Absolute Truth Again

A friend sent me this article, and I had some nits to pick with it (below).

First off, a word about my own philosophical and religious biases.  I am reasonably certain that ancient Skeptics, Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, and pre-Socratic philosophers (people I have studied intently over the last few years) are not post-Modern (nor even Modern, like Kant).  The Buddhists and medieval Daoists I am interested in are also not post-Modern (nor even Modern, at least not the majority of them).

I am not really certain that there is any such thing as a coherent "post-Modernism" out there in the world, and if there is I am definitely not one of its advocates (at least not knowingly or evangelically).

Math is not locksmithing (let alone "ethics" in the broadest sense).  Contrary to Craig's analogy, more than one key can fit a door, which can always be opened without keys, as well.  It need not be arrogant for the locksmith to insist that only one key will open a certain door (it might be, depending on how he makes that assertion).  It is, and will always be, naive and presumptuous.  Craig's analogy to math here just shows that he fails to notice how all human communication is not mathematics, an obvious empirical reality that many "non post-Moderns" (perhaps even some whom he quotes as authorities "on his side") would concede (and perhaps even embrace: what makes you think I reject St. Augustine entirely? I don't, even if I cannot be him, i.e. craft my own life as an exact replica of his).

The underlying subtext to Craig's entire article, as I read it, is that there is a single, true way to live one's life (something that he calls Christianity).  I do not believe this, not even if I become a Christian at some point in future (as I might well do: I am not ruling that out).  Like other people before me, including the very pre-Modern Socrates, I do believe that it is arrogant to presume one knows something when one does not really know it.  People like Socrates (and Kant, for that matter) have very good reasons to reject the idea of simple, absolute truth existing as something we can build our lives around.  Historically, what happens when you and I embrace this truth and champion it?  Well, you mount a crusade to make me kiss your cross (or die), while I stir up a jihad to make you wear my burkha (or die).  That fight between us is stupid (even if it is not always arrogant or inhumane).  To pursue it is to become liable in the creation of dysfunctional societies (like the one we are currently living in, a ridiculous caricature of civil order in which showing love for my neighbor means forcing him to wear my burkha against his will because "God says so!" or "think of the children!").  I don't want any part of this nonsense.  I don't see it as particularly good.  Insofar as Christianity is being good, I don't think it is particularly Christian.  Insofar as God wants us to be good, I don't think he approves it.  (So take that, Craig:  I think God disapproves your Christianity.  I suppose this means I must be another agent provocateur of post-Modern Satan.  How convenient for you: now you can dismiss me without considering whether I might have anything valuable to say.)

An Authentic Life

It occurs to me that what I really want from life, and have always wanted, is something we might call authenticity.  I want to find myself in circumstances where I have a useful outlet for the impulses I carry inside.  I want a field to labor in.  I want friends with whom (for whom, in whom) I can make a positive difference in the world.  I want to belong somewhere.

The hardest thing for me to deal with as I struggle to find a job, a church, etc., is the recurring realization that there are many places I exist but few where I really belong.  I am a transient, a vagrant, a mercenary, a useful idiot (whom the real community dismisses with a smirk or a smile when his contract is up).  I want to be something more.  I don't want riches or honor.  I am willing and able to make sacrifices to belong.  But I cannot sacrifice my commitment to doing good (as I see it) and avoiding evil (as I see it).  I cannot look away from evil I see myself doing and pretend that it is somehow good, unless I see clearly how the pretence is justified.

As I look for somewhere to belong in the world, I run across many other people with different ideas of what I should be, how I should belong (to them or some gang like theirs).  To some I look like a good recruit (though they don't always recruit me); to others I look like shit.  I understand.  I don't expect everyone to like or want me.  I see my own limitations clearly all the time, as I attempt to do things and find myself incapable of carrying through as I thought to: this does not have to be bad; some of my greatest achievements have occurred as unexpected outcomes from failure.  The hardest thing for me to deal with is unremitting failure, with no immediate positive pay-offs in sight.  This is particularly hard when I see how I might be very close to fulfilling someone's need--so close to belonging in some gang where I might make a positive difference--but circumstances mean that I cannot carry through on that promise, that it remains a dead end rather than a live opportunity.

I do not resent the success of other people.  I do not think that life owes me anything for happening to exist as I do.  Mine is and has been a very privileged and blessed existence, I judge, and perhaps it is my turn to suffer for that, to pay a little back for all the good things I have been given in the past--not because I was deserving of them, but because Nature and the people around me were very kind and I was not unappreciative (of that kindness).  I do feel sorry for my dependents, the people who rely on me to help them stay alive and find happiness on the way (we hope).  I wish I could provide for them better than I do (not that I would like to be materially richer necessarily; what I would like would be to give them some stability, a place to grow up without the constant threat of unnecessary change that currently looms over them).

I see more clearly now why the scholar's life is historically a solitary one (locked in an empty garret somewhere, reading, writing, living on pennies, finding friends in the library without getting to close to anyone).  It is not really secure (as few lives are in this world).  Taking dependents is something strong people do, and the young scholar is not strong (usually, typically--and I am quite typical in this regard).  The honest pursuit of truth is not one that lends itself well to wealth-production; even in academia, what gangs love most is a smooth lie.  Smooth lies get you tenure where complicated truths get you rated and written off (as an ignoramus, which I admit that I am: I have struggled to correct this flaw my entire life, only to realize at last that it is incorrigible).  If only I could find the right gang, a gang that might have some use for my ignorance.  If I were a better man, I might be able to say with Oscar Wilde, "I have nothing to declare but my genius."  Alas, instead I find myself echoing that poor fool Socrates: "I have nothing to declare but my ignorance."  And I am not ready to drink hemlock.  What an idiot I am!  

The Problem with School Today

The problem with school these days is that it over-values success, at the expense of process (which always involves failure, especially if one is ever going to succeed in doing anything really, practically useful--as opposed to aesthetically pleasing). School wants us all to look like winners without actually doing the work required to win (i.e. losing over and over). 

I like grappling, so I imagine wrestlers. School wants you to have the achievement record of Alexander Karelin without his medical record (lots of injuries on the road to that much Olympic gold).

School today inverts the old Latin dictum esse quam videri (briefly translated "be rather than seem," i.e. it is better to have real experience than to look experienced). People are afraid to study things they aren't good at, because it will show up on their record, and people reading that record will say, "Loser!" and give whatever prize they have to somebody else. What gets lost in the shuffle is the reality that we are not all going to get the same prizes no matter what happens (life exists by creating winners and losers, always)--and depriving oneself of loss just makes the inevitable that much more painful when it comes. When you talk to guys like Karelin in the locker room, most of them aren't stuck-up assholes (who think they are where they are because they are somehow superior in every fashion to every other human out there). They see the costs of their success. They see its precariousness (a few points ground out on the mat after hours of sweat in the gym, getting pummelled by team-mates and berated by coaches).

Many people whose success is not the result of actual physical hardship have a much less humble view of themselves (and a much more arrogant attitude toward their fellowman, especially when he loses). Worst of all is the academic, politician, or economist who never lost a debate (or an election or a buttload of money). These types are insufferable--convinced that they have figured life out and that the rest of mankind are just worms who somehow fail to appreciate their excellent example and stop failing. "Why should you flunk calculus, Billy Stupid? I never did. Just try harder next time! (And no, I will not hire you to take out my trash: only A-level garbage men on my team. I cannot have your loser-ness bringing down our morale and/or killing our phenomenal performance, which is entirely the result of our own excellent moral qualities.)"

Some Mormon Mysteries

I interrupt a long hiatus to offer the following responses to two simple questions: (1) What is God to you?  (2) Are families forever?

(1) I would say that God to me is uncertainty, probability, unpredictability, the blind spot in my human mirror onto the vast thing that is reality. I am a machine for looking into reality and seeing discrete variables causally: I see X, and I see Y, and when one follows the other I can always tell you why. Unfortunately, I will not always be right. But this does not mean that life is utterly purposeless (or utterly random: we experience things that are regular all the time, even when there is no possibility of doing a scientific study to rule out coincidence as ultimate "cause").

I can do many things with my blind spot. I can paint it to look friendly or scary. I can personify it, pray to it, wear little trinkets and whatnot to remind me of it, or I can take an opposite route--depersonifying it, refusing to pray to it, finding some other reason for whatever little trinkets I want to wear. The approach I take is heavily influenced by my personal history. Who are my mentors? What books do I read? What music do I know? Do I interact more with Jesus or the Pharisees in my particular faith tradition? (Every cultural tradition includes people focused on broad principles, that can become too broad to make useful sense, and people focused on narrow laws, that can become too narrow to be useful. If I am poisoned by hippie Jesus' lackadaisical approach to life, then I am likely to react by running towards a more strict Phariseeism to correct my fault, whereas if I am poisoned by strict Phariseeism, I become more likely to course-correct by running towards hippie Jesus. I am in the latter category, but I have met quite a few people on the opposite trajectory.)

Eternal families? I don't really know what eternity is. If it is temporal, then it is just time going on and on and on without stopping (physicists, is that really even possible? I doubt it, since time is something that exists relative to other things that change, e.g. when universes bang in and out of existence). What would one do forever? How would one live (without going insane)? I don't know. I like some change, some narrative, some regrets, and an end to life's story (with possibilities for new stories: who knows what comes after my story? not me, surely). When I see "the eternal perspective" invoked in Mormonism, I also note a disturbing trend towards preserving some (galling) injustice in the status quo: "From an eternal perspective, it does not matter so much that you are currently unsuccessful (unmarried, female, black, enslaved, etc.). Just live with that, and God will eventually set it all right" (by having some king and priest who isn't a loser like you look after it? this isn't what is meant always by any means, but it is often the message transmitted, unfortunately).

The useful eternal perspective for me exists outside time. Eternity is not time going on with no end, but a space outside time, a metaphorical space where possibility exists untapped, unexhausted, unreached (and in some sense unreachable) by human understanding. It is what Buddhists call emptiness (not nothingness, but the indefinite possibility that something might happen--or not). Instead of inspiring us to come up with self-serving stories to justify evil in the status quo ("blacks are roughing it here because they were fence-sitters in the pre-existence, women because Eve ate that damn apple," etc.), it reveals to us the poverty of material success. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, and I choose to love him (and life) anyway. Replace "the Lord" with Nature if you like. Feminize him (it, them). Do whatever you like! It is your life's work to make art of your religion. But you will not exhaust reality; you will not escape the blind-spot built into your humanity. That is not a bug, I fear, but a feature--and the only cure we have found is death (not really so bad, when one approaches it correctly: I can have really happy thoughts about rotting somewhere in the ground, providing nourishment to the biota all around me--the same way so many other beings have died to keep me alive through my mortality; I want to give something back).

(2) Families? I don't know how they exist or last universally (for all observers everywhere). I don't think I ever will, but I know that I love mine. I know that I value them in a way that I cannot value others (not because I have no use for non-family, but because I cannot be that intimate with all humanity, let alone all sentient life). In the context of my own life-story, they are essential: they are the people who hear my story, who share it, who find meaning in it, and who enrich me with their own stories--stories that contain meaning I can see (because I am close to them, for whatever reasons). I don't know how we are together. Forever? What would that mean? My sons eternally in diapers? Eternally squabbling because someone threw up or punched someone? Eternally meeting with relatives each Thanksgiving to spread diseases (and good cheer)? I prefer to think that we are together now, and that I hope to remain with them for the duration of my story: no matter what happens, they will always be important to that story. That is all I can say.

Happiness in Brief

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).

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.

The Wisdom of Mirth

Friedrich Nietzsche.  Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None.  Trans. W. Kaufmann.  New York: Modern Library, 1995.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House, 2012.  ISBN: 1400067820.

It was mere coincidence that I happened to read these two books together, coincidence that almost makes you believe in deity (since they go together so well, with Taleb even recommending Nietzsche's writings as containing some of the clearest anticipations of his ideas that he has uncovered). There is much I could say about either book, and maybe later I will try, but here I just want to talk about one thought that I have after finishing both.

It seems to me that the take-home message from both is that people cannot control outcomes, individually or collectively, but that they can and should aspire to own (and embrace) their destiny.  I cannot control whether I get cancer, but I can and should aspire to bear cancer nobly if it falls to my lot (as it might, in spite of all that I or anyone else might do to prevent it).  We cannot make society safe (from crime or war or drugs or death in any number of forms), but we can and should aspire to make it love nobility.  We can publicly worship those people and values that we love for the good they have done, and we can publicly pillory those we hate (for the good they think they have done, to our harm).  We can show others the gods we worship, and let them decide to worship with us or revile.  If they worship, then we respect their contribution as they make it (demanding nothing from them that they are not comfortable providing).  If they revile, then we respect that contribution (demanding nothing from them that we aren't willing to give them ourselves: they can live in peace, doing whatever nonsense they please, as long as they don't expect us to worship them for it or take any active part ourselves in stupid stuff we don't believe in).

Society isn't about bringing us all together in one big happy family, in which everyone gets along perfectly with everyone else.  Society is about reconciling us all to the fact that this will never happen.  We don't all see eye to eye.  We never have.  We never will.  Some of us have the courage to stand for what we believe in, even when others make that very painful for us.  These people are heroes.  Some of us prefer to wait for someone else to tell us what to believe, what to fight for, how to live.  These people are the mob (who might be scum).

What separates heroes from the mob isn't necessarily what they do (not that that isn't important at all, of course).  It is how they do it.  We all fight for causes, somehow, someway.  Are you a noble fighter?  Do you have respect for those who abstain from your fight for their own noble reasons?  For those who fight on the opposite side because they are convinced that you are a dangerous idiot who deserves to go to hell?  Do you love such people, more than the mob who fancy themselves your friends because they happen to fight on your side--not because it is theirs but because they want to cool?  If so, then you are a hero (no matter what church you belong to, what beliefs you have or don't, what politics you espouse, or what you do for a living: heroism is about playing strong and fair, not being "right" or "winning" or some other such nonsense).

We are all, individually and collectively, characters in stories that we tell one another (and ourselves).  What kind of characters should we be?  Heroes, we say (and so I assume, for the moment: in any case, we all approach the business of storytelling from an egocentric point of view, wondering how we fit in and what good, heroic deeds we should do).  So what kind of heroes should we be?

In my experience, there are two kinds of hero.  One is the tragic hero, who faces the reality that he cannot control outcomes by killing himself in attempt to do so anyway.  ("Damn the torpedoes!  Full speed ahead!")  This kind of heroism can be very inspiring (very purely, nobly heroic).  It can also cause a lot of pain and anguish that are not (strictly speaking) necessary (from a point of view like mine: here we enter into my personal views on the best kind of heroism).  If we aspire to become tragic heroes, we run the risk of enhancing our suffering, and perhaps the suffering of those around us.  (The tragic hero wears hair shirts to mortify his flesh when he gets too frisky with joie de vivre.  He puts out his eyes rather than see evil.  He does not take it well when he learns that he has killed his father, slept with his mother, or otherwise broken any custom in the moral code he holds sacred.  He would much rather die than be dishonored.)  That path, noble as I can see that it is (in the examples of men and legends around me, including the legend of Jesus), is not for me.  I prefer another.

My path is the path of the comic hero.  This kind of heroism is not immediately as prepossessing as the tragic variety.  Where the tragic hero faces insuperable odds with Stoic calm and resignation (waiting to commit suicide like Cato when the inevitable happens and Caesar wins), the comic hero prefers jokes and an optimistic cynicism. ("We're really screwed here, but maybe something new turns up unexpectedly to save our sorry butts!")  Humor is the key here, any humor.  Gallows humor.  Slapstick.  The point is to make the show go on.  You can do everything the tragic hero does, if you must, but your attitude is one of cheerful defiance (not heroic resignation).  Instead of acting like Achilles (e.g. Sylvester Stallone in "Rambo"), you emulate Odysseus (e.g. Clint Eastwood in "Dirty Harry").  Talk is cheap.  So you talk, a lot, and game the system that the tragic hero refuses to dignify with any response other than laconic contempt.  You know you don't control your outcome utterly, but you don't really care.  Instead of tapping your mom and ripping out your eyes, you ride that dung beetle to the throne of Zeus with gusto, and cheerfully accept whatever reception waits.  ("I get to do battle with Ares?  Great!  Sleep with Aphrodite?  Even better!")

Tragedy makes your focus narrow.  You are drawn inexorably toward the doom you cannot avoid, the doom that is written all over your entire world (your family, your people, the stars, and so on and so forth).  You are impotent, but you still stand bloody and unbowed, confidently awaiting the Black Swan that is going to ruin you once and for all.  Comedy, on the other hand, leaves you wide open.  You aren't drawn anywhere.  Who knows what ridiculous prank the universe is going to play on you next?  The most you can do is try to keep your shirt on while Zeus throws the dice again.  Maybe this time you won't end up with egg on your face, but as long as it is there, you might as well laugh, right?  Maybe today you are stuck fighting some interminable, awful war on foreign shores, but tomorrow you could be bedding a goddess.  Better take that shower after all.  You might need it!  You are always waiting for the Black Swan that is going to save you (whether from some really bad guys or just a really bad movie script, because comedy has room for the small as well as the large).

Heroism works best by adapting us to the situations we face--allowing us to give each problem our best shot without feeling too bad about the results (which are never entirely in our control).  Comic heroism, I think, makes it easier for us to adapt than does the tragic (even as the tragic is intuitively easier to understand and even emulate: many a man who struggles to live as a hero has little problem dying as one).  Laughter really is the best medicine, the gift that lets us embrace and transcend our own smallness and meanness--the pettiness that comes with thinking that your individual thoughts are somehow intricately bound up with the meaning and purpose of the entire universe.  Of course they are!  Just like your bowel movements, and the bowel movements of other living things (including small and large cattle: we need bullshit to live, honestly!).

Life is funny.  It would be insufferably tragic, if it weren't also so ridiculous, so unexpected and absurd.  A series of mistakes and stop-gaps, compounding over time, a hopeless tangle of purposes and cross-purposes canceling each other out, and out of it all comes this ape pretending to explain everything with a bedtime story (wait, I mean a gajillion bedtime stories).  The earth is impossibly old!  No, wait, she is incredibly young.  Her wrinkles clearly prove ... that the Intelligent Designer went to fashion school?  Nay, that she was once a dragon, and we live on her corpse!  (Or was it a turtle?  In fact, it may be turtles all the way down!)  In ancient times, the first man was made of mud.  (Or was it blood?  Maybe we should kill a bunch of heretics to find out.  If they bleed red liquid, we'll know we're right!)  And then the Lord made woman.  (From mud, or from a rib?  More importantly, why on earth would he do such a thing?  Why make something that doesn't have a penis?  Well, it has boobs!  Point taken!  Clearly we must save it from doing anything that might shake those things too much when we're not around to gape at them.  Shut them up at home, for goodness' sake!)  And then they made more people.  (People!  How did they make people?  Are we old enough to have this discussion yet?  Probably not.  Let's say a stork gave them babies!)  And then the people were wicked.  (Wicked?  What means that?  Well, they fought, and ate, and farted, and had babies, and got sick, and died, and other stuff.  Wait, why is eating bad?  And babies--what's wrong with getting those from storks?  It makes sense that war be something bad, but what makes it happen?  Hell, kids, you ask too many questions!  Let's just say there was this evil dude named Satan who did it all.  Or was his name Ahriman?  Loki?  Was he a dude dude, with a thingy, or was he maybe something else, like a snake?  So many questions!  Maybe we should just make Satan a mad scientist and be done with it.  But how does that make him different from God?)  And then we had to punish the wicked so that others wouldn't be like them.  (Because punching you when you're sick means that I won't get sick, right?  No.  Stop taking everything out of context!  But is there really any other way to take it?  Snap!)  And so on, and so forth.  We are only ever telling the same story over and over, varying the particulars as some among us accidentally learn a few "new" things (forgetting that there is really nothing new or old for those who cannot tell the difference) and attempt to convey understanding of them with old words.

All religions are true.  All are false as well.  What matters is not so much which one you believe, as whether you live well.  Do you tell your lies sincerely, and live by your code well?  Could you die today and wake up happy, even if you were in hell?  If you can say yes to that, then I approve of you (not that you care or ought to, but you have my approval whether you want it or not).  Life is first about what we do, second about how we do it, and only last (and least) about the words that we or others use to tell stories about it.  It doesn't matter who the storyteller is (whether he is a man or a woman, a paleolithic shaman or a modern scientist): the story will always be incomplete--a pale reflection of things that are more real than it is, helpful in some ways but in others worse than useless.  Some of us worship the stories.  We worship them wildly, madly, destructively, with a passion that cankers all that is most noble and heroic in our souls.  Nietzsche and Taleb call us away from such fanaticism, away from the worship of stories--into the clear, cool light of day, where we must make our choice and meet our doom the hero's way (without knowing or caring how results turn out after we've given our best).  You can meet your doom however you please.  I don't know what it will be any more than I know my own, but I do know this: whenever mine finds me, I will be laughing.  Vale!          

The Dark Side of Happiness

Recently my attention has been drawn repeatedly to the (disconcerting and even unpleasant) reality (1) that human beings do not understand why things happen and (2) that individual recipes for happiness are not universal.

(1) Life is full of problems.  This appears universal (to the animal world, not just the human species), and so as observers we slip easily into the habit of talking about it as something singular: we point to it in the aggregate with words like evil or the human condition.

Confronted on a daily basis with evil (the human condition), we naturally react.  There are as many reactions as there are individuals, but two common reactions are anger and sorrow.  These emotions drive us to move (an emotion is what propels us to act in response to stimuli, breaking the trance that holds Buridan's ass forever between water and food).  Our motion takes many shapes, too numerous and different to define (e.g. lashing out in anger or scorn, or reaching out in sorrow or pity).  We cannot help this (our reaction), though we can with effort learn to control it a little bit (muting reactions so that we don't express them in ways we find unsettling).

Life does not wait for our reactions, however.  It goes on.  More importantly, it does not depend on our reactions.  We don't get this.  We think that we can make things happen the way we want them to.  We think that if we do the right dance, performing each step perfectly, the universe will give us release from our troubles (a release that we refer to with words like happiness).  Some of us base our entire outlook on life around the idea that we can make our own happiness, that we can defeat evil (the human condition) and avoid the suffering that it brings.  This attitude is problematic when we apply it to ourselves (for reasons I hope to get into in a moment).  It is disastrous when applied to others.

What I am trying to say will make more sense if I give you an analogy to illustrate it.  Think of the fly that charges against a closed window repeatedly, doing its best to escape the stifling environment of the house for the great outdoors (where it can end its brief existence properly, experiencing whatever it is that flies have developed to regard as happiness over the course of their evolution).  Sometimes, the window that the fly is bumping into is closed, and it remains closed.  In these cases, unless some factor intervenes (e.g. a human with a flyswatter), the fly that charges the window will eventually wear itself out, give up the ghost, and fall dead on the windowsill.  From the perspective of a fly, that death is almost certainly evil.  But not all flies charge the same window.  What happens when the window is open a crack (or more)?  Under these circumstances, the fly that charges it may eventually get out (and find happiness in its release from prison).  Now, imagine that the second fly (whose window happened to be cracked open) somehow finds itself able to communicate with the first.  Naturally, it will tell the first fly that happiness depends on pursuing the ritual that it used to escape from the prison that both of them experience.

"Keep charging the window!" it will say. "That is how you get out!"

The first fly may agree or not.  Being a fly, it is likely to agree: flying against the window is what comes naturally for it.  But the promise of happiness that seems so certain to the second fly is really anything but.  Hard as this is to understand or accept, the condition of happiness lies outside the power of the individual organism (whether we talking about flies or human beings, as far as I can tell).  Things happen to us, things that have consequences beyond our power to control, no matter how we may react.  I could do anything, but I am not going to change the fact that I was born at a particular time to particular parents. I am always determined by more than just my next emotion, and not everything that determines me is under my control.  I cannot control what other people do.  I cannot control the weather.  I cannot always even control myself (when I react involuntarily or lose consciousness or capability owing to external factors like poisonous gas, to give one example that occurs to me right now).  Even if I do everything in my power to secure what looks like happiness to me ("charging against the window" with all my might and main), that happiness remains fundamentally and irrevocably dependent on factors beyond my control (the window has to be open).  As a human being, I do have more resources than the fly.  I can think.  I can reason (using the experience of others to guide mine).  But I cannot control historical outcomes, and my lack of control is not momentary or fixable (with the right regimen).  There is no "right" way for a fly to charge a window; when the charging fly fails to escape, it is not because its flight was deficient in any way.  It simply did what flies do, did it well even, and did not get lucky.  Sometimes that is what happens.

(2) Because of all the foregoing, success can actually be a bad thing for understanding (even if it is good for happiness).  The fly that succeeds has no patience for its friend that doesn't.  It doesn't understand that the happiness which it found through charging the window isn't universal.  This happens all the time in human life.  Somebody makes a lucky bet in the market.  Somebody gets a nice job.  Somebody stumbles into very good health.  Somebody has really good relationships with friends and family.  And, inevitably, somebody starts telling other people how to be happy. 

"If you live the way I do, then you will be happy!  Just make this bet (not that one).  Go for this job (not that one).  Read this book (not that one).  Do this exercise (not that one).  Say these words (not those ones)."  And so on.

But life doesn't work like this.  My happiness is not yours.  I cannot tell you what makes you happy, what will make you happy, because I cannot know that.  If I could tell you, the answer would almost certainly reveal that happiness exists beyond human control.

("Well, you need to be born to good parents in perfect health, live your long life free of troubles that you can handle without breaking down, avoid the foods and climates that make you ill, and remember to pass this advice along to others--for a small fee, if you like!")

I advise all people to avoid being hit by cars.  I think that getting hit by a car would be unhappy.  But some people are going to be hit by cars, no matter what they or anyone else does (and if we somehow lose all access to cars, then they will die by some other accidental means).  What is happiness for them?  The good news is that many of them do discover happiness.  The bad news is that they must always find it for themselves.  You cannot make others happy. 

You especially cannot make others happy when you do not understand how they are miserable.  Misery and happiness are really just two words for the same thing in human experience (our attachment to ourselves and those around us, our expectations for life).  We call it misery when we don't like it, happiness when we do.  But it is in itself neither miserable nor happy, neither evil nor good.  Flies crash into windows because that is what flies do, pure and simple.  It does no good for the fly who made it out to lecture the fly who hasn't ("Charge harder! Have more faith! Power through it!").  It may be comforting to think that we make our own destiny, that we control where we end up and how, but that does not make it true.  It is certainly comforting to think that we can help those around us, but when we actually attempt this, it becomes clear pretty quick that "helping" is much more about "compassion" (literally "shared suffering") than it is about anything else (e.g. "happiness").  You can hold someone's hand and say that you are sorry that she feels bad.  You cannot make her feel better.  You don't have what it takes.  She doesn't have it, either (at least not all to herself, under her control).  If she is lucky, then she will stumble across it someday (when the window happens to be open). 

When it comes to explaining and/or creating happiness, much moral advice is worse than useless.  It merely makes "failed" people feel worse (they already feel bad).  It makes them feel helpless instead of hopeful (since the easy solutions that work so well for others don't work for them: if the window is closed, it doesn't matter how a fly charges it).  It closes them to new solutions rather than opening them (since they see how the obvious ones really, really don't work: this causes them to lose hope altogether sometimes).  It makes them feel like irredeemable pariahs (all their friends made it through the window: why are they so dumb? so lazy? so whatever that they cannot power through the glass in front of them the way others have?).

So there we are.  Happiness is not universal.  It is not even securely happy (since it is at root the same thing as misery: happiness is what we call life when we like it; misery is what we call it when we don't; none of us likes life all the time).  It is not verbally communicable.  It cannot be handed down in easy recipes.  The most we can do for those we love when they are miserable is "mourn with those who mourn" and hope that they stumble across the bright side of misery eventually.

The Nature of Language

An acquaintance expressed some frustration that a girl he knows identifies herself as a lesbian while pursuing romantic relationships with men.  This made me think, and my first thoughts are on this page.

From my perspective, language is demonstrative. It points at something: sometimes it points badly (in a way that other people have real difficulty following). If you use language too cryptically, I am left in the dark when it comes to seeing your meaning out there the real world as I experience it. You say words like 'lesbian' and I am not sure that you mean what I would mean if I used those words. I sit back and wait for more data from you (language or behavior) before deciding what you are getting at.

There is an interesting problem here: sometimes, especially when dealing with complex phenomena (like sexuality or the economy), we have a tendency to oversimplify. Words are part of that oversimplification. We use them to refer in a general way to specific circumstances that we are familiar with. Thus, one person says 'lesbian' when she means to say something like 'woman attracted to women but also to certain men, i.e. a woman like me.' Maybe for her the point is that she is not entirely straight, and 'lesbian' is the first word that comes to her mind when she wants to put a tag on that. If you listen to her carefully, notice how she uses the word (e.g. what contexts call it forth from her), and avoid projecting your own idea of lesbianism into her idea of lesbianism, then you can understand her (well enough not to be completely clueless every time she speaks about her lesbianism). 

But there is this thing out there known as logic, a thing which maintains such unnatural (and in complex contexts, frankly absurd) idea that A ('lesbian') cannot be not-A ('likes sex with men'). 'Free market' cannot be 'protectionist racket.' 'Too big to fail' cannot be 'too big not to fail.' And so on. Since antiquity, there have been people who thought that words were more real than other phenomena -- that words allow us to deal directly with pure truth, unclouded by pesky empirical data (which is full of logical fallacies and paradoxes, unlike the perfect world academics have historically imagined -- a world in which A is never not-A).  The great power of words is that they generalize, making individual experiences shareable across time and space.  This is also their great weakness, especially when they are used to generalize a particular experience that many people have never had (e.g. being a lesbian the way my friend's acquaintance is) -- and one word is used all by itself to define that experience for everyone, everywhere (logically, A is never not-A anywhere, so we should be able to invoke it as the same thing anywhere, in any context -- people who see problems with this are just fools attracted to 'nuance,' 'paradox,' 'ambiguity,' and other namby-pamby 'unscientific' and illogical things).

But reality is beyond concepts. Things like lesbianism, capitalism, and such resist reduction to simple formula. These words point: they don't define. In the real world, people aren't either homosexual or heterosexual: we exist on a spectrum. And capitalism isn't either the best thing that ever happened to society or the worst: human social behavior, like human sexual behavior, exists on a spectrum. As long as we use language to point at material stuff that historically resists reduction to real dichotomy (good/evil, positive/negative, up/down, gay/straight, A/not-A), we are speaking descriptively, not definitively (unless we want to join the prophets who speak as morons -- prophets who exist in and out of the LDS church). We need to realize the artificiality of our language: it is emphatically not prior to the phenomena that call it forth. Reality is bigger than our reductive efforts to define it (historically: maybe one day, God will come down to earth in the form of a great scientist and give us words that define all things perfectly; it is a cool thought, and I really doubt it). 

Life, Liberty, and Happiness

Thomas Merton.  The Way of Chuang Tzu.  Abbey of Gethsemani, 1965.  ISBN: 0811218511.

As I was returning one of the last books I still have checked out from my soon-to-be alma mater's library, I could not help saving some more inspiration from Thomas Merton.  Without commentary (for now), behold:

"The Man of Tao" (pp. 91-92) 

The man in whom Tao
Acts without impediment
Harms no other being
By his actions
Yet he does not know himself
To be "kind," to be "gentle."

The man in whom Tao
Acts without impediment
Does not bother with his own interests
And does not despise
Others who do.
He does not struggle to make money
And does not make a virtue of poverty.
He goes his way
Without relying on others
And does not pride himself
On walking alone.
While he does not follow the crowd
He won't complain of those who do.
Rank and reward
Make no appeal to him;
Disgrace and shame
Do not deter him.
He is not always looking
For right and wrong
Always deciding "Yes" or "No."
The ancients said, therefore:

"The man of Tao
Remains unknown.
Perfect virtue
Produces nothing.
'No-Self'
Is 'True-Self.'
And the greatest man
Is Nobody."

"Wholeness" (pp. 105-106) 

"How does the true man of Tao
Walk through walls without obstruction,
Stand in fire without being burnt?"

Not because of cunning
Or daring;
Not because he has learned,
But because he has unlearned.

All that is limited by form, semblance, sound, color,
Is called object.
Among them all, man alone
Is more than an object.
Though, like objects, he has form and semblance,
He is not limited to form.  He is more.
He can attain to formlessness.

When he is beyond form and semblance,
Beyond "this" and "that,"
Where is the comparison
With another object?
Where is the conflict?
What can stand in his way?

He will rest in his eternal place
Which is no-place.
He will be hidden
In his own unfathomable secret.
His nature sinks to its root
In the One.
His vitality, his power
Hide in secret Tao.

When he is all one,
There is no flaw in him
By which a wedge can enter.
So a drunken man, falling
Out of a wagon,
Is bruised but not destroyed.
His bones are like the bones of other men,
But his fall is different.
His spirit is entire.  He is not aware
Of getting into a wagon
Or falling out of one.

Life and death are nothing to him.
He knows no alarm, he meets obstacles
Without thought, without care,
Takes them without knowing they are there.

If there is such security in wine,
How much more in Tao.
The wise man is hidden in Tao.
Nothing can touch him.

"When the Shoe Fits" (pp. 112-113)

Ch'ui the draftsman
Could draw more perfect circles freehand
Than with a compass.

His fingers brought forth
Spontaneous forms from nowhere.  His mind
Was meanwhile free and without concern
With what he was doing.

No application was needed.
His mind was perfectly simple
And knew no obstacle.

So, when the shoe fits
The foot is forgotten,
When the belt fits
The belly is forgotten,
When the heart is right
"For" and "against" are forgotten.

No drives, no compulsions,
No needs, no attractions:
Then your affairs
Are under control.
You are a free man.

Easy is right.  Begin right
And you are easy.
Continue easy and you are right.
The right way to go easy
Is to forget the right way
And forget that the going is easy.

This is really good stuff.  I wish I had spent more time listening as a young man, and less time preaching, but I recognize also that regret is pointless.  Let it all go and do what the situation demands.  There are no demands that cannot be met.  The Tao always takes care of itself: just don't invest heavily in any particular outcome to its evolutions.  Apathy is an amazing psychological (spiritual) tool, unlocking the floodgates of human potential, removing artificial barriers to the Tao that we all carry alive and well inside.

The Prophetic Book of Ether

Terryl Givens.  By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.  ISBN: 0195168887.

This book came to me as a gift from a dear Mormon friend, who heard about my faith crisis and wanted to help.  I found it more enjoyable than many apologetic works, and can recommend it (along with these interviews) to anyone interested in a faithful approach to Mormonism that does not eschew thinking (or truth, even the uncomfortable truth that people like Boyd K. Packer find useless).

Over the past ten years, I have done a lot of thinking (about life, including Mormonism).  One of the insights that has come to me can be illustrated well by a story in the Book of Mormon.  I offer my reading of that story here, as an homage to Givens, and a witness to the kind of Mormon that I am (inactive in the Corporation of the President, but firmly committed to certain principles of the gospel).

As a kid, I read the Book of Mormon many, many times.  (By the time I went on my mission, I had lost count of the number of times I had read it.)  To me, the culmination of the book was not the coming of Christ to the Americas (which always struck me as boring: he just repeats sections of the New Testament almost verbatim and performs a lot of perfunctory ordinances), but the Book of Ether.  In my mind, Ether was like a summary of the whole volume, with the brother of Jared playing the role of Lehi, the Jaredite kings fighting and converting like the early Nephite and Lamanite rulers, and Ether taking the prophetic mantle assumed elsewhere by Abinadi, Mormon, and Moroni.  Ether is simultaneously John the Baptist (a social outcast, eking out a lonely existence in a wilderness cave while he prophesies the end of civilization) and the Anglo-Saxon Wanderer (the last survivor of a lost tribe destroyed in battle, a role that Coriantumr also gets to play at the end of the Book of Ether, when the prophet Ether disappears: where does he go?).  As a social outcast within LDS Mormonism (and American society at large), I am drawn to Ether's character.  As someone who frequently feels like the world is falling apart around him, I identify with Ether.  I look into the world, and everywhere I see what Ether saw: Coriantumr and Shiz fight for total domination, dividing the whole civilized world between them, and eventually everybody loses (with Coriantumr as the lone survivor of what was once a great civilization: after everyone else perishes in battle, he wanders about all by himself, gets picked up by a group of new Jewish immigrants, and dies; Ether pulls an Enoch and just disappears from the narrative abruptly).  Maybe a crude chart can illustrate what I am getting at:

                                  CORIANTUMR vs. SHIZ

                                              Catholics vs. Protestants

                                      Martin Luther vs. Thomas Muentzer                         

                             Cavaliers (royalists) vs. Roundheads (parliamentarians)

                                                Puritans vs. Quakers

                                        conservatives vs. liberals

                                                    Tories vs. Whigs

                                  Thomas Jefferson vs. Alexander Hamilton

                       Missourians / Illinoisans vs. Mormons

                                         Confederacy vs. Union

                                         white people vs. black people

                                           bourgeoisie vs. proletariat

                                         management vs. unions

                              Axis Powers (Nazis) vs. Allies (Soviet-enablers)

                                                  fascists vs. communists

                                  Ezra Taft Benson vs. Hugh B. Brown

                                                       USA vs. USSR

                                 al-Qaeda / Taliban vs. USA

                                          family farms vs. Monsanto

                             straights (Mormons) vs. gays

Throughout history, people line up in partisan groups: us versus them.  The list above could get longer (much longer), but there is one thing you would never find on it: good versus evil.  Looking closely at both sides of the list reveals that even where one side enjoyed a preponderance of goodness (in comparison with its opponents), it was not utterly, purely good.  The political union forged to defeat the Nazis (a good enterprise!) came at the cost of enabling the Soviets (a bad enterprise).  The Confederacy supported slavery (a bad thing): they also supported states' rights (a good thing, since smaller systems function more intelligently, saving information that would otherwise be destroyed).  Alexander Hamilton was a staunch advocate for fiscal responsibility (a good thing): he also laid the foundation for the Fed (which comes with some seriously bad consequences that we are still living with).

In the character of Ether, I look at these conflicts, and I see human capital being wasted.  People on one side ignore all the good on the other side.  Worse, they ignore the bad on their side.  They identify their side as God's side, and brand their enemies as the stooges of Satan.  Mistaking Tolkien's Lord of the Rings for reality, they see themselves as sainted heroes and the enemy as vile orcs, forgetting that we are all just people: we are all at once bad and good.  There are no exceptions.  Every human organization hurts at least as many people as it helps: the question is what kind of harm that is.  If it is slight, then we might be willing to suffer it, especially if the alternative (e.g. being ruled by the Nazis) is utterly unbearable.  But we should never pretend that it isn't there.  We should never tell people to put absolute faith in any human coalition, encouraging them to ignore and deny the reality of human imperfection as an omnipresent element adulterating everything it touches.  Blind allegiance is dangerous -- to the individual (whom it leaves exposed to abuse by the group), and to society (which needs constructive criticism and dissent in order to grow and prosper).

This insight is not original to me.  I first encountered it in the work of Hugh Nibley:

"Patriotism shows itself in times of crisis: 'These are the times that try men's souls!' is the refrain of the earliest purely patriotic odes—those of the Greek lyric poets, who describe the true patriot as one who stands shoulder to shoulder with his fellow citizens facing any odds. In this atmosphere of crisis, an attitude of defense and defiance naturally associates patriotism with the panoply of war. The classic trappings of patriotism have been inherited by the Western World along with the pageantry of chivalry from the ceaselessly warring tribes of the steppes of Asia. The flag is the bright rallying point that can be seen for miles by the mounted hordes on the open plains, where the trumpet's message and the arrow's flight carry unhindered for great distances. In jungle and forest it is another story, but the formal symbols of European patriotism belong to 'the World of the Jaredites,' the polarized world of host against host on the darkling plain, of Shiz versus Coriantumr. But does the true patriot destroy his people in his own interests as that previous pair did? Under chivalry the essence of patriotism was to support one's liege lord, who enriched one with a share of his ceaseless looting. There are no more touching stories of loyalty than are found in the literature of the Heroic Ages. Yet Roland, Beowolf, Blondel, etc., stand out precisely because they were those rare souls who remained true while others ran for cover.

There is something wrong with this patriotism, which is based on conflict. As Froissart tells us forcibly, under chivalry the only way to prove one's nobility was by fighting somebody. The tradition survives, and to this day there are many whose patriotism is not a widening but a contracting circle, recalling the defensive-aggressive posture of the Roman trux et minax (dour and threatening), the walled towns and castles of the Middle Ages, the family shelter of the Jaredites in which "every man did cleave unto that which was his own; . . . and every man kept the hilt of his sword in his right hand, in the defence of his property and his own life and of his wives and children" (Ether 14:2), and finally, the narrowest circle of all, with every man "walk[ing] in his own way," seeking his own interests amid the rich offerings of Babylon (see D&C 1:16). The passion for security ends in total insecurity, with the would-be patriot fancying himself as a lone frontiersman, facing the world with his long rifle, his keen eyes searching the horizon for enemies and finding them everywhere; until one day as he draws his circle even smaller, we find him coolly keeping his next-door neighbor and fellow countrymen in the sights of his trusty .22, lest the latter make a suspicious move in the direction of his two-years' supply" (from "The Uses and Abuses of Patriotism" in Brother Brigham Challenges the Saints).

I still resonate with this kind of thinking today.  Unfortunately, it seems increasingly unwelcome in many of the places I grew up frequenting (including the LDS church, which does not welcome people who take its call for absolute loyalty with a rational grain of salt).  I have turned into a something of a social pariah -- a scruffy prophet crying out in the wilderness of the Internet, begging people to be honest with themselves and with others, even when honesty hurts.  I am another Ether -- one of many Mormons (and former Mormons) calling on the LDS church (especially) to remember its roots and come clean.  Who cares what the consequences are?  God can take care of the church, of people's testimonies, of the spin rival denominations may lay on anything we say.  Our place is to tell the truth and let the cards fall.  No more lies.  No more unthinking loyalty.  No more slandering the other side as mudslingers while we pretend to be spotless.  Following the advice attributed to Jesus in the Beatitudes, we need to forget about others' motes and concentrate on our own beams.  This will not be easy, but it is the right thing to do, and Mormons who really believe in righteousness will do it (to the best of their ability: no one can ask more than that).  Otherwise, we're just as guilty as anyone else.  In Ether's story, Coriantumr is no better than Shiz (and vice versa: at the end of the day, they are both guilty, both ruined, and both dead).

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

Truth and Lies, Reality and Myth

Peter Kingsley. In the Dark Places of Wisdom. Inverness: Golden Sufi, 1999. ISBN: 189035001X.

Peter Kingsley. Reality. Inverness: Golden Sufi, 2003. ISBN: 1890350095.

Peter Kingsley. A Story Waiting to Pierce You. Point Reyes: Golden Sufi, 2010. 1890350214.

Robert Pirsig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Morrow, 1974. ISBN: 0688002307.

These books were all important in my discovery that reality exists apart from myth (without excluding it).  I encountered Kingsley's work while investigating the early Greek philosopher Parmenides, about whom he has written extensively.  (He also has many interesting things to say about Empedocles.)  I was impressed with Kingsley's scholarly depth (more than one of my dissertation advisors, who finds some of his historical ideas "fanciful"), but what really drew me to his work was its elegant simplicity.  Reading his work shows you (1) how ancient people found meaning in the pre-Socratics, and (2) how the pre-Socratics remain relevant today.

The central thesis of Kingsley's work is that Parmenides was concerned with reality as people actually experience it.  He wanted to talk meaningfully about all the experiences that all of us have every moment of our lives--no matter who we are, where we live, or when.  In other words, he was what some people call a mystic.  Like other mystics ancient and modern, he used the language and ideas of his time to talk about the human experience (conceived as something universal, i.e. bigger and larger than any single person's understanding).  He told myths.  He composed poetry.  He saw changes happening all over the place, all the time, and he saw continuity underlying change.  He recognized that people are at once alike and different (when compared with one another), and that they all see the same world (even when they see it very differently).  In short, he was an ancient analogue to Robert Pirsig -- the mad modern genius whose idea of Quality is very like Parmenidean Being.  I will try to summarize my understanding of this Quality/Being below.

Reality is not a narrative.  It does not develop predictably from known principles, and its end is equally mysterious.  When storytellers say in the beginning, they are venturing into the unknown--a place none of us has ever been--just as they are when they say the end.  (How do we really know that a story has ended?  What is the end, really, of anything?  If there is no known beginning, then there is no known end.)  Most of us experience reality as a series of impressions--thoughts, feelings, impressions, ideas, reactions, intuitions, experiences.  But these only ever exist in the present moment, where we organize them and reorganize them, over and over again.  In this process of organization, something is always lost.  No story can ever do justice to the full extent of the experience it seeks to describe.  From this perspective, all stories are lies: they omit potentially important information.  Living well is learning to live with lies, learning to hold them when they help you and to let them go when their usefulness is gone.  Lies are not inherently evil, but they become so when  we insist that they must be true.  Lies are not inherently good, but they become so when we know how to use them well (i.e. when to stop believing them).  The wise man is aware of lies, is happy with them, because he sees the reality behind them.  He is in the moment, discarding the lies that hurt and embracing the lies that help (which he will let go in turn when they prove false).  Consciousness is not a matter of learning the absolute truth (finding the rock upon which to build a permanent house), but of learning the impossibility of absolute truth (riding the wave of contextual truth, which moves constantly as moments pass and the nature of life's game changes).  Truth (reality, quality, being) is in the experience, which no myth, however great it may be, can really capture.  Myth is useful.  It can help you benefit from someone else's experience, but it is no substitute for actively engaging your own experience (which is the most important thing for you, the bricks and mortar out of which your very own life is made).

When it finally broke through to me what Kingsley, Pirsig, and Parmenides were talking about, I knew that something had changed fundamentally in the way I think consciously about the world.  Part of me assented unconditionally to the way they conceive consciousness: waxing psychological, I think that my conscious mind finally realized how it really works (and has always worked, as near as I can tell).  As I experience life, following the truth is much more like surfing than building a house on a rock.  I tried building that house on the rock, and the rock kept washing away.  Now, I am riding the wave.  I don't have to stop every few moments and convince myself that the rock is not water.  I do not have to pretend to hold onto solid matter where all I can find is fluid.

Kingsley warned me that reading his books would change the way I looked at things.  As a faithful LDS, I was not convinced (with good reason: maybe if I had read them 10 years earlier, they wouldn't have changed anything: every individual walks a unique path to Reality).  In the end, however, he was right.  I must credit him with providing one of the most interesting interludes in my faith journey as an adult.

Cave Apes ... et Lupum

Alex Gibney.  "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room."  Jigsaw, 2006.

Andrew Ross Sorkin.  Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System--and Themselves.  Viking, 2009.  ISBN: 0670021253.

Daymon Smith.  The Book of Mammon: A Book about a Book about the Corporation That Owns the Mormons.  CreateSpace, 2010.  ISBN: 1451553706. 

All of the ideas represented in these sources have been important to me over the past several years as I have slowly started coming to grips with the way things work in the modern world (including my corner of it in the United States of America).  If I could summarize what I have learned so far, I would say something like this.

Since the dawn of recorded history (sometime after the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago), human beings have been gathering in groups too large to function as small hunter-gatherer clans.  Agriculture creates caloric surfeit, which leads to more people: eventually, there are so many people that we need a way of relating to others whom we do not know personally.  So we come up with laws, by-laws, and loopholes (for the times when laws and by-laws don't apply, apply badly, or thwart us in something we really want to do, for reasons that may or may not be justifiable).  In short, we invent corporations (governments, companies, mafias, and everything in between).  Corporations, like people, create culture.  They are themselves alive, after a fashion--with their own habits, their own ways of being, and their own desire to survive and thrive (no matter what: they are not necessarily hostile toward other corporations or people, but their primary goal is to survive for themselves: at the end of the day, bees exist to protect the hive).  There is always a tension between the individual person and the corporation(s) to which he belongs.  The individual is an ancient clansman, with habits, culture, and ideals suited for relating well to people he knows personally.  The corporation subverts his clannish sense of honor and integrity--of necessity, since corporate business cannot happen unless people give up or at least suppress the kind of egalitarian individualism characteristic of hunter-gatherer clans.  The beehive and the wolf-pack do not work alike: the bee has no life outside the hive (versus the proverbial lone wolf), and conformity to the "rule" of the hive is largely beyond contention (adult worker bees do not become queens, while a low-ranking wolf-cub might easily end up ruling the pack).

Human beings are both bee-like (in their corporate activity) and wolf-like (in their relationship with themselves and people that they know personally).  Laws, by-laws, and such work for us the way pheromones and such work for bees (and other social insects that have to live in enormous groups, like ants).  But underneath the blanket of corporate pheromones lurks the werewolf, desiring nothing more than the simple life of his less civilized, less socialized forefathers.  When the hive breaks down, he comes out.  When the hive decides that he is not worth saving, or that he must be sacrificed for the common good without what he recognizes as due process, he rebels--and all good servants of the hive rush to condemn him out of hand, for his existence constitutes a perpetual threat to their lovely Deseret.  I grew up under the mistaken idea that the hive is only ever responsible for good things.  "God save the Queen!" was a mantra that I lived by.  For better or worse, however, I imbibed a lot of wolfish values to go with this apian ideal.  At a relatively young age, I became committed to things like individual freedom, civil disobedience, and constructive criticism.  As I grew older, I became more involved with the business of the hive.  My grandparents gave me some stocks (and maybe a bond or two) for birthdays.  I joined the Boy Scouts and wrote letters to congressmen.  I committed myself body and soul to the Corporation of the President (more commonly known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), dedicating two years of my life to proselytize in northern Spain.  I signed up for the draft.  I enrolled in several universities and took degrees.  But the more involved I became with learning and preaching apian values, the more troubled my allegiance to the Queen became.  I saw her hurting people--people I knew, people that the wolf buried deep in me could not forget.  These people were not always aware of how the Queen hurt them.  Sometimes they welcomed the pain, as any good worker bee would.  I sometimes wondered whether I was not horribly deviant for objecting to their suffering (particularly when they took it up so gladly). 

At some point, the turning point of my life thus far, it dawned upon me that the Queen was not acting alone.  She was not an almighty Other, living apart from ordinary humanity in some exalted state of being where moral decisions are clear and everyone always gets his just deserts.  She was just another wolf like me, and she was using me to do her business with others.  This was not bad in itself.  We absolutely need things like law in order to deal with other people, and we have not managed to create a law whose sanctity requires no guard (no Queen).  But now the Queen was using her position to get me to do things that did not feel right, things that the wolf in me found downright degrading.  As an American and a Mormon and an academic, I knew I had certain "rights" (on paper), rights to which I had often given lip service in the past.  I realized that I did not have to take all of the Queen's orders lying down.  If she ordered me to do something that I did not approve, I could protest.  I could refuse.  I could stand for something I really believed in.  In theory, I should even be able to do this without getting myself killed.  (Modern society has progressed beyond the point of burning werewolves at the stake; today we adopt a more passive-aggressive approach, which on the whole I find much preferable.  I have no objection to being ignored or shunned when the alternative is violent death.) 

I still stand for many of the things that the Queen supports.  But I take exception to a lot of what she does.  I think her proselytizing is often bad business, whether it is Mormon missionaries going door to door or American soldiers meddling in the affairs of foreign countries.  I am fortunate in that most of my academic advisors have refrained from using force or lies to have their way with me, but I am aware of others who have not been so lucky.  I want to gag just about every time I hear any kind of political advertisement, no matter what party or candidate it represents: the man who would be Queen sends out pheromones that say, "I'm cool! Put your faith in me and it'll be OK!"-- expecting me to be a good little bee and take him seriously (letting someone else, probably some crackpot with a wolfish grin, do a serious background check on his bona fides).  Don't get me wrong.  I love the sound of words like faith, hope, and charity.  But the wolf in me wants them to stand for something more than the Queen's latest scheme for fleecing me and using the proceeds to save her drones on Wall Street (not to mention the Ivy League or downtown Salt Lake City, or any other place where a few plutocrats sit in judgment over the lives of their "less fortunate" fellows, shifting them around like so many pieces of chattel without bothering to ask permission or doubt themselves or even tell the public what they are really doing). 

My real problem with the Queen is not so much what she does as the manner in which she does it.  She likes to hide.  When making really important decisions, she always avoids public scrutiny (retreating into the boardroom with only her closest flunkies, who are always kept in strict confidence).  She does not like talking to the company rank and file in anything other than rhetorical cliches ("I know this company is the best ever: we stand for hope, growth, and a better future!"), which sound hollow even when things are going well and ridiculous when they are not.  Whenever anyone gets a whiff of her books being cooked (as they more or less always are), she puts a drone on the TV to deny it (and accuse short-sellers, terrorists, rogue scholars, or anti-Mormons of seeking to ruin her beehive with base slander).  She never admits any wrong on her part, preferring to pass the buck to "bad" drones, whom she then offers for public humiliation: two recent examples are Dick Fuld (the only banker who was actually allowed to fail) and Randy Bott (who is currently taking heat for expressing out loud what some more powerful members of the Corporation of the President have long believed).  John D. Lee is another example, and anyone who blames Bush or Obama solely for any of the decisions made by their army of handlers (not to mention incredibly powerful associates, like the chairman of the Federal Reserve) comes close to making them scapegoats as well.  In short, she is not very good at being honest.

So transparency is not something she does, until she has to, and even then she fails to come fully clean, blaming one drone for a mistake that implicates all of them along with the culture of crazy groupthink that their mistress cultivates--a culture in which the greater good requires worker bees to make any sacrifice, no matter how great, to keep the company alive in its current state.  (That is the Abrahamic sacrifice, right there.  Do this awful thing because God demands it.  Hold your nose, and it will all turn out right.)  Unfortunately, sacrificing scapegoats does not always work.  Wall Street is still teetering, even though Dick Fuld's Lehman Brothers went bust.  (Other businesses also needed to go down, and the more we keep them alive on life support, the weaker our "recovery" is going to be, before we are once again in the emergency room.)  LDS doctrine on negroes is still historically racist, even if the Corporation of the President has excoriated Randy Bott.  The Democratic and Republican parties are both out of touch with reality, no matter whom the voting public elects to sit in the White House and hold press conferences.  (Clinton? Gore? Bush? Obama? Santorum? Romney?  These guys all look remarkably similar to me.  All of them are plutocrats.  All of them pander to me with words that sound nice.  All of them are Queen's men.)  Nazism was certainly bigger than Adolf Eichmann, who represents perhaps the most famous individual instance of the problem created by human hive culture.  Suppose that some historical fluke had allowed us to extract him alone, try him solo, and punish him somehow for his callous attitude toward human life.  Would Nazism then have been perfectly benign?  Was Eichmann (or the other Adolf, for that matter) the only reason thousands of bureaucratic Germans went berserk in the mid-twentieth century?  No.  The problem is bigger than any one person.  It comes from the hive.  It comes from too many people burying the wolf too deep.

The wolf knows that there is no such thing as a greater good that does not do irreparable harm to somebody.  The wolf knows that truth is always better than lies, if you want to run a business that does not go bust or trample on the people it aims to serve.  (On the other hand, if you are a worker bee dealing with a cut-throat Queen looking for somebody to scapegoat, you had much better lie than tell the truth.  The Queen always claims the right to lie to you as much as she wants: why does she throw a royal fit when someone pays her back in her own currency?)  The wolf knows that only men without honor suppress truth that is not "useful" -- coaxing workers into the hive with promises that don't match reality.  If you want to do business with the wolf, you have to stand for something yourself.  You have to be more than a company drone.  The wolf is not always polite.  He does not always dress posh.  His accent can be off-putting.  He often has habits that others find distressing.  But he is honest about them.  He doesn't play the Queen's game of Jekyll and Hyde, wearing one face in public and another inside the boardroom.  If he wants to lie to you, or take your cash (or the livelihood and life that that cash represents), or assassinate your character, then he will do it to your face.  He won't stab you in the back and then come calling with some story about how the degradation is good for your character development (but bad for his, it would seem: why does the greater good always mean workers doing more for drones? the Queen hates questions like this).  If he pays taxes, it is because he either fears retribution (e.g. from the IRS) or believes in the services that he actually securing (e.g. federal agencies, with everything they do for the common good).  If he pays the Corporation of the President their 10% of his income, it is because he believes in what that corporation does: he wants his money feeding a church that just spent some $5 billion on the most expensive mall in the world (at $2500 per square foot, the City Creek Center in Salt Lake City is more expensive than the Burj Khalifa, which only cost $450 per square foot, or the much larger City Center of Las Vegas, which came to $655) while offering a mere $1.2 billion (or so) in humanitarian aid over the past 25 years (1985-2009).  (Shopping is great!  And we should give some change to the beggars, too.  That's what Jesus would do, right?  Some wolves probably believe this.  The bees just bring their honey into the hive because that is what bees do.  They don't care what happens to it afterward.  That's someone else's job.)

The reason that we need to keep closer touch with our inner wolf is that the beehive is never as safe as the Queen wants it to seem.  Eventually, it is going to topple over.  (Every hive in history has fallen.  Why should ours be any different?  Others were no less convinced of their special invulnerability than we are, and look where that hubris took them.)  When it does fall, we need people able and willing to put up a new one.  We need people who know how to take risks, how to lose (without blowing up), and above all, how to connect with other people and convince them not to go berserk.  It takes a wolf to talk a wolf down.  Some of the Queen's top drones are just wolves patched over with a thin layer of beeswax: they are actually not as scary as those whose wolfish nature is wholly dormant.  These jokers believe in their own mythology, to the point that they cannot accept correction.  (Dick Fuld is one of these folks: to this day he thinks that he did nothing wrong, that his bankrupt business was fundamentally sound.)  These are the guys who cannot see reason, no matter how it dresses up and dances for them.  Drunk on their own righteousness, they will go to their graves refusing to doubt themselves no matter how ruthlessly reality tarnishes the fantasy that they are masters of the universe.  ("Just give me a chance!" they tell whoever wants to hear, "This time, it will be great!  Profits are going to go up!"  The proper wolfish response is, "Whatever, dude.")  Following such philosopher-kings is dangerous, to the individual (especially) and to the group as well.  I hope there are less of them in power than I sometimes fear.