Saturday, January 19th
George Lakoff and the family metaphor
We can apply the distinction in my last blog between monarchic and democratic views of human structure to its most basic form: the family. We can describe a monarchic family as one in which one of the parents has the most power and a democratic family as one where the parents (or all members) have equal power. It occurred to me that this distinction between a monarchic and democratic family has already been described, though in different terms, by George Lakoff. Lakoff is a linguist who has a strong side interest in politics. One of his main political contribution has been to describe the difference between progressives and conservatives in terms of family metaphor. Interestingly, nobody seems to dispute this metaphor, though some are not happy with it. Rather than using the terms monarchic and democratic, Lakoff uses the terms "strict father" and "nurturant parent" to describe the two paradigms.
Some progressives are unhappy with this, saying "nurturant parent" isn't too different from "nurturant mommy." There are clear political disadvantages to characterizing the Democratic Pary as the nurturant mommy party. But the main problem is this: Lakoff in his political metaphor had to keep some degree of monarchic thinking. It is still political suicide to go "completely" democratic. Lakoff's nurturant parent is still a monarch; Lakoff is unwilling to admit a "nurturant parents" paradigm. This is a shame, since the U. S. government is (or should be) a balance between three branches of equal power, with none of them having monarchic power over the other two. Unfortunately we don't think of them this way. Especially in times of crisis, we revert to the comfort that monarchic thinking brings.
In my opinion, Lakoff was closer to the point when he described the difference between progressive and conservative (or democratic and monarchic) as a difference between direct and systemic causality. According to Lakoff, conservatives tend to view things in terms of direct causality (things have a single cause) whereas progressives tend to view things in terms of systemic causality (things have multiple causes). In terms of ultimates, we can ask how the universe was caused. Did the universe have a single cause (usually named "God") or should we understand the universe as caused by multiple sources?
Sunday, January 13th
Monarchy vs. Democracy
In my last blog I suggested that there is a crucial difference in the way value is affixed in monarchy as opposed to democracy. In democracy value (or rightness or goodness) is a matter of consensus whereas in monarchy value (or rightness or goodness) depends on the opinion of a single individual: the monarch.
The term "monarchy" immediately conjures up pictures of a king ruling a kingdom, but I am going to use the term more generally to mean any situation where there is a single authority figure. I have been a part of some conservative Christian churches which were certainly monarchies, but the monarch was called "pastor" instead of "king." We shouldn't be surprised at all to find monarchical thinking in such churches because they model their authority structures after the ones found in the Bible, a collection of books written at a time when monarchy was completely dominant as a political model.
A Kingdom is the largest example of a monarchy. A conservative Church is smaller. If we continue down to the smallest political structure possible we find the Family. And not surprisingly, conservative Christians generally believe strongly that the Family should also be a monarchy. The monarch in this case is called "husband" rather than "king" or "pastor."
In all of these cases of monarchy, power is vested in the single strongest figure. In democracy, power is vested in the largest and therefore strongest collection of individuals. In democracy as a political form, authority comes from determining by vote the will of the largest group on a particular matter. So monarchy and democracy are similar in that authority is roughly synonymous with power, but different in that monarchy is concerned with the power differences between single individuals whereas democracy defines power relative to the size of various groups of individuals.
I suggested in my last blog that the principles of monarchy could have come from a biological function, namely the self preservation instinct. It is possible that the principles of democracy could also have their root in a biological function or functions, probably the various social instinct that humans have.
All human institutions are likely to mix monarchy and democracy in varying degrees such that there is no such thing as a "pure" monarchy or democracy. In our own current political system we have a figure that looks something like a monarch, namely the president. Interestingly, in 21st century Christianity, God in popular consciousness looks more like a president than he does a king. For example, one of the main expectations of our president is that he keep our economy prosperous (it's the economy, stupid). This is paralleled in the prosperity gospel, in which God, in contradistinction to a king (and the God of the Bible), primarily is concerned with the prosperity of his "subjects."
Friday, January 11th
The value of a human soul
The soul, according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is the self-aware essence unique to a particular living being.- Wikipedia
My last blog entry got me thinking about the value of a human soul. If we can admit that "soul" is a religious word that is roughly analogous to the word "self," then we can invoke the self preservation instinct to explain the very high value a human soul is commonly held to have. Because of the self preservation instinct, my selfhood, or my "soul" will naturally be the most valuable thing in the world to me, even more valuable than the entire world. "For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?"
This settles the matter until I perceive that in the "whole world" there are other beings very much like me- other human beings. Very likely they have the exact same sense of selfhood that I have. What is the value of their souls? It is selfish of me to insist that the value of my soul is higher than the value of other souls that I perceive around me. Yet this is exactly what my self preservation instinct continues to tell me. This leads naturally to a competition as I seek to prove that my selfhood is of the very highest value in the whole world, and all the other humans do the same.
With this competition for value of souls among individual humans comes the possibility of winners and losers: those who are judged to have souls of high value and those who are judged to have souls of low or no value. Who is to judge? For the large part of human history, the monarch (translation: one authority) has been the judge. And who does the monarch judge to have the highest value soul of all the humans? Because of his (human monarchs overwhelmingly have been male) self preservation instinct, the monarch will judge his own soul to be overwhelmingly the most valuable.
Historically monotheism came into being at a time when monarchy was firmly entrenched as a political system. So we should not be surprised at all to find that the monotheistic God looks like the typical king of the first millennium B. C. God certainly is a monarch and male. And whatever may be said of how God affixes the value of other human souls, it is clear that God judges his own selfhood to be far more valuable than that of any other human soul or even the sum total of all other souls. God's Selfhood is of such high value that all other souls should give it continual worship- continually proclaiming that God's Selfhood is the most valuable thing that exists or can possibly exist.
It is commonly believed that if God does not exist than there can be no way to say that human life is of any value whatsoever. The pervasive power of this false dichotomy shows how entrenched monarchy still is in our way of thinking, at least our religious thinking. This should come as no surprise when we realize that monarchy as a political system was still very evident all over the globe as little as 300 years ago. The Democratic Age (or Republican Age if you prefer) is still just recent jot in the entire history of humankind.
In a democratic system value is affixed in a different way than in monarchy. I will examine the differences the next time I choose to blog.
Sunday, January 6th
The Numinous
Not long ago various friends gave us a few books to help us deal with the grief of recent losses. I found the most interesting of these to be The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis. I read a few of C. S. Lewis' philosophical essays years ago back when I was still a strong Christian, and it was interesting to read him again years later now that I am an unbeliever. The foremost impression that I got was that his reputation as a deep Christian thinker is certainly well deserved. Yet his thinking is not so lofty that it doesn't touch common human experience.
One main thesis of The Problem of Pain is that pain necessarily must exist if rational beings that make choices and are aware of the existence of other beings exist. Lewis explains this brilliantly in a way that feeds into his belief in God's existence, but there is a simpler way to prove it. Speaking in terms of evolution, for beings to survive they must have some sense of selfhood, and the drive to preserve that selfhood against annihilation. This is commonly called the self preservation instinct. Pain is necessary to this. There must be some biological mechanism which says that allowing one's self to be hit by a mack truck is an undesirable experience, and not a desirable one. Pain fits the bill perfectly. One theological problem with Lewis' position which he acknowledges as an aside but almost as quickly dismisses, is that pain must exist in the Christian heaven, since beings with a sense of selfhood exist there. Lewis' explanation is if pain is below a certain threshold, we do not consider it an evil, but desirable. He uses the example of the slight ache in one's legs after a long day of hiking. It seems to me that the Buddhist conception of heaven is a bit more honest, which acknowledges that only when one annihilates all sense of selfhood can one experience heaven.
As brilliantly as Lewis exposits this necessary relationship between pain and self, I was disappointed that he did not see a possible similar relationship between what he calls The Numinous and Self. The existence of The Numimous is Lewis' main proofs for God's existence in The Problem of Pain. Lewis defines The Numinous as humankind's universal belief in a transcendent reality and says this about it:
We do not know how far back in history this feeling goes. The earliest men almost certainly believed in things which would excite the feeling in us if we believed in them, and it seems therefore probable that numinous awe is as old as humanity itself. But our main concern is not with dates. The important thing is that somehow or other it came into existence, and is widespread, and does not disappear from the mind with the growth of knowledge and civilization.
[...] There seem to be, in fact, only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function [...] or else it is direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name Revelation might be properly given.
These two views which Lewis states are clearly a false dichotomy. But even if option one, the "mere twist in the human mind" were accepted, would it be so far off what we observe in species other than humans? There is a huge number of things we observe in animals that seem to serve no clear biological function, such as the colorful buttocks of certain species of baboon. Perhaps belief in The Numinous just happened to evolve in humans for no clear reason. But it is not necessary to defend this. Belief in The Numinous does in fact serve a clear biological function relating to self preservation. We can see that clearly in the way monotheism has developed. The drive for self preservation will be stronger as the value of the Self is increased. What could increase the value of Self more than belief that one's self exists forever in the form of a Soul which has infinite value to a transcendent Being who is Himself of infinite value?
Thursday, January 3rd
The return of cruel blogging
Many, many years ago (well, about 1995 anyway which is a lot of time in the computer world) I decided I would make a website. It was really exciting to be able to design a website back then. There weren't yet popular software packages that did the job and the few non-professional individuals that were doing it were doing it "by hand," learning html from scratch. Though it was fun designing a website, I learned that there really wasn't much point unless you had this thing called "content." This was something of an issue because lots and lots of the people who were designing personal websites for fun (like me) didn't really have such a thing as "content." For them, as for me, "content" was something of an afterthought: it was more fun just to own and to design your very own website.
One thing I decided would be fun to put on my own personal website in the way of content was a series of articles outlining what I though about this or that issue. These had mostly to do with religious issues with a side of music: particularly church music. "Blog" wasn't a term that had come into popular consciousness yet- but in fact what I and many others were doing was a kind of primitive blogging. In fact, I think that somebody picked up on the fact that there were a lot of people in my boat and came up with this radical concept of keeping a weblog. As we all know, the idea caught on like wildfire.
Blogging software makes the job of getting your personal opinion articles up on the 'net a piece of cake. There is no longer the necessity of designing a nice looking page from scratch- all that is necessary is to input the raw text and the software takes care of the rest. Pretty neat concept.
When I first started blogging, my idea was to parallel what I had already been doing: to write a series of mini-articles which were essentially a conversation with myself about this or that subject. I suspected that if I had any readers, it would be an occasional stranger that surfed in from this or that search engine. Certainly if any of my friends or acquaintances were reading my blog, they weren't telling me- and I wasn't getting any comments.
Then I started attending Central Vineyard church, a quite a bit younger crowd than my previous church, and full of avid bloggers. I discovered the idea of a blogging community: a group of bloggers who read and commented on each other's blogs. I started getting used to the idea that my friends and acquaintances would be reading my blog, and my writing started changing a bit.
When my wife Nancy found out about the concept of a blogging community, the idea became more attractive to her. She started her own live journal blog and jumped right in. One thing that she noticed was that my blog was still pretty much tailored to strangers: I didn't talk much about the personal and relational stuff that was likely to be more interesting to people that already knew me. Thus it was that the content of my blog has changed somewhat over the years and I have moved away from the original idea of writing articles intended to express my personal point of view and more towards talking about particulars in my life that might be interesting to friends and aquaintances.
Then came my faith crisis and my movement away from Christianity and church. This has put my blog in an interesting position. Suddenly it seems as though my blog is not going to be very attractive for people in my church to read- in fact if I am to talk about religious issues it could be painful for them.
So I am in a bad position as far as my blog is concerned: I still want to talk about the transcendent, but my new beliefs are likely to cause pain to the people who have been reading my blog the most over the past few years. In this context I have been thinking about a Thomas Paine quote I ran across recently: "Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man." I wonder to what extent believing in the God of Christianity has made me more cruel than I otherwise might have been?
What does it mean to be cruel? "Able or disposed to inflict pain or suffering" is one definition, "indifference to suffering and even positive pleasure in inflicting it" is another. Cruel blogging therefore would be a blog which is indifferent to the suffering it may cause those who read it- or one that even takes pleasure in inflicting such suffering on others. Blogging about God and the transcendent seems to have a particular ability to be cruel: people have strong beliefs about such things and they have particular ability to suffer mentally when they read opinions by friends that are opposed to their own opinions.
Blogging about the transcendent is by no means the only type of blogging that has the potential to be cruel. I immediately think of political blogging as having at least as much potential to be cruel. Any subject which can generate strong and opposing opinions has this potential.
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