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).

Intelligent Design Gets Fooled by Randomness

Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.  New York: Random House, 2004.  ISBN 0812975219.

Every moment of my life, I make bets with the universe.  If it is cold, I bet it will stay that way for a certain amount of time, and I wear warm clothes.  If I need to get somewhere, I bet my car will work (or take the bus or the train).  If I enter a relationship with another person voluntarily, I bet its overall effect on my existence will be more positive than negative.  If I feel hungry, I eat something (or don't), betting that eating (or fasting) will make me feel better.  Sometimes, my bets pay off: I get more upside than downside from exposure to the reality I don't really understand.  Eating (or fasting) makes me feel good.  Other times, my bets do not pay off: I get more downside than upside from exposure to the reality I don't understand.  Eating (or fasting) makes me sick.

Some time near the dawn of my adolescence, I picked up the idea that there exists out there in the universe a betting strategy that would provide only upside--no downside at all (or at least, no downside worth considering: the upside would be so good that it would always pay gamblers like me more than it cost).  This idea was intuitive--it was a story I was inclined to tell myself by nature--and it was reinforced by my education, especially my religious education (which told me that my perfect betting strategy existed and was the restored gospel of Jesus Christ preached by the Latter-day Saints).

The LDS church (that I was brought up in) offered me a fixed strategy for making bets with the universe.  If you reduce this LDS strategy down to its essence, it looks something like this: (i) never do anything you feel bad about (bad feelings are a sign from God that a bet is evil); (ii) follow the prophets, no matter what (the prophets will never lead the faithful astray: their bets will always yield more upside than downside).  I placed many bets with this strategy over the course of my adolescence and young adulthood.  Some of them paid off (more upside than downside).  Others did not.  I was told that the downside from these bad bets would even out eventually, that losses did not matter, that they were Satan trying to mislead me (away from the one true strategy for making bets with the universe).  I should just take my losses, no matter what they were, and have faith that the upside would appear, eventually, and erase the debts that were starting to destroy my life's accumulation of moral capital.  For a while, this rhetorical placebo worked ("eat your losses, and God will make them up to you"), but there came a moment in my life when it didn't--a moment when my losses were too catastrophic to be ignored, a moment when it was painfully clear to me that I needed to change some of my bets with the universe or go morally bankrupt.  I had a moral crisis, what some call a crisis of faith.

Nassim Taleb tells my same story, in a different environment: Wall Street.  In brief, some Wall Street traders are kind of like religious fanatics (of the species I represent).  They make bets with the universe, as we all do, and when their bets are bad, they double down.  "My betting strategy is perfect.  I have constructed it painstakingly, rationally, conscientiously--and any losses I take will ultimately be offset by even larger profits!"  Blah, blah.  The worst of these traders were those who traded with others' money (e.g. investment bankers attempting to game the market with the life's savings of ignorant bank customers).  These guys could lose all their clients' money several times over (as some of them did), still believe in the truth of their bad betting strategy (which after all remains as logical, precise, and mathematical after losing money as it was before), and (worst) walk away with their own fortunes intact (even if they could never get employment as traders after their catastrophic losses).  These smug SOBs screwed their clients over, big time, and felt absolutely no compunction about doing it--because they believed uncritically in the absolute truth of their betting strategies.  Every time I read this story I am struck with how relevant it is--not just to my religious life, but to life in general.

As a result of my personal experiences, including my encounter with Nassim Taleb's work, I have realized something important about myself.  I don't trust any fixed betting strategy to deliver more upside than downside.  I don't care who tells me a story: I do not ever want to bet on a single story being so true that I can accept it without criticism (without taking out insurance somewhere, for when it turns out to be false).  When I was young, I believed in a universe of order--a just world that makes sense, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked (eventually).  I no longer believe in that universe.  I have seen too many good people go under, and too many successful morons (including evil morons).  And I have learned that people all have different betting strategies (even individual LDS take the generic Mormon model and use it differently) and that these are all more similar than different.  Mormonism is more like Catholicism or Protestantism or Islam or Buddhism or even atheism than it is unlike them.  All -isms originate as ideas in the human mind, which leaves recognizable generic traces (no matter what particular story it tells in any given instance).  When you look honestly into history, it is patently obvious that the human mind is not a key to clear understanding of absolute reality.  Ideas are cheap.  Logical, linear ideas creating logical, linear maps of reality are cheap: they appear all over the place (in Mormonism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism, atheism, and any other -ism anyone can think of ever).  Results are what matter.  Change your ideas to match the results, not the other way round.  Ideas are like quicksand, inherently unstable and dangerous (no matter what they are or who has them or what methods he claims to use to get at them).

There is a fundamental insight here, something deeper than the silly ideological wars between competing -isms.  The fundamental insight is that reality is an open, chaotic system, not a closed, orderly one.  No matter how nice some story sounds in the classroom (or the chapel or the lab or the boardroom), it is guaranteed to be false in some way.  Logic is nice, and we should use it, but we should also use our eyes.  You can lie with logic (and math and science as these exist among human beings) as easily as with any other language (logic is a language, like math and Spanish and Latin).  Some lies are more harmful than others.  The worst lies are those that people don't question, those that escape recognition and get accepted as some kind of absolute, fundamental truth.  The worst lie is the one that says you can make bets with the universe that have no downside, no unexpected results, no risk for doing real damage.  Historically, there is no such thing as a bet with the universe that life wins unconditionally: all species go extinct, like all companies, churches, nations, and -isms.  But the successful people never see this.  The gamblers who staked it all and won don't realize that they win because they are lucky: they preach about how to succeed ("just make bets like I did! playing Russian roulette worked great for me, and if you have the right moral fiber, it will work for you, too!").  The losers know to question their strategies.  They see that their smarts don't work, that their logic is flawed, that reality remains opaque to the human mind (whether that mind approaches it through Mormonism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, atheism, or any other -ism: it doesn't matter which ideological horse you ride, you are never guaranteed to find happiness, at all).  But the winners don't get it. 

The winners talk about "intelligent design" as something real, and verifiable by recourse to simple observation.  "See this awesome company I have built," Dick Fuld says of Lehman Brothers.  "My partners and I had this great vision, and the brilliant piece of work you see before you is a result of our intelligent design" (the same kind of intelligent design that produces Paley's watch or Behe's cell or any other complex product of any process anyone wants to imagine).  Then the thing unexpectedly goes bankrupt.  What happened?  Where is the intelligent design?  Here apologists for the really just world I used to believe in typically come up with some kind of rational, logical deus ex machina to save their Intelligent Designer (whom we may as well call God) from being dumb the way all intelligent designers we see in history appear dumb.  "My CEO is not fooled by randomness the way Dick Fuld was.  Fuld was a loser, but my CEO is a winner.  Read his latest book!  It will show you how his design is really intelligent, fundamentally different from the flawed logic used by idiots like Fuld."  You can ride this train as many times as you like, picking a new guru (a new Intelligent Designer) every time your old one blows up.  If you're lucky, yours may never blow up (in your lifetime, anyway): you might be able to use his strategy to place bets that turn out well for you, randomly, because sometimes bets turn out well.  Success happens (I almost added "unfortunately").  You can play Russian roulette and win--even win big: that doesn't make it a good strategy to recommend to others who want to enjoy your kind of success.

At the end of the day, I really like paganism--the extinct Greek and Roman variety, especially--as an -ism for modeling the way I see the world.  The Greek god of just order is Zeus.  He makes sure that good guys win and bad guys lose.  But he is not omnipotent.  The rest of his family have will too (and often oppose him directly), and there are always Titans looking to rebel and destroy his fragile, temporal order.  In addition to all that, there lurks behind his throne the prophecy (preserved by Prometheus) that one day a son will overthrow him (the way he overthrew his father back in the day).  He is a realistic kind of intelligent designer--a gambler who places bets (attempting to effect order) that will not always pay off.  If there is a god ruling over the mess that is real life, this is what he looks like: he is not someone you can rely on for perfect stability.  From my perspective, there is nobody you can rely on uncritically for perfect stability--no person, no ideology, and no god (whether gods are real or not: it doesn't matter).  Real life is not about picking one strategy for placing bets and then insisting on that strategy dogmatically until you die (particularly if said strategy leads you to blow up: it would be sheer madness to continue killing yourself merely for an idea--no matter how pretty or logical it might appear).

I don't see myself as an opponent of religion or science, per se.  I don't have a problem with people placing bets that they like with the universe.  But I am a resolute opponent of people who think they have discovered "the secret" to winning Nature's game.  I mistrust priests and scientists.  I think it a virtue to doubt them, not embrace them and their (dangerous) ideas uncritically.  The best among them share my fear (and take measures to prevent their inevitable mistakes from hurting other people unnecessarily); the worst demand respect that they never earn (trying to bully me into making the bets they would on the grounds that they are "smarter" than I am because of some stupid ideology they like, an ideology which might be religious or scientific, Mormon or non-Mormon, skeptical or not: it doesn't matter, and I don't care).  In short, my moral crisis did not lead me to change allegiance from one god to another (who might be the devil).  What changed for me was the way in which I look at all gods, especially when they come to me strongly recommended by people looking to influence my moral behavior.  I mistrust people (including myself).  I think people are fools--lovable fools when they get their own lives wrong, dangerous fools when they try to make me make the same mistakes they are making because some god (or non-god) wills it.  Authoritarian bastards are authoritarian bastards, no matter what rhetoric they use to make themselves (and their followers) feel good about it.  I don't follow any of them (until I have to, because they will kill or ostracize me otherwise, and I want to live).  I don't love them.  I don't agonize over whether we should pick one over another (voting for the lesser of two evils).  They are all bastards.  They are all dangerous.  I am always against them, no matter what nifty rhetorical guise they use to cover up their bullshit.  They can be as religious or scientific as they please.  They can plead priesthood or democracy or logic or whatever the hell they want, and I will still refuse to bend the knee.  They can nail me to a rock and have the eagle tear my liver (as Zeus did to Prometheus), and I will die despising them for it.      

Common Human Decency

The following represents my initial response to a friend inquiring about certain observations he has made of different Mormon and post-Mormon communities (particularly communities in which certain potentially problematic behaviors occur).  My friend was interested in questions like these: What does it mean to be Mormon, post-Mormon, ex-Mormon?  How is Mormonism coherent?  How can a good Mormon, post-Mormon, or ex-Mormon community thrive?  What does healthy Mormon, post-Mormon, and ex-Mormon behavior look like?  I am not trying to answer any of these questions definitively, so please don't anyone jump on me for being too harsh or ignoring an important point of view.  These are just some rambling thoughts I have had, and I am writing them here now because I am stuck in an airport with nothing better to do.

The LDS church is not a coherent organization. Mormons are not correlated. They maintain a semblance of order and coherence by wearing the same clothes, saying the same things in church, etc., and believing that all of this is cosmically important somehow.  While there are some doctrines that leaders like to push as true explanations of Mormon behavior that they want to correlate, the truth on the ground is that people get baptized, serve missions, and go to the temple for a plethora of unique and personal reasons.  They come to the church for different reasons.  They practice ordinances for different reasons.  They find Mormonism compelling for different reasons.

In my view, many Mormons inside the LDS church follow Jesus' admonition to be like little children.  They are genuinely sweet, well-meaning, and adorable, but they are also naive -- and capable of growing up into anything from the Dalai Lama to Adolf Hitler.  As a general rule, growth is good. Maturity is good. But it is also dangerous: teenagers are proof of this. When you take the LDS blinders off of adult "children" in the church, many of them don't know how to respond. They try everything (e.g. drinking, swinging), and it doesn't always end up well. But here's the rub: many people fall into the same behaviors inside the church (without having existential crises or "coming of age" as adults). There is, quite frankly, no place on earth where you can escape the fact that you make decisions, and that those decisions don't always lead to the results you would like. The most we can hope for is that people will learn from their decisions, especially the bad ones.

The church attempts to help people learn by scaring them away from "bad" decisions. (Unfortunately, some of the things it is scared of are emphatically not bad, like coffee or honest history.)  But this is not really a workable solution for many folks (and it is even worse for society at large than the alternative, which is to admit that mistakes are always going to be made, and to take steps for dealing with them that do not involve pretending that we can make them vanish by heroic acts of willpower). Imagine how my life would be if I decided to train my toddlers to rely on me for all their bathroom needs forever. At some point, the little tykes need to learn how to wipe their own butts, even if they occasionally get some poop on their hands.  It washes off.  Rebellious teens grow up, in most cases, to be nice, responsible adults.  They learn the law of the harvest ("if I want these results, I need to cultivate this kind of behavior").  People need to make mistakes in order to learn and grow.  They need to "fall" the way Eve falls, partaking of the tree and accepting the good and the evil that comes with that.  Much as some of the overprotective among us would like to keep our fellow humans from learning in the school of hard knocks, there really is no other way.  A man who is only faithful to his wife (or anyone) because he thinks some celestial bureaucrat is watching at all times has not learned what fidelity means.  He doesn't know what virtue is until he gets acquainted with vice (on some level: I am not saying that we must all experiment with everything that presents itself to any one of us, only that we have to be free to do so).

Lack of failure actually explains many of the problems in our LDS culture. Striving with all our might to avoid failure, what we really do is avoid understanding it when it occurs (inevitably).  We create textbook examples of what Nassim Taleb calls the lucky fool.  The lucky fool has a good life, and he thinks he knows exactly how he got to be so lucky.  He knows what clothes to wear, what friendships to cultivate, what books to read, what kind of sex to have, what to drink, where to work, etc.  Wanting to help the rest of the community out, he gives terrible advice to other people, not because he means badly (quite the contrary), but because he cannot see that his circumstances are not universal.  He cannot see that wearing a tie has nothing to do with his success, that reading a particular book has nothing do with it, that his method of having sex is not a panacea for all human ills.  LDS Mormonism is a rampant breeding ground for lucky fools: they become our leaders.  When their advice fails, they have no response other than to deny that protocols were properly followed ("you must not have been wearing my lucky tie right -- no sacrament for you!"). They have no idea how to deal productively with failure.  Preaching shame and fear doesn't really work: the "bad" kids don't buy it, and the "good" ones do themselves more harm than good by taking it seriously.  Instead of facilitating personal evaluation and adjustment, it hardens moral positions that are already there: the "bad" kids learn that they are hopeless rebels, and they revel in being wicked; the "good" kids learn that they are hopeless rebels, and their hearts are broken.  What they don't learn is how to change themselves.

A really wise man once said that there is no such thing in life as success or failure, only feedback. The way to cure lucky fools is to let them see that success and failure are just the same thing -- that there is no such thing as success without failure! People need to make mistakes. And just as we all have (and need) different kinds of success, so we all have (and need) different kinds of failure. Some people need to get drunk and throw up everywhere at least once. Others need to sleep around. Some of us just need a nice cup of Turkish coffee and a book chock full of intelligent heresy. As there is not a single perfect blueprint for success, so there is not a single perfect blueprint for failure. Each man must craft his own perfect catastrophe as a catalyst for future success. Every Eve must eat her own apple. I cannot prescribe one for you, and yours will not necessarily do anything for me. The "God-shaped hole" some people speak of in the soul of every man is one that each person must fill for himself. Some of us will not approve for ourselves what others choose to fill the hole: even among the most correlated Mormons, this is true; I think back to missionary companions I did not see eye-to-eye with. Humans thrive on tension, opposition, and the like ("there must needs be opposition in all things"). The key is to leverage this feature creatively rather than destructively.  You have to take people's communal incoherence and let it grow into something ordered.

As I see it, when Mormons question their childlike faith, they enter a radically new world. Some of them are going to grow slowly. Some are going to grow up fast. Some are going to require one kind of failure to facilitate their growth; others will require a different kind.  Some are going to make their friends blush (or find new friends), and others are going to make friends proud.  There is no coherent, unitary, sanitary post-Mormonism (speaking globally).  So what is a decent post- or ex-Mormon chap supposed to do?  How should he address his fellow doubters or unbelievers?  What kind of moral standards can he get behind?  How can he preach effectively, usefully, to people who no longer fit the church's model of obedient little children?  If it were me, I would just preach what I deemed to be correct principles, throw in the necessary caveats ("nothing I say trumps your personal experience"), and then let people govern themselves. I wouldn't have organized groups or a "brand" or any of that stuff.  That just creates unnecessary opportunities for people to make unhelpful generalizations ("All post-Mormons are drunks, whores, etc., because I know this one person somewhere who did something that destroyed his life!").  Personally, I am not at all opposed to communities (whether they unite around faith or doubt, which seem like the same thing to me now).  I do not think these communities should be centralized or correlated: let the people living in them run them (as informal meet-ups or formal affairs with constitutions, by-laws, the whole nine yards: whatever the different communities want). If individuals want to drink, or swing, or whatever, then it's on them (not any guru or podcaster or other "authoritative" figure: grown-ups have to wipe their own butts).

There are limits in each one of us to what we can pleasantly endure in ourselves and other people.  The hardest lessons to unlearn, I think, are visceral ones. Let me be honest and make myself vulnerable to illustrate the point. I think of homosexuals having sex, holding hands, kissing, etc., and I just want to barf -- not because of God (whom I don't really believe in as a person), or because I am a mean person (I like to think: I haven't ever attacked anyone for being gay, and I don't go around persecuting them). There is something deeper there, something integral to me that sees homosexuality and screams, "That is not for you, buddy!" As a good little Mormon, I learned that my deepest feelings (like this one) were the voice of God speaking to me (this is OK, so far), and that He had the same plan for me and everyone else (this is emphatically wrong: whatever the universe was thinking when it devised all of us, it did not make us to be carbon copies of each other).  Many people whose intellects have left fanatical Mormonism still have their minds planted there firmly.  They still barf when they see homosexuals (or swingers or drinkers), and they naively expect everyone else to barf, too. But it isn't going to happen. It shouldn't happen (for reasons that become apparent when we look at the lives of people who have needs and experiences very different from our own).

The underlying question here is simple: how do we come together harmoniously when we are not all exactly (or even remotely) alike? There are many viable answers. (1) Sometimes, we simply don't come together. I don't go to gay bars, and I probably never will. That's OK! I don't think the gay bars need to worry about making themselves more attractive to clientele like me. I don't expect or want them to. I want them to do their thing: I just don't want to be part of it. (2) When we do come together, we create boundaries (the laws of the group): in order make sense and cause minimum damage, these boundaries need to be local -- something that individual friends and acquaintances hash out face to face.  (3) On a global level -- where huge, geographically and culturally diverse groups like the LDS church or the audience of a popular podcast exist -- the only things that work are principles. The principles have to be rigid enough to mean something, while still being flexible enough to accomodate the vast differences in that far-flung audience.  They can be, and it is not really as hard as one might think.  Take fidelity, for instance.  In itself, all fidelity means is trust, honor, integrity, honesty.  It doesn't mean that no one should ever drink or have sex with multiple partners or whatever.  It means that if I promise not to drink, or have sex, or leave a chalk circle I have drawn around my feet, I will abide by that promise.  Fidelity inevitably looks different to different people.  That is OK.  Some people will swing (or drink or be gay) and still be honorable, upstanding folk. And some will lie and reveal themselves as toxic (to anyone who gets too close: you cannot trust a liar; even if you try to, you don't really).

In summary, let me invoke and enlarge upon an analogy my friend made. Imagine that we are all sailing about helter-skelter on rafts washing in life's currents. The LDS church tries to be a kind of lighthouse, pointing out the dangerous rocks that threaten to sink us. Unfortunately, some of us find that the church's beacons are too far inland to offer us really useful protection.  So the  enterprising spirits among us try to make salvation more accessible, building new lighthouses directly over the rocks we have discovered and pointing them out clearly to fellow travelers.  Some travelers see our new beacons and appreciate them. At the end of the day, however, people are always going to crash their rafts. It's what people do. The most any of us can do (whether in or out of the LDS church) is help folks prepare well on their own for the inevitable.  We don't need to make ourselves absolute moral authorities, providing the universal blueprint for every human life: I can live my truth without being threatened by yours.  The one thing we cannot do is lie.  I have to be honest with you, and with the community, about who I am, what I want from the community, and what I am willing to contribute to it.  Joseph Smith died largely because he was not willing to let people in the community expose lies that he and several people close to him were telling.  In my view, it was the lies that brought him down more than any of the other questionable behaviors in which he was engaged.  (I am not saying that those behaviors were not problematic, only that they were not necessarily problematic, if he went about them honestly, e.g. asking men and women point blank if they would be willing to admit him as an active third wheel in their marriage.)  People are willing to forgive an honest deviant: if I walk into a gay bar and some man propositions me, I choke back my puke and say, "Thanks, but no thanks."  If I walk into a public restroom at the airport and am groped without my consent, I go ballistic.

As my wife says to our toddlers, "Use your words, and keep your hands to yourself!"  If they can do it (and learn to wipe their butts, too), then so can grown men and women.

Incest and Homosexuality, Oh My!

I wrote this about incest and gay marriage and thought it might be worth hanging on to (if nothing else as a beginning of my attempt to articulate how I feel about public and private morality).

People make their own relationships: this is largely unavoidable, and it sometimes ends badly (as in really badly, not just badly from your overly inquisitive neighbor's point of view).  Our laws against incest don't really prevent it from happening (any more than our War on Drugs stops people from smoking crack).  Prohibition had a noble aim (get working men out of the bar and set them up providing for their families instead of beating them).  This noble aim did not prevent it from failing miserably: it took a bad situation (people are stupid) and made it worse (stupid people now get their stupid fix via gangsters who operate under the law, endangering innocent bystanders to keep the stupid stuff happening).  The real solution to these moral problems is not more severity, more scrutiny, more censorship, but less.  The less people care, the less likely they are to get involved in fights (which strike me as nature's worst means for solving problems).

As matters stand in the marriage business, we have a significant portion of the population (something like 10%) whose only "acceptable" outlet for sexual fulfillment is the equivalent of a nineteenth-century whorehouse.  I don't know how many gay Mormons you know.  They tend to escape notice.  It may surprise you to know that the vast majority of them are not at all interested in moving to San Francisco and hanging out in sleazy bars in the hopes of finding true love.  They value things like chastity, fidelity, decency, etc. (good old-fashioned virtues), and they want to settle down (and start families, not group orgies).  For natural reasons, most people (gays included) are not going to want to have sexual relations with their closest relatives; for natural reasons, a small group of people will diverge from this norm (they already do; beating them up, whether literally or figuratively, is not really going to stop them).  We don't go bananas every time a farm animal has sex.  If sheep can do it without destroying the world, why not humans?  What is the point of criminalizing behavior that is fundamentally harmless?  Lumping gay people with incestuous people and then combining both groups with sexual predators is just silly: the only way it makes sense is that they all make us "normal" folks say, "Yuck!"  But consenting adults who love each other (and manage their relationship such that they aren't having sex in public) are not really anything like predators (who often as not are heterosexual men: the difference between them and other folk is not in their sexual orientation per se, but in the violent way they choose to express it; for natural reasons, there will never be a society that embraces the sexual fetish that allows you to kidnap victims and murder them with impunity).

I think Prohibition was a well-intended idea that failed in practice.  I think allowing gay marriage would free a significant number of people to have better relationships (relationships more like the one I have with my wife).  I do not think that the slippery slope from allowing gay marriage to tolerating serial killers exists.  It is a figment of the imagination (an imagination that does not know human limits because it has never really thought about what makes us moral beings).  As for incest, I am personally not interested.  In the case of gay twins, at least we can be certain that no deformed offspring will result.  As long as no one is being raped or murdered or otherwise coerced against his will (I support restrictions on pedophilia, since kids are fundamentally vulnerable), I have no objection to people doing what they feel they need to do.  That does not mean that I "approve" whatever they do (I support my neighbor's right to heterosexual marriage even when I think him a cretin unworthy of reproduction: until he commits a really serious crime, I am not going to butt into his love life).  It does not mean that I want to watch.  It does not mean that I waste time teaching my kids how to have incestuous sex (or whatever).  People are wrong when they think that all supporters of gay marriage want to push it as some kind of public erotic display.  "Now we are going to learn how to have anal sex, kids!"  No.  The truth is that many of us care less about sex, not more.  The less focused I am on learning (and trying to "fix") all of your quirks, the easier it is for me to develop healthy relationships of my own, relationships in which I don't try to dictate how you think or who you are, relationships in which I have the freedom to hold and practice my own morality precisely because I give you the same freedom.  I value my personal religious freedom too much to risk losing it by trying to impose myself fruitlessly on others (who are not always going to be like me, just as I am not always going to be like them: the question is not who shall submit to whom, but how we are going to get along as equals).  From my standpoint, religious freedom is safeguarded best when I leave you as much alone as possible, allowing you the widest license feasible in terms of marriage, lifestyle, etc.  If I treat you with fascist disdain and attempt to over-rule your moral decisions of which I do not approve, then I forfeit my right to be indignant when you respond in kind.  The best decision for both of us is to walk away from the fight: you cannot win by fighting.  The most you can do is model in your own life the standards you find most compelling: if you are a really good model, you will inspire yourself and others (no matter what your sexual orientation).  To me, this is Christianity (or just plain old human decency).

My New Church?

Judging from this podcast, my ideal church might be a gym.  I would really like to participate actively in MovNat, at some point in the future.  (And I already wanted to walk the Camino de Santiago in minimal footwear: Julien Smith beat me to it, of course!)

What is Pornography?

In honor of the upcoming General Conference, I offer my own talk on pornography, created from a very rambling essay I posted a while back on a message-board for Mormons.

What is pornography? This question is actually really hard to answer. (I could bring up the Supreme Court justice who summed it up with an aphorism to the effect of, "I cannot define it, but I know it when I see it.") The way we use the word in the LDS church, it often seems to refer to images of people that cause sexual arousal. This causes a lot of confusion, since what causes arousal for one person does not always do much (or anything at all) for another. Some people are excited by the sight of a foot; others are impervious to full nudity. Some Mormons are "offended" by the J. C. Penney catalogue. Others can "endure" (and even be inspired by) much "wilder" stuff. (Here I remember a course in Western Civilization that I had at BYU: the teacher, a woman, announced at the beginning that students would be required to study in detail works of great art, including nude paintings and statues, and that anyone who objected to that should drop out before the semester got underway.)  Generally speaking, official church pronouncements ignore these niceties and refer to pornography as some kind of monolithic thing, with universal (and universally evil) effects.  In other words, we objectify art along with everything else!

In the real world, outside of our religious fantasies, people are sexually stimulated by a variety of mundane and unavoidable things.  Sex is woven deep into our being. Like every human practice, it sometimes comes out "evil" -- not because there is anything inherently wrong with it in the abstract, but because there are things wrong with particular individuals, things which sometimes find expression in the sexual habits of said individuals. While it makes no sense to censor the world to fit some imaginary Platonic standard of what constitutes "beauty" and what constitutes "smut" (since the standard is inevitably arbitrary and incoherent), it makes a whole lot of sense for the individual to avoid images that make his life worse (and do whatever he pleases with images that do not). No one can write the book telling us what images are universally safe to look at, because the same image speaks to each one of us in a different way. We have to be our own censors. Some people have no problem with the Venus de Milo. Other people find her the bane of their existence. That is OK. Let the hedonists enjoy and the ascetics abstain without mutual recrimination. As long as no one is being tortured to make the art (as sometimes happens in some of the seedier parts of the sex industry), it is all good.

My line of thinking is perhaps best illustrated with an analogy from physical culture. Years ago, there was widespread fear of working out with (heavy) weights. People who thought nothing of a day's work on the farm somehow got it into their heads that picking up moulded pieces of iron with no practical aim beyond increasing strength would render them unsupple, impotent, and just generally physically degenerate. Since then, we have learned that this is not the case. That does not mean, however, that every person in the world should immediately drop whatever he is doing, run to the nearest gym, load an Olympic bar with all the plates on the rack, and throw out his back. To get the benefits of strength training (which, like sex, is neither good nor bad in itself), you have to ease into it, listening to your body and responding with more or less load as you feel pleasure or pain in the aftermath of your last workout. There is no one program that will work for all trainees (elite athletes in a variety of sports, hardcore gym rats, and the rest of us at all stages of physical development and degeneration). It is not that really heavy squats or deadlifts are evil, by any means, only that you should not decide to start your training career tomorrow with the poundage that (say) Konstantin Konstantinovs uses (unless you happen to be a reincarnation of the Hulk).

Sex is not evil. It is not even that dangerous, provided you come at it with a modicum of preparation and good sense (i.e., it is no more dangerous than a heavy deadlift). The church's mistake here is to rush into generalities without realizing that the nature of the problem is inherently specific. (Masturbation is not a problem. Porn, with the exception of anything produced under duress, is not a problem. Strength training is not a problem. The problems are human beings, who respond differently to all of the above in unique situations, often unmappable without recourse to intensive individual scrutiny.) Instead of recognizing that exercise must be tailored to the individual, the church qua personal trainer gives us "the one true workout" complete with "true" exercises and "true" poundages that every trainee (beginner to advanced) must put up for the required, "true" number of repetitions. Anything less is sin; more usually earns commendation for going above and beyond the call of duty (even when the trainee all but kills himself). This is ridiculous, and harmful if you happen to be one of the people for whom the one true size is a particularly bad fit.

One more word for those who think I am not being hard enough on evil porn (which I see as existing only for the individual). Let's take another analogy, this one dietary. I am reasonably certain that every murderer has drunk water regularly. But wait, all of us do too! Are we all running a terrible risk of becoming murderers every time we sip that deceptively refreshing beverage? Are we slowly changing inside, gradually morphing into the next Jeffrey Dahmer? Fortunately, the answer is no. Water is one variable of many that go into the making of a serial killer, but correlation is not causation. Sex, like thirst, is a pervasive human need. Some people think about it, make pictures of it, have it, and then use it to commit terrible crimes (or at least make themselves and others miserable), but that is not the fault of images (which may or may not match someone's definition of pornography), or the romantic partners of the criminals, or their victims. It is the fault of the criminals. Until we approach the person, we cannot address the problem.

One more personal story, and then I will shut up. 10 years ago, I was young, extremely scared of my sexuality (which I wanted to tear out by the roots: I used to fantasize about cutting off my genitalia or killing myself), and very, very devout (the reason I hated sex so much was because persistent erections made me feel "unworthy," requiring endless rounds of confessing my sin to the bishop, being chastised, and feeling like crap). I was also extremely sensitive in a sexual way: anything could set me off, even things that have nothing to do with sex (like pull-ups). I could barely talk to girls my age and avoided activities where young women participated. I attended a stake dance one time (only one time) and did not have the nerve to go inside. I never dated. Then, I went on a mission. The women of Spain did not care that I could not bear the sight of nubile females, and they were not going to cater to my weak eyes by going about in burkhas. They let it all hang out, and (what amazed me at the time) I was perfectly fine. My fear receded as I realized that seeing nearly naked women did not automatically turn me into some kind of lustful monster (think of the Hulk again). Gradually, I learned that acceptance was a much better strategy for healthy sexuality than avoidance. Getting married was a huge leap forward for me (and required some deprogramming which I won't bore or titillate you with). Today I accept my sexuality, and that of everyone else, and I make a point of never imposing myself (and my images of beauty, truth, etc.) on another person. Nakedness is no excuse for lack of manners. Intimacy is no excuse. Pretty pictures are no excuse. Ugly pictures are no excuse. There is no excuse.

Pornography is just pictures (or stories, i.e. verbal pictures), some good, some not so good, and some frankly awful, but most of it is nothing to be deathly afraid of (unless you are trapped in a ridiculous worldview that makes objectification, abstractions, and stereotypes the most important things in the universe, idol gods that all mere mortals must worship). If it bothers you, there are many other things to hold your mind and take your time. The less you care about it, the less power it will have over you.

Remembering 9/11

I recently posted the following on another website, where various people (mostly Americans) were sharing their feelings about 9/11.  Mine seem germane to a lot of the things I say around here, so I thought it might be good to repost them. 


I remember 9/11 every day. I remember that all people, myself included, are dangerous morons, liable to believe ridiculous nonsense and to express those beliefs with wanton violence. I remember my own naive faith in God and country, and reflect that I was once as fanatical and irrational as the most raving Islamic terrorist.  


Not too many years ago, if my God (or my commander-in-chief) had ordered me to ship out to the Middle East and shoot up Muslims there, I would have gone, and I would have pulled the trigger. Of course I would have lamented that my victims couldn’t see the light and join God’s side (embracing the “freedom” that I brought at gunpoint). I would have said that my ideals were high, because they were. They were so high that I had lost contact with more mundane things, like the value of forgiving others and living in peace. I was so committed to freedom as an ideal, that I was willing to deprive myself and others of it in real time. I would give up my ability to make moral decisions (to kill or not to kill, to forgive or not to forgive). I would kill other people for specious crimes that boil down to nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. (If you had the misfortune to be born an Iraqi or an Afghani, you automatically run the risk of dying violently by my hands, as a civilian casualty, no matter what your individual attitude toward other people might be. Hey, at least you die “for freedom.”) I had no more moral integrity than those criminals who blew up the Towers. And I was a blue-blooded American (descended from people who immigrated before the Revolution).


9/11 was the beginning of a really painful realization for me. I slowly began waking up to the fact that my ideals, like the ideals of those terrorists, are toxic. Today, I am still American. But I am no longer a tool that others can manipulate with the word “freedom.” I don’t kill on command. I don’t let anyone take away my moral responsibility for whatever it is that I happen to be doing. I will never be as naive, as thoughtless, or as stupidly patriotic as I once was.

A Double-Minded Man

Dallin H. Oaks. "Truth and Tolerance." CES Fireside.  20 September 2011.

I listened to this talk (for fun), and I found it frustrating.  The first half of the talk was a paean to absolute truth.  Oaks said that LDS believe in absolute truth, asserted that moral relativism is bad, and strongly implied that atheists are morally insensitive (since they lack the connection to God that provides access to absolute truth, i.e. they are necessarily moral relativists).  According to Oaks, we Saints have a responsibility to stick up for the absolute truth, no matter what, especially since we live in a society of moral weaklings who don't understand that tattoos and gayness are really serious business (i.e. damnable, at least in some sense of the word). 

The second half of the talk seemed like a retreat from this uncompromising position: apparently, God doesn't want us to be too insistent in our (necessary) crusade for absolute truth.  Somehow, some kind of tolerance is still a virtue for believers, even though they aren't allowed to be really happy with anything less than absolute truth.  According to Oaks, we are supposed to forgive sinners, saving the adulteress from stoning with Jesus (John 7:53-8:11), but then admonishing her sternly never to do it again (or what? would Jesus have thrown her into outer darkness for a relapse? would he at least have taken her to court? would stoning have been back on the table? Oaks does not say).  The final part of the talk was a defense of Proposition 8 (denying marriage to homosexuals), which Oaks construes as a bid for religious freedom.  I confess I am not buying this (or most of his talk, really).  Let me see if I can explain why.

It is easy to denounce moral relativism (which comes from godless heathen) and exalt absolute truth (which comes from God) when you deal purely in words.  But what is moral relativism in action?  What is absolute truth in action?  What do these words look like in real life?  As an adolescent, I believed in absolute truth the way Oaks does.  I don't believe in it any more (having fallen from grace, as Oaks would see it).  But much of my behavior as a moral being has not materially changed.  (I don't have tattoos, or drink, or smoke, or even commit adultery.  I could pass the moral worthiness portion of a temple recommend interview, with the exception that I don't always wear the one true brand of underwear.)  So what changed?  Well, I started looking carefully at how humans make (and imagine) moral decisions, and I discovered something funny: in practice, we are all moral relativists (both atheists and religious, including Oaks!).  Let me explain.  Better yet, I will tell a story from the Book of Mormon.

Remember how Nephi got the brass plates?  He went to Laban (the guy with the plates), told him the absolute truth that almighty God wanted those plates in his hands right away, and Laban said, "Okay!"  Not really.  Instead, after asking for the plates nicely and getting violently rebuffed, Nephi came across Laban drunk in an alley, and God told him to do something he really didn't want to do (1 Nephi 4:10-18):

And it came to pass that I was constrained by the Spirit that I should kill Laban; but I said in my heart: Never at any time have I shed the blood of man. And I shrunk and would that I might not slay him. And the Spirit said unto me again: Behold, the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands. Yea, and I also knew that he had sought to take away mine own life; yea, and he would not hearken unto the commandments of the Lord; and he had also taken away our property.  And it came to pass that the Spirit said unto me again: Slay him ... Therefore, I did obey the voice of the Spirit, and took Laban by the hair of the head, and I smote off his head with his own sword.

Why was righteous Nephi hesitant to obey an order from God (who gives out absolute truth, remember)?  Maybe it has something to do with this other command from God: "Thou shalt not kill" (Exodus 20:13; Mosiah 13:21).  Maybe Nephi was confused by his schizophrenic God (Don't kill!  Kill!).  In any event, the text shows him reasoning things out contextually (like anyone would): Given that I have already struck out being nice, and that this guy is a really dangerous jerk, maybe it is morally acceptable to kill him after all.  Take that, absolute truth!

Nor is Nephi the only Mormon hero forced to become a moral relativist in light of God's schizophrenia.  His brother Jacob suffers the same fate.  First God tells Jacob that the Nephites must be monogamous: "For there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife" (Jacob 2:27); but then he throws in a caveat to this absolute truth: "For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise, they shall hearken unto these things" (Jacob 2:30).  God's absolute truth so far: Don't kill anyone (unless I tell you to) or marry more than one wife (unless I tell you to).  What's this?  Does God believe in absolute truth or not?  Why can't he provide a simple rule that covers all cases, absolutely?  (That would be absolute truth, right?)  The more you read the scriptures, the worse this problem gets.  A few examples:

(1) Absolute truth about polygamy: "Behold David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord" (Jacob 2:24). "Verily thus saith the Lord unto you, my servant Joseph, that inasmuch as you have inquired of my hand to know and understand wherein I, the Lord, justified my servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as also Moses, David, and Solomon, as touching the principle and doctrine of their having many wives and concubines ... David also received many wives and concubines, and also Solomon and Moses my servants, as also many others of my servants, from the beginning of creation until this time; and in nothing did they sin save in those things which they received not of me" (D&C 132:1, 38).  God's absolute truth: You can marry anyone you please as long as I say so, but do be aware that my mind changes from time to time.  Today's abomination is tomorrow's principle and doctrine (the new and everlasting covenant of marriage!). 

(2) Absolute truth about adultery: "If a man be found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall both of them die" (Deuteronomy 22:22); "He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone" (John 8:7).  God's absolute truth: Kill adulterers, until I tell you not to.

(3) Absolute truth about genocide: "When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee ... thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them nor shew mercy unto them" (Deuteronomy 7:1-2); "Thus saith the Lord of hosts ... go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass" (1 Samuel 15:2-3); "And when [Jesus'] disciples James and John saw [that the Samaritan village would not offer Jesus hospitality], they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them" (Luke 9:54-55).  God's absolute truth: Kill your enemies mercilessly (including their women, children, and domestic animals), until I tell you not to (finally!).  I guess the real question is what God thought about the Holocaust or Rwanda.  Was he for or against genocide in either case?  How do we know?  It would be so much easier if he could just tell us something consistent, instead of talking out of both sides of his mouth.  (Maybe the Holocaust was a criminal mistake, but Rwanda was just a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah getting its just come-uppance?  Do we even want to wonder about the Mountain Meadows Massacre or the World Trade Center attacks here?)

(4) Absolute truth about what we should eat: "Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is clovenfooted, and cheweth the cud, among beasts, that shall ye eat. Nevertheless ye shall not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that divide the hoof: as the camel, because he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the hoof; he is unclean unto you. And the coney, because he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the hoof; he is unclean unto you; and the swine, though he divide the hoof, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean unto you. Of their flesh ye shall not eat, and their carcase ye shall not touch; they are unclean unto you" (Leviticus 11:3-8); "And [the apostle Peter] became very hungry ... and saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending unto him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth: wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat. But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean. And the voice spake to him again the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou unclean" (Acts 10:10-15).  God's absolute truth: Don't eat pigs!  Eat pigs!

(5) Absolute truth about keeping the Sabbath: "The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work" (Exodus 20:10); "And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath day ... And the Lord said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp" (Numbers 15:32-35); "Jesus went on the sabbath day through the corn; and his disciples were an hungred, and began to pluck the ears of corn, and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto him, Behold thy disciples do that which is not lawful ... But he said unto them ... the Son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath" (Matt. 12:1-8); "And [Jesus] said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath" (Mark 2:27); "And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them" (Acts 20:7).  God's absolute truth: The sabbath is the seventh day of the week.  No wait, it is the first (for some of you, anyway). If you even pick up sticks on that day, then you die.  No wait, you can do good things on the sabbath: the sabbath was made to help you, not to kill you.  Please make up your mind, God, preferably before somebody decides to kill me for picking up sticks on the wrong day!

We could string this list out to absurd lengths (what clothes does God like? what business is he in? what would he do with four billion dollars?), but you get the picture: on just about any ordinary moral dilemma, the Judeo-Christian god (like any god with more than one human follower) is all over the map.  He stands for one thing today (polygamy! genocide!) and another tomorrow (monogamy! peace!).  In other words, he is a moral relativist!  But wait a minute.  There is one thing about which God does not admit any relativity, ever.  The single genuine absolute truth of God is a pragmatic principle well known to ruthless dictators of every ideology: You must always do what I say, no matter what.  And the only really moral answer to this principle is what it has always been: "Bullcrap!"  Really moral people don't hand their agency over to someone else carte blanche (unless they are infants or very small children).  They do not obey authority with no good reason.  They make (and are answerable for) their own decisions.  And, like Nephi above, they have to sort out those decisions in context: sometimes it may be right to kill another person (e.g. when your life is in serious jeopardy); other times, not so much.  There is no absolute truth here, folks, just contextual truth (what Oaks calls moral relativism).  I wish life wasn't so hard.  I wish it were as simple as memorizing some absolute truths or submitting to an all-wise, benevolent dictator, and that these practices would get us out of every moral dilemma unscathed, but that wish is a hopeless fantasy.  No one, not even Oaks, really lives that way.  To the extent that people pretend to, they are just ignoring their personal responsibility for the decisions they make, passing the buck to God (who speaks to them in the voice of another human or the personal revelation of their own moral intuition).

This is the rock upon which Oaks' talk really founders, for me.  The only non-ridiculous absolute truth he can offer as coming from God is Do as I say, and don't ask why: I speak for God, who is above giving reasons to mere mortals.  What about all of God's other spokespersons?  Some talk about the virtues of tolerance (like the Muslim cleric Oaks quotes at one point).  Others talk about its dangers (like Oaks).  Some talk about the virtues of truth (like me).  Others talk about the dangers of truth that is not useful (e.g. Boyd K. Packer, whom Oaks praises as a champion of truth: the irony kills me, until I remember what kind of truth Packer is standing for).  The fact of the matter is that truth and tolerance are meaningless without context.  The truth that you had oatmeal for breakfast this morning rather than pancakes does not interest me too much.  The truth that Brigham Young takes at least some of the blame for causing the Mountain Meadows Massacre does.  Same thing with tolerance.  I have no problem tolerating fires in the fireplace, but if you throw me into a furnace while it's hot, my tolerance suddenly shrinks.  What can I say?  God made me a moral relativist?  (That doesn't guarantee he won't cut me off mercilessly at some later point, does it, since he is historically a two-faced waffler?  Man, what a post-modern, avante-garde punk God is.  We already know that he swears, and that he has body piercings, at least since Golgotha.  What if he wears tattoos?)

Contrary to what Oaks says, atheists are not necessarily morally insensitive, any more than Mormons are.  All of us are moral beings with ideas about what kinds of behavior are right in certain contexts.  Some of our ideas are vindicated by experience.  Others are not.  There is no easy cheat-sheet out there somewhere with all the harmless behaviors on one side and all the harmful ones on the other.  If many of us are much more tolerant of homosexuals than of serial killers, maybe it is because we find that, in our experience (which may or may not contradict an idea we had at some point), homosexuals are much less dangerous (particularly when we treat them with human dignity, respecting the desire that many of them have to form lasting pair-bonds and rear families).  If many of us don't get angry or even upset when Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Seventh-day Adventists, or atheists break the Sabbath (or pick up sticks), maybe it is because we find that, in our experience, breaking the Sabbath is a perfectly innocuous thing (like picking up sticks, as long as the sticks are not intended for beating out the brains of unbelievers).  If your experience is different, then share it, by all means, but don't bring in God as some kind of sanctimonious bully on your side (since, as we have seen, he seems to be on all sides of every question: what makes you so sure he agrees with you all the time?).  My sense is that if Oaks could deal with the first part of his talk better (the claim that LDS Mormons recognize and defend God's absolute truth), then the second part would make more sense (as an explanation of what we Mormons stand for in practical terms, i.e. when we contribute our two cents on what laws should govern the larger collective morality).

Losing Religion, Gaining Faith

Life has me completely tapped out at the moment, but I found an essay that really speaks to my spiritual experience over the past few years.  Like the author, I too feel a new connection with people of all kinds since losing my old religion, and I have had profoundly moving experiences whose power depended on acknowledging myself as profoundly weak (helpless even) and temporal (with no clear prospect of continuing on past death as I am now).

I feel like I am open to the human experience as had by people in all walks of life, in all countries, in all religions (including those individuals who fall outside any institutionalized faith tradition).  I also confess that I feel alone and terrified sometimes, especially when it seems that institutions are betraying me all over the place.  But at the end of the day, I realize that it is better to be calm and take each situation as it comes up, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst as best I can.  Existentially, I feel like I have more real, honest-to-goodness faith than I have ever had: I am really trusting a universe that I do not know very well at all.  I am also learning to trust other people more (as I believe human institutions less).  I may not entirely approve every thought or action undertaken by my family or friends, but I trust their motives to be good, and I support them no matter what (until they give me really good reasons not to).  I have little trust for politicians, presidents, CEOs, religious leaders (especially those who claim special access to divinity), journalists, news pundits, and others who speak for corporations (who often have them bought and paid for).  In general, I find it is better to have low expectations of insitutions: they cannot deliver much more than nice words and minimal interference with real people living real lives; to the extent that they do this, I am happy with them.

Not with a Bang, but a Whimper

The following is my commentary on someone's idea that religions create problems and then offer solutions. Someone else responded to this idea by suggesting that the artificial problem-solution dynamic occurs outside of religion proper.  I pick up where this comment left off.  


I agree with the comment that points to this dilemma (a more or less fake problem with a more or less fake solution) outside of religion: it is endemic in politics (which subsists on chronic fear and incompetence), education (which subsists on chronic ignorance and incompetence), the health-care industry (which subsists on chronic illness), and the stock market (which subsists on chronic ignorance, fear, and incompetence).

To be brief, almost all of the people who minister to our human needs in any capacity these days instinctively do so in such a way as to make us parasitically dependent on them. They want to keep us as a regular customer (or voter), and to that end they buy us off with promises to save us from otherwise irredeemable deficiencies in our individual and corporate selves. If we were to wake up tomorrow healthy, intelligent, self-reliant, and fearless, they would suddenly have nothing to do (and would have to confront a drastic alteration in their own way of being, which depends on our chronic dependence). The real problem with modern civilized life, as I see it, is that we have lost sight of health, goodness, wholeness, and integrity as objects to be pursued for their own sake. Instead of going for complete human development (as many people as possible relying as little as possible on outside input to survive), we go for minimal human development (as many people as possible as reliant on others as possible without pushing the others beyond what they can bear). All of our institutions are becoming the kind of dead-end trap that the LDS church currently is. "Check your brain at the door, take a number, and do whatever the nice man in the suit says: everything will be fine."

This is my real problem with life at the moment. My faith crisis is not confined to one particular institution or mode of being: I am suddenly looking at the whole ruddy mess of human society and seeing the same stupid cancer of nonsense eating everything. How can I speak out against this while feeding my family? Where can I work without feeling that my integrity is being sold to dupe people out of their human dignity? How can I achieve the level of moral independence necessary to come clean to my supervisors about how I really feel when they talk to me in serious tones about "the demands of the profession" (which I increasingly see as code for "we must protect the status quo, no matter what")? These are the tough questions that keep me up at night. These are the issues I would like to hear a prophet (or anyone) address openly.

Theory without Practice: Faith without Works?

The following is a thought I have been mulling over for some time.  I expressed it as follows on a message board for unorthodox Mormons.

I think modern LDS Mormonism has an unhealthy obsession with theoretical abstractions. We are so caught up with (static) images and words that we have no time for (dynamic, evolving) reality. We approach other human beings as simple stereotypes--interchangeable, cookie-cutter widgets with slots and tabs for assembling endless iterations of the one true family (which is presided over by a man, fed and served hand and foot by a woman, and burdened with as many submissive kids as possible). When we meet someone without a slot (or with two tabs), we deny their reality: "You aren't really homosexual; you're just a sinner who won't get on board with the one true family. Pin on a fake smile and join us for another Family Home Evening on the evil of straying outside rigid stereotypes! It'll cure your gayness (eww!)." Because we tend to see people as abstractions (collections of slots and tabs), it is really no wonder that we have problems with things like honesty, integrity, and even (gasp!) pornography.

What do Mitt Romney and a hopeless porn addict have in common? They both are obsessed with heavily stereotyped images, images empty of unique personal content. Mitt tells the voters want they want to hear, keeping his own counsel about what he really believes. I have no idea what he really thinks about anything (and I admit I have not tried really hard to break the shells of conservative and Mormon armor that he wears). The porn addict relates to images rather than to people: he wants sex devoid of content. Morality without quirky personal content! That is what we are selling in LDS Mormonism (and much of the religious right in the USA). This is why our spokesmen come off as duplicitous, boring, and (ultimately) destructive. They are working to maintain a vision of humanity that is too simple to contain (let alone control) complex reality. They hate pornography because it provides a visceral, graphic indication of what is wrong with their approach to reality: some of their most faithful followers take their abstract approach to human relationships into the bedroom, with predictably awful results. (People get offended when you treat them like objects. Not just in bed. This isn't really rocket science, folks.)

The more we focus on theoretical abstractions to the exclusion of reality, the less thoughtful and introspective our religion becomes. Instead of examining our morality, criticizing it, improving it, tinkering with it, we do whatever we happen to do and then justify it with the right word. The word is more important to us than the reality. Witness our eagerness to defend "marriage," as though there were something monolithic out there going under that name. What do we mean when we say "marriage"? I think many LDS have this idea that most folks (at least most "good" folks, most "Christian" folks) have virtually identical relationships coming under this moniker: one man, one woman, several kids; no mistresses, no affairs, no fighting, no spousal abuse, no sibling rivalry, no inherent evil. (Is anyone pushing for a defense from marriage? Some people have good reason to get on that bandwagon.) Reality is messy: the word "marriage" covers a wide range of relationships between very different people. Some marriages are (always) going to be great, and some are (always) going to be terrible. I love my wife and make an effort to respect her and treat her as an equal. My neighbor is an angry drunk who beats his wife and treats her like a doormat. My other neighbor is happily married to someone of the same sex. How does breaking up the homosexual couple do anything at all to the other two? How does opposing no-fault divorce improve anything for the heterosexual couples? (The battered spouse does not always want to make a charge stick, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who has ever been battered or disappointed in love.) Defending "marriage" in the conservative vein is essentially opposing any measure that would upset the illusions (1) that every problem will be OK if we just ignore it long enough and (2) that all people are the same (in ethical terms). This is ridiculous. Ignoring problems does not make them go away, and my marriage is in no way, shape, or form any kind of absolute blueprint for yours: you have to make your own bed, live your own life, be your own person. I can't tell you how to be; all I can do is offer my own experience as something for you to consider, on your own terms, as you find it relevant.

In the church, we obsess so much over doing something wrong. And we go and do things wrong anyway! We get married too soon, have sex too early in a relationship, get caught pretending to be someone or something we're not. A good religion would help us figure out how these mistakes actually happen. It would point us to resources that helped us actually change our behavior, rather than pressuring us to cover our guilty asses with pious psychobabble after the fact and then browbeating the few who are caught red-handed or are too honest with themselves and others to "play the game." To do the LDS General Authorities justice, I think they sincerely believe in the power of their words: they think that the Family Proclamation is really defending families (instead of tearing them to shreds to save a lifeless, oversimplified definition). Packer means it when he says that (and I paraphrase), "a study of doctrine will do more to improve behavior than a study of behavior will do." His sincerity is irrelevant to the fact that he happens to be dead wrong. We need theory, of course. We need rules. But if theory is going to useful, it has to be responsible for the results it helps to generate. It has to be grounded in some kind of reality. As a people, we LDS have spent a good part of our history (particularly our recent, post-correlation history) drifting away from reality, turning the gospel into an empty shell of an ethic whose real-world applicability is nowhere near as good as most of us suppose. (I understand the Book of Mormon musical points this out with humor.) If we are going to offer a real city on the hill, a lighthouse that points people toward real improvement in their lives (as opposed to our vocabularies), then we have to snap out of this blue funk and call a spade a spade, even if it hurts our rapport with members short-term. At the end of the day, there is no viable corporate substitute for individual integrity. There is nothing faith-promoting about wrecking people's lives to save a bad definition, an ungrounded abstraction.

Follow the Profit

James Adams.  Waffle Street: The Confession and Rehabilitation of a Financier.  San Clemente: Sourced Media, 2010.  ISBN: 9780984106851.

F. A. Hayek.  The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism.  Edited by W. W. Bartley III.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.  ISBN: 0226320669.

James Buchan.  Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money.  New York: Welcome Rain, 2001. ISBN: 1566491800.

Here are three books that have contributed a great deal to my small understanding of the complex system of trade that delivers food to my table.  While I hope to say more about each individually in the coming weeks (as I have time), here is what I took from each one in brief. 

Waffle Street. As Jean-Baptiste Say recognized many years ago, production drives consumption.  If you make nothing, you sell nothing, or whatever it is that you are selling is in fact nothing (and all attempts to found financial stability upon it are delusional, no matter how many PhDs may tell you otherwise).  Unfortunately, people have a strong tendency to try and make something out of nothing: if we exercise enough faith in our fearless leaders (especially the late not-so-great John Maynard Keynes), we can enjoy brief moments of euphoric "prosperity" during which we treat ourselves to massive shopping binges financed by debt that we (or our shareholders, taxpayers, children) promise to pay it back later, someday, with something (in the vain hope that it is actually consumption that drives production: "if enough people cry loudly for this cool toy, surely someone will give it to them in exchange for pretty green paper").

The Fatal Conceit.  You cannot have a stable human society that does not respect individual integrity (the individual's responsibility to answer for him or herself and his or her moral choices).  Yes, people are idiots (and want to buy the world on credit sometimes), but all attempts to corral them into obedience to one true standard of non-stupid behavior end up failing miserably when the "smart" people in charge are (inevitably) revealed as fools.  As Juvenal has it (Satire 6.347-348), Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? ("Who will regulate the regulators?").  The answer to moral problems in human life (including problems with what we call "the economy" these days) is not more external regulation: individual people need to realize that they are the only people responsible for their decisions, which they had better take seriously.  All regulatory solutions are just stop-gaps for idiots: good in the short term (insofar as they prevent us all starving in the streets right away), and bad in the long term (as they accustom us to passing our moral agency on to government stooges who are no smarter or morally conscious than we are).  The fatal conceit is thinking that we can prosper without individual integrity, that our regulation is better, that our leaders are smarter, that our collective ventures are somehow qualitatively different from all the others that have crashed and burned before us doing the same stupid things we are doing (making regulators responsible for our individual moral choices).  

Frozen Desire. The essential message of this book is that money is intrinsically worthless.  It is just a symbol, a pretty bit of paper or metal with a logo on it that people in a very narrow time-frame use to attribute value to other things.  When it cannot be traded for real things (food, clothing, shelter), it is revealed to be nothing (nothing but desire, the longing for things that one does not have).  Buchan would agree with Adams (and Say) that the secret to success in life is producing real things rather than cultivating insatiable desire.  But he goes farther than either of them in radically devaluing the concrete form of desire that is the lifeblood of our current economy.  I confess that I am very sympathetic to him.  (I like to think of the present world economy as someone with a very bad case of diabetes: the Keynesian approach to the disease keeps pumping the patient full of insulin to stave off increasing and increasingly severe bouts of glycemic shock; a more responsible approach is to radically cut the sugar supply, causing an immediate crash that hurts like hell but ultimately puts the patient on a much firmer footing, presuming he survives.  I am not a doctor and have not made this metaphor perfect.  Patience!)  I look forward to the day (which I am still naive enough to envision as a reality) when money is just a toy for me, an idle curiosity that I play with, instead of the only thing standing between my family and starvation.  Meanwhile, I think it is best used very sparingly, preferably no more than absolutely necessary (kind of like sugar!).      

Living with Relative Truth

Renzo Gracie.  Legacy.  Satchel Films, 2008.

This essay is a bit off-beat, with a documentary film heading it up instead of a book, but it contains a lot of good stuff that has been rattling my mental cage of late.

My faith crisis left me with a large intellectual and "spiritual" void.  For many years, I lived with a definite purpose as the player in a fixed divine plan: this plan provided a stable reference point from which to evaluate every decision I made and give it meaning.  When I realized that this plan was founded on empty speculation, free floating mythology as likely to be false as true, I felt rather like the pre-modern explorers who ventured to the edge of the world with inaccurate maps.  Like them, I quickly found myself in uncharted territory, with nothing solid to rely on in grappling with reality but my own intuition and reasoning ability.  How was I to shape my daily behavior, my "morality" (from the Latin mores, i.e. "habits, character"), without the fixed reference point of the Mormon gospel?  My first reaction was to look to other religious traditions, chiefly alternative brands of Christianity and the completely unrelated Tibetan Buddhism.  I have already written about some of the insights these new paradigms provided me.  But like Mormonism, my new would-be worldviews proved frustrating in some ways: Christianity in general seemed to suffer from a lot of the same biases and weaknesses that led me out of Mormonism, and Buddhism, while initially less off-putting to someone who has overdosed on Christianity, has its own set of weaknesses, its own special blindness to reality.  (I am not ready to take vows committing me irrevocably to a single community; nor do I find the call to become a vegetarian--or admire excessively those who do--particularly compelling).

When absolute truth becomes impossible, what is one to do with what is left?  How do we judge among the relative truths that remain?  I have a historical analogy that helps me make sense of my efforts to reconstruct a world of meaning from the shattered pieces of my Mormon faith.  Before the arrival of the Gracie family and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) in the early 1990's, the student of martial arts in the United States had a variety of distinct, largely insular options available to him: he could practice taekwondo, karate, judo, boxing, or wrestling; combining karate/taekwondo and boxing to make kickboxing was about as integrative as elite clubs got.  Many masters preached the superlative value of their respective arts, each touting his own as the most pure, most complete answer to the problem posed by human self-defense and physical development.  "Dialogues" between the arts were inconclusive, since they never met on neutral ground: challenge matches took place in private or in arenas that favored one art over the other (by disallowing certain techniques).  The Gracies and the UFC changed all of this by creating a well-known public venue where martial artists of any style could compete openly against one another with no holds barred (originally, the only techniques disallowed were biting and eye-gouging).  Overnight, the invincibility of "pure" fighting arts proved a myth, as fighter after fighter went down before the Gracies' jiu-jitsu, a unique form of submission wrestling developed by the family from the Japanese jiu-jitsu of Mitsuyo Maeda.

The Gracies proved that many arts had neglected to develop the kind of ground-fighting skill required to do well in a weaponless no-holds-barred match.  For a while, they beat anyone and everyone they encountered, making Gracie jiu-jitsu look an awful lot like the "one true martial art" that so many then claimed to be.  Then, something funny happened.  People started integrating jiu-jitsu (and other well-rounded ground-fighting systems) into their martial arts, practicing it alongside their native discipline and inoculating themselves against its tricks.  The result?  The Gracies were mortal again: a good fighter with ground defense could defeat them.  Today, the modern UFC features contests between individual athletes who train multiple arts to come up with their own, individual styles.  There is no "one true martial art," no absolute truth in the ring, and yet the martial arts have not died or ceased to be relevant.  Instead, each really well-developed art offers something that the fighter will find useful.  Striking arts (boxing, Thai boxing, karate, taekwondo) complement grappling arts (jiu-jitsu, wrestling, judo).  My own martial arts instructor recognized this fact early on, before it became really obvious to everyone, and was among the first non-grappling Americans to train with the Gracies and have his senior students learn from them.

Bottom line: complex activity (like fighting no-holds-barred or living a rewarding life) requires a large and evolving toolkit.  I needed some kind of arena to test my ideas (which like everything, were infantile and unformed to start with) against one another and prove which were the most effective at turning me into the kind of moral being that I want to be.  Like everyone, I have an instinct for moral behavior: some things just seem right to me.  But this instinct does not cover everything, nor does it always tell me precisely what I must do in every situation.  So far, the strongest evaluative pressure I have been able to bring to bear on moral problems, apart from my instinct, is rational understanding.  If an idea makes sense, and I apply it to acquire something useful (as well as instinctively pleasing), then it works (for me) and is accepted into the ethical and ideological toolkit I am building (my own personal "religion" --  the martial art of "living well").  The entries that follow this one will detail which ideas have faired best so far in the ring of my rational thought (with my instinct as matchmaker, and my reason as referee/judge).  It is certain now that my legacy, like the Gracies', will be something other than the ultimate superiority of my way over all others (that illusion died forever for me with the collapse of Mormonism and the soul-searching that followed); but maybe, like the Gracies, I can inspire others and give them (and myself) some useful ideas to work with in creating a wonderful life.  In the end, my legacy, like that of the Gracies, is an individual one -- an expression of my character, not an articulation of the one true model for any and every character.  Some very good people will not look much like me.  That does not make my character (or the tools I use to shaped it) less valuable.  Take them (or leave them) as they are useful (or not) to you, personally, as an individual building your own, unique brand of moral excellence.  (P. S. If you like martial arts at all, you will like Renzo's film about the unique way of life developed by his family; I highly recommend it.)