Happiness is a little thing that obstinately refuses to grow bigger. No matter how we beg her to become universal and immortal, she insists on being fleeting and parochial.
Happiness is being right where you are, as the person you are, experiencing whatever it is that you experience. It might be something that many people enjoy, or it might not. What really matters is your attitude towards whatever it is: if you have the right attitude, one that you adopt consciously and deliberately, then you will always be happy, even when "whatever it is" happens to be something that most people would regard as something very bad.
Happiness is breaking your leg and passing out from intense pain at the doctor's office, only to wake up later in recovery and realize that you are not dead. For a moment you don't care about anything else (including the bill you cannot afford).
Happiness is spending years of your life trying to serve people who tell you repeatedly that they hate your guts and wish you would go to hell. You smile and move away as they curse you, spit at you, punch you, and belittle you. You regularly attend meetings where well-meaning fools offer you reasons why other people hate you: perhaps you are a sinful wretch, incapable of showing honest affection; or maybe you just lack some basic social awareness--your smile is awkward, you don't shake hands right, and you have this tendency to babble on instead of getting to the point when people actually let you talk instead of spitting on you. You smile and sit through these meetings. At the end you shake the speaker's hand and say, "Thank you very much." And you mean it.
Happiness is going to school to qualify yourself for a job that ceases to exist soon after you graduate. You smile and release the hope that you had for outcomes that are now impossible. You see that the small things in life are still there for you--family, friends, food, and even work, too (though it won't be the sort of work you imagined doing as a doe-eyed undergraduate).
Happiness is being reminded constantly how people are better than you. You learn not to mind this obvious truth. You stop dwelling on it. You just accept it and move past it, looking for the way to help in situations where "the best" is not what is needed (since you don't have it to offer: why spend time regretting what you never have? that will not make anyone happier).
Happiness is waking up each day and realizing that your dreams have come true, because they are small dreams--little dreams of small happiness that even the most unlucky person might expect to find fulfilled every now and then.
Happiness is realizing that you never wanted much, and that you have almost all of it nearly all the time. If you have it, you don't need more. A little pleasure is sufficient for the greatest happiness humans can achieve. If you lack it, don't worry. Human life is fleeting and yours will change soon (losing whatever it is that makes you miserable right now).
Showing posts with label moral relativism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label moral relativism. Show all posts
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Monday, February 18, 2013
More Reflections on Apologetics
To me it seems that the apologetics business is inherently thuggish.
"Defending the faith" naturally turns into attacking "deviant" versions
of it that appear threatening (rightly or wrongly), the
same way defending the structural integrity of a biological organism
involves killing cells deemed dangerous (rightly or wrongly). I see the
"old guard" of Mormon apologists from FARMS as something of a bad allergic reaction, these
days. They fight most viciously against Mormons who agree most with
them, people like John Dehlin. This is in some degree inevitable, since
there are precious few enemies left that are worth contending with.
Old-school anti-Mormonism is pretty much dead. The new face of the
mainstream Mormon faith and the evolution of American society have
killed it. Nobody seriously listens to the Ed Deckers of the world any
more. If they do, you don't need a doctorate to dismiss them. ("Excuse
me, Westboro Baptist! My degree in theology shows that your position on
homosexuality is hermeutically disputable!") In today's world, the
problems that religion faces are problems that don't respect the old
battlelines drawn up in the past (Mormons vs. Protestants in the
ninteenth century, Protestants vs. Catholics since before that).
Mormons are more like their old enemies than they are unlike them. But old habits die hard. I remember my own experience in an introductory anthropology course at a state university. When it came time to discuss world religions, our instructor, an atheist, asked all of us to share something about our religious faith (or lack thereof). I was still a really fanatical Mormon at that point, so I bore my testimony (that Jesus was a physical being of flesh and bone who lived, died for our sins, rose from the dead, and appeared to Joseph Smith to restore his gospel in preparation for the kingdom of God that he would establish any day now, when he returned to overturn the temporal order of the earth). The person who sounded the most like me was an evangelical Christian, who spoke before I did and brought up (before he knew I was Mormon) that he rejected Mormons as Christians and would never pray with one. The rest of the class were liberal Christians (including a Catholic whom the evangelical barely managed to accept as Christian), cultural believers (who attended church or synagogue with family), agnostics, and a few avowed atheists. The evangelical and I were the only zealots. We were both radically attached to Jesus, radically convinced that he was crucial to a good human life and that we understood him correctly where others did not. The rest of the class thought we were crazy weirdos, and nice as we might try to be to one another (as people who approached life pretty much the same way), the same fanaticism that brought us together (as Jesus freaks) also drove us apart ("Your Jesus is not mine, i.e. not the real Jesus!"). The gap between us was largely cosmetic and rhetorical (we spoke the same language with a slightly different accent), whereas the gap between us and the rest of the class was fundamental and profound (they had no clue what the heck we were talking about when we bore witness to them, and we understood their visions of faith even less than they grasped ours). When I went on an LDS mission, later, I continued to have experiences like this one. The people who understood my language of faith best were those who already spoke it, and these people were most often fluent in Christian fanaticism because they were closely attached to their own version of it. They were more likely to hate me (as a Mormon missionary) than the agnostics and atheists (who viewed me either with shock, as something completely odd and foreign, or with a kind of detached condescension, as though I were a little child who just couldn't get past the fact that Santa is a story, not a real person). The people who attacked me verbally, as a Mormon missionary, were mostly evangelical Christians, Jehovah's Witnesses, and fanatical Catholics (I served my mission in a very Catholic country). The people who listened to me kindly were liberal believers (e.g. charismatic Christians who didn't care about historical creeds, liberal Catholics who embraced Vatican II, even some liberal Muslims) and agnostics (who were often atheists). Talking with these people left me feeling like there was a giant disconnect with the rhetoric I spoke and the reality I lived. Rhetorically, I was closest to people whom I didn't really like (because they didn't like me: all we ever did was argue unproductively about the incontrovertible, absolute truth that we each professed differently). Realistically, I was closer to the people who didn't feel threatened by my fanaticism (because they didn't share it, at all). I couldn't contribute anything useful to my fellow fanatics, since our mutual fanaticism constituted an insuperable barrier to any kind of understanding. The people I could have constructive conversations with were those who didn't see me as any kind of threat, the people who existed outside the realm(s) of conflict where my fanaticism was born (the old, historical dichotomies between "heretical" Christianities and "orthodox" Christianity). I was never going to convert them (baptize them into Mormonism), but I could learn from them (and even teach them things that they found enlightening, things that enriched their perspective on humanity in ways that they appreciated). By the time I finished my mission, I didn't bother talking much to fanatics any more. I had proven over and over how pointless it was (it just made people mad; no fanatic loved Jesus better for hearing me bawl about how I loved him differently).
When I arrived at BYU, I was still a fanatic (but a questioning one: I was trying to understand why I felt drawn toward non-fanatics, what there was in fanaticism that made its devotees obnoxious to each other). When I left, with an undergraduate degree in the humanities, I was much less of a fanatic. In grad school, I ceased to be fanatic (or turned the dial way down: my wife still thinks I am fanatical, but I see myself as much less crazy than I used to be). I realized that I didn't have access to secrets of reality that other people don't possess. The more I looked at my zealous Mormon fanaticism, the more similar it appeared to the other zealous fanaticisms I encountered in the outside world (e.g. in evangelical Christianity or the Watchtower or Opus Dei). Even worse, I realized that my apologetic bent (which I adopted as a youthful zealot) pushed me towards an even more polarized verson of Mormon fanaticism than that expressed by your average Mormon. Apologists create this island within their tradition, an island that embraces just enough of outside influences to dismiss them (enough Judaism to dismiss the Hebrews as insufficiently Mormon, enough Christianity to dismiss the Christians as insufficiently Mormon, enough Islam to dismiss the Muslims as insufficiently Mormon, enough Buddhism to dismiss Buddhists as insufficiently Mormon, enough rational skepticism to dismiss agnostics, atheists, and skeptics as insufficiently Mormon). Inevitably, the apologetic island cuts some "orthodox" insiders off (because they aren't "hip" enough to be rational the way apologists are: they don't see any Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or rational skepticism in their religion; they just blindly do whatever they think the prophet says instead of using the right apologetic Urim and Thummim to get at true Mormonism, which is nothing less than universal human reality). In grad school, I realized that there was no reason a person couldn't get at the deepest human truths accessible through an ideology that wasn't Mormon. There is no language that is absolutely superior to all others in every respect. (Spanish is not qualitatively better or worse than Chinese. Each one may be better or worse for individual people, but neither is universally superior to the other.) There is no religion that is absolutely superior to all others in every respect. (Mormonism is not qualitatively better or worse than Buddhism. Each one may be better or worse for individual people, but neither is universally superior to the other.) I realized that I could not be the kind of apologist who argued for the universal superiority of one particular brand of fanaticism (my own Mormonism). Unfortunately, I had invested much of my identity as a religious person on the existence of a singular, universal fanaticism (that I had to proclaim to the world). That was my personal mistake. When I learned how great a mistake it was, my religious identity collapsed entirely. I don't blame apologists for this. I destroyed my own faith when I based it on something inherently unstable (a youthful attachment to the romantic ideal of one true fanaticism to rule them all and in the Celestial Kingdom bind them).
Religion works best when it draws different people together so that they can learn from each other, embracing their differences and accepting that these need not destroy the possibility for peaceful coexistence. The strongest religions are those that don't need much careful defense from individuals who practice them. Apologetics historically works best by subverting this process, teaching people to overvalue their differences (mine are "true" where yours are "false") and employ them against one another gratuitously ("We shouldn't have to learn about your crappy faith in school: you represent a danger to civilized life and must be shut out through argument if not by recourse to the lawcourt or the battlefield!"). The strongest apologists are those who weaken their religion (by making it depend too much on the apologist's personal idiosyncrasies, such that it falls apart when someone who isn't an initiate attempts to use it: "My spiritual witness confirms that religion is rational my way, not yours, you evil heretic!"). The strong apologist needs a weak religion (so that he has something to defend: the really strong religions don't need apologists; they can stand on their own). I realized this in grad school. I realized that as an apologist, I was undermining the foundation of everything I loved most about religion. It was devastating. (Imagine waking up one morning and realizing that you inadvertently supported the Nazi party or some Islamic terrorist cell in the name of doing something really good: I wasn't trying to hurt anyone, but I became aware that my actions and character were very hurtful, needlessly so.)
As a result of my experiences, I think apologists mean well. I don't think many of them understand their work very well, though. They want to make religion better, much of the time, because they love it. Unfortunately, their good intentions often lead them to make things worse (for themselves and others, including those inside and outside the religious traditions where they participate). Life as an apologist is always tough. People "misunderstand" you constantly, when your work--that some people embrace eagerly and with joy--inexplicably causes great pain to others (who feel their faith attacked and undermined by yours, not always irrationally or incorrectly). The contemporary Mormon apologist is often a "nice" guy, I think, caught in a web bigger than he is, doing his level best to live up to his own expectations for himself and the (conflicting) expectations others have of him. I wish him well. There but for the grace of Zeus go I.
Mormons are more like their old enemies than they are unlike them. But old habits die hard. I remember my own experience in an introductory anthropology course at a state university. When it came time to discuss world religions, our instructor, an atheist, asked all of us to share something about our religious faith (or lack thereof). I was still a really fanatical Mormon at that point, so I bore my testimony (that Jesus was a physical being of flesh and bone who lived, died for our sins, rose from the dead, and appeared to Joseph Smith to restore his gospel in preparation for the kingdom of God that he would establish any day now, when he returned to overturn the temporal order of the earth). The person who sounded the most like me was an evangelical Christian, who spoke before I did and brought up (before he knew I was Mormon) that he rejected Mormons as Christians and would never pray with one. The rest of the class were liberal Christians (including a Catholic whom the evangelical barely managed to accept as Christian), cultural believers (who attended church or synagogue with family), agnostics, and a few avowed atheists. The evangelical and I were the only zealots. We were both radically attached to Jesus, radically convinced that he was crucial to a good human life and that we understood him correctly where others did not. The rest of the class thought we were crazy weirdos, and nice as we might try to be to one another (as people who approached life pretty much the same way), the same fanaticism that brought us together (as Jesus freaks) also drove us apart ("Your Jesus is not mine, i.e. not the real Jesus!"). The gap between us was largely cosmetic and rhetorical (we spoke the same language with a slightly different accent), whereas the gap between us and the rest of the class was fundamental and profound (they had no clue what the heck we were talking about when we bore witness to them, and we understood their visions of faith even less than they grasped ours). When I went on an LDS mission, later, I continued to have experiences like this one. The people who understood my language of faith best were those who already spoke it, and these people were most often fluent in Christian fanaticism because they were closely attached to their own version of it. They were more likely to hate me (as a Mormon missionary) than the agnostics and atheists (who viewed me either with shock, as something completely odd and foreign, or with a kind of detached condescension, as though I were a little child who just couldn't get past the fact that Santa is a story, not a real person). The people who attacked me verbally, as a Mormon missionary, were mostly evangelical Christians, Jehovah's Witnesses, and fanatical Catholics (I served my mission in a very Catholic country). The people who listened to me kindly were liberal believers (e.g. charismatic Christians who didn't care about historical creeds, liberal Catholics who embraced Vatican II, even some liberal Muslims) and agnostics (who were often atheists). Talking with these people left me feeling like there was a giant disconnect with the rhetoric I spoke and the reality I lived. Rhetorically, I was closest to people whom I didn't really like (because they didn't like me: all we ever did was argue unproductively about the incontrovertible, absolute truth that we each professed differently). Realistically, I was closer to the people who didn't feel threatened by my fanaticism (because they didn't share it, at all). I couldn't contribute anything useful to my fellow fanatics, since our mutual fanaticism constituted an insuperable barrier to any kind of understanding. The people I could have constructive conversations with were those who didn't see me as any kind of threat, the people who existed outside the realm(s) of conflict where my fanaticism was born (the old, historical dichotomies between "heretical" Christianities and "orthodox" Christianity). I was never going to convert them (baptize them into Mormonism), but I could learn from them (and even teach them things that they found enlightening, things that enriched their perspective on humanity in ways that they appreciated). By the time I finished my mission, I didn't bother talking much to fanatics any more. I had proven over and over how pointless it was (it just made people mad; no fanatic loved Jesus better for hearing me bawl about how I loved him differently).
When I arrived at BYU, I was still a fanatic (but a questioning one: I was trying to understand why I felt drawn toward non-fanatics, what there was in fanaticism that made its devotees obnoxious to each other). When I left, with an undergraduate degree in the humanities, I was much less of a fanatic. In grad school, I ceased to be fanatic (or turned the dial way down: my wife still thinks I am fanatical, but I see myself as much less crazy than I used to be). I realized that I didn't have access to secrets of reality that other people don't possess. The more I looked at my zealous Mormon fanaticism, the more similar it appeared to the other zealous fanaticisms I encountered in the outside world (e.g. in evangelical Christianity or the Watchtower or Opus Dei). Even worse, I realized that my apologetic bent (which I adopted as a youthful zealot) pushed me towards an even more polarized verson of Mormon fanaticism than that expressed by your average Mormon. Apologists create this island within their tradition, an island that embraces just enough of outside influences to dismiss them (enough Judaism to dismiss the Hebrews as insufficiently Mormon, enough Christianity to dismiss the Christians as insufficiently Mormon, enough Islam to dismiss the Muslims as insufficiently Mormon, enough Buddhism to dismiss Buddhists as insufficiently Mormon, enough rational skepticism to dismiss agnostics, atheists, and skeptics as insufficiently Mormon). Inevitably, the apologetic island cuts some "orthodox" insiders off (because they aren't "hip" enough to be rational the way apologists are: they don't see any Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or rational skepticism in their religion; they just blindly do whatever they think the prophet says instead of using the right apologetic Urim and Thummim to get at true Mormonism, which is nothing less than universal human reality). In grad school, I realized that there was no reason a person couldn't get at the deepest human truths accessible through an ideology that wasn't Mormon. There is no language that is absolutely superior to all others in every respect. (Spanish is not qualitatively better or worse than Chinese. Each one may be better or worse for individual people, but neither is universally superior to the other.) There is no religion that is absolutely superior to all others in every respect. (Mormonism is not qualitatively better or worse than Buddhism. Each one may be better or worse for individual people, but neither is universally superior to the other.) I realized that I could not be the kind of apologist who argued for the universal superiority of one particular brand of fanaticism (my own Mormonism). Unfortunately, I had invested much of my identity as a religious person on the existence of a singular, universal fanaticism (that I had to proclaim to the world). That was my personal mistake. When I learned how great a mistake it was, my religious identity collapsed entirely. I don't blame apologists for this. I destroyed my own faith when I based it on something inherently unstable (a youthful attachment to the romantic ideal of one true fanaticism to rule them all and in the Celestial Kingdom bind them).
Religion works best when it draws different people together so that they can learn from each other, embracing their differences and accepting that these need not destroy the possibility for peaceful coexistence. The strongest religions are those that don't need much careful defense from individuals who practice them. Apologetics historically works best by subverting this process, teaching people to overvalue their differences (mine are "true" where yours are "false") and employ them against one another gratuitously ("We shouldn't have to learn about your crappy faith in school: you represent a danger to civilized life and must be shut out through argument if not by recourse to the lawcourt or the battlefield!"). The strongest apologists are those who weaken their religion (by making it depend too much on the apologist's personal idiosyncrasies, such that it falls apart when someone who isn't an initiate attempts to use it: "My spiritual witness confirms that religion is rational my way, not yours, you evil heretic!"). The strong apologist needs a weak religion (so that he has something to defend: the really strong religions don't need apologists; they can stand on their own). I realized this in grad school. I realized that as an apologist, I was undermining the foundation of everything I loved most about religion. It was devastating. (Imagine waking up one morning and realizing that you inadvertently supported the Nazi party or some Islamic terrorist cell in the name of doing something really good: I wasn't trying to hurt anyone, but I became aware that my actions and character were very hurtful, needlessly so.)
As a result of my experiences, I think apologists mean well. I don't think many of them understand their work very well, though. They want to make religion better, much of the time, because they love it. Unfortunately, their good intentions often lead them to make things worse (for themselves and others, including those inside and outside the religious traditions where they participate). Life as an apologist is always tough. People "misunderstand" you constantly, when your work--that some people embrace eagerly and with joy--inexplicably causes great pain to others (who feel their faith attacked and undermined by yours, not always irrationally or incorrectly). The contemporary Mormon apologist is often a "nice" guy, I think, caught in a web bigger than he is, doing his level best to live up to his own expectations for himself and the (conflicting) expectations others have of him. I wish him well. There but for the grace of Zeus go I.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Intelligent Design Gets Fooled by Randomness
Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. New York: Random House, 2004. ISBN 0812975219.
Every moment of my life, I make bets with the universe. If it is cold, I bet it will stay that way for a certain amount of time, and I wear warm clothes. If I need to get somewhere, I bet my car will work (or take the bus or the train). If I enter a relationship with another person voluntarily, I bet its overall effect on my existence will be more positive than negative. If I feel hungry, I eat something (or don't), betting that eating (or fasting) will make me feel better. Sometimes, my bets pay off: I get more upside than downside from exposure to the reality I don't really understand. Eating (or fasting) makes me feel good. Other times, my bets do not pay off: I get more downside than upside from exposure to the reality I don't understand. Eating (or fasting) makes me sick.
Some time near the dawn of my adolescence, I picked up the idea that there exists out there in the universe a betting strategy that would provide only upside--no downside at all (or at least, no downside worth considering: the upside would be so good that it would always pay gamblers like me more than it cost). This idea was intuitive--it was a story I was inclined to tell myself by nature--and it was reinforced by my education, especially my religious education (which told me that my perfect betting strategy existed and was the restored gospel of Jesus Christ preached by the Latter-day Saints).
The LDS church (that I was brought up in) offered me a fixed strategy for making bets with the universe. If you reduce this LDS strategy down to its essence, it looks something like this: (i) never do anything you feel bad about (bad feelings are a sign from God that a bet is evil); (ii) follow the prophets, no matter what (the prophets will never lead the faithful astray: their bets will always yield more upside than downside). I placed many bets with this strategy over the course of my adolescence and young adulthood. Some of them paid off (more upside than downside). Others did not. I was told that the downside from these bad bets would even out eventually, that losses did not matter, that they were Satan trying to mislead me (away from the one true strategy for making bets with the universe). I should just take my losses, no matter what they were, and have faith that the upside would appear, eventually, and erase the debts that were starting to destroy my life's accumulation of moral capital. For a while, this rhetorical placebo worked ("eat your losses, and God will make them up to you"), but there came a moment in my life when it didn't--a moment when my losses were too catastrophic to be ignored, a moment when it was painfully clear to me that I needed to change some of my bets with the universe or go morally bankrupt. I had a moral crisis, what some call a crisis of faith.
Nassim Taleb tells my same story, in a different environment: Wall Street. In brief, some Wall Street traders are kind of like religious fanatics (of the species I represent). They make bets with the universe, as we all do, and when their bets are bad, they double down. "My betting strategy is perfect. I have constructed it painstakingly, rationally, conscientiously--and any losses I take will ultimately be offset by even larger profits!" Blah, blah. The worst of these traders were those who traded with others' money (e.g. investment bankers attempting to game the market with the life's savings of ignorant bank customers). These guys could lose all their clients' money several times over (as some of them did), still believe in the truth of their bad betting strategy (which after all remains as logical, precise, and mathematical after losing money as it was before), and (worst) walk away with their own fortunes intact (even if they could never get employment as traders after their catastrophic losses). These smug SOBs screwed their clients over, big time, and felt absolutely no compunction about doing it--because they believed uncritically in the absolute truth of their betting strategies. Every time I read this story I am struck with how relevant it is--not just to my religious life, but to life in general.
As a result of my personal experiences, including my encounter with Nassim Taleb's work, I have realized something important about myself. I don't trust any fixed betting strategy to deliver more upside than downside. I don't care who tells me a story: I do not ever want to bet on a single story being so true that I can accept it without criticism (without taking out insurance somewhere, for when it turns out to be false). When I was young, I believed in a universe of order--a just world that makes sense, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked (eventually). I no longer believe in that universe. I have seen too many good people go under, and too many successful morons (including evil morons). And I have learned that people all have different betting strategies (even individual LDS take the generic Mormon model and use it differently) and that these are all more similar than different. Mormonism is more like Catholicism or Protestantism or Islam or Buddhism or even atheism than it is unlike them. All -isms originate as ideas in the human mind, which leaves recognizable generic traces (no matter what particular story it tells in any given instance). When you look honestly into history, it is patently obvious that the human mind is not a key to clear understanding of absolute reality. Ideas are cheap. Logical, linear ideas creating logical, linear maps of reality are cheap: they appear all over the place (in Mormonism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism, atheism, and any other -ism anyone can think of ever). Results are what matter. Change your ideas to match the results, not the other way round. Ideas are like quicksand, inherently unstable and dangerous (no matter what they are or who has them or what methods he claims to use to get at them).
There is a fundamental insight here, something deeper than the silly ideological wars between competing -isms. The fundamental insight is that reality is an open, chaotic system, not a closed, orderly one. No matter how nice some story sounds in the classroom (or the chapel or the lab or the boardroom), it is guaranteed to be false in some way. Logic is nice, and we should use it, but we should also use our eyes. You can lie with logic (and math and science as these exist among human beings) as easily as with any other language (logic is a language, like math and Spanish and Latin). Some lies are more harmful than others. The worst lies are those that people don't question, those that escape recognition and get accepted as some kind of absolute, fundamental truth. The worst lie is the one that says you can make bets with the universe that have no downside, no unexpected results, no risk for doing real damage. Historically, there is no such thing as a bet with the universe that life wins unconditionally: all species go extinct, like all companies, churches, nations, and -isms. But the successful people never see this. The gamblers who staked it all and won don't realize that they win because they are lucky: they preach about how to succeed ("just make bets like I did! playing Russian roulette worked great for me, and if you have the right moral fiber, it will work for you, too!"). The losers know to question their strategies. They see that their smarts don't work, that their logic is flawed, that reality remains opaque to the human mind (whether that mind approaches it through Mormonism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, atheism, or any other -ism: it doesn't matter which ideological horse you ride, you are never guaranteed to find happiness, at all). But the winners don't get it.
The winners talk about "intelligent design" as something real, and verifiable by recourse to simple observation. "See this awesome company I have built," Dick Fuld says of Lehman Brothers. "My partners and I had this great vision, and the brilliant piece of work you see before you is a result of our intelligent design" (the same kind of intelligent design that produces Paley's watch or Behe's cell or any other complex product of any process anyone wants to imagine). Then the thing unexpectedly goes bankrupt. What happened? Where is the intelligent design? Here apologists for the really just world I used to believe in typically come up with some kind of rational, logical deus ex machina to save their Intelligent Designer (whom we may as well call God) from being dumb the way all intelligent designers we see in history appear dumb. "My CEO is not fooled by randomness the way Dick Fuld was. Fuld was a loser, but my CEO is a winner. Read his latest book! It will show you how his design is really intelligent, fundamentally different from the flawed logic used by idiots like Fuld." You can ride this train as many times as you like, picking a new guru (a new Intelligent Designer) every time your old one blows up. If you're lucky, yours may never blow up (in your lifetime, anyway): you might be able to use his strategy to place bets that turn out well for you, randomly, because sometimes bets turn out well. Success happens (I almost added "unfortunately"). You can play Russian roulette and win--even win big: that doesn't make it a good strategy to recommend to others who want to enjoy your kind of success.
At the end of the day, I really like paganism--the extinct Greek and Roman variety, especially--as an -ism for modeling the way I see the world. The Greek god of just order is Zeus. He makes sure that good guys win and bad guys lose. But he is not omnipotent. The rest of his family have will too (and often oppose him directly), and there are always Titans looking to rebel and destroy his fragile, temporal order. In addition to all that, there lurks behind his throne the prophecy (preserved by Prometheus) that one day a son will overthrow him (the way he overthrew his father back in the day). He is a realistic kind of intelligent designer--a gambler who places bets (attempting to effect order) that will not always pay off. If there is a god ruling over the mess that is real life, this is what he looks like: he is not someone you can rely on for perfect stability. From my perspective, there is nobody you can rely on uncritically for perfect stability--no person, no ideology, and no god (whether gods are real or not: it doesn't matter). Real life is not about picking one strategy for placing bets and then insisting on that strategy dogmatically until you die (particularly if said strategy leads you to blow up: it would be sheer madness to continue killing yourself merely for an idea--no matter how pretty or logical it might appear).
I don't see myself as an opponent of religion or science, per se. I don't have a problem with people placing bets that they like with the universe. But I am a resolute opponent of people who think they have discovered "the secret" to winning Nature's game. I mistrust priests and scientists. I think it a virtue to doubt them, not embrace them and their (dangerous) ideas uncritically. The best among them share my fear (and take measures to prevent their inevitable mistakes from hurting other people unnecessarily); the worst demand respect that they never earn (trying to bully me into making the bets they would on the grounds that they are "smarter" than I am because of some stupid ideology they like, an ideology which might be religious or scientific, Mormon or non-Mormon, skeptical or not: it doesn't matter, and I don't care). In short, my moral crisis did not lead me to change allegiance from one god to another (who might be the devil). What changed for me was the way in which I look at all gods, especially when they come to me strongly recommended by people looking to influence my moral behavior. I mistrust people (including myself). I think people are fools--lovable fools when they get their own lives wrong, dangerous fools when they try to make me make the same mistakes they are making because some god (or non-god) wills it. Authoritarian bastards are authoritarian bastards, no matter what rhetoric they use to make themselves (and their followers) feel good about it. I don't follow any of them (until I have to, because they will kill or ostracize me otherwise, and I want to live). I don't love them. I don't agonize over whether we should pick one over another (voting for the lesser of two evils). They are all bastards. They are all dangerous. I am always against them, no matter what nifty rhetorical guise they use to cover up their bullshit. They can be as religious or scientific as they please. They can plead priesthood or democracy or logic or whatever the hell they want, and I will still refuse to bend the knee. They can nail me to a rock and have the eagle tear my liver (as Zeus did to Prometheus), and I will die despising them for it.
Every moment of my life, I make bets with the universe. If it is cold, I bet it will stay that way for a certain amount of time, and I wear warm clothes. If I need to get somewhere, I bet my car will work (or take the bus or the train). If I enter a relationship with another person voluntarily, I bet its overall effect on my existence will be more positive than negative. If I feel hungry, I eat something (or don't), betting that eating (or fasting) will make me feel better. Sometimes, my bets pay off: I get more upside than downside from exposure to the reality I don't really understand. Eating (or fasting) makes me feel good. Other times, my bets do not pay off: I get more downside than upside from exposure to the reality I don't understand. Eating (or fasting) makes me sick.
Some time near the dawn of my adolescence, I picked up the idea that there exists out there in the universe a betting strategy that would provide only upside--no downside at all (or at least, no downside worth considering: the upside would be so good that it would always pay gamblers like me more than it cost). This idea was intuitive--it was a story I was inclined to tell myself by nature--and it was reinforced by my education, especially my religious education (which told me that my perfect betting strategy existed and was the restored gospel of Jesus Christ preached by the Latter-day Saints).
The LDS church (that I was brought up in) offered me a fixed strategy for making bets with the universe. If you reduce this LDS strategy down to its essence, it looks something like this: (i) never do anything you feel bad about (bad feelings are a sign from God that a bet is evil); (ii) follow the prophets, no matter what (the prophets will never lead the faithful astray: their bets will always yield more upside than downside). I placed many bets with this strategy over the course of my adolescence and young adulthood. Some of them paid off (more upside than downside). Others did not. I was told that the downside from these bad bets would even out eventually, that losses did not matter, that they were Satan trying to mislead me (away from the one true strategy for making bets with the universe). I should just take my losses, no matter what they were, and have faith that the upside would appear, eventually, and erase the debts that were starting to destroy my life's accumulation of moral capital. For a while, this rhetorical placebo worked ("eat your losses, and God will make them up to you"), but there came a moment in my life when it didn't--a moment when my losses were too catastrophic to be ignored, a moment when it was painfully clear to me that I needed to change some of my bets with the universe or go morally bankrupt. I had a moral crisis, what some call a crisis of faith.
Nassim Taleb tells my same story, in a different environment: Wall Street. In brief, some Wall Street traders are kind of like religious fanatics (of the species I represent). They make bets with the universe, as we all do, and when their bets are bad, they double down. "My betting strategy is perfect. I have constructed it painstakingly, rationally, conscientiously--and any losses I take will ultimately be offset by even larger profits!" Blah, blah. The worst of these traders were those who traded with others' money (e.g. investment bankers attempting to game the market with the life's savings of ignorant bank customers). These guys could lose all their clients' money several times over (as some of them did), still believe in the truth of their bad betting strategy (which after all remains as logical, precise, and mathematical after losing money as it was before), and (worst) walk away with their own fortunes intact (even if they could never get employment as traders after their catastrophic losses). These smug SOBs screwed their clients over, big time, and felt absolutely no compunction about doing it--because they believed uncritically in the absolute truth of their betting strategies. Every time I read this story I am struck with how relevant it is--not just to my religious life, but to life in general.
As a result of my personal experiences, including my encounter with Nassim Taleb's work, I have realized something important about myself. I don't trust any fixed betting strategy to deliver more upside than downside. I don't care who tells me a story: I do not ever want to bet on a single story being so true that I can accept it without criticism (without taking out insurance somewhere, for when it turns out to be false). When I was young, I believed in a universe of order--a just world that makes sense, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked (eventually). I no longer believe in that universe. I have seen too many good people go under, and too many successful morons (including evil morons). And I have learned that people all have different betting strategies (even individual LDS take the generic Mormon model and use it differently) and that these are all more similar than different. Mormonism is more like Catholicism or Protestantism or Islam or Buddhism or even atheism than it is unlike them. All -isms originate as ideas in the human mind, which leaves recognizable generic traces (no matter what particular story it tells in any given instance). When you look honestly into history, it is patently obvious that the human mind is not a key to clear understanding of absolute reality. Ideas are cheap. Logical, linear ideas creating logical, linear maps of reality are cheap: they appear all over the place (in Mormonism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism, atheism, and any other -ism anyone can think of ever). Results are what matter. Change your ideas to match the results, not the other way round. Ideas are like quicksand, inherently unstable and dangerous (no matter what they are or who has them or what methods he claims to use to get at them).
There is a fundamental insight here, something deeper than the silly ideological wars between competing -isms. The fundamental insight is that reality is an open, chaotic system, not a closed, orderly one. No matter how nice some story sounds in the classroom (or the chapel or the lab or the boardroom), it is guaranteed to be false in some way. Logic is nice, and we should use it, but we should also use our eyes. You can lie with logic (and math and science as these exist among human beings) as easily as with any other language (logic is a language, like math and Spanish and Latin). Some lies are more harmful than others. The worst lies are those that people don't question, those that escape recognition and get accepted as some kind of absolute, fundamental truth. The worst lie is the one that says you can make bets with the universe that have no downside, no unexpected results, no risk for doing real damage. Historically, there is no such thing as a bet with the universe that life wins unconditionally: all species go extinct, like all companies, churches, nations, and -isms. But the successful people never see this. The gamblers who staked it all and won don't realize that they win because they are lucky: they preach about how to succeed ("just make bets like I did! playing Russian roulette worked great for me, and if you have the right moral fiber, it will work for you, too!"). The losers know to question their strategies. They see that their smarts don't work, that their logic is flawed, that reality remains opaque to the human mind (whether that mind approaches it through Mormonism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, atheism, or any other -ism: it doesn't matter which ideological horse you ride, you are never guaranteed to find happiness, at all). But the winners don't get it.
The winners talk about "intelligent design" as something real, and verifiable by recourse to simple observation. "See this awesome company I have built," Dick Fuld says of Lehman Brothers. "My partners and I had this great vision, and the brilliant piece of work you see before you is a result of our intelligent design" (the same kind of intelligent design that produces Paley's watch or Behe's cell or any other complex product of any process anyone wants to imagine). Then the thing unexpectedly goes bankrupt. What happened? Where is the intelligent design? Here apologists for the really just world I used to believe in typically come up with some kind of rational, logical deus ex machina to save their Intelligent Designer (whom we may as well call God) from being dumb the way all intelligent designers we see in history appear dumb. "My CEO is not fooled by randomness the way Dick Fuld was. Fuld was a loser, but my CEO is a winner. Read his latest book! It will show you how his design is really intelligent, fundamentally different from the flawed logic used by idiots like Fuld." You can ride this train as many times as you like, picking a new guru (a new Intelligent Designer) every time your old one blows up. If you're lucky, yours may never blow up (in your lifetime, anyway): you might be able to use his strategy to place bets that turn out well for you, randomly, because sometimes bets turn out well. Success happens (I almost added "unfortunately"). You can play Russian roulette and win--even win big: that doesn't make it a good strategy to recommend to others who want to enjoy your kind of success.
At the end of the day, I really like paganism--the extinct Greek and Roman variety, especially--as an -ism for modeling the way I see the world. The Greek god of just order is Zeus. He makes sure that good guys win and bad guys lose. But he is not omnipotent. The rest of his family have will too (and often oppose him directly), and there are always Titans looking to rebel and destroy his fragile, temporal order. In addition to all that, there lurks behind his throne the prophecy (preserved by Prometheus) that one day a son will overthrow him (the way he overthrew his father back in the day). He is a realistic kind of intelligent designer--a gambler who places bets (attempting to effect order) that will not always pay off. If there is a god ruling over the mess that is real life, this is what he looks like: he is not someone you can rely on for perfect stability. From my perspective, there is nobody you can rely on uncritically for perfect stability--no person, no ideology, and no god (whether gods are real or not: it doesn't matter). Real life is not about picking one strategy for placing bets and then insisting on that strategy dogmatically until you die (particularly if said strategy leads you to blow up: it would be sheer madness to continue killing yourself merely for an idea--no matter how pretty or logical it might appear).
I don't see myself as an opponent of religion or science, per se. I don't have a problem with people placing bets that they like with the universe. But I am a resolute opponent of people who think they have discovered "the secret" to winning Nature's game. I mistrust priests and scientists. I think it a virtue to doubt them, not embrace them and their (dangerous) ideas uncritically. The best among them share my fear (and take measures to prevent their inevitable mistakes from hurting other people unnecessarily); the worst demand respect that they never earn (trying to bully me into making the bets they would on the grounds that they are "smarter" than I am because of some stupid ideology they like, an ideology which might be religious or scientific, Mormon or non-Mormon, skeptical or not: it doesn't matter, and I don't care). In short, my moral crisis did not lead me to change allegiance from one god to another (who might be the devil). What changed for me was the way in which I look at all gods, especially when they come to me strongly recommended by people looking to influence my moral behavior. I mistrust people (including myself). I think people are fools--lovable fools when they get their own lives wrong, dangerous fools when they try to make me make the same mistakes they are making because some god (or non-god) wills it. Authoritarian bastards are authoritarian bastards, no matter what rhetoric they use to make themselves (and their followers) feel good about it. I don't follow any of them (until I have to, because they will kill or ostracize me otherwise, and I want to live). I don't love them. I don't agonize over whether we should pick one over another (voting for the lesser of two evils). They are all bastards. They are all dangerous. I am always against them, no matter what nifty rhetorical guise they use to cover up their bullshit. They can be as religious or scientific as they please. They can plead priesthood or democracy or logic or whatever the hell they want, and I will still refuse to bend the knee. They can nail me to a rock and have the eagle tear my liver (as Zeus did to Prometheus), and I will die despising them for it.
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Taming Human Nature
This morning a vivid image came to my head as I was walking home in the rain after dropping my boys off at preschool.
Imagine that pleasure and pain are the same thing: emotion. Now imagine that your soul is a nice little valley, and emotion is a large river running through it (providing fresh water, fish and other wildlife, hydropower, etc.). Naturally, the nature of the river Emotion is going to vary over time. Sometimes, when the winter snows melt or heavy rains fall, the river will become rough and turgid, rising up and flooding the valley of Soul with dark water. It will destroy things. Other times it will be smooth, clear, and peaceful. It will create things.
Human nature is to observe things and react. We see the river Emotion. We observe how it changes over time, and we naturally want to minimize the harm its flooding causes and maximize the good that comes from its calm. For some of us, this means building a giant dam to hold it back (and maybe release some of its energy in a controlled fashion to accomplish some specific tasks, like creating energy for the community and washing out wastes from the artificial lake created by the dam). There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, nothing at all. But not all rivers are easily dammable (because nature makes each valley unique), and sometimes damming brings unexpected consequences (drastically altering the environment in the soul valley in ways that might be worse for its health than some seasonal flooding).
In my valley of Soul, I built the strongest dam I could come up with. I followed the best blueprints I could find to construct a wall that would tame the river Emotion completely and indefinitely. But my river was not one of those easy to dam. The artificial lake I created became a breeding ground for bad things, anxieties that festered and spread like noxious algae, poisoning the atmosphere of my little soul valley. Then, to make matters worse, my perfect dam began to leak. At first, the leaks were small and manageable: all I needed to clean them up were a few Dutch boys with some basic engineering skills. But as time progressed, the viability of this maintenance crew proved less and less, until one day, the dam broke, and my valley was hit with the flood of the century.
The flood utterly destroyed my old dam, along with many of the improvements and opportunities that that dam afforded. Because of this experience, I was obliged to rethink everything I thought I knew about soul valleys (mine in particular) and dams. I went back to the drawing board, with a new team of engineers, since my Dutch boys had no clue what had happened or what to do about it (other than rebuild the old dam and hope that the recent flood was simply a fluke). As I rethought things and consulted with new engineers, I learned many things about the nature of soul valleys and emotional rivers (my own and those elsewhere in universe of humanity).
Meanwhile, my valley began to recover from the massive flooding. Life returned to an equilibrium. Time passed, and I still had not replaced the old dam. I had spent years in terror of what would happen to me without the protection of that dam, of the seasonal flooding that some said would utterly destroy life in my valley. As it turned out, the seasonal floods were nothing compared to the collapse of the dam: my valley recovered nicely from them. In fact, they were actually kind of pleasant, a much tamer version of the wild water that destroyed the dam. Also, I realized that the environment was much better without that great stagnant lake of fear around, the lake whose black darkness the dam had created and then vomited all over my valley of Soul. Why remake that lake, I wondered to myself?
Everything I heard from the engineers convinced me that my valley was always going to be flooded at one time or another, and it seemed to me that regular seasonal floods were much easier to manage (and much more pleasant) than occasional tsunamis. The deciding factor in my decision not to rebuild the dam was how lovely life without the lake was, though. Some people like lakes. Some lakes are really quite likable. But mine wasn't. I did not like it. Why rebuild something unnecessary and unpleasant? People who like artificial lakes in their soul valleys are always telling me how much fun they have in them, how they make so many nice and convenient things possible (advanced hydropower, irrigation, fishing, water-skiing), and I don't deny that. But my lake was not like that (or perhaps better, was not just that). It was also a home for the Loch Ness Monster, whom I am very glad to be rid of.
People who want absolute control over their valley of Soul see me as backwards, chaotic, primitive, and uncivilized because I have not dammed the river Emotion. I let her follow her natural currents. When she floods, I am flooded. When she dries up, I am dry. It is not always easy or pleasant. But neither was having a dam. Every choice we make in dealing with Emotion will necessarily involve both pleasure and pain. Every valley is different, with different inhabitants who value different things (and have different traditions, different types of culture that allow them to live in the unique habitat nature has given them). In my valley, we live better with natural rhythms, and no dam. We aren't out to dynamite your dam, at all, but we aren't going to build one for ourselves, either. We know what it will do to our valley. We have seen it, and we did not like it. Much as you like dams (in your valley), we dislike them more (in our valley: we like them fine in yours, if you want them there). Much as you hate seasonal floods (in your valley), we like them more (in ours, where they are part of the rhythm that gives our life shape and meaning: we need them for the same reason that you need dams).
Recently a number of people have reached out to me, offering to help me build dams (or at least attend meetings where teams of Dutch boys tell us how to make the sort of dam that once graced my valley). Much as I appreciate the offer, I really don't need a dam (certainly not one like that), and I am not really interested in spending a lot of time discussing the proper design for something that is useless to me. (One does not go to study with a master trumpeter if one wishes to learn the violin. As beautifully as you might play the trumpet, it is not my instrument, and I am not going to spend hours learning it, though I am happy to listen to you play sometimes.) To quote a venerable old book, your love and interest are much appreciated, but I would be at Jerusalem.
Imagine that pleasure and pain are the same thing: emotion. Now imagine that your soul is a nice little valley, and emotion is a large river running through it (providing fresh water, fish and other wildlife, hydropower, etc.). Naturally, the nature of the river Emotion is going to vary over time. Sometimes, when the winter snows melt or heavy rains fall, the river will become rough and turgid, rising up and flooding the valley of Soul with dark water. It will destroy things. Other times it will be smooth, clear, and peaceful. It will create things.
Human nature is to observe things and react. We see the river Emotion. We observe how it changes over time, and we naturally want to minimize the harm its flooding causes and maximize the good that comes from its calm. For some of us, this means building a giant dam to hold it back (and maybe release some of its energy in a controlled fashion to accomplish some specific tasks, like creating energy for the community and washing out wastes from the artificial lake created by the dam). There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, nothing at all. But not all rivers are easily dammable (because nature makes each valley unique), and sometimes damming brings unexpected consequences (drastically altering the environment in the soul valley in ways that might be worse for its health than some seasonal flooding).
In my valley of Soul, I built the strongest dam I could come up with. I followed the best blueprints I could find to construct a wall that would tame the river Emotion completely and indefinitely. But my river was not one of those easy to dam. The artificial lake I created became a breeding ground for bad things, anxieties that festered and spread like noxious algae, poisoning the atmosphere of my little soul valley. Then, to make matters worse, my perfect dam began to leak. At first, the leaks were small and manageable: all I needed to clean them up were a few Dutch boys with some basic engineering skills. But as time progressed, the viability of this maintenance crew proved less and less, until one day, the dam broke, and my valley was hit with the flood of the century.
The flood utterly destroyed my old dam, along with many of the improvements and opportunities that that dam afforded. Because of this experience, I was obliged to rethink everything I thought I knew about soul valleys (mine in particular) and dams. I went back to the drawing board, with a new team of engineers, since my Dutch boys had no clue what had happened or what to do about it (other than rebuild the old dam and hope that the recent flood was simply a fluke). As I rethought things and consulted with new engineers, I learned many things about the nature of soul valleys and emotional rivers (my own and those elsewhere in universe of humanity).
Meanwhile, my valley began to recover from the massive flooding. Life returned to an equilibrium. Time passed, and I still had not replaced the old dam. I had spent years in terror of what would happen to me without the protection of that dam, of the seasonal flooding that some said would utterly destroy life in my valley. As it turned out, the seasonal floods were nothing compared to the collapse of the dam: my valley recovered nicely from them. In fact, they were actually kind of pleasant, a much tamer version of the wild water that destroyed the dam. Also, I realized that the environment was much better without that great stagnant lake of fear around, the lake whose black darkness the dam had created and then vomited all over my valley of Soul. Why remake that lake, I wondered to myself?
Everything I heard from the engineers convinced me that my valley was always going to be flooded at one time or another, and it seemed to me that regular seasonal floods were much easier to manage (and much more pleasant) than occasional tsunamis. The deciding factor in my decision not to rebuild the dam was how lovely life without the lake was, though. Some people like lakes. Some lakes are really quite likable. But mine wasn't. I did not like it. Why rebuild something unnecessary and unpleasant? People who like artificial lakes in their soul valleys are always telling me how much fun they have in them, how they make so many nice and convenient things possible (advanced hydropower, irrigation, fishing, water-skiing), and I don't deny that. But my lake was not like that (or perhaps better, was not just that). It was also a home for the Loch Ness Monster, whom I am very glad to be rid of.
People who want absolute control over their valley of Soul see me as backwards, chaotic, primitive, and uncivilized because I have not dammed the river Emotion. I let her follow her natural currents. When she floods, I am flooded. When she dries up, I am dry. It is not always easy or pleasant. But neither was having a dam. Every choice we make in dealing with Emotion will necessarily involve both pleasure and pain. Every valley is different, with different inhabitants who value different things (and have different traditions, different types of culture that allow them to live in the unique habitat nature has given them). In my valley, we live better with natural rhythms, and no dam. We aren't out to dynamite your dam, at all, but we aren't going to build one for ourselves, either. We know what it will do to our valley. We have seen it, and we did not like it. Much as you like dams (in your valley), we dislike them more (in our valley: we like them fine in yours, if you want them there). Much as you hate seasonal floods (in your valley), we like them more (in ours, where they are part of the rhythm that gives our life shape and meaning: we need them for the same reason that you need dams).
Recently a number of people have reached out to me, offering to help me build dams (or at least attend meetings where teams of Dutch boys tell us how to make the sort of dam that once graced my valley). Much as I appreciate the offer, I really don't need a dam (certainly not one like that), and I am not really interested in spending a lot of time discussing the proper design for something that is useless to me. (One does not go to study with a master trumpeter if one wishes to learn the violin. As beautifully as you might play the trumpet, it is not my instrument, and I am not going to spend hours learning it, though I am happy to listen to you play sometimes.) To quote a venerable old book, your love and interest are much appreciated, but I would be at Jerusalem.
Friday, June 29, 2012
Common Human Decency
The following represents my initial response to a friend inquiring about certain observations he has made of different Mormon and post-Mormon communities (particularly communities in which certain potentially problematic behaviors occur). My friend was interested in questions like these: What does it mean to be Mormon, post-Mormon, ex-Mormon? How is Mormonism coherent? How can a good Mormon, post-Mormon, or ex-Mormon community thrive? What does healthy Mormon, post-Mormon, and ex-Mormon behavior look like? I am not trying to answer any of these questions definitively, so please don't anyone jump on me for being too harsh or ignoring an important point of view. These are just some rambling thoughts I have had, and I am writing them here now because I am stuck in an airport with nothing better to do.
The LDS church is not a coherent organization. Mormons are not correlated. They maintain a semblance of order and coherence by wearing the same clothes, saying the same things in church, etc., and believing that all of this is cosmically important somehow. While there are some doctrines that leaders like to push as true explanations of Mormon behavior that they want to correlate, the truth on the ground is that people get baptized, serve missions, and go to the temple for a plethora of unique and personal reasons. They come to the church for different reasons. They practice ordinances for different reasons. They find Mormonism compelling for different reasons.
In my view, many Mormons inside the LDS church follow Jesus' admonition to be like little children. They are genuinely sweet, well-meaning, and adorable, but they are also naive -- and capable of growing up into anything from the Dalai Lama to Adolf Hitler. As a general rule, growth is good. Maturity is good. But it is also dangerous: teenagers are proof of this. When you take the LDS blinders off of adult "children" in the church, many of them don't know how to respond. They try everything (e.g. drinking, swinging), and it doesn't always end up well. But here's the rub: many people fall into the same behaviors inside the church (without having existential crises or "coming of age" as adults). There is, quite frankly, no place on earth where you can escape the fact that you make decisions, and that those decisions don't always lead to the results you would like. The most we can hope for is that people will learn from their decisions, especially the bad ones.
The church attempts to help people learn by scaring them away from "bad" decisions. (Unfortunately, some of the things it is scared of are emphatically not bad, like coffee or honest history.) But this is not really a workable solution for many folks (and it is even worse for society at large than the alternative, which is to admit that mistakes are always going to be made, and to take steps for dealing with them that do not involve pretending that we can make them vanish by heroic acts of willpower). Imagine how my life would be if I decided to train my toddlers to rely on me for all their bathroom needs forever. At some point, the little tykes need to learn how to wipe their own butts, even if they occasionally get some poop on their hands. It washes off. Rebellious teens grow up, in most cases, to be nice, responsible adults. They learn the law of the harvest ("if I want these results, I need to cultivate this kind of behavior"). People need to make mistakes in order to learn and grow. They need to "fall" the way Eve falls, partaking of the tree and accepting the good and the evil that comes with that. Much as some of the overprotective among us would like to keep our fellow humans from learning in the school of hard knocks, there really is no other way. A man who is only faithful to his wife (or anyone) because he thinks some celestial bureaucrat is watching at all times has not learned what fidelity means. He doesn't know what virtue is until he gets acquainted with vice (on some level: I am not saying that we must all experiment with everything that presents itself to any one of us, only that we have to be free to do so).
Lack of failure actually explains many of the problems in our LDS culture. Striving with all our might to avoid failure, what we really do is avoid understanding it when it occurs (inevitably). We create textbook examples of what Nassim Taleb calls the lucky fool. The lucky fool has a good life, and he thinks he knows exactly how he got to be so lucky. He knows what clothes to wear, what friendships to cultivate, what books to read, what kind of sex to have, what to drink, where to work, etc. Wanting to help the rest of the community out, he gives terrible advice to other people, not because he means badly (quite the contrary), but because he cannot see that his circumstances are not universal. He cannot see that wearing a tie has nothing to do with his success, that reading a particular book has nothing do with it, that his method of having sex is not a panacea for all human ills. LDS Mormonism is a rampant breeding ground for lucky fools: they become our leaders. When their advice fails, they have no response other than to deny that protocols were properly followed ("you must not have been wearing my lucky tie right -- no sacrament for you!"). They have no idea how to deal productively with failure. Preaching shame and fear doesn't really work: the "bad" kids don't buy it, and the "good" ones do themselves more harm than good by taking it seriously. Instead of facilitating personal evaluation and adjustment, it hardens moral positions that are already there: the "bad" kids learn that they are hopeless rebels, and they revel in being wicked; the "good" kids learn that they are hopeless rebels, and their hearts are broken. What they don't learn is how to change themselves.
A really wise man once said that there is no such thing in life as success or failure, only feedback. The way to cure lucky fools is to let them see that success and failure are just the same thing -- that there is no such thing as success without failure! People need to make mistakes. And just as we all have (and need) different kinds of success, so we all have (and need) different kinds of failure. Some people need to get drunk and throw up everywhere at least once. Others need to sleep around. Some of us just need a nice cup of Turkish coffee and a book chock full of intelligent heresy. As there is not a single perfect blueprint for success, so there is not a single perfect blueprint for failure. Each man must craft his own perfect catastrophe as a catalyst for future success. Every Eve must eat her own apple. I cannot prescribe one for you, and yours will not necessarily do anything for me. The "God-shaped hole" some people speak of in the soul of every man is one that each person must fill for himself. Some of us will not approve for ourselves what others choose to fill the hole: even among the most correlated Mormons, this is true; I think back to missionary companions I did not see eye-to-eye with. Humans thrive on tension, opposition, and the like ("there must needs be opposition in all things"). The key is to leverage this feature creatively rather than destructively. You have to take people's communal incoherence and let it grow into something ordered.
As I see it, when Mormons question their childlike faith, they enter a radically new world. Some of them are going to grow slowly. Some are going to grow up fast. Some are going to require one kind of failure to facilitate their growth; others will require a different kind. Some are going to make their friends blush (or find new friends), and others are going to make friends proud. There is no coherent, unitary, sanitary post-Mormonism (speaking globally). So what is a decent post- or ex-Mormon chap supposed to do? How should he address his fellow doubters or unbelievers? What kind of moral standards can he get behind? How can he preach effectively, usefully, to people who no longer fit the church's model of obedient little children? If it were me, I would just preach what I deemed to be correct principles, throw in the necessary caveats ("nothing I say trumps your personal experience"), and then let people govern themselves. I wouldn't have organized groups or a "brand" or any of that stuff. That just creates unnecessary opportunities for people to make unhelpful generalizations ("All post-Mormons are drunks, whores, etc., because I know this one person somewhere who did something that destroyed his life!"). Personally, I am not at all opposed to communities (whether they unite around faith or doubt, which seem like the same thing to me now). I do not think these communities should be centralized or correlated: let the people living in them run them (as informal meet-ups or formal affairs with constitutions, by-laws, the whole nine yards: whatever the different communities want). If individuals want to drink, or swing, or whatever, then it's on them (not any guru or podcaster or other "authoritative" figure: grown-ups have to wipe their own butts).
There are limits in each one of us to what we can pleasantly endure in ourselves and other people. The hardest lessons to unlearn, I think, are visceral ones. Let me be honest and make myself vulnerable to illustrate the point. I think of homosexuals having sex, holding hands, kissing, etc., and I just want to barf -- not because of God (whom I don't really believe in as a person), or because I am a mean person (I like to think: I haven't ever attacked anyone for being gay, and I don't go around persecuting them). There is something deeper there, something integral to me that sees homosexuality and screams, "That is not for you, buddy!" As a good little Mormon, I learned that my deepest feelings (like this one) were the voice of God speaking to me (this is OK, so far), and that He had the same plan for me and everyone else (this is emphatically wrong: whatever the universe was thinking when it devised all of us, it did not make us to be carbon copies of each other). Many people whose intellects have left fanatical Mormonism still have their minds planted there firmly. They still barf when they see homosexuals (or swingers or drinkers), and they naively expect everyone else to barf, too. But it isn't going to happen. It shouldn't happen (for reasons that become apparent when we look at the lives of people who have needs and experiences very different from our own).
The underlying question here is simple: how do we come together harmoniously when we are not all exactly (or even remotely) alike? There are many viable answers. (1) Sometimes, we simply don't come together. I don't go to gay bars, and I probably never will. That's OK! I don't think the gay bars need to worry about making themselves more attractive to clientele like me. I don't expect or want them to. I want them to do their thing: I just don't want to be part of it. (2) When we do come together, we create boundaries (the laws of the group): in order make sense and cause minimum damage, these boundaries need to be local -- something that individual friends and acquaintances hash out face to face. (3) On a global level -- where huge, geographically and culturally diverse groups like the LDS church or the audience of a popular podcast exist -- the only things that work are principles. The principles have to be rigid enough to mean something, while still being flexible enough to accomodate the vast differences in that far-flung audience. They can be, and it is not really as hard as one might think. Take fidelity, for instance. In itself, all fidelity means is trust, honor, integrity, honesty. It doesn't mean that no one should ever drink or have sex with multiple partners or whatever. It means that if I promise not to drink, or have sex, or leave a chalk circle I have drawn around my feet, I will abide by that promise. Fidelity inevitably looks different to different people. That is OK. Some people will swing (or drink or be gay) and still be honorable, upstanding folk. And some will lie and reveal themselves as toxic (to anyone who gets too close: you cannot trust a liar; even if you try to, you don't really).
In summary, let me invoke and enlarge upon an analogy my friend made. Imagine that we are all sailing about helter-skelter on rafts washing in life's currents. The LDS church tries to be a kind of lighthouse, pointing out the dangerous rocks that threaten to sink us. Unfortunately, some of us find that the church's beacons are too far inland to offer us really useful protection. So the enterprising spirits among us try to make salvation more accessible, building new lighthouses directly over the rocks we have discovered and pointing them out clearly to fellow travelers. Some travelers see our new beacons and appreciate them. At the end of the day, however, people are always going to crash their rafts. It's what people do. The most any of us can do (whether in or out of the LDS church) is help folks prepare well on their own for the inevitable. We don't need to make ourselves absolute moral authorities, providing the universal blueprint for every human life: I can live my truth without being threatened by yours. The one thing we cannot do is lie. I have to be honest with you, and with the community, about who I am, what I want from the community, and what I am willing to contribute to it. Joseph Smith died largely because he was not willing to let people in the community expose lies that he and several people close to him were telling. In my view, it was the lies that brought him down more than any of the other questionable behaviors in which he was engaged. (I am not saying that those behaviors were not problematic, only that they were not necessarily problematic, if he went about them honestly, e.g. asking men and women point blank if they would be willing to admit him as an active third wheel in their marriage.) People are willing to forgive an honest deviant: if I walk into a gay bar and some man propositions me, I choke back my puke and say, "Thanks, but no thanks." If I walk into a public restroom at the airport and am groped without my consent, I go ballistic.
As my wife says to our toddlers, "Use your words, and keep your hands to yourself!" If they can do it (and learn to wipe their butts, too), then so can grown men and women.
The LDS church is not a coherent organization. Mormons are not correlated. They maintain a semblance of order and coherence by wearing the same clothes, saying the same things in church, etc., and believing that all of this is cosmically important somehow. While there are some doctrines that leaders like to push as true explanations of Mormon behavior that they want to correlate, the truth on the ground is that people get baptized, serve missions, and go to the temple for a plethora of unique and personal reasons. They come to the church for different reasons. They practice ordinances for different reasons. They find Mormonism compelling for different reasons.
In my view, many Mormons inside the LDS church follow Jesus' admonition to be like little children. They are genuinely sweet, well-meaning, and adorable, but they are also naive -- and capable of growing up into anything from the Dalai Lama to Adolf Hitler. As a general rule, growth is good. Maturity is good. But it is also dangerous: teenagers are proof of this. When you take the LDS blinders off of adult "children" in the church, many of them don't know how to respond. They try everything (e.g. drinking, swinging), and it doesn't always end up well. But here's the rub: many people fall into the same behaviors inside the church (without having existential crises or "coming of age" as adults). There is, quite frankly, no place on earth where you can escape the fact that you make decisions, and that those decisions don't always lead to the results you would like. The most we can hope for is that people will learn from their decisions, especially the bad ones.
The church attempts to help people learn by scaring them away from "bad" decisions. (Unfortunately, some of the things it is scared of are emphatically not bad, like coffee or honest history.) But this is not really a workable solution for many folks (and it is even worse for society at large than the alternative, which is to admit that mistakes are always going to be made, and to take steps for dealing with them that do not involve pretending that we can make them vanish by heroic acts of willpower). Imagine how my life would be if I decided to train my toddlers to rely on me for all their bathroom needs forever. At some point, the little tykes need to learn how to wipe their own butts, even if they occasionally get some poop on their hands. It washes off. Rebellious teens grow up, in most cases, to be nice, responsible adults. They learn the law of the harvest ("if I want these results, I need to cultivate this kind of behavior"). People need to make mistakes in order to learn and grow. They need to "fall" the way Eve falls, partaking of the tree and accepting the good and the evil that comes with that. Much as some of the overprotective among us would like to keep our fellow humans from learning in the school of hard knocks, there really is no other way. A man who is only faithful to his wife (or anyone) because he thinks some celestial bureaucrat is watching at all times has not learned what fidelity means. He doesn't know what virtue is until he gets acquainted with vice (on some level: I am not saying that we must all experiment with everything that presents itself to any one of us, only that we have to be free to do so).
Lack of failure actually explains many of the problems in our LDS culture. Striving with all our might to avoid failure, what we really do is avoid understanding it when it occurs (inevitably). We create textbook examples of what Nassim Taleb calls the lucky fool. The lucky fool has a good life, and he thinks he knows exactly how he got to be so lucky. He knows what clothes to wear, what friendships to cultivate, what books to read, what kind of sex to have, what to drink, where to work, etc. Wanting to help the rest of the community out, he gives terrible advice to other people, not because he means badly (quite the contrary), but because he cannot see that his circumstances are not universal. He cannot see that wearing a tie has nothing to do with his success, that reading a particular book has nothing do with it, that his method of having sex is not a panacea for all human ills. LDS Mormonism is a rampant breeding ground for lucky fools: they become our leaders. When their advice fails, they have no response other than to deny that protocols were properly followed ("you must not have been wearing my lucky tie right -- no sacrament for you!"). They have no idea how to deal productively with failure. Preaching shame and fear doesn't really work: the "bad" kids don't buy it, and the "good" ones do themselves more harm than good by taking it seriously. Instead of facilitating personal evaluation and adjustment, it hardens moral positions that are already there: the "bad" kids learn that they are hopeless rebels, and they revel in being wicked; the "good" kids learn that they are hopeless rebels, and their hearts are broken. What they don't learn is how to change themselves.
A really wise man once said that there is no such thing in life as success or failure, only feedback. The way to cure lucky fools is to let them see that success and failure are just the same thing -- that there is no such thing as success without failure! People need to make mistakes. And just as we all have (and need) different kinds of success, so we all have (and need) different kinds of failure. Some people need to get drunk and throw up everywhere at least once. Others need to sleep around. Some of us just need a nice cup of Turkish coffee and a book chock full of intelligent heresy. As there is not a single perfect blueprint for success, so there is not a single perfect blueprint for failure. Each man must craft his own perfect catastrophe as a catalyst for future success. Every Eve must eat her own apple. I cannot prescribe one for you, and yours will not necessarily do anything for me. The "God-shaped hole" some people speak of in the soul of every man is one that each person must fill for himself. Some of us will not approve for ourselves what others choose to fill the hole: even among the most correlated Mormons, this is true; I think back to missionary companions I did not see eye-to-eye with. Humans thrive on tension, opposition, and the like ("there must needs be opposition in all things"). The key is to leverage this feature creatively rather than destructively. You have to take people's communal incoherence and let it grow into something ordered.
As I see it, when Mormons question their childlike faith, they enter a radically new world. Some of them are going to grow slowly. Some are going to grow up fast. Some are going to require one kind of failure to facilitate their growth; others will require a different kind. Some are going to make their friends blush (or find new friends), and others are going to make friends proud. There is no coherent, unitary, sanitary post-Mormonism (speaking globally). So what is a decent post- or ex-Mormon chap supposed to do? How should he address his fellow doubters or unbelievers? What kind of moral standards can he get behind? How can he preach effectively, usefully, to people who no longer fit the church's model of obedient little children? If it were me, I would just preach what I deemed to be correct principles, throw in the necessary caveats ("nothing I say trumps your personal experience"), and then let people govern themselves. I wouldn't have organized groups or a "brand" or any of that stuff. That just creates unnecessary opportunities for people to make unhelpful generalizations ("All post-Mormons are drunks, whores, etc., because I know this one person somewhere who did something that destroyed his life!"). Personally, I am not at all opposed to communities (whether they unite around faith or doubt, which seem like the same thing to me now). I do not think these communities should be centralized or correlated: let the people living in them run them (as informal meet-ups or formal affairs with constitutions, by-laws, the whole nine yards: whatever the different communities want). If individuals want to drink, or swing, or whatever, then it's on them (not any guru or podcaster or other "authoritative" figure: grown-ups have to wipe their own butts).
There are limits in each one of us to what we can pleasantly endure in ourselves and other people. The hardest lessons to unlearn, I think, are visceral ones. Let me be honest and make myself vulnerable to illustrate the point. I think of homosexuals having sex, holding hands, kissing, etc., and I just want to barf -- not because of God (whom I don't really believe in as a person), or because I am a mean person (I like to think: I haven't ever attacked anyone for being gay, and I don't go around persecuting them). There is something deeper there, something integral to me that sees homosexuality and screams, "That is not for you, buddy!" As a good little Mormon, I learned that my deepest feelings (like this one) were the voice of God speaking to me (this is OK, so far), and that He had the same plan for me and everyone else (this is emphatically wrong: whatever the universe was thinking when it devised all of us, it did not make us to be carbon copies of each other). Many people whose intellects have left fanatical Mormonism still have their minds planted there firmly. They still barf when they see homosexuals (or swingers or drinkers), and they naively expect everyone else to barf, too. But it isn't going to happen. It shouldn't happen (for reasons that become apparent when we look at the lives of people who have needs and experiences very different from our own).
The underlying question here is simple: how do we come together harmoniously when we are not all exactly (or even remotely) alike? There are many viable answers. (1) Sometimes, we simply don't come together. I don't go to gay bars, and I probably never will. That's OK! I don't think the gay bars need to worry about making themselves more attractive to clientele like me. I don't expect or want them to. I want them to do their thing: I just don't want to be part of it. (2) When we do come together, we create boundaries (the laws of the group): in order make sense and cause minimum damage, these boundaries need to be local -- something that individual friends and acquaintances hash out face to face. (3) On a global level -- where huge, geographically and culturally diverse groups like the LDS church or the audience of a popular podcast exist -- the only things that work are principles. The principles have to be rigid enough to mean something, while still being flexible enough to accomodate the vast differences in that far-flung audience. They can be, and it is not really as hard as one might think. Take fidelity, for instance. In itself, all fidelity means is trust, honor, integrity, honesty. It doesn't mean that no one should ever drink or have sex with multiple partners or whatever. It means that if I promise not to drink, or have sex, or leave a chalk circle I have drawn around my feet, I will abide by that promise. Fidelity inevitably looks different to different people. That is OK. Some people will swing (or drink or be gay) and still be honorable, upstanding folk. And some will lie and reveal themselves as toxic (to anyone who gets too close: you cannot trust a liar; even if you try to, you don't really).
In summary, let me invoke and enlarge upon an analogy my friend made. Imagine that we are all sailing about helter-skelter on rafts washing in life's currents. The LDS church tries to be a kind of lighthouse, pointing out the dangerous rocks that threaten to sink us. Unfortunately, some of us find that the church's beacons are too far inland to offer us really useful protection. So the enterprising spirits among us try to make salvation more accessible, building new lighthouses directly over the rocks we have discovered and pointing them out clearly to fellow travelers. Some travelers see our new beacons and appreciate them. At the end of the day, however, people are always going to crash their rafts. It's what people do. The most any of us can do (whether in or out of the LDS church) is help folks prepare well on their own for the inevitable. We don't need to make ourselves absolute moral authorities, providing the universal blueprint for every human life: I can live my truth without being threatened by yours. The one thing we cannot do is lie. I have to be honest with you, and with the community, about who I am, what I want from the community, and what I am willing to contribute to it. Joseph Smith died largely because he was not willing to let people in the community expose lies that he and several people close to him were telling. In my view, it was the lies that brought him down more than any of the other questionable behaviors in which he was engaged. (I am not saying that those behaviors were not problematic, only that they were not necessarily problematic, if he went about them honestly, e.g. asking men and women point blank if they would be willing to admit him as an active third wheel in their marriage.) People are willing to forgive an honest deviant: if I walk into a gay bar and some man propositions me, I choke back my puke and say, "Thanks, but no thanks." If I walk into a public restroom at the airport and am groped without my consent, I go ballistic.
As my wife says to our toddlers, "Use your words, and keep your hands to yourself!" If they can do it (and learn to wipe their butts, too), then so can grown men and women.
Monday, June 18, 2012
Credo quia absurdum est
"I believe it because it is absurd." I read the famous aphorism (falsely?) attributed to Tertullian somewhere as an undergraduate, and it stuck with me. (Notice that what I am about to say follows equally well from the authentic quotation in De carne Christi 5.4: credibile prorsus est, quia ineptum est, i.e. "it is believable precisely because it is absurd" -- the point is that religion appears nonsensical.) As an LDS missionary in northern Spain, I even cited the aphorism on occasion when explaining myself to nonmembers (and potential converts, rare as that species was). My reasoning, which I still find apt today, was more or less as follows.
You don't belong to a church because its doctrine makes perfect sense. (No doctrine does.) You don't belong to a church because it never makes a mistake. (They all do.) You belong to a church because God put you there (in that family, in that community, in the nexus of events that got you through the door and into the baptismal font, or some other initiatory ritual).
Someone outside your group looks at what you do and says, "Dude, that is absurd." If you are honest, and empathetic, you see his point and acknowledge it: "Yes, that absurdity you see, that is real, and that is precisely what keeps me coming back. I am a part of this community, which means that I embrace the absurdity." A case in point. What other people find obnoxious in me (as a person and a potential lifelong companion), my wife finds "cute" (or so she says -- that doesn't mean that she never pushes back or that she is an utterly passive doormat, the way some people seem to think it should: it's just the way things are!).
I certainly don't think we should ignore data that overthrow our ideas (no matter how we may feel about said ideas). As a Mormon missionary, I did not invite people to ignore data. I was all about trying to get them to look at it; for me, that was Mormonism (further light and knowledge, continuing revelation, an unfolding of exciting new ideas with no end in sight). Then, at some point, I realized that the institutional church was not behind me. Slowly, I became aware that this was not all: the church was actually opposed to me, was fighting against the gospel (as I understood it) -- actively denying the Holy Ghost (to use its own language) -- and I was pretty devastated. Today, I am mostly recovered. I think of myself as an atheist, or a Buddhist, or an uncorrelated Mormon, depending on the weather and the social circle I am moving in. I have not found absolute truth. I do not have "the" answer, but I have found much better questions, and my faith journey continues -- largely without the LDS church, since it appears to have no use for what I see as the purpose of life (asking tough questions, and respecting the fact that we don't all have to meet them with the same answers, that the game of life has more than one solution).
People come to religion, in my view, pretty much the same way that they come to music or cuisine. You listen, you taste, and something in the experience grabs you. You have to hear more, to get that flavor again. You have to play. You have to dance. You have to try that recipe again and again, and get it right yourself. You don't come to jazz or Italian because they are rationally superior to folk or Mexican. You might try to convince yourself that you do, after the fact, when somebody presses you for reasons why you suddenly went cuckoo (from their perspective) -- but such rationalization is specious (as rationalization often is when it is invoked to explain complex historical decisions involving more variables than we can separate easily). You come to jazz, and you don't know why: you just have to. Tertullian's statement captures that.
You don't belong to a church because its doctrine makes perfect sense. (No doctrine does.) You don't belong to a church because it never makes a mistake. (They all do.) You belong to a church because God put you there (in that family, in that community, in the nexus of events that got you through the door and into the baptismal font, or some other initiatory ritual).
Someone outside your group looks at what you do and says, "Dude, that is absurd." If you are honest, and empathetic, you see his point and acknowledge it: "Yes, that absurdity you see, that is real, and that is precisely what keeps me coming back. I am a part of this community, which means that I embrace the absurdity." A case in point. What other people find obnoxious in me (as a person and a potential lifelong companion), my wife finds "cute" (or so she says -- that doesn't mean that she never pushes back or that she is an utterly passive doormat, the way some people seem to think it should: it's just the way things are!).
I certainly don't think we should ignore data that overthrow our ideas (no matter how we may feel about said ideas). As a Mormon missionary, I did not invite people to ignore data. I was all about trying to get them to look at it; for me, that was Mormonism (further light and knowledge, continuing revelation, an unfolding of exciting new ideas with no end in sight). Then, at some point, I realized that the institutional church was not behind me. Slowly, I became aware that this was not all: the church was actually opposed to me, was fighting against the gospel (as I understood it) -- actively denying the Holy Ghost (to use its own language) -- and I was pretty devastated. Today, I am mostly recovered. I think of myself as an atheist, or a Buddhist, or an uncorrelated Mormon, depending on the weather and the social circle I am moving in. I have not found absolute truth. I do not have "the" answer, but I have found much better questions, and my faith journey continues -- largely without the LDS church, since it appears to have no use for what I see as the purpose of life (asking tough questions, and respecting the fact that we don't all have to meet them with the same answers, that the game of life has more than one solution).
People come to religion, in my view, pretty much the same way that they come to music or cuisine. You listen, you taste, and something in the experience grabs you. You have to hear more, to get that flavor again. You have to play. You have to dance. You have to try that recipe again and again, and get it right yourself. You don't come to jazz or Italian because they are rationally superior to folk or Mexican. You might try to convince yourself that you do, after the fact, when somebody presses you for reasons why you suddenly went cuckoo (from their perspective) -- but such rationalization is specious (as rationalization often is when it is invoked to explain complex historical decisions involving more variables than we can separate easily). You come to jazz, and you don't know why: you just have to. Tertullian's statement captures that.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Living with the Unknown
Flogging Molly. "The Story So Far." Float. Borstal Beat Records, 2008.
This song is a good illustration of what it feels like to live with relative truth, in a topsy-turvy world that is constantly changing. There are constants, like gratitude when we survive and grief when others' don't, but stories we tell about our success and failure keep changing--as new facts appear and old ones disintegrate. We struggle perpetually to understand, and aspire to act always on our best understanding, but we can never see the whole picture, and so our story is never finished, never perfect. It is only "the story so far"--whether that means the last five minutes or the last five million years.
You always had what you wanted
So leave it behind
And if the glass isn't broken
Then the future's not blind
All that you know
Means nothing to you
But it's the loss of control
That shatters the truth
'Cause the story so far
Is already here
We've made it this far
Through the daggered-edge spears
But life cuts to pieces
Till the wounds hold no secrets
Makes it all who you are
Love craves self-destruction
It's a blizzard in hand
You lay your cards on the table
But you're not in command
So burn with the fire
You so eagerly lit
Watch the flames flicker higher
Say I don't care about me
'Cause the story so far
Is already here
We've made it this far
Through the daggered-edge spears
But life cuts to pieces
Till the wounds hold no secrets
Makes it all who you are
Makes it all who you are
Makes it all who you are
Makes it all who you are
Though it's bitter the pill
That you swallow to feel
I don't care what I lost
I just thank God I'm alive
Makes it all who you are
Makes it all who you are
Makes it all who you are
Makes it all who you are
Makes it all who you are
That's the story so far
This song is a good illustration of what it feels like to live with relative truth, in a topsy-turvy world that is constantly changing. There are constants, like gratitude when we survive and grief when others' don't, but stories we tell about our success and failure keep changing--as new facts appear and old ones disintegrate. We struggle perpetually to understand, and aspire to act always on our best understanding, but we can never see the whole picture, and so our story is never finished, never perfect. It is only "the story so far"--whether that means the last five minutes or the last five million years.
You always had what you wanted
So leave it behind
And if the glass isn't broken
Then the future's not blind
All that you know
Means nothing to you
But it's the loss of control
That shatters the truth
'Cause the story so far
Is already here
We've made it this far
Through the daggered-edge spears
But life cuts to pieces
Till the wounds hold no secrets
Makes it all who you are
Love craves self-destruction
It's a blizzard in hand
You lay your cards on the table
But you're not in command
So burn with the fire
You so eagerly lit
Watch the flames flicker higher
Say I don't care about me
'Cause the story so far
Is already here
We've made it this far
Through the daggered-edge spears
But life cuts to pieces
Till the wounds hold no secrets
Makes it all who you are
Makes it all who you are
Makes it all who you are
Makes it all who you are
Though it's bitter the pill
That you swallow to feel
I don't care what I lost
I just thank God I'm alive
Makes it all who you are
Makes it all who you are
Makes it all who you are
Makes it all who you are
Makes it all who you are
That's the story so far
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
My New Church?
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Friday, September 30, 2011
What is Pornography?
In honor of the upcoming General Conference, I offer my own talk on pornography, created from a very rambling essay I posted a while back on a message-board for Mormons.
What is pornography? This question is actually really hard to answer. (I could bring up the Supreme Court justice who summed it up with an aphorism to the effect of, "I cannot define it, but I know it when I see it.") The way we use the word in the LDS church, it often seems to refer to images of people that cause sexual arousal. This causes a lot of confusion, since what causes arousal for one person does not always do much (or anything at all) for another. Some people are excited by the sight of a foot; others are impervious to full nudity. Some Mormons are "offended" by the J. C. Penney catalogue. Others can "endure" (and even be inspired by) much "wilder" stuff. (Here I remember a course in Western Civilization that I had at BYU: the teacher, a woman, announced at the beginning that students would be required to study in detail works of great art, including nude paintings and statues, and that anyone who objected to that should drop out before the semester got underway.) Generally speaking, official church pronouncements ignore these niceties and refer to pornography as some kind of monolithic thing, with universal (and universally evil) effects. In other words, we objectify art along with everything else!
In the real world, outside of our religious fantasies, people are sexually stimulated by a variety of mundane and unavoidable things. Sex is woven deep into our being. Like every human practice, it sometimes comes out "evil" -- not because there is anything inherently wrong with it in the abstract, but because there are things wrong with particular individuals, things which sometimes find expression in the sexual habits of said individuals. While it makes no sense to censor the world to fit some imaginary Platonic standard of what constitutes "beauty" and what constitutes "smut" (since the standard is inevitably arbitrary and incoherent), it makes a whole lot of sense for the individual to avoid images that make his life worse (and do whatever he pleases with images that do not). No one can write the book telling us what images are universally safe to look at, because the same image speaks to each one of us in a different way. We have to be our own censors. Some people have no problem with the Venus de Milo. Other people find her the bane of their existence. That is OK. Let the hedonists enjoy and the ascetics abstain without mutual recrimination. As long as no one is being tortured to make the art (as sometimes happens in some of the seedier parts of the sex industry), it is all good.
My line of thinking is perhaps best illustrated with an analogy from physical culture. Years ago, there was widespread fear of working out with (heavy) weights. People who thought nothing of a day's work on the farm somehow got it into their heads that picking up moulded pieces of iron with no practical aim beyond increasing strength would render them unsupple, impotent, and just generally physically degenerate. Since then, we have learned that this is not the case. That does not mean, however, that every person in the world should immediately drop whatever he is doing, run to the nearest gym, load an Olympic bar with all the plates on the rack, and throw out his back. To get the benefits of strength training (which, like sex, is neither good nor bad in itself), you have to ease into it, listening to your body and responding with more or less load as you feel pleasure or pain in the aftermath of your last workout. There is no one program that will work for all trainees (elite athletes in a variety of sports, hardcore gym rats, and the rest of us at all stages of physical development and degeneration). It is not that really heavy squats or deadlifts are evil, by any means, only that you should not decide to start your training career tomorrow with the poundage that (say) Konstantin Konstantinovs uses (unless you happen to be a reincarnation of the Hulk).
Sex is not evil. It is not even that dangerous, provided you come at it with a modicum of preparation and good sense (i.e., it is no more dangerous than a heavy deadlift). The church's mistake here is to rush into generalities without realizing that the nature of the problem is inherently specific. (Masturbation is not a problem. Porn, with the exception of anything produced under duress, is not a problem. Strength training is not a problem. The problems are human beings, who respond differently to all of the above in unique situations, often unmappable without recourse to intensive individual scrutiny.) Instead of recognizing that exercise must be tailored to the individual, the church qua personal trainer gives us "the one true workout" complete with "true" exercises and "true" poundages that every trainee (beginner to advanced) must put up for the required, "true" number of repetitions. Anything less is sin; more usually earns commendation for going above and beyond the call of duty (even when the trainee all but kills himself). This is ridiculous, and harmful if you happen to be one of the people for whom the one true size is a particularly bad fit.
One more word for those who think I am not being hard enough on evil porn (which I see as existing only for the individual). Let's take another analogy, this one dietary. I am reasonably certain that every murderer has drunk water regularly. But wait, all of us do too! Are we all running a terrible risk of becoming murderers every time we sip that deceptively refreshing beverage? Are we slowly changing inside, gradually morphing into the next Jeffrey Dahmer? Fortunately, the answer is no. Water is one variable of many that go into the making of a serial killer, but correlation is not causation. Sex, like thirst, is a pervasive human need. Some people think about it, make pictures of it, have it, and then use it to commit terrible crimes (or at least make themselves and others miserable), but that is not the fault of images (which may or may not match someone's definition of pornography), or the romantic partners of the criminals, or their victims. It is the fault of the criminals. Until we approach the person, we cannot address the problem.
One more personal story, and then I will shut up. 10 years ago, I was young, extremely scared of my sexuality (which I wanted to tear out by the roots: I used to fantasize about cutting off my genitalia or killing myself), and very, very devout (the reason I hated sex so much was because persistent erections made me feel "unworthy," requiring endless rounds of confessing my sin to the bishop, being chastised, and feeling like crap). I was also extremely sensitive in a sexual way: anything could set me off, even things that have nothing to do with sex (like pull-ups). I could barely talk to girls my age and avoided activities where young women participated. I attended a stake dance one time (only one time) and did not have the nerve to go inside. I never dated. Then, I went on a mission. The women of Spain did not care that I could not bear the sight of nubile females, and they were not going to cater to my weak eyes by going about in burkhas. They let it all hang out, and (what amazed me at the time) I was perfectly fine. My fear receded as I realized that seeing nearly naked women did not automatically turn me into some kind of lustful monster (think of the Hulk again). Gradually, I learned that acceptance was a much better strategy for healthy sexuality than avoidance. Getting married was a huge leap forward for me (and required some deprogramming which I won't bore or titillate you with). Today I accept my sexuality, and that of everyone else, and I make a point of never imposing myself (and my images of beauty, truth, etc.) on another person. Nakedness is no excuse for lack of manners. Intimacy is no excuse. Pretty pictures are no excuse. Ugly pictures are no excuse. There is no excuse.
Pornography is just pictures (or stories, i.e. verbal pictures), some good, some not so good, and some frankly awful, but most of it is nothing to be deathly afraid of (unless you are trapped in a ridiculous worldview that makes objectification, abstractions, and stereotypes the most important things in the universe, idol gods that all mere mortals must worship). If it bothers you, there are many other things to hold your mind and take your time. The less you care about it, the less power it will have over you.
What is pornography? This question is actually really hard to answer. (I could bring up the Supreme Court justice who summed it up with an aphorism to the effect of, "I cannot define it, but I know it when I see it.") The way we use the word in the LDS church, it often seems to refer to images of people that cause sexual arousal. This causes a lot of confusion, since what causes arousal for one person does not always do much (or anything at all) for another. Some people are excited by the sight of a foot; others are impervious to full nudity. Some Mormons are "offended" by the J. C. Penney catalogue. Others can "endure" (and even be inspired by) much "wilder" stuff. (Here I remember a course in Western Civilization that I had at BYU: the teacher, a woman, announced at the beginning that students would be required to study in detail works of great art, including nude paintings and statues, and that anyone who objected to that should drop out before the semester got underway.) Generally speaking, official church pronouncements ignore these niceties and refer to pornography as some kind of monolithic thing, with universal (and universally evil) effects. In other words, we objectify art along with everything else!
In the real world, outside of our religious fantasies, people are sexually stimulated by a variety of mundane and unavoidable things. Sex is woven deep into our being. Like every human practice, it sometimes comes out "evil" -- not because there is anything inherently wrong with it in the abstract, but because there are things wrong with particular individuals, things which sometimes find expression in the sexual habits of said individuals. While it makes no sense to censor the world to fit some imaginary Platonic standard of what constitutes "beauty" and what constitutes "smut" (since the standard is inevitably arbitrary and incoherent), it makes a whole lot of sense for the individual to avoid images that make his life worse (and do whatever he pleases with images that do not). No one can write the book telling us what images are universally safe to look at, because the same image speaks to each one of us in a different way. We have to be our own censors. Some people have no problem with the Venus de Milo. Other people find her the bane of their existence. That is OK. Let the hedonists enjoy and the ascetics abstain without mutual recrimination. As long as no one is being tortured to make the art (as sometimes happens in some of the seedier parts of the sex industry), it is all good.
My line of thinking is perhaps best illustrated with an analogy from physical culture. Years ago, there was widespread fear of working out with (heavy) weights. People who thought nothing of a day's work on the farm somehow got it into their heads that picking up moulded pieces of iron with no practical aim beyond increasing strength would render them unsupple, impotent, and just generally physically degenerate. Since then, we have learned that this is not the case. That does not mean, however, that every person in the world should immediately drop whatever he is doing, run to the nearest gym, load an Olympic bar with all the plates on the rack, and throw out his back. To get the benefits of strength training (which, like sex, is neither good nor bad in itself), you have to ease into it, listening to your body and responding with more or less load as you feel pleasure or pain in the aftermath of your last workout. There is no one program that will work for all trainees (elite athletes in a variety of sports, hardcore gym rats, and the rest of us at all stages of physical development and degeneration). It is not that really heavy squats or deadlifts are evil, by any means, only that you should not decide to start your training career tomorrow with the poundage that (say) Konstantin Konstantinovs uses (unless you happen to be a reincarnation of the Hulk).
Sex is not evil. It is not even that dangerous, provided you come at it with a modicum of preparation and good sense (i.e., it is no more dangerous than a heavy deadlift). The church's mistake here is to rush into generalities without realizing that the nature of the problem is inherently specific. (Masturbation is not a problem. Porn, with the exception of anything produced under duress, is not a problem. Strength training is not a problem. The problems are human beings, who respond differently to all of the above in unique situations, often unmappable without recourse to intensive individual scrutiny.) Instead of recognizing that exercise must be tailored to the individual, the church qua personal trainer gives us "the one true workout" complete with "true" exercises and "true" poundages that every trainee (beginner to advanced) must put up for the required, "true" number of repetitions. Anything less is sin; more usually earns commendation for going above and beyond the call of duty (even when the trainee all but kills himself). This is ridiculous, and harmful if you happen to be one of the people for whom the one true size is a particularly bad fit.
One more word for those who think I am not being hard enough on evil porn (which I see as existing only for the individual). Let's take another analogy, this one dietary. I am reasonably certain that every murderer has drunk water regularly. But wait, all of us do too! Are we all running a terrible risk of becoming murderers every time we sip that deceptively refreshing beverage? Are we slowly changing inside, gradually morphing into the next Jeffrey Dahmer? Fortunately, the answer is no. Water is one variable of many that go into the making of a serial killer, but correlation is not causation. Sex, like thirst, is a pervasive human need. Some people think about it, make pictures of it, have it, and then use it to commit terrible crimes (or at least make themselves and others miserable), but that is not the fault of images (which may or may not match someone's definition of pornography), or the romantic partners of the criminals, or their victims. It is the fault of the criminals. Until we approach the person, we cannot address the problem.
One more personal story, and then I will shut up. 10 years ago, I was young, extremely scared of my sexuality (which I wanted to tear out by the roots: I used to fantasize about cutting off my genitalia or killing myself), and very, very devout (the reason I hated sex so much was because persistent erections made me feel "unworthy," requiring endless rounds of confessing my sin to the bishop, being chastised, and feeling like crap). I was also extremely sensitive in a sexual way: anything could set me off, even things that have nothing to do with sex (like pull-ups). I could barely talk to girls my age and avoided activities where young women participated. I attended a stake dance one time (only one time) and did not have the nerve to go inside. I never dated. Then, I went on a mission. The women of Spain did not care that I could not bear the sight of nubile females, and they were not going to cater to my weak eyes by going about in burkhas. They let it all hang out, and (what amazed me at the time) I was perfectly fine. My fear receded as I realized that seeing nearly naked women did not automatically turn me into some kind of lustful monster (think of the Hulk again). Gradually, I learned that acceptance was a much better strategy for healthy sexuality than avoidance. Getting married was a huge leap forward for me (and required some deprogramming which I won't bore or titillate you with). Today I accept my sexuality, and that of everyone else, and I make a point of never imposing myself (and my images of beauty, truth, etc.) on another person. Nakedness is no excuse for lack of manners. Intimacy is no excuse. Pretty pictures are no excuse. Ugly pictures are no excuse. There is no excuse.
Pornography is just pictures (or stories, i.e. verbal pictures), some good, some not so good, and some frankly awful, but most of it is nothing to be deathly afraid of (unless you are trapped in a ridiculous worldview that makes objectification, abstractions, and stereotypes the most important things in the universe, idol gods that all mere mortals must worship). If it bothers you, there are many other things to hold your mind and take your time. The less you care about it, the less power it will have over you.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
A Double-Minded Man
Dallin H. Oaks. "Truth and Tolerance." CES Fireside. 20 September 2011.
I listened to this talk (for fun), and I found it frustrating. The first half of the talk was a paean to absolute truth. Oaks said that LDS believe in absolute truth, asserted that moral relativism is bad, and strongly implied that atheists are morally insensitive (since they lack the connection to God that provides access to absolute truth, i.e. they are necessarily moral relativists). According to Oaks, we Saints have a responsibility to stick up for the absolute truth, no matter what, especially since we live in a society of moral weaklings who don't understand that tattoos and gayness are really serious business (i.e. damnable, at least in some sense of the word).
The second half of the talk seemed like a retreat from this uncompromising position: apparently, God doesn't want us to be too insistent in our (necessary) crusade for absolute truth. Somehow, some kind of tolerance is still a virtue for believers, even though they aren't allowed to be really happy with anything less than absolute truth. According to Oaks, we are supposed to forgive sinners, saving the adulteress from stoning with Jesus (John 7:53-8:11), but then admonishing her sternly never to do it again (or what? would Jesus have thrown her into outer darkness for a relapse? would he at least have taken her to court? would stoning have been back on the table? Oaks does not say). The final part of the talk was a defense of Proposition 8 (denying marriage to homosexuals), which Oaks construes as a bid for religious freedom. I confess I am not buying this (or most of his talk, really). Let me see if I can explain why.
It is easy to denounce moral relativism (which comes from godless heathen) and exalt absolute truth (which comes from God) when you deal purely in words. But what is moral relativism in action? What is absolute truth in action? What do these words look like in real life? As an adolescent, I believed in absolute truth the way Oaks does. I don't believe in it any more (having fallen from grace, as Oaks would see it). But much of my behavior as a moral being has not materially changed. (I don't have tattoos, or drink, or smoke, or even commit adultery. I could pass the moral worthiness portion of a temple recommend interview, with the exception that I don't always wear the one true brand of underwear.) So what changed? Well, I started looking carefully at how humans make (and imagine) moral decisions, and I discovered something funny: in practice, we are all moral relativists (both atheists and religious, including Oaks!). Let me explain. Better yet, I will tell a story from the Book of Mormon.
Remember how Nephi got the brass plates? He went to Laban (the guy with the plates), told him the absolute truth that almighty God wanted those plates in his hands right away, and Laban said, "Okay!" Not really. Instead, after asking for the plates nicely and getting violently rebuffed, Nephi came across Laban drunk in an alley, and God told him to do something he really didn't want to do (1 Nephi 4:10-18):
Nor is Nephi the only Mormon hero forced to become a moral relativist in light of God's schizophrenia. His brother Jacob suffers the same fate. First God tells Jacob that the Nephites must be monogamous: "For there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife" (Jacob 2:27); but then he throws in a caveat to this absolute truth: "For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise, they shall hearken unto these things" (Jacob 2:30). God's absolute truth so far: Don't kill anyone (unless I tell you to) or marry more than one wife (unless I tell you to). What's this? Does God believe in absolute truth or not? Why can't he provide a simple rule that covers all cases, absolutely? (That would be absolute truth, right?) The more you read the scriptures, the worse this problem gets. A few examples:
(1) Absolute truth about polygamy: "Behold David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord" (Jacob 2:24). "Verily thus saith the Lord unto you, my servant Joseph, that inasmuch as you have inquired of my hand to know and understand wherein I, the Lord, justified my servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as also Moses, David, and Solomon, as touching the principle and doctrine of their having many wives and concubines ... David also received many wives and concubines, and also Solomon and Moses my servants, as also many others of my servants, from the beginning of creation until this time; and in nothing did they sin save in those things which they received not of me" (D&C 132:1, 38). God's absolute truth: You can marry anyone you please as long as I say so, but do be aware that my mind changes from time to time. Today's abomination is tomorrow's principle and doctrine (the new and everlasting covenant of marriage!).
(2) Absolute truth about adultery: "If a man be found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall both of them die" (Deuteronomy 22:22); "He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone" (John 8:7). God's absolute truth: Kill adulterers, until I tell you not to.
(3) Absolute truth about genocide: "When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee ... thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them nor shew mercy unto them" (Deuteronomy 7:1-2); "Thus saith the Lord of hosts ... go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass" (1 Samuel 15:2-3); "And when [Jesus'] disciples James and John saw [that the Samaritan village would not offer Jesus hospitality], they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them" (Luke 9:54-55). God's absolute truth: Kill your enemies mercilessly (including their women, children, and domestic animals), until I tell you not to (finally!). I guess the real question is what God thought about the Holocaust or Rwanda. Was he for or against genocide in either case? How do we know? It would be so much easier if he could just tell us something consistent, instead of talking out of both sides of his mouth. (Maybe the Holocaust was a criminal mistake, but Rwanda was just a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah getting its just come-uppance? Do we even want to wonder about the Mountain Meadows Massacre or the World Trade Center attacks here?)
(4) Absolute truth about what we should eat: "Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is clovenfooted, and cheweth the cud, among beasts, that shall ye eat. Nevertheless ye shall not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that divide the hoof: as the camel, because he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the hoof; he is unclean unto you. And the coney, because he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the hoof; he is unclean unto you; and the swine, though he divide the hoof, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean unto you. Of their flesh ye shall not eat, and their carcase ye shall not touch; they are unclean unto you" (Leviticus 11:3-8); "And [the apostle Peter] became very hungry ... and saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending unto him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth: wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat. But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean. And the voice spake to him again the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou unclean" (Acts 10:10-15). God's absolute truth: Don't eat pigs! Eat pigs!
(5) Absolute truth about keeping the Sabbath: "The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work" (Exodus 20:10); "And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath day ... And the Lord said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp" (Numbers 15:32-35); "Jesus went on the sabbath day through the corn; and his disciples were an hungred, and began to pluck the ears of corn, and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto him, Behold thy disciples do that which is not lawful ... But he said unto them ... the Son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath" (Matt. 12:1-8); "And [Jesus] said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath" (Mark 2:27); "And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them" (Acts 20:7). God's absolute truth: The sabbath is the seventh day of the week. No wait, it is the first (for some of you, anyway). If you even pick up sticks on that day, then you die. No wait, you can do good things on the sabbath: the sabbath was made to help you, not to kill you. Please make up your mind, God, preferably before somebody decides to kill me for picking up sticks on the wrong day!
We could string this list out to absurd lengths (what clothes does God like? what business is he in? what would he do with four billion dollars?), but you get the picture: on just about any ordinary moral dilemma, the Judeo-Christian god (like any god with more than one human follower) is all over the map. He stands for one thing today (polygamy! genocide!) and another tomorrow (monogamy! peace!). In other words, he is a moral relativist! But wait a minute. There is one thing about which God does not admit any relativity, ever. The single genuine absolute truth of God is a pragmatic principle well known to ruthless dictators of every ideology: You must always do what I say, no matter what. And the only really moral answer to this principle is what it has always been: "Bullcrap!" Really moral people don't hand their agency over to someone else carte blanche (unless they are infants or very small children). They do not obey authority with no good reason. They make (and are answerable for) their own decisions. And, like Nephi above, they have to sort out those decisions in context: sometimes it may be right to kill another person (e.g. when your life is in serious jeopardy); other times, not so much. There is no absolute truth here, folks, just contextual truth (what Oaks calls moral relativism). I wish life wasn't so hard. I wish it were as simple as memorizing some absolute truths or submitting to an all-wise, benevolent dictator, and that these practices would get us out of every moral dilemma unscathed, but that wish is a hopeless fantasy. No one, not even Oaks, really lives that way. To the extent that people pretend to, they are just ignoring their personal responsibility for the decisions they make, passing the buck to God (who speaks to them in the voice of another human or the personal revelation of their own moral intuition).
This is the rock upon which Oaks' talk really founders, for me. The only non-ridiculous absolute truth he can offer as coming from God is Do as I say, and don't ask why: I speak for God, who is above giving reasons to mere mortals. What about all of God's other spokespersons? Some talk about the virtues of tolerance (like the Muslim cleric Oaks quotes at one point). Others talk about its dangers (like Oaks). Some talk about the virtues of truth (like me). Others talk about the dangers of truth that is not useful (e.g. Boyd K. Packer, whom Oaks praises as a champion of truth: the irony kills me, until I remember what kind of truth Packer is standing for). The fact of the matter is that truth and tolerance are meaningless without context. The truth that you had oatmeal for breakfast this morning rather than pancakes does not interest me too much. The truth that Brigham Young takes at least some of the blame for causing the Mountain Meadows Massacre does. Same thing with tolerance. I have no problem tolerating fires in the fireplace, but if you throw me into a furnace while it's hot, my tolerance suddenly shrinks. What can I say? God made me a moral relativist? (That doesn't guarantee he won't cut me off mercilessly at some later point, does it, since he is historically a two-faced waffler? Man, what a post-modern, avante-garde punk God is. We already know that he swears, and that he has body piercings, at least since Golgotha. What if he wears tattoos?)
Contrary to what Oaks says, atheists are not necessarily morally insensitive, any more than Mormons are. All of us are moral beings with ideas about what kinds of behavior are right in certain contexts. Some of our ideas are vindicated by experience. Others are not. There is no easy cheat-sheet out there somewhere with all the harmless behaviors on one side and all the harmful ones on the other. If many of us are much more tolerant of homosexuals than of serial killers, maybe it is because we find that, in our experience (which may or may not contradict an idea we had at some point), homosexuals are much less dangerous (particularly when we treat them with human dignity, respecting the desire that many of them have to form lasting pair-bonds and rear families). If many of us don't get angry or even upset when Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Seventh-day Adventists, or atheists break the Sabbath (or pick up sticks), maybe it is because we find that, in our experience, breaking the Sabbath is a perfectly innocuous thing (like picking up sticks, as long as the sticks are not intended for beating out the brains of unbelievers). If your experience is different, then share it, by all means, but don't bring in God as some kind of sanctimonious bully on your side (since, as we have seen, he seems to be on all sides of every question: what makes you so sure he agrees with you all the time?). My sense is that if Oaks could deal with the first part of his talk better (the claim that LDS Mormons recognize and defend God's absolute truth), then the second part would make more sense (as an explanation of what we Mormons stand for in practical terms, i.e. when we contribute our two cents on what laws should govern the larger collective morality).
I listened to this talk (for fun), and I found it frustrating. The first half of the talk was a paean to absolute truth. Oaks said that LDS believe in absolute truth, asserted that moral relativism is bad, and strongly implied that atheists are morally insensitive (since they lack the connection to God that provides access to absolute truth, i.e. they are necessarily moral relativists). According to Oaks, we Saints have a responsibility to stick up for the absolute truth, no matter what, especially since we live in a society of moral weaklings who don't understand that tattoos and gayness are really serious business (i.e. damnable, at least in some sense of the word).
The second half of the talk seemed like a retreat from this uncompromising position: apparently, God doesn't want us to be too insistent in our (necessary) crusade for absolute truth. Somehow, some kind of tolerance is still a virtue for believers, even though they aren't allowed to be really happy with anything less than absolute truth. According to Oaks, we are supposed to forgive sinners, saving the adulteress from stoning with Jesus (John 7:53-8:11), but then admonishing her sternly never to do it again (or what? would Jesus have thrown her into outer darkness for a relapse? would he at least have taken her to court? would stoning have been back on the table? Oaks does not say). The final part of the talk was a defense of Proposition 8 (denying marriage to homosexuals), which Oaks construes as a bid for religious freedom. I confess I am not buying this (or most of his talk, really). Let me see if I can explain why.
It is easy to denounce moral relativism (which comes from godless heathen) and exalt absolute truth (which comes from God) when you deal purely in words. But what is moral relativism in action? What is absolute truth in action? What do these words look like in real life? As an adolescent, I believed in absolute truth the way Oaks does. I don't believe in it any more (having fallen from grace, as Oaks would see it). But much of my behavior as a moral being has not materially changed. (I don't have tattoos, or drink, or smoke, or even commit adultery. I could pass the moral worthiness portion of a temple recommend interview, with the exception that I don't always wear the one true brand of underwear.) So what changed? Well, I started looking carefully at how humans make (and imagine) moral decisions, and I discovered something funny: in practice, we are all moral relativists (both atheists and religious, including Oaks!). Let me explain. Better yet, I will tell a story from the Book of Mormon.
Remember how Nephi got the brass plates? He went to Laban (the guy with the plates), told him the absolute truth that almighty God wanted those plates in his hands right away, and Laban said, "Okay!" Not really. Instead, after asking for the plates nicely and getting violently rebuffed, Nephi came across Laban drunk in an alley, and God told him to do something he really didn't want to do (1 Nephi 4:10-18):
And it came to pass that I was constrained by the Spirit that I should kill Laban; but I said in my heart: Never at any time have I shed the blood of man. And I shrunk and would that I might not slay him. And the Spirit said unto me again: Behold, the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands. Yea, and I also knew that he had sought to take away mine own life; yea, and he would not hearken unto the commandments of the Lord; and he had also taken away our property. And it came to pass that the Spirit said unto me again: Slay him ... Therefore, I did obey the voice of the Spirit, and took Laban by the hair of the head, and I smote off his head with his own sword.Why was righteous Nephi hesitant to obey an order from God (who gives out absolute truth, remember)? Maybe it has something to do with this other command from God: "Thou shalt not kill" (Exodus 20:13; Mosiah 13:21). Maybe Nephi was confused by his schizophrenic God (Don't kill! Kill!). In any event, the text shows him reasoning things out contextually (like anyone would): Given that I have already struck out being nice, and that this guy is a really dangerous jerk, maybe it is morally acceptable to kill him after all. Take that, absolute truth!
Nor is Nephi the only Mormon hero forced to become a moral relativist in light of God's schizophrenia. His brother Jacob suffers the same fate. First God tells Jacob that the Nephites must be monogamous: "For there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife" (Jacob 2:27); but then he throws in a caveat to this absolute truth: "For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise, they shall hearken unto these things" (Jacob 2:30). God's absolute truth so far: Don't kill anyone (unless I tell you to) or marry more than one wife (unless I tell you to). What's this? Does God believe in absolute truth or not? Why can't he provide a simple rule that covers all cases, absolutely? (That would be absolute truth, right?) The more you read the scriptures, the worse this problem gets. A few examples:
(1) Absolute truth about polygamy: "Behold David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord" (Jacob 2:24). "Verily thus saith the Lord unto you, my servant Joseph, that inasmuch as you have inquired of my hand to know and understand wherein I, the Lord, justified my servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as also Moses, David, and Solomon, as touching the principle and doctrine of their having many wives and concubines ... David also received many wives and concubines, and also Solomon and Moses my servants, as also many others of my servants, from the beginning of creation until this time; and in nothing did they sin save in those things which they received not of me" (D&C 132:1, 38). God's absolute truth: You can marry anyone you please as long as I say so, but do be aware that my mind changes from time to time. Today's abomination is tomorrow's principle and doctrine (the new and everlasting covenant of marriage!).
(2) Absolute truth about adultery: "If a man be found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall both of them die" (Deuteronomy 22:22); "He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone" (John 8:7). God's absolute truth: Kill adulterers, until I tell you not to.
(3) Absolute truth about genocide: "When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee ... thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them nor shew mercy unto them" (Deuteronomy 7:1-2); "Thus saith the Lord of hosts ... go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass" (1 Samuel 15:2-3); "And when [Jesus'] disciples James and John saw [that the Samaritan village would not offer Jesus hospitality], they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them" (Luke 9:54-55). God's absolute truth: Kill your enemies mercilessly (including their women, children, and domestic animals), until I tell you not to (finally!). I guess the real question is what God thought about the Holocaust or Rwanda. Was he for or against genocide in either case? How do we know? It would be so much easier if he could just tell us something consistent, instead of talking out of both sides of his mouth. (Maybe the Holocaust was a criminal mistake, but Rwanda was just a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah getting its just come-uppance? Do we even want to wonder about the Mountain Meadows Massacre or the World Trade Center attacks here?)
(4) Absolute truth about what we should eat: "Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is clovenfooted, and cheweth the cud, among beasts, that shall ye eat. Nevertheless ye shall not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that divide the hoof: as the camel, because he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the hoof; he is unclean unto you. And the coney, because he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the hoof; he is unclean unto you; and the swine, though he divide the hoof, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean unto you. Of their flesh ye shall not eat, and their carcase ye shall not touch; they are unclean unto you" (Leviticus 11:3-8); "And [the apostle Peter] became very hungry ... and saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending unto him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth: wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat. But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean. And the voice spake to him again the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou unclean" (Acts 10:10-15). God's absolute truth: Don't eat pigs! Eat pigs!
(5) Absolute truth about keeping the Sabbath: "The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work" (Exodus 20:10); "And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath day ... And the Lord said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp" (Numbers 15:32-35); "Jesus went on the sabbath day through the corn; and his disciples were an hungred, and began to pluck the ears of corn, and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto him, Behold thy disciples do that which is not lawful ... But he said unto them ... the Son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath" (Matt. 12:1-8); "And [Jesus] said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath" (Mark 2:27); "And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them" (Acts 20:7). God's absolute truth: The sabbath is the seventh day of the week. No wait, it is the first (for some of you, anyway). If you even pick up sticks on that day, then you die. No wait, you can do good things on the sabbath: the sabbath was made to help you, not to kill you. Please make up your mind, God, preferably before somebody decides to kill me for picking up sticks on the wrong day!
We could string this list out to absurd lengths (what clothes does God like? what business is he in? what would he do with four billion dollars?), but you get the picture: on just about any ordinary moral dilemma, the Judeo-Christian god (like any god with more than one human follower) is all over the map. He stands for one thing today (polygamy! genocide!) and another tomorrow (monogamy! peace!). In other words, he is a moral relativist! But wait a minute. There is one thing about which God does not admit any relativity, ever. The single genuine absolute truth of God is a pragmatic principle well known to ruthless dictators of every ideology: You must always do what I say, no matter what. And the only really moral answer to this principle is what it has always been: "Bullcrap!" Really moral people don't hand their agency over to someone else carte blanche (unless they are infants or very small children). They do not obey authority with no good reason. They make (and are answerable for) their own decisions. And, like Nephi above, they have to sort out those decisions in context: sometimes it may be right to kill another person (e.g. when your life is in serious jeopardy); other times, not so much. There is no absolute truth here, folks, just contextual truth (what Oaks calls moral relativism). I wish life wasn't so hard. I wish it were as simple as memorizing some absolute truths or submitting to an all-wise, benevolent dictator, and that these practices would get us out of every moral dilemma unscathed, but that wish is a hopeless fantasy. No one, not even Oaks, really lives that way. To the extent that people pretend to, they are just ignoring their personal responsibility for the decisions they make, passing the buck to God (who speaks to them in the voice of another human or the personal revelation of their own moral intuition).
This is the rock upon which Oaks' talk really founders, for me. The only non-ridiculous absolute truth he can offer as coming from God is Do as I say, and don't ask why: I speak for God, who is above giving reasons to mere mortals. What about all of God's other spokespersons? Some talk about the virtues of tolerance (like the Muslim cleric Oaks quotes at one point). Others talk about its dangers (like Oaks). Some talk about the virtues of truth (like me). Others talk about the dangers of truth that is not useful (e.g. Boyd K. Packer, whom Oaks praises as a champion of truth: the irony kills me, until I remember what kind of truth Packer is standing for). The fact of the matter is that truth and tolerance are meaningless without context. The truth that you had oatmeal for breakfast this morning rather than pancakes does not interest me too much. The truth that Brigham Young takes at least some of the blame for causing the Mountain Meadows Massacre does. Same thing with tolerance. I have no problem tolerating fires in the fireplace, but if you throw me into a furnace while it's hot, my tolerance suddenly shrinks. What can I say? God made me a moral relativist? (That doesn't guarantee he won't cut me off mercilessly at some later point, does it, since he is historically a two-faced waffler? Man, what a post-modern, avante-garde punk God is. We already know that he swears, and that he has body piercings, at least since Golgotha. What if he wears tattoos?)
Contrary to what Oaks says, atheists are not necessarily morally insensitive, any more than Mormons are. All of us are moral beings with ideas about what kinds of behavior are right in certain contexts. Some of our ideas are vindicated by experience. Others are not. There is no easy cheat-sheet out there somewhere with all the harmless behaviors on one side and all the harmful ones on the other. If many of us are much more tolerant of homosexuals than of serial killers, maybe it is because we find that, in our experience (which may or may not contradict an idea we had at some point), homosexuals are much less dangerous (particularly when we treat them with human dignity, respecting the desire that many of them have to form lasting pair-bonds and rear families). If many of us don't get angry or even upset when Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Seventh-day Adventists, or atheists break the Sabbath (or pick up sticks), maybe it is because we find that, in our experience, breaking the Sabbath is a perfectly innocuous thing (like picking up sticks, as long as the sticks are not intended for beating out the brains of unbelievers). If your experience is different, then share it, by all means, but don't bring in God as some kind of sanctimonious bully on your side (since, as we have seen, he seems to be on all sides of every question: what makes you so sure he agrees with you all the time?). My sense is that if Oaks could deal with the first part of his talk better (the claim that LDS Mormons recognize and defend God's absolute truth), then the second part would make more sense (as an explanation of what we Mormons stand for in practical terms, i.e. when we contribute our two cents on what laws should govern the larger collective morality).
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Mormons run into the same problem with their own descriptive adjective when they get mad at splinter groups (including the polygamist churches) who call themselves Mormons. "We aren't those people! They cannot steal our identity! Blah, blah!" Historically, those groups have every bit as much right as the LDS to the adjective Mormon. When we get mad at them for using it (and daring to use it differently than we do), we only reveal our pettiness. (Is religion about words for us? Do we really care that much about adjectives, for Christ's sake? What is the New Testament really about, people?) The only moral position is to let our actions speak for themselves. If you want to get a message of goodness out into the world, you have to be good. You cannot waste time fighting about stuff that (1) doesn't really matter and (2) that you are never going to change by fighting. The fact of the matter is that historical Christianity has always given birth to heretics, much to the chagrin of the orthodox. Many Catholics would expunge the Protestant Reformation if they could. Many Protestants would expunge the Mormon Restoration. Many Mormons would expunge the schism that produced the FLDS. But history isn't about what we would do. It's about what other people already did. Historically speaking, Mormons (including the FLDS) are clearly a Christian offshoot, different from other offshoots but not categorically separate. (The Mormon vision of Jesus, particularly in the Book of Mormon, is recognizably Protestant, with a few tweaks that drive Nicene believers crazy, though I had a professor at BYU who showed us how Mormons could embrace the Nicene creed, if we were willing to get creative with the meaning of the deliberately vague Greek words used to craft it.)
Call us bad Christians, deviant Christians, heretical Christians, anti-Christ Christians, or whatever you want, really. It doesn't really matter, and it won't really change anything (except insofar as it contributes to emotional sectarian feeling on both sides). And that exclusivist streak that you find in us, that arrogance that presumes to judge other Christians and find them wanting? That is vintage historical Christianity: Joseph Smith took it from the Christian movements around him. (Read some of the proselytizing pamphlets from the era: slandering the other guy was the way to preach back then.) Not only that, it goes all the way back: as far back as we are aware of groups of people calling themselves Christians, we find them at one another's throats (literally or figuratively) over the fact that they cannot agree about stuff. (Read the New Testament, especially Acts. Notice Ananias, Sapphira, and the fight between Peter and Paul.) Christ came to bring a sword, didn't he? But it is ultimately unfair to make partisan craziness uniquely Christian: we find it all over human history, before, after, and outside of Christianity (as well as all through it). People separate into groups and fight about whose group is best. If we're lucky, we just call each other names. If we're not, we end up with wars. C'est la vie. I wish it weren't so. I used to think that Christians should be different. But historical research has entirely wilted my naive optimism.