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.

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.      

Love Is Not My Answer

"He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me" (Matt. 10:37 KJV).

This scripture is an interesting one, about which I have had occasion to think quite a bit over the past few years.  Here are some insights that have come to me, as a result of my personal experience with religion, family, and the community at large. 

The family is a problematic institution, historically. The love that it produces turns easily into hatred. The peace that it cultivates often produces seeds of war. Saints and ascetics have been trying to tame the wild human family for years (castrating it, chaining it, smothering it, attacking it with violent hatred or seducing it with sweet love). It is a myth that religion and the family are peaceful companions on the road to heaven. A nice myth. But reality shows that they are enemies more than friends, and the family doesn't always fight on the right side (any more than religion does: we all fight dirty eventually).

Read in a positive light, I think anti-family Jesus is appealing to people to step outside their tribalism (outside the mafia that is "the family" so often in history), recognizing that the other guy out there has a family just as real and worth preserving as yours. (Hector has a family as real, human, and valuable as the family of Achilles.) I support this kind of reasoning, up to a certain point: there is a limit to the pain I am willing to cause my own family in order to avoid hurting yours.

This limit is part of what holds me back from embracing "pure compassion" as preached in some Buddhist sects, or "the pure love of Christ" as it often appears historically (usually in contexts like the monastery, where the family is something dangerous and suspicious that we would do better to avoid). I don't have an equal love for all beings. I care about the things close to me (that I am conscious of) more. I love my people more than the people I have never met. I don't see this distinction as completely overcomable (and I actually embrace it, within certain limits: I accept that there are and must be limits to the lengths I am willing to go to defend my private love; I see that love is not equal, fair, or nice all the time, and I strive to keep my love as docile as possible).

For me, part of the process of growing up has been sorting out explicitly where I stand vis-a-vis my family, myself, and the community at large. I cannot help loving myself. But I can doubt my self-love as something useful when it causes me to do others obvious, unnecessary harm. I cannot help loving my family. But I can doubt my family-love when it causes me to do others obvious, unnecessary harm. I cannot help loving my community (less than I love myself or my family--that's simply how I roll). But I can doubt my community-love when it causes me to do others (including myself) obvious, unnecessary harm.  I cannot help loving.  But I can stop loving blindly, reflexively, unconditionally.

I have realized that love is not the answer. It is the question, often, but as an answer it is very dangerous (precisely because it has an historical tendency to turn into vicious, violent hatred: the worst crimes in history are those that come from love, with the worst love being the love for community that loses sight of the individual utterly out of an awfully pure desire to save and exalt the collective). 

If I had to respond to anti-family Jesus, who invites me to follow him, giving up my love for family in order to replace it with love for God, this is what I would say.  "In my experience, the best answer for one love is not another one. A better answer than love is indifference, doubt, hesitation, inaction. 'Do unto others as you would that they did unto you,' you say? Better not to do unto them, say I.  Let them be, and keep out of it until you see an obvious need that you can meet--because somebody needs it, not because you love them. Leave love out of it!  She is too wild and dangerous.  Her remedies are worse than the diseases they pretend to cure."

The more experience I accumulate, the more important it seems to me to notice that there is no such thing as life without death, success without failure, love without hatred.  Another way to put this: the nature of life is to die; the nature of success is to fail; the nature of love is to hate.  I think life makes its own morals, and these are inevitably mortal (causing death as well as survival: we live by making other things die, then prolong the life of organisms around us by dying ourselves) and parochial (favoring one party or parties at the expense of others: my love for life necessarily means that I long for the death of other things, and eventually for my own death).  In brief, I don't see any possibility for a world in which love (or life) is an unqualified good, something to be embraced without any reserve.  I cannot love God with all my heart, might, mind, and strength, because such love creates a hatred of the Devil that is too powerful.  My unconditional love of God becomes unconditional hatred for all that is Not God, and the danger threatened by this hatred is greater than the safety offered by love, in my experience. 

I do not renounce love, for that is impossible.  But I do renounce unconditional love, reluctantly but firmly.  Such strong brews are not for man (or this man, at any rate: I do not presume to dictate to others; this much love I can offer them!).  

Damn the Singularity

Recently I have run into this thing known as "the Singularity."  To me it seems fishy: here are my reasons (for the moment; in the conversation where these ideas came up, the topic of discussion was immortality, which I abjure).

Every historical development in technology ever seen has been accompanied by unexpected "evil" effects. To get to the heart of the matter immediately at hand, the advances of modern medical science have come to us at the expense of iatrogenics. There is no such thing in history as an upside without a downside, a pro without a con.

More importantly, when we come to consider systems as complex as the human body (or any ecosystem whose existence requires the cooperation of multitudes of cells and cycles), we have a species-wide tendency to think reductively (trying to explain non-linear realities in terms of linear causality, as though the reasons for a particular biological phenomenon--like, say, schizophrenia--were unitary and constant for all cases, such that my schizophrenia occurs because of the same generic malfunctions that cause yours: research is showing that this idea is simply bullshit; for a very good layman's discussion, see Matt Ridley's chapter "The Madness of Causes" in his book The Agile Gene).

If we build immortality, there is no guarantee that it would ever work for the entire species. Inevitably, the price for making some people immortal will be killing other people (when my immortality becomes your mortality, or vice versa). In a best-case scenario, future generations will be the one eating the bullet here (they will be eliminated, I guess, until we find some other environment for immortal offspring to colonize: Earth is not currently big enough to accomodate an infinite crowd of immortals; if such a group appears, you can be sure that some of them will begin living out the myth of that god-awful TV series "Highlander"). And that is being ridiculously optimistic (i.e. assuming that there are no untoward side-effects en route to the kind of immortality naively imagined by guys like Ray Kurzweil). How is society supposed to exist without death, seriously? If history is any guide, we would become a bunch of petty, selfish bastards (think of the Olympians in the Iliad and the Odyssey: they are basically immortal human beings, and most readers agree they are douchebags).

I am very skeptical of the Singularity. I doubt it will happen (since I don't see death ever being defeated: from my viewpoint, death looks like something permanent in the nature of life). But even if it does, I would reject it (as something bad--Satan's plan, if you will). As an atheist and a materialist, I choose death (which is what makes my life enjoyable, meaningful, and worthwhile: if I were immortal, I would lose my humanity, the heroic vulnerability that gives me integrity).   

These ideas came up in the context of a discussion of Mormonism.  (Some Mormons embrace the Singularity as an affirmation of their beliefs, e.g. the idea that we will eventually become gods and inhabit a glorified world.)  Some see a great divide between Mormonism and the Singularity, but I don't.  Here is why.

To my mind, the value that Mormonism adds to this conversation is that it reminds us how dumb we really are. The Singularity, in my mind, is just a modern version of the same stupid ideas that found a home earlier in Mormonism. Joseph Smith was a progressive in his time, a visionary who wanted to marry naive human fantasies (like living forever or having group orgies without any unpleasant repercussions) with practical reality. He is one illustration of the weakness (or as Nassim Taleb would say, the fragility) inherent in this kind of approach.

Nature is bigger than us, even if we are all brilliant scientists (and we're not). Cheating her is dumb. You can try it if you want, but I will always bet against you (as I bet against Joseph Smith). I think history will show the Singularity to be as silly as Mormonism, a piece of twenty-first-century lunacy that future generations will shake their heads over the same way I shake my head over early Mormons hieing to Kolob.

The Family Is Perishing! So What?

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the demise of the family.  It is an issue that continues to bother me, especially as demagogues of every political and religious stripe repeatedly invoke it to push through social programs whose positive utility I doubt (even as I see their negative utility clearly in some cases: trying to control the sex lives of your neighbors via legislation causes all kinds of obvious problems, but no clear benefits that I have ever seen).

What are we talking about, in concrete terms, when we invoke the demise of the family?  Many of my friends adopt a position here that looks more or less like this: the population of the First World is dropping precipitately, and we must counteract this by getting married and cranking out more kids, come hell or high water. Assuming that this problem is really a problem and that my procreating wildly would put a dent in it (a rather large assumption), I wonder if it is really good for kids to be born into a society where they exist merely as stop-gaps: "We had you because we need to make sure our genes don't get diluted by weirdos who aren't like us." I am not sure I like this as an approach to procreation. I doubt its utility for the population as a whole (stuff happening in the global community occurs outside of anyone's agenda), and I really doubt its utility for individuals (who might not have the resources for the giant families that God seems to want them to have: do we all have to live like farmers in Bangladesh? is that God's plan? really?).

To me it seems that the family has always been falling apart. Read what prudes wrote about the collapse of morals among the working class in the nineteenth century.  They said all the same kinds of things we hear today about families in the inner city.  Somehow, despite the collapse of the family before I was born, I managed to make it into the world--into a nice family--and do pretty well.  So far, my kids are getting lucky, too, though there are fewer of them: my wife isn't prepared to crank them out the way my mom was (she isn't physically fit for that task, for starters), and I am not rich the way my dad was (for many reasons).  Society now is much different than it was, and no amount of hand-wringing by the Barack Obamas and Rick Santorums of the world is going to change that reality: they can cook up schemes to make me more educated and better housed all day long, but wishing won't make it so.  I know I cannot afford a house, and that paying for more school would be a wasted investment, and I am moving on. Screw the American dream.

I am tired of living in somebody else's world, an old man's world in which you can interview with a company on the spur of the moment, right before you graduate with a BA, and then work there for the next fifty years (the way my grandfather did).  That was great, when it happened.  But life went on.  History happened.  That world is over, finished and done just like the Roman empire (or the Confederate States of America, or the Soviet Union, or the Mormon state of Deseret).  I am tired of being told that my mission in life is to revive it, no matter what the cost to those I hold near and dear.  I am tired of being expected to sacrifice all I have (and all that my kids will ever have: hello crushing debt!) so that old farts can go to fancy malls and pretend that the Great Depression never happened.  Screw that.  Here's a thought: life is not static.  The family participates in life, ergo families aren't static.  This is even true if we make people immortal (since we're Mormons and we like to think this way). The relationship between Jesus and God the Father is not the same since Jesus got nailed to the cross.  You don't just pick up where you left off and pretend that kind of thing never happened.  Life is about moving on (inherently, necessarily).  I will not relate to my kids the same way I do now in twenty years (assuming we last that long in this world).  I don't relate to my parents the same way now as I did when I was five years old.  If eternity is our destiny, then I expect my post-mortal relationship with my family will go on evolving: after an infinity of years (measured by any standard you like, human or divine: but let's say KST, Kolob Standard Time), my family relationships will have shifted infinitely.  My family will be destroyed and rebuilt all the time, essentially--the same way my body is destroyed and rebuilt regularly.  That is what life is, and if there is such a thing as eternal life I know of no other way to conceive it than as an indefinite progression of what already happens.

Immortality is just mortality with no ending.  Once you see that, these arguments about "the destruction of the family" become ridiculous. Is the family always going to be falling apart?  Then why save it?  I just don't have the energy to get worked up every time another demagogue tells me that I have to give him time and money and votes or my family will implode.  It's like they want me to spend all my time standing in a highway, staring down the oncoming traffic and screaming, "Yikes! I'm going to die!"  Eventually, my hormonal pathways are all exhausted and I embrace the inevitable: "Yikes.  I really am going to die (unless I find something better to do than stand in the highway screaming with these crazy people)." You can only spend so much time scared to death, even when the threat is real. Fear isn't static any more than life is.  It comes and goes, rising and falling in dynamic waves whose very nature is to avoid static equilibrium (in spite of all the bloviating and hand-wringing of priests and politicians since the dawn of history).

Here's a thought.  The next time somebody tells me that the family is dying, I am going to smile and walk away.  Then I am going to find my kids and give them a hug.  I am going to find my wife, and give her a kiss.  And then I am going to spend a tender, thoughtful moment embracing the reality that we won't always be the people we are right now.  How grand!  Just think that everything wrong with us right now will not always be wrong.  Time will pass.  Stuff will happen.  Our problems will move on with it.  We will find new things, new successes and new problems.  We will do our best to meet them, and then life will go on (with or without us: it doesn't really matter; we cannot last longer than we last or do better than our best).  When I do reach the end of my life on earth, I don't want to look back on a history of fear. 

I don't want to spend my whole life running from the mortality of my relationships.  (No matter what they are today, they will change in the coming years.  Always.  Dying and being reborn as something new, unless you kill them dead and embalm them to keep them from evolving.)  I don't want to look back and remember only that I was terribly scared of losing everyone and everything that ever mattered to me.  I want to look back and feel grateful for all the good things I had, good things that came to me as gifts--unexpected, unsought, unearned, but no less sweet for all that.  I want to leave my kids with an appreciation for life's fragile, temporary joys rather than an expectation that these last forever, uninterrupted by any change or sorrow.  I don't know whether life is immortal or not.  But if you know how to take the good with the bad--the sweet with the bitter, the way life mixes things all the time--then you will always be fine.  If you last forever, you will know how to endure eternity without wishing for death.  If one death is the end of you, then you will know how to meet it with joy, having made the most of your experiences.  I have made my peace with my life--with my family and myself and the world around me as it exists right now--so the demagogues have nothing to offer me (no matter what they claim to stand for: I don't care).  If they are really interested in defending my family, then they would do best to leave us all alone; when we need their help, we will come asking for it.

Does God Exist? Why I Don't Care.

This was written for a family member determined to bring me back into the fold of believers (where I may still be: I am not precisely certain what tokens of "real faith" I lack; the only crimes I can find in my behavior seem like virtues to me, e.g. I refuse to say that I think as I do not, and I remain open to polite discussion with believers and atheists of all stripes alike--and find much to appreciate among individuals on both sides of all these arguments).

The deity I believe in doesn't need me to believe in it.  It doesn't care what I think, about anything.  It knows (as I am slowly coming to realize) that thoughts are just limited impressions (faithful impressions at best, but even then they are never going to tell you "the truth" about the way things are).  I haven't decided I don't need god(s), since any gods out there don't care what I decide (and my decision would be silly: why would I make such a decision?  I haven't decided that we are the only life-forms in the universe either, or that I am never going to eat toast no matter what happens).  Worldviews are diametrically opposed, but the world isn't.  It is just there, being what it is, no matter what rubbish anybody thinks about it.  I don't believe in any worldview whole-heartedly.  I think they all have their merits and demerits, as indexes to the world (which is more real than any of them will ever be).  I like using them when they help me and avoiding them when they hurt me (in real life: I am about living more than I am about developing a blueprint for life). 

I live my life based in faith (trust, confidence, experience), the same as every other person I have ever met (as far as I can tell).  I trust some people more than others.  I trust some stories more than others sometimes, too, but I don't have an unshakable commitment to any story.  They are all true and false, in my eyes.  The answer to the question, "Is there a god?" is really "Why should I care?"  From there you get on to the practical things that God's existence is supposed to entail.  As long as God's existence entails me doing things consonant with my integrity, then I am happy to call myself his friend.  When his existence begins requiring me to sin against my honor, however, I become his enemy.  I don't care whether he exists or not.  (Of course reality exists!  God is just another word for reality.  Richard Dawkins is a fool waging a crusade against Santa because he cannot understand Christmas.  Unfortunately, many people who love Christmas seem to be just as shallow and silly as he is: they think defending Christmas from his idiotic onslaught requires proving that there really is a Santa like the one he imagines.  Gah!  The whole charade makes me alternately sick with disgust and giddy with mirth.  People are so dumb!  But such is life, I guess.)

I don't love my family because somebody has come up with a mathematical equation proving to me that they exist (for reals).  The god I believe in is like you (personally): he doesn't care (or even know) what scientists and theologians are doing with their little games, cheap parlor-tricks that have somehow become so expensive in recent times.  Anyone can believe whatever nonsense he pleases about the gods, and they don't care.  They just do their god thing, and let us do our human one (until our time runs out).  The point is to be a good person, not to know the truth about gods--which is unknowable, especially if divinity is really the uncreated, inaccessible mystery that some people want it to be: I am open to experiencing the company of a being who isn't there the way we are, but how would that happen, really?  How would I experience something so outside my experience?  If the answer is that I do it by believing in the literal truth of bed-time stories, then I have to laugh.  I simply cannot do that.  Assuming he exists, God would understand.  I love you, not because of theories or arguments or some such claptrap, but because I know you, personally and intimately, in a way that circumvents all arguments and evidence and nonsense.  I will always love you, even if at some point in time you don't exist.  Existing is not the point.  Arguments over existence mean very little to me any more.  They are a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing except the small-mindedness of those who take them too seriously.

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!