, as long as I keep that poster facedown in my car, I can almost join in the star-spangled solidarity.
At a time when young men and women from all over this country are risking their very lives in a foreign land, I fail to honestly express my convictions because I am afraid—afraid I might alienate my neighbors; afraid that kids might see it and egg my home, or worse: leave the gleaming shards of Dixie Chicks music scattered on my lawn; afraid of what this poster would do to the safe little nest my wife and I are creating for our child. I am in awe of the kind of courage and sacrifice our soldiers are showing in Iraq. I grieve that this sacrifice is for a cause I cannot believe in.
As I live my life, anticipating with joy and hope and some fear the birth of my first child, as I put together the crib carried in by a deliveryman bubbling with enthusiasm over his own experience with new fatherhood (and showing us pictures of his baby), as I rub Tanya’s pregnant abdomen and sing to Evan through her belly button—as I live my life of comfort and joy, American soldiers are far from their families, far from the comforts of climate-controlled homes and spaghetti dinners and walks at the lake with the dog. They are off in a distant desert with sand chafing in their boots and at their necks, acting not out of their own self-interest, but because their nation has called them to serve. Some of those soldiers will not return home alive. Some will sustain physical injuries they will never fully recover from. Others will be haunted for the rest of their lives by things they have seen and done in the name of service to their nation. I can hardly imagine what that kind of sacrifice is like.
There are those who say that opponents of this war should keep quiet, out of respect for these soldiers. It would be easy for me to say that the reason I failed to put up that poster in my window is because I agree with this sentiment. But how can I honor these brave young men and women if I remain silent when I sincerely believe that their lives are being put at risk to no good end? Worse, how could I claim to honor their courage if I refuse to show even a fraction of that courage in my own life by openly expressing my convictions?
I have a son on the way. My friends tell me I will be a good father. I hope that when the time comes for me to share with him, in love, my honest understanding of the truth, I will do so without fear, rather than hide it facedown in the back seat of my car. If there is one thing that each of us can do, one thing to make this world a better place, it would be to speak the truth in love, and give others the space to do the same. Ultimately, I think that’s what fatherhood is supposed to be about.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Brief Question about Fighting for Change and the Ethico-Religious Hope
Just a little while ago I stumbled across the following quote from an article by Rabbi Michael Lerner:
What both are talking about here relates to what I refer to, in Is God a Delusion?, as "the ethico-religious hope"--that is, the hope that in some fundamental way the universe is on the side of the good. In my book, I define God by reference to this hope: belief in God is belief that there exists that which fulfills this hope--or, put in more pragmatic terms, to have faith in God is to live one's life as if there is that which fulfills this hope.
There is no question in my mind that what Lerner and King are referring to can have enormously rich pragmatic fruits, in the sense of motivating people to face entrenched injustices and powerful opposition--and to do so without retreating behind a gun or a terrorist bomb, but with a commitment to honesty and nonviolence. The sense that the universe is somehow fundamentally on the side of the good can give people the courage to trust in good means to attempt good ends against seemingly impossible odds.
It doesn't have to be "God" in the traditional sense (and there are some conceptions of "God"--as I've argued in my book and elsewhere--that don't align with this hope in any way that could be expected to bear such fruits). But my question--and it is a serious one, not merely rhetorical--is whether there is in materialistic/naturalistic worldviews something that can serve the same motivating function. Could the civil rights movement have been built up around a secular humanist idea that would do the same work--in terms of motivating courageous and persistent nonviolence in the effort to transform the world for the better--that King's invocation of a God of agapic love served?
In part, my question is sparked by the fact that I am starting to read Greg Epstein's impassioned defense of secular humanism, Good Without God, which is in part an attempt to inspire humanists to stand together nonviolently and compassionately against the social forces that continue to marginalize those who reject theistic belief. He takes as one of his models Martin Luther King; but in so doing is Epstein implicitly embracing some non-theistic variant of the ethico-religious hope? If so, can it be sustained from his secular humanist foundations? And if not, is there some alternative to this hope, something consistent with seeing the universe as fundamentally indifferent to the good, that can motivate a commitment to relying on morally good means in the pursuit of morally good ends even when doing so seems utterly "unrealistic"?
The most important changes in our country have come about because people were willing to fight for what everyone supposedly knew to be “unrealistic” (e.g., ending segregation, ending ten thousand years of unchallenged male supremacy and sexism, legitimating gay and lesbian lives, building an environmental movement, and the list goes on).
Realism is idolatry — believing in God is believing that there is some Force in the Universe (some of us call it God) that makes possible the transformation from “that which is” to “that which could and should be.”It immediately brought to mind the following passage from Martin Luther King's 1956 speech at UC Berkeley, "The Power of Nonviolence":
I am quite aware of the fact that there are persons who believe firmly in nonviolence who do not believe in a personal God, but I think every person who believes in nonviolent resistance believes somehow that the universe in some form is on the side of justice. That there is something unfolding in the universe whether one speaks of it as an unconscious process, or whether one speaks of it as some unmoved mover, or whether someone speaks of it as a personal God. There is something in the universe that unfolds for justice and so in Montgomery we felt somehow that as we struggled we had consmic companionship. And this was one of the things that kept the people together, the belief that the univers is on the side of justice.
What both are talking about here relates to what I refer to, in Is God a Delusion?, as "the ethico-religious hope"--that is, the hope that in some fundamental way the universe is on the side of the good. In my book, I define God by reference to this hope: belief in God is belief that there exists that which fulfills this hope--or, put in more pragmatic terms, to have faith in God is to live one's life as if there is that which fulfills this hope.
There is no question in my mind that what Lerner and King are referring to can have enormously rich pragmatic fruits, in the sense of motivating people to face entrenched injustices and powerful opposition--and to do so without retreating behind a gun or a terrorist bomb, but with a commitment to honesty and nonviolence. The sense that the universe is somehow fundamentally on the side of the good can give people the courage to trust in good means to attempt good ends against seemingly impossible odds.
It doesn't have to be "God" in the traditional sense (and there are some conceptions of "God"--as I've argued in my book and elsewhere--that don't align with this hope in any way that could be expected to bear such fruits). But my question--and it is a serious one, not merely rhetorical--is whether there is in materialistic/naturalistic worldviews something that can serve the same motivating function. Could the civil rights movement have been built up around a secular humanist idea that would do the same work--in terms of motivating courageous and persistent nonviolence in the effort to transform the world for the better--that King's invocation of a God of agapic love served?
In part, my question is sparked by the fact that I am starting to read Greg Epstein's impassioned defense of secular humanism, Good Without God, which is in part an attempt to inspire humanists to stand together nonviolently and compassionately against the social forces that continue to marginalize those who reject theistic belief. He takes as one of his models Martin Luther King; but in so doing is Epstein implicitly embracing some non-theistic variant of the ethico-religious hope? If so, can it be sustained from his secular humanist foundations? And if not, is there some alternative to this hope, something consistent with seeing the universe as fundamentally indifferent to the good, that can motivate a commitment to relying on morally good means in the pursuit of morally good ends even when doing so seems utterly "unrealistic"?
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Excerpt from That Damned Book: Efficacious Grace and Rational Freedom
Since participants on this blog seem to have an ongoing interest in issues of free will, I thought I'd share something from the chapter I'm working on right now from That Damned Book. The excerpt is from the first of two chapters in which we critically assess the argument that God will not save all because to do so would require Him to trump the freedom of the unregenerate in a morally unacceptable way. In the chapter from which this excerpt is drawn, we consider the first of two responses to this "liberal" justification for the doctrine of hell--namely, the response which invokes the concept of "efficacious grace" (roughly, a divine act which guarantees the salvation of the sinner by ensuring that the sinner responds favorably to God's offer of loving union with Him). In this excerpt, we begin to consider the case for the view that it is possible for God to bestow efficacious grace. Once we narrow in on the "Thomistic" view on this matter (meaning the view endorsed by followers of St. Thomas Aquinas), we offer an account of the Thomistic view of freedom. It is this part of the excerpt that I think may be of special interest to readers of this blog.
That God can bestow efficacious grace was assumed by most older dogmaticians, whether Protestant or Catholic, who discussed the matter. But the Catholics were divided over the nature of efficacious grace. Adherents to the older Thomist and Augustinian tradition took such grace to differ in kind from so-called “merely sufficient grace” (which gave sinners all they needed for salvation other than the appropriate subjective act of will). Followers of Molina, however, held that efficacious grace does not differ in kind from sufficient grace, but differs only in virtue of the fortuitous situation the creature is placed in when receiving sufficient grace.
While volumes of scholastic theology have been written on this dispute, for our purposes a brief overview is sufficient. According to the Thomists and their Protestant followers, when God grants efficacious grace, what He does is guarantee conversion and regeneration by putting creatures in a state that influences their motives such that they have every reason to respond favorably to the offer of salvation and no reason not to. But if this is what efficacious grace involves, it raises important questions about the nature of creaturely freedom. Most significantly, one may wonder if efficacious grace is consistent with libertarian freedom—by which we mean, roughly, the power to act or not act on motives that incline but do not determine the will. Freedom in this libertarian sense exists only if, when one makes a choice, one could have chosen otherwise—that is, there is some possible world in which one chooses otherwise.
In affirming that God can grant efficacious grace, the Thomists did not mean thereby entirely to deny creatures freedom in something like this sense. Rather, they meant simply to limit its scope. Specifically, the Thomistic view is that what we call libertarian freedom is a coherent understanding of freedom only when the creature confronts conflicting motives for action. It does not extend to circumstances in which the creature has every reason to pursue a given course of action and no reason not to. Under such circumstances the Thomistic view is that the will of the creature is not merely inclined towards the given action but determined to do it. The action remains wholly voluntary, but there is no possible world in which an agent who has every motive to do A and no motive not to nevertheless refrains from doing A—and so, it seems, the action is determined even though voluntary, and so conforms to what is usually labeled “compatibilist freedom” by contemporary philosophers.
But it strikes us that this contemporary language implies something Thomists did not mean to imply—namely that there are two kinds of freedom, compatibilist and libertarian. We find it more in tune with Thomistic ideas to say that freedom simply operates differently under conditions of uniformity of motives than it does under conditions in which motives conflict. In the latter case, free choice looks like what we think of when we speak of libertarian freedom, whereas in the former case it looks like what we think of when we speak of compatibilist freedom.
If this is right, God could guarantee that the unregenerate freely-but-inevitably make the subjective choices necessary for salvation. For Thomists, this is the essence of how efficacious grace works: it brings all the creature’s motives into conformity with the choice of pursuing loving union with God above all things.
The Molinists, however, objected to the Thomistic view of efficacious grace because they took it that freedom has a libertarian character even under conditions of uniform motives. Granted this strong notion of libertarian freedom, it would initially seem impossible for God to give efficacious grace without first extinguishing the creature’s freedom. But the Molinists argued, on the contrary, that (i) God has middle knowledge, and (ii) for every rational creature there is a possible world in which she would freely (in the strong libertarian sense) respond favorably to God’s offer of salvation. That God has middle knowledge means He knows, for any creature X He might create, what X would freely do in any circumstance God might put X in. Thus God can give efficacious grace to X by creating that world in which He knows, by middle knowledge, that X would favorably respond to grace.
For a number of reasons we are unconvinced by this Molinist doctrine. First, we are not convinced that divine omniscience entails middle knowledge. It is not clear to us that, in the absence of an actual (libertarian) free choice made under an actual set of circumstances, there is any truth of the matter with respect to what the agent would freely choose in the libertarian sense. Furthermore, as William Lane Craig has shown, supposing that God does have middle knowledge does not, by itself, demonstrate that He can give efficacious grace. Hence, we will not argue here that efficacious grace is possible on the Molinist view of freedom. Given the strong libertarian perspective of the Molinists, we think a different argument for universalism (which we discuss in the next chapter), is more compelling than the argument from efficacious grace developed here.
In this chapter, then, we will argue that God has available to Him a morally permissible means of bringing it about that all a creature’s motives uniformly favor conversion. If so, then on a Thomistic view of freedom there is a morally permissible means for God to guarantee that all freely make the choices necessary for salvation.
So, is there a means whereby God could, without moral fault, bring about in a creature uniformity of salvation-inducing motives? To answer this, we think it may be helpful to develop a fuller picture of the Thomistic view of freedom by way of a contemporary philosopher—Thomas Talbott—whose thinking is very close on this matter to that of the Thomists.
Like the Thomists, Talbott insists that one cannot imagine anyone freely choosing what they have no motive to choose and every motive not to choose. Such a choice, for Talbott, is incoherent. If one is in a condition such that all of one’s motives converge on a single choice, then Talbott thinks this choice becomes inevitable.
On Talbott’s view such a choice may nevertheless be truly free—but only if certain conditions are met. Talbott argues that if ignorance or deception entails that one chooses based on misrepresentations of the alternatives (such that what one thinks one is choosing is different from what one is actually doing), then one’s freedom is impeded. And if controlling affective states entail that an agent is determined to choose one option even if informed deliberation would come down in favor of another, then the agent is “in bondage to desire” and, again, not truly free. But if someone is “freed from all ignorance, deception, and bondage to desire,” the agent’s choice is free even if all motives converge on a single option, thereby making the choice of that option inevitable.
But if all of this is right, then there will be different ways to produce conformity of motives, not all of which should be assessed in the same way. Consider the following case. Suppose Jenny grows up in a dystopian future where all children are fed a highly addictive drug from infancy. They are taught (falsely) that the drug is a medicine they need to stay healthy—while in fact it is used by a tyrannical regime to control the people. Given her addiction and beliefs, Jenny’s motives all converge on the choice to continue taking the drug. But insofar as this choice is governed by deception and addiction, it is not free in Talbott’s sense.
But suppose a resistance group reveals to Jenny the truth, so that she now knows the drug is harmful but remains addicted. She now has reason-based motives to stop taking the drug, but they are impotent because she is in bondage to her addiction. Perhaps the resistance gives her a counter-drug that weakens the strength of her addiction but does not shut down the cravings. Now, whenever she is in the vicinity of the drug, she faces an inner struggle. Sometimes, with the right help and support (and a bit of luck) she can resist her craving; but usually she falls prey to it, weeping in horror at her own weakness. At this point we might say she has some measure of freedom—but it remains constrained by the hold the drug continues to exert.
But then imagine the resistance group finds a way to break her addiction. Now she neither craves the drug nor thinks taking it is a good idea. Let’s suppose, further, that she has no other motive to continue taking it but many reasons not to: concern for her health and continued freedom from addiction, gratitude to her liberators, a desire to oppose the unjust regime, etc. Suppose, in other words, that once she is finally freed of her addiction all her motives converge on a single choice: not to take the drug. Even if this means (as Talbott and the Thomists believe) that her rejecting the drug is inevitable, we wouldn’t want to say her choice isn’t free. Rather, we’d say that, with respect to this issue, she is truly free for the first time.
This example shows, we think, that the “libertarian” and “compatibilist” labels are both inadequate for the sense of freedom that Talbott champions. Prior to help from the resistance, Jenny’s choice to take the drug would be free in the compatibilist sense—but not free in Talbott’s sense. After her final liberation, her choice to refuse the drug is free in Talbott’s sense—but not in the libertarian sense (which assumes the possibility of having chosen otherwise). What makes the choice free in the one case but not in the other is that reason is no longer impeded from playing the role it ought to play in decision-making. Hence, we think the best label for this conception of freedom is “rational freedom.” And given Aquinas’s emphasis on the natural ordering of the will to follow reason, we think such “rational freedom”—which treats only some cases of uniform motives determining one’s choices as free—best captures the Thomistic view.
Underlying this view of freedom are several presuppositions, which can be summarized as follows: (i) Values are objective, such that there are objectively good or best choices and objectively bad ones; (ii) the rational faculty makes judgments in accord with its finite grasp of this objective order of values; (iii) the will can be controlled by non-rational forces (such as addictions, childhood coping mechanisms, entrenched habits); (iv) the will is naturally ordered to choose in accord with rational judgments, such that in the absence of non-rational controlling factors the will always chooses in accord with reason.
These presuppositions imply, in brief, that the will is naturally ordered to follow reason (its “default setting,” if you will, even if the will can be reprogrammed), and that reason in turn is naturally ordered to discern the objective good. On this view, choices are free to the extent that both will and reason can operate in accord with their nature—that is, there is nothing (such as “ignorance, deception, or bondage to desire”) that impedes them from acting on their natural teleology. This, we think, captures the essence of freedom as it is understood both by the Thomists and, more recently, by Talbott.
In any event, what all of this shows is that one can bring about uniformity of motives both in ways that impede “rational” freedom and in ways that do not. As such, if efficacious grace is a divine act of producing uniformity of salvation-favoring motives in the unregenerate, this divine act may or may not impede freedom in the Thomistic sense—depending on whether this uniformity is produced by inducing false beliefs and/or affective states at odds with reason, or whether it is produced by revealing truth and removing affective barriers to acting on what reason discerns.
Given this perspective, the question is not only whether God can bring about uniformity of salvation-favoring motives in the unregenerate, but whether He can do so in a way that promotes rather than impedes rational freedom. In fact, we think it falls within the power of an omnipotent being to do both. Hence, not only do we think it is within God’s power to bestow efficacious grace. We think it is within God’s power to do so in a way that does not violate the freedom of the unregenerate—at least if “freedom” is understood in this Thomistic sense.
That God can bestow efficacious grace was assumed by most older dogmaticians, whether Protestant or Catholic, who discussed the matter. But the Catholics were divided over the nature of efficacious grace. Adherents to the older Thomist and Augustinian tradition took such grace to differ in kind from so-called “merely sufficient grace” (which gave sinners all they needed for salvation other than the appropriate subjective act of will). Followers of Molina, however, held that efficacious grace does not differ in kind from sufficient grace, but differs only in virtue of the fortuitous situation the creature is placed in when receiving sufficient grace.
While volumes of scholastic theology have been written on this dispute, for our purposes a brief overview is sufficient. According to the Thomists and their Protestant followers, when God grants efficacious grace, what He does is guarantee conversion and regeneration by putting creatures in a state that influences their motives such that they have every reason to respond favorably to the offer of salvation and no reason not to. But if this is what efficacious grace involves, it raises important questions about the nature of creaturely freedom. Most significantly, one may wonder if efficacious grace is consistent with libertarian freedom—by which we mean, roughly, the power to act or not act on motives that incline but do not determine the will. Freedom in this libertarian sense exists only if, when one makes a choice, one could have chosen otherwise—that is, there is some possible world in which one chooses otherwise.
In affirming that God can grant efficacious grace, the Thomists did not mean thereby entirely to deny creatures freedom in something like this sense. Rather, they meant simply to limit its scope. Specifically, the Thomistic view is that what we call libertarian freedom is a coherent understanding of freedom only when the creature confronts conflicting motives for action. It does not extend to circumstances in which the creature has every reason to pursue a given course of action and no reason not to. Under such circumstances the Thomistic view is that the will of the creature is not merely inclined towards the given action but determined to do it. The action remains wholly voluntary, but there is no possible world in which an agent who has every motive to do A and no motive not to nevertheless refrains from doing A—and so, it seems, the action is determined even though voluntary, and so conforms to what is usually labeled “compatibilist freedom” by contemporary philosophers.
But it strikes us that this contemporary language implies something Thomists did not mean to imply—namely that there are two kinds of freedom, compatibilist and libertarian. We find it more in tune with Thomistic ideas to say that freedom simply operates differently under conditions of uniformity of motives than it does under conditions in which motives conflict. In the latter case, free choice looks like what we think of when we speak of libertarian freedom, whereas in the former case it looks like what we think of when we speak of compatibilist freedom.
If this is right, God could guarantee that the unregenerate freely-but-inevitably make the subjective choices necessary for salvation. For Thomists, this is the essence of how efficacious grace works: it brings all the creature’s motives into conformity with the choice of pursuing loving union with God above all things.
The Molinists, however, objected to the Thomistic view of efficacious grace because they took it that freedom has a libertarian character even under conditions of uniform motives. Granted this strong notion of libertarian freedom, it would initially seem impossible for God to give efficacious grace without first extinguishing the creature’s freedom. But the Molinists argued, on the contrary, that (i) God has middle knowledge, and (ii) for every rational creature there is a possible world in which she would freely (in the strong libertarian sense) respond favorably to God’s offer of salvation. That God has middle knowledge means He knows, for any creature X He might create, what X would freely do in any circumstance God might put X in. Thus God can give efficacious grace to X by creating that world in which He knows, by middle knowledge, that X would favorably respond to grace.
For a number of reasons we are unconvinced by this Molinist doctrine. First, we are not convinced that divine omniscience entails middle knowledge. It is not clear to us that, in the absence of an actual (libertarian) free choice made under an actual set of circumstances, there is any truth of the matter with respect to what the agent would freely choose in the libertarian sense. Furthermore, as William Lane Craig has shown, supposing that God does have middle knowledge does not, by itself, demonstrate that He can give efficacious grace. Hence, we will not argue here that efficacious grace is possible on the Molinist view of freedom. Given the strong libertarian perspective of the Molinists, we think a different argument for universalism (which we discuss in the next chapter), is more compelling than the argument from efficacious grace developed here.
In this chapter, then, we will argue that God has available to Him a morally permissible means of bringing it about that all a creature’s motives uniformly favor conversion. If so, then on a Thomistic view of freedom there is a morally permissible means for God to guarantee that all freely make the choices necessary for salvation.
So, is there a means whereby God could, without moral fault, bring about in a creature uniformity of salvation-inducing motives? To answer this, we think it may be helpful to develop a fuller picture of the Thomistic view of freedom by way of a contemporary philosopher—Thomas Talbott—whose thinking is very close on this matter to that of the Thomists.
Like the Thomists, Talbott insists that one cannot imagine anyone freely choosing what they have no motive to choose and every motive not to choose. Such a choice, for Talbott, is incoherent. If one is in a condition such that all of one’s motives converge on a single choice, then Talbott thinks this choice becomes inevitable.
On Talbott’s view such a choice may nevertheless be truly free—but only if certain conditions are met. Talbott argues that if ignorance or deception entails that one chooses based on misrepresentations of the alternatives (such that what one thinks one is choosing is different from what one is actually doing), then one’s freedom is impeded. And if controlling affective states entail that an agent is determined to choose one option even if informed deliberation would come down in favor of another, then the agent is “in bondage to desire” and, again, not truly free. But if someone is “freed from all ignorance, deception, and bondage to desire,” the agent’s choice is free even if all motives converge on a single option, thereby making the choice of that option inevitable.
But if all of this is right, then there will be different ways to produce conformity of motives, not all of which should be assessed in the same way. Consider the following case. Suppose Jenny grows up in a dystopian future where all children are fed a highly addictive drug from infancy. They are taught (falsely) that the drug is a medicine they need to stay healthy—while in fact it is used by a tyrannical regime to control the people. Given her addiction and beliefs, Jenny’s motives all converge on the choice to continue taking the drug. But insofar as this choice is governed by deception and addiction, it is not free in Talbott’s sense.
But suppose a resistance group reveals to Jenny the truth, so that she now knows the drug is harmful but remains addicted. She now has reason-based motives to stop taking the drug, but they are impotent because she is in bondage to her addiction. Perhaps the resistance gives her a counter-drug that weakens the strength of her addiction but does not shut down the cravings. Now, whenever she is in the vicinity of the drug, she faces an inner struggle. Sometimes, with the right help and support (and a bit of luck) she can resist her craving; but usually she falls prey to it, weeping in horror at her own weakness. At this point we might say she has some measure of freedom—but it remains constrained by the hold the drug continues to exert.
But then imagine the resistance group finds a way to break her addiction. Now she neither craves the drug nor thinks taking it is a good idea. Let’s suppose, further, that she has no other motive to continue taking it but many reasons not to: concern for her health and continued freedom from addiction, gratitude to her liberators, a desire to oppose the unjust regime, etc. Suppose, in other words, that once she is finally freed of her addiction all her motives converge on a single choice: not to take the drug. Even if this means (as Talbott and the Thomists believe) that her rejecting the drug is inevitable, we wouldn’t want to say her choice isn’t free. Rather, we’d say that, with respect to this issue, she is truly free for the first time.
This example shows, we think, that the “libertarian” and “compatibilist” labels are both inadequate for the sense of freedom that Talbott champions. Prior to help from the resistance, Jenny’s choice to take the drug would be free in the compatibilist sense—but not free in Talbott’s sense. After her final liberation, her choice to refuse the drug is free in Talbott’s sense—but not in the libertarian sense (which assumes the possibility of having chosen otherwise). What makes the choice free in the one case but not in the other is that reason is no longer impeded from playing the role it ought to play in decision-making. Hence, we think the best label for this conception of freedom is “rational freedom.” And given Aquinas’s emphasis on the natural ordering of the will to follow reason, we think such “rational freedom”—which treats only some cases of uniform motives determining one’s choices as free—best captures the Thomistic view.
Underlying this view of freedom are several presuppositions, which can be summarized as follows: (i) Values are objective, such that there are objectively good or best choices and objectively bad ones; (ii) the rational faculty makes judgments in accord with its finite grasp of this objective order of values; (iii) the will can be controlled by non-rational forces (such as addictions, childhood coping mechanisms, entrenched habits); (iv) the will is naturally ordered to choose in accord with rational judgments, such that in the absence of non-rational controlling factors the will always chooses in accord with reason.
These presuppositions imply, in brief, that the will is naturally ordered to follow reason (its “default setting,” if you will, even if the will can be reprogrammed), and that reason in turn is naturally ordered to discern the objective good. On this view, choices are free to the extent that both will and reason can operate in accord with their nature—that is, there is nothing (such as “ignorance, deception, or bondage to desire”) that impedes them from acting on their natural teleology. This, we think, captures the essence of freedom as it is understood both by the Thomists and, more recently, by Talbott.
In any event, what all of this shows is that one can bring about uniformity of motives both in ways that impede “rational” freedom and in ways that do not. As such, if efficacious grace is a divine act of producing uniformity of salvation-favoring motives in the unregenerate, this divine act may or may not impede freedom in the Thomistic sense—depending on whether this uniformity is produced by inducing false beliefs and/or affective states at odds with reason, or whether it is produced by revealing truth and removing affective barriers to acting on what reason discerns.
Given this perspective, the question is not only whether God can bring about uniformity of salvation-favoring motives in the unregenerate, but whether He can do so in a way that promotes rather than impedes rational freedom. In fact, we think it falls within the power of an omnipotent being to do both. Hence, not only do we think it is within God’s power to bestow efficacious grace. We think it is within God’s power to do so in a way that does not violate the freedom of the unregenerate—at least if “freedom” is understood in this Thomistic sense.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Blog Milestone
Well, not really. Since I just started monitoring blog statistics in June of this year, any statistical milestones are a bit arbitrary insofar as they only represent a few months of the blog's history. Still, it was cool to note that the blog hit 20,000 page views earlier today. If only my book would sell as many copies...
From the Archives: The Parable of the Spaceship
Last week, my philosophy of religion class considered pragmatic arguments for religious belief--including the arguments articulated by William James (especially in The Will to Believe). It so happens that the view of "faith" that I defend in Is God a Delusion? is very influenced by James's pragmatic approach. At one point, as I was writing the chapter on faith for the book, I wrote up a kind of parable that was intended to capture the Jamesian picture of our human predicament as it relates to religious belief (slightly modified to include, as part of the pragmatic dilemma humans confront, an important thematic distinction in my book, namely Plutarch's distinction between "religion" and "superstition"--or what might be better called the religion of hope and the religion of fear). The parable ended up not making it into the final book, but I did post it on the blog back in 2008, before the book even came out. Since many current readers of this blog have likely never seen it, and since it has bearing on what we've been doing recently in my class, I reprint it now:
Imagine that you abruptly wake up to find yourself on an enormous spaceship. Earth appears through one of the viewports as a diminishing globe—only less blue than it looks in the photos you’ve seen, as if you’re looking at it through a brownish film. You have no idea how you got here. You begin to explore, opening doors at random. You find a kitchen, an exercise room, several bedrooms, and other rooms with strange equipment. Some doors are locked.
As you explore, you begin to meet others who, like yourself, have no memory of how they got here. The first people you meet are a middle-aged woman named Jane, who reminds you of your favorite aunt, and a young man named Paul. Together you follow the sound of voices to what looks almost like a classroom. A dozen people have gathered there. You join them. More people trickle in, until your numbers swell to about fifty.
Eventually, several groups of intrepid explorers head off to see if they can learn more. Your own explorations are interrupted by a scream. Following the sound, you find a smashed-in door leading to a deep shaft. At the bottom is Paul, his neck obviously broken.
Having no way to reach him, you gather in the classroom with others who were close enough to hear the scream, and you await the return of the rest. After a time, one of them—whom you’ve learned is a college student named Joe—returns. He says he’s done a complete circuit of every level and found nobody else, certainly nothing like a crew. “If there are space aliens flying this thing, they’re hiding behind the locked doors.”
But then, a few minutes later, Jane returns, full of excitement. “I’ve met them!” she announces. People gather around. “Well, I didn’t actually see them. It’s like they exist in another dimension. But they were able to…talk to me…sort of. What they did was make pictures in my head. From what I could gather, there’s been some kind of catastrophe. A nuclear war, maybe. I think the aliens were studying Earth when it happened and decided to save as many of us as they could. There are dozens of ships, and they…beamed us up. I guess the process is disorienting. Wipes your short-term memory. Anyway, we’re being transported to a new home. They’ve used their technology to make the ship as comfortable as they could. But some doors are locked for our safety. We shouldn’t try to go in them.” Jane pauses and shrugs. “That’s it. And I’m not sure I got it all right. It was weird, all these pictures in my head.”
Her story elicits considerable heated discussion. Jane is shocked to hear about Paul’s fate, but takes it as evidence that her visions were honest. Someone points out that her experience sounds suspiciously like hallucinating. Someone else asks if she’s ever taken LSD, which elicits a few chuckles. Jane looks away, turning red, but doesn’t answer.
More explorers return without much to report. And then a frazzled young man, Chris, stumbles in. His story is similar to Jane’s, but with important differences. “They were getting in my head, man. Putting pictures there. Forcing me to see stuff I didn’t want to see. It’s like, I saw explosions, all over the planet. And then their ships were swooping down and suckin’ people up with beams of light. They destroyed the planet, man. Alien invasion! And now they’ve snagged a few of us and they’re taking us to some other place. We’re gonna be zoo exhibits.”
Jane shakes her head. “No, no. You’ve misunderstood.”
“This is nuts,” says Steve, a chemistry professor. “Space aliens? I doubt it. This is some kind of experiment. Someone perfectly human has built this thing to test our psychological reactions or something. These…visions…are probably some sort of post-hypnotic suggestion.”
As hours stretch into days, people stake out bedrooms and establish routines. Steve leads a cadre of “investigators” in a systematic exploration of the ship. They map and describe it, and eventually call a meeting where they report their discoveries. One significant discovery is a room where they can regulate the ship’s temperature, humidity, and light levels. They also note that some of the unlocked rooms contain dangerous machines. “Joe nearly got electrocuted,” Steve explains. “And the nearest kitchen is running low on food. We’re gonna need to find some other food source pretty soon.”
“But what does it mean?” you ask. “Why are we here? Are we zoo specimens taken by hostile aliens, or refugees rescued by friendly ones? Or lab rats in some experiment?”
Joe shrugs. “Who knows? All we can do is describe what this place is like. If you want to know what it all means, ask the mystics over there.” He points to Jane and Chris.
“The mystics are idiots,” Steve snaps. “If we’re gonna survive we need to figure this out.”
“Maybe we can’t,” says Jane.
“Yes, we can. There’s a perfectly…human explanation for all this. We just need more information. We need to break down those locked doors.’”
“No way, man!” Chris rises to his feet, looking fierce.
“Chris is right,” says Jane. “They’re locked for our safety.”
“So says mystic Jane.”
“But remember what happened the first day. That young man who broke his neck.”
“Paul was a reckless idiot. We’ll be careful. We’ve got to figure out what’s going on.”
“I’ve told you what’s going on. They talked to me.”
“Convenient that they only talked to you.”
“Chris, too. Maybe only some minds are receptive.”
Steve rolls his eyes. “Let’s suppose they did communicate with you. Some kind of woo-woo ESP. Why should we trust them? They sucked us from our homes.”
“To save our lives.”
“So says mystic Jane. Mystic Chris has a different interpretation, as I recall.”
“If we need more information,” Jane says, “let’s try to communicate with them again. I was in that room with all the pillows—the meditation room—when they first contacted me. Let’s go back there, try talking to them.”
“A waste of time,” Steve huffs. “If they exist at all, they obviously can’t or won’t do more than put pictures in the heads of a couple of screwballs.”
Jane sighs in frustration. “It’s hard to understand them, but I think they exhausted their ability to affect our dimension when they altered the ship to make it suitable for us. But that doesn’t mean they’re not helping. They can still get the ship to its destination. The drive systems operate in both their dimension and ours.”
“How convenient.” Joe shakes his head. “If you’re right, they might as well not exist as far as life on this ship is concerned. If we’re going to deal with that, we need to help ourselves. Let’s figure out how the ship works, what the dangers are, how to control them. I’m with Steve. We gotta start breaking down doors.”
“They’ll kill us, man,” Chris says. “Just like they took out Paul. You start going where they don’t want us to go, they’ll get mad. They’ll blast us. Not just you. These bastards are nasty. They’ll take it out on all of us.”
“Yeah, right,” says Steve.
“I’m serious, man. We gotta keep these buggers happy. We’re in their power. You start opening doors, I’m gonna have to stop you, man.”
“Just try it.” Steve looks around the room. “Who’s with me?” he says again.
And now, finally, the moment is here. You have to decide what to do. Do you join Steve and start breaking down doors? Do you join Jane in the meditation room? Do you join Chris in trying to stop Steve? Do you decide to ignore all of them and head to the kitchen for some soup?
Let’s suppose you like Jane. She seems a decent person, and her story of what is happening is certainly more attractive than Chris’s. If she’s right, then going to the meditation room with her might uncover some new insight. And so you decide to go, in the hope that her story is on the right track, that there are benevolent aliens guiding the ship, aliens you can trust.
Suppose you go with Jane. Suppose that while you’re sitting in the meditation room, silently asking for the aliens to speak to you, you experience a momentary glimmer of something. It feels like someone is there, except that you can’t see or hear anything. Jane, meanwhile, is ecstatic. “They’re talking!” she says. “They’re worried about Steve and Chris. They don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
The feeling you have might just be the power of suggestion. Jane might be hallucinating. For all you know, Steve might be right about things, or Chris. There’s no evidence that clearly speaks one way or the other. But you’ve sensed something. You trusted Jane enough to follow her to the meditation room, and it produced what felt like contact with someone. You could shrug and walk away. Go get soup. Maybe Jane’s delusion is just rubbing off on you. But you hope otherwise.
You turn to Jane. “What’s it like? Talking to them?”
“Wonderful,” she says. “They want to know us, to be our friends. And it makes it so much better, knowing they’re there and mean us well. You know? It’s all so frightening, otherwise.” She sighs. “Do you hear them at all?”
“I thought, maybe, a little.”
She smiles. “It’s a start. Keep listening for them. In the meantime, just know you can trust them.”
Let’s suppose you do just as she says. Suppose that you orient your life aboard ship in terms of Jane’s teachings, in the hope that she’s right. You decide, out of hope, to live as if her teachings are true. But since her teachings are about benevolent aliens who are looking out for the denizens of the ship, orienting your life in terms of those teachings means trusting the aliens Jane says are there.
And this means rejecting Chris’ claims about nasty aliens that need to be appeased on pain of retaliation. While it doesn’t mean blocking Steve and his group from finding out what they can about the ship, and while it certainly doesn't mean rejecting their findings, it might mean taking seriously the idea that the locked doors are locked for a good reason. But mostly, it means two things: continuing the practice of listening for their voices in the hope that a relationship with them will be possible, and finding some comfort in the promise that the ship is taking you, in the end, to a safe harbor.
And here is the question: Could a morally decent, reasonable person follow this path? If you apply the reasoning of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris to this parable, the answer would seem to be no. After all, Jane is training people to believe beyond the evidence, and therefore priming them to become followers of Chris and his extremism. Right?
Or have Dawkins and Harris missed something important?
Imagine that you abruptly wake up to find yourself on an enormous spaceship. Earth appears through one of the viewports as a diminishing globe—only less blue than it looks in the photos you’ve seen, as if you’re looking at it through a brownish film. You have no idea how you got here. You begin to explore, opening doors at random. You find a kitchen, an exercise room, several bedrooms, and other rooms with strange equipment. Some doors are locked.
As you explore, you begin to meet others who, like yourself, have no memory of how they got here. The first people you meet are a middle-aged woman named Jane, who reminds you of your favorite aunt, and a young man named Paul. Together you follow the sound of voices to what looks almost like a classroom. A dozen people have gathered there. You join them. More people trickle in, until your numbers swell to about fifty.
Eventually, several groups of intrepid explorers head off to see if they can learn more. Your own explorations are interrupted by a scream. Following the sound, you find a smashed-in door leading to a deep shaft. At the bottom is Paul, his neck obviously broken.
Having no way to reach him, you gather in the classroom with others who were close enough to hear the scream, and you await the return of the rest. After a time, one of them—whom you’ve learned is a college student named Joe—returns. He says he’s done a complete circuit of every level and found nobody else, certainly nothing like a crew. “If there are space aliens flying this thing, they’re hiding behind the locked doors.”
But then, a few minutes later, Jane returns, full of excitement. “I’ve met them!” she announces. People gather around. “Well, I didn’t actually see them. It’s like they exist in another dimension. But they were able to…talk to me…sort of. What they did was make pictures in my head. From what I could gather, there’s been some kind of catastrophe. A nuclear war, maybe. I think the aliens were studying Earth when it happened and decided to save as many of us as they could. There are dozens of ships, and they…beamed us up. I guess the process is disorienting. Wipes your short-term memory. Anyway, we’re being transported to a new home. They’ve used their technology to make the ship as comfortable as they could. But some doors are locked for our safety. We shouldn’t try to go in them.” Jane pauses and shrugs. “That’s it. And I’m not sure I got it all right. It was weird, all these pictures in my head.”
Her story elicits considerable heated discussion. Jane is shocked to hear about Paul’s fate, but takes it as evidence that her visions were honest. Someone points out that her experience sounds suspiciously like hallucinating. Someone else asks if she’s ever taken LSD, which elicits a few chuckles. Jane looks away, turning red, but doesn’t answer.
More explorers return without much to report. And then a frazzled young man, Chris, stumbles in. His story is similar to Jane’s, but with important differences. “They were getting in my head, man. Putting pictures there. Forcing me to see stuff I didn’t want to see. It’s like, I saw explosions, all over the planet. And then their ships were swooping down and suckin’ people up with beams of light. They destroyed the planet, man. Alien invasion! And now they’ve snagged a few of us and they’re taking us to some other place. We’re gonna be zoo exhibits.”
Jane shakes her head. “No, no. You’ve misunderstood.”
“This is nuts,” says Steve, a chemistry professor. “Space aliens? I doubt it. This is some kind of experiment. Someone perfectly human has built this thing to test our psychological reactions or something. These…visions…are probably some sort of post-hypnotic suggestion.”
As hours stretch into days, people stake out bedrooms and establish routines. Steve leads a cadre of “investigators” in a systematic exploration of the ship. They map and describe it, and eventually call a meeting where they report their discoveries. One significant discovery is a room where they can regulate the ship’s temperature, humidity, and light levels. They also note that some of the unlocked rooms contain dangerous machines. “Joe nearly got electrocuted,” Steve explains. “And the nearest kitchen is running low on food. We’re gonna need to find some other food source pretty soon.”
“But what does it mean?” you ask. “Why are we here? Are we zoo specimens taken by hostile aliens, or refugees rescued by friendly ones? Or lab rats in some experiment?”
Joe shrugs. “Who knows? All we can do is describe what this place is like. If you want to know what it all means, ask the mystics over there.” He points to Jane and Chris.
“The mystics are idiots,” Steve snaps. “If we’re gonna survive we need to figure this out.”
“Maybe we can’t,” says Jane.
“Yes, we can. There’s a perfectly…human explanation for all this. We just need more information. We need to break down those locked doors.’”
“No way, man!” Chris rises to his feet, looking fierce.
“Chris is right,” says Jane. “They’re locked for our safety.”
“So says mystic Jane.”
“But remember what happened the first day. That young man who broke his neck.”
“Paul was a reckless idiot. We’ll be careful. We’ve got to figure out what’s going on.”
“I’ve told you what’s going on. They talked to me.”
“Convenient that they only talked to you.”
“Chris, too. Maybe only some minds are receptive.”
Steve rolls his eyes. “Let’s suppose they did communicate with you. Some kind of woo-woo ESP. Why should we trust them? They sucked us from our homes.”
“To save our lives.”
“So says mystic Jane. Mystic Chris has a different interpretation, as I recall.”
“If we need more information,” Jane says, “let’s try to communicate with them again. I was in that room with all the pillows—the meditation room—when they first contacted me. Let’s go back there, try talking to them.”
“A waste of time,” Steve huffs. “If they exist at all, they obviously can’t or won’t do more than put pictures in the heads of a couple of screwballs.”
Jane sighs in frustration. “It’s hard to understand them, but I think they exhausted their ability to affect our dimension when they altered the ship to make it suitable for us. But that doesn’t mean they’re not helping. They can still get the ship to its destination. The drive systems operate in both their dimension and ours.”
“How convenient.” Joe shakes his head. “If you’re right, they might as well not exist as far as life on this ship is concerned. If we’re going to deal with that, we need to help ourselves. Let’s figure out how the ship works, what the dangers are, how to control them. I’m with Steve. We gotta start breaking down doors.”
“They’ll kill us, man,” Chris says. “Just like they took out Paul. You start going where they don’t want us to go, they’ll get mad. They’ll blast us. Not just you. These bastards are nasty. They’ll take it out on all of us.”
“Yeah, right,” says Steve.
“I’m serious, man. We gotta keep these buggers happy. We’re in their power. You start opening doors, I’m gonna have to stop you, man.”
“Just try it.” Steve looks around the room. “Who’s with me?” he says again.
And now, finally, the moment is here. You have to decide what to do. Do you join Steve and start breaking down doors? Do you join Jane in the meditation room? Do you join Chris in trying to stop Steve? Do you decide to ignore all of them and head to the kitchen for some soup?
Let’s suppose you like Jane. She seems a decent person, and her story of what is happening is certainly more attractive than Chris’s. If she’s right, then going to the meditation room with her might uncover some new insight. And so you decide to go, in the hope that her story is on the right track, that there are benevolent aliens guiding the ship, aliens you can trust.
Suppose you go with Jane. Suppose that while you’re sitting in the meditation room, silently asking for the aliens to speak to you, you experience a momentary glimmer of something. It feels like someone is there, except that you can’t see or hear anything. Jane, meanwhile, is ecstatic. “They’re talking!” she says. “They’re worried about Steve and Chris. They don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
The feeling you have might just be the power of suggestion. Jane might be hallucinating. For all you know, Steve might be right about things, or Chris. There’s no evidence that clearly speaks one way or the other. But you’ve sensed something. You trusted Jane enough to follow her to the meditation room, and it produced what felt like contact with someone. You could shrug and walk away. Go get soup. Maybe Jane’s delusion is just rubbing off on you. But you hope otherwise.
You turn to Jane. “What’s it like? Talking to them?”
“Wonderful,” she says. “They want to know us, to be our friends. And it makes it so much better, knowing they’re there and mean us well. You know? It’s all so frightening, otherwise.” She sighs. “Do you hear them at all?”
“I thought, maybe, a little.”
She smiles. “It’s a start. Keep listening for them. In the meantime, just know you can trust them.”
Let’s suppose you do just as she says. Suppose that you orient your life aboard ship in terms of Jane’s teachings, in the hope that she’s right. You decide, out of hope, to live as if her teachings are true. But since her teachings are about benevolent aliens who are looking out for the denizens of the ship, orienting your life in terms of those teachings means trusting the aliens Jane says are there.
And this means rejecting Chris’ claims about nasty aliens that need to be appeased on pain of retaliation. While it doesn’t mean blocking Steve and his group from finding out what they can about the ship, and while it certainly doesn't mean rejecting their findings, it might mean taking seriously the idea that the locked doors are locked for a good reason. But mostly, it means two things: continuing the practice of listening for their voices in the hope that a relationship with them will be possible, and finding some comfort in the promise that the ship is taking you, in the end, to a safe harbor.
And here is the question: Could a morally decent, reasonable person follow this path? If you apply the reasoning of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris to this parable, the answer would seem to be no. After all, Jane is training people to believe beyond the evidence, and therefore priming them to become followers of Chris and his extremism. Right?
Or have Dawkins and Harris missed something important?
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Therapeutic Fiction
When I woke up this morning, I thought about writing a blog post about the election results—more precisely, about the results of the Oklahoma State Questions, and about what an ethic of love and hospitality and compassion would say about, for example, a proposal to needlessly prohibit what is already prohibited by the US Constitution, in a state where there isn’t even the remotest likelihood that any judge will be tempted to rely on Muslim Sharia law, where the only possible function of a such a proposal would be to give voters a chance to say “F*&%@ you!” to our Muslim neighbors from the polling booth. Or about the “English only” question…
But by this time my blood was starting to boil. And so when I got to my office, instead of working myself up into a fit by fixating on the election results, I went to “My Documents,” found the folder called “Fiction,” and opened a document entitle “Christmas Sleigh Novel.” I set to work on revising the opening scene, then added a new scene in the middle, bringing alive a section that had always seemed a bit drab. I allowed myself to spend the entire morning on it. Since I’d just finished a draft of Chapter 5 of That Damned Book on Hell yesterday, I gave myself permission to engage in some therapeutic play.
This is what fiction-writing has always been for me. I write philosophy because I am passionate about ideas and arguments, because I want to wrestle with the meaning of life head-on. Of course, ideas and arguments and issues of meaning are also at work in fiction, but they play out in a different way. In fiction, if your aim is to make a systematic and compelling case for a thesis, your work descends into preachiness. In fiction your job isn’t to make a case but to tell a story.
And somehow the process of doing that has become, for me, a therapeutic exercise. A couple of years ago I was called upon to reflect explicitly on this therapeutic dimension of my fiction when one of my stories won the Crème-de-la-Crème Award of the Oklahoma Writers’ Federation. I was asked to write a short article about the story and what it meant to win, and this led me to reflect on the story’s origins and its significance.
“Malaguena” is about a teenage girl whose family duties included cleaning the apartment of a stroke-stricken aunt. The old woman so disgusts her that she treats her as little more than a thing, but by the end of the story she is moved to connect with her on a human level, extending a gesture of respect.
It’s fiction, but the story has its origins in my own past. Years ago I had a summer job as a nursing assistant for a home nursing service in Oslo, Norway. One of my tasks was to clean the apartment of an old, stroke-ridden woman. But I never did treat her as more than a thing. She’d sit there on the sofa while I cleaned, half-naked, scattering ashes on her bathrobe as she chain-smoked. I tried to pretend she wasn’t there, praying she’d return the favor. But sometimes there’d be something she wanted. Since she couldn’t speak, she’d grunt at me and gesture wildly, trying to communicate. But I’d never figure out what she meant. She’d lapse into silence, and I’d leave.
For years I felt the weight of my inadequacy. And finally, long after that woman’s death, I wrote this story about a teenage girl, inadequate in many of the ways that I was inadequate, who somehow realized that what she needed to do was a simple act of affirmation, an acknowledgement of her aunt’s humanity. The story, in turn, became my effort to acknowledge and affirm the humanity of that woman I had tried not to look at while I cleaned her home. It became, in other words, an act of self-forgiveness.
But there’s a more generic way in which writing fiction is therapeutic. When I get outraged by current events, tinkering with a story can help restore balance. Perhaps it’s the details of the task—toying with word choices, cutting out the fat, fretting over whether a bit of dialogue sounds authentic. Perhaps it’s the struggle to get in touch with the sympathetically human in each of the characters, even the least sympathetic of them. Perhaps writing fiction expands my capacity for compassion, and so helps to quiet the anger and outrage that has the power to so disturb my inner peace. Perhaps it’s just that fiction is less about my ego than is philosophy. As a philosopher by profession, I’m supposed to be good at it, and so my inevitable inadequacies become something to beat myself up about. With fiction I can just write. If a story wins an award or gets published, it’s something to be celebrated rather than something only to be expected.
If that's writing, then part of the therapeutic value of writing fiction probably will be lost were it to become something other than a hobby.
For a couple of years now, I’ve spent the months leading up to Christmas tinkering with a Christmas novel. It was actually born as a short story back in the ‘90’s, when I was a visiting assistant professor at Pacific Lutheran University. The author-in-residence at PLU, Jack Cady (a wonderful writer, by the way), became a champion of the story. But it was long as short stories go. Not quite novella length, but longer than most editors would be comfortable devoting to a story by an unpublished writer. When I sent it to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (the story had fantasy themes), Jack sent a note along with it to the editor, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, whom he knew.
It didn’t get the story published, but I’m sure his note had something to do with the fact that, a few months later, Ms. Rusch bought another story of mine, “Faery Storm.” The Christmas story, however, languished. Jack suggested that I expand it, maybe into a short novel. But at that point my visiting position at PLU came to an end. I found myself temping at a bank to make ends meet while trying to find an academic philosophy position in a very tight market. For years after that, my life became about my philosophy career—about landing that tenure track job, then about getting published, getting tenure. There was no time for fiction.
A few years back, after getting tenure, I started writing fiction again in my free time. And one of the things I did was brush off the Christmas story and begin to think about how to expand it into a novel. My first effort was, I must concede, an utter failure. I had the idea of framing the story in something like the way that John Irving did in A Prayer for Owen Meany—with an adult narrator alternating between rather drab accounts of his present life and colorful recollections from his childhood.
This was powerfully effective in Owen Meany. All the vibrancy and vitality of the narrator’s childhood recollections become focused in his best friend, Owen Meany, and all of that vibrancy and vitality comes into sharp contrast with the dull grey existence of the narrator’s adult life, a world in which Owen Meany is absent. And so, when at last Owen’s inevitable death is told, readers feel as if they are being cast into this colorless, pro forma existence—the world as it is without Owen.
I had visions of doing something like that—except to have the key events of the story take place in the present, so that the adult narrator can redeem his life despite the loss of his sister all those years ago, and despite his own guilt about her death.
This just didn’t work. The narrator was transformed into this stunted adolescent you just couldn’t identify with. It’s hard to empathize with the plight of someone who should have dealt with these issues decades ago, before they turned him into an a**hole. Of course, Dickens was able to pull off something of this sort with Scrooge. That has something to do with Dickens’ genius, but also (I think) with the third-person-omniscient point of view that authors of the era were able to adopt (but which is pretty much off the table today).
Had this been a problem in my philosophical work, it would’ve kept me up at night. But instead, it was just an interesting puzzle. How do I make the story work?
Last year, as the holiday season approached, I dusted off the story again and wrestled with the problem. And then, abruptly, I thought, “If the problem is that the narrator should have dealt with these issues before they turned him into an a**hole, then, well, I should have him deal with these issues before they turn him into an a**hole.” That is, make him a teenager, two years out from his sister’s death, still wrestling with the imminence of guilt and loss.
The result was an enormous improvement. But it still…wasn’t…quite…there. Nevertheless I talked with an agent (who mainly represents young adult novels) at last spring’s Oklahoma Writers’ Federation Conference. He asked to see the manuscript, kept it for a couple of months, then finally wrote a note declining to represent the manuscript “despite its obvious merits.”
In other words: It’s got promise, but it’s still…not…quite…there.
I was, of course, disappointed. But in a strange way this makes me happy. Because it means I still have this story to work on as the holiday season approaches. It means that my fiction-writing remains free of the expectations that I place on my other work. For now, at least, it remains just a kind of therapeutic play.
And right now, after the results of yesterday’s election, I need all the therapy I can get.
But by this time my blood was starting to boil. And so when I got to my office, instead of working myself up into a fit by fixating on the election results, I went to “My Documents,” found the folder called “Fiction,” and opened a document entitle “Christmas Sleigh Novel.” I set to work on revising the opening scene, then added a new scene in the middle, bringing alive a section that had always seemed a bit drab. I allowed myself to spend the entire morning on it. Since I’d just finished a draft of Chapter 5 of That Damned Book on Hell yesterday, I gave myself permission to engage in some therapeutic play.
This is what fiction-writing has always been for me. I write philosophy because I am passionate about ideas and arguments, because I want to wrestle with the meaning of life head-on. Of course, ideas and arguments and issues of meaning are also at work in fiction, but they play out in a different way. In fiction, if your aim is to make a systematic and compelling case for a thesis, your work descends into preachiness. In fiction your job isn’t to make a case but to tell a story.
And somehow the process of doing that has become, for me, a therapeutic exercise. A couple of years ago I was called upon to reflect explicitly on this therapeutic dimension of my fiction when one of my stories won the Crème-de-la-Crème Award of the Oklahoma Writers’ Federation. I was asked to write a short article about the story and what it meant to win, and this led me to reflect on the story’s origins and its significance.
“Malaguena” is about a teenage girl whose family duties included cleaning the apartment of a stroke-stricken aunt. The old woman so disgusts her that she treats her as little more than a thing, but by the end of the story she is moved to connect with her on a human level, extending a gesture of respect.
It’s fiction, but the story has its origins in my own past. Years ago I had a summer job as a nursing assistant for a home nursing service in Oslo, Norway. One of my tasks was to clean the apartment of an old, stroke-ridden woman. But I never did treat her as more than a thing. She’d sit there on the sofa while I cleaned, half-naked, scattering ashes on her bathrobe as she chain-smoked. I tried to pretend she wasn’t there, praying she’d return the favor. But sometimes there’d be something she wanted. Since she couldn’t speak, she’d grunt at me and gesture wildly, trying to communicate. But I’d never figure out what she meant. She’d lapse into silence, and I’d leave.
For years I felt the weight of my inadequacy. And finally, long after that woman’s death, I wrote this story about a teenage girl, inadequate in many of the ways that I was inadequate, who somehow realized that what she needed to do was a simple act of affirmation, an acknowledgement of her aunt’s humanity. The story, in turn, became my effort to acknowledge and affirm the humanity of that woman I had tried not to look at while I cleaned her home. It became, in other words, an act of self-forgiveness.
But there’s a more generic way in which writing fiction is therapeutic. When I get outraged by current events, tinkering with a story can help restore balance. Perhaps it’s the details of the task—toying with word choices, cutting out the fat, fretting over whether a bit of dialogue sounds authentic. Perhaps it’s the struggle to get in touch with the sympathetically human in each of the characters, even the least sympathetic of them. Perhaps writing fiction expands my capacity for compassion, and so helps to quiet the anger and outrage that has the power to so disturb my inner peace. Perhaps it’s just that fiction is less about my ego than is philosophy. As a philosopher by profession, I’m supposed to be good at it, and so my inevitable inadequacies become something to beat myself up about. With fiction I can just write. If a story wins an award or gets published, it’s something to be celebrated rather than something only to be expected.
If that's writing, then part of the therapeutic value of writing fiction probably will be lost were it to become something other than a hobby.
For a couple of years now, I’ve spent the months leading up to Christmas tinkering with a Christmas novel. It was actually born as a short story back in the ‘90’s, when I was a visiting assistant professor at Pacific Lutheran University. The author-in-residence at PLU, Jack Cady (a wonderful writer, by the way), became a champion of the story. But it was long as short stories go. Not quite novella length, but longer than most editors would be comfortable devoting to a story by an unpublished writer. When I sent it to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (the story had fantasy themes), Jack sent a note along with it to the editor, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, whom he knew.
It didn’t get the story published, but I’m sure his note had something to do with the fact that, a few months later, Ms. Rusch bought another story of mine, “Faery Storm.” The Christmas story, however, languished. Jack suggested that I expand it, maybe into a short novel. But at that point my visiting position at PLU came to an end. I found myself temping at a bank to make ends meet while trying to find an academic philosophy position in a very tight market. For years after that, my life became about my philosophy career—about landing that tenure track job, then about getting published, getting tenure. There was no time for fiction.
A few years back, after getting tenure, I started writing fiction again in my free time. And one of the things I did was brush off the Christmas story and begin to think about how to expand it into a novel. My first effort was, I must concede, an utter failure. I had the idea of framing the story in something like the way that John Irving did in A Prayer for Owen Meany—with an adult narrator alternating between rather drab accounts of his present life and colorful recollections from his childhood.
This was powerfully effective in Owen Meany. All the vibrancy and vitality of the narrator’s childhood recollections become focused in his best friend, Owen Meany, and all of that vibrancy and vitality comes into sharp contrast with the dull grey existence of the narrator’s adult life, a world in which Owen Meany is absent. And so, when at last Owen’s inevitable death is told, readers feel as if they are being cast into this colorless, pro forma existence—the world as it is without Owen.
I had visions of doing something like that—except to have the key events of the story take place in the present, so that the adult narrator can redeem his life despite the loss of his sister all those years ago, and despite his own guilt about her death.
This just didn’t work. The narrator was transformed into this stunted adolescent you just couldn’t identify with. It’s hard to empathize with the plight of someone who should have dealt with these issues decades ago, before they turned him into an a**hole. Of course, Dickens was able to pull off something of this sort with Scrooge. That has something to do with Dickens’ genius, but also (I think) with the third-person-omniscient point of view that authors of the era were able to adopt (but which is pretty much off the table today).
Had this been a problem in my philosophical work, it would’ve kept me up at night. But instead, it was just an interesting puzzle. How do I make the story work?
Last year, as the holiday season approached, I dusted off the story again and wrestled with the problem. And then, abruptly, I thought, “If the problem is that the narrator should have dealt with these issues before they turned him into an a**hole, then, well, I should have him deal with these issues before they turn him into an a**hole.” That is, make him a teenager, two years out from his sister’s death, still wrestling with the imminence of guilt and loss.
The result was an enormous improvement. But it still…wasn’t…quite…there. Nevertheless I talked with an agent (who mainly represents young adult novels) at last spring’s Oklahoma Writers’ Federation Conference. He asked to see the manuscript, kept it for a couple of months, then finally wrote a note declining to represent the manuscript “despite its obvious merits.”
In other words: It’s got promise, but it’s still…not…quite…there.
I was, of course, disappointed. But in a strange way this makes me happy. Because it means I still have this story to work on as the holiday season approaches. It means that my fiction-writing remains free of the expectations that I place on my other work. For now, at least, it remains just a kind of therapeutic play.
And right now, after the results of yesterday’s election, I need all the therapy I can get.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Guest Post on Free Will and Determinism
A student in my philosophy of religion class has (in keeping with an invitation extended at the start of the semester) bravely offered up something he has written for anonymous posting on this blog. While this is something that was written for another class, he thought it had bearing on questions that come up routinely on this blog (he's right), and that it relates to issues we are wrestling with in class (right again). Since I suspect he is hoping that posting his thoughts here will inspire both discussion and constructive feedback, I encourage both. It goes without saying, however, that disagreement and criticism should be respectful. Anything that does not, in my judgment, meet this condition will be deleted. With that said, here are some thoughts on free will and determinism from an undergraduate student at Oklahoma State University:
Abstract
Oftentimes, people have a black and white perspective on the punishment of those responsible for unjust actions. Even though someone’s brain might biologically operate differently than the average brain, they are usually punished equally. In the famous case of Phineas Gage (Macmillan, 2000, pp.47-50) an iron rod entered under his left eye and up through his skull, landing 25 feet behind him. In the process it destroyed his frontal lobe. The post-accident Gage was not the same as the pre-accident Gage based on Dr. Harlow’s observations and the observations of friends and family. We can all agree that the psychological changes that ensued were not directly Gage’s fault.
Biological factors aside, causal determinism can still be applied. Similar to the nurture aspect of the nature-nurture perspective in psychology, a person’s upbringing can play a tremendous role in their future personality or actions. For instance, an abusive or drug-addicted parent is going to somehow have an affect on his/her child’s life. We must take the deterministic perspective into consideration in our legal system and in our own personal judgments of other people. Just as we have got away from stoning adulterers, burning ‘witches’ at the stake, and lynching people because of their color, we must evolve. We must gradually move away from our unambiguous ideas about justice. Causal determinism further clears the lens by which we judge others’ actions and reactions so that we may develop more accurate opinions of each other.
Discussion
There are several types of determinism. The one this essay focuses on is causal (cause-al) determinism—not to be confused with predeterminism, Calvanism, or theological determinism. Determinism is defined as all things in life including actions, thoughts, thought processes, reactions, and behavior have a cause-and-effect determination based on an unbroken series of prior events. The idea is analogically similar to dominoes falling. For instance, and this is just an example for clarity: John Doe has an intense fear of flying. He has this fear because his mother died in a plane crash ten years ago. Therefore, he does not fly out of country and refuses to see his brother who lives in Britain. Perhaps his brother thinks John simply does not want to see him, however due to casual determinism he prefers to stay at home because his mother died on a plane. Determinism is not always a conscious phenomena; it exists in the subconscious as well, or perhaps in both. Jane Doe might be scared of snakes because she had been bitten at age two, but she no longer recalls the actual occurrence. These are all just basic, general examples of determinism.
Specifically, there are different types of determinism aside from what has been discussed previously. Soft determinists often agree with compatibilism, or the idea that free will and determinism can coexist. In this idea, one’s reactions and opinions might have been shaped by past events, but the individual is not chained to his/her past. Essentially it recognizes determinism as a part of free will.
Hard determinists often stand by the argument of incompatibilism, or the belief that the ideas of free will and determinism cannot coexist in one idea or theory. Determinism is absolute and free will is an illusion, and since one’s birth, a series of events were set in motion—a domino flicked or a clock wound, if you will—and this one action has solely affected all thoughts and opinions since. If you perceive you have free will and you act, in reality you are acting because something subconsciously or consciously affected you previously. The problem with hard determinism is that an evil person’s moral behavior can be blamed entirely on the environment or biology of that person. It causes one to disregard moral control entirely because he/she did not feel in control of his/her life and destiny. Some who perform bad actions use hard determinism as a scapegoat. That is not to say determinists are not in favor of punishing criminals.
Indeterminists renounce determinism, believing that past events have no bearing on one’s decision-making or thought processes, and the human psyche consists solely of free will. This idea, like hard determinism is seemingly more extreme than soft determinism.
I will be mainly focusing on the compatibilistic idea of determinism because it is the least radical. It is the golden mean between indeterminism and hard determinism. It is also the easiest to apply to everyday situations and everyday life, and like in most areas of philosophy and psychology, usually the least black-and-white approach yields the best results. In psychology, the overall consensus now—after much debate—is that both nurture and nature play a role in childhood development. This blending of ideas is the approach I will take with free will and determinism.
First, I will discuss the biological perspective of determinism. There are many individual psychological cases relating to biology of the human brain. In the incredible case of Phineas Gage, it goes to show how the physical alteration of the brain can permanently change personality. After the incident, he was “no longer Gage” (Macmillan, 2000, pp.47-50). He did not function like he used to, and for this he never regained his position at work as a foreman. Harlow and others describe him after the incident as unable to plan and being profane. Although some scholars believe the actual description of post-accident Gage was distorted, he was a changed man.
There are other case studies where brain damage has played a role in moral/ethical decisions (Rutigiliano, 2008, p.1). For instance, in the case of Albert Fish, damage to the frontal lobe had disastrous consequences.
Now I will discuss the environmental perspective of determinism. The environment of a child at an early age often plays a large role in how they will act for the rest of their life. If their father shows no respect and curses the majority of the time, the child will pick up the same habits. At such a young age, it is hard for children not to follow in their parent’s footsteps, as they are starting with a clean moral slate. They have no immediate perception of what is right and wrong, especially about the abstract, until their parents pave the way. Fear about a reoccurring event in obvious ways affects a person’s lifestyle. If one was too scared to drive a car because of a dangerous wreck caused by a drunk driver that might cause them to stay at home. They would lose social contact with the outside world. The wreck might also cause them to despise anyone who drinks even in moderation. The chain continues. If a person grew up in a low income area with drug-addicted parents, and they literally knew nothing except crime and gangs, having never seen the other side of life, how can we expect them to resort to anything different from what they have seen? Crime, drugs, and violence often is the ‘language’ these people have spoken their entire lives. If no one is willing to teach them a different language—one of love or responsibility—how can we judge them?
Conclusion
Do we, as horribly flawed creatures, have a right to judge others based on something they cannot control? Some of us need to step back and rethink the morality of people’s actions in general. Often it is easy to say, “well if I were in that situation, I would never do that.” In reality we cannot say that in all truth because we would not be ourselves in that situation. We might be someone else, regressing into our primal selves or acting out of character. It is always better to judge oneself before judging others, as we see not the full picture. Causal determinism further clears the lens by which we judge others’ actions and reactions so that we may develop more accurate opinions of each other.
References
Macmillan, M. (2000). Restoring Phineas Gage: A 150th Retrospective. Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 9(1), 46-66. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database on Feb. 27, 2010.
Thimble, M. (1990). Psychopathology of Frontal Lobe Syndromes. Seminars in Neurology, 10(3). Retrieved from www.ect.org on Feb. 26, 2010.
Rutigliano, A. (2008). Predestined Serial Killers. Serendip’s Exchange. Retrieved from Serendip’s Exchange on Feb. 26, 2010.
Lois Rogers Medical, E. (n.d). Secret tests on brains of serial killers. Sunday Times, The, Retrieved from Newspaper Source Plus database on March 10, 2010.
Abstract
Oftentimes, people have a black and white perspective on the punishment of those responsible for unjust actions. Even though someone’s brain might biologically operate differently than the average brain, they are usually punished equally. In the famous case of Phineas Gage (Macmillan, 2000, pp.47-50) an iron rod entered under his left eye and up through his skull, landing 25 feet behind him. In the process it destroyed his frontal lobe. The post-accident Gage was not the same as the pre-accident Gage based on Dr. Harlow’s observations and the observations of friends and family. We can all agree that the psychological changes that ensued were not directly Gage’s fault.
Biological factors aside, causal determinism can still be applied. Similar to the nurture aspect of the nature-nurture perspective in psychology, a person’s upbringing can play a tremendous role in their future personality or actions. For instance, an abusive or drug-addicted parent is going to somehow have an affect on his/her child’s life. We must take the deterministic perspective into consideration in our legal system and in our own personal judgments of other people. Just as we have got away from stoning adulterers, burning ‘witches’ at the stake, and lynching people because of their color, we must evolve. We must gradually move away from our unambiguous ideas about justice. Causal determinism further clears the lens by which we judge others’ actions and reactions so that we may develop more accurate opinions of each other.
Discussion
There are several types of determinism. The one this essay focuses on is causal (cause-al) determinism—not to be confused with predeterminism, Calvanism, or theological determinism. Determinism is defined as all things in life including actions, thoughts, thought processes, reactions, and behavior have a cause-and-effect determination based on an unbroken series of prior events. The idea is analogically similar to dominoes falling. For instance, and this is just an example for clarity: John Doe has an intense fear of flying. He has this fear because his mother died in a plane crash ten years ago. Therefore, he does not fly out of country and refuses to see his brother who lives in Britain. Perhaps his brother thinks John simply does not want to see him, however due to casual determinism he prefers to stay at home because his mother died on a plane. Determinism is not always a conscious phenomena; it exists in the subconscious as well, or perhaps in both. Jane Doe might be scared of snakes because she had been bitten at age two, but she no longer recalls the actual occurrence. These are all just basic, general examples of determinism.
Specifically, there are different types of determinism aside from what has been discussed previously. Soft determinists often agree with compatibilism, or the idea that free will and determinism can coexist. In this idea, one’s reactions and opinions might have been shaped by past events, but the individual is not chained to his/her past. Essentially it recognizes determinism as a part of free will.
Hard determinists often stand by the argument of incompatibilism, or the belief that the ideas of free will and determinism cannot coexist in one idea or theory. Determinism is absolute and free will is an illusion, and since one’s birth, a series of events were set in motion—a domino flicked or a clock wound, if you will—and this one action has solely affected all thoughts and opinions since. If you perceive you have free will and you act, in reality you are acting because something subconsciously or consciously affected you previously. The problem with hard determinism is that an evil person’s moral behavior can be blamed entirely on the environment or biology of that person. It causes one to disregard moral control entirely because he/she did not feel in control of his/her life and destiny. Some who perform bad actions use hard determinism as a scapegoat. That is not to say determinists are not in favor of punishing criminals.
Indeterminists renounce determinism, believing that past events have no bearing on one’s decision-making or thought processes, and the human psyche consists solely of free will. This idea, like hard determinism is seemingly more extreme than soft determinism.
I will be mainly focusing on the compatibilistic idea of determinism because it is the least radical. It is the golden mean between indeterminism and hard determinism. It is also the easiest to apply to everyday situations and everyday life, and like in most areas of philosophy and psychology, usually the least black-and-white approach yields the best results. In psychology, the overall consensus now—after much debate—is that both nurture and nature play a role in childhood development. This blending of ideas is the approach I will take with free will and determinism.
First, I will discuss the biological perspective of determinism. There are many individual psychological cases relating to biology of the human brain. In the incredible case of Phineas Gage, it goes to show how the physical alteration of the brain can permanently change personality. After the incident, he was “no longer Gage” (Macmillan, 2000, pp.47-50). He did not function like he used to, and for this he never regained his position at work as a foreman. Harlow and others describe him after the incident as unable to plan and being profane. Although some scholars believe the actual description of post-accident Gage was distorted, he was a changed man.
There are other case studies where brain damage has played a role in moral/ethical decisions (Rutigiliano, 2008, p.1). For instance, in the case of Albert Fish, damage to the frontal lobe had disastrous consequences.
An example of a serial killer that had suffered sever injury to his frontal lobe is Albert Fish, better known as the Brooklyn Vampire. At the age of seven he had a severe fall off a cherry tree which caused a head injury from which he would have permanent problems with, such as headaches and dizzy spells. (2) [4] After his fall he began to display many violent tendencies, including an interest in sadomasochistic activities. At the age of twenty he killed his fist victim, a twelve-year-old neighbor by the name of Gracie whom he cannibalized.Albert is just one example of biological determinism of one’s personality or moral actions. More and more studies have concluded that many extremely violent-natured people have something literally wrong with their brain (Rutigiliano, 2008, p.1).
A startling amount of criminals on death row have been clinically diagnosed with brain disorders. A recent study has demonstrated that 20 out of 31 confessed killers are diagnosed as mentally ill. Out of that 20, 64% have frontal lobe abnormalities. (1) [4] A thorough study of the profiles of many serial killers shows that many of them had suffered sever head injuries (to the frontal lobe) when they were children.Other biological predispositions may affect a person’s future judgment, character, or actions. For example it is well known that there is actually a specific gene responsible for the “addiction” complex. Often I hear people say that they are predisposed to becoming an alcoholic because his/her father was. I have also heard the same thing said about the gambling mentality. Granted that it is no excuse for bad behavior, it is still something to be considered.
Now I will discuss the environmental perspective of determinism. The environment of a child at an early age often plays a large role in how they will act for the rest of their life. If their father shows no respect and curses the majority of the time, the child will pick up the same habits. At such a young age, it is hard for children not to follow in their parent’s footsteps, as they are starting with a clean moral slate. They have no immediate perception of what is right and wrong, especially about the abstract, until their parents pave the way. Fear about a reoccurring event in obvious ways affects a person’s lifestyle. If one was too scared to drive a car because of a dangerous wreck caused by a drunk driver that might cause them to stay at home. They would lose social contact with the outside world. The wreck might also cause them to despise anyone who drinks even in moderation. The chain continues. If a person grew up in a low income area with drug-addicted parents, and they literally knew nothing except crime and gangs, having never seen the other side of life, how can we expect them to resort to anything different from what they have seen? Crime, drugs, and violence often is the ‘language’ these people have spoken their entire lives. If no one is willing to teach them a different language—one of love or responsibility—how can we judge them?
Conclusion
Do we, as horribly flawed creatures, have a right to judge others based on something they cannot control? Some of us need to step back and rethink the morality of people’s actions in general. Often it is easy to say, “well if I were in that situation, I would never do that.” In reality we cannot say that in all truth because we would not be ourselves in that situation. We might be someone else, regressing into our primal selves or acting out of character. It is always better to judge oneself before judging others, as we see not the full picture. Causal determinism further clears the lens by which we judge others’ actions and reactions so that we may develop more accurate opinions of each other.
References
Macmillan, M. (2000). Restoring Phineas Gage: A 150th Retrospective. Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 9(1), 46-66. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database on Feb. 27, 2010.
Thimble, M. (1990). Psychopathology of Frontal Lobe Syndromes. Seminars in Neurology, 10(3). Retrieved from www.ect.org on Feb. 26, 2010.
Rutigliano, A. (2008). Predestined Serial Killers. Serendip’s Exchange. Retrieved from Serendip’s Exchange on Feb. 26, 2010.
Lois Rogers Medical, E. (n.d). Secret tests on brains of serial killers. Sunday Times, The, Retrieved from Newspaper Source Plus database on March 10, 2010.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Some Reflections on Kierkegaard
The other day, due to the confluence of an error on my part and being a bit behind the syllabus, my philosophy of religion class ended up being about two historical figures that I do not usually consider together: Søren Kierkegaard and Blaise Pascal. Specifically, I considered the Kierkegaardian case for what is usually labeled “fideism” in the same lecture as I outlined Pascal’s famous “wager.” For reasons I won’t get into here, this juxtaposition led me to reflect on Kierkegaard’s fideism in a somewhat different light than usual. I want to share some of those reflections here.
Fideism is generally defined as the thesis that it is sometimes appropriate (especially in relation to ultimate matters pertaining to the fundamental nature of reality and the meaning of our lives) to believe something on faith rather than based on reason and evidence, perhaps even in the teeth of reason and evidence.
What this means depends on what we take believing something “on faith” to mean. In practice if not in theory, believing something “on faith” often ends up meaning essentially the same as believing it “just because” (where there is absolutely nothing after the “because”), and doing so with complete certainty that one is right (again, with no foundation at all). Typically, the believer then adds that this conviction is due to God implanting it, even though one has no reason to think that God implanted it.
Understood in this sense, if I happen to believe that the entire population of African elephants is right at this moment flying around inside my refrigerator, then so long as I have no reason and evidence for believing this but remain firm in my belief, and so long as I insist that I believe it because God implanted the belief in me (even though I have no reason at all for thinking that this is true), then I am believing it on faith. Seen in this light, it becomes a challenge to justify the worth that is so often attached to believing something on faith.
But this isn’t Kierkegaard’s fideism. In fact, if fideism is defined in terms of believing things without evidence, I think one misses Kierkegaard’s point altogether. Because for Kierkegaard, faith isn’t really about what you believe at all. In fact, so long as what you care the most about is the content of your belief, faith in Kierkegaard’s sense has eluded you.
Consider an analogy. Suppose you meet someone for whom you feel an immediate attraction. You go on a few dates. You start to fall in love. In fact, you feel yourself falling hard. But then you pause and ask yourself, “Who is this person, really? Does she deserve my love? Is she the kind of person with whom I can sustain a long-term relationship?” Suppose you take these questions seriously and so back off from your burgeoning feelings so as to get an appropriately objective perspective. You investigate her history, interview her friends and her boss at work, all the while not letting your feelings for her color what you hear, since you want to get a wholly objective picture. Finally, through this process, you come to know more facts about her than virtually any other person alive.
But, of course, at this point the rhythm of love has been shattered. You have no romantic feelings for her anymore because you’ve stifled them in favor of a wholly objective consideration of what is true and false about her. Likewise, in the process of doing this, she’s sensed your withdrawal and moved on emotionally. Even should you decide from what you learn that a love relationship with her might be a good idea “on paper,” the very process of pursuing such an investigation has killed any chance of having such a love relationship in fact. Furthermore, the things you learn through such an objective investigation are the wrong things in any event. What really matters for whether a love relationship is possible depends on what you learn through relating to her as a lover.
When it comes to the ultimate nature of reality, Kierkegaard thinks something along the same lines is the case. Kierkegaard tells us that “the highest truth is that the knower is an existing subject,” by which he means that the most important thing for me to know is that I am a subject of experiences with a life to live and relationships to form. One of those relationships is with reality—with the world around me as it truly is. But if I investigate the world objectively and dispassionately, in order to collect all the right facts about it, I become like the deluded fool who squashes any chance at actually being in love with a real person because he is too focused on collecting all those facts that can only be collected by setting passionate interest aside.
The real truth about me is that I am a creature who cares passionately, and to be true to myself, I must live passionately in relation to the world. If I squash that passion in favor of objectivity, I stifle the truth about me and so fail to live the truth—all for the sake of collecting propositions that are more likely to be objectively factual. I end up living a life that is utterly false to what it means to be the kind of being I am—and my consolation is a collection of facts.
Consider the following passage from Kierkegaard (in which Kierkegaard is assuming for the sake of argument what he will readily admit is unknowable, namely that the Christian God is the true God—that, in other words, what Christians believe is true):
Kierkegaard frames the question in terms of objectivity and subjectivity—such that believing the correct doctrines is characterized as the objective side of faith, while believing in the right way, with the right kind of passion and love and attention to one’s relationship with the object of devotion, is the subjective side. I think this characterization may actually be misleading, because in reality both of these aspects of faith are subjective. Believing the right doctrines is a subjective achievement. My beliefs are a subjective matter, and hence believing in the truth is one dimension of having the “right” kind of subjective relationship to the truth. The other dimension is having the right kind of passion, the right kind of attitude, towards the object of belief.
The objective reality—such as the truth about God, about whether God exists at all and what He is like—is a different matter than how closely my beliefs correspond with this truth. And it may well be the case (as Kierkegaard seems to think) that it is impossible to ascertain how closely my beliefs about God correspond to reality. But that, of course, is Kierkegaard’s point: If I devote myself to this question, and to the task of bringing my beliefs about ultimately reality into alignment with ultimate reality as it is in itself, I am devoting myself to a task that, when pursued dispassionately, becomes a distraction from living life (which is passionate). And since this question about ultimate reality is unanswerable, a commitment to answering it before I decide what attitude to adopt towards the universe and how to live my life amounts to the decision to refuse to live a human life at all.
Now I think there’s something to all of this—but I want to make several qualifications. First, sometimes an objective study of something can be an expression of one’s passionate devotion. Because I love my wife, I pay attention to little details about how she moves, about the inflections of her voice. I want to hold these things in my heart accurately, and so there are moments when I attend so closely to her that I lose sight of myself for awhile. Likewise, the best scientists are full of wonder at the physical world—and their devotion to describing it accurately is a manifestation of that passion.
Second, our beliefs affect our attitudes and passions (and, of course, our attitudes and passions affect what we believe). We cannot cleanly separate the two. If I come to believe that my wife has cheated on me or that she disdains me, that would affect our relationship. If I come to believe that God is indifferent to human needs and human suffering—even that God is cruel and hateful—these beliefs will almost certainly impact my attitude towards God. It will be hard to sustain a passionate devotion in the light of these beliefs. More to the point, such devotion would be unfitting.
While it is true that a focus on dispassionately collecting facts about a potential romantic partner is inimical to actually having a romantic relationship, it also true that some people are blinded by their passions and so fail to see ugly truths about the object of their devotion—and their love is thereby rendered pathetic or even dangerous.
And when it comes to loving reality as it is in itself, such love is hardly being expressed when one unswervingly clings to certain beliefs about reality and loves them with all the passion of the infinite while ignoring reasons to doubt their veracity. In that case, the object of love has become one’s own picture of reality. One has become an idolater.
So how are we to pursue the balancing act between believing the right things about ourselves, others, and reality, and living the right way in relation to all of these things? I think Kierkegaard may be best understood as a kind of pragmatist—but not Pascal’s kind. Pascal saw faith as a betting game, in which you bet on the side which offers the highest payoff and the lowest risk. But for Kierkegaard, the proper analogy is not that offered by the betting table, in which you calculate which is your safest bet. Rather, it is that little table in the bistro, sitting across from someone you think you might be falling in love with, aware of the risks and costs of giving your heart in error, but prepared, for the sake of living life, to take the leap.
But if that is the right analogy, then what are the implications for how we construe reality at the most fundamental level, for what kind of meaning we attach to our lives, and for our decisions about the kind of life we forge? Surely it's not blind and unwavering dogmatism, but rather a habit of learning from one's leaps.
Fideism is generally defined as the thesis that it is sometimes appropriate (especially in relation to ultimate matters pertaining to the fundamental nature of reality and the meaning of our lives) to believe something on faith rather than based on reason and evidence, perhaps even in the teeth of reason and evidence.
What this means depends on what we take believing something “on faith” to mean. In practice if not in theory, believing something “on faith” often ends up meaning essentially the same as believing it “just because” (where there is absolutely nothing after the “because”), and doing so with complete certainty that one is right (again, with no foundation at all). Typically, the believer then adds that this conviction is due to God implanting it, even though one has no reason to think that God implanted it.
Understood in this sense, if I happen to believe that the entire population of African elephants is right at this moment flying around inside my refrigerator, then so long as I have no reason and evidence for believing this but remain firm in my belief, and so long as I insist that I believe it because God implanted the belief in me (even though I have no reason at all for thinking that this is true), then I am believing it on faith. Seen in this light, it becomes a challenge to justify the worth that is so often attached to believing something on faith.
But this isn’t Kierkegaard’s fideism. In fact, if fideism is defined in terms of believing things without evidence, I think one misses Kierkegaard’s point altogether. Because for Kierkegaard, faith isn’t really about what you believe at all. In fact, so long as what you care the most about is the content of your belief, faith in Kierkegaard’s sense has eluded you.
Consider an analogy. Suppose you meet someone for whom you feel an immediate attraction. You go on a few dates. You start to fall in love. In fact, you feel yourself falling hard. But then you pause and ask yourself, “Who is this person, really? Does she deserve my love? Is she the kind of person with whom I can sustain a long-term relationship?” Suppose you take these questions seriously and so back off from your burgeoning feelings so as to get an appropriately objective perspective. You investigate her history, interview her friends and her boss at work, all the while not letting your feelings for her color what you hear, since you want to get a wholly objective picture. Finally, through this process, you come to know more facts about her than virtually any other person alive.
But, of course, at this point the rhythm of love has been shattered. You have no romantic feelings for her anymore because you’ve stifled them in favor of a wholly objective consideration of what is true and false about her. Likewise, in the process of doing this, she’s sensed your withdrawal and moved on emotionally. Even should you decide from what you learn that a love relationship with her might be a good idea “on paper,” the very process of pursuing such an investigation has killed any chance of having such a love relationship in fact. Furthermore, the things you learn through such an objective investigation are the wrong things in any event. What really matters for whether a love relationship is possible depends on what you learn through relating to her as a lover.
When it comes to the ultimate nature of reality, Kierkegaard thinks something along the same lines is the case. Kierkegaard tells us that “the highest truth is that the knower is an existing subject,” by which he means that the most important thing for me to know is that I am a subject of experiences with a life to live and relationships to form. One of those relationships is with reality—with the world around me as it truly is. But if I investigate the world objectively and dispassionately, in order to collect all the right facts about it, I become like the deluded fool who squashes any chance at actually being in love with a real person because he is too focused on collecting all those facts that can only be collected by setting passionate interest aside.
The real truth about me is that I am a creature who cares passionately, and to be true to myself, I must live passionately in relation to the world. If I squash that passion in favor of objectivity, I stifle the truth about me and so fail to live the truth—all for the sake of collecting propositions that are more likely to be objectively factual. I end up living a life that is utterly false to what it means to be the kind of being I am—and my consolation is a collection of facts.
Consider the following passage from Kierkegaard (in which Kierkegaard is assuming for the sake of argument what he will readily admit is unknowable, namely that the Christian God is the true God—that, in other words, what Christians believe is true):
If one who lives in a Christian culture goes up to God’s house, the house of the true God, with a true conception of God, with knowledge of God and prays—but prays in a false spirit; and one who lives in an idolatrous land prays with the total passion of the infinite, although his eyes rest on the image of an idol; where is there most truth? The one prays in truth to God, although he worships an idol. The other prays in untruth to the true God and therefore really worships an idol.
Kierkegaard frames the question in terms of objectivity and subjectivity—such that believing the correct doctrines is characterized as the objective side of faith, while believing in the right way, with the right kind of passion and love and attention to one’s relationship with the object of devotion, is the subjective side. I think this characterization may actually be misleading, because in reality both of these aspects of faith are subjective. Believing the right doctrines is a subjective achievement. My beliefs are a subjective matter, and hence believing in the truth is one dimension of having the “right” kind of subjective relationship to the truth. The other dimension is having the right kind of passion, the right kind of attitude, towards the object of belief.
The objective reality—such as the truth about God, about whether God exists at all and what He is like—is a different matter than how closely my beliefs correspond with this truth. And it may well be the case (as Kierkegaard seems to think) that it is impossible to ascertain how closely my beliefs about God correspond to reality. But that, of course, is Kierkegaard’s point: If I devote myself to this question, and to the task of bringing my beliefs about ultimately reality into alignment with ultimate reality as it is in itself, I am devoting myself to a task that, when pursued dispassionately, becomes a distraction from living life (which is passionate). And since this question about ultimate reality is unanswerable, a commitment to answering it before I decide what attitude to adopt towards the universe and how to live my life amounts to the decision to refuse to live a human life at all.
Now I think there’s something to all of this—but I want to make several qualifications. First, sometimes an objective study of something can be an expression of one’s passionate devotion. Because I love my wife, I pay attention to little details about how she moves, about the inflections of her voice. I want to hold these things in my heart accurately, and so there are moments when I attend so closely to her that I lose sight of myself for awhile. Likewise, the best scientists are full of wonder at the physical world—and their devotion to describing it accurately is a manifestation of that passion.
Second, our beliefs affect our attitudes and passions (and, of course, our attitudes and passions affect what we believe). We cannot cleanly separate the two. If I come to believe that my wife has cheated on me or that she disdains me, that would affect our relationship. If I come to believe that God is indifferent to human needs and human suffering—even that God is cruel and hateful—these beliefs will almost certainly impact my attitude towards God. It will be hard to sustain a passionate devotion in the light of these beliefs. More to the point, such devotion would be unfitting.
While it is true that a focus on dispassionately collecting facts about a potential romantic partner is inimical to actually having a romantic relationship, it also true that some people are blinded by their passions and so fail to see ugly truths about the object of their devotion—and their love is thereby rendered pathetic or even dangerous.
And when it comes to loving reality as it is in itself, such love is hardly being expressed when one unswervingly clings to certain beliefs about reality and loves them with all the passion of the infinite while ignoring reasons to doubt their veracity. In that case, the object of love has become one’s own picture of reality. One has become an idolater.
So how are we to pursue the balancing act between believing the right things about ourselves, others, and reality, and living the right way in relation to all of these things? I think Kierkegaard may be best understood as a kind of pragmatist—but not Pascal’s kind. Pascal saw faith as a betting game, in which you bet on the side which offers the highest payoff and the lowest risk. But for Kierkegaard, the proper analogy is not that offered by the betting table, in which you calculate which is your safest bet. Rather, it is that little table in the bistro, sitting across from someone you think you might be falling in love with, aware of the risks and costs of giving your heart in error, but prepared, for the sake of living life, to take the leap.
But if that is the right analogy, then what are the implications for how we construe reality at the most fundamental level, for what kind of meaning we attach to our lives, and for our decisions about the kind of life we forge? Surely it's not blind and unwavering dogmatism, but rather a habit of learning from one's leaps.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Morality, Religion, Bifurcating Ideologies...and Sam Harris's New Book
Earlier this week, in my philosophy of religion class, I offered a brief review of the questions and controversies surrounding the relationship between morality and religion--a topic that I wanted to touch on in class but (as I was making the difficult decisions one has to make when designing a course) decided not to spend extensive time on.
Because theists so often argue that one cannot have morality without God--or at least that one cannot have any kind of objective morality which can provide normative guidance across interpersonal and cultural divides--it makes sense for atheist thinkers, especially those who believe in an objective morality, to attempt to establish a secular foundation for objectively binding moral standards. Thus, it is no surprise that Sam Harris, the "original" new atheist, would turn his attention to this task.
A few months back I offered my reflection on Sam Harris's efforts to pursue this task in a TED talk. Now Harris has released a book on the topic, The Moral Landscape, developing his claim that science can offer an objective foundation for ethics. Just today, Michael Ruse--a philosopher I greatly respect and author of numerous works in the philosophy of science, (including Darwinism and its Discontents and his most recent book, Science and Spirituality)--offers his take (down) of that book in Religion Dispatches.
Many of the points Ruse makes are similar to those I raised in relation to Harris's TED talk--but Ruse is quicker to highlight Harris's deeper agenda, which is (yet again) to trash religion and people of faith. "To say that religion is a bit of an obsession for Harris," Ruse comments, "is rather like saying Hitler had a bit of a thing about the Jews." Ruse is himself an atheist who wrangles repeatedly with creationists and ID theorists, but he's what William Rowe (the atheist philosopher of religion) would dub a "friendly atheist"--that is, his attitude is one of skeptical but respectful critical engagement with people of faith. I think, like me, Ruse is greatly troubled by the kind of bifurcating ideology--the us/them divide and the villifacion on those on the other side of it--that characterizes so much of the contemporary debate about theism and religious faith.
Often, the issue of morality is invoked by religious fundamentalists to villify atheists: There can be no morality without God, they argue; and hence, atheists must be amoral. The reasoning here is terrible, of course. Even if you think that the existence of objective moral truths in some fashion or another depends on the existence of a God, it hardly follows that atheists can't be deeply moral. Suppose there is ongoing uncertainty about the underlying physics that explains the force of gravity--and suppose that in a debate about this underlying physics, one side in the debate has the right answer. It doesn't follow that those on the other side of the debate don't believe in gravity (let alone that they behave as if it doesn't apply to them).
Ruse, in his review of Harris's new book, seems to worry that Harris is taking a page out of the religious fundamentalist's book--trying to argue, in effect, that religious people can't be genuinely moral because they misconceive the foundations of morality. In fact, Ruse seems to be concerned that pursuing this kind of villification of religious believers is a basic driving purpose behind Harris's book.
How else do we explain Harris's utterly gratuitous 15-page attack on Francis Collins, the head of the NIH who also happens to be Christian--an attack that seems entirely out of place in a book that's supposed to be about the foundations of morality? As one reads his review, one can almost see Ruse blinking in astonishment. If your purpose is to explain the foundations of morality in terms of scientific facts, why ignore G.E. Moore's arguments that this cannot be done (in terms of what Moore calls the naturalistic fallacy) while devoting more than a dozen pages to trashing a scientist who has, buy all accounts (except, perhaps, the accounts of those religious conservatives who want to ban stem cell research) led the NIH with distinction?
In fact, as I argued when Harris first called Collins unfit to lead the NIH in the pages of the New York Times (simply because of Collins' Christian faith), there is a very disturbing similarity between Harris's denunciation of Collins and traditional religious denunciation of heretics. Now, it seems, Harris wants to go further: Belief in God not only disqualifies one from being fit to lead an organization such as the NIH; it fundamentally compromises one's ability to lead a moral life.
To be fair, I have yet to read Harris's book and I am going simply off of Ruse's review. Perhaps Harris's argument is not quite so hostile to religion as all of that. But, of course, having read his other books I'm prone to think Ruse's characterization is right. And if it is, then Harris is once again recreating atheism in religious fundamentalism's image--this time by taking the fundamentalist argument that atheists can't be moral and inverting it to apply to religious believers.
I think the issue of how morality and religion intersect is an important one. But I think it is crucial that we explore this and related issues without the sort of hostile us/them thinking that puts those with different ideas into a morally disabled "out-group." This is not to say there is no truth to the notion that certain ways of thinking can have morally pernicious effects. After all, I just argued in my most recent Religion Dispatches article that allegiance to a doctrine of biblical inerrancy can threaten our capacity for empathy and compassion. But there's a difference between focusing on specific ways of thinking (making a concrete case that their implications are damaging and inviting critical response), and pursuing an agenda of ideological disqualification in which an entire group of diverse human beings is cast beyond the pale--be it Muslims, or Christians, or Jews, or Hindus, or atheists. If any way of thinking has morally pernicious effects, this surely does.
Is Harris guilty of this? I'll decide for sure once I've read his book. But whatever is the case with Harris, let us agree that neither theists nor atheists have a corner on being moral, and neither theists nor atheists have a unique claim on harboring ideas with questionable implications for our prospects of living the most virtuous life we are capable of. In the struggle to understand what it means to live a good life--and the place of religious faith and respect for science in that struggle--bifurcating ideologies only impede progress.
Because theists so often argue that one cannot have morality without God--or at least that one cannot have any kind of objective morality which can provide normative guidance across interpersonal and cultural divides--it makes sense for atheist thinkers, especially those who believe in an objective morality, to attempt to establish a secular foundation for objectively binding moral standards. Thus, it is no surprise that Sam Harris, the "original" new atheist, would turn his attention to this task.
A few months back I offered my reflection on Sam Harris's efforts to pursue this task in a TED talk. Now Harris has released a book on the topic, The Moral Landscape, developing his claim that science can offer an objective foundation for ethics. Just today, Michael Ruse--a philosopher I greatly respect and author of numerous works in the philosophy of science, (including Darwinism and its Discontents and his most recent book, Science and Spirituality)--offers his take (down) of that book in Religion Dispatches.
Many of the points Ruse makes are similar to those I raised in relation to Harris's TED talk--but Ruse is quicker to highlight Harris's deeper agenda, which is (yet again) to trash religion and people of faith. "To say that religion is a bit of an obsession for Harris," Ruse comments, "is rather like saying Hitler had a bit of a thing about the Jews." Ruse is himself an atheist who wrangles repeatedly with creationists and ID theorists, but he's what William Rowe (the atheist philosopher of religion) would dub a "friendly atheist"--that is, his attitude is one of skeptical but respectful critical engagement with people of faith. I think, like me, Ruse is greatly troubled by the kind of bifurcating ideology--the us/them divide and the villifacion on those on the other side of it--that characterizes so much of the contemporary debate about theism and religious faith.
Often, the issue of morality is invoked by religious fundamentalists to villify atheists: There can be no morality without God, they argue; and hence, atheists must be amoral. The reasoning here is terrible, of course. Even if you think that the existence of objective moral truths in some fashion or another depends on the existence of a God, it hardly follows that atheists can't be deeply moral. Suppose there is ongoing uncertainty about the underlying physics that explains the force of gravity--and suppose that in a debate about this underlying physics, one side in the debate has the right answer. It doesn't follow that those on the other side of the debate don't believe in gravity (let alone that they behave as if it doesn't apply to them).
Ruse, in his review of Harris's new book, seems to worry that Harris is taking a page out of the religious fundamentalist's book--trying to argue, in effect, that religious people can't be genuinely moral because they misconceive the foundations of morality. In fact, Ruse seems to be concerned that pursuing this kind of villification of religious believers is a basic driving purpose behind Harris's book.
How else do we explain Harris's utterly gratuitous 15-page attack on Francis Collins, the head of the NIH who also happens to be Christian--an attack that seems entirely out of place in a book that's supposed to be about the foundations of morality? As one reads his review, one can almost see Ruse blinking in astonishment. If your purpose is to explain the foundations of morality in terms of scientific facts, why ignore G.E. Moore's arguments that this cannot be done (in terms of what Moore calls the naturalistic fallacy) while devoting more than a dozen pages to trashing a scientist who has, buy all accounts (except, perhaps, the accounts of those religious conservatives who want to ban stem cell research) led the NIH with distinction?
In fact, as I argued when Harris first called Collins unfit to lead the NIH in the pages of the New York Times (simply because of Collins' Christian faith), there is a very disturbing similarity between Harris's denunciation of Collins and traditional religious denunciation of heretics. Now, it seems, Harris wants to go further: Belief in God not only disqualifies one from being fit to lead an organization such as the NIH; it fundamentally compromises one's ability to lead a moral life.
To be fair, I have yet to read Harris's book and I am going simply off of Ruse's review. Perhaps Harris's argument is not quite so hostile to religion as all of that. But, of course, having read his other books I'm prone to think Ruse's characterization is right. And if it is, then Harris is once again recreating atheism in religious fundamentalism's image--this time by taking the fundamentalist argument that atheists can't be moral and inverting it to apply to religious believers.
I think the issue of how morality and religion intersect is an important one. But I think it is crucial that we explore this and related issues without the sort of hostile us/them thinking that puts those with different ideas into a morally disabled "out-group." This is not to say there is no truth to the notion that certain ways of thinking can have morally pernicious effects. After all, I just argued in my most recent Religion Dispatches article that allegiance to a doctrine of biblical inerrancy can threaten our capacity for empathy and compassion. But there's a difference between focusing on specific ways of thinking (making a concrete case that their implications are damaging and inviting critical response), and pursuing an agenda of ideological disqualification in which an entire group of diverse human beings is cast beyond the pale--be it Muslims, or Christians, or Jews, or Hindus, or atheists. If any way of thinking has morally pernicious effects, this surely does.
Is Harris guilty of this? I'll decide for sure once I've read his book. But whatever is the case with Harris, let us agree that neither theists nor atheists have a corner on being moral, and neither theists nor atheists have a unique claim on harboring ideas with questionable implications for our prospects of living the most virtuous life we are capable of. In the struggle to understand what it means to live a good life--and the place of religious faith and respect for science in that struggle--bifurcating ideologies only impede progress.
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