Hell

Some interesting quotes from Postman's Technopoly.  The first quote is actually from C. S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters, x):

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin."  The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint.  It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps.  In those we see its final result.  But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.  Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

Part of my faith crisis was waking up to the realization that there is no such thing as an enlightened bureaucracy.  They all tell you they are wonderful, and they are all lying.  Some do more and more obvious harm than others, but all are harmful--especially if you believe the crap they always tell you about how they are saving the world.  If the world is saved, it will be at least as much in spite of bureaucracy as because of it (though I am sure any bureaucracy that survives will give itself credit as our savior, or--more insidiously--as his humble instrument).

The second quote is from Postman (85-86):

Bureaucracy has no intellectual, political, or moral theory--except for its implicit assumption that efficiency is the principal aim of all social institutions and that other goods are necessarily less worthy, if not irrelevant.  That is why John Stuart Mill thought bureaucracy a "tyranny" and C. S. Lewis identified it with Hell.  The transformation of bureaucracy from a set of techniques designed to serve social institutions to an autonomous meta-institution that largely serves itself came as a result of several developments in the mid- and late-nineteenth century: rapid industrial growth, improvements in transportation and communication, the extension of government into ever larger realms of public and business affairs, the increasing centralization of governmental structures.  To these were added, in the twentieth century, the information explosion and what we might call the "bureaucracy effect": as techniques for managing information became more necessary, expensive, and complex, the number of people and structures required to manage those techniques grew, and so did the amount of information generated by bureaucratic techniques.  This created the need for bureaucracies to manage and coordinate bureaucracies, then for additional structures and techniques to manage the bureaucracies that coordinated bureaucracies, and so on--until bureaucracy became, to borrow again Karl Kraus's comment on psychoanalysis, the disease for which it purported to be the cure.  Along the way, it ceased to be merely the servant of social institutions and became their master.  Bureaucracy now not only solves problems but creates them.  More important, it defines what our problems are--and they are always, in the bureaucratic view, problems of efficiency.  As Lewis suggests, this makes bureaucracies exceedingly dangerous, because though they were originally designed to process only technical information, they are now commonly employed to address problems of a moral, social, and political nature.  The bureaucracy of the nineteenth century was largely concerned with making transportation, industry, and the distribution of goods more efficient.  Technopoly's bureaucracy has broken loose from such restrictions and now claims sovereignty over all of society's affairs.

The single greatest problem with bureaucracy is that efficiency is not an unmixed blessing.  It inevitably creates fragility (as Nassim Taleb would say), rendering those who rely on it blind to important realities, realities that are inefficient.  (Or, as bureaucrat Boyd K. Packer would say, truths that are not very useful.)  Two more quotes from Postman (88-89):

The role of the expert is to concentrate on one field of knowledge, sift through all that is available, eliminate that which has no bearing on a problem, and use what is left to assist in solving a problem.  This process works fairly well in situations where only a technical solution is required and there is no conflict with human purposes--for example in space rocketry or the construction of a sewer system. It works less well in situations where technical requirements may conflict with human purposes, as in medicine or architecture.  And it is disastrous when applied to situations that cannot be solved by technical means and where efficiency is usually irrelevant, such as in education, law, family life, and problems of personal maladjustment.  I assume I do not need to convince the reader that there are no experts--there can be no experts--in child-rearing and lovemaking and friend-making.  All of this is a figment of the Technopolist's imagination, made plausible by the use of technical machinery [like fancy documents purporting to illustrate the one true family], without which the expert would be totally disarmed and exposed as an intruder and an ignoramus ... There is, for example, no test that can measure a person's intelligence.  Intelligence is a general term used to denote one's capacity to solve real-life problems in a variety of novel contexts.  It is acknowledged by everyone except experts that each person varies greatly in such capacities, from consistently effective to consistently ineffective, depending on the kinds of problems requiring solution.  If, however, we are made to believe that a test can reveal precisely the quantity of intelligence a person has, then, for all institutional purposes, a score on a test becomes his or her intelligence.  The test transforms an abstract and multifaceted meaning into a technical and exact term that leaves out everything of importance.  One might even say that an intelligence test is a tale told by an expert, signifying nothing.

Nonetheless, the expert relies on our believing in the reality of technical machinery, which means we will reify the answers generated by the machinery.  We come to believe that our score is our intelligence, or our capacity for creativity or love or pain.  We come to believe that the results of opinion polls are what people believe, as if our beliefs can be encapsulated in such sentences as "I approve" and "I disapprove."

I see this nonsense playing out all the time in different places.  In education, we mistake scores for learning (and the ability to learn).  In church, we mistake adherence to arbitrary (and even harmful) rules for piety.  In government and business, we mistake sound-bytes for sound policy, and assume that the talking suits whose companies we support actually know what the heck they are doing because they get up on time, clean up nicely, and diligently show us charts decorated with impressive technical jargon.  Everywhere, we trust people to know stuff that they don't really know, even when their incompetence becomes truly dangerous, destroying our ability to function as individuals and as a society.  How am I supposed to become intellectually competent if my chief aim is to get good scores on tests, pleasing masters, colleagues, and students?  How I am supposed to become morally competent if every decision I make has to pass muster with an incoherent book of rules compiled by bureaucrats in Salt Lake City (or Colorado City, or Canterbury, or Rome, or any other major religious center)?  How am I supposed to be financially and politically capable if my actionable resources can be appropriated on a moment's notice to save stupid businesses lucky enough to be "too big to fail"?  In a world where I exist merely as an individual consumer--helpless, needy, and stupid--how am I supposed to do anything worth doing at all?

The worst part of my faith crisis has been my inability to talk coherently about this aspect of it.  I express a disillusion with technology in general, and immediately others (not just Mormons) rush in with their pet technical solution to my lack of faith.

"Yes!  It can be really frustrating dealing with idiots like George Bush and his henchmen.  Vote for Obama and this will all get better ... The reason it isn't better yet is that the evil Republicans still have power."  [If you want the Republican version of this, just change a few words, swapping Obama for Bush, and vice versa, and referencing evil Democrats.]

"Yes!  The church comes with all kinds of people.  Sometimes, inexplicably, they speak as men when we all think that they are speaking for God.  We have to learn to ignore this, have faith that it will all turn out right, and keep exercising our religious freedom to call other people to repentance."

"Yes!  It can be really frustrating dealing with religious bigots like Boyd Packer and his henchmen.  Come to my church and this will all get better ... The reason it isn't better yet is that you are still holding on to icky Mormon ideas instead of embracing true Christianity." [Imagine the face of the Reverend Jeffress here, and maybe someone like Ted Haggard for good measure].

"Yes!  Being an academic is hard sometimes.  Maybe if you went to another workshop, or published a paper, or applied for your 300th job, or worked more diligently on your dissertation, you wouldn't be in this mess."

I have spent much of my life being broken--not politically savvy enough, or righteous enough, or smart enough, or diligent enough, or whatever.  After fifteen years (starting in adolescence, when I became aware of other people as more than entertainment), I am still broken.  But the stupid bureaucracies that push me all over the place are broken too.  They think they know what they are doing.  They think they are wise.  They think they righteous.  They think they deserve the right to put me in my place, humbly enslaving me to the greater good that they represent (but can never represent intelligibly, for some reason: pond scum like me just doesn't get it, I guess).  The difference between them and me, as I see it, is that I admit my limits and refuse to go past them, while they don't.  I try to be morally responsible.  They don't.  I answer for my mistakes.  They don't answer for theirs.  I am interested in changing things in fundamental ways, so that I don't have to rely on them all the time (though I have nothing against their going on without me).  The only change that they welcome is the one that puts them in control of the status quo, where I am comfortably stuck under their thumb.  Their heaven on earth is my hell.

Myth as Language

Someone recently wrote to me about my discussion of C. S. Lewis.  In responding to this person's insights, I came up with something I would like to share more generally.

The problem with the claim for Christ (as the one and only way to God, or the Good) is that it is not really stronger than a claim for Balder (or Osiris, or any other dying and rising god).  Today we know a bit more about the gospels than we did in Lewis' day, and they are very clearly myth (just like Egyptian myth or Norse myth or any other myth).  They aren't history (any more than the changing story of Joseph Smith's First Vision is).  This does not mean that they do not express important human truths, but those truths are not historical (i.e. accounts of what really happened at some moment in the past) or particular (i.e. stories of a particular person doing particular things).  Myths are about universal truths like love, loss, and moving on into the great unknown.  They are about what happens all of the time to all of us (and each one of us). 

Just like you can speak of these universal things in any language without losing important meaning (since Spanish is no truer than English or Russian or Chinese as an expression of human reality), so you can put them in any myth: they are the timeless truth; the myth is just an accidental vessel that holds them.  Lewis' mistake was presuming that Christianity was somehow categorically different from other religions.  It isn't.  This doesn't diminish its importance: English is still important, even if it is not categorically superior to (say) Spanish (which is also important, right? why should we pretend that Spanish is inferior to English? why pretend that Christianity is categorically superior to Buddhism, Judaism, or Islam?).  This doesn't mean that the real truths it teaches are not important or universal.  But it does allow us to check them against other versions of themselves (as it were), and to compare our myth-makers with other storytellers out there (who may pick up on some important things that we leave out of our stories, for one reason or another).

From my perspective, Lewis just made the choice at some point to speak English (Christian), i.e. to make English (Christianity) the language through which he expressed himself.  That is perfectly fine, and English (Christianity) happens to be my native language as well.  But I like other languages.  I don't see them as categorically inferior to mine (though there are speakers of each who claim it as the one and only true language, and treat those ignorant of it as babbling idiots, no matter how well they speak their own language; I think this is wrong).

I can make an emotionally charged argument that anyone who chooses to dismiss the Buddha or Muhammad (or Osiris or Balder) is willfully rejecting the one true prophet or the one true God.  I can make an emotionally charged argument that English is the one true language, that there is no such thing as a cultured human being who has never read Shakespeare in the original.  Both arguments have a gigantic flaw.  They ignore the humanity of other people, a humanity evident in the facts (1) that there are many prophets and many gods (including many as good as ours), and (2) that there are many great human cultures entirely ignorant of Shakespeare (who did not live early enough to bestow his genius on the Upanishads, the writer of Ecclesiastes, the Homeric poets, or countless others widely and rightly acknowledged as having achieved high levels of culture).

What is good in my culture (English, Christianity) does not have to be qualitatively superior to what is good in other cultures.  People do not have to speak my language (English, Christianity) to me before I acknowledge them as true human beings.  I think even C. S. Lewis is willing to concede this on some level (with the story of the saved Calormene in the Last Battle).  The only difference between us is that I see the saved Christian as being more like that Calormene: God is a mystery that all human cultures (including every form of Christianity) seek in vain to capture and own for themselves (and their little languages), but he is not ours.  We can be his, but he cannot be ours.  He can speak for us, but we do not speak for him.  When we try to do this (speak for him), what we say has a disturbing tendency to become fascist nonsense.

Does that make my position a little clearer?  I don't think I am calling Lewis (or any Christian) stupid.  I think Christians are by and large good people, with good stories in a good language.  But I see in us (and other human beings of all faiths) tendencies towards a kind of cultural absolutism which others use and prey upon to bad effect (in the history of the world, which it has become my job to read).  For what it is worth, I have the same tendencies.  So if we are fools, then we are all fools together.  I have not become someone who sees other cultures as magically superior to his own: we all have human flaws that can be dangerous.  But I do think that acknowledging the flaws in ourselves (as we cannot help seeing them in others) is an important first step towards getting along better with everyone (including our very selves).  Moral improvement cannot really begin until we are entirely honest (at least with ourselves).  For me, that means admitting that Christians (and English-speakers) are neither better nor worse than other human beings.  Our story is one of many.  It is not the only story in any way.  It can be special because we love it, and that is enough.  It does not have to be true history, or the source of imaginary superiority that we enjoy over those who have different stories.  As I read Jesus (including some of the words attributed to him outside the New Testament, e.g. in the Gospel of Thomas), he was not necessarily interested in declaring himself the one true God (though some disciples were eager to claim him as such) or in founding a missionary church (though some disciples were eager for that as well).  The core of Christianity, as I understand it, is cultivating love for the world (God and one's fellow human beings, which are not artificially restricted to those who speak the same language or tell the same stories).  To me, this message is more important than the messenger (who may or may not have been a god on earth: why does this matter? is his message somehow false if he didn't rise from the dead or turn water into wine, etc.? I don't think so.  If Lewis does, then we disagree there.)

Apostle Meets Skeptic

C. S. Lewis.  The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics.  New York: HarperCollins, 2007.  ISBN 0061208493.

C. S. Lewis.  God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics.  Ed. W. Hooper.  Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970.  ISBN 0802808689. 

Thanks to my mother, I grew up with C. S. Lewis.  Ever since I was old enough to think about religion in any remotely systematic way, I have lived in the intellectual shadow of the keen but simple genius behind Narnia, Screwtape, and Mere Christianity.  Receiving my own collection of Lewis' greatest hits from Mom was an unexpected bright spot in my disaffection from LDS Mormonism and the kind of fundamentalist Christianity that it embraces.   It gave me pause to think about aspects of Christianity that are still very much part of my evolving worldview.

I think I still have a lot in common with Lewis.  For one thing, my break with literalist Mormonism left me very much convinced in the reality of that which he calls "the Tao" in The Abolition of Man.  Although my walk with Mormonism ultimately took away my belief in gospel as history, it did not leave me convinced that life was meaningless or moral standards unnecessary.  I still had a strong sense of right and wrong: it was more malleable on some points (like what combination of partners can constitute a healthy marriage), but still grounded in some basic absolutes (adultery is always wrong).  So, even as the myths of Mormonism and Christianity ceased to be literally true (true as history) for me, the ethical standards behind them remained a fundamental part of my moral and philosophical outlook on the world.  I discovered Lewis' natural law ("the Tao") as something objectively true, in my own experience: whether I think of myself as Mormon, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, or agnostic (and in the last few months I have been all of these, sometimes simultaneously), I experience it as a constant reality, a standard I can trust even as the faces of the gods that guard it blur and fade, sometimes to nothing.  The Christian version is the Sermon on the Mount, a re-composition of the Jewish Ten Commandments.  Muslims have the Five Pillars of the Faith, and Buddhists the principle of compassion that is an integral part of the life of the bodhisattva.  Atheists and agnostics have similar standards rooted in the symbiotic relationships between individuals that can be observed among humans and in nature.  The term "Tao" comes to Lewis from Lao-tzu, who may just be the master of all when it comes to teaching religious truth: I am excited to read his Tao Te Ching, which I have heard of and seen quoted but have never seriously digested.

The one quarrel I have with Lewis, the only one serious enough to mention in this little essay, is the sentiment behind this statement (from page 132 of God in the Dock):

My conversion, very largely, depended on recognizing Christianity as the completion, the actualization, the entelechy, of something that had never been wholly absent from the mind of man.  And I still think that the agnostic argument from similarities between Christianity and paganism works only if you know the answer.  If you start by knowing on other grounds that Christianity is false, then the pagan stories may be another nail in its coffin: just as if you started by knowing that there were no such things as crocodiles then the various stories about dragons might help to confirm your disbelief.

This statement rests on what I regard now as a false binary: either (1) Christianity is entirely true, or (2) it is entirely false.  If (1) it is true, then it is the completion (the actualization, the entelechy) of every human religious impulse.  If (2) it is false, then it is a bunch of silly stories with no meaning that anyone should take seriously.  From where I now stand, philosophically, there is no merit in either of these positions.  This is because Christianity is not any more pure than human life in general: as I experience it, it is an amalgam of true and false, useful and silly, myth and history.  Why should I deny the truth that is in Christianity because of the many falsehoods that are also in it?  Why pretend that it represents the last word on human ethics and spirituality, when (in my experience) it clearly doesn't?  For me to do so would be dishonest and emotionally (not to mention religiously) impoverishing.  Thinking analogically shows why Lewis' dichotomy between absolute truth and absolute falsehood is ridiculous: the fact that the sledgehammer is not a good tool for brain surgery does not mean that it has no valid uses!  A tool can be useful without being the one and only tool we ever use, and the same is true of ideas.  Christianity can contain truth without containing all truth.

One more example of Lewis' tendency to over-simplify in dividing religious truth from error. Just as I reject Gordon B. Hinckley's assertion that Joseph Smith was either a complete charlatan or God's best buddy ("If [the First Vision] did not [occur], then this work is a fraud": quoted from "The Marvelous Foundation of Our Faith," Ensign [November 2002]), so I reject Lewis' attempt to say what amounts to the same thing about Christ (from pages 50-51 of Mere Christianity in The Complete Signature Classics):

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.'  That is the one thing we must not say.  A man who was a man and said the sort of things Jesus said [think of Joseph Smith here] would not be a great moral teacher.  He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell.  You must make your choice.  Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.  You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon [think of Joseph Smith again]; or you can fall down at his feet and call Him Lord and God.  But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great moral teacher.  He has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to [somehow, people who over-simplify always end up speaking for deity instead of letting it speak through them].

So in theory the Sadducees and Pharisees had the right idea when they went about trying to destroy Christ as a devil?  Or maybe they should have just ignored him?  What could they possibly learn from him, as long as they were not willing to fall down and kiss his feet?  If I read Lewis right, he is saying that we should meet extravagant theological claims either with active disinterest (for the lunatic), outright rejection (for the devil), or unqualified acceptance (for God).  This is plainly a false trilemma, especially when you do the research (some of it impossible in Lewis' day, to be fair) necessary to approach the historical Jesus, who may not have made all the assertions put into his mouth by gospel writers (just as he may not even have existed).  Like Mormons who assert that their mythical Joseph Smith must be historically true or the vibrant religious life they have built around him is completely false, Lewis falls into the trap of confusing myth and history, making reality an illustration of myth instead of the reverse.  If he took himself seriously he would have to ignore, abominate, or worship a lot more than I am willing to.  Take Joseph Smith, for example.  Despite my status as a doctrinal apostate, I am not willing to define the first Mormon prophet categorically as either a "lunatic" (more so than the rest of us) or "the Devil of Hell" or the sainted martyr that the modern LDS proclaim.  I live in a world where both Jesus and Joseph Smith have useful contributions to make to human ethics and religion, even if we do not believe in the literal, historical truth of everything they are reported to have said or been (or any of it, really).  The ethical reality in my life that Christian and Mormon myths touch does not depend on those myths being historically true:  I can practice charity without believing that a man who was also God rose from the dead.  I can receive personal revelation from the universe without worrying about the exact nature of what Joseph saw or did not see in the Sacred Grove.  Why impoverish my life by assuming that all myths are either worthless (to be ignored), disgusting (to be abominated), or perfect (to be adored without criticism, accepted without qualification)?  Where do such myths exist?  As of now, I find them only in overly simplified apologetics (like Lewis' trilemma here).  The real myths, like real life, are equal parts truth and falsehood, serious thought and wild speculation.  To ignore them is stupid (because they are the lab notes in an ongoing human experiment in which I must participate: like just about every other person I have ever met, I create stories that give meaning to my life; my stories are better when I can compare them to others).  To abominate them is pointless (since hating the stories of others does not make mine any better).  To worship any of them as literal truth is dangerous (because each ignores as much truth as it creates: you cannot get too many perspectives on a problem as difficult as living well--picking a single story as your "one and only" is about as smart as deciding to use no tool but the hammer for the rest of your life).   

There are many more things I could say about Lewis.  The outlook expressed in his works is by and large a valuable one that I am glad to carry with me, even when I find it too simple to handle complex reality: in particular, I regret not being able to say more here about the really interesting portrayal of divinity in his space trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength), a portrayal that I find aesthetically and philosophically compelling on many levels.  For now, I conclude by saying that I love learning from C. S. Lewis as I love learning from Christianity: both are sources for good ideas, but neither offers the last word on the the astonishingly rich and complex thing that is the universe.