In memory of a great man…

My Grandpa Bill died today.  I really loved him.  He had been ill for a while, and had gone downhill over the last few days.  So it wasn’t a shock, but still.  The enormity is not one of tragic loss, for he lived a beautiful life.  I’ll miss him, for sure.  But this is not the kind of grief that wells up from injustice and unfairness and senselessness.  This enormity springs from the reverberation of the girders that make up my own life, like all the steel in a bridge ringing when a hammer strikes an I-beam.

Bill taught me a lot of stuff.  When I was five years old, he taught me how to skid on my bicycle.  My dad wasn’t thrilled about the marks all over his driveway, but I think about Bill almost every time I get on my bike.

Now Bill was an Eagle Scout back when merit badges might require dynamite from the dry goods store.  His rascally sense of good, clean fun taught me to seize the day, to take responsible risks.  Don’t ask why, ask “why not?”  And if it involves a cherry bomb, so much the better!

He taught me how to turn the other cheek.  He had no tolerance for the mistreatment of others, but never demanded redress when he was mistreated.  He never wanted it to be about him, but he always wanted his loved ones to thrive.

He taught me how to persevere.  Five months in Germany left him physically – and I suspect – emotionally scarred for years.  But he refused to let those scars remove life and joy.  He knew better than all of us the depths of pain and hunger.  But he refused to be defined by them.

Bill had a huge impact on who I am.  How different it could have been!  He looked up one day 64 years ago to see an 88mm howitzer shell push through the wooden beams in the roof above him.  It didn’t explode.  How different would my life be if it had?  How different would I be?  How different would I be if he, like so many others, had not been willing to go stand in the way of that shell?

You see, Bill was patient and kind.  He didn’t envy.  He wasn’t proud, and he would never boast.  He was not rude or self-seeking.  He was not easily angered, and he didn’t hold grudges.  He would not dwell on the bad, but always rejoiced when I did well.  He always protected, for sure.  He always trusted, always hoped, and God knows he always persevered.

Even now, I see signs of Bill all around me.  The love and dedication he put into his marriage has now been reflected two generations down.  My son makes the same goofy jokes and gets the same silly grin that his great-grandfather so often did.  The birds at my birdfeeder remind me of his.

This morning, I got out my bike.  I got up some speed and laid down a great big skid mark across my own driveway, so he could see it.  Thanks, Bill.  I love you.

 

A critique of consequentialism, part II

In my first post on this topic, I highlighted what I think is a pervasive trend among professional philosophers and regular people, both religious and non-religious.  That is, that the primary determinant of the value of a given action is the outcome that it produces, that the desired outcome is happiness, and that reason should play some role in determining which of a set of possible actions will bring about the most happiness.

In contrast to that, I’ll propose my own axioms, and then we can follow them as far as they go.

1. The most important thing — the goal-function — is to obtain deep relationships with other people and with God.
2. The action that you should take in a situation should generally be the one that deepens a relationship that you are involved in.
3. Reason should play some role in determining which of a set of possible actions will bring about the deepening of relationships that you are involved in.

Before we can follow this to logical consequences, there are a number of clarifications that have to be made.

What is a deep relationship?  How do you say one relationship is deeper than another?

Yeah, well that’s a tricky one, isn’t it?  Maybe this is a cop-out, but I’m going to pull what I think more real philosophers should pull — the “I know it when I see it” argument.  It’s very easy for these types of questions to degenerate into hopeless hairsplitting.  We pretty much know what we mean by a deep relationship.  Put it this way: imagine one or more people in your life whom you are really close to.  Now, imagine that they decided never to talk to you again, and in fact, five years went by without you hearing from them.  You would miss that relationship, right?  A deep relationship is defined as the thing that you would miss in that situation.

I think that such a common-sense definition should be perfectly sufficient for these purposes.  After all, this is supposed to be a way to set values for real life, so real-life definitions of terms are appropriate.  I’m sure there are pathological situations that someone could make up that would be unclear as to whether a relationship was deep or not, but for the vast majority of cases, we should be okay.

Is there no role for maximizing happiness?

I haven’t figured out how to fit this in quite yet, but I do think that there is a role for maximizing something like happiness.  I think that it is important to try to meet the basic needs of others.  I think it’s most important to meet the needs of others around you, because that deepens a relationship, but it’s hard to imagine that feeding hungry people is a bad thing, even if you never meet them.

On a related topic, Miles Burnyeat talks about the difference in meaning of the word happiness now, as compared to even a few hundred years ago.  Today, we tend to think of happiness as a psychological state, like glee and mirth.  More rarely, the distinction is drawn between joy and happiness, where joy is taken as an assumed attitude of optimism and gratitude.  However, for Aristotle, a happy life was one that had been successful at what it had aimed to do (assuming the aim was virtuous.)  Thus, he thought it might have been impossible to know if you had a happy life until after you were dead!  This is the sense of the word the Framers intended when they wrote of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…” — not an attempt to have a good time on Saturday night, but an attempt to live a life of successful virtue.

 

A critique of consequentialism, part IA

My last post seems to have brought out the Objectivists for some reason.  I realized from their comments that I was not being precise in my language.  However, I think this is an important point.

When I describe a statement as rational, I will mean “arrived at by a coherent series of steps. which is logical, in the sense that it follows rules of formal logic.”  Some people use rational and logical to mean correct — “The rational conclusion is that Heller invented a new gun right.”  That statement is not rational by my definition, as there is no justification with reasons.  Maybe it’s so, and maybe it ain’t, but it certainly isn’t rational or logical.  It will, however, probably get some additional hits to this post.

 

A critique of consequentialism, part I

Let me preface this by saying that I have done no where near as much reading as I should have done on the this subject. I welcome reading suggestions, whether they be to fill out my understanding of other positions, correct my misrepresentations of other positions, or point out that my position has already been fully explained somewhere else. However, with a family and a day job, I’m not likely to get to all of the things I should read any time soon. Rather than putting this posting series off by 30 years, I’m going to write it now out of ignorance.

There is an excellent survey series of philosophical topics in podcast form known as Philosophy Bites. As I’ve listened to quite a number of these short reviews of important philosophers, I’ve noticed that many share a common central theme. While they might not all classify themselves as consequentialists, there is a strong consequentialist streak in many of them. Furthermore, many define the consequential goal as happiness, pleasure, or the avoidance of pain.

Let’s back up a second. Consequentialism is simply the idea that the point of doing something is for the end result. This is what most of us do every day when we go to work. While you might not feel like getting up and going to work today, you have a goal to make money. (Actually, probably your goal is a bigger house, or a good retirement, or education for your children, or a vacation to Maui. All of those become fungible with money.) If you were told you could do anything you wanted today and still get paid, you might well choose not to go to work.

If you are in school, you work hard in each class to get a good grade, and in all your classes to graduate, and to graduate so you can get a job, and to get a job so you can go to Maui. Consequentialism is at the core of the “Protestant work ethic.” And it would be foolish to deny that it has served America well, at least materially.

Consequentialism also is at the heart of much of the study of practical ethics today, particularly bioethics. The central argument in very many bioethics questions today is whether some interim bad thing in a medical/biological process is bad enough to outweigh the good of the goal. For some, like Peter Singer, this becomes a full-fledged utilitarianism. Mr. Spock summarized it neatly: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. In the case of utilitarianism, you decide on the goal-function, and then all choices should be made in such a way to maximize that goal added up over all of society. Other forms of consequentialism do not insist as strictly on a sum over all members of society, but they share the idea that the best ethical choice is the one that does best at achieving your goal function. As we’ll discuss later, that goal function is generally (since Socrates) defined as some kind of happiness or pleasure.

Mr. Spock was keen on utilitarianism because utilitarianism is keen on reason. It relies on a rational accounting of the various sources of good and sources of bad, and a clear, rational evaluation of the optimal choice. It allows no room for a sentimental choice — famously, if your dog and a stranger’s child are drowning and you can only, you are obligated to save the child, even if it is your favorite dog.

Now, many will take issue with “cold-hearted rationality.” I will not. However, I will take issue with the weight to which many philosophers (and politicians and regular people) give to rationality. It is often said that the “rational answer” is the correct one; if you choose something else, you are being selfish or sentimental. Irrational equals wrong. Well, maybe so, but rational can equal wrong also. For every rational system — that is, every formal logic — rests on a set of axioms. To my knowledge (see the caveat above about not reading enough) it is impossible to create a logic that is free of axioms.

So, clearly, you may construct a system of logic that is self-consistent, based on a set of axioms. (It will not be complete, but that’s a different story.) But that doesn’t lend any rational proof that your axioms are correct; in fact, it is impossible to offer rational proof of the correctness of your axioms. There is only self-consistency.

This is how I appreciate Singer. I think he is brilliant, and I think his arguments are very tight. I disagree with most of his conclusions, because I disagree with most of his axioms. Neither one of us is being irrational in this, and furthermore, it is not a debate that can be settled by logic. Interesting, no?

I’ll go on about the axioms that I choose in the next part, but let me take a crack at summarizing some representative axioms of the philosophical mainstream:

1. The most important (in some cases, the only important) aspect of a philosophical/ethical question is the outcome.
2. A good outcome is one which brings happiness or pleasure to individuals. A bad outcome is one which brings pain, especially physical pain, to individuals.
3. Logical arguments are the best way to get from these axioms to practical conclusions about how to act.

There are many variations of course: the relative importance of interim or secondary goals, the relative value of pleasure for individuals of different status, proximity, species, etc., the relative importance of individual vs. group benefit, and so on. But these basic axioms go back to at least Aristotle, who attributed them to Socrates.

In the next part, I’m going to outline my view, which is quite a bit different. I believe it is just as rational, but it relies on a different set of axioms. And it flies in the face of what is generally considered to be rational ethics.

 

The Minimal Set of Christianity

Butler Bass’ book “Christianity for the Rest of Us” has gotten me thinking about what constitutes the minimal set of Christianity. That is, what is the minimal set of beliefs/doctrines/statements that one must hold to be true in order to be a Christian? If you don’t hold at least these beliefs, then you might be a good person, even a great person, even a spiritual person, but honestly, you are more of a Unitarian than a Christian.  So, what are “these beliefs”?

Some emergent church proponents hold that set to be the null set. Well, actually they will probably say that as long as the beliefs are “true for you” then that is good enough. This is the kind of philosophical silliness that Borg is far too prone to. If you’ve read my other posts (and my only reader, John, has) you’ll know that I find that kind of statement “not even wrong.” So, let’s move on.

Butler Bass would find the question to be a meaningful one, but I’m not sure what her answer would be.

Since this is my blog, and I’m not turning it in to get graded, I won’t speculate on her answers, but simply give you mine. Feel free to leave your own in the comments. And just for fun, let’s try to keep it to 4 bullet points. “Three bullet points” is so 1990s.

• “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” God is the one responsible for creating the universe and everything in it; everything good flows from Him. He created us to be in relationship with Him.
• “For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn it, but rather that it might be saved through Him.” When we have failed to be in good relationship with God, he sent Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, to live with us where he was killed and resurrected, so that that relationship might be restored.
• “Death is swallowed up in victory… If Christ is not raised, your faith is worthless.” The resurrection of Christ is real and historical. If it is not, then our relationship with God has not been restored, and we have succeeded in permanently ruining it. At that point, it doesn’t much matter what you think about anything.
• “Go and sin no more… Love your neighbor as yourself.” Always be grateful that God was willing to go to such lengths to save our relationship, even when we keep screwing it up. Being grateful means two things: try to stop screwing up that relationship, and try to pass on to others the love that you’ve been shown by being in good relationship with them.

I don’t think you can cross any of those off the list and still be a Christian, instead of a Unitarian or something else. That’s not meant in a pejorative way; I simply mean that people that don’t hold those beliefs are better described by a term other than “Christian.”

Now, I suspect many people (well, at least my only reader) to have a much longer list. I too have a longer list of things I believe to be true about God, our relationship with Him, and our relationship with each other. I just don’t think any of those other things are part of the minimal set. Two Christians can disagree about the relative importance of faith and works, yet both remain Christian. Two Christians can disagree on Paul’s view vs. Peter’s view, literal creationism, postmillenialist eschatology, or even whether it’s okay to have coffee in church — yet remain Christians.

I don’t mean to say that I don’t think there is a correct view and an incorrect view on each of these points. I wouldn’t personally claim to know the correct view in all cases, but I believe one exists for almost all of them. Rather I mean to say that I don’t think that any of those questions matter as much as the four in bullets. Those four are the only ones that are really important; the rest are just details.

So, study the details, learn about them, debate them on the steps of the temple. Let us all move forward to a better understanding of God. But let’s also not forget they are the details.

 

(r)epublicans and (d)emocrats

I, for one, am ecstatic that our two choices for president appear to be Obama and McCain.

That’s because I believe our system is intrinsically a small-r republican one. That is, we elect people — people, I say — that we think would make wise judgments, and then let them make them.

For whatever reason — really, must we go there? — I was listening briefly to Sean Hannity on the radio on the way home. Caller after caller lamented the fact that they could not trust McCain to make the “right decisions” if he were elected president. These people want a robot to sign and veto according to some program. And don’t be feeling smug, you Leftists — I’m sure that if the Left could support talk radio, you’d be saying the same things.

What about the idea of electing a person who is wise? Not one who necessarily agrees with every one of your personal platform planks, but one who can listen, think, and make wise choices? We haven’t had that since… well, a long time. I think Washington was actually that way. Maybe a couple since.

Really, people, if you want a robot, why not just eliminate the president and congress, and have a plebiscite for every question?

 

…what you think it means…

In chapter 14 of “Christianity for the Rest of Us” (page 209), Bass describes a youth listening to a lecture about the Virgin Birth. It had become a discussion about the actuality of the Virgin birth, and afterwards, the youth commented, “I believe in the Virgin Birth. It is so beautiful that it has just got to be true — whether it happened or not.”

This is precisely the kind of comment that baffles me. Either it happened, and it’s true, or it didn’t happen and it’s not. Saying it’s true but didn’t happen makes no sense to me. Saying that it didn’t happen, but we can learn true wisdom from the story makes sense. Saying it didn’t happen and was simply an embellishment by later writers makes sense. Those are alternative truth claims. But saying it might not have happened but is still true is a logical impossibility.

Still, our group had some useful insights to keep in mind. Basically, the consensus was that we shouldn’t take a “common expression” like that to be loaded with epistemological jargon. That is, the speaker probably thinks his statement is logically equivalent to, “The historical details are not nearly as important to me as the meaning and beauty in the story.” I think that’s a very different statement, but then again, I’m a geek.

Suppose that’s true, and that’s what he meant. I can’t decide whether I think that that means the issue should be blown off as irrelevant, or whether it’s a really big problem. The sharing of terms in the different modes of postmodernism (see previous) allows the morphing of one term into an implication of something very different. For example, even though Borg and Bass use very similar vocabulary, I’m convinced after reading their books that they share very little ontology. Nevertheless, unless you are a major epistemology geek, you probably think they are roughly the same.

“Words, they’re all we’ve got to go on.” – Stoppard, Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead

 

You keep saying that word…

The biggest issue I have with the emergent church is centered around the word “postmodernism.” I find the postmodernist philosophy to be inconsistent and intellectually unsatisfying. I find the literary version to be ridiculous and self-absorbed. So, how could a Christian church go around claiming to be postmodern?

One of my complaints with much of the writing on this topic is a failure to define terms. Of course, the literary postmodernists would claim that defining terms is a fundamentally impossible operation…. But anyway, here’s what I mean.

Philosophical postmodernism: That philosophy which holds that objective truth, if it exists at all, is completely unknowable by human beings. Humans must use language to express all thoughts and ideas, but we have no way of knowing if our language expresses reality, or if it is just language. Therefore, “truth” and “meaning” are re-defined to refer to the consistency of statements within our own “web of meaning.” Other people can have other webs of meaning, and there is no way of sorting out who is right and who is wrong.

Literary postmodernism: Turn-of-the-century fiction was written to stand on its own; to tell a tale, demonstrate a moral principle, or make some point that the author was trying to make. “Modern” fiction (roughly from the 20’s to the 60’s or so) asserted that a work of fiction was the joint effort of writer and reader — every novel was different for each person who read it, because they each brought different backgrounds and contexts to the story. “Postmodern” literary theory says that the author is irrelevant. What the author was trying to say in the work has no bearing whatsoever, but instead the language (which is the only thing that matters) should be deconstructed to reveal the real meaning — a meaning the author likely wasn’t even aware of.

The philosophy is self-defeating: how can it claim to be true?

The literary method is ridiculous: the triumph of the critics, as they claim that the authors are irrelevant, and only they can reveal the Truth to us.  Any document can be made to say anything.

But Butler Bass (Christianity for the Rest of Us) claims that “This book treats postmodernism as a cultural ethos rather than a philosophical or literary category.” (note 6) She quotes Bauman: “One can think of postmodern life as one lived in a city in which traffic is daily re-routed and street names are liable to be changed without notice.” (page 22). For Butler Bass, the defining aspect of postmodernism seems to be the lack of bedrock certainties in our day-to-day lives.

In some sense, this was really the problem of Modernism. Fast moving world, changing all the time, new industries, the rise of suburbia, the American Westward migration, the decline of the old-fashioned town. I’m not sure what’s “post” about it, except this idea, perhaps, that those certainties cannot exist.

Is that it, then? At the turn of the century, there was certain (if rigid) stability; the Modern era was one where the stability no longer reigned, and the postmodern is that when we believe it doesn’t even exist?

Maybe. But I think, having read the first 4 chapters or so, that Butler Bass is combining the Modern problem of a lack of societal roots, with an aversion to certainty in truth statements, and calling that the postmodern cultural ethos. The prescription, then, involves finding new societal roots combined with a healthy humility in truth claims.

Of course, it’s very different to claim that you should be modest in your certainty about truth, than to claim that all statements about truth are equally true because there is no objective reality. There is some danger in conflating these terms, I’d say.

 

Lent study

So, we’re reading “Christianity for the Rest of Us” by Diane Butler Bass for Lent.  I’ve read the first 2 chapters so far; some things I’m going to like, others, not so much.

Probably this has been said many times, but it seems that one of the things that the emergent church wants to be is nice.   Specifically, the emergent church is pretty well annoyed by the “meanness” of the evangelical right.  This meanness is demonstrated by hardline ideological positions, without empathy for people who find themselves having to make hard choices.  It is demonstrated by solid claims of truth, where the rejection of different views becomes a personal rejection of the viewer.  It is demonstrated by an arrogant attitude that they are in certain possession of truth, that there is no possibility that they could be wrong about anything.

I agree with all of this assessment of the evangelical right.  Certainly there are many evangelicals who reject such attitudes, but equally certainly there are a large number who do not.  I don’t know whether that point of view is actually the dominant view, or just the loudest view from the evangelical church, but the effect is the same.

That being said, much of the emergent church overreacts to this meanness, by saying not that we need to speak the truth in love, but that only the love is important and the truth is not.  Annoyed by those who claim to have sole possession of truth, they claim not that the real truth may be different, but that there is no objective truth.

I don’t know yet whether this is Bass’ claim… we’ll see.

 

Saved by Zero?

John over at “All that Glitters” is on a bit of a rant about Sola Fide — that is, that we are saved by faith alone, and not by works. I should know better than to argue theological points with John — he’ll win every time. Oh well. But I think all of the claims on both sides miss a bit of the point: by their fruits ye shall know them. True faith cannot help but to express itself in works. If there are no works, the faith behind it is probably not solid either. If I speak with tongues of angels, but have not love… The fruits of the Spirit are all “works” things, not intellectual assents to propositions. They are all stuff we do. When Abraham believed, and it was credited as righteousness, that belief meant that he got off his butt and did something.

I’ll grant that James goes pretty far down the road advocating for works. But “faith without works is dead” I take to mean “If you have a faith that does not express itself in works, it’s probably not much of a faith.” The textual/historical/linguistic basis for this is… uh, it makes sense to me in the English. If your intellectual meanderings do not change the way you live your life, what do they matter? I heard once that David Hume struggled with the fact that he really did believe that he was going to meet his friends at the pub in the evening, and that those friends really did exist when he wasn’t looking at them. He could not make his intellectual reasoning match his living reality.

So, sola fide? Sure. There is nothing we can do to earn God’s salvation. It’s like swimming to Hawaii. The best of us may get quite a bit further than the worst, but it doesn’t really matter because we’ll all drown long before we get there. But if all you got is sola fide, that’s probably not the kind of fide that God is looking for.

Faith and works, faith and works, they go together like a horse and carriage… or something.