As far as irritation goes, this one comes close to being a mere amusement. I am talking about a challenge issued by The Atheist Advocate, the terms of which are fairly well explained by the illustration here, and I have to admit it’s tempting to just get behind this one. Seriously, I can almost go along with it.
…almost.
If only I had a nickel for all the times I have seen Christians complain about petty grievances or pass along outright falsehoods about this or that attack on their faith, well I could certainly afford another nice meal on that change. Hell, the non-existent war on Christmas alone ought to earn some believers a permanent subscription to “Cry Wolf Daily” (which actually wouldn’t be a bad blog project, come to think of it). Anyway, the point is that it gets damned tiresome to hear a dominant religious majority whine about how religious minorities are oppressing them.
But of course it isn’t really a dominant majority that spreads these cries of repression. Rather it is a small and highly vocal group of political Christians who would like very much to define repression of their beliefs so broadly as to include the failure to bow to their every Goddamned whim.
Taken at face value, I can’t help thinking this little gambit doesn’t quite rise above the difficulties it seeks to address. This whole thing really strikes me as something of a contest over First World Problems. One would hate to run into the occasional lunatic that might make either of these T-Shirts cause for real violence. …or the occasional workplace bigot that might actually use less violent means of putting someone from the wrong camp in their place. In any event, I expect most folks here in America would probably face little other than an uncomfortable conversation or three over wearing either of these shirts. There are some definite regional exceptions to be sure (cough! …deep South! …midwest!), but for the most part I think we are talking about a war of words.
Yes, I do figure those wearing an ‘atheist’ T-Shirt will have quite a few more of those unpleasant conversations than those wearing a ‘Christian’ T-Shirt, but I am open to the possibility that I am wrong about that, and I certainly wouldn’t estimate the flack for wearing the Christian shirt to be zero. Oddly enough, I expect some of the grief given to both Christians and atheists over this sort of thing could come from the same sources. An awful lot of people seem to want to have their sin and get to heaven too, so to speak, and they can be equally testy with religious fundamentalists and non-believers alike. This ‘moderate’ bunch can be especially testy if they believe someone else has brought the issue to the table and tried to force the question, …say by advertizing their (non-)beliefs in public.
That said, yes, I do think Christians are more likely to get a free pass on public expressions of their views f for no other reasn than that they have had their foot in that door for longer than those of us in the just-say-no camp. What strikes me as far more important is the fact that the list of people who have found out what ‘persecution really is’ would be unlikely to include anyone whose main worry of the day is what people will say about an ugly T-Shirt. There are people out there who face real consequences because of their belief-stances, and both atheists and theists are among them. That list also includes plenty of people who face real suffering as a result of things over which they have absolutely no control whatsoever. So, I think people should count themselves blessed if they live somewhere that you could actually play this game and expect life to continue in the wake of it.
As a general rule, I think anyone who wants others to appreciate the struggles they face could do better than to start by trivializing those of others people. I also think we would all be better served if folks spent less time claiming the title of most-repressed and more time thinking about what constitutes reasonable treatment of those with whom we disagree.
Oddly enough I’m not really opposed to the challenge, per se, just a certain over-billing of its significance. Still, if this leads a few of the more self-important Christians to rethink their narratives of martyrdom, then perhaps it’s a good thing. If it leads some people of either camp (or any other) to think carefully about their own bully-triggers and what we can do to help those under the gun for such things, so much the better.
I found this piece on Stumbleupon, I believe. As far as Memes go, I actually kind of like this one. And by ‘kind of” I mean ‘really’ …kind of.
You see, I look at this meme, and a part of me wants to shout; “Yeah Boyeeee!” (…preferably in the face of some believer who has just suggested one of the alternatives). It’s damned frustrating to deal with that kind of commentary. You know how it goes; “The only reason you don’t believe is blah blah, blah…” …Blech! Seriously I’ve heard that line way too many times (and apparently so did someone else). So, it’s nice to see a bold affirmation that one’s own judgement really is the basis of, …well, ones own judgement!
…as opposed to some dismissive third person narrative.
Still, I wonder, would this look any different from any other religious perspective? If I asked for ‘Reasons I believe in God’, used the exact same sentence for the red color, and then made just a few strategic changes to the decoy list (Peer Pressure, Social Conformity, Afraid of Death, Raised That Way, Mental Disturbance, Haven’t Really Thought About It), I imagine we could present this to a few believers and generate exactly the same sense of vindication that I feel looking at this meme right now. “Damned right,” I can just hear them saying about that red line. …some might even add a “Praise Jesus!” or something like that, but my mind’s ear just doesn’t really want to go there.
Seriously, …yuck!
My point is of course that trivializing generalizations are a stick in the side of lots of folks, not just atheists. This is just the tip of the iceberg, a larger problem looms beneath the surface. And no, I didn’t just choose that image, because I live in Alaska; I actually thought about it and decided that it would be the best metaphor I could… well, anyway… the point is that this is part of a larger problem.
In the classic formulation of the problem, humans seem to possess a nearly universal tendency to explain other people’s actions (particularly those we don’t like) as a function of some consistent feature of their own personality while explaining our own actions in terms of situational factors. This tendency has generally been described as the Fundamental Attribution Error, or alternatively, as a function of Actor-Obeserver Asymmetry. What does this mean? Well, it means the reason you didn’t pay your bill on time this month is because of those unexpected medical expenses, the repair bill for the car, and well, it was little Johnny’s birthday, and you had to get him something… (You know the story). The reason your friend didn’t pay you the money he owes you? Well, he’s just a lazy bastard!
Okay, so that’s classical attribution theory, at least if you add a little salt to the vocabulary. Recent studies have shown that this basic contrast between situational versus dispositional explanations doesn’t quite explain the full range of data on this topic. Not to worry, a replacement theory is available, and it seems to illustrate the same point, albeit with a little less flair. The folk-conceptual theory approaches this same phenomenon by suggesting that people apply a range of different folk models to explain their own behavior and those around them. Depending on just how much one identifies with a person whose behavior they seek to explain, he/she is likely to adopt radically different descriptions of the behavior in question. One of the variables, for example is a difference between offering a reason for a behavior as its explanation and offering a history of reasoning as its explanation.
Case in point?
Saying; “I don’t believe in the Christian God, because the problem of evil renders this notion incoherent,” or conversely, saying; “I believe in God, because aspects of DNA coding appear to be irreducibly complex, and hence they require more of an explanation than chance evolution could provide.” What both of these explanations for a belief have in common is that each serves to explain a belief and at the same time to advance an active case for it. Conversely, saying “That guy Johnny, well he believes what he believes, because he has a deep fear of death (or Hell).” This latter sort of explanation describes a stage in a causal chain of behavior, one which doesn’t actively make much of a case for Johnny’s beliefs. In fact, the explanation undermines his credibility. The bottom line here is that we are looking at two different types of explanation, and the choice of which type to offer depends an awful lot on the disposition of the speaker towards the behavior/belief in question.
People thus have different ways of explaining behavior that they value and behavior that they don’t, and those differences serve more to shift the narrative around our feet than they do to set up a straight-forward evaluation of the issue. I really do think this is the key to the problem addressed in that meme above. People use dismissive explanations for beliefs they don’t identify with while presenting the reasons for beliefs they do identify with in terms of their own judgements.
You can see this consistently in the sphere of religious and philosophical discussions wherein you and I can supply all manner of thoughtful reasons for the judgements we’ve made, but that guy over there? Well, you know where he was raised and how his parents are! And all those people in the church on the corner? Well, they just have to believe in something; it fills a void somehow; they really are just brained washed aren’t they!?!
…and so on.
I’m including you in the good and thoughtful narrative of course, dear reader, but that’s just because you are reading my blog. When you’re gone I’m going to tell my other friend that you just had a traumatic experience.
The bottom line is that it’s difficult to disentangle the full range of human motivation, and when we do this for religion, the tendency is to do it in a way that privileges one’s own judgement while trivializing that of others. Folks we identify with can enjoy praise by association, and those that we don’t, well damn them anyhow, right? They really need to learn to think for themselves!
So, why do I like this meme? Well, it took me down that path just now, and lucky you, I brought you along for the ride. I guess this is yet another instance of ‘liking’ something not quite meaning that I agree with it.
This meme is a good answer to half of the actor-observer bias.
…and it’s a damned good illustration of the other half.
I suppose that is something of a win-win situation.
Okay, I love Condescending Wonka as much as the next connoisseur of sarcasm, but sometimes its difficult to separate the crap he rightfully calls out from the crap he obscures in the process.
Case in point?
Look to your left.
The thing about this gem is that it skewers a pretense for which I have absolutely no sympathy. I’ve been asked far too many times why I don’t commit great acts of cruelty dishonesty, or outright villainy, all on the assumption that failure to believe in God apparently means you are well on your way to doing the worst things imaginable. It’s a pretty common theme in the amateur apologetics camps, and some folks keep coming back to it no matter how often (or how reasonably) you answer their questions.
And yes, the people who insist that all sense of morality goes out the window once you walk away from God scare me, …more than a little bit.
So, I have no sympathy for the mindset mocked by this little meme, none whatsoever.
But Wonka’s argument here is a little troubling in itself, because of course nobody really does figure out that murder is wrong, all by themselves. It might be easier if the category in question were simply ‘killing’, but it isn’t. It’s ‘murder’. And murder is a social construction. (How many people are really against ‘killing’ in all its forms anyway, or even ‘killing sentient creatures.’ No. Most of us are quite willing to kill under the right circumstances, even if we might find it difficult to do so.
If you’ve ever tried to sort the difference between killing that is acceptable from killing that isn’t you can see how very quickly a simple question leads to a very complex maze of possible answers. Issues of self defense, defense of others, and military or police service all skew the simple answer in a variety of ways. Add in possible mercy killings and a mix of government and business polices that lead accidentally or by design to deaths of innocent people in one part of the world or another, the whole damned thing gets that much more messy.
I’m not even suggesting that you can’t sort the mess. What I am saying is that social conventions are a big part of the means by which this mess does get sorted. We don’t figure out that murder is wrong all by ourselves; we learn what murder is from those around us. Others are actively involved in helping is form an orientation towards the prospect of killing another person, helping us decide when and under what circumstances we would be willing to do so.
It’s worth noting that references to God(s) serve as a pretty common part of that social process by which this and other moral questions are sorted out for a lot of people. One could question, as I do, whether or not gods are an essential part5 of that equation, and even conceding the role that gods do play in communicating ethics for many people does not entail belief in the literal existence of any of them. But there is a big difference between suggesting you can be good without God, or even questioning the role of divine entities in ethical lessons and the pretense that it’s all so perfectly obvious you can settle the whole matter all on your own.
It’s a particularly obnoxious fellow that insists we would all go conky-wobble with each other in the absence of God. More reasonable theologians have asked whether or not non-believers can produce an adequate explanation for the ethics that we do have. …I think the answer is yes, but that’s a response to a different kind of discussion. It’s hard to tell what to do when one runs into someone who insists that we are all one god shy of an shoot-out at the K-Mart Corral. Their position is crap, and their arguments are profoundly disturbing.
Still, it isn’t quite true that each of us handles the moral questions of life on the strength of our own individual conscience alone. We get a lot of help from our friends and loved ones.
The answer to both Wonka and the target of his abuse turns out to be the same; it’s more complicated than that.
One hears it all the time; the notion that religion ought to be kept out of politics. I’m torn by the suggestion, because it is commonly used in response to the politics of conservative Christians, …and I have little sympathy for their politics. But the fact is, that just isn’t where I would draw the battle lines. If most people frown at the likes of Pat Robertson or Rick Warren, I suspect they are frowning for reasons that differ significantly from my own.
Religion IS politics as far as I am concerned; it’s bad politics, but politics just the same. I don’t quite mean to suggest that religion is simply a crass tool by which some folks seek to enhance their own power and influence.
….seriously, I don’t QUITE mean to say that.
…at least not as a general rule.
No. What I am suggesting is that religion consistently presents folks with a vision of order in the cosmos. That vision answers questions about how one ought to behave, yes, but it also contains answers to questions about the nature of authority and the social expectations that go with it. These traditions may tell us about Heaven and Hell, Karma, etc. all visions of a cosmic order, but they also tell us a little about how one ought to treat others, assess other people’s character, and what we may fairly do in response to the virtues or vices of those around us. The notion that all of this is supposed to stop short of addressing real political questions strikes me as a rather improbable.
…it’s also unreasonable.
To put it in more concrete terms, it makes sense to me that someone who believes in the Ten Commandments would (when stepping into the voting booth) bear in mind the likelihood that a political candidate was going to follow them as well. It makes sense to me that folks would bear such things in mind when making in countless other decisions of a political nature.
Which is part of what makes the role of religion in American government (and perhaps other settings as well) so completely absurd. On the one hand, religious teachings are all about precisely the sort of questions that one must address in politics; on the other, it is separate from and distinct from those institutions, limited in some respect by the establishment clause and re-enforced by the free exercise clause. Religion has a potentially absolute absolute claim on every aspect of life, and yet while protecting the rights of believers, we expect them to stop short of weighing in on the most important questions of the day. The whole situation is at least a little odd, to say the least.
Far from the natural order of things, this feature of American politics rests in our Constitution and popular culture like a fault line running through a population trying its best to ignore it and get on with life.
…which I think is the real reason people want to keep religion out of politics. If they can keep folks from putting the two topics together in the same conversation, then they can avoid dealing with a mountain of contradictions even Mohammed would be hard pressed to move about.
The history of religion certainly doesn’t teach us to expect its proponents to stop short of political commentary. The God of Abraham in particular has played an overtly political role in each of his major religions. It is only with the decline of ancient empires that Christianity and Islam have come to be defined as something distinct from politics. Each of these traditions became mere ‘religions’ when the moral order they espoused lost its connections to the political order in which they once flourished. Institutions that we think of today as religion were once unashamedly political. Few if any thought twice about it.
What distinguishes religious traditions from those of modern politics is less of an ontological divide than a range of social conventions, not the least of them being a clear discordance between the visions of authority contained in each. Indeed, the notions are so far apart that people often fail to recognize them as different answers to the same question. The end result is a rather marked failure to notice something very interesting about the relationship between religion and politics in modern life. You see, there is something highly ironic (and more than a little tragic) about the sensibilities of those who speak of a Lord in world wherein we elect a President (or, for that matter, a Congressman or a Parliamentian).
And this is what I mean by a fault line that the public does its damnedest to ignore. Most people don’t even pause to think about this, but the notion of a ‘Lord’ has not always been so divorced from the social order. The language about which one spoke of God was not always so completely severed from the language about which one thought about their own government. There was a time when that term, ‘Lord’, would have pointed not merely to a benign old man in the sky, but also to the nobility of Europe. The implication was neither accidental, nor trivial. Indeed, the point of such language was to draw a clear parallel between the loyalties that men owed to each other (or more to the point, that commoners owed to the aristocracy) and those that they owed to the keeper of cosmic justice. A reference to the ‘Lord’ would have meant for many in past times a role reflected in both their religious discourse and in the social realities of their daily lives.
How weird it must be to live in a world in which one answers to a Lord in Heaven but votes for politicians down here! At least it would be weird if we paid more attention to the way either of these institutions actually handle questions about how people ought to behave.
But of course the problem is not merely a function of this one word. When Conservative Christians speak of power, they almost invariably invoke a range of metaphors ill-fitted to the realities of a republican style government. They speak of God as a sovereign, all the while operating in a public life wherein the people are assumed to be sovereign. They speak of the Ten Commandments in a world wherein laws are deemed in some sense to be created by the people (albeit indirectly). And how strange that we (and by ‘we’ I mean mainly Christians) want Children to pledge allegiance to one nation (under God or not), as if such an oath had much bearing on modern notions of citizenship! It cannot mean nothing that people who live in a participatory democracy envision so much of their lives through the language of aristocracy.
Does this mean that Conservative Christians do not understand democracy?
No it doesn’t.
…at least not in principle, but I can think of a few folks!
It does suggest a certain tension between the nature of authority some folks encounter on Sunday and those they are called upon to use in the voting booth. This sort of tension might even have some positive benefits, though I suspect that would require people to be more aware of the difference than they generally seem to be. It probably should not surprise us too much when the language of one sphere creeps into that of another. I think we can see this in the way that many conservative Christians speak of the founding fathers in reference to a broad range of constitutional questions. So much the more so on litmus test politics such as gay rights which so many use to discern the loyalties of those around us.
I could field a number of polemics at this point, but perhaps that is not really where I want to go with this. The divergence between modern visions of political authority and the archaic language with which conservative Christians approach that same subject is an interesting point in itself. What to make of it is another question. And of course this returns us to the original question of whether or not one can reasonably expect religious leaders to keep their noses out of politics.
If I am reading the popular culture correctly, I think most people expect a natural division between these spheres of social (and political) life, as if some great natural boundary separates them. For my own part, I think it’s little other than history. Indeed, I don’t think the term ‘religion’ denotes a clear and well defined body of institutions, beliefs, or practices, certainly not any that fall neatly outside the boundaries of political life. As it happens, the modern world has developed a range of political expectations which simply differ from those of the institutions we now call religion. That difference does not lie in the nature of the institutions in questions, it lies in the particular approach that each takes to the deeper moral questions of social life.
What keeps conservative Christianity from enjoying a more direct role in American political life is its political anachronism. It’s vision of authority is not (thankfully) that of our own government.
The first sin was not the eating of an apple (or even a pomegranate). No, it began when mankind (or at least Eve) gave an ear to the Serpent, or so the story goes, at least according to my old Bible-as-Literature prof. I try to keep that in mind whenever I find myself cast in the role of that Serpent, or at least one of his servants.
I am speaking of course of those moments when someone tells me that I worship Satan, or that I serve him. It is common enough to see this charge leveled at atheists, at least on the net. I doubt its occurrence is limited to that context.
I must say that it took me some time to wrap my mind around the concept. You might think it would be a little difficult to worship an entity in which you don’t believe. I certainly did. But it turns out to be remarkably easy to serve him, he does all the work for you, even without letting you know about it. I have been reassured many times that my actions serve the dark lord, regardless of my own conscious intent. I have also been told that deep down I know this to be the case, whether I will admit it or not. It’s always fascinating to find out what I know and what I believe, especially when it has the makings of a good horror story.
Just think of it; you have two competing stories!
- On the one hand, I would like to think of my story as one of a sincere guy tapping away at the keyboard in the hopes that he can present a reasonable case for a position that he thinks is correct, and in the end maybe teach something to someone, or perhaps learn something from a well-reasoned response. We could call this the intellectual exchange model of the disc… hey you! Wake up, dammit!
- Okay, on the other hand, you have a minion of Lucifer operating under the auspices of the Dark Lord himself to invest ordinary binary code with the force of evil and send it out to work its insidious wonders on unsuspecting believers.
Honestly, it doesn’t take much effort to figure out which is the more interesting story. (Sigh!) And if you too count yourself as a vocal non-believers, this whole thing probably rings a bell or three in your own experience.
In truth, there is little one could do to answer such a claim, because of course every answer you give would be subject to the same suspicion, which is why I am inclined to think of the story of Adam and Eve here. …and of the Serpent. The trouble really does begin for that narrative in the decision to listen to that serpent as it is an act of disloyalty to God. To speak with His enemy at all is itself unthinkable! Subsequent troubles could hardly be surprising; they are the narrative consequence of willfully opening oneself to an evil message.
I think this is the model behind the charge that atheists serve Satan. It not merely some bit of empirical confusion about what we do and don’t believe, so much as it is a warning about the nature of any message we happen to carry. That is precisely the point of casting atheists in the role of Satan’s servants; it is in effect to construe our every word and deed as an evil which one ought not to give reasonable consideration.
I have tried myself and seen others attempt a range of different responses to this kind of charge, but lately I am inclined to accept it.
I’ll be your huckleberry.
I don’t mean to say that I actually intend harm to others, but I am simply done trying to convince certain parties that I (or other atheists) can be good without God. If these are the terms, then I sometimes want to say ‘so be it’. I will not give those who make such accusations the satisfaction of trying to plead innocence from the bottom of a poisoned well.
The whole thing smacks of manipulation of course, but it is not merely manipulation, because some people actually do seem to believe it, or at least they say that they do. In its own right, this sort of charge is actually a fascinating example of the limitations of reasoning.
Another of my old professors, Maurice Finnochiaro, used to talk about the study of argumentation as a historical phenomenon. He was interested in meta-argumentation, arguments about arguments. And in its own way this little gift of frustration for an unbeliever is in fact an argument about an argument. It is a clear and concise statement about the prospects for constructive discussion, albeit a rather pessimistic one.
The viewpoint in question is very much informed by the outlook of Spiritual Warfare, which is to say that it reflects a range of suppositions about the spiritual powers at play in the world. It is the same sort of thinking that finds Satanic messages in so many rock&roll lyrics, Devil Worshipers in Day-care centers everywhere, and demons in Hentai images. It is the same thinking that leads to talk of protecting baby-Christians (those new in the faith) from exposure to other views, and it is the same sort of thinking that plays havoc with the lives of homosexuals in Uganda and other places where some Charismatic Christians go to press for policies they could never manage in the west. But seriously, my list of horribles aside, the point is that there is a body of religious tenets behind the sort of charge that Atheists serve Satan. If we are inconvenienced by the whole thing, chances are we should count our blessings.
…though we won’t actually want to call them ‘blessings’ of course.
But the charge of Satanic worship, absurd though it may be to the mind of an unbeliever is a good reminder of the reflexive nature of reasoning. It would be a swell world for rationalists if we could divide all the ideas of humanity up into those about which we reason and then a separate list of ideas about how to reason. It would be swell if that second set rested safely outside the scope of disagreement, a sort of neutral arbiter in our disputes. But it just doesn’t work like that. And in this as in any other debate, one must remember that among our disagreements we often also differ on the significance of disagreements themselves and the very nature of reasoning about them. In other words, part of the argument is also always about the nature of argumentation itself.
Sometimes we are fortunate enough to discuss (or even debate) with people with whom we share enough assumptions about the nature of reasoning to proceed with a reasonable discussion, even in the face of vast disagreements over issues like belief in God. Folks may not flip their whole belief orientation on the basis of a single conversation (or even thirty of them), but sometimes we shift a little, modify an assumption, or even simply come to appreciate the asthetics of a well argued point from the other side. Such discussions can be rewarding and pleasant exchanges, …if that is, one starts with a range of assumptions that makes it possible.
Some people just don’t make those same assumptions. When someone says that atheists serve Satan, they are sending a very clear signal that they are not down for the discussion, at least on any terms which would give an unbeliever a chance. To do so would already be a betrayal of their faith, and a mistake exposing them to tremendous evil (evil carried by you and I my unbelieving friends). It is also a signal that the clear significance of your words lies not in the quality of your reasoning so much as an impersonal force over which you may not have conscious control. That force will be the focus of the accuser, not the cogency of any argument you make.
Sometimes idealization strengthens a value; sometimes it destroys it. The trick is to know the difference.
It gets more difficult to tell the difference when a value becomes central to one’s own life, or if it has become a commonplace theme in the community around her. Failure to follow a given value can become so unthinkable that dissonance reduction strategies simply overtake the effort to apply it to the miscellaneous judgement calls of daily life.
At the extreme end of caring about something, defense mechanisms become so strong that the rhetoric of rationalization simply eclipses the discourse needed to plan effective action. Thus, love becomes a foreign notion to much of Christianity, Reason and Logic brand-names jealously guarded by unbelievers, and self-reliance the hallmark of Americans themselves as dependent on others as any people ever were. In like manner, racism becomes unthinkable to liberals, notwithstanding the prominence of racial categories in our policies, and patriotism goes without saying to conservatives, even when they attack their own nation (literally or metaphorically). It is easy enough to see that talking-up a value doesn’t always mean living up to it; but things are worse than that. Talking up a value can sometimes chase any meaningful effort to put it into practice right out of the building.
***
I used to think about this a lot when I worked in Navajo country. Out there the value term with the most weight to it was hózhǫ́. This is usually translated as something like ‘balance’ or ‘harmony,’ and for many this is enough to tie the notion to themes better suited to American pop-Buddhism and New Age thought. In contrast to bilagáanas, diné (Navajos) were non-confrontational, at least according to common folk-wisdom on the subject.But it wasn’t merely outsiders that approached the concept in these terms; Navajos themselves sometimes use this approach to explain themselves to others.
This theme always troubled me, because it sure as Hell didn’t describe the people I knew and worked with. Sure I had seen plenty of situations in which I had seen diné show notable restraint or reluctance to engage in confrontation. But I had seen some spectacular confrontations in my days out there. More to the point, it had always seemed to me that conflict rested just under the surface of pretty much every item of business occurring in that area. The question it seems to me is not whether Navajos engage in conflict more or less than the average Bilagáana (white person); but rather under what circumstances will each do so and for what purposes. I think the answer to this question is different for Navajo than it is for Anglos, but I also think this requires a lot more subtlety than the oppositional stereotypes generally allow.
I had a boss out there who used to tell me that the sort of balance implied in the concept of hózhǫ́actually entailed a trace of conflict. Conflict too had its value in this ideal, he seemed to be telling me, and so it too had its place in the balance people strove to attain. So, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find a layer of conflict in the workings of folks who embraced this value. But sometimes I am a damned slow student. Years after I had moved on from that job, I think I finally got this lesson. I got the point while reading up on Henry Kissenger. Thinking of hózhǫ́ as a kind of Realpolitik is of course little more than replacing one metaphor for another, but I continue to think it is a helpful correction to the cosmic muffin concepts that saturated so much of the public discussion of hózhǫ́, at least when the rest of the conversation occurred in English. Even still, the distance between this value and the practices of those who hold it dear is vast, so vast that it seems often to escape the ability of folks to conceptualize the matter.
Which I suppose puts diné on par with the rest of us.
***
It used to drive me to tears, back during my brief stint as a moderator on the Internet Infidels message boards, when I would see some fellow heathen lecturing a Christian on the virtues of reason and rationality. Okay, this didn’t always bother me, but it drove me nuts those specific moments when the Christian was doing a damned good job of reasoning about the particular issue and the unbeliever not so much
Yes, that does happen.
I wouldn’t count myself an Atheist if I didn’t think that ultimately the most reasonable thing to do about gods is to just say ‘no’ to them. But the backing of reason needs to be earned in the details of a discussion, and which side will earn it is back on the table every time you decide to take up the subject. Like it or not, in some conversations about religious matters, it is in fact the believer that is doing a better job of reasoning. That really shouldn’t surprise anyone whose sense of human nature hasn’t been completely overdetermined by their sense of the battle lines in question. Yet in such moments, when the compelling argument just isn’t coming, leave it to the rotten-hearted to simply claim the cultural capital of a free thinking rational person and remind the believer that she isn’t in the club, so to speak.
That is the sort of hypocrisy I suppose I should expect in any camp, including my own, but it doesn’t make seeing it any easier. Take any given value, and you will always see a sort of tension between its motivating characteristics, the oughtness it urges on us, and its currency for those with some claim to that value. Ideally, one could expect those claiming the virtue of reason to be those who actually live up to it, but ideological movements and philosophical orientations also generate a degree of association with a given virtue. And for some, that is enough. They are more rationale by virtue of their allegiances; and little else need be said about the matter.
***
Likewise I will never accept the excuses that conservative Christians make for opposition to homosexuality. It is common enough to hear from folks that their stance on the topic is taken out of love, that they have gay friends, and that they are merely following the word of the Lord on this. (I’ll skip the example of the lady who re-assured me that she had nothing personal against gay people, because she loved Will & Grace. …okay, I didn’t quite skip it, but, well, …I can’t help myself sometimes.) Conservative Christians often cry foul when their position is described as hateful, insisting that we take their own motivations into account.
In my book, you measure goodwill by the way people treat others; and efforts to deprive gay lesbian folks of the right to marry, to adopt, or to security in the workplace make for a straight forward case of malice. Even without these concrete harms, the high suicide rates for those of homosexual orientation speak to the high costs that some folks pay for unwarranted stigma placed on certain sexual preferences. Against all this and more, the oft-repeated claims that one can oppose homosexuality while keeping to the admonition to love others starts to ring a bit hollow. The approach taken by conservative Christians against homosexuality makes of ‘love’ a mere footnote, an intellectual exercise in resolving an apparent inconsistency. It falls well short of living up to a virtue which could well be the shining light of Christian faith.
***
What has me thinking about this is a recent encounter with one of the ways this sort of problem is commonly expressed in ordinary language. I can’t think of any other way to put it, so I will just call it ‘vacuous Idealization’. What I mean to get at by coining this monstrous bit if vocabulary is a variety of rhetoric that cancels a value in practice by elevating it to a level of abstraction which is utterly meaningless.
Take for example ‘true love,’ which we are often assured isn’t selfish at all. But that’s not all that true love isn’t. It also isn’t carnal, and it isn’t fleeting. It really isn’t harmful to the one who is loved, and it most certainly isn’t conditional. True love doesn’t keep track of the time, and it doesn’t care how much money you have or how tall you are. True love is timeless, and true love is, …blech! I can’t go on.
By the time we get done with all the things true love isn’t, I can’t help wondering if anything is left in the category at all. And that I suspect is the point of ‘true love’; it is actually an empty set, with no concrete members no associated concepts to define it. Instead we get the illusion that true love has been defined by taking ordinary instances of perfectly human (and rather flawed) love and negating each of the flaws. We are left to believe that we still know what we are talking about when all of the frailties of human relationships have been tossed in the trash of love that is merely real, as opposed to that which is true, …pardon me True.
I call Shenanigans!
Real love looks nothing like this True love that people talk about. You notice when she gets in bed without brushing her teeth. And yes Real Love hopes that her relatives will take care of her when she needs them. Real love may not care how tall you are, but she’s damned glad you don’t have any really ugly birthmarks. And if real love hasn’t made a point of principle out of your race, your nationality, your political party or your religion, then she certainly does have a way of finding people most when they travel in the same circles she does. Real love comes and goes (dammit anyhow) sometimes without warning and without leaving behind any explanation for her visit, or her departure. And sad to say, real love does have her contingencies, much as we might wish otherwise. Real love always comes with the blemishes, and the do matter, and they don’t go away.
True love is little other than the hope of some ineffable residue left when we’ve taken out all the things that come with Real love in our actual lives. But that is a hope hung on an imaginary hook. If you take away enough of the things that come with real love, you end up with nothing at all. Sadly, I am inclined to think that may be the point of this kind of rhetoric. By stripping out the foibles of real human relationships and the attitudes that go with them, one ends up with a value that is whatever you will make of it. It is something that will never happen, a virtue no-one will ever realize, nor will they ever have to.
And being thus emptied of its meaning, True Love is the perfect predicate for an imaginary subject, to wit, “God is love!”
***
On a side note, and I will just throw it out there, I do think this is one the reasons those who emphasize the divinity of Jesus most seem least likely to emulate his actions and teachings. If he is a human, with real human foibles, then the stories told about him offer a real example of how one ought to live. If he is a God, though, well then who could hope to live up to that example?
Yes, I get that this is generally thought to be a paradox in that Jesus is commonly supposed to be both. And yet it is the nature of such enigma that one can only meaningfully speak of, or think about, one of its axes at any given moment. You can say of a paradox that it is both x and y, but you cannot grasp both at the same time. And of course believers do typically come with a marked preference.
***
In like manner, I think people often approach issues of objectivity in the most self-defeating manner. It is common enough to speak of a knowing subject and known object when framing different questions about how knowledge works. There is nothing particularly wrong with this, providing one understands the two as part of a relationship of sorts. Once folks start talking about the possibility that a claim could belong entirely to one or the other, the whole model gets rather misleading.
To put it another way, I think we can speak meaningfully about objective features in knowledge, or even of greater or lesser degrees of objectivity, but if objectivity is defined as the total absence of subjective input, well then that is epistemological failure on the horizon. Bringing this a little closer to actual contexts of reasoning, I often hear (or read) commentary in which people compare reasoning with emotion or logic with rhetoric, etc., the implication being that one must choose one over the other. In the popular imagination good reasoning does not appeal to emotion, and rhetoric is always a bad.
But of course the point of much good reasoning is rhetorical; it is an attempt to convince someone of something. Far from requiring an absence of emotion, this kind of project is often enhanced by a display of emotion. If you want people to care about something, then you ought to show them that you do too. Fail to do that and watch them doodle as you talk.
The bottom line here is that the quest for objectivity becomes mysticism when it is conceived in terms of purity. If the practice of careful judgement requires an absence of subjectivity, emotion, or conscious efforts at persuasion, then careful judgement resides in a world we have never been and never will be. In fact, we don’t have the faintest idea how to get there, because the very notion is simply nonsense.
***
On a related note, let us consider the notion of Truth with a capital T. I’ve long since lost track of the number of times I have been told that truth is unattainable, or heard questions such as ‘what is truth’ framed as though it were something ‘out there’, so to speak. Not surprisingly, this approach has the effect of rendering meaningless the mundane truths of daily life. Against the promise of this cosmic Truth, no mere fact could possibly hope to hold our attention. And so the quest for Truth so often becomes an escape from truths.
Countless sophomoric essays have been written about the unattainability of this grand truth …Truth. It sits like the Kantian thing-in-itself well beyond our mere mortal efforts to find it. Many are the ways people have found to explain our failure to find this elusive entity, hiding somewhere in the mountains of philosophical goodness. But the details are un-necessary, because the failure of this quest begins with the framing of the question.
We use the concept of truth (or falsehood) on a daily basis to help us distinguish between claims we agree with and those we don’t. There is a lot of room for disagreement over the nature of that process, and it’s a damned interesting question, but if any theory of truth doesn’t address that sort of process then it is already headed down the wrong path from the outset.
Ultimately, questions about truth are less a matter of discovering a fact in the myriad lands of facts about the world around us, than it is a question of figuring out what means to say that something is true (and how that possibility relates its alternatives). Questions of truth value often involve great concepts and momentous philosophical questions, but they also occur in the context of topics of little importance, some of them being outright dull. I know that I consider it true that the Dr. Pepper I am drinking is too warm and false that the weather is nice outside. (I live in the arctic; what did you expect?) Any theory about the nature of truth that separates it entirely from such mundane matters is less a theory about truth than a hijacking of the notion for some other purpose.
What is Truth?
If you really must go on a quest to discover the answer to this question, then don’t let that quest
***
On a related note, and because it fits the pattern, could someone please tell the boys from Chicago what time it is. It is a good song, but seriously, does anyone really know what time it is?
YES!
We know what time it is, because time is not a thing to be known independent of human reckoning. If the conventions of human discourse say it is 5:30pm, Alaskan Standard Time, then it is 5:30pm, Alaskan Standard Time.
To make the question more complicated than that is not a quest for something profound; it is a dramatic self-indulgence.
Yes, I’m a lot of fun at parties too.
***
And with that the rant is nearing its end. If you are still reading this, then you have more patience than I do, and I apologize for tramping through matters both sacred and profane as well as a good many points in between. But of course that is my point, so to speak, that in effect the two extremes may at times prove to be one in the same. When a value becomes too important, even to conceive the possibility of transgressing against it, then people remove it from conscious thought in ways that parallel the treatment of things they abhor. Such sacred values can cease to be an effective means of motivating people, precisely because they mean too much to allow for the full range of human possibilities. Worse yet, people sometimes seem to take a value down this road for the very purpose of cancelling its bearing on daily life. Either way my point is that you should be careful about just how much you care about such things, because somewhere past “a lot” lies “Fuhgetaboutit!
Sometimes texts and utterances become what they purport to describe. Case in point? This little meditation on the spiritual meaning of suffering, An Attempt to Explain Christianity to Atheists In a Manner That Might Not Freak Them Out by The Bad Catholic at Patheos.com. Well, it certainly became a source of suffering for me (and apparently for P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula), and I suspect not a few others trying to sift through the article for one reason or another. Whether or not the article succeeds in becoming meaningful is another question.
Honestly, the whole thing is a Gish Gallop for me, from the scholastic presentation to the major assumptions of the argument and the vocabulary its author uses. Were I to attempt a refutation, I wouldn’t know where to start. If this was an attempt (as the author suggests) to speak to atheists, I can’t help but think it is an utter failure (or perhaps an ironic joke). If its author ever seriously had an unbelieving audience in mind, then he has done just about as much as he could to avoid communicating with that audience.
There is however one thing about this piece that does catch my attention; its final paragraph (emphasis added):
This changes everything: To see the child with leukemia is to see Christ suffering in that child, suffering to bring the world back to Perfection. To experience agony is to cry out with the strain of lifting this fallen world to Paradise. We are called to recognize this, and to actualize this. This is why I am a Christian.
I say this bit catches my attention, because I find it genuinely disturbing. I also recognize it (or something like it) from a number of previous conversations with believers, many of whom have advanced the argument that life is somehow less meaningful without God. They don’t always state their position in such stark terms, but I do think the view is common enough to rise above the idiosyncracies of this particular article. So, it is perhaps worth a comment or two.
Kitch-Christ: The true meaning of suffering?
The claim that Bad Catholic makes, that to see a child suffering is to see Christ suffering within her is thoroughly dehumanizing, because it relegates the suffering of the child to a secondary role. What is moving about the suffering of a child is not her own suffering but that of Christ. The meaning of suffering has, according to Bad Catholic, less to do with the pain of particular persons than the cosmic struggle of a heroic Jesus trying to lift the fallen world into paradise. I am not even sure if it is the crucified Christ we are supposed to see in this girl. Rather, I think we are supposed to see in the eyes of a child suffering the muscular Jesus of the Lord’s Gym lifting his heavy cross up to save the world. Her suffering is meaningful precisely because of the meaning that Christ gives it.
No.
Not just ‘no’, but Hell no!
And if you want to write about a deficiency of meaning in the world then you have one right there. Never mind a world without God; how about one in which you cannot see the most compelling moments of human suffering because of the big giant Jesus standing in your way!
If the suffering of people right in front of you requires a theory making it about something else altogether, or rather someone else, then your faith does not augment the meaning of suffering; it detracts from it. And the theory that was supposed to deepen our understanding of suffering has instead blunted its very force. It is not the suffering of the little girl that matters; it is not her loss of hope, or her agony, or her tears; it is that of someone else.
As I read this utter crap, I can’t help but to be struck by a quote the Bad Catholic keeps at the top of his webpage. It is attributed to G.K. Chesterton; “Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.” I can’t help but think this wonderful little quote might well have forestalled this miserable exercise in tortured logic and pathetic indifference to the actual condition of suffering in another living being.
Perhaps one ought to let his sense of other living things be less a theory and more of a love affair.
The meaning of human suffering is immediate. This is no less true of others than it is for ourselves. I for one do not need to see Jesus Christ or any other supernatural entity to give a damn about the suffering of another human being, or even that of an animal.
Prometheus opens with great promise delivered on a grand scale. It is a quest to find the origins of life on earth, a journey to meet our makers. I had entered the theater primed with expectation (the promos for this film were brilliant), and upon learning where the story would take us, I smiled and settled into my seat. Seriously, I couldn’t wait to see what new directions Ridley Scott might take with this wonderful theme.
Sadly, the answer was right into the ground.
Because the big crash of a spaceship at the end of this flick was the perfect metaphor for the movie as a whole. It was just one big train space-ship wreck.
…complete with main characters running directly away from the rolling wheel-like space ship instead of jumping to the side. Yes, they actually did that. Seriously, how does a movie studio spend so many millions of dollars on special effects and star power only to miss the fact that they put a Loony Tunes gag in the middle of the dramatic climax of the story? Or do they just think we are that stupid?
Maybe we are. …Damn!
Don’t get me wrong. I like really cool special effects as much as the next guy. But I also like an interesting story. Is it really too much to ask that they appear in the same film?
Ridley Scott has produced such films! Alien was such a film. More to the point, Blade Runner was such a film. And one of the best things about Blade Runner was its use of the very same theme.
Blade Runner
Blade Runner was a classic Philip K. Dick story. Few authors could make something so fantastic speak to people in such personal ways, and Ridley Scott transmitted that to the screen brilliantly. Do you remember Roy’s encounter with his maker? Do you remember watching as this replicant interrogates his very creator, trying desperately to wheedle extra time out of the very man who had chosen to the hour of Roy’s demise? And do you remember how easily the story acquired its deeper significance, that moment when a simple plot point about a creature trying to extend its life acquired philosophical significance?
For all his artificial nature, Roy stood before his maker asking questions about the very meaning of mortality. They were questions we could all recognize. Questions that touched deeply on what it means to be human, what it means to live for only a little while.
And in that moment when the character of Roy stands before his maker and demands to know the reason for his imminent death, he became so very human.
…still more so in the moment of his passing:
What makes Roy’s story so compelling is not merely that we can see the metaphor, but that the metaphor is used to tell us something about our own humanity. It is not merely the loss of personal life that Roy mourns. It is also the passing of his experiences into oblivion, experiences that could be of real value to someone. He is a remarkable character, to be sure, and the world will lose something as he passes.
…just as it does with the passing of each of our loved ones.
…just as it will for each and every one of us.
Roy
Roy meets his maker to confront his own mortality, and he takes us along for the ride. We are there, not just to witness the action, but to share in the meaning of that encounter. …perhaps even to share in the crime of deicide when Roy executes his own verdict on his maker.
And what of Prometheus?
Grandfather?
As Roger Ebert tells us, Prometheus raises questions about the origin of human life, presenting us with a version of the panspermia hypothesis in which all of life on earth is begun through the apparent suicide of a pale muscular alien. In the opening scenes that alien appears alone on a barren plant, his spaceship leaving without him. With all the solemnity of a priest performing a great ritual, the alien consumes a mysterious substance, and it ravishes his body. As the mysterious alien falls into a rushing river, his body disintegrates, releasing the seeds of life into a new world.
Was this earth, as Roger Ebert suggests? Ridley Scott tells us that it could be any planet, but of course the point of the scene is to raise the possibility. This might have been how life on earth started, so we are asked to believe. More to the point, it may well be how life on planet earth will begin anew, if the “engineers” as these aliens are called, should choose to return.
That is the possibility uncovered by our main characters in Prometheus. They set out in a quest to find the engineers, to speak with our very creators only to find them bent on our destruction. And thus the a question about the origin of life on earth transforms into a question about the possibility of its imminent demise. The two questions are really the same, because each is essentially a question about the motives of the engineers.
Why?
Shaw
This SHOULD have been a brilliant movie. What makes it so sad is the inattention to narrative detail. The scientists do not act like scientists, especially the geologist who’s rabid anti-intellectualism belies his choice of career. Seriously, didn’t someone on set know that geology is a science? But of course this is a side character, and his flaws are forgivable. What of the main characters?
Three people drive the quest to find the engineers in Prometheus. Two archaeologists, Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway (played by Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall Green) initiate the quest to find the engineers as a result of the result of their own findings. Holloway is so intent on speaking with the engineers that he engages in reckless actions upon landing. Believing the engineers to be dead, he drowns his sorrows in a bottle. I suppose we are meant to appreciate the irony of a scholar lamenting the greatest archeological find in the history of the field, but I for one could not get past the absurdity of it. Shaw could almost have served as a voice of reason were it not for her complete irrelevance in the lead-up to the final conflict. No-one listens to her (least of all her husband and partner Holloway), right up until she ends up as the sole human survivor of the expedition.
…which is to say that no-one ever listens to her.
And then of course there is Peter Weyland (played by Guy Pearce). A wealthy old man facing the end of his own life, Weyland funds the expedition for the sole purpose of extending his life. How he came to the conclusion that the engineers would extend his life is beyond me? I think it was beyond the writers themselves? Whatever its origins, Weyland holds onto this assumption despite all evidence to the contrary. Long after it has been made clear that the engineers bear no goodwill towards their creation, Weyland chooses to speak with one of them. It was a foolish mistake.
…and it was his last one.
And here we have the crux of the problem.This movie doesn’t really raise any questions about the origins of life at all. The prospect that life on earth might have its origins in the stars is simply a premise designed to kick-start the action. Nothing about the unfolding action sheds any light on the significance of that premise, nor does it begin share that significance with anyone in the audience.
Space Lab
The central meaning of the encounter with the engineers rests on the irrational presuppositions of Holloway, Shaw, and Weyland. Each of them has loaded the event with significance particular to their own stories, their reasons for doing so barely explored in the course of the film. This sort of approach might have worked with some earnest character development, but Prometheus was too busy wowing us with majestic visuals and sudden moments of terror. In the end, this film attaches no genuine meaning to the event at all.
And so the encounter with the makers of humanity does not quite resonate the way it could have. The encounter with the engineers is an intrinsically interesting moment, one spoiled terribly by the lack of a meaningful storyline to carry us through it. Unlike Roy, these characters bring no great questions to their creator; seeking instead to learn whatever he chooses tell them. But he tells them nothing, electing instead to begin smashing up its creation.
…which actually sums up this movie pretty well.
***
I have to thank my friend Michael Kucan for helping me to remember some of the more irritating details of this movie. I would also like to recommend aknittysociety blog, which contains a wonderful analysis of race and gender in Prometheus. I should also say that in my thoughts about Blade Runner were rather strongly influenced by entry in Roger Ebert’s Journal, I Remember You.
It had been a very long drive into work that week, not the least of reasons being a heavy snow storm that descended upon the central Navajo Nation just as I got into the area. I didn’t expect to see my landlady in the office, but there she was. She and I normally passed each other going both ways of our weekly commutes, and upon seeing her I assumed she had been trapped in town by the snowstorm. Would I be on the floor that night? …or asleep in the office? Not to worry, my landlady and her 4-wheel drive were on the way out of town, but she wanted me to know that I would have company that night after all.
I cocked an eyebrow and waited to learn more.
It turns out she had picked up a guy on the side of the road near Chinle. She didn’t know much about him, except that he was a bilagáana (a white guy) and he had come out to the reservation looking for native wisdom. She had blessed him with his taste of that wisdom by getting him in out of the cold. She added that she thought he was sick. So, I taught my class that evening and headed over to the house wondering what (or rather whom) I would find.
I’ve long since forgotten the man’s name, but he was indeed sick. A doctor had apparently told my guest that his Prostate Cancer could not be treated. So, he had come to Navajo country in the hopes that a Medicine Man could accomplish something that modern science could not. My guest didn’t elaborate much on his condition, though his frequent trips to the bathroom might have testified in some sense to the diagnosis. He was French, as I recall. I don’t think he ate at all that night, nor did he accept an invitation to breakfast.
The house contained two quite decent beds, but no central heating. So, my guest slept on the floor that night and I slept on the couch, thus putting us both near the coal-burning stove. In the morning, he pulled out his tarot cards and tried to get a sense of what the day had in store for him. The man offered to do a reading for me, but I declined. It had been a long time since I had left that sort of thing behind, and I didn’t want it back in my life, not even as a sort of social experiment. Instead, the man explained what each card meant as he drew it during his own reading. There was some good and some bad, and as one might expect, a lot of wiggle room on the particulars.
Although I asked, the man never really told me whether or not he was looking for someone in particular. I suspect he thought the practical problem of finding a Medicine Man willing to help him would resolve itself, perhaps with the aid of his cards or some comparable means of divination.
I don’t think my guest ever asked me for anything, nor did he accept anything I offered. The storm had broken late that evening, and his reading had been promising. So, the man opened the door to find a truly beautiful morning. Soon, he was on his way.
***
It is hard to explain just how out-of-place my guest for the evening had been. The man would have had far more luck turning south and heading into Sedona. Perhaps one of the more shady medicine-men would have sold him a quick Blessing-Way, but the real thing, so to speak, is a family affair. It would take friends and relatives to put together the resources, to aid in the ceremonies, and to help in the long rites. The proper healing from a local perspective might have taken several nights on end with several participants needed to make all this work. The logic of the system is as much social as it is metaphysical. Repayment for all of this effort would take the form of similar service when those same people needed help in various forms during over the course of their lives.
This man didn’t really fit into the scenario he was trying to bring about. It wasn’t just the clumsy eclecticism of tarot cards and native healers that seemed off to me. On a much more profound level, my guest had come seeking a personal experience; its social implications were simply beyond him. With enough goodwill, folks could of course devise a work-around, but how likely was it that anyone would give him the chance? To say nothing of the odds that any of it would work!
Who knows?
I could easily hope that my guest for that evening found what he was looking for and flourishes today living, evidence that my sense of both metaphysics and indigenous culture are dead wrong on all counts.
It was desperation, not malice, that brought this man to Navajo country, and yet his failure to appreciate the social setting was part of a much larger problem. I often wonder just what is it about other people’s rituals and beliefs that makes them so attractive to those on a spiritual quest, even with personal health hanging in the balance? Among other things, this question always comes to mind when I think of that particular night in Chinle. Once that question takes hold of my thoughts, I cannot help but to want to follow it down a few similar paths.
***
I remember reading about the ascended spiritual masters (Kuthumi, Maitreya, St. Germaine, etc.) in my grandmother’s old Theosophy books. The masters dwelt on this earth, at least when they wanted to, or so I read. The home of the masters, so the story goes, rested in the remotest parts of Tibet. I suppose that when the books had been written, this seemed an adequate explanation for the seeming impossibility of finding the masters by normal means. It took meditation to bridge the distance.
I remember sitting in on a séance as a child in the early 70s, one in which I and several family members received the names of our spirit guides. I remember the name of my “Indian guide.” It was “White Thumb.” With the name of “Wee One,” my “Joy Guide” also seemed to bring to mind an Indian, albeit a little one, perhaps an invisible playmate, …very useful to a kid living on a ranch inconveniently far from my classmates. I wasn’t half as interested in any of my other guides as I was in these two.
I also remember that the name of my father’s Indian guide had been of the South Asian variety. I cringe at the explanation, …this was a higher form of Indian guide, so he was told. I cringed again many years later when a family friend dismissed questions about the authenticity of sweat baths run by non-Indian practitioners. She assured me that she and her spiritual mentors were engaged in practices far more advanced than anything Native Americans had actually done. And of course I thought about all of this when I learned about the tragedy of a sweat bath lead by James Arther Ray. I wonder if he too was engaged in practices far more advanced than those of the Indian peoples from whom he borrowed piecemeal?
I remember a woman at a Native American Studies conference who once asked me if I was following the “Red Road,” a question so loaded with cultural baggage I couldn’t begin to unpack it in time to give an adequate response. I expect the woman must have found me quite a disappointment.
But Spiritual appropriation isn’t just limited to Native American traditions. I recall with great pleasure reading Karma Cola long before I headed out to the rez. Gita Mehta’s brutal observations on the antics of spiritual tourists in India touch upon issues quite familiar to those observing how Native traditions fare in New Age circles. Many of the characters she describes in Karma Cola appear quite as hapless as my guest sitting there reading tarot cards on his way to find a Medicine Man. Few seem quite so innocent or nearly as sympathetic.
Mehta has been rightly criticized for focusing on the negatives. So many claim to have found something of value in Eastern traditions. What personal pettiness it must take to deny or to minimize this! And yet the specter of people on a personal quest, proceeding oblivious to the social context in which they operate rings true for me. Whatever folks may have found in these strange, foreign, traditions, it seems a safe bet to suggest that they commonly miss much more.
What bothers me most is that the part spiritual tourists miss may well be the most important piece of the story, the part which anchors all that spiritual talk to an established community. I cannot help but wonder if the quest to learn someone else’s spirituality isn’t rather commonly an effort to escape that very thing!
Those traveling (literally or metaphorically) through other people universe are freed from much of the social context in which it the symbols and ideas they use acquire meaning. They can learn how to perform a ritual, or even what it means in some idealized sense, but they are freed from the tedium by which that ritual is connected to countless aspects of daily existence. Most importantly, spiritual tourists are free to fill in the gaps as they see fit. Perhaps some people need this; perhaps some even do great things with the opportunity. Either way, the point stands.
For some at least, the chance to strip a practice of its social context and rebuild it as they see fit is precisely the pay-off for embarking on a trip into unknown spiritual territory. There may be good reasons for doing that, but how often do people even realize that is what they are doing?
It is certainly common enough to speak of belief as a choice, but could I choose to believe that I was not sitting in a chair right now? (I am.) Could I choose to believe that the music playing at this moment (Sky-Fucking-Line-of-Toronto) had been recorded by The Kinks? (It was The Rugburns.) Could I choose to believe that my cat, Auto-Kitty (pictured to the left) is a Siamese? (She is of course a Tortie.)
Mind you, I am not asking if I could tell you that Auto-Kitty is a Siamese. I most certainly could. I am not asking if I could play some special word-game in approaching the subject and define ‘Siamese’ in such a manner as to include cats with a tortoise-shell coat. I am not even asking whether or not I could embark on some long-term project to convince myself that my little Auto-Kitty was really a Siamese. …though I really don’t think I could do that either. No, I am asking whether or not I could choose to believe, right here and now, that a cat I know to be something other than a Siamese was in fact (using a conventional understanding of the term) actually a Siamese?
The answer is ‘no’.
I think it is safe to say, dear reader, that we could come up with a range of similar propositions for you, claims that you could not choose to believe, at least not without a complex long-term brain-washing process to get you there. You could probably assert these claims, but you could not actually believe them.
So, there is at least one respect in which belief appears to present a limit to our choices. Somewhere in the question of what one believes, we all encounter an emergent property which is beyond the control of our immediate will. …Okay, at least the vast majority of us do.
No, it is not my intention to suggest that we have no choice at all with respect to beliefs, but rather to suggest that the choices must in some respect live with this emergent property, the one which defies our power to shape it at will. Truth be told I think we could probably put a range of different propositions on a scale of sorts. Auto-Kitty’s non-Siamese status is, for me at least at maximum (or near maximum) resistance to the whims of my personal belief. For you, perhaps, taking my word for it, there is perhaps cause for doubt about the matter, and it might be reasonable to say that one’s response to doubt involves a degree of choice.
More to the point at hand, we could perhaps find a range of propositions about subjects inherently difficult to resolve, full of ambiguity, and perhaps even loaded with more heuristic than factual value. One might get to say that he or she has a bit more choice in such matters. But I still think it is worth knowing that somewhere in our mental landscape, we normally encounter a limitation, a point of resistance to the free play of our choices.
I should add that I do think personality is another variable. Some people seem far more capable of choosing what to believe than others. I should also add that in at least one respect this is far from a virtue.
So what?
Well, what I am getting at is a trace of the larger question of Beliefs with a capital B. I don’t mean beliefs such as; What color is the chair? What kind of cat is that? or Is there too much chili paste in the chicken red curry? No, I mean questions like; Do you believe in God? How about reincarnation? karma? …The Holy Trinity? …you get the idea. Because people often speak of these beliefs as a choice.
The notion that belief in god is a choice is a particularly common fashion of speaking, and that fashion of speaking can be very misleading. It makes of belief a moral decision, and side-steps the epistemological questions about that belief in favor of arguments from consequantialism. One must, according to this approach, choose whether or not to accept or reject God, all of which actually begs the question of whether or not She actually exists.
But I don’t wish to go too far down this particular road at the moment. I am more interested in fleshing out how the issue affects self-presentation in matters of belief.
Okay, I am thinking about how this affects me!
You see, I often think back to these days of my own deconversion, and I realize that I have become accustomed to speaking of the process in unnecessarily mystical terms. I sometimes say that “I lost belief in God at around the age of 18,” or I may explain that “I chose to reject religion at that age.” Perhaps I will say that “I lost my faith,” and so on.
I don’t think this language is at all unusual, but the more I think about it the more I realize that they are not accurate descriptions of what happened at that time in my life at all. It would be far closer to the truth to say that I never really had faith at all. It would be more precise to say that I could find no aspect of my thought process which has ever answered to the concept of ‘faith’ as it is normally used in connection to belief in God.
Still further, I think it would be more accurate to say that I never really believed in God. Oh, I wanted to! As a young teen I REALLY wanted God in my life. I read. I prayed. I meditated. I studied. I did everything I could to ‘find God’ as they say, and the truth is that I just never did. I found a great deal of speech about him, but that speech never resonated with me on any personal level, nor did it point to anything in the objective world that struck me as a good candidate for a deity. When the day came that I finally came to see myself as an unbeliever, it was less a rejection of some viable notion than it was a concession that no such concept could be found in my mental landscape.
It was less a choice to reject belief than an acknowledgement of a mental state over which I did not really have a choice.
This was about the age of 18 or 19, and by that time I had come to know a number of approaches to the subject of God and religion. But these were always bracketed concepts in my own mind. They were ideas that someone else believed in, definitions of God that fit someone else’s beliefs, …or at least their claims. When I embraced my role as an unbeliever, the decision changed absolutely nothing about my beliefs. It was a change in my self-presentation, a decision about how best to describe the beliefs (or the lack thereof) that I already had.
For me at least, I could no more choose to believe in God than I could choose to believe that Auto-Kitty is a Siamese. I could say that God exists of course, but short of equivocation, I could not mean it.
I could deflect the question and say that I do not know whether or not God exists. Better yet, I could grunt and change the subject.
I could choose to put forward a variety of labels for my thoughts on the subject. So, for example, I could probably describe myself as either an ‘atheist’, an ‘agnostic’, or even an ‘agnostic atheist’. I could add the qualifiers ‘weak’ before ‘atheist’ or ‘soft’ before ‘agnostic’, or I could leave them off according to taste. Any of these approaches would be an equally accurate description of my take on the matter of God. I am somewhat inclined to believe that the label ‘non-cognitivism’ would work as well, though I would have to read-up a bit more on that approach to the issue before deciding once and for all on the label. But let us be clear, what I am choosing here is a label and a certain amount of baggage that goes with that label. What I am not choosing is what I will or won’t actually believe.
I have a little more wiggle room on the issue of surety. I could say that I am certain on the matter or that I am open to the possibility that a god does exist. The cognitive hazards of container metaphors aside, both of these could be a reasonably accurate description of my attitude on any given day. Choosing one or the other term would in a sense help to make the issue normative; it would give me an incentive to try for the attitude I had adopted as a self-description, and to avoid the other. Either way, I do feel like I have a little more choice in the degree of certainty I wish present my approach to this issue to others.
Indeed, I have lots of choices about the way I package my lack of belief and explain it to others. I also have lots of choices about what my (non-)beliefs mean to me and how they will shape my actions in the future.
What I do not have a choice about is what I actually believe on the subject. Somewhere in there, the power of choice simply escapes me.
***
Okay, I lied about what Auto-Kitty was trying to say in the title. What she was actually trying to tell you with that little meow of hers is that in the picture above, she is more comfortable than you or I or any other person in the whole of human history will ever be. She just wanted you to know that.
As far as irritation goes, this one comes close to being a mere amusement. I am talking about a challenge issued by The Atheist Advocate, the terms of which are fairly well explained by the illustration here, and I have to admit it’s tempting to just get behind this one. Seriously, I can almost go along with it.
