The River of Heraclitus

Liberals and Conservatives

2012-02-05T16:15:00.000+02:00

Society exists as a tension between conservatives (who resist innovation to preserve the status quo) and liberals (who support innovation to improve the status quo). Ideally, liberals generate a bunch of neat ideas and conservatives shoot down the really dumb ones. In practice, however, people get stuck. When we get stuck, it is usually because too many of us are too conservative. (Liberals go bust really quickly when they go crazy, e.g. Joseph Smith.) What you have in the modern LDS church is a society mired in excessive conservatism. Even as we pay lip-service to liberal innovation ("personal revelation" starting with Joseph Smith in the Grove), in practice we are actively trying to inhibit change in all its forms (which amounts to deluding ourselves into thinking that it doesn't exist: if there is no change, then there is no dangerous innovation to be scared of, and the conservative majority of us can preserve the illusion that things are stable in God's kingdom of order).

There is nothing inherently great about change for its own sake, but (a big but) some change is always necessary to survive. In other words, conservatives are right to resist random change ("ooh! neo-conservatism is so cool! let's throw all of our social weight behind the Religious Right, conveniently forgetting that they have been trying to destroy us since the nineteenth century!"), but wrong to postpone it indefinitely: sometimes, you have to change. The problem with our current situation in the LDS church is that we are trying to live without noticing change. This means that we end up standing for nothing (since change is real), and falling for anything (jumping right into bed with the people who have been seeking to bring the Church down since its formation). Instead of using our brain power to come up with creative new ideas for taking Mormonism forward into the 21st century, we are using it to come up with creative re-interpretations that justify us to implacable enemies (many of whom no longer exist as a significant factor on the demographic landscape) and anchor us to moral positions that are at once un-Mormon and intellectually indefensible.

What is Intelligent Design?

2012-01-27T19:29:00.000+02:00

This screed came out of my pen in reaction to an article on Intelligent Design theory, which was sent to me by a very good friend.

I have believed both sides of this argument: I started out believing in Darwinian evolution, converted to ID, and have re-converted to belief in evolution. To me, it seems abundantly clear (1) that change happens all the time, (2) that there is a significant degree of randomness involved in change, and (3) that people systematically underestimate the randomness (or overestimate their ability to understand it). This does not mean that I think that everything Darwin said is true: it isn't, and current ideas about biological evolution look significantly different from what he put forward in On the Origin of Species. In the future, theories will continue to evolve: it is not in the nature of things for permanent knowledge to exist. Real knowledge depends on context, which is constantly changing. Useful knowledge does not assert itself as something absolute, unchanging, non-evolving.

One problem that people on the ID side have (from my perspective) is that they fail to understand how design really works. Take Paley's analogy: you find a watch on the beach (watch = universe) and presume that some watchmaker (= God) made it. In real life, however, watchmakers don't make watches on their own, with untutored intelligence! The original watch was a clock, which came into existence at multiple times in history in various formats: engineers took those formats and tweaked them, and tweaked them, and tweaked them, and continue to tweak them, creating all kinds of different watches. No one individual ever invented a Platonic form of the watch ("one watch to time them all"). Someone came up with a gizmo that gave someone else an idea for another gizmo, and so on. The watch is evolving as I write this. Watchmakers are noticing random things in their old blueprints, in their customer base, in the work of other watchmakers, and they are building new watches (including some very different from an early Benedictine clock). The original watchmakers did not come up with their watch out of thin air: the gizmos they built were likewise inspired by earlier gizmos (and a crowd of engineering ideas that no single historical individual is responsible for). The way that "intelligent design" actually works in human terms is actually very much like the way modern biologists imagine biological evolution taking place. Engineers share ideas and create multiple gizmos (which become prototypes for more gizmos) just as organisms share DNA and create multiple offspring (which become prototypes for more organisms). One person is not responsible for creating watches (which are a collective phenomenon). One thing is not responsible for creating biological life (which is a collective phenomenon).

Another problem with ID is that it does not really say anything about how we are to understand things. The modern biologist's story of evolution doesn't just give you a fun myth for science class: it explains how diseases happen (as bacteria and viruses evolve to become better predators), how speciation happens (as isolated pockets of organisms develop apart from their parent populations), how ecosystems exist (as multiple populations of living things evolve together) -- and thus how our actions as human beings influence the prevalence of disease and living species. It gives practical answers (that actually work sometimes!) to practical questions (should I build a house here? what kind of house? should I have a pet? what kind? what should I eat? what medicine should I take for a particular illness or infection?). ID, on the other hand, just points out that the whole thing is a mystery. "The universe is the product of an otherwise unknown and perhaps unknowable intelligent designer" (who for some reason left no business card on the beach with Paley's watch). Can I ask the designer what to do when I am sick, when I want to build a house? I can. What does he say? Nothing at all, until I remember that he is also known as God. Then he says all kinds of stuff:

"You are sick? Sacrifice a lamb, or a goat, or two turtle doves, and leave an offering of incense with the priest (who must be paid handsomely to officiate). That didn't work? Well, maybe you can try dedicating a small statue of me (complete with thunderbolts in hand) at your local temple? That didn't work? How about a cast of the affected body part? Still no dice? Well, I suppose you could try burning or cutting yourself: remember that weird dream you had about being on fire the other night? I sometimes talk to people in dreams. Maybe you should ask the local madman what he thinks; I love schizophrenics: they always hear me so loud and clear!"

Historically speaking, God has many conflicting faces (all of them suspiciously human, to my eye), and he offers all kinds of contradictory prescriptions for human life, contradictory prescriptions that are about as reliable as medicine before germ theory. (By saying all kinds of different things over time, God occasionally offered somebody something that worked, much as some pre-modern doctors occasionally cured people with panaceas like quinine. If I give quinine to every sick person I meet, the malaria patients will be cured; some people will get better on their own; and everyone else will die. Old time medicine, like old time religion, worked, but it was not really reliable. Sometimes, avoiding the consumption of pig meat may help society prosper; other times, not so much. God is either really bad at seeing the difference or really bad at communicating it to his acolytes.) The ID people have no practical advice to offer except the outworn ideas presented by God: some of these ideas work (perhaps even very well), and others don't, but it takes an evolutionist to see the difference. The evolutionist may give you some of God's medicine, but he will follow up with you when it doesn't work, and will even invent new medicine (which won't always work, either). The ID guy just hands you over to the priest, who gives you the divine panacea du jour and then lets you survive or die without bothering to think of anything new (and heretical: we have to stick to the tried and true, even when history shows us that it doesn't really work).

Evolution is practical because it changes (mimicking the growth we see in life, and in God, for that matter). ID is impractical because it does not change (mimicking the stagnation we see in death, and in many churches). The people who believe in evolution are engaging in useful thought whenever they ask how changes occur. The people who believe in ID are not, since they have no positive theory of change. I reconverted to belief in evolution when I realized that in my experience (1) change is real, and (2) engaging it practically requires something more than uncritical acceptance of ancient mythology. This is not because the mythology is worthless, but because it contains a lot of chaff mixed in with the wheat, chaff that needs to be sifted out if I am to avoid poisoning myself every time I take something from God's medicine cabinet (which we all do at some point: no one claims to know everything, except for some crazy fanatics, and we all fall back on "common sense" whose usefulness is open to question).

Why Mormons are Christians, Part 2

2012-01-19T22:57:00.000+02:00

This podcast validates my own position that Mormons are Christians. Historically speaking, Abrahamic religion lives in a milieu defined by pseudepigrapha ("false writings" whose historical authors assign their work to some mythical hero, e.g. Moses or Paul or some other legendary Christian apostle or associate of the prophet Muhammad). Like other religious leaders before him (e.g. the Deuteronomists, the Christian writers who gave us the Gospels or some of the dubious Epistles, and Muslim authors of hadith), Joseph Smith (and/or his collaborators) made up stories, sacred stories that he credited to mythical heroes (Moses, Abraham, Mormon, Moroni, Nephi).

Mormonism is just one outgrowth of the giant body of folklore that is Abrahamic religion (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with all their different sects). Folklore can be profound. Folklore can be moving. Folklore can teach you useful things. But it is not history. It cannot teach the lessons of history. Its lessons are about human nature, not what really happened at some point in historical time, since most of it never did (certainly not as advertised): no historical Exodus, no Resurrection, no appearance of the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad, no First Vision for Joseph Smith. These events are myths that explore human nature outside of history--myths like the Lord of the Rings, the Kalevala, the Nibelungenlied, the Volsungasaga, the Homeric epics, the Mahabarata, and the Ramayana.

There is definitely a useful place for myth in the world. I can learn from Tolkien's work without believing in a historical place known as Middle Earth. The character of Bilbo Baggins offers insight into modern human nature, not the nature of a nonexistent tribe of midgets living in a culture that has disappeared from the face of the earth (leaving no physical trace, just like the Lamanites and the Nephites!). All these years I thought I was trying to be a "faithful" historian, I was really just doing my utmost to turn ancient science fiction into factual history. I attended seminars in ancient history that were functionally equivalent to courses in "hobbitology" (complete with the latest research tracing the real history of Homo floresiensis: the Liang Bua cave is all that remains of the Shire)! It would be funnier if people didn't take it all so seriously.

Bob Price is my kind of Southern Baptist, and I am his kind of Mormon.

The Dark Side of Religious Fervor

2012-01-16T18:35:00.000+02:00

A friend brought these clips to my attention. While I don't endorse Christopher Hitchens without qualification (since I have my own opinions), here he summarizes an insight that was crucial to me as I came to doubt my old, naive faith in religion (leaving God out of it for the moment). Religion doesn't make people better. I am not certain (as Hitchens is) that it makes them worse, but it certainly can countenance bad things, including some things so bad that they take my breath away.

In at least some cases, religion seems to exacerbate human situations that are already suboptimal, taking something bad and making it truly rotten. My faith crisis involved seeing this on a small scale in my own life (as I recognized toxic ideas I was clinging to because I had religious faith in them), and on a large scale in the world (where I awoke slowly in the wake of 9/11 to the fact that religion kills as much as it creates, that it is at least as cruel as it is kind, that I was ignoring the vast potential for ruthless destruction that lurked under my innocent willingness to do without question whatever a particular group of older men might tell me to do). This was something horrible to contemplate, but I am honestly more scared of the results had I not dared to look into the abyss and ask myself, "Do I really want to pledge my soul to somebody else? Can I live with faith in an institution that demands unqualified, uncritical obedience?"

Katabasis

2012-01-12T20:58:00.000+02:00

Robert Bly. Iron John: A Book about Men. Originally published by Addison-Wesley, 1990. ISBN: 0306813769.

Julien Smith. The Flinch. Domino Project, 2011. ASIN: B0062Q7S3S.

For many years, I lived with a gnawing fear in the pit of my stomach. In a very visceral way, I just knew that there were bad things abroad in the world. I knew that these bad things were coming for me, and that I was no match for them: they were harder, stronger, bigger, and more complex than anything I was prepared to deal with. I lived in fear of them, all the time. The older I got, the worse the fear became. I feared that I would get sick, that I would not be able to go to school, that I would flunk out, that I would would never get a job, that people would see me for the pathetic weakling I thought I was and reject me without a second thought. As an adolescent, I attempted to deal with this fear in a number of ways: I retreated to books, to chores, to physical activities, and (above all) to religious exercises like prayer and confession.

My youthful attempts to escape the fear were not uniformly successful. While I could put my mind out of fear temporarily with coping strategies (the books, the chores, the physical activities, and some religious activities), I could never really banish it. My most excruciating experiences with it were religious: no matter how hard I prayed, I could not be permanently certain that I was worthy of God's love. It seemed to me that no matter what I did or could do, God was always one thought away from condemning me to hell. In retrospect, I can see that this was largely a question of puberty: I reached it, had some sexual feelings, and was convinced that the devil had taken permanent hold of me (since in spite of all I did--praying every day, studying scripture, serving in church callings, confessing to the bishop repeatedly--I could not make the sex go away). But there were deeper insecurities here than just teenage sexuality, and my spirit was in some measure already broken before the correlated LDS gospel stomped on it for good measure.

Looking back, I think the thing that bothered young me most about life in general and sex in particular was my lack of control. I believed that there should be a way of living that gave me control over myself. I wanted to take action to make myself strong--physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually healthy. I wanted to do something that would help me face the fear. In hard work, I found the closest thing to a panacea: I could toughen my body and my mind with intelligent and diligent practice, spending time in the yard, in the gym, and in the library with thick books. But my spiritual practice seemed to leave me worse than I was before undertaking it. I came away from hard work exhausted but relaxed (and unafraid), while spiritual work left me more worried (and afraid). Even when I had a good spiritual experience, I knew it was only a matter of time before something shattered my fragile feeling of spiritual calm. Every time I went with the youth to the LDS temple, I asked myself Do I really belong here? Am I really worthy to be in the presence of the Lord? and I was always afraid that the answer would be No. When I did feel that negative answer, I wanted to kill myself. The shame was almost unbearable, and talking about it with God and church leaders made it worse. Family members could sometimes talk me down, but it was brutal. I would fantasize about suicide or castration. I feared to share this with anyone. I just wanted to curl up and die, ridding an otherwise beautiful world of the blot that was my miserable, wicked existence.

Robert Bly and Julien Smith write about what ultimately saved me from this psychic death trap. As part of his work on masculine psychic development, Bly talks about katabasis, Greek for descent, as something all of us have to undergo on the road from cradle to grave (Iron John, p. 70):

Our story simply says that after wandering around a while, having no "craft," the young man at last got a job in the kitchen--which is traditionally in the basement--of a castle. The story [of Iron John] says that after all the gold fingertips and hair [the rich life experienced by the young protagonist before], what is proper next for the man is the whirlpool, the sinking through the floor, the Drop, what the ancient Greeks call katabasis.
...
When katabasis happens, a man no longer feels like a special person. He is not. One day he is in college, being fed and housed--often on somebody else's money--protected by brick walls men long dead have built, and the next day he is homeless, walking the streets, looking for some way to get a meal and a bed. People know immediately when you are falling or have fallen: doormen turn their backs, waiters sneer, no one holds the subway car door for you. Your inner psychology changes as an old shame surfaces; one walks with head down and feels it's all inevitable. The inner masculine self changes. While one is still grandiose and naive, a young man lives inside, shiny-faced, expectant, hopeful, dandified, a prince. After the Descent begins, an old man takes the place of the prince. To one's amazement a helpless, anti-social, brittle, isolated derelict takes over.

Katabasis is what happens when there is nowhere to run from the fear. Stuck with nowhere to go, the only thing one can do is take the low road, the road that leads straight into the jaws of hell, straight into the place one has been desperately trying to avoid. You face your greatest fear head-on, confronting Death like a mythic hero (think of Heracles going down to the Underworld, or Jesus going to free the souls in Hell). You let Death give you her best shot, recognizing that she might utterly destroy you with it. And then, something miraculous happens: the fear recedes, and your capacity to act effectively increases. Death breaks you down, smashing your illusions to pieces, and you emerge from the conflict forged into something better, something different from anything you would have imagined before. One might call it resurrection.

Bly talks about katabasis as one stage in the life of man. Smith treats it as a recurring phenomenon, noticing how the people who achieve moral greatness in life are invariably those who are able to go through katabasis (which he calls facing the flinch) repeatedly without backing down. Death pushes you toward torpid entropy, insisting that you live in an increasingly narrow comfort zone--avoiding conflict of any kind until you find perfect peace and flatline. The submissive are too afraid of Death to rebel, too timid to confront their fears head-on (breaking out of old habits, which might be smoking, drinking, working a soul-destroying job, or cultivating a psychotic fascination with one's incurable wickedness). Smith's thesis: Improving life requires cultivating the ability to change habits; one does this by repeatedly facing the flinch and refusing to back down. If you are afraid of something, you confront it directly, deal with it, and move on past it. If you want to be a champion athlete, you pursue your sport of choice to the point of exhaustion, pass that point, and discover the outermost limits of your physical capacity. If you want to stop smoking (or doing any drug), you cut your use down to nothing and discover a new life (without the drug). It hurts, of course, but the only thing that hurts more than confronting your fears is avoiding them.

There are a million ways to avoid the flinch, a million ways to do wrong by yourself in evading it. There are a hundred names for those people and behaviors: lazy, avoidant, cynical, arrogant, and anything in between. All of these names convey attitudes that encourage you to avoid seeing what is right in front of you, all in a different way, and each of the people who has one of these attitudes defends it. In contrast, there is only one way to do it right and to see the truth. It is to look at these ways of acting in yourself or others and cross through their verbal defenses, and not to believe them at all.

Every person has his own way of being avoidant and overly confident. It's impossible to name all the ways people do this. But the solution is always the same: ruthless yet compassionate honesty in the face of all the lies you tell yourself. The flinch will keep you avoidant your whole life if you let it. You will see nothing of the magic or serendipity or incredible experiences that others have if you keep your blinders on. For this reason, taking them off may be the single most important challenge you ever face. There are enough viewers. There are enough cheerleaders. There are enough coaches and enough commentators. What there isn't enough of are players. Do not put this down and return to your normal life. Fight. Don't flinch. Don't ever be afraid again.

At some point, I confronted certain fears and grew past them. In the gym, I confronted the physical pain and danger associated with active movement, and I became stronger. In the classroom, I confronted my fear of ignorance and mental ineptitude, and I became more intelligent. But at church, I remained stuck in my old patterns of fear. My progress outside church came from a willingness to doubt everything. I came into the gym and the classroom prepared to unlearn everything I thought I knew about strength and intelligence. I was open, humble, and critical (without being mean: finding the right answer was my goal, not denigrating the wrong answer). But religion resisted these attributes, telling me that there were things I could not question, things that I could not under any circumstances doubt. Initially, I accepted that religion was unique, above questioning. I avoided the flinch, swerving away from the gates of hell. But this was a bad strategy: it was slowly killing my spirit, just as mental or physical stagnation would have killed my body.

As time went by, I became more and more conscious that I was running from something every time I went to church, and it seemed more and more that what I was running from was the best part of my character--the happy part, the part that knew how to do something besides cower in fear of the wrath of the Almighty. The more time went by, the more I wanted to confront my fear. I knew I needed to confront it, or it would destroy me. Still, that confrontation was one of the hardest things I have ever done. It required me to look deep into my soul and see what was really there. It required me to let go of my preconceptions about life, my religious faith that everything would be OK if I just avoided the flinch. As I turned down the road to hell, finally, it occurred to me that I had spent many years talking about something I had never really done. I talked about trusting God. I talked about letting go, about falling into the abyss with faith that whatever happened would be right. I talked, but the whole time my eyes were screwed shut, and my feet were planted as far away from that abyss as they could be. This was particularly striking when I looked back on my experience teaching church lessons to "investigators" (as LDS missionaries call potential converts): I would tell these people to let go of their ideas about life and throw themselves entirely on the mercy of an unknown God (I thought I knew him, but they knew they didn't). I was like the skydiving instructor who coaches other people to successful jumps without ever attempting one himself. I needed to get out and do something. I needed some skin in life's game. I needed things to be real, more than I needed them to be safe. So I finally turned down the forbidden road. I followed all the great heroes whom life has ever produced (and many more whom we will never hear from), and I took the low road to an unknown place.

When I came back from that awful place (a place of awe), I was a changed man. Some things were better: I was no longer constantly afraid. Some things were worse: many of my cherished dreams about the nature of reality (and the character of God) were shattered, and some of my old friends could not bear to see me without these. Some even seemed to value these dreams more than they valued me, suggesting that it might be better that I had died or suffered anything rather than face the flinch and overcome my fear. I understand how these people feel. I do not think less of them for feeling, and I am truly grieved that they are grieved, but I do not think I would do things differently if I could somehow go back to where I was before the descent. The descent destroyed some parts of me, yes, but the parts that it left make a much better person--a person less afraid of his own shadow, a person more able to make real moral decisions for himself (rather than relying blindly on others with more social capital or more guts). I am no longer ashamed to be alive (or at least, not as ashamed as I used to be). I do not live in permanent fear of the Almighty, or anything really. Death will come for me again, of course, but meantime there is nothing to be gained by worrying about her. I have discovered the courage to recognize and live by my own moral convictions. I would not trade that for anything. It has given me unexpected faith in my own humanity, tapping internal reservoirs of moral strength and conviction that I did not know I possessed. These days, I really want to live, and my fears have become challenges to be met with defiance rather than a fate I must endure in submission. I love Henley's old poem:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Life can be truly miserable sometimes, for me and for other people (including many who suffer more than I ever have). Sometimes, it makes no sense. But fear is not the answer. Fear will not save you; or, at the very least, it was not saving me. After my descent into the underworld, I have a new message for whatever is out there commanding my fear (whether humans, gods, demons, or an impersonal, indifferent nothingness): "Bring it!" I may not have what it takes to win (and eventually everyone loses), but you had better believe I will go down swinging. No more cowering and cringing for me. No more flinching.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

2011-12-29T06:08:00.002+02:00

Jared Diamond. "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race." Discover Magazine, May 1997, 64-66.

I discovered Diamond's essay for the first time several years ago, while I was reading up on human health (in an ongoing quest to improve my own). I was intrigued, and eventually convinced, although I know that there are important points to be made against Diamond's pessimistic take on agricultural civilization (e.g. the arguments raised by Steven Pinker). That said, this post is going to be my version of Diamond (dumber, shorter, and with less references). I wrote the original version of the post in response to a friend, who forwarded an article lamenting recent decline in the birth rate among nations of the First World. I have seen several such articles, all of them implying that social upheaval (broken economies, crime, etc.) is owing to a lack of babies, a lack that these writers (if I understand them correctly) seem to ascribe to widespread laziness. My fellow First Worlders are not "putting out" as industriously as they should, and will be rewarded with the implosion of their padded social safety nets (as fewer kids exist to care for more and more parents, aged and helpless). I doubt this. Following the train of thought developed by Daniel Quinn, I further doubt that a reduction in human population worldwide would be a bad thing (necessarily: I am not saying that it would be great, either; it might, however, be natural -- as good or bad as rocks, waterfalls, and bacon). Here is what I wrote, with a little minimal editing.

I think population reduction is a healthy response to imbalance in resources. We simply don't have the goods to fuel endless growth (in people or the things they require to exist, things like food, water, shelter, clothes, entertainment -- unless we are willing to drastically reduce our expectations in these areas). We are adjusting to several environmental factors, e.g. globalization (and concomitant competition for increasingly scarce resources), climate change (which may or may not have anything significant to do with us), and technological revolution (which has addicted increasing numbers of us to luxuries like running water, food that someone else prepared, housing that someone else built, gadgets that someone else invented and mass-produced, and lifetimes spent working narrow careers with companies that don't go belly up).

Historically, the agricultural model for human survival has been to reproduce like insects: we made lots of people -- lots of sick, blind, stunted, relatively weak people -- and took over from the hunter-gatherers (who were healthier, sharper-sighted, taller, stronger, and even more mentally capable than we) by sheer force of numbers. One familiar episode in this ongoing saga is the displacement of the American Indians by boatloads of European riff-raff (whose guns, germs, and steel paved the way for them to become a dominant force worldwide). Indians were healthier (as individuals), more sustainable (as communities), and less numerous than the immigrants who replaced them. We were the mites and moths and hornets who overran their beehive. Now, it's our turn to be overrun. Maybe the result will be just another opportunistic parasitism, but I don't know. I get the feeling that other societies are collapsing too: people are living shorter and sicker lives all over the world; standard methods of producing the energy modern civilization requires to exist are failing; economies are imploding (not just in Europe and North America: India, China, and their neighbors are also looking less than robust these days). I think we may just have to learn to live with less; and that may mean that there will be less of us. Our old methods for solving these dilemmas are (1) plague and (2) wars: the last century saw us pushing (1) away while embracing (2) with all our might. I think we might be due for a switch, with (1) returning (in the form of rampant diseases of civilization: diabetes, syndrome X, autoimmune disorders, obesity, failure to thrive, infertility, heart disease, stroke, cancer, etc.) and (2) fading (as we stagger away from a century of vicious fighting). I could be wrong, of course.

A central concern here is quality of life. If we are all willing to live in really primitive conditions (such as many of our forefathers endured), then the agricultural model offers a kind of haven, but it comes with a price, deliberately breaking the individual to save the community: better 1000 people barely alive than 100 thriving. The price for the civilization that is India is the dung-heap that is Mother Teresa's Calcutta. The price for the relatively few rich and prosperous people worldwide is a much larger group of starving and miserable people (who make clothes for the rich, grow their food, clean their houses, etc.). This is the way agriculture is and ever has been (even in Mormon Utah: Brigham Young and his close friends were millionaires while others eked out a hardscrabble existence in a howling wilderness that has yet to blossom as Temple Square). Do we want to perpetuate that? I am not sure. I don't have final answers. But I think a lot of people with elective power are using it (in their own lives) to build a kind of middle-class freedom that is ultimately anathema to the agricultural model (which requires them to be serfs). Women don't want to be baby-making machines. Men don't want to spend their lives slaving away for the Man so that their fourteen sons can fight for the privilege of taking their spot on the line when they are too wasted and decrepit to hack it any more. Nobody wants to bet on the longevity of social contracts that are collapsing all over (as education becomes increasingly overpriced and meaningless, at least in terms of securing long-term gainful employment that serves the employee rather than his feudal masters). There is your threat to the family: good, old-fashioned supply and demand. If there is no food for my family, no place for them to live, no job that will allow me to provide them with these things, then how am I supposed to have one (a family, that is)? Many people just cannot afford it (unless they are willing to bring their kids up as serfs, which those of us in the First and Second Worlds are loathe to do: we were raised as gentry or honorable artisans, not slaves). So population declines, with acts of God (plague, environmental conditions) and human anxiety (increasing uncertainty about the future) as proximate causes.

Since this is a topic of recurring interest to me, there will be more about it on the blog. I am not done with it yet by any means.

My New Church?

2011-12-20T23:20:00.000+02:00

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

Gangsters for God

2011-12-13T01:24:00.001+02:00

Harold Schindler. Orrin Porter Rockwell: Man of God, Son of Thunder. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983. ISBN: 087480440X.

Marco Amenta. "La siciliana ribelle." Music Box Films, 2009.

I just finished Schindler's biography of Porter Rockwell, which I have been reading while walking to and from my office: it breaks up the monotony of my day, and gives me something to think about besides all the jobs that I am not going to get. I have actually enjoyed it a good bit.

Rockwell was quite a character. Many people loved him (not just the LDS leaders whom he served faithfully). Many people hated him (especially after he was implicated in the attempted assassination of Lilburn W. Boggs, the infamous governor of Missouri who signed the extermination order evicting the Mormons from his state). Many people feared him. Whatever your personal reaction to the man, it is really hard not to be interested in him, at least. I learned that he joined the church young, that he befriended the prophet Joseph Smith, and that (like the prophet) he was rendered lame by an accident (which left one of his legs shorter than the other). I learned how he was personally affected by the war between the Mormons and the Missouri settlers that ended in Boggs' extermination order, a war that saw lawless violence on both sides. I learned that he spent nine months languishing alone in jail, waiting to be tried as Boggs' murderer, attempting at least two escapes before he was finally exonerated due to lack of evidence. Early Mormon history contains many stirring tales; one of the most dramatic is undoubtedly the one of Rockwell's unexpected return from Independence, Missouri (where he was freed from jail December 13th, 1843), to Nauvoo, Illinois, where he interrupted the prophet Joseph's Christmas party (December 25th):

Fifty couples had accepted the prophet's invitation to dine and dance at his home, celebrating not only the Christmas season, but also Joseph's victories over the forces against him. He had been three times arrested and three times acquitted during the year on charges preferred by the state of Missouri. Bennett had been defeated. And Joseph had successfully weathered the storm of controversy surrounding the doctrine of plural marriage. Most important, Joseph had secretly decided to become a candidate for the presidency of the United States. Suddenly the festivities were interrupted by a noisy scuffle at the front door. Members of Joseph's Life Guard were struggling furiously to control what they thought to be a drunken Missourian who was punching and jabbing in every direction. The prophet, resplendent in his Legion costume, pushed through the crowd to the center of the disturbance and ordered the guards to throw the intruder out forcibly. As Joseph turned to walk away he was caught by something familiar in the filthy, disheveled specter of a man whose hair dangled in greasy snarls down his shoulders. For a moment Joseph looked the creature full in the face. It was grinning at him.

"To my great surprise and joy untold," he wrote, "I discovered it was my long-tried, warm, but cruelly persecuted friend, Orrin Porter Rockwell, just arrived from nearly a year's imprisonment, without conviction, in Missouri." For Joseph, his friend's appearance was the fulfillment of his prophecy of March 15 that Rockwell would "honorably escape" the clutches of the Missourians. Rockwell was the center of attention, and after partaking of a glass of the wine which flowed so freely at the festivities, he sat down with Joseph and a knot of church dignitaries to recount his trials since fleeing Nauvoo. At the conclusion of his story, the prophet sat silent for several minutes; then, placing his arm around his friend's shoulder, [he] announced for all to hear: "I prophesy, in the name of the Lord, that you -- Orrin Porter Rockwell -- so long as ye shall remain loyal and true to they faith, need fear no enemy. Cut not thy hair and no bullet or blade can harm thee!" ... From this day forward through thirty-five violent years in which Rockwell encountered hostile Indians, desperadoes, and other characters on the western scene, he managed to avoid a single physical injury at the hands of another man (Schindler, pp. 101-102).

This anecdote tells you a lot about Port (as he was known to friends). He was loyal (enough to spend almost a year in jail for protecting the prophet, who was his friend). He was tough (almost too tough for a posse of the prophet's Life Guard, even after a year spent running from the law and starving in jail). He was a legend in his own time. Before we get too excited about Smith's prophecy, it should be noted that Rockwell did cut his hair once. Many years after the prophecy, he encountered Don Carlos Smith's widow Agnes Coolbrith, who was bald in consequence of a recent bout with typhoid fever. Rockwell, generous friend that he was, had his hair cut to make her a wig:

Porter wore his hair long, as he said the Prophet had told him that if he wore his hair long his enemies should not have the power over him neither should he be overcome by evil. When he met Sister Smith he had no gold dust or money to give her, so he had had his hair cut to make her a wig and from that time he said that he could not control the desire for strong drink, nor the habit of swearing (Letter of Mrs. Elizabeth D. E. Roundy, quoted in Schindler, p. 220).

By modern LDS standards, Rockwell was undoubtedly a strange-looking Saint: a long-haired, hard drinking, swearing, gunslinging bear of a man. I am pretty sure the BYU Testing Center would have forbidden him entrance, though I am willing to guess that people on the street might have taken him a little more seriously than they did me when I did my tour of duty as a missionary. He certainly made an impression on Richard Burton (the famous nineteenth-century world traveler, not the modern actor):

Porter Rockwell was a man about fifty, tall and strong, with ample leather leggings overhanging his huge spurs, and the saw-handles of two revolvers peeping from his blouse. His forehead was already a little bald, and he wore his long grizzly locks after the ancient fashion of the U.S., plaited and gathered up at the nape of the neck; his brow puckered with frowning wrinkles contrasted curiously with his cool determined grey eye, jolly red face, well touched up with "paint," and his laughing good-humoured mouth. He had the manner of a jovial, reckless, devil-may-care English ruffian. The officers called him Porter, and preferred him to the "slimy villains" who will drink with a man and then murder him. After a little preliminary business about a stolen horse, all conducted on the amiable, he pulled out a dollar, and sent to the neighbouring distillery for a bottle of Valley Tan. The aguardiente was smuggled in under cloth, as though we had been respectables in a Moslem country, and we were asked to join him in a "squar' drink," which means spirits without water. The mode of drinking was peculiar. Porter, after the preliminary sputation raised the glass with a cocked little finger to his lips, with the twinkle of the eye ejaculated "Wheat!" that is to say "good," and drained the tumbler to the bottom ...

Of these "squar' drinks" we had at least four, which, however, did not shake Mr. Rockwell's nerve, and then he sent out for more. Meanwhile he told us his last adventure, how when ascending the kanyon he suddenly found himself covered by two long rifles; how he had thrown himself from his horse, drawn his revolver and crept behind a bush, and he had dared the enemy to come out and fight like men ... When he heard that I was preparing for California he gave me abundant good advice -- to carry a double-barrelled gun loaded with buckshot; to "keep my eyes skinned," especially in kanyons and ravines; to make at times a dark camp ... and never to trust to appearances in an Indian country ... I observed that, when thus speaking, Porter's eyes assumed the expression of an old mountaineer's, ever rolling as if set in quicksilver. For the purpose of avoiding "White Indians," the worst of their kind, he advised me to shun the direct route, which he represented to about as fit for travelling as h-ll for a powder magazine" (Richard Burton, City of the Saints, quoted in Schindler, pp. 309-310).

Burton was not the only stranger impressed by Rockwell, and (frankly) there was much to admire about the Mormon Samson. He survived the Missouri troubles and the Nauvoo disaster, managing to run successful businesses (a ferry service in Missouri and a tavern in Nauvoo, though Emma Smith evicted this establishment from the Smith home, where the prophet Joseph wanted to locate it). He was Brigham Young's prairie scout and mountaineer. He carried mail. He played a key role in thwarting Johnson's army during the Utah War (not without some personal embarrassment: the first time he and some others tried to drive off the army's mules, they only succeeded in losing their own mounts). He had another tavern at Point of the Mountain, and he was famous in Utah for his stock (horse and cattle). He had a reputation for being at once honest (so that outsiders looked to him for advice, scouting expertise, and protection) and dangerous (so that he was implicated in several grisly deaths, like the botched assassination of the Aiken party and the mysterious beheading of an otherwise unknown Missourian). As gangsters go, he was "all wheat" (as he would have said).

I grew up with immense reverence for the prophets Brigham Young and Joseph Smith. They were heroes who could do no wrong; the crimes alleged against them were anti-Mormon lies. Inevitably, this distorted picture of reality left me vulnerable to demonizing their less well-known associates, men like John D. Lee, Bill Hickman, and Porter Rockwell. Today, I see the early LDS church as a mafia. This is not really as black a mark against it as some might think: the government of Missouri that tried to crush it with mob violence was also a mafia (with different factions: remember Bleeding Kansas). The American frontier was just not a nice place back in the day. This does not mean that nothing good ever happened there, or that pioneers like Porter Rockwell were generally bad people. But they were not really what we moderns would call civilized. They lacked scruples that we consider basic; death was a constant reality for them, and killing a necessary part of life. What would you do if you woke up one day and found yourself in danger of sudden death from ruthless strangers? Would you think calmly to yourself, "Maybe I should move somewhere else, ditch my family and friends (with their weird religion which I believe heart and soul), and start over" or would you fight back? Some early Mormons thought better of it and turned tail, no doubt. Others fought back -- becoming "gentlemen of honor" just like the Italian mafiosi depicted by Marco Amenta. Of these latter, some became renowned as despicable criminals (like Lee and Hickman), while others (like Rockwell) attained a kind of outlaw respectability. Rockwell's strength was his honesty and integrity; in his own words (shouted to American vice president Schuyler Colfax when Rockwell was in his cups), "I never killed anyone who didn't need killing" (quoted in Schindler, p. 343). Unlike Bill Hickman, Rockwell never turned state's evidence (becoming a snitch) or killed people for purely mercenary reasons (though some alleged that Joseph Smith at least rewarded his attempt on Boggs' life); he was the kind of mafioso who killed to defend life and honor (his own, and that of his close friends, who just happened to be mafia bosses). Unlike John D. Lee, he never stooped to killing women and children (a circumstance which might owe something to luck as well as his character, to be punctilious; but facts are facts). You might not agree with Rockwell, but you knew where he stood, and that he was totally committed. In many ways, he is more admirable than either Joseph Smith (who was a philanderer and a liar, two things Rockwell never was) or Brigham Young (who was also a liar, and thus more of a coward than Rockwell: hanging Lee out to dry alone for the mistakes at Mountain Meadows despite promises of immunity was a dastardly thing).

Modern Apocalypse

2011-12-03T19:51:00.001+02:00

"Prophets of Doom." History Channel, 2011.

As I prepare to hunt for a job puttering around like most academics, it is interesting to take a look at the big picture of what is going on in society. The world as we know it is crashing, as it always has, only it is bigger now, so it falls harder. I hope I can prepare myself to live in a world without all the things I depend on subconsciously.

I wish universities studied this stuff. I feel like this is really what I am interested in. What I really want to learn is how to live happily like the people in "less developed" economies, which are more sustainable than the cancerous, obese behemoth that is the imploding First World. My research into antiquity is an attempt to get back to something better than modern civilization, without making the same mistakes that were made. I want to return to the Bronze Age (or earlier), without being stupid the same way my ancestors were back then.

My journey into the past is also a journey into the future. It is not a "restoration" (in the Mormon sense) really; it is more of a cautious reformation. There is no Eden to return to. But there is a purgatory before the modern hell, and right now that purgatory is looking like the place to build if you want to last.

My Religion

2011-11-24T16:58:00.001+02:00

I composed this statement in response to a series of questions posed by a Christian on one of the Mormon sites I frequent.

I see religion as a kind of poetry, an expression of human life that takes its form in gestures aimed at creating and preserving meaning. For me, there is really no hard distinction between religion and other systems of culture that encompass entire lives: religion includes politics, economics, and all kinds of culture. What is more, people are born into religions the same way they are born into language. You can learn a new language, and you can take up a new religion, but traces of the old one will be with you always (even if you don't like it: I cannot get away from the fact that I was born into twentieth-century American English; in the same way, I cannot escape the fact that I was born and raised into twentieth-century Mormonism). I think every religion, like every language, contains means for expressing human reality: as a medium of human expression, Mormonism is no truer or falser than Catholicism or Buddhism, just as English is no truer or falser than Spanish or Chinese. They are different tools for accomplishing the same purpose. Some languages come easier to some people than others, and some people prefer one to another: this is natural and good, and there is really nothing to be done about it. That said, I don't think the world would be better (or even fundamentally different) if we all spoke the same language, or professed the same religion. People would still be people, which means that some of us would use religion to express things that others would find offensive, and vice versa. The world would be a lot more boring, too, in the same way that international airports are (with endless iterations of the same stores selling the same merchandise, muting the idiosyncratic at the expense of the universal as much as possible). So I am actually glad that there are many different religions out there in the world: the ones I fear the most are those that see their mission as wiping out others. That is like wanting to cut down the rainforest in order to plant lots of soybeans: it might be profitable short-term, but in the long run everybody loses.

With that in mind, let me offer my answers to your questions.

(1) Do you see yourself living Joseph Smith's restored Christianity? Yes and no. First for the negative. After many years spent investigating early Christianity, I do not believe Smith (or any of the reformers over the centuries) has restored it. More than that, I do not believe that it is something that can be restored. I see Christianity as a bundle of competing movements that was never really united under one banner: historically, all of us claim Christ, but none of us owns him.

Now for the positive. I grew up Mormon, which means that I grew up praying (alone and with my family), singing hymns, and reading the Bible (which I read through several times on my own as an adolescent, along with the additional holy books recognized by Mormons: the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants). When I was about eleven years old, I had a powerful experience reading the Book of Mormon: I finished reading it the first time, prayed to know whether it was true or not, and had a strong inner witness: to me, this confirmed that Jesus was the Christ, and Joseph Smith was his prophet. Since this experience, I have had a few more (including two years as a missionary in northern Spain) which have led me to conclude that my emotional witness was not indicative of objective reality. Subjectively, though, it gave me moral strength to make decisions that have improved my life, while at the same time leaving me vulnerable to some bad decisions too (like the decision to hate sexuality, and to think that confessing every sexual experience to my local bishop would help me erase this indelible part of my human character).

As a result of my experiences with Mormonism and religion in general--the good, the bad, and the ugly--I do not think that any one religion is as good as its most fanatical followers claim. I don't believe in absolute truth as something that can be expressed by human beings: we can allude to it, we can dance around it, but the moment any of us tries to define it, "amen to the priesthood or authority of that man" (from Doctrine and Covenants 121, one of my favorite Mormon scriptures). But I do believe in "continuing revelation" (as Mormons say): I think that it is important to leave oneself open to new insight, no matter what its source. Part of my personal experience growing up Mormon was embracing this aspect of the faith wholeheartedly: for me, Mormonism was never entirely restricted to the correlated, soul-destroying mush produced by LDS church headquarters. If it had been, I would probably be more of an atheist than I currently am. But the Mormons I grew up with were better than their leaders: they intuited the difference between rigid obedience to leaders and thoughtful membership in a faith community that nobody owns. (Mormonism is free from corporate ownership the same way French is: despite attempts by controlling bodies to own and define the language, it exists organically outside definition.) Also, I think there is something to the old Mormon doctrine that Lorenzo Snow expressed more or less as follows: "as man is, God once was, and as God is, man may yet become." My study of religion has led me to conclude (with Xenophanes, the Greek philosopher-poet) that we all paint God in our own image (even when we try not to). Others will disagree, and that is fine: I learn from their disagreement (and am enriched by it). Since I still embrace these (and a few other) core principles of my early Mormonism, I still feel comfortable calling myself a Mormon.

(2) Is restored Christianity important to you? Yes. I have family and friends deep inside Mormonism ("died in the wool, true blue through and through"), and at all stages of disaffection. The former see themselves as "restorationist Christians" and are quite committed to that position. I don't want to cut them entirely (as I would if at this point I decided to sever formally all ties with the church). More important, I still see myself as the same person who received a testimony of Joseph Smith at eleven years old. I don't want my family to think that I am reneging on my commitment to them, and to the values that I learned from them and shared with them, in a very Mormon context. And, to top things off, I still "speak" Mormon. My instinctive way of looking at the world is Mormon, informed by experiences with other faiths that I am still assimilating (the way I am still learning Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Arabic), but Mormon nonetheless. What is more, the Mormon I "speak" is (on my reading) an historical dialect of Christianity, in the restorationist tradition (which includes more movements than just Mormonism).

(3) Is restored Christianity important to the Mormon movement? It is important to my family and friends. This is a Mormon movement that matters to me. I am not sure how important it is to the LDS church. I used to think it was important, but then I went on a mission, attended BYU, and started understanding more things in General Conference. Today, I see the LDS church leadership as ambiguous enemies: they haven't attacked me personally yet, but they certainly could, and they assault every ideological position of mine that they can (maligning me to my family as an evil apostate). There was a time when I feared excommunication, but I have moved past that: if it happens, then I will do my best Martin Luther impression.

(4) Do you regard the Bible as just another phase that someone else went through, or is it something that you consider yourself to be answerable to? This strikes me as an unfairly loaded question, setting up a false dichotomy. The Bible for me is a collection of mythology. As a source of personal ethics, some of it is really good, like Ecclesiastes (which is my personal favorite). Some of it is OK, like the gospels (though I don't believe in miracles such as Jesus is supposed to have performed). Some of it is pure crap, like Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and the more violent among the prophets. As a window onto the human soul, it is all valuable, and we are all answerable for what we carry inside us, including the part of us that imagines and carries out crimes while giving God the "glory." Thus, in my opinion, the Bible is really only as useful as the people who read it. In the hands of literalistic, legalistic folk (such as currently rule at LDS church headquarters), it is dangerous. In the hands of more sensitive folk, it is harmless and may even be helpful (just like other holy books, including the Book of Mormon, the Koran, the Dhammapada, etc.).

(5) Do you aspire to bringing yourself into alignment with the perspective of the New Testament, or is that phase of thinking something that is better left in the past? I see the NT as containing different perspectives, with Peter disagreeing with Paul, and other writers taking mutually opposed stances whose harmonization is a later historical development. How do I bring myself into harmony with something that lacks harmony? Putting the question in context with some analogues, how would I bring myself into harmony with Shakespeare's Hamlet? I could read it a lot, write essays about it, study it, and know a great deal about it, but in general the more I do these things the less I see the work as a univocal thing. It is like the original draft of the US Constitution, full of compromises and unresolved tensions, which are interesting without being fundamentally harmonious (the way I use the word: Heraclitus would call it harmony).

(6) Have you got a rationale or philosophy or theology that you use to validate your position? My philosophy is that I am open to anything that people want to share with me. If I can understand and apply it with good results, then I make it a part of my life. The paradigm through which I view truth is that of an ancient skeptic (think Sextus Empiricus), or cynic (Diogenes of Sinope). Modern thinkers I like include David Hume and Nassim Taleb. I am all about doubt. I think the best insights come to those least married to presuppositions about the nature of reality.

(7) Do you consider your personal outlook to be compatible with the larger Mormon outlook and official teaching? I think it could be: modern Mormonism is largely incoherent, and could evolve in many directions, some of which might comfortably contain ideological positions like mine. Right now, however, leadership is most definitely opposed to people like me. Members are ambiguous, with some tolerant or even sympathetic toward positions like mine, and others decidedly hostile. Others yet have never noticed that people like me exist.

Hell

2011-11-21T15:02:00.001+02:00

Some interesting quotes from Postman's Technopoly. The first quote is actually from C. S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters, x):

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

Part of my faith crisis was waking up to the realization that there is no such thing as an enlightened bureaucracy. They all tell you they are wonderful, and they are all lying. Some do more and more obvious harm than others, but all are harmful--especially if you believe the crap they always tell you about how they are saving the world. If the world is saved, it will be at least as much in spite of bureaucracy as because of it (though I am sure any bureaucracy that survives will give itself credit as our savior, or--more insidiously--as his humble instrument).

The second quote is from Postman (85-86):

Bureaucracy has no intellectual, political, or moral theory--except for its implicit assumption that efficiency is the principal aim of all social institutions and that other goods are necessarily less worthy, if not irrelevant. That is why John Stuart Mill thought bureaucracy a "tyranny" and C. S. Lewis identified it with Hell. The transformation of bureaucracy from a set of techniques designed to serve social institutions to an autonomous meta-institution that largely serves itself came as a result of several developments in the mid- and late-nineteenth century: rapid industrial growth, improvements in transportation and communication, the extension of government into ever larger realms of public and business affairs, the increasing centralization of governmental structures. To these were added, in the twentieth century, the information explosion and what we might call the "bureaucracy effect": as techniques for managing information became more necessary, expensive, and complex, the number of people and structures required to manage those techniques grew, and so did the amount of information generated by bureaucratic techniques. This created the need for bureaucracies to manage and coordinate bureaucracies, then for additional structures and techniques to manage the bureaucracies that coordinated bureaucracies, and so on--until bureaucracy became, to borrow again Karl Kraus's comment on psychoanalysis, the disease for which it purported to be the cure. Along the way, it ceased to be merely the servant of social institutions and became their master. Bureaucracy now not only solves problems but creates them. More important, it defines what our problems are--and they are always, in the bureaucratic view, problems of efficiency. As Lewis suggests, this makes bureaucracies exceedingly dangerous, because though they were originally designed to process only technical information, they are now commonly employed to address problems of a moral, social, and political nature. The bureaucracy of the nineteenth century was largely concerned with making transportation, industry, and the distribution of goods more efficient. Technopoly's bureaucracy has broken loose from such restrictions and now claims sovereignty over all of society's affairs.

The single greatest problem with bureaucracy is that efficiency is not an unmixed blessing. It inevitably creates fragility (as Nassim Taleb would say), rendering those who rely on it blind to important realities, realities that are inefficient. (Or, as bureaucrat Boyd K. Packer would say, truths that are not very useful.) Two more quotes from Postman (88-89):

The role of the expert is to concentrate on one field of knowledge, sift through all that is available, eliminate that which has no bearing on a problem, and use what is left to assist in solving a problem. This process works fairly well in situations where only a technical solution is required and there is no conflict with human purposes--for example in space rocketry or the construction of a sewer system. It works less well in situations where technical requirements may conflict with human purposes, as in medicine or architecture. And it is disastrous when applied to situations that cannot be solved by technical means and where efficiency is usually irrelevant, such as in education, law, family life, and problems of personal maladjustment. I assume I do not need to convince the reader that there are no experts--there can be no experts--in child-rearing and lovemaking and friend-making. All of this is a figment of the Technopolist's imagination, made plausible by the use of technical machinery [like fancy documents purporting to illustrate the one true family], without which the expert would be totally disarmed and exposed as an intruder and an ignoramus ... There is, for example, no test that can measure a person's intelligence. Intelligence is a general term used to denote one's capacity to solve real-life problems in a variety of novel contexts. It is acknowledged by everyone except experts that each person varies greatly in such capacities, from consistently effective to consistently ineffective, depending on the kinds of problems requiring solution. If, however, we are made to believe that a test can reveal precisely the quantity of intelligence a person has, then, for all institutional purposes, a score on a test becomes his or her intelligence. The test transforms an abstract and multifaceted meaning into a technical and exact term that leaves out everything of importance. One might even say that an intelligence test is a tale told by an expert, signifying nothing.

Nonetheless, the expert relies on our believing in the reality of technical machinery, which means we will reify the answers generated by the machinery. We come to believe that our score is our intelligence, or our capacity for creativity or love or pain. We come to believe that the results of opinion polls are what people believe, as if our beliefs can be encapsulated in such sentences as "I approve" and "I disapprove."

I see this nonsense playing out all the time in different places. In education, we mistake scores for learning (and the ability to learn). In church, we mistake adherence to arbitrary (and even harmful) rules for piety. In government and business, we mistake sound-bytes for sound policy, and assume that the talking suits whose companies we support actually know what the heck they are doing because they get up on time, clean up nicely, and diligently show us charts decorated with impressive technical jargon. Everywhere, we trust people to know stuff that they don't really know, even when their incompetence becomes truly dangerous, destroying our ability to function as individuals and as a society. How am I supposed to become intellectually competent if my chief aim is to get good scores on tests, pleasing masters, colleagues, and students? How I am supposed to become morally competent if every decision I make has to pass muster with an incoherent book of rules compiled by bureaucrats in Salt Lake City (or Colorado City, or Canterbury, or Rome, or any other major religious center)? How am I supposed to be financially and politically capable if my actionable resources can be appropriated on a moment's notice to save stupid businesses lucky enough to be "too big to fail"? In a world where I exist merely as an individual consumer--helpless, needy, and stupid--how am I supposed to do anything worth doing at all?

The worst part of my faith crisis has been my inability to talk coherently about this aspect of it. I express a disillusion with technology in general, and immediately others (not just Mormons) rush in with their pet technical solution to my lack of faith.

"Yes! It can be really frustrating dealing with idiots like George Bush and his henchmen. Vote for Obama and this will all get better ... The reason it isn't better yet is that the evil Republicans still have power." [If you want the Republican version of this, just change a few words, swapping Obama for Bush, and vice versa, and referencing evil Democrats.]

"Yes! The church comes with all kinds of people. Sometimes, inexplicably, they speak as men when we all think that they are speaking for God. We have to learn to ignore this, have faith that it will all turn out right, and keep exercising our religious freedom to call other people to repentance."

"Yes! It can be really frustrating dealing with religious bigots like Boyd Packer and his henchmen. Come to my church and this will all get better ... The reason it isn't better yet is that you are still holding on to icky Mormon ideas instead of embracing true Christianity [imagine the face of the Reverend Jeffress here, and maybe someone like Ted Haggard for good measure]."

"Yes! Being an academic is hard sometimes. Maybe if you went to another workshop, or published a paper, or applied for your 300th job, or worked more diligently on your dissertation, you wouldn't be in this mess."

I have spent much of my life being broken--not politically savvy enough, or righteous enough, or smart enough, or diligent enough, or whatever. After fifteen years (starting in adolescence, when I became aware of other people as more than entertainment), I am still broken. But the stupid bureaucracies that push me all over the place are broken too. They think they know what they are doing. They think they are wise. They think they righteous. They think they deserve the right to put me in my place, humbly enslaving me to the greater good that they represent (but can never represent intelligibly, for some reason: pond scum like me just doesn't get it, I guess). The difference between them and me, as I see it, is that I admit my limits and refuse to go past them, while they don't. I try to be morally responsible. They don't. I answer for my mistakes. They don't answer for theirs. I am interested in changing things in fundamental ways, so that I don't have to rely on them all the time (though I have nothing against their going on without me). The only change that they welcome is the one that puts them in control of the status quo, where I am comfortably stuck under their thumb. Their heaven on earth is my hell.

Living on the Dole

2011-11-20T15:44:00.001+02:00

Neil Postman. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage, 1992. ISBN: 0679745408.

Berndt Heinrich. A Year in the Maine Woods. Da Capo, 1995. ISBN: 0201489392.

Postman writes about the demise of old human culture (the art of living well), and the rise of a new one (the art of manipulating hyper-specialized tools in exchange for increasingly complex goods and services from other tool-users, goods and services so complex that no individual can provide them for himself). Heinrich offers an interesting paradox: a new man (the hyper-specialized professor of biology) who nevertheless manages to live well in the old style, largely because he lives simply.

In his book, Heinrich tells how he went out into the Maine woods, built a log cabin, and managed to thrive without regular access to many of the amenities of Postman's technopoly (amenities like running water, the indoor toilet, and the refrigerator). The modern Thoreau did not cut himself off entirely from society: he installed a phone in a friend's outhouse, and he made regular visits to less technologically unburdened people around him, but his experiment is still impressive. He made his own food, keeping an eternal stew on the stove: as long as he boiled it once each day, bacteria never ruined it, and thus he required no refrigerator. He gathered water each day from a spring nearby. (In modern communities suffering from water shortage, e.g. Western cities like Las Vegas, he recommends cutting off easy individual access to water, requiring people to travel and get their own: the farther they travel, the less extra, unnecessary water they will be willing to bring back.) His daily entertainment came from cutting wood (for the stove), running, visiting neighbors (or receiving visits from family members and students), and (especially) watching native wildlife (which he describes in great detail throughout the book, as you expect a good biologist to do). He did not have a television or Internet. He conducted numerous experiments, some personal (like his attempt to calculate the moon's orbit, a quantity known to science but unknown to him personally) and some professional (his original excuse for this excursion was a desire to see how ravens behave in the wild: he published his findings for scientists). He was never afraid to get dirty--trapping rodents (which he then fed to ravens or cooked and consumed himself), tasting insects (which were always invading his little home: the strangest invaders were so-called "cluster flies," giant black flies that gathered in the crevices of the cabin over winter and came out in hordes every time it got warm), and mucking around in the outdoors (where he regularly collected roadkill and dead farm animals to feed his ravens).

Reading Heinrich's experience reminded me of Postman, largely because Heinrich strikes me as one of those happy moderns least affected by the diseases of modern civilization that Postman talks about. At the end of the day, Heinrich knows how to take care of himself better than most people. He has practical know-how that is increasingly rare in modern life, which is supposed to work better the less each individual knows about doing for himself, and the more he knows about serving society (with increasingly hyper-specialized skills). Heinrich also has remarkable psychological contentment--though he alludes offhand to his ex-wife (who presumably wasn't down with moving off into the wilderness), and wood-madness (what happens when you live too long as a forest hermit away from other people). Unlike many people, he is not worried about business or politics: Wall Street and Washington are far from his consciousness, whether as sources of goodies to harvest or sins to protest (chief among these the withholding of goodies). If the economy tanks, his woodland home will still be there, and he will still be able to live in it. He is not "on the dole" with the rest of modern civilization, sucking the teat of the giant behemoth that is Society (supply-and-demand, proletariat and bourgeois, presided over by the divine Hand of Adam Smith or the corporate Consciousness of Karl Marx).

It strikes me that much of modern society lives "on the dole." Employed or not, all of us depend on others to do for us in really basic ways (e.g. providing access to food, shelter, and clean clothing). Increasingly, this dependence is not a luxury (the way it often has been throughout history), but an expectation: we even get some people talking about it as a "right" (which seems idiotic to me). Confronted with problems, we demand that specialists come in and save us from life (whether unpredictable forces of nature, our own incompetence, or the incompetence of someone else near us). We throw tantrums (occupying Wall Street, joining the Tea Party) instead of fixing the root of the problem (our individual attitude and aptitude). Our established organizations of social control (government, schools, churches, businesses) play to our infantilism, cultivating citizens who vote for suck-ups (who in turn promise them the world on a silver platter), students who care more about getting ahead temporarily than actually learning anything about real life (that might be hard, not to mention pay small short-term dividends), worshipers who think that piety is doing whatever some guru (or book written by gurus) says, and customers who are supposed to sit back and be "needy" (since Keynesians value consumption over production). The result is that we are always feeling helpless, frustrated, and worried. No one likes living on the dole, whether that means being a wage-slave (some of whom make millions) or a homeless bum. Better to live in a wilderness with no amenities.

A final thought. Heinrich is just like us modern civilized folk in many respects: he uses a lot of the same technology, and relies on other people to help him with things he cannot provide. The difference, as I see it, is that he engages his own life much more continuously and thoughtfully than we do. He asks for help with problems that he has already attempted to solve on his own, problems that many of us would never recognize because we have already called specialists in to take care of everything without doing our own diagnosis. We sit around passively, waiting for life to happen to us (and complaining when it happens badly). Heinrich goes out to meet it. We never know what we are capable of, and we feel frustrated, alienated from ourselves (and one another), and helpless. Heinrich sees what he can do every day, and is empowered even by failure (which for someone like him is a kind of learning). We are helpless in the hands of our tools, which have created a culture that controls us. Heinrich is the master of his tools, which he uses to make culture.

Useless Truth

2011-11-18T16:57:00.001+02:00

Philip Jenkins. The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died. New York: Harper Collins, 2008. ISBN: 9780061472800.

While at BYU, I noted a peculiar fascination with Greek Orthodoxy among some of the faculty with interest in early Christianity. One of my professors in particular mentioned that if he were not Mormon, he would be Orthodox. The Orthodox tradition was attractive for its connection to ancient Greek Christianity (or better, Christianities), the closest thing(s) to authentic primitive Christianity that objective-minded historians can find.

Jenkins tells the story of the Greek Christians, and of other Christians outside the western European tradition (though he refers freely to that tradition to illustrate his narrative). Here you will find the story of ancient Christians in Syria, Egypt, Persia, India, and China, not to mention Asia Minor (modern Turkey). You will find Nestorians, Monophysites alongside more exotic (and independent) heretics, like the Manichaeans and (inevitably) the Muslims. You will learn how the Christians conquered the East, and lost it all. You will be forced to confront how the prosperity gospel (expressed in scriptures like Deuteronomy 28 and Mosiah 2:22) does not work, as you see covenant people suffer the almost complete dissolution of their culture--in spite of every promise, in spite of every revelation, in spite of every miracle. You will find stories of religious genocide, occurring still in relatively modern times (e.g. the annihilation of millions of Greeks and Armenians by Turks in the early twentieth century). You will see the best faces of religion (the scholar, the humanitarian, the pillar of society), and the worst (the holy warrior, the sectarian, the scourge of God). You will see the power of chance, which offered the eastern Christians safety (with the possibility of a Mongol alliance against the Muslim powers) and then snatched it away, perhaps forever (when powerful Mongol chieftains converted to Islam). Notice that persecution of the Other is a non-denominational doctrine: Christians brought it to the Muslims, and vice versa. Religion knows how to be kind, and how to be cruel, regardless of who is in charge or what they claim to believe.

The best part of the book, from my perspective, is the very end, where Jenkins talks about the need in contemporary Christian thought for a theology of defeat, failure, and disaster. How do we deal with the failure of God? How do we process divine indifference to prayer, to sacrifice, to basic human decency? Historically, we tend to ignore it, an ignorance that impoverishes our perspective on reality, and cheapens our faith (leaving people like me loathe to believe anything any religious leader may say). We dismiss the losers as apostates, has-beens, divine rejects. Their stories go untold. Their thoughts are forgotten. Their experiences, the good and the bitter, teach us nothing. Jenkins calls us to repentance (pp. 261-262):

Christians believe that God speaks through history; and only by knowing that history can we hope to interpret momentous events like the Japanese persecutions [which annihilated Catholicism in early modern Japan] and the fall of the Asian churches. Yet Christians have systematically forgotten or ignored so very much of their own history that it is scarcely surprising that they encounter only a deafening silence. Losing the ancient churches is one thing, but losing their memory and experience so utterly is a disaster scarcely less damaging. To break the silence, we need to recover those memories, to restore that history. To borrow the title of one of Charles Olson's great poems: the chain of memory is resurrection.

In a nutshell, modern, western Christianity suffers from the same problem that plagues modern LDS Mormonism: an inability to deal productively with its faith history, a history which is full of what Boyd K. Packer might call useless truth. But that truth is not useless. That truth is what points us toward new revelation, showing us problems that we have failed to address adequately. That truth is what keeps us humble, showing us that we do not know the mind of God, that we are (in fact) extremely ignorant of any guiding principle at the helm of the universe. We have to preserve that truth, telling the "faith-destroying" stories of heartbreak and disaster (like what really happened at Mountain Meadows, or the Council of Nicaea, or the Battle of Ankara, or the Latin sack of Constantinople, or the modern Turkish "cleansing" of Smyrna). We cannot pretend that uncomfortable truth does not exist without endangering our souls, the souls of our children, and the very heart and soul of our entire community. Whether you are Mormon, Christian, both, or something else, lying for the Lord is bad. Ignoring for the Lord is bad, too. I cannot lie, and I will not ignore. To do so would be to go against everything that I stand for as a moral human being, as a Mormon and a Christian.

Truth is healing. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32). It sets us free from pretending, free from the fear that something unknown "out there" may take away the inner strength that keeps us sane. We ignore and abjure it at our peril, especially when it tells us things that we do not want to know, showing us where our puny efforts to control reality break down. The more we harden ourselves against useless truth today, the worse we are going to feel tomorrow, when it is inevitably shouted down at us from the housetops. I cannot resist it any more, and that is why I am what I am--estranged from my faith community, without a secure job that I might have had, and generally disillusioned with "faithful" attempts by some religious to obfuscate and deny real suffering (my own and that of other people). Like better men before me, I come to you now, Internet world, "from the back of a broken dream," simultaneously shattered and inspired by my personal encounter with useless truth.

Canary in the Mine

2011-11-15T14:24:00.001+02:00

Boyd J. Petersen. Hugh Nibley: A Consecrated Life. Kofford, 2002. ISBN: 1589580206.

Martha Beck. Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith. Crown, 2005. ISBN: 0307335992.

Hugh Nibley. "The Roman Games as the Survival of an Archaic Year Cult." PhD dissertation. University of California at Berkeley, 1938.

I first encountered Hugh Nibley when I was about sixteen years old. Making my way through my parents' library looking for something substantial to devour, I came upon An Approach to the Book of Mormon, and was immediately fascinated. Like many of the groupies I encountered later at BYU, I too succumbed to the spell of exotic historical narratives, numerous foreign languages, and professorial tone, buttressed with crowds of dense footnotes. My worship reached its zenith when I read Approaching Zion and Temple and Cosmos, which I still regard as some of Nibley's best work (even if it is not perfect, by any means).

The hardest thing for me to give up as a missionary was my addiction to printed matter, an addiction which Nibley fed (not just with his own material: he also pointed me towards other sources of information about the ancient world). I missed his wide perspective in the mission field, especially when those around me (leaders and fellow missionaries) seemed much more narrowly focused, reducing the gospel to cheap kitsch that could be marketed door to door in easy soundbytes. I knew they meant well, but it seemed to me even then that we were prostituting the kingdom of God, selling it with the same kind of tactics (and sales meetings) that other people use to sell vacuum cleaners or sleazy magazines. One of many pleasures that came with the end of my mission was the freedom to look at the gospel from a non-sales perspective. Eternal salvation is not something decided by how fast two young men walk, how diligently they brush their teeth or shine their shoes, or how widely they smile when you come to the door to tell them, for the umpteenth time, that you really aren't interested in another chat about baptism. Fed up with being told that the life and death of other people depended on my personal hygiene (and their knee-jerk reaction thereto), I rushed happily back to BYU, and picked up with Nibley where I had left off (somewhere in The World and the Prophets).

Ironically, it was at BYU that the first cracks in my idol started to appear. I encountered several professors whom I respected very much, and learned that not all of them were ardent Nibley fans. That gave me pause. Another wrench in the works was that I began learning more about his personal life, which I was actively assimilating as a guide for my own. I took pride in spending no time (or hardly any) socializing, preferring to remain holed up in the library working. I did not date (until my last year as an undergraduate). I did not have a job. I studied, ate, worked out, and slept. This worked pretty well for me: I got excellent marks in all my classes, and avoided the pitfalls of dating in Provo (like having to consider marrying a girl after you have taken her out twice). I also avoided spending money that I didn't have (and wasn't likely to get, given that my idol spent most of his life as poor as a churchmouse). Then, as so often happens, life intervened and busted up my dream of Mormon scholarly perfection. Things started innocently enough, with Nibley's funeral in the old Provo Tabernacle (before it burned down). Naturally, I attended (and sat up very high in the gallery: I love those old pioneer churches in Utah; they have much more character than the modern LDS buildings). In the midst of all the passionate eulogies, which were generally full of praise and admiration (as I would expect), there was some mention made of Nibley's wayward daughter, Martha, who was not welcome in the family. Having read Petersen's book (above), I knew a little about her: she had accused her father of sexually molesting her, an accusation that none of her family members supported. Of course I thought she was nuts. Her accusation rested on memory recovery techniques that I knew to be shady (I had done my research!), and, besides, no one as perfect as Hugh Nibley would give up something as wonderful as the gospel to waste time torturing a little girl, his own little girl. It was ridiculous.

Fast forward a little. I am working closely with a Nibley acolyte in the BYU faculty, trying to piece together a commentary on the New Testament that will be at once an academic tour-de-force and a solid bit of Mormon apologetics. As often happens, my mentor's discourse turns to reminiscences of the Great Man (Nibley), whose daughter went crazy at Harvard and came back with all these incomprehensible allegations. In passing, my mentor mentions that he and other groupies used to hang out regularly at the Nibleys' little house in downtown Provo. I have seen the house. It is pretty tiny. I picture it full of people, coming and going all the time, and books stacked floor to ceiling (as it has been described by witnesses like Petersen). I think about Petersen's account of the lack of amenities in the house, how the Nibleys moved in without any furniture (literally), and how the Great Man would sometimes throw a tent in his car, pile in the kids, and go camping impromptu in the nearby canyons. In Petersen's account, this life seemed idyllic and perfect, just the kind of thing I would do with my eight kids when I was living in a tiny house in Provo, playing the role of the Lord's Apologist. But what if it wasn't all fun and games for everyone involved? What if having a father who worked all the time, except when he was stuffing your tiny house full of books and strangers or taking you off into the howling wilderness, wasn't as much fun as I thought?

Petersen's book contained the seeds of my questions, pointing out the extremely awkward relationship between Hugh and his mother, for example, and the fact that Hugh never related well to his children once they ceased being babies. Hugh was a loner, like I was shaping up to be, a workaholic, a war veteran who suffered from PTSD, an awkward lover (who married his much younger wife almost on a dare, according to the family legend preserved by Petersen, after his first love refused him), and basically kind of crazy. None of this cancelled his brilliance, or made me admire his work less, but it did give me pause, especially when I accidentally found myself courting a young woman and contemplating marriage. What if she didn't want to live in a dump with eight kids while I worked all the time, or wandered off into the wilderness? Was it really fair of me to ask this kind of commitment? In patterning my own life after that of the Great Man, what was I really signing on for? I admit that I did not really know. But I began to wonder.

Fast forward some more, to graduate school. Here, the intellectual doubts my professors had expressed about Nibley came to a head, when I read his PhD thesis myself (listed above) in search of some ideas for what paths I might pursue. While there was no denying that Nibley was incredibly well-read, there was also no getting around the fact that my professors' most telling criticisms stuck. Stripped of all its baggage (fancy foreign words and dense footnotes), Nibley's thesis was pretty dodgy: there are records of many ancient peoples holding ceremonies to usher in the new year; the Romans may have had one too (though their earliest religious calendars extant don't attest a single ritual occasion with all of the events that Nibley finds characteristic of year ceremonies); all these ancient year ceremonies (the imaginary Roman one too) may descend from the earliest, most ancient year ceremony of them all. I realized that I could use this kind of logic to write a thesis about Orlando, Florida, as the center of an ancient pilgrimage ritual (showing features similar to other pilgrimage centers like Santiago de Compostela, Mecca, or Jerusalem). At what point do historical parallels (or imaginary historical parallels) become meaningful? Do rituals really descend consciously from one another? Does the same kind of behavior never spontaneously crop up in two or more different places, just because people are people? The Nibley spell was broken.

Losing my idol was part of the faith crisis that hit me full force in graduate school (though it had really been building ever since I became academically interested in religion: you cannot bring critical thinking to something that does not bear scrutiny without asking for trouble). Recently, I happened across Martha's book in a local library and decided to give it a read. Having heard both sides of the story now--Martha's (as told by herself) and her family's (as told by Boyd Petersen)--I have some thoughts to offer.

First, I do not know what exactly to conclude about the allegations of sexual abuse. In Nibley's defense, no one else in the family accuses him (though Martha claims that her mother was initially willing to admit his guilt). In Martha's defense, I do not think that her memories are entirely false. I have some personal experience with victims of sexual abuse, and the story she tells rings true enough that I cannot dismiss it as pure fabrication. (There is the vaginal scarring to consider, as well.) I tend to suspect that her family may be right in putting the blame for the actual assault off onto someone else, perhaps another man in the family circle (which Nibley's apologetic work extended to include a lot of interlopers). Nibley's awkwardness as a father, and his failure to defend Martha, might then account for her "remembering" him later as the perpetrator. Or not. I do not presume to know either way.

Second, the Nibley family was really dysfunctional. The idyllic picture painted by Boyd Petersen omits a lot of crap: the dirty diapers littering the floor, the mother abandoned to her fate--lying in bed and crying all day while her husband plays with Latin, Greek, and ancient Egyptian. Martha says her mother admitted being a victim of sexual abuse, and believes that Hugh's mother abused him. I lack the facts to come down firmly on either side, but it does seem hard not to conclude that all has not been well with the Nibleys. This is nothing for them to be ashamed of, really. It is just the way the cookie crumbles, sometimes. My life hasn't been all teddy bears and rainbows, either, and others have suffered worse than I or the Nibleys.

Finally, Nibley's position as LDS Apologist in Chief drove him crazier than he otherwise would have been. The guy had an overbearing mom (who might have abused him). He fought in a war before we knew what PTSD was, and never received any therapy. On top of all this, chance put him in charge of defending the historicity of the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham. As a result of his heroic efforts in this impossible war of words, a war that cannot be won, he was constantly harried by fanboys (like I would have been had the situation presented itself), and suffered at least one nervous breakdown (speaking with Louis Midgely before an audience of BYU students). A lot of his apologetic work puts the cart before the horse, assuming a theory to be true (e.g. the Mormon gospel is really ancient) and then finding evidence to back this assumption up (ancient records contain things that vaguely resemble the Mormon gospel!). He was not always careful to allow for the fact that he might be wrong. (Consider, for example, his overly hasty dismissal of the evidence that Joseph Smith was convicted of glass-looking in 1826.)

Today, I still enjoy reading Hugh Nibley. His satire is great, and I think the idea he had of Mormonism is better than many (including the one I ended up serving for the greater part of my mission). But I do not aim any more to be the person he was. I am not an apologist. I am not a defender of the faith. Any faith worth trusting can look after itself. It doesn't need me to drive myself and those around me crazy in order to preserve it.

Early American Dreams

2011-10-31T02:16:00.000+02:00

Daniel J. Boorstin. The Americans: The Colonial Experience. New York: Vintage, 1964. ISBN: 0394705130.

This book tells the story of the early European settlers in the thirteen British colonies that eventually became the United States. Four things stood out to me as I went through the book.

(1) Americans are historically individualists. Historically, we tend toward an egalitarian view of the world, even as this view becomes more and more a relic of realities that exist no more. It was much truer back in the day that Boorstin describes, when there was no professional American army, and European barriers of caste and culture carried little or no meaning on this side of the pond. (Everyone had to know a little about farming, medicine, and fighting. We didn't have the means or the interest to separate professionals into rigid castes governed by outdated rules that didn't work at all on the wild frontier of Western civilization.) Over and over again, Boorstin comes back to the same ideal early American, a jack of all trades who never let his book-learning get in the way of practical experience. Americans were amateur farmers (having plenty of land to experiment with and no reason to husband it as intensively as their European counterparts), amateur doctors (having plenty of disease to look after, little formal medical schooling to speak of, and no ironclad respect for book learned expertise), amateur scientists (having plenty of new flora and fauna to classify, not to mention geographical discoveries to make), amateur priests (especially in areas where multiple sects existed), and amateur warriors (since they were constantly called on to defend themselves and their families at a moment's notice from Indian attacks).

Reading this book helped me see how, in a certain way, the moral attitude that I have adopted (more like stumbled into)--and tried only too imperfectly to implement over the course of my life so far--is historically American. I don't like being trapped in a rigid profession, with non-negotiable rules and a fixed hierarchy (of practitioners and of knowledge). I tend to think that such professions are largely bullcrap, no matter who makes them. Politicians, professionals, businessmen, and clergy all sound remarkably similar when you strip away the particulars of their speech and look at the generalities: "We are God's gift to the world. Pay us or risk losing everything worth anything in life. There is no happiness without conformity to our rules. Too bad they don't work out for all of you as well as they do for us: God must not like you as much." Such professions exist to serve values that I find tendentious, artificially narrow, and (ultimately) dangerous. Most of the time, they make a point of avoiding issues that I find important (like integrity, sustainability, and quality), passing the buck for difficult decisions on to some nebulous higher authority (God, the common weal, or some lesser avatar, e.g. the almighty dollar or a charismatic CEO) whose humble agent (some bureaucrat) has the unfortunate duty of serving the public by playing the role of Divine Inquisitor (or mafia enforcer: pick your own evil metaphor).

(2) Americans are historically idealists. Many of the first American colonists were religious zealots looking for a place to be the city on the hill that they felt Christ was calling them to be. They were often seriously, dangerously nutty. Puritans tortured and killed people who didn't fit the mold that their standard of righteousness demanded. Some of their victims were Quakers, who were as adamant about courting martyrdom as any Puritan was about dishing it out. Seriously, what do you do with someone who keeps coming back to your settlement begging that you either accept his (or her) preaching, or at least have the decency to kill the messenger? Not having learned that passive non-interest is the most effective way to deal crazy Bible-thumpers, the Puritans became the cruel partisan establishment that they had fled. The persecuted were reinvented as persecutors (and the groundwork was laid for myths like those in the Book of Mormon, which talks a lot about rival preachers with a penchant for going to unreasonably hostile villages where they and their outnumbered followers run the risk of being killed). Of course, American idealism had positive expressions as well. Rhode Island was a haven of tolerance for those non-martyrs unable to make it in Massachusetts. Pennsylvania too welcomed members of many different faiths, who managed to get along with each other remarkably well. Virginia cultivated a relaxed, practical attitude to religion that ultimately nourished the Deism of several original Founding Fathers (e.g. Thomas Jefferson). In the end, Congregationalist Puritan craziness backfired, and the sect ultimately became much more practical (eventually giving birth to Unitarianism in the nineteenth century!). Ironically, the American Quakers became mired in the very kind of narrow dogmatism that their creed explicitly rejects, leading them to a cultural dead end from which they are still trying to resurrect the original divine spark recognized by George Fox.

I am definitely an idealist. I believe in truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I dislike lies. I dislike compromise. I dislike all the dirty, messy realities that inevitably come up when people organize and treat with each other in official, officious ways. But my faith crisis has taught me to tone it down. There is a place for compromise. There is a place for letting sleeping dogs lie. And there is even a place for lying (as the nun hiding Jews from the Nazis would know). But it is really too bad, because I would like to have everything out there in the open.

(3) Americans are historically naive. The first Americans had all kinds of crazy ideas about life that did not really pan out as advertised. We believed that we would establish a religious utopia: instead, we have a secular republic (which is in some ways, many ways, a much better thing). We believed in our European way of life; we thought we were doing the savage wilderness a favor by trying to civilize it. Even if we were, it was definitely not the kind of favor we thought we were doing it, since our Greek gift of civilization brought a lot of bad stuff (e.g. smallpox) whose real import escaped us entirely. In many ways, our history reads as a continuous series of brilliant ideas that imagine heaven (utopia, the American dream) only to end up raising hell (civil wars, slavery, industrialization, globalization, Wall Street).

(4) Americans respond to circumstances, valuing empirical functionality over theoretical perfection. The saving grace of our naivete historically has been that it comes with a healthy dose of practical skepticism. We start with pie-in-the-sky, but when this fails to materialize, we change the game-plan. We learn from our mistakes. When the Indians showed us new ways to raise crops, treat illness, and wage war, we learned (and to this day, many of us still think of fighting as a life-and-death struggle between free men, rather than some kind of organized game for noblemen and professional mercenaries; we still prefer Cincinnatus over Caesar, at least in our mythology). This is the principle of continuing revelation in Mormonism, and it is an important part of my personal creed as a human being (and an American too).

My Heretical Testimony

2011-10-24T16:09:00.005+03:00

I know that I do not know very much, and that I doubt pretty much everything I think I know.

I know that absolute truth is dangerous, and that it makes no sense to me.

I know that reality is out there, that it is larger and more complicated than I can ever perfectly understand. I don't know if it has a name by which it refers to itself. I doubt that it does.

I know that theory without practice is bad, and faith without works is dead. I believe in continuing revelation.

I know that myth is a permanent fixture in the human landscape: we all tell stories, all the time. I know that I cannot believe in the absolute, literal truth of any one of our stories. By the same token, I do not think that any of them is absolutely false.

I know that Jesus Christ is as real as Santa Claus (or Saint Nicholas). I know that Joseph Smith spoke for God as much as Martin Luther did.

I know that organized religion does a lot of good in the world. I know that it also does a lot of bad. I know that I cannot put complete trust in any group of people: every corporation is a mafia; every mafia makes some really terrible decisions. Some mafias are better than others, but that does not mean that any of them deserves uncritical loyalty. I respect them (and myself) too much to give them what they do not deserve.

I know that I was born a Mormon, and that I remain a Mormon (even if I choose to add prefixes or caveats: these just confirm the fact that the leopard cannot change his spots). As I cannot delete or deny my Mormonness by word play, so the authorities of the LDS church cannot: after twenty years, I am a member of the flock whether the shepherds want me or not. I wish they did not feel threatened by people like me. I wish I did not feel threatened by them. Maybe one day we can all get along.

Armageddon

2011-10-24T15:26:00.006+03:00

Flogging Molly. "Screaming at the Wailing Wall." Borstal Beat Records, 2004.

Here is a musical prayer that neatly summarizes my study on terrorism.

So, God, how come every wrong's been done?
With deals no Christ should allow
Once the communist now the terrorist
With blood as thick as yours
Now a caravan of clouds
Warns us all of winter showers
Then rattle comes the rain
With each bullet, it screams your name

So how come this gatherin' storm
Pours little on the truth?
Where the smokin' gun's a familiar
song let loose
With the bombed out cars
Come the falling stars
From a heaven we'll never know
And the nameless names
On the misspelled graves grow tall
We're still screamin' at the Wailing Wall

I'll liberate your peoples' fate
Spoke the Burnin' Bush
But the songs of beasts
Grow with oil soaked teeth
Their dollar is mighty and true
Now the eagle soars the sky
Over refugee and child
And to all there is no end
Another day in perfect Hell

So how come this gatherin' storm
Pours little on the truth?
Where the smokin' gun's a familiar
song let loose

All Hail!

Now a caravan of clouds
Warns us all of deadly showers
Then a-rattle comes the rain
With each bullet, it screams your name

So how come this gatherin' storm
Pours little on the truth?
Where the smokin' gun's a familiar
song let loose
With the bombed out cars
Come the falling stars
From a heaven we'll never know
And the nameless names
On the misspelled graves grow tall
We're still screamin' at the Wailing Wall

Oh I'll liberate your peoples' fate
As we scream at the wailing wall

I think this song makes a fair bid to express all the irony, suffering, and idealism that characterize the so-called War on Terror on all its fronts. God speaks. His servants obey, and we keep waiting for the ensuing Armageddon to induce a glorious Millennium of peace and prosperity. Meantime, all hell breaks loose, over and over again, causing some of us to question our ideals that are too high to admit any compromise.

Violence and Fragility, Summarized

2011-10-24T03:04:00.000+03:00

Here is a metaphor that occurred to me as I finished my last post.

Violence is to the body politic what inflammation is to the body. In critical moments, it may save us from acute danger, but as a chronic condition it is utterly ruinous.

Violence and Fragility

2011-10-24T03:01:00.004+03:00

This represents a continuation of my thoughts about terrorist violence.

Violence is a bad long-term solution to moral problems because it creates more trouble than it solves, eventually doing injury to the cause that it is invoked to protect. (Despite the fact that it existed nominally to protect Irish Catholics from Protestant violence, the IRA ends up being responsible for more Irish Catholic deaths than any other organization in Ireland, North or South: read Shanahan's book for references.) But the real problem is something different.

When do people get violent? Is it not when they have run out of other options, when they are "backed into a corner" (as the saying goes)? One thing that holds true across all of the terrorist groups I have looked at (Muslim zealots, Basque and Irish nationalists) is that they feel trapped: they are "oppressed" by powers to which the only sane response (in their eyes) is violence (up to and including suicide, whether by detonating themselves in public or going on hunger strikes in prison). The vision that gives meaning to the life of a terrorist gives him freedom (to think, to find meaning in life), but that freedom comes at a terrible cost, because it is inherently fragile. It depends on other people having feelings that they may not (and in the case of modern terrorists, do not) have. It demands validation that history appears very loathe to give (as the overwhelming majority of Muslims, Irish, and Basques continue to reject the visions of utopia that their less inhibited comrades proclaim). The fanatics, inspired with the holy zeal of absolute truth, cannot admit this. Even if they do, they promptly cast themselves as prophets who will "lead the way" in spite of their people's backsliding ways. If enough of us play the bloody hero, they seem to think, surely the cause of Allah will prosper, and the nations of Euskadi and Ireland will shake off Britain and Spain to become heaven on earth.

As for those who actively oppose the terrorists, they are pond scum, orcs with no real motivation backing up the mindless cruelty they inflict on true Muslims, Irish Catholics, and Basques. You don't treat with pond scum. You don't compromise. You do whatever it takes to get the orcs off your land and out of your life. If that means blowing up some of their ill-favored children (or the children of others too blind to see them for the irreparable cancer that they are), well then, so be it.

There is an important common thread here between terrorist reasoning and the ongoing financial collapse of the Western world. Banks are failing because the way we do business in a modern world is too efficient: there is only one true way to do things, the cheapest way that maximizes profit. Ideologies are failing because they are likewise too efficient: there is only one true way to exist, and that is the way of Allah (as preached by Osama bin Laden). When maximizing profits creates snafus, true believers in the modern market economy cannot think of a new way to do business: like an alcoholic who has drunk all the gin in the house, they start raiding the medicine and cleaning cabinets, grasping for anything to keep their drunken dream of happiness alive. Just so, when the violent way of Allah creates hell instead of heaven, the terrorists respond with more violence, hoping that the ideologically driven crusade that is in many ways the cause of their problems may magically turn into a solution. When Coriantumr kills Shiz (Ether 15), they may finally have their way. If there are no people left in the world, then there will be no sectarian violence! But is that the best resolution we can come up with? What is the point of heaven anyway, if the only way to have it is to raise hell?

The more I think about moral conflicts, the less useful violence seems to me. It has its place, of course, and it will not be denied. But that does not mean that that place is necessarily where past generations have put it. And there are differing degrees of violence. I can kill someone actively, or I can passively make their lives so miserable and impossible that they kill themselves. I can hurl bombs, or I can hurl insults. (Note that polite insults are still insults.) If the choice is necessarily between one and the other, I naturally prefer the insults and the passive aggression (whether I am on the giving or the receiving end). But I would actually like to maintain my distance from both kinds of violence. I want my way of life to be as nonviolent as possible. Ironically, this requires that I admit some violence, since to deny it entirely would merely lead to its appearing under some clever disguise (like the "re-education camps" employed by certain high-minded regimes). Pretending that I am utterly harmless is as silly and as wrong as indulging every opportunity I have to do harm. I have to admit the real harmfulness that is in me. I have to know it, and I have to develop real means of dealing productively with it. This is tough stuff, requiring a lot more moral fiber than many of us seem to think (to judge from our public discourse).

More on this later. For now, I'm tapped out.

The Irish Republican Army

2011-10-23T16:27:00.000+03:00

Timothy Shanahan. The Provisional Irish Republican Army and the Morality of Terrorism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. ISBN: 0748635300.

Richard English. Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0195177533.

Both of these books tell much of the modern story of the Irish civil war and its ongoing bloody aftermath. English's book is more historical (offering evidence and trying to interpret events with an eye toward understanding what really happened), while Shanahan's is more philosophical (going beyond what happened to inquire why it happened and whether it should have happened, i.e. how it can or cannot be justified). If you want a timeline (from the nineteenth-century Fenian movement to the 1916 Easter Rising to the 1969 schism that produced the Provisional IRA), English is good. If you want a discussion of moral positions, English is still good, but Shanahan is better.

Reading these books piecemeal, distracted by my real life, I cannot claim to have digested them thoroughly. But I know enough to articulate better some of insights from my study of terrorism. I am going to go through these quickly here.

(1) Terrorists are people, too. There was a point in my life when I thought of terrorists the way other Tolkien characters think of orcs. Terrorists were pond scum, whose human form was just some kind of disguise. In English and Shanahan's books, however, you see that the IRA are just people: they live, long, believe, suffer, and die the same way the rest of us do. They don't like blowing up babies. They don't do it for fun, but like many of us, they can be suckered into doing stupid things "for the greater good."

(2) Terrorists believe in absolute truth. The most frightening insight into the terrorist mind that my research has revealed is its obsession with the one "true" way of being. All terrorists are dedicated to a cause that is bigger than they are, a cause which they see as the work of God, a cause before which every knee must bow and every tongue confess. This insight is frightening because of my former belief in absolute truth. Now that time has worn off some of the initial shock of learning that absolute truth stokes some very dangerous ideological fires, I can see that the mirage of absolute truth offers some benefits too (along with stultifying mental rigidity and the occasional bomb). It helps people (especially those with truly miserable lives) find purpose and meaning in their suffering. In the case of the Irish revolutionaries, it redeems their feelings of helplessness in the face of coercion, whether from the British military (who outgun them), or from their own countrymen (who outnumber, hate, and fear them). It gives them a means for exerting some influence over the course of their own lives. Their lives are not just wastes of time and space: they are contributions to a glorious Irish destiny, which the soldiers of the IRA see as a republic uniting all the counties in perfect harmony. This harmony is entirely unhistorical and impossible, of course, since a significant number of Irish people do not believe in it. As with the Basques, so among the Irish there are deep ideological fissures separating members of a single culture.

(3) Violence is never a good long-term strategy. The real problem that terrorists consistently run into is that their way of finding meaning in life brings them into violent conflict with other people. Their meaning requires that other meanings submit or die. They cannot compromise (because their truth is absolute). They cannot back down. They cannot change their minds. What is it that gives them this impossible rigidity? It is the power of conviction. Faith in their absolute truth leads them to do and say things that cause their fellowmen significant (and even irreparable) harm. As a result, they are naturally feared and hated. Their cause falls into disrepute among non-believers, who denounce them as monsters and/or crackpots and even (in the case of the IRA) mount armed counter-resistance against them. Uncompromising hatred breeds uncompromising hatred, and the terrorist dream of heaven ends up creating hell on earth. Instead of an Ireland divided but civil, we get an Ireland divided, blown up, and extremely angry.

I think there are many important lessons to learn from terrorism. For me, the most important lesson has been that I need to make a conscious effort to find ways of dreaming and believing that do not put me on the warpath with other people. I do not want my dreams of heaven to make life on earth hell. I am not interested in fighting wars (whether the "cultural" wars we talk about today in the USA or actual shooting wars like the one fought by the IRA). In the context of Mormonism, my study in terrorism is one of the reasons I refuse to be a bitter ex-Mormon. I don't think that would make anything better, really, for me or for anyone else. It would just pile more fuel on the awful fire of uncompromising emotional enthusiasm that has destroyed so many good things in this world (including much of modern Ireland). My studies are also part of the reason I cannot ever have the faith I once had, either. I cannot believe in something so fervently that I become closed to compromise, to doubt, to mercy. I cannot believe in absolute truth. I find it immoral.

Are Mormons Christian?

2011-10-11T23:41:00.001+03:00

I wrote this for some friends. I liked it enough to save it here.

My two cents on the perennial argument about who is really a Christian. It is a bad question. It is like asking, "Who is a real human being?" "Who is a nice person?" "Who is a true Scotsman?" (for the atheists and logicians out there). You cannot own a descriptive adjective. Constantine and the bishops at Nicaea tried really hard to create a monopoly on the meaning of the word Christian throughout the Roman empire. They failed. The Catholic church then attempted to maintain a monopoly on the meaning of the word in Europe. They failed. Now various Protestant sects want to claim a monopoly. And they are failing. Christians are scattered all over world, believing all kinds of things, and practicing all kinds of different rituals. There is no such thing as an objectively true Christian. There are only people who use the word Christian to describe themselves. If you want to say something meaningful about yourself, you cannot be content to say, "I am a Christian," and leave it at that. Are you Catholic (what rite?), Orthodox (what rite?), Protestant (what sect?), etc.? What do you think Jesus taught? (Surprise! Christians do not agree about the nature of Christ. There are degrees of deviance, with some people being more alike than others, but we are all different.)

Mormons run into the same problem with their own descriptive adjective when they get mad at splinter groups (including the polygamist churches) who call themselves Mormons. "We aren't those people! They cannot steal our identity! Blah, blah!" Historically, those groups have every bit as much right as the LDS to the adjective Mormon. When we get mad at them for using it (and daring to use it differently than we do), we only reveal our pettiness. (Is religion about words for us? Do we really care that much about adjectives, for Christ's sake? What is the New Testament really about, people?) The only moral position is to let our actions speak for themselves. If you want to get a message of goodness out into the world, you have to be good. You cannot waste time fighting about stuff that (1) doesn't really matter and (2) that you are never going to change by fighting. The fact of the matter is that historical Christianity has always given birth to heretics, much to the chagrin of the orthodox. Many Catholics would expunge the Protestant Reformation if they could. Many Protestants would expunge the Mormon Restoration. Many Mormons would expunge the schism that produced the FLDS. But history isn't about what we would do. It's about what other people already did. Historically speaking, Mormons (including the FLDS) are clearly a Christian offshoot, different from other offshoots but not categorically separate. (The Mormon vision of Jesus, particularly in the Book of Mormon, is recognizably Protestant, with a few tweaks that drive Nicene believers crazy, though I had a professor at BYU who showed us how Mormons could embrace the Nicene creed, if we were willing to get creative with the meaning of the deliberately vague Greek words used to craft it.)

Call us bad Christians, deviant Christians, heretical Christians, anti-Christ Christians, or whatever you want, really. It doesn't really matter, and it won't really change anything (except insofar as it contributes to emotional sectarian feeling on both sides). And that exclusivist streak that you find in us, that arrogance that presumes to judge other Christians and find them wanting? That is vintage historical Christianity: Joseph Smith took it from the Christian movements around him. (Read some of the proselytizing pamphlets from the era: slandering the other guy was the way to preach back then.) Not only that, it goes all the way back: as far back as we are aware of groups of people calling themselves Christians, we find them at one another's throats (literally or figuratively) over the fact that they cannot agree about stuff. (Read the New Testament, especially Acts. Notice Ananias, Sapphira, and the fight between Peter and Paul.) Christ came to bring a sword, didn't he? But it is ultimately unfair to make partisan craziness uniquely Christian: we find it all over human history, before, after, and outside of Christianity (as well as all through it). People separate into groups and fight about whose group is best. If we're lucky, we just call each other names. If we're not, we end up with wars. C'est la vie. I wish it weren't so. I used to think that Christians should be different. But historical research has entirely wilted my naive optimism.

Penn Jillette's Take on Atheism, Libertarianism, Terrorism

2011-10-11T18:25:00.005+03:00

I was getting ready to write something like this for my next essay on terrorism. Like Jillette, I too believe that I do not know what is best for other people, and that it is categorically wrong for me to dictate to them (unless I am telling them to please avoid blowing my head off, vel sim). I also really like what he said about reserving the right to change his mind about something as his experience with it evolves. For me, that is what good faith is (and always has been)--not accepting a single answer as true no matter what, but remaining open to new truth (even when it destroys the old).

Secret Combinations

2011-10-11T17:41:00.003+03:00

If even a little of this is true, my distrust of government, corporations (including churches), and the media is not misplaced. The worst enemy is always the one who makes you entirely dependent on him.

Atheist Agnostic Believer

2011-10-10T22:38:00.007+03:00

Chuck Borough has produced a great podcast over at Mormon Expression. I agree with just about everything the man said, and have repeatedly reflected that my own status as a Mormon is best described with the adjectives atheist (since I doubt the existence of a personal deity), agnostic (since I don't know for a fact), and believer (since I believe in community, including family and friends and the values that sustain these relationships).

Contrary to what someone prominent implied recently in a large gathering of LDS, I am not some kind of fascist who wants to force others to deny God so that we can all go on a wild crime spree together. Borough's Santa Claus analogy is perfect. When I realized that the jolly old gent was not a real person residing on the North Pole, I did not suddenly lose all respect for Christmas: I still like gathering with family and friends, singing, sharing food, and even exchanging gifts (though I am sometimes embarrassed that my offerings are a little meager). Christmas is still Christmas for me, even if I don't anticipate flying reindeer on my roof come Christmas Eve. Just so, Mormonism did not lose all its meaning for me when I realized that I have serious doubts about the existence of a personal God and the moral authority of those who represent him (whether gods incarnate like Christ or inspired prophets like Joseph Smith). I still believe in the importance of being a moral person. I believe in community, including the community of believers. Unfortunately, they seem not to believe in me. Judging from Elder Christofferson's recent talk, LDS church leaders think I am a fascist, a nihilist, and (to sum it up) a pretty rotten excuse for a human being. While I can sort of understand where they are coming from, having spent a little time in that place myself, I cannot accept their caricature of me. It is wrong, and I resent it. If anybody asks, then yes, it offends me. But I can be offended safely: I am not going to drop my morals and lash out at them violently (as Nehor did to Gideon). Instead I am going to reach out and ask them to realize that many of us "atheists" are people too, that we love our families, that we read scripture, that we believe in and desire many of the same good things that they do.

Sometimes I probably speak too harshly against religion. That is just the pain of my subjective personal betrayal speaking. It is not objective reality. Many religious people are absolutely fine. Their faith nourishes them in what I would call (in my saner moments) a perfectly fulfilled human life. But the same is also true of many "secular" people, i.e. people whose religion certain sects (not just the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) fear and seek to denigrate. Why deny this? Why pretend that happy and fulfilled atheists don't exist? Why make us all out to be Satan? Why drive a wedge between us and our believing friends and family? Are you really willing to make a man an offender for a word? Do you think the fate of the universe really hangs on accepting a certain narrow construction of reality, a construction that has no room for doubts about things which are (to be frank) easy to doubt? Why would a loving God do that? I wouldn't do it. I refuse to write all believers off as fanatic members of the Inquisition: I know too many who aren't that way at all, and I am not committed to a worldview that makes it necessary for me to deny their reality to have mine.

Anyway, back to work I go. Thanks for listening to the rant, Internet world.

What is Pornography?

2011-09-30T18:53:00.000+03:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

House of Submission, House of War

2011-09-29T17:53:00.016+03:00

Bernard Lewis. The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. New York: Modern Library, 2003. ISBN: 0679642811.

A second essay on terror and holy war.

This book provides a detailed discussion of the historical background from which modern Muslim fundamentalism arose (e.g. organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the religious government of the Ayatollah Khomeini). It contains many insights, offers many different perspectives, and presents overall a complex, realistic picture of the worldwide phenomenon that is (and has been) Islam. Lewis is not anti-Muslim at all, but (like most Muslims) he cannot condone the modern guerrilla war on civilians that we in the West have lately dubbed terrorism. The Islamic thread holding the book together is jihad, the Muslim crusade, which began as actual, literal war with geographical and political conquests (undertaken during the life of Muhammad) and became a metaphor for the believer's struggle to offer his best service to God. (Remember that Islam means submission to Allah.)

Lewis emphasizes that the Muslim jihad has resisted criticism (as a historical movement) and secularization (no modern Muslim uses jihad the offhanded way we Westerners often use crusade, e.g. as a synonym for cause). Whereas Christians took up the original crusade relatively late (after suffering as a persecuted minority for centuries) and dropped it relatively early (after several military disasters), the jihad started with Muhammad and was never dropped (in part because it was met, at least initially, with unbroken success). Today, many Christians are embarrassed by the idea of holy war (which they see as barbaric and somewhat foolish); fewer Muslims are so embarrassed. Many Christians are concerned with avoiding the unnecessary imposition of their values on other people: they create walls between church and state (which some of them then doubt and want to pull down). In Muslim culture, there is (ideally) no wall between church and state. There is no church, really, only the faithful believers, who are united in obedience to God. In a good Muslim state, the law of Allah is the law of the state, and vice versa.

The Muslim world is conceptually simple. All people live in one of two "houses" -- the house of Submission (i.e. the house of Islam) or the house of War. Historically, Islam reaches out to the house of War with violence, with conquest, and with the revelation of a better way to live (which the more enlightened inhabitants of the house of War embrace willingly). This violence comes with strict rules, however, rules which Lewis (and others, including many Muslim authorities) interpret to forbid the kind of tactics (e.g. suicide missions against civilians) employed by groups like al-Quaeda. Even with this caveat, I am still not entirely comfortable with it. But I am not a Muslim, so my opinion matters little, especially to those Muslims who have already decided that I am a servant of the Great Satan (owing to the accident that I was born in the United States and raised as a Christian). This brings me to an interesting problem.

I have known or at least interacted with various Muslims personally over the years. Most of them have been really good people (moral, upstanding, respectful, helpful). I even have several American friends who have converted to Islam (including some who are at least as doubtful about the literal truth of ancient mythology as I am). What am I to make of these people? Are they secretly plotting the violent overthrow of my life? Do they only pretend to value other people, other cultures, other ways of being that do not come to us from the only God and his last Prophet? As a result of long-standing personal interactions with them, I really, really don't think so. And yet they react with pain and aversion when the state of Israel comes up in conversation, or when a discussion of the United States' historic involvement in the Middle East gets serious. What causes my good friends to flinch? Could it be the same thing that drives many of their co-religionists homicidally crazy? Lewis answered this question in the affirmative, and it was painful for me.

You see, the track record of our government in the Middle East is not that great. Terrified by every shadow of a threat against our power in a region we don't control, we supported anyone carrying gun against our perceived enemies (e.g. Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom we attempted to play against one another; and Osama bin Laden, whom we supported against the Soviets). We didn't really care if these people were nice to the rest of the neighborhood or not: it turns out, they weren't. Not only that, we didn't even support our allies reliably: when the last Shah of Iran agreed to be our puppet (as the locals saw it), we repaid his loyalty by refusing to offer any kind of aid whatsoever; when his government collapsed, we were so eager to pander to his successors that we let him go into exile outside our borders. By associating with thugs (Hussein, bin Laden, etc.) and then treating our allies like dirt (even the relatively harmless ones, like the Shah), we pretty much killed our reputation with a sizable population of foreign Muslims. These people fail to understand how it is acceptable for the United States to blow them up (or send some local thugs to blow them up), but not for them to retaliate (in some way: not all of them fly planes into buildings full of innocents). They don't see how it isn't hypocritical of us to claim the moral high ground as agents of freedom and justice and then throw our support to the likes of Saddam (whom we don't even support reliably). This does not mean that jihad is not a problematic concept, or that al-Qaeda was justified in attacking the Towers. Far from it. But it does reveal that calling such attacks unprovoked is a little naive. We knew there were religious people in the Middle East. We knew their sacred texts preached holy war. We knew they had a history of fighting for honor and religion. We knew they were outfitted with weapons and training (a lot of it from us). We knew that, and we went and kicked the beehive anyway. Is the honey really worth it?

For me, the most shocking and scary thing about Islam (including the "malfunctioning" Islam branded as terrorism in the West) is how normal it is. I grew up in a conservative Christian environment: though many Christians would deny me fellowship as a Mormon, I spent a good portion of my life living in their company, learning from their textbooks (including the King James Bible), and aspiring to be like them. I wanted to break down the wall between church and state, putting prayer in the schools and the government in the marriage bed. I thought the United States of America was a nation that depended on God the way the idealized house of Islam depends on Allah. I thought life would be better worldwide if all people converted to Christianity (and ultimately to Mormonism, the truest form of Christianity). I was not overtly violent in my enthusiasm to convert the world, but how much of that was historical accident? Many Mormons of the nineteenth century were violent (as some Christians have always been), and I personally was never provoked. What if someone had treated my leaders (religious or political) with blatant disrespect and bombed my house? Who knows how I might have reacted, especially if someone whose authority I respected had responded with a pious American, Christian, or Mormon version of the original 1996 ultimatum published to the West by al-Qaeda? The more I think about the 9/11 attacks, the more it seemed to me that I am in no way categorically different from the Muslim terrorists whose violence I naturally abhor. If the shoe were on the other foot, who knows what awful crimes I might have laid on the altar for the United States of America, for Christendom, for my God?

The attacks of 9/11 were one of many factors that ultimately forced me to re-examine my loyalty to all human institutions (and my relationship to God). As a result, I have become simultaneously less violent and less trusting. The good guys look a lot like the bad guys to me. We are all simply human, doing what we think the situation demands (in the Middle East this means blowing stuff up) and spinning stories to justify it.

Myth as Language

2011-09-27T16:02:00.001+03:00

Someone recently wrote to me about my discussion of C. S. Lewis. In responding to this person's insights, I came up with something I would like to share more generally.

The problem with the claim for Christ (as the one and only way to God, or the Good) is that it is not really stronger than a claim for Balder (or Osiris, or any other dying and rising god). Today we know a bit more about the gospels than we did in Lewis' day, and they are very clearly myth (just like Egyptian myth or Norse myth or any other myth). They aren't history (any more than the changing story of Joseph Smith's First Vision is). This does not mean that they do not express important human truths, but those truths are not historical (i.e. accounts of what really happened at some moment in the past) or particular (i.e. stories of a particular person doing particular things). Myths are about universal truths like love, loss, and moving on into the great unknown. They are about what happens all of the time to all of us (and each one of us).

Just like you can speak of these universal things in any language without losing important meaning (since Spanish is no truer than English or Russian or Chinese as an expression of human reality), so you can put them in any myth: they are the timeless truth; the myth is just an accidental vessel that holds them. Lewis' mistake was presuming that Christianity was somehow categorically different from other religions. It isn't. This doesn't diminish its importance: English is still important, even if it is not categorically superior to (say) Spanish (which is also important, right? why should we pretend that Spanish is inferior to English? why pretend that Christianity is categorically superior to Buddhism, Judaism, or Islam?). This doesn't mean that the real truths it teaches are not important or universal. But it does allow us to check them against other versions of themselves (as it were), and to compare our myth-makers with other storytellers out there (who may pick up on some important things that we leave out of our stories, for one reason or another).

From my perspective, Lewis just made the choice at some point to speak English (Christian), i.e. to make English (Christianity) the language through which he expressed himself. That is perfectly fine, and English (Christianity) happens to be my native language as well. But I like other languages. I don't see them as categorically inferior to mine (though there are speakers of each who claim it as the one and only true language, and treat those ignorant of it as babbling idiots, no matter how well they speak their own language; I think this is wrong).

I can make an emotionally charged argument that anyone who chooses to dismiss the Buddha or Muhammad (or Osiris or Balder) is willfully rejecting the one true prophet or the one true God. I can make an emotionally charged argument that English is the one true language, that there is no such thing as a cultured human being who has never read Shakespeare in the original. Both arguments have a gigantic flaw. They ignore the humanity of other people, a humanity evident in the facts (1) that there are many prophets and many gods (including many as good as ours), and (2) that there are many great human cultures entirely ignorant of Shakespeare (who did not live early enough to bestow his genius on the Upanishads, the writer of Ecclesiastes, the Homeric poets, or countless others widely and rightly acknowledged as having achieved high levels of culture).

What is good in my culture (English, Christianity) does not have to be qualitatively superior to what is good in other cultures. People do not have to speak my language (English, Christianity) to me before I acknowledge them as true human beings. I think even C. S. Lewis is willing to concede this on some level (with the story of the saved Calormene in the Last Battle). The only difference between us is that I see the saved Christian as being more like that Calormene: God is a mystery that all human cultures (including every form of Christianity) seek in vain to capture and own for themselves (and their little languages), but he is not ours. We can be his, but he cannot be ours. He can speak for us, but we do not speak for him. When we try to do this (speak for him), what we say has a disturbing tendency to become fascist nonsense.

Does that make my position a little clearer? I don't think I am calling Lewis (or any Christian) stupid. I think Christians are by and large good people, with good stories in a good language. But I see in us (and other human beings of all faiths) tendencies towards a kind of cultural absolutism which others use and prey upon to bad effect (in the history of the world, which it has become my job to read). For what it is worth, I have the same tendencies. So if we are fools, then we are all fools together. I have not become someone who sees other cultures as magically superior to his own: we all have human flaws that can be dangerous. But I do think that acknowledging the flaws in ourselves (as we cannot help seeing them in others) is an important first step towards getting along better with everyone (including our very selves). Moral improvement cannot really begin until we are entirely honest (at least with ourselves). For me, that means admitting that Christians (and English-speakers) are neither better nor worse than other human beings. Our story is one of many. It is not the only story in any way. It can be special because we love it, and that is enough. It does not have to be true history, or the source of imaginary superiority that we enjoy over those who have different stories. As I read Jesus (including some of the words attributed to him outside the New Testament, e.g. in the Gospel of Thomas), he was not necessarily interested in declaring himself the one true God (though some disciples were eager to claim him as such) or in founding a missionary church (though some disciples were eager for that as well). The core of Christianity, as I understand it, is cultivating love for the world (God and one's fellow human beings, which are not artificially restricted to those who speak the same language or tell the same stories). To me, this message is more important than the messenger (who may or may not have been a god on earth: why does this matter? is his message somehow false if he didn't rise from the dead or turn water into wine, etc.? I don't think so. If Lewis does, then we disagree there.)

Kale Borroka

2011-09-20T00:46:00.012+03:00

Mario Onaindia. Guia para Orientarse en el Laberinto Vasco. Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2000. ISBN: 8478808396.

This essay starts a series of reflections on terrorism and the concept of holy war.

Ten years ago, I was preparing to serve as an LDS missionary in northern Spain. Right before I left for Utah en route to the LDS Missionary Training Center in Provo, the Twin Towers were attacked. Living at home away from the television, it was some time before I learned of the attack, and my first reaction was not very emotional. I remember a vague fear that the attack would impede my upcoming international adventure, but when it did not I promptly ceased to care too much about the political kerfuffle that followed (as the United States declared her War on Terror): the issues of right and wrong, forgiveness and retribution, fear and loathing that the attacks raised were relegated to stew somewhere unnoticed in the back of my mind.

Less than a month later, I found myself living with three other LDS missionaries in Bilbao on the northern Spanish coast. I had not been there more than a few weeks or so when another terrorist attack disrupted my life. This time, I could not just brush it off. It had been a long day, but I was feeling happy. We had already returned to our comfortable little apartment in the Begona district, and I was standing alone in the main room, looking out at the city, which was lit up for the night. Everything was quiet and still: our window was open, I think, and the air was crisp and clear. Then, suddenly, there was a massive sonic boom, and the floor underneath me shook. I thought someone was dynamiting our building! Fortunately, I was mistaken. The next day, there was a blast crater in the park (Etxebarria Parkea) across the street (including a few shredded trees), and people were talking about how the target had been some local police (the Ertzaintza). Another attack took place several months later. A fellow missionary and I were visiting one of our local LDS sisters (with her family), and she happened to have the television on. No sooner did we reassure her that it would not destroy our ability to focus than the scene cut suddenly to downtown Bilbao, and we were upstaged: La Gran Via Don Diego Lopez de Haro was practically empty (unheard of for the hour), and all windows near the train station (and the nearby post of the Guardia Civil) were smashed. Throughout my stay in Bilbao (about six months), these events never left me: when I went to the municipal police station to hand in paperwork for my empadronamiento, the wall held a giant plaque commemorating officers killed in combat, and one of our regular walking routes took us right past an official station downtown (either police or Guardia Civil) where men with machine guns guarded the roof as well as every entrance. It was strange to see them standing there, watchful and alert, scanning the crowds of shoppers, business travelers, and schoolchildren, who parted naturally to step around their large guns, but never interrupted the flow of countless conversations. It was like they were not there. Until the terrorists blew them up, again.

Who were these terrorists? I learned quickly that they were Basque nationalists, members of a group known commonly as ETA, an acronym for Euskadi ta Askatasuna ("Basque Homeland and Freedom"). I knew they fought for freedom from Spanish and French rule (this much the graffiti told), that they targeted military and police preferentially (this much the gossip told), and that their role in Basque society was hotly contested (this much the continual demonstrations in the street told: some hotly demanded the release of political prisoners; others decried the use of violence by Basques). That was all I got. As a young foreigner still very adolescent and very much involved in my own mission (which had everything to do with sharing Mormonism and as little as possible to do with Basque terrorism), I was not exceptionally receptive to the deeper currents moving the masses of people then around me. I thought that Basque people were quirky (with traditional language, dress, and other forms of culture that came out especially on holidays), stubborn (because few of them wanted to talk religion with an American teenager determined to convert them), and good (since they seemed to value things like family, integrity, and honor). I did not really see where terrorism fit in this collage. But, years later, Mario Onaindia showed me.

Onaindia's book is a fascinating history of the nationalist movement(s) in Euskadi (Basque Country). It starts with two seminal events: (1) the abolition of the fueros vascos (roughly the Basque equivalent of the English Magna Carta) by the democratic reforms of Antonio Canovas del Castillo (1876); and (2) the creation of the Euzko Alderdi Jeltzalea (i.e. "Basque Party of the Supporters of God and Old Laws," or, more prosaically, the Partido Nacionalista Vasco) by Sabino Arana (1894). The aftermath of these events occupies an entertaining cast of historical characters all the way through the twentieth century (right up to the day I felt the floor shake under my feet!). The story is long and very dense, and I am still struggling to understand it all, but I have enough to notice some interesting things. Basically, canceling the fueros created a more or less permanent fracture in Basque society. Some Basques gave the old laws up for lost and started working to secure their place in society by other means. These people accepted more or less peaceful interaction with successive Spanish governments that came and went over the last century, using legal means to establish boundaries between Basque society and the larger Spanish commonwealth. Nationalists in this category include the current Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV), which operates today like any other political party in a modern representative democracy, attracting voters who elect officers who enact policies (which might include measures designed to secure greater autonomia for Basques in Euskadi). However, a significant minority of Basques felt that no government (neither the Spanish republic, nor Franco's dictatorship, nor the restoration government that followed under Juan Carlos I) had any right to treat with them at all without the fueros. The intransigence of these hardliners was radicalized early on as a result of the brutal industrialization of Vizcaya (starting in the nineteenth century under the republic), which destroyed not only the local landscape, but also much of the peasant culture so dear to some Basques. As a result of this action (and others like it), the tough minority lost all respect for any government, which they saw as intractably foreign and oppressive (Onaindia nicknames this caricature of the Spanish government Neguri, after the wealthy neighborhood in Bilbao where the original industrialists who destroyed the old Vizcaya built mansions with their ill-gotten gain). Thoroughly disillusioned with Spain, the radicals became warriors, kidnapping and killing targeted enemies (government officials, police, Basques who were too cooperative with the Spanish government, and even wholly innocent and helpless bystanders like Miguel Angel Blanco) and engaging in regular bouts of public mayhem (the kale borroka). ETA is the most active, high-profile group formed in modern times by these insurgents.

The result is a bizarre situation, in which passionate Basques on both sides say words that sound the same (at least to outsiders like me) even as their actions are noticeably different. One man is proud of his Basque heritage and declares that pride by voting for a local politician. Another is similarly proud and declares it by blowing up a car near the police station. Each thinks the other is nuts. Each thinks his expression of cultural pride is the only "true" one (the only one worthy of a real Basque). At certain moments in historical time, each has declared the other to be a traitor. And yet they say they want the same thing: freedom, dignity, and self-determination for Basque people. One seeks that prize through negotiation, admitting the fact that different Basque people want different things (i.e. that there is no single definition for "freedom, dignity, and self-determination" that all Basques would recognize: some of them want Euskadi to maintain affiliation with the Spanish government, and see that government as standing for something more than ruthless exploitation). The other opts for violence, even violence directed at his own people, because he thinks that his vision of "freedom, dignity, and self-determination" must prevail at all costs. (He does not see any good in the government, which is forever tainted by certain moments of its past.) If other Basques cannot see it, he must show them. If they cannot accept it, he must punish them (just as he punishes the servants of the Spanish government, e.g. politicians, policemen, and officers of the Guardia Civil). Neguri must not win: if she is brutal (killing and enslaving innocents), then he must oppose her with the same brutality. War hurts everyone, but you cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?

The warrior sees the negotiator as a compromised coward, a weakling who abandons real freedom for a specious pretense (the diluted autonomia within the larger commonwealth that the Spanish government allows). The negotiator sees the warrior as an uncompromising fool, a danger to himself and to everyone else who comes near him (like Blanco, mentioned above, whose "crime" was being in the wrong place at the wrong time: he did nothing to oppress Basques, and his death brought no obvious victory for the separatist movement). But when Onaindia stripped off the warrior's mask and showed him to me in his native habitat, with the ghosts of Neguri looming down over him, threatening his traditional way of life with a faceless and horrible modernity (the end of Spanish hegemony abroad, industrialization of the Basque countryside, and the post-modern desert of globalization in which the wealthy take all and the poor turn to bankrupt governments for economic help rather than retaining the means and skills to serve themselves), I saw that he is not necessarily an inhuman monster. Instead, he looked a lot more like a rather ordinary human being responding to a not entirely irrational fear that his whole way of life is disappearing. When democrats offer him a seat at the common table of the new Spanish order, he fears a trap (a repeat of the rape of Vizcaya). He does not want to move forward to a new society. He wants to go back to the good old days (which have only gotten better since we left them). He does not see where the emerging order created by the Spanish government and the negotiators has any room for him, really. They speak to his head (arguing that the Basque people have freedom, dignity, and self-determination now), but they have not managed to persuade his heart (which cannot help feeling that today's freedom is not what the old freedom was, before the abolition of the fueros and the coming of Neguri).

And so Euskadi remains riven, people go on dying, and visitors like me have to tread carefully.

Remembering 9/11

2011-09-16T00:44:00.005+03:00

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

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

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

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

A Double-Minded Man

2011-09-15T20:36:00.035+03:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deconversion Story

2011-09-12T19:26:00.000+03:00

Evid3nc3. "Why I Am No Longer a Christian." Youtube, 2011.

This series of videos is a very interesting look at deconversion from Christianity. I really enjoyed it, and I can personally identify with many of the experiences the author documents (both good and bad).

First Love

2011-09-08T23:08:00.016+03:00

Flogging Molly. "Laura." Whiskey on a Sunday. Borstal Beat Records, 2006.

The last few posts have shared a little of the hurt I feel as a result of my unique experiences with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). This hurt is understandably strange to people who have not felt it, especially those LDS close to me whose experiences have been very different from mine. Contrary to what some might think, I do not deny (or even begrudge) others' positive experiences with the LDS church and culture. I know that not every LDS suffers the way I do. I do not want every Saint to experience for him- or herself the betrayal and the pain that I experienced. But I don't want to pretend like my suffering never happened, either. I need the freedom to express that suffering, if I am ever to turn it into a positive stepping-stone instead of a negative stumbling-block. I need to be able to share my real self (and the real pain that I feel) with the people I am close to and care about. But I need to do this without hurting them too much, too. With that in mind, I have come up with a gentle metaphor for my experience with the church. (There is no profanity in this post: it is not necessary.)

My metaphor begins with a personal story. I was about fourteen years old. I remember being at my local church building before or after a meeting (I think it was a Sunday afternoon, though it might have been Wednesday night). The lights were dim in the building, and there were not many people around. I was on my own for the moment, but was heading toward the genealogical library (I think) to look for my dad, so that we could go home together. Like many LDS meetinghouses, ours was built with three central rooms (chapel, overflow, and gym) circumnavigated by a long, horseshoe-shaped hallway. I was on one side of the horseshoe (by a water-fountain in the foyer), and the genealogical library was on the other. Without thinking much about it, I decided to cross over toward the library via the overflow. As I opened the door to the overflow and began to step through, my life changed suddenly. There was a girl approaching the door I had just opened. I had seen her somewhere before. Her family were recent converts, and she was a little younger than I was. Up until this moment, she was nobody special (as far as I was concerned), but something happened when I opened the door and she was just right there, coming the other way and looking me straight in the eye. Before either of us could swerve or apologize, our eyes met and something happened. I fell in love.

In the wake of this disaster, we (the girl and I) managed to avoid collision, mumbled incoherent apologies at one another, and hurried on our respective ways (toward opposite ends of the building). But it was not over. In the weeks, months, and even years that followed, she was always somewhere in the background of my thoughts, torturing and enchanting me with her impossible (and utterly unexpected) beauty. She attended church meetings, Sunday School, and youth activities. I was never safe. Of course I was desperate to talk to her, but (being who I was) I couldn't. Lacking any real idea of her character, I imagined her as a kind of angel (morally and aesthetically), a perfect being who by some miracle managed to coexist with mere clod-hopping churls such I was. I spontaneously reinvented the medieval game of courtly love, with this girl playing an exalted Guinevere to my lowly Lancelot, only the complete lack of any real relationship between us meant that we were more like the Grail and Perceval. I longed always for a glimpse of the sacred Beloved, but would never presume to speak to her, let alone have any carnal knowledge of her (such as touching her hand or, heaven forbid, kissing it). Too incorrigibly wicked to be a Galahad or Bors de Ganys (as I was beginning to realize from my inability to keep from waking up during wet dreams), I had to take Perceval's route of penance and tears, of hair-shirts, self-flagellation, and perpetual exile in the service of the Holy Beloved. I spent many hours weeping on my knees, begging God to forgive me and remove my sexuality from the picture, so that it might not taint the impossibly pure affection I felt for this perfect being.

Oddly enough, despite all my fervent prayers (which were as much on her behalf as mine), the object of my affection was rather perplexed by me (and perhaps a little put out). Looking back, I think she might have liked it if I actually dared to say more than two words to her. I think she might have appreciated it if I had had the guts to get to know her (maybe even dance with her at one of those creepy church dances, which for some reason were always done in the dark to really awful music: was it to make us think that dancing really is devilish?). But I was oblivious (and psychotic). There were times when she made valiant efforts to break down the barrier between us, inviting me to youth activities in person and once even volunteering to read the scripture "Draw near unto me and I will draw near unto you" (D&C 88:63) right after I had read in class. But these attempts only made me feel vaguely uneasy. Though I was naive, I was fortunate to have wiser people around me. I remember one older lady in our ward in particular, who happened to be my Sunday School teacher when all this was going on. One day in class she casually remarked that many of us thought we were in love now, even though we weren't really: "You think you're really in love, but it's just puppy love. In a few years, it will blow over and you'll laugh at it!" I snorted inwardly and recoiled in horror at the blasphemy to my Lady (who as a perfect being could only be loved perfectly, i.e. eternally, chastely, and without any rival: one does not "get over" a goddess). But, as often happens, time eventually vindicated my teacher's pragmatic realism over my youthful idealism. After several years, I realized that my initial love, my first true love, was not really that girl. It was Love itself (or herself, if you want to personify it). I was in love with Love. The girl (poor thing) was just an object onto which I projected my naive ideas about Love. I did not love her (how could I when I didn't even know her!), but my idea of her (Love). Her real attentions disturbed me because they revealed that she had a personal identity outside the angelic mold I had created for her, i.e. that I was not in love with her (the real her), but with a phantasm of my own creation. There were some funny moments of cognitive dissonance which also pointed this fact up to me, like the time when I realized that she liked rock music. (How could my pure Lady like rock music! Inconceivable! She might even have normal bodily functions, too. Gross! Is she only human after all? I'll have to start praying that I can help her overcome these flaws. These thoughts are utterly ludicrous now, but when I had them they were serious business.)

As things turned out, I survived my first love without hurting anyone too badly. I annoyed the girl, yes, but at least I never managed to make her expect too much (since all I gave out were long looks, sighs, and prayers that she could not receive). I caused myself some grief, but I also learned important lessons about human relationships, the most important being that I need to deal with other people on their terms (trying to see them as they are as much as possible, not as I imagine them). Now, let's do a thought experiment. Imagine that my Sunday School teacher was not wise. Imagine her telling the class that first love is the only true love, that we have to maintain it no matter what, that it is wicked to get over it. Assuming I took this advice, where would I be today? If the girl was as naive as I was (as I have no reason to suppose she would not have been), I would be unhappily married to a person unknown to me, a person whose real character I would always be trying to overlay and stifle with impossible adolescent illusions of perfection. Our relationship would be completely dysfunctional, with one or both of us failing to engage the other meaningfully. It would also be a perfect metaphor for my relationship with the LDS church.

My love affair with the church is much like my first crush. It began relatively suddenly and even unexpectedly, when I was eleven years old. My mother was put on bed-rest early in her last pregnancy (which ultimately resulted in my youngest siblings), and my father had to work, so I was detailed (as the oldest child) to look after making everyone breakfast and overseeing most of the daily housework. I would get up early in the morning while everyone except my father slept and go to work making oatmeal in the kitchen. Waiting for the stuff to cook gave me an extended period of free time, which I spontaneously decided to fill with scripture study. I had no real reason, no motive for this decision, and what followed from it was largely unexpected (just like my accidental encounter with the girl and everything that resulted from that). I became a scripture junkie. I was hooked. Reading from the Book of Mormon every morning gave me this incredible emotional high. It was so powerful, that when I finished I went on to read the King James Bible, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price (all of which I eventually read through several times). I prayed fervently to God about the scriptures, just as I did about my Beloved, and I had a firm testimony that they and the organization that produced them were true (just as I knew my Lady was true and pure and everything else wonderful). I believed that God wrote these books (whatever imperfect human tools he might have used to pen the actual words and then typeset them for me), just as I believed that he created me to worship my Lady (an unworthy servant to a perfect angel). When the scriptures mentioned God and his servants (prophets, seers, revelators, apostles, and so on) as active figures in real history, I took them at their word. I believed in the magical powers I found in the scriptures: I thought that servants of God really could heal diseases with their staves (Numbers 17) or their saliva (John 9:1-7), that they brought people back from the dead (2 Kings 4:32-35; Luke 8:49-56), that they could call fire down from heaven and burn up God's enemies (2 Kings 1:5-15; Luke 9:51-56). And when the church added that such divine servants exist today and preside in perfect righteousness over the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I took them at their word. In other words, I projected my own, naive ideas about Divinity onto the church and its leaders (the way I projected my naive ideas about Love onto the girl).

Unfortunately, there was no one to keep me from "marrying" the church, no one to warn me that my devotion was unbalanced, ill-informed, and generally ridiculous (expecting more of humanity than humanity has to offer). Instead of deflating my naive adolescent enthusiasm, people around me mostly treated it as a kind of virtue, as though it were a good thing to expect impossible things from church leaders, as though they could live up to the excessive esteem and deference I held for them as healers, saviors, and mouthpieces for God. I might be Perceval (a mere worm struggling to live worthy of the lowest kind of holiness), but here at last was Galahad (my church leaders: the closest thing to human perfection in the world), and the Grail Quest would be won. We were going to build Zion together, a utopian society in which there would be nothing bad at all. With God and Christ on our side, who could stop us? Well, apparently we could. Unfortunately for my absolute faith in the church, I thought she had no dark side, no serious skeletons in the closet. When she demanded everything I had (my time, talents, love, and devotion), I gave it to her willingly, because she alone was worthy (as the body of Christ, led by his hand-picked leaders: Romans 12:5; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31). I wanted to know everything I could about the church (naturally: learning about her in the scriptures made me very happy, and what evil could be known of something as perfect as the very kingdom of God on earth? Did not the Lord himself command us, "Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith" [D&C 88:118]?). I was ready to give the church the benefit of every doubt, as I had already done when I gave my entire life to her, first at baptism and later when I entered the temple. Unfortunately, she had not been entirely forthcoming with me. I gave her everything of mine, but she held back (a lot, as it turns out).

Here my story becomes very personal. Different people need different things to be happy in a relationship. Some people don't need transparency, brutal truth, or the freedom to ask difficult questions. As it turns out, I am not one of those people. If you really like rock music, I don't want you to pretend that you don't just to make me happy. (I might never have realized this if I had been unfortunate enough to marry my first crush: in a worst-case scenario, I would have resented her constantly for failing to live up to my fantasy in which she was the perfect Lady, the Holy Grail of womanhood. I might have thought that it was her duty at least to seem as "perfect" as I thought she should be.) If you really have a rather sordid past, I don't want you to pretend that you don't just so that I'll feel good about dedicating a huge portion of my life to you. I want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I am at once an idealist and a realist, which means I want to see things as they really are (warts and all) before I start trying to change them for the better (in a way that actually improves them). Because nobody warned me about idolizing the church and its leaders early on, I had impossible expectations going into my career as an adult Saint. I wanted my adolescent fantasy of Divinity to correspond to reality, the way I used to want my adolescent fantasy of Love to correspond to a certain young girl. After years of experience and research, I discovered that my adolescent religious fantasy is not real. (No working magic props. No heavenly fire. No Galahad.) I'll be honest: this broke my heart. It turned my world upside down, and I am still struggling to recover.

My feelings are not unlike those of a bereaved lover who wakes up one morning to discover that his beloved has perished utterly (and irrevocably) overnight. Songs like the one that heads this essay still make me cry:

Feel the words from my lips
To your heart's fingertips
Then you know where I come from
'Cause I know, yes I know
Everything there is to know
'Cause I lost everything I had
See, I could have danced on the sun
But my world came undone,
Laura!

There's no need for tears
There's no need to cry
The love that you leave
Will never be denied
This pain in my head
Escaped from my heart
No woman alive can touch
Who you were

So bye-bye, Laura!
Nobody can take your place
Bye-bye, Laura!
Your beauty will never fade
Fade!

My world came undone. I lost everything (including my dreams of hieing to Kolob, i.e. dancing on the sun). My head hurts, but my heart hurts more. It is surprisingly like growing up and feeling nostalgia for the way things used to be (when you were five years old, ten, nineteen). But I know that my youth is irrevocably gone, and with it my naivete. I can never trust the LDS church naively again (or any other group of people claiming to speak for God), just as I can never again fall head over heels in love with someone I have never met (a circumstance for which I am sure my wife is grateful). Growing up and leaving our youthful fantasies behind is a necessary and healthy part of life, I now think, but that does not mean that it is easy or painless, especially when you are not well prepared (e.g. when you think that it is a virtue to hang doggedly onto those fantasies, as I used to). For all those who think that they have separated reality from fiction and discovered the universal meaning of life at age eleven, I repeat the observation of my Sunday School teacher (with a slight twist): "You think you know, but it's just youthful hormones. In a few years, it will blow over and you'll laugh at it, unless you make it the defining cornerstone of your character. Then, you will cry." The price for taking our naive fantasies too seriously is deep grief.

Sacred and Profane: Holy S***!

2011-09-06T20:53:00.018+03:00

Mircea Eliade. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans. W. Trask. London: Harcourt, 1987. ISBN: 015679201X.

I have read this book several times (in translation and in French). If I could sum up its message, it would be something like this. According to many different ancient human cultures, there are two kinds of activity, one sacred and the other not. Sacred activity has purpose. Profane activity is meaningless. Sacred activity recurs in measured season (as the year passes, the season changes, life progresses: think of Ecclesiastes 3:1-8). Profane activity just happens (as my toddler wanders here or there, alternately stuffing food in his mouth and spitting it out randomly). All activity is profane until someone, some god makes it sacred. Space is profane until gods use it to build worlds (of which our mortal temples are just models). Time is profane until gods measure it into regular seasons that construct the year (and repeat it endlessly in expanding cycles). Words are profane (mere noise, meaningless twaddle) until gods use them and give them meaning. In ancient cultures, every meaningful event in human life is presumed to exist as an iteration of divine activity: gods did this, so we do this. (Gods were born, so we are born. Gods ate food, so we eat food. Gods avoided plowing with ox and ass yoked together, so we avoid this. Gods got drunk [or didn't], so we get drunk [or don't]. Gods had sex, so we have sex. Gods killed adulterers, so we kill adulterers. Gods built homes, so we build homes, and so on and on.) Determining what gods did and did not do at any moment in sacred time becomes an important activity in ancient societies, too difficult and time-consuming for the average peasant, and so priests are created: ritual adepts with formulae for revealing what a god did (or would do), and (therefore) what we (as a community) should do. These formulae involve all kinds of interesting craziness, e.g. casting different kinds of lots, feeding special animals (and observing how they eat), performing sacrifices (and examining the entrails for signs left by the gods), watching the weather, performing special rituals in a temple, consulting holy books (the Tablets of Destiny, the Vedas, the Torah, the prophecies of the Sibyl, the Koran, etc.) or astrological charts.

What does all this have to do with four-letter words in English? Plenty! I still remember the first time I came across "cuss words" (as they were then known). I was about five years old, in kindergarten, and during recess one day I happened to be playing with a friend of sorts (we weren't particularly great friends, but I still remember his name--LeGrand--and his long, blond hair) near a trailer that had been set up in the schoolyard (perhaps as some kind of temporary classroom). We had just learned to read (more or less), so when I saw graffiti on the trailer I naturally started reading it off. I read rather scornfully, since the words didn't meaning anything to me: "F***, s***, -- what is all this nonsense?" LeGrand was horrified: "Don't say those words! Those are bad, bad words!" He looked genuinely upset, and I was somewhat surprised: if these words were so awful, how come I had never heard of them? Shouldn't someone have warned me that the world might end early if I uttered one of the deplorable words? We left the trailer, and I forget about cursing. We never cursed at home, so they just did not come up: my family expressed anger and other strong emotions differently (though my mother would occasionally say, "Bull!" when she thought someone was exaggerating the truth: it took me years to learn the rest of the expression, which she was too polite to utter).

For years, then, cursing was a meaningless (profane) activity, as far as I was concerned. I had no need for strong words, as I had no need for strong drink. When people told me God had no use for such things either, this made perfect sense. Then I went on an LDS mission to Spain (one of the most linguistically abrasive countries in Europe, in case anyone wants to know). Suddenly, I was listening to people curse all the time. Everywhere I went, people were constantly calling me out: "Cabrón! Hijo de puta! Maricón! Mamón! Testículo de Jehová! Me cago en Diós y tu madre, boludo! Véte a la mierda, capullo! No me jodas, gilipolla!" The gist of these insults was pretty easy to understand ("Leave me alone, you religious moron!"), and eventually I understood what they were actually saying. The strangest thing was how important context could be in determining what somebody really meant, especially with the word coño (c***), which could be a term of affection or an insult depending on the speaker's tone. While I came to understand cursing a little better (having to deal with it constantly), I still had no real use for it, and the Spanish curse words didn't really mean much to me. They were just words, interesting souvenirs from my journey into an alien culture. (I still laugh when I remember one young elder who naively asked the waitress at McDonald's if he could have an ice cream cone: unfortunately, his pronunciation of the word cono was a little off.) I was not offended by them. (Good thing, too, since if I had been I would have spent my whole time abroad seething and would probably have given myself an ulcer!) Even though I understood cursing better (on an intellectual level) after my mission abroad, it was still meaningless (profane) to me. I had no place for it, no need to express the emotional energy and intensity that I could sense only vaguely in others.

Then, several years later, I had a faith crisis. My crisis was a long time building and involved many factors. From an intellectual standpoint, it started when I read some Mormon apologetic work and became really interested in church history; from there it took me years, but I eventually had read enough to know that what I learned over years of church meetings (sacrament meeting, Sunday School, priesthood meeting, seminary, institute) was not anything like real history. (The church's versions of its own history leave out or obfuscate important information, e.g. the multiple accounts of the First Vision, the fact that Joseph Smith was a folk magician, Nauvoo polygamy, the fact that the Book of Abraham is in no way a translation of the Egyptian Book of Breathings.) From an emotional standpoint, it began when I hit puberty and started to experience myself as a sexual being (i.e. evil spawn of Satan). Over the years, I put myself through a lot of emotional hell because I was intellectually convinced (1) that the church was what its leaders say it is and (2) that it had the tools to fix my "problems" with sin and guilt. When it finally became clear to me that neither of these was true, i.e. that the church was not what it claims to be (intellectually) and that it could not relieve me of sin or guilt (worse, it would gladly load me with these permanently to make me docile to leadership), I was angry.

I had been angry before, certainly. I had been late somewhere or forgotten something or done something stupid and said, "Bother!" (Even on the mission, I never joined other missionaries in a rousing chorus of "Fetch!" To my ear, this sounded even sillier than ordinary swearing.) But this was different. I felt that I had based my entire adolescent and young adult life on a lie. (I look back with shame on moments like the one when, as a missionary for the church, I mistakenly informed two evangelicals that their story of Joseph Smith's First Vision was historically inaccurate; if I had actually known my church history, after more than a decade studying it actively at church, I would not have made that mistake. I would not have lied to them. I don't like it when an organization I love and trust uses me to tell lies.) Worse than that, I had tortured myself pointlessly for years in a misguided effort to master my sexuality (which was never out of control). I had trusted the most vulnerable parts of my fledgling self to a judge in Israel, winced as he branded them with divine justice (as prescribed by Spencer W. Kimball, prophet, seer, and revelator), and then watched in despair as I had to repeat the process over and over again (since try as I might, no amount of repentance would make the sex go away: I was not sexually active with anyone, nor like to be since I could not stop wondering whether I might have committed the sin next to murder every time I woke up during a wet dream). The more I thought about this, the more betrayed and disillusioned I felt. Not only had the church played me for a fool (intellectually: they got me to fib for them in Spain) and used pathological guilt to control me rather than heal me, they also had the gall to stand between me and my immediate family, who, as faithful members, would be duty-bound to reject their son and brother as an evil apostate now that I was done believing in the prophets' fairy tales and confessing to the prophets' bishops. (Fortunately, my family proved more forgiving than some, but I had no way of knowing a priori that they wouldn't cut me off the way others have.) The more I thought about this, the more I realized that I wasn't just angry. I was pissed. And cursing suddenly made sense. It became sacred.

This brings us to God. The God of the Old Testament (assuming here for brevity's sake that there is only one) has no problem cursing people out, e.g. "I will cut off from Ahab him that pisseth against the wall" (2 Kings 9:8) and "Behold I will corrupt your seed and spread dung upon your faces" (Malachi 2:3). Or in other words, "I will kill every last one of those motherf***ers!" (to Jehu, Ahab's successor who fulfilled God's curse by exterminating the old king's family) and "Hey, I'm going to f*** you up and shove s*** in your faces!" (to the temple priests against whom God sent Malachi). While my salty translations are not perfectly accurate (since curse words vary widely in time and space), they are not inaccurate either: God wasn't being nice or polite, and his expressions were most certainly very crude. And even the more circumspect Jesus (who tells us to stick with ordinary "Yes" and "No" in Matthew 5:37) calls the Syrophoenician woman a little bitch (κυνίδιον) in Mark 7:27 (though some have pointed out that the diminutive makes it a term of endearment, i.e. something like cute little bitch). The Apostle Paul continues the tradition of cursing: "I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung (σκύβαλον), that I may win Christ" (Philippians 3:8). In other words, "As I long as I have Jesus, I don't give a s*** about anything else!" So, if God and his ministers swear (as they do), why don't I? Well, until my faith crisis, I didn't really have any need to. I still don't, for the most part, but every now and then my righteous indignation boils over (usually when I think about big corporations using people like tools), and I sing songs like this ("Drunken Lullabies," from Flogging Molly):

Must it take a life for hateful eyes
To glisten once again
Five hundred years like Gelignite
Have blown us all to hell
What savior rests while on his cross we die
Forgotten freedom burns
Has the Shepherd led his lambs astray
To the bigot and the gun

Mormonism is not as old as the Irish conflict, but we Mormons suffer from the same crazy human mentality that sees only black and white, good and evil, Catholic and Protestant, God and Satan (1 Nephi 14). We relentlessly attack the evil in others and in ourselves, refusing to compromise because that would mean the end of civilization (and/or victory for the other side, which we regard as the anti-Christ). We are so drunk on this all-or-nothing idea of civilization that we seem willing to give up almost anything and anyone to save it: we lie about our past; we put ourselves through rigorous emotional torment; we spend time and money gratuitously denying other people the blessings of marriage and divorce; as a church, we write every dissenter off as a wicked apostate, no matter how thoughtful or respectful his (or her) individual position. Like the Irish, we bring war in the name of peace (though ours ceased to be a shooting war long ago, thank goodness). Before my faith crisis, I couldn't really see all of this. More to the point of my subject (sacred and profane), I couldn't appreciate a song like "Drunken Lullabies," with its cursing, its blasphemy (how can the Good Shepherd lead his lambs astray?), and its blatant disregard for the correlated Word of Wisdom. (Though, if we go by the original document revealed to Joseph Smith, beer is actually recommended: as long as the Irish refrain from whiskey, they can have as much stout as they please and still be good Mormons!) Today, this song is sacred for me: it moves me as profoundly as any hymn ever did. It is about a human tragedy that I can personally relate to.

Another sacred song from Flogging Molly is about the mess that is the city of Detroit post-bailout ("The Power's Out"):

Yeah the power's out
Well there's f*** all to see
Yeah the power's out
Like this economy
Guess it's par for the course
Unless you're a blood-sucking leech CEO, CEO

So I guess the Good Lord has forgotten about me, yeah
And me like himself my old trade's carpentry, yeah
I could build him a cross with one hand behind back
And the other three nails 'case he gives me the sack

A few years ago, this song would have meant nothing to me. Before I woke up to find myself betrayed by the church, I didn't worry about betrayal, really. I was intellectually aware that it existed, but I had nothing personal invested in it, no raw emotions on the line. Then, one day, I found myself unexpectedly abandoned by God and excoriated by his leaders (whom I could not approach directly with my problems, because they would just tell me to shut up and repent or get the heck out of their church). At the same time, I was growing up enough to know something about how corporations work, and I realized that God's leaders weren't the only people telling me (and other poor fools like me) to shut up and repent or else. I started listening when politicians and university presidents spoke. I noticed when fellow citizens and students got royally screwed (and then shoved under the rug if they made too big of a stink about it). And I realized that I don't have much sympathy or respect for many of the people who exercise power in modern corporate America. Specifically, I am tired of being lied to (by liberal and conservative leaders alike) and used (to fund ridiculous economic schemes designed to save businesses that should have adapted or died years ago, including our federal government with its Ponzi schemes disguised as social services). To the extent that leaders lie to me and abuse me, I don't like them (no matter how noble they say their cause is). To the extent that I thought I could depend on them before they failed to make good on their word (which is generally too lightly given), I really don't like them. I need a way to express my dislike, a meaningful (sacred) outlet for this righteous indignation. But I am not a violent person. I am actually not a very angry person. So I just sing angry, cynical songs and then go about my work, tending my own little garden with Voltaire's Candide. It is amazing how much better I feel towards lying leaders after I have flipped them off.

The Problem with Gurus

2011-08-18T17:19:00.005+03:00

Geoffrey D. Falk. Stripping the Gurus: Sex, Violence, Abuse and Enlightenment. Million Monkeys, 2009. ISBN: 0973620315.

This book is available online, for free, and it is actually quite informative and entertaining. It presents a number of anecdotes illustrating what typically goes wrong when one person surrenders his moral authority abjectly to another (a demonstration often referred to "faith" or "obedience" in my experience).

Reading Falk releases a cascade of conflicting emotions in me. On the one hand, I want to believe in the guru-disciple relationship: for many years I assumed it as a given, taking the word of my parents, my religious leaders, and my martial arts instructor as law (and worshipping them as its administrators). In the case of my parents and my martial arts instructor, this blind, absolute faith proved harmless; in time, I grew to the point where I no longer needed the crutch of someone telling me exactly what to do in crucial situations (e.g. in the bathroom, in the car, in the sparring ring), and they stepped back to let me "do my own thing" without any fuss or recrimination. Their goal was to make me a fully fledged individual (like them, but not eternally under their thumb: in fact, if I had continued requiring constant supervision to perform "like a big boy," they would have regarded their teaching time as wasted). I was safe trusting these people absolutely because they trusted me back and did not take undue advantage of my youthful gullibility (in taking them for gods when, as they would tell you, they are just human beings like everybody else).

On the other hand, my religious experiences with the guru-disciple relationship have not turned out well. This goes back at least as far as puberty, when I joined the Aaronic priesthood and became personally answerable to my local LDS bishop. My bishop was a family man--kind, interested, and good--and he did his best to help me grow up righteous. Unfortunately, this meant interrogating me regularly about my sexual proclivities, which I was very uncertain about (having scarcely any practical experience with them). I was gradually becoming aware (1) that sex existed, (2) that it was part of my life (whether I wanted it or not), and (3) that if I had anything to do with it before marriage, I was hell-bound (not because I would actually go to Outer Darkness, though that was ultimately a possibility: meantime, I would be unable to fulfill my public duties as an Aaronic priesthood holder; everyone would notice my failure to perform and conclude that I was a miserable sinner). The latter point (3) was especially distressing, since I was always in doubt as to what inroads precisely sex was allowed to make on me before marriage. Could I have a wet dream? What if I rolled over at night and something happened? What if I woke up in the middle of something happening? What if I woke up touching myself? What if ... ? I had just experienced a very emotional conversion to the "truth" of my religion (the Mormon equivalent to "getting saved" as a born-again Christian), and religious observance was very important to me. I wanted to be a good Aaronic priesthood holder. I did not want to fail in my public duties, and I was not willing to lie just to go through the motions: for me (as a very sincerely religious person), that would the ultimate sacrilege. I took the church's nebulous prohibition on premarital sex (of any kind) very seriously, and thus I found myself confessing repeatedly to my bishop, the "judge in Israel" with authority to handle such matters before God and the faith community.

I was told that confessing to the bishop, repenting (which might involve formal discipline, like having my ability to participate in public ceremonies revoked), and being forgiven would make me feel better, would improve my moral standing (as an individual and a member of the LDS community), would make me a better person. Unfortunately, all I got was several years of agony, wherein I would go running to the bishop every time I had a wet dream or any other unusual sexual experience whose "appropriateness" struck me as being in question. While this occasionally did result in momentary happiness (when the bishop happened to say something like, "Oh, don't worry about that"), relief was never lasting: sex was still out there to destroy me. And there were times when I came close to being disciplined; I felt scared and powerless (since I could not make the sex go away), as well as humiliated (since I was constantly letting my community down and having to confess my awful sinfulness to the good bishop, who just wished I could be a good little boy like everyone else: I was really, really naive). I desperately wanted to control my sexuality "appropriately" -- so I dutifully did everything my bishop told me (pray, study the scriptures, don't think about girls) and even tried to read Spencer W. Kimball's Miracle of Forgiveness on my own (not an exercise I recommend to anyone trying to cope with intense shame, guilt, or fear). None of this helped, at all (except insofar as the scriptures occasionally distracted me with a story that was not my own, though I still felt personally condemned every time any sexual misdeed was denounced). It was like pouring endless rounds of saltwater on an open wound that never healed. Instead of learning to control myself and be responsibly comfortable with sexuality, I learned to react with abject shame and fear every time anything reminded me of sex. I learned to mistrust (and even hate) myself: what abiding worth could I possibly have if I was unable to avoid continually tumbling in the direction of sexual sin, the sin closest to murder (a closeness that was drawn to my attention repeatedly in church meetings especially for youth)?

I have many happy memories from my youth. I also have many unhappy memories, times when I wished I could end it all by castrating myself physically (as I read that some of the early church fathers did) or committing suicide (when I figured I was already headed to Outer Darkness as an all-but murderer). My parents shared a few of these sad moments, and they did their best to make me see that I was crazy. My church leaders shared a few of these sad moments, and they did their best to make sure that I continued to suffer indefinitely (not because they meant to hurt me, but because they genuinely thought that all of this anguish was somehow good for me, that my sinfulness would be washed away in the pangs of "godly sorrow"). I went to my parents, and they said, "Don't be ridiculous." I went to my religious leaders (including that bishop, whom I honestly never want to see again, not because he is a bad person but because I have so many bad memories of sitting in his office, telling him things he did not need to know), and they said, "Confess. Repent. Go and sin no more." Tragically, I listened to my leaders over my parents.

Somehow I managed to get off on a mission in spite of my recurrent lapses into sexuality. (If I remember correctly, my dad got really exasperated with my doubts about worthiness and said something about real people having to live normal lives in spite of wet dreams: the work of the world still needs doing, even if you might have accidentally masturbated, moron! Good for him.) There, I managed to avoid having too much to do with sexuality: it was still around, but the increase in other stressors put a sudden (and surprising, to me anyway) damper on its power over me. I was still intensely religious. I still believed in my leaders absolutely. Though I had long since started distancing myself from my parents and my martial arts instructor, I was still tied to my church leaders' apron-strings. When local leaders, mission presidents, and visiting General Authorities told me to spend 60 hours proselytizing every week, I did. When they promised baptismal success if we were righteous, I believed them. When nothing happened in spite of our best efforts (i.e. our numbers remained very unimpressive), I should have concluded that I was still a miserable sinner ruining God's plan with my incorrigible wickedness, but I did not. Instead, I started thinking, and something inside me snapped. I was tired of feeling ashamed, guilty, scared, and powerless around my religious leaders. I was tired of having my best efforts never be enough for them. I was tired of being the miserable failure who couldn't do anything really good for God because he might have accidentally masturbated. I was tired of "authorities" giving me plans that did not pan out and then blaming me for the failure. Slowly, I stopped listening fearfully to the authorities. I started looking at life for myself and asking myself honestly what I thought about it. The apron-strings began to come off. It would take years for them to be removed entirely.

I still remember the last time I confessed anything to an LDS bishop. I was a graduate student in my mid-twenties, getting ready to be married in the Salt Lake temple. Thinking innocently about marriage and everything it involved, I found myself one day in the art library of my institution. I pulled a random book off the shelf, opened it up, and confronted a painting of a pregnant nude (by Lucian Freud). It was like a dash of cold water to the face: I did not know what to think, and the old panic welled up. Would I be unworthy now to be married? Would I have to spend the next several years explaining to everyone over and over again why I could never have a normal life? (Ha!) I went in to see my bishop--another kind, interested family man--and told him about the painting (but not the rest of my life). He smiled, said that it was normal for me to be thinking about marriage at this point of my life, that there was nothing wrong with enjoying beautiful art, and that was that. As I left his office in a painfully familiar rush of adrenaline, I thought to myself, "I am never going to play this game again. I am not going to burden this man or any man with my private neuroses, no matter what calling God has given him. I will not take a friendly mentor and turn him into an almighty guru." The apron-strings went really slack that day.

Today, I think there is an important difference to be made between mentors and gurus. The mentor knows that he has limitations. He does not speak the absolute will of an all-knowing God. He just tells you where he is been so that you can take his wisdom as a road map (if you want to). If you are really young or naive, he might have to control you a bit (especially at first, as anyone with toddlers knows), but his goal is always to set you out eventually on your own. He never demands respect for ideas that don't work. The guru, on the other hand, believes that he has transcended whatever limitations he may have. He does speak the will of God. When he speaks, you listen or go to hell. He will always want to control you. If you give him your fear, your guilt, your shame, then you have put yourself entirely in his power, and he will ride you into the ground. Even if he wants to do you good, his "guru-ness" (the mantle of authority that Boyd K. Packer likes to talk about) will not let him: that is what they mean when they say that power corrupts, not that it turns people's heads (though it can do that too), but that it inevitably leads to people getting unnecessarily hurt. Every time hierarchical power is exerted, people get hurt. (This actually makes good biological sense: I refer you to Robert Sapolsky's work on stress in baboons.) The mentor knows this and tries to help prepare his protege for inevitable blowback. The guru ignores this, whether ignorantly or maliciously, and leaves his disciple naively, nakedly vulnerable. By refusing to take full and permanent responsibility for another person's morality, the mentor (no matter how he might express himself verbally) is demonstrating love. By claiming absolute devotion, the guru (no matter how he might express himself verbally) is demonstrating contempt. I am done learning from people who despise me, people whose teaching always boils down to "F*** you!" (though they are not always aware of it). I let them do me (only metaphorically, thank goodness) for years, and I cannot recommend it. It is bad.

My Personal Canon

2011-07-25T02:47:00.004+03:00

I have been thinking I should post a list of books that really speak to my soul. Here, in no particular order, are books that I find uniquely inspiring as I pursue moral excellence.

Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth). This book is the only part of the Old Testament that I still take really seriously as an inspiring commentary on the human condition. (Some of the Proverbs and Psalms are good, too, but others are not. I can also appreciate aspects of some of the prophets, especially Isaiah, but they also contain a lot of old-school mythology that doesn't really speak to me any more.)

Epistle of James. This is the only book in the New Testament that I really like any more. It is all about real ethical problems and workable solutions. (The Gospels contain a lot of myth disguised as history, as does Acts, and Paul is a bit too polemical for my taste. Revelation is an interesting kookfest, but its ethical relevance is pretty much nil, at least for me.)

Doctrine and Covenants 121. This section of the D&C is a favorite of mine. I still like the image of leadership that it presents (one that strives to inspire emulation rather than demand obedience). If Joseph Smith had done a better job of living up to this, he might not have died so early.

Seeds of Contemplation. This gem from Thomas Merton (published in 1961) has been a real source of inspiration for me. Every chapter is quotable (and useful in real moral dilemmas that I have). The Christianity practiced by the author is an ethical system that I definitely believe in.

What Makes You Not a Buddhist. This introduction to Buddhism by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse (from Bhutan) has become another book that I look to repeatedly for insight into the human condition. I have really enjoyed reading it over and over again, noting my reaction to the four truths: (1) all compounded things are impermanent; (2) all emotions are pain; (3) all things have no inherent existence; (4) nirvana is beyond concepts. If I have an old-school credo (map of "ultimate reality"), this might be one of the most accessible statements of it that I have stumbled across.

War and Peace; Anna Karenina. I have read both of these books multiple times over my life (especially the former, but the latter is also really, really good). I am always impressed at the insight into humanity (rich and poor, working and lazy, intelligent and not, civilized and savage) that both contain. Of the Russian writers, Tolstoy is the only one that has always spoken to me (though I really like Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, which should probably also be in this canon). War and Peace is everything one could want in a book: comprehensive, entertaining (light-hearted at times, but deadly serious too), and very long (it is one of the few books over 1000 pages that I routinely wish were longer). Anna Karenina shows us all aspects of sin, including the humanity (and human goodness) of the sinner. Together, I think they provide more useful insight into your average human reality than any ancient mythology.

Dao De Jing. This ancient Chinese text is a recent addition to my canon. (I would not have understood it as a young[er] man, back when I approached everything in terms of Platonic forms, confounding the abstract with the concrete.) I discovered it while working on the problem of organic wisdom (as opposed to absolute knowledge), and I have really fallen in love with it. Life (and human ethics) is about process, not results, and everything we do is fluid. Nothing is ever set in stone (unless it is meant to be broken).

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. As a young college student, I was drawn to the Greeks and Greek philosophy, and I could never figure out why. I also wanted to achieve a kind of personal excellence in other fields of endeavor that were important to me, but was not really interested in competition or what most moderns categorize as "success" (money, power, prestige, technical brilliance, etc.). Robert Pirsig's book (published in 1974) is one of the clearest expressions of my own longing for "quality" (my own authentic, integral experience with reality) that I have ever found. As I read it, something inside me said, "Yes! Yes! That's just what I have been feeling. That's precisely why I hate my relationship with machines and am obsessed with studies that yield no obvious external rewards!" The book is excellent.

Never Let Go. This quirky collection of strength-training tips and life advice created by Dan John (and published in 2009) is included here because it speaks to my conviction that human ethics involve the whole individual, with physical health laying the groundwork for moral excellence (and all other emergent properties of the human condition that we sometimes refer to with words like "spirituality"). Dan believes this too (as far as I can tell), and his book is refreshingly honest, simple, and packed with great strength-training advice (including knowing references to most of the other authors I have read in my search for top-notch health tips). Rather than pad my list with a bunch of stuff about strength and health, I include Dan as a concession to that part of my life (which continues to be important). Also, I find his brutal honesty and humility as refreshing as they are funny. (Seriously, how many strength books do you know that give you real insight into being healthy and strong and make you laugh at the same time? Not many, I'm guessing.)

Fooled By Randomness; The Black Swan; The Bed of Procrustes. I have read Taleb's books several times (including the last, a collection of modern proverbs). I find them continually entertaining and insightful (despite what some critics think). They never fail to put me in touch with the reality of my own ignorance (which is what every good book should do, in my opinion). I really like them.

These are all the obvious titles that come to mind today. Of course I may expand the list, as time goes by. My canon is completely open.

Losing Religion, Gaining Faith

2011-06-19T16:10:00.002+03:00

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

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

The LDS Articles of Faith from a Female Perspective

2011-06-05T16:14:00.011+03:00

This comes from a feminist friend (who shall remain anonymous). It was too good not to post, and she had no objection to my publishing it here. It is sacrilegious, of course, but it is also funny (and even embarrassingly true):

(1) We believe that the divinity of God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost gives them power and authority, and that the sacredness of Heavenly Mother makes her effete and silenced.

(2) We covenant that all women must be punished for Eve's transgression.

(3) We believe that through the atonement of Christ, all temple-recommend holding, sealed, heterosexual couples (or triples...) can be saved through obedience to the laws and ordinances of LDS doctrine.

(4) We believe that the first principles and ordinances of the gospel are, first, faith in the current prophet; second, obedience; third, possession of a temple recommend; fourth, correlated study of correlated scripture.

(5) We believe that women are called of God to bear and raise children through eternity, but only at home under the presiding direction of their husbands.

(6) We believe in the same organization that existed in the primitive church, namely: men are in charge. [Actually, some early Christians gave women some kind of authority in the movement: see Romans 16:1. This does not undermine the historical truth that men have been largely responsible for running the Christian movement.]

(7) We believe in the gift of balls, testosterone, hairy chests, five-o'clock shadows, and so forth.

(8) We believe the King James Version of the Bible to be the word of God, as long as it is correlated correctly. We also believe the opinion of the bishop to be the word of God.

(9) We believe versions of what Joseph Smith revealed, some of what Brigham Young revealed, and we believe correlation has now established all important things pertaining to the kingdom of God.

(10) We believe in the Republican (Grand Old Party) version of the Constitution, and in restoring the Founding Fathers' true intent; that Zion, the New Jerusalem, has been built in Salt Lake City, Utah; that fifteen old, white men reign personally upon the earth; and that they rightly influence members' votes to raise the Constitution to its paradisaical glory.

(11) We claim the privilege of sending missionaries throughout the world to teach all men how, where, and what to worship.

(12) We believe in being subject to prophets, seventies, stake presidents, bishops, husbands, or even twelve-year-old boys, rather than obeying, honoring, or allowing any woman to preside in her own home.

(13) We believe temple-recommend holders to be honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and that temple recommends are good for all men; and so, we may say, temple-recommend interviewers may ask and admonish as they will: they may ask all things, they may pry into all things, they may demand any things in hopes to be able to control all things. If there is anything uncorrelated, unorthodox, or sexy, they seek after these things.

Reclaiming Eternity

2011-05-19T17:47:00.009+03:00

Shunryu Suzuki. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Boston: Weatherhill, 1970. ISBN: 0834800799.

One of the hardest things about falling out of my original Mormon faith was losing what Latter-day Saints like to refer to as "the eternal perspective." As a Saint, I knew who, where, and what I would be forever, pending my performance on the test that is this mortal life. I dealt with pain in the present by imagining a glorious future where it would not matter (or might even provide the same kind of pleasure that veterans get from showing their scars and reminiscing). Part of what destroyed this perspective for me was seeing how bad some suffering is for people, and how callously some LDS (and Christians in general) can be toward that suffering as a result of their conviction that isn't real (like heaven) or doesn't matter (the way heaven does). I realized that focusing on the future at all costs not only alleviates pain in the present (for some people); it also causes (or amplifies) it (at least in certain circumstances). It was hurting me, since in the present I could never convince myself that I was living up to the standard that would guarantee my eternal future (or receiving the grace that would secure that future in spite of anything that might happen: either I wasn't good enough, or Jesus wasn't there for me; either way, the result was the same: I was continually anxious about my eternal salvation). Still, I clung to that (imaginary) future as my one hope, my solid anchor in a world always changing and often unfriendly. When exploring my own psyche and Christian history (in which I include the history of the LDS) completely severed this anchor, I was pretty devastated.

Suzuki was one of many people who threw me a lifeline at this point. If I could summarize what he taught me in Zen Mind, it would look something like this: past and future are illusions; the only real thing is the eternal now. Eternal relationships are vital now, at this very moment. They do not depend on yesterday, or tomorrow, or anything outside of the breath that comes in and goes out right now. You cannot be good in the past or the future, but you can be good now. You cannot be married in the past or the future, but you can be married now. You cannot repent of the past or the future, but you can repent now. Birth, death, and the whole cycle of life in between is at once real and unreal: things do change, but they also stay the same. I enjoy waking up in the morning, seeing the sky, smelling the flowers, listening to the birds, and being alive in the moment. If for some reason I cannot see, or smell, or hear, or otherwise perceive external phenomena, I still enjoy thinking. I also enjoy sleep, a different kind of thought, and when it becomes the sleep from which none wake (as far as we know), who is to say that I will not enjoy that just as much? Death is just another alteration in consciousness, unreal until we meet it in the eternal now. As there is no use being scared of birth, so there is no use being scared of death. Meaning outside of the present is dangerous, because it leads us to ignore the one thing we have, which is this very moment. Carpe diem!

Not with a Bang, but a Whimper

2011-04-22T17:55:00.001+03:00

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

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

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

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

Theory without Practice: Faith without Works?

2011-03-31T23:42:00.004+03:00

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

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

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

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

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

Follow the Profit

2010-11-13T19:18:00.012+02:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virtual Reality

2010-10-16T16:49:00.002+03:00

Kate Distin. The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment. Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0521606276.

Reading Distin after Lotman and Uexkull drove home the idea that we all live in in two worlds. One of these is almost completely outside our ken: we cannot see it, hear it, touch it, smell it, taste it, or even think about it really (except to think that it exists). The other is knowable: we can see it, hear it, touch it, smell it, taste it, and think it. The first world is the "real" world. The second world is a sensory projection (the human equivalent of the self-generated universe of Uexkull's tick). The first world becomes intelligible to us only as our senses receive impressions that it projects into the second world, where we can feel them.

How does the mind fit into all of this? It provides a holding place for sensory data, a kind of personal library where sensory impressions are recorded for consultation and comparison. Over time, it accumulates enough information to help us "see" the second world coherently. (Babies just experience stuff without knowing what they experience, while older children have an idea about what it is that they are experiencing, how it will respond to specific actions, etc.) Distin describes this process as the acquisition of memes, which bind together in the mind to form a complete map of everything we experience (see, hear, touch, smell, taste, think). These memes bind to one another into complexes (A goes with B goes with C, and so on) of information, creating a world-map we use to navigate through the virtual reality that our senses project.

All world-maps are "deficient" in some way, because none of them sees everything from every available point of view: this observable relativity is what makes it possible for us to realize that the first world, the world we cannot know, exists. So no meme or meme-complex, no idea or ideology, is ever sufficient to tell anyone all he or she needs to know about reality, which is larger than the mind's ability to grasp (exceeding the capacity of the entire human sensory apparatus). Confronted with infinite reality, our human world-maps are no more omniscient than that of Uexkull's tick. The most we can ever do is conceive provisionally correct ideas: we cannot know all there is.

Memes on my Mind

2010-10-10T22:44:00.002+03:00

Kate Distin. The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment. Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0521606276.

As a follow-up to the last post, I offer three points which reading The Selfish Meme brought into focus for me.

(1) People do not automatically take charge of their ideas (memes). Ideas can and will run your life as they please if you let them, inducing you to do and be a number of things which you might never do or be if you examined yourself carefully and decided consciously what to dedicate yourself (your doing and being) to. The fact that this happens is not really anyone's "fault" (unless you believe in a divine puppet-master pulling our and/or all strings): it results from the facts (1) that we need ideas to survive, and (2) that we begin life largely (indeed wholly) at the mercy of a relatively small bundles of ideas (starting with the meme-complexes articulated and defended by our parents).

(2) The human mind is amazingly plastic: it will bend over backwards to make "bad" memes "good" (i.e. to get useful and use-able information from even the crappiest sources). The individual capacity to adapt and "mold" memes admitted from someone else (parents, the community, churches, schools, teachers, gurus, etc.) is an amazing human feature. Sometimes the most worthless piece of information (a really dumb meme) can be redeemed by someone's ability to fit it into a new context (re-tooling an old meme-complex or creating a new one). For a practical example, consider what Denise Minger has done for T. Colin Campbell's China Study. Because of the nature of human "intelligence" (the way we pick up memes and run with them), no idea (meme), no matter how stupid, is a guaranteed stillbirth. By the same token, even really dumb ideologies (meme-complexes) can build defenses against skepticism that will convince people not to challenge truth-claims (no matter what these are: they might be absolute truth or ridiculous nonsense; either way, some people will run with them while others won't, and both sides will have "reasons" that appear compelling from some perspective). They can also accommodate some useful information (at least enough that people keep passing them on).

(3) I am not really comfortable living my life in accordance with ideas I have not examined and approved (however provisionally) for myself, for reasons that I find compelling. I recognize that not all of my standards in choosing ideas (memes) and even ideologies (meme-complexes) are rationally defensible: making decisions with insufficient information is part and parcel of the human condition as I experience it. That being said, there are one or two things I am pretty sure I know (at least empirically), and I cannot live seriously with ideas (memes) and ideologies (meme-complexes) that deny my knowledge (requiring me to have faith in something that I "know" to be untrue). I have to own my own memes and use them in a way that appears ethical to me. I cannot spend the rest of my life assuming that "one day" in the future everything will magically make sense and be perfect if I just keep doing what seems wrong to me in the here and now.

Imagining How Culture Works

2010-10-04T05:43:00.004+03:00

Kate Distin. The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment. Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0521606276.

While certainly not the last word on the subject of culture, this book really opened my mind. Distin tries, with little empirical grounding (to the annoyance of Matteo Mameli), to get a notional grip on how people create, use, and transmit information (a process we sometimes call "culture" from the old Latin colere, meaning "to cultivate, tend, take care of a field"). While I agree provisionally with the problems Mameli finds with fanciful thought experiments such as Distin performs, I still learned a good deal from her approach, which (for my own enjoyment) I am going to outline here in a series of quotes (preceded by my summaries):

(1) Culture evolves by "memes" (discrete packets of replicable cultural information) the way biology evolves by genes (discrete packets of replicable biological information). The information in memes exists in the form of "representations" (mental images that shape human thought and behavior).

"The most basic element in evolution, whether biological or cultural, is replication. There are two steps involved in replication: the preservation of the information that is copied, and the means by which it is transmitted...In the evolution of any form, what evolves is essentially information. Genes are a means of preserving biological information, and the format that they use is DNA. We know where to look for the units of biological selection (within organisms) and we know what form that information takes (DNA). In culture, however, things are not yet so obvious, and this is a real stumbling block for many who first encounter the meme hypothesis. It is all very well to suggest that culture "evolves" via memes, just as biology does via genes, but where exactly are these memes to be found and--most fundamentally--what are they?" (18) ...

"Since memes are replicators it is reasonable to expect that their content, too, must be preserved in a particular way...What does this mean in practice? Much information will have a severely restricted impact on the meme pool, owing to its limited effects on the world. The reasons for such limitations are varied. For example, the Spanish that I learned many years ago, for exam purposes, has now all but disappeared from my memory, since its potential effects (enabling me to communicate with other Spanish speakers, or to read Spanish text) are not able to operate when I am surrounded by monolingual English speakers and choose not to buy any books written in Spanish. That information, in the context of my particular mind and environment, has therefore very little effect on the world. Other representational content may not have much potential in any context: a poorly written novel, which neither stirs the heart nor stimulates the mind of the reader, will struggle to survive in the competition for our attention. There may be some mileage in being associated with a successful replicator (i.e., being selected as a side effect of a replicator with useful effects), but in general a meme demands content that has an executing role, in (potentially) producing a phenotypic effect. [Translation: we want information to be practically useful in some way if we are going to go to the trouble of learning it, using it, and passing it on in usable form to others.]" (19) ...

"Surely the vast majority of our mental representations are created as the result of encounters with a particular sort of object--a book, an apple, a person or whatever...Suppose that a wasp flies into a room where there is a small child who has never encountered one. Ben has, however, seen bees many times before, and the wasp triggers the representation that he has previously had whenever bees have flown into the room. That representation was created as a result only of previous encounters with bees, since this is the first time that Ben has seen a wasp. As a result of his belief about those sorts of insects, Ben will believe that this one might sting him, avoid antagonising it, and do his best to let it back into the garden. My intuition about Ben is that, rather than a correct representation (of a bee-type insect, for instance), he has made a lucky mistake (thinking it is actually a bee)...No matter that both insects fulfilled the same purpose in his life (causing him to represent them in a certain way, and therefore to avoid them); what does seem relevant is that he assigned the wrong identity to the wasp. Wasps are not bees" (25-26) ...

"[T]here are different sorts of mental representation, with some being more complex than others. In particular, some representations play a role much like a switch, linking an organism's perception of a given stimulus to behaviour that is appropriate as a response. Others are more complex, and have not only these external links to perceptions and behaviour but also internal links to other representations [Pavlov's dogs salivated when a bell rang, an event they learned to associate with being fed, even when no food was forthcoming]--and the content of any given representation will be determined by all of these links" (34).

(2) Memes exist and reproduce following patterns evident elsewhere in information integration and dissemination.

"It is well known that complex replication will always be more successful if the complexity involved is hierarchical. This fact has been neatly illustrated by Herbert Simon, in a parable which suggests 'a general functional reason why complex organization of any kind, biological or artificial, tends to be organized in nested hierarchies of repeated sub-units.' It goes roughly as follows. Each of two watchmakers have to assemble watches from a thousand component parts. He has, in effect, to replicate an established complex form. Tempus assembles his watches piece by piece, and they are so constructed that if he pauses or drops an unfinished watch then he has to start again from scratch. Hora, on the other hand, makes subassemblies of ten parts each, then subassemblies of ten of these, and finally a whole watch from ten of those, so if he is interrupted then he loses only a small part of his work. As a result, Hora can assemble his watches in a fraction of the time that it takes Tempus: according to Simon's analysis, if there is a chance of say one in a hundred that either watchmaker will be interrupted while adding a part to his assembly, then Tempus can be expected to take four thousand times as long as Hora to assemble a watch. Although in fact the statistics of expectation show that the correct relationship is more like two thousand times as long, Simon's key point still holds: the Hora style of building gives a better time scale, greater stability and resistance to shock, and a greater amenability to repair and improvement--and it is clearly hierarchical" (41).

"Replication...will be most efficient if it builds on what already exists rather than starting afresh each time. An important implication of this message is that the most successful sort of replication will be particulate: if the constituent parts of what is replicated were to blend, then the end product would be a conglomerate rather than an assembly. The units of an assembly must be what Arthur Koestler has described as 'self-assertive': each maintains its own individuality within the assembly. On the other hand each must also be compatible with the others in the assembly, otherwise the result will be unstable: as part of a larger system, towards whose future and stability they tend to 'work', the units in an assembly must (in Koestler's terms again) be 'integrative' as well as self-assertive. The replication of complexity, in its reliance on assemblies, is therefore dependent on the existence of dual-natured units, which are able to retain their individual identities whilst operating as part of a complex" (42).

"It is of course important to acknowledge that there is a difference between the acquisition of information and the acceptance of that information into one's network of beliefs. There is a sense in which the "flat earth" meme is still pretty successful today: plenty of people know that it is possible to believe that the earth is flat, even though they themselves do not subscribe to that belief. In this way it is perhaps analogous to a recessive gene, whose DNA we possess and are able to pass on to our children but which exerts no effect on our bodies or behaviour. Similarly, we are capable of passing on information that persists in our memories, even when we don't assent to it, but it will have little or no effect on our thoughts or behaviour. Just because I understand what it means to believe that the earth is flat, I neither subscribe to a conspiracy theory about the origin of satellite pictures of the earth nor have any doubt that it is possible to circumnavigate the globe" (44).

(3) Memes evolve by simultaneously conforming to and rebelling against the cultural status quo. The information they encode at once agrees with the growing body of information already "out there" in society (in mega-packets of systematized information that Distin calls "protective meme complexes" -- one example of such a complex might be the LDS gospel) and disagrees with it (changing it in some way, large or small -- this looks like the Mormon principle of continuing revelation). The survival of a meme depends more on the culture around it than on itself: a great idea goes unnoticed if there is no context in which it makes sense, no reason to pick it up, no evangelist committed to selling it.

"One of the most significant aspects of any meme's environment will be the other memes that are present in that culture, and this is the factor that will often dominate the fate of novel memes in particular. In order to be accepted, an idea has (usually) to be compatible with those already in existence--which means that selection will favour memes that are capable of exploiting the current cultural environment. The result will be coadapted meme complexes which bestow further benefits on their members in addition to the initial privilege of admission: as the complexes grow in size and strength, they will become more difficult to penetrate, providing protection against invading, contradictory ideas. This is analogous to the complexes of coadapted genes to be found within particular species, and typically we should expect to find protective meme complexes within specific cultures. It also reflects [the] fact...that the direction of evolution will be dependent upon what already happens to exist. For specific novel replicators--both genes and memes--this will mean that their success of failure will be partly determined by the prior existence of other replicators in their area. 'Much as the evolution of rabbits created ecological niches for species that eat them and parasitize them, the invention of cars created cultural niches for gas stations, seat belts, and garage door openers'" (57).

"A meme's own content may, then, be a fairly arbitrary factor in determining its success: its fortune in the struggle for survival will always be relative to context. As memes struggle to gain and retain the attention of human minds, their success or failure is in this sense influenced more by the environment than by their own content. Novel memes must be fit for the existing body of culture, for the physical environment and for the dictates of human biology and psychology, in order to stand a chance of being copied accurately or enduringly" (67).

(4) Memes exist in human minds and external repositories (like libraries, architectural blueprints, articulate cultural ideologies [e.g. correlated Mormonism], etc.) but require active presence in the mind in order to be reproduced. The key point to take away is this: the individual human mind is not an absolute master of the meme pool; all individual mental activity occurs inside a greater cultural complex with ideas (memes) and ideologies (meme-complexes) that we only naively construe as being our own. This does not mean that we are entirely powerless as individuals, however. While we cannot tell what memes the world will confront us with, we can (and do) shape our personal reaction, selecting for the memes we engage with and against the ones we ignore.

"[T]here is no significant distinction to be drawn between the human mind and external information stores such as libraries and the Internet, but in order for a meme to be available to selection, active copies of it must exist. If the human mind is not universal, but is developed via interaction with existing culture, then external representations play an essential role in memetic replication. The internal brain structures are, though, the ultimate source of the external representations. Thus a combination of both sorts of meme store has led to a massive capacity for information dissemination and copying stability, which would have been impossible via only one of the storage methods...This picture ties in with the view of the capacity to gain and retain attention as the best measure of memetic fitness. If a meme is to be replicated, then it must be able to grab our attention: at times when only passive copies of it persist, it is not able to do this and is therefore not at all fecund. On the other hand, if a meme is to persist then it must be able to able to retain our attention, and passive copies of it are the most efficient way of ensuring its prolonged existence. This extension of memes' phenotype is also reminiscent of Clark's view that 'much of what we commonly identify as our mental capacities may...turn out to be properties of the wider extended systems of which human brains are just one (important) part'" (90).

"[T]he human mind develops as a result of acquiring memes, and many of its activities are then dictated by its memes--but...the memes themselves cannot function independently of minds, and are always initially created by a mind. Modern humans, on this story, are born with a degree of mindedness, and this is exploited by existing memes to the extent that the fully fledged mind may, itself, create new memes" (115).

(5) Memes as we know them depend on "meta-representation" (inducing general principles from specific instances; e.g. the leap the baby makes when he learns that the individual word "cat" means something like "small, furry animal with whiskers" no matter the context in which it occurs).

"Modern memetic evolution could not begin, however, until our own ancestors were capable of manipulating--and of course copying--the right sort of mental representations. However memetic information is transmitted between individuals, the important thing is that it should be represented in such a form that those who acquire it can manipulate it freely, without being tied to a particular context. Many organisms can represent the world around them, but memes are representations with a particular nature: as complex, context-independent concepts, they depended on their emergence on the development of unique mental capacities. The participants in memetic evolution needed to be able to compare incoming information with their existing knowledge, to fit it in with their existing skills, and if necessary to rerepresent it in a different format--and the mere fact of its being transmitted via imitation cannot guarantee this. Meta-representation is key [and the age-old debate pitting nature against nurture resolves with each being necessary]" (141).

(6) Memes exist in "systems of representation" (RS) that are in theory infinite (as opposed to genes, whose RS is finite (DNA). Memes are like letters that can be re-arranged infinitely to form an infinite number of languages (with an infinite number of rules for "making sense").

"[T]he memetic equivalent of DNA is not one, but many cultural systems of representation. Unlike organisms and their DNA, we are not endowed at birth with one fixed RS [representation system], but have the capacity to learn and develop many fixed systems. Language has primacy amongst them in that it alone is the result of a biological endowment which also facilitates its communication through speech. Crucially, however, it is also the result of the human capacity for meta-representation, and it is this which facilitates the development of alternative RSs. These nonlinguistic systems, whose rules and structures are incredibly diverse, must be realized in a medium which is not subject to the constraints of universal grammar" (167).

(7) The human mind exists prior to memes and requires memes to develop. The mind takes memes from its environment, compares them, and uses them to create new solutions to the problems it encounters. During this process, the mind necessarily relies on a body of memes much larger than those it "owns" for itself, having recourse to external depositories of cultural information (meme-complexes).

"Infants have the basis of and potential for strong muscles, but in a form that is by no means fully developed. Once a muscle begins to be used, however, it soon strengthens and develops its potential. In this sense, exercise 'creates' the strong muscle; but conversely the exercise could not have occurred in the first place without the existing basis of a weaker muscle. Similarly, in the mental activity of a newborn child there is the basis of and potential for a fully fledged mind. As soon as this is put to use and begins to acquire concepts (both from its contemporaries and as a result of its own discoveries about its surroundings), it begins to develop that potential. Thus the concepts that it acquires 'create' the mind only in the sense that exercise 'creates' muscles: the mind itself does not merely consist of a complex of concepts, but rather develops as a result of its interaction with them. Furthermore, the concepts themselves would not have existed in the first place if there were no prior existence of some mental activity" (170-171).

"[C]onsciousness cannot be explained as a meme machine, but rather the memes-mind relationship was more accurately portrayed two thousand years ago, in the parable of the sower...The message [of the biblical parable] is clear: different people (and even the same person at different times and stages of her life) will respond to the same information in very different ways. Incoming information--the seeds of the parable--will be understood, remembered, acted upon and then passed on to others with varying degrees of accuracy and enthusiasm, depending on its recipient's mind--the soil" (173).

"[T]he design process [by which engineers create products]--which seems prima facie to be the harnessing of imagination to practicality--is underpinned by a methodology that is iterative and in many senses even mindless. It moves from a perceived demand, through clarification of the problem in a solution-neutral statement, and the generation and initial selection of concepts with the potential to meet the requirements, to a structured development and detail design of the end product. At each stage of the process selections will be made between possible solutions, according to the demands and wishes laid down in the target specifications. An option may be rejected when it is still an idea ('How about a pick-up truck?'), whilst it is being developed as part of the embodiment design ('Perhaps a 1.3 litre engine will give us the power we need'), or even when it has reached the final stage of the detail design ('Let's try the engine from our existing pick-up as a prototype'). It may be rejected on the basis of economic as well as engineering considerations. If at any point it seems that the end result will not be viable, then losses will be cut and the project abandoned" (176).

"Thus the preceding account [reproduced above] of the design of human artefacts provides a working, observable example of the compatibility of evolution with design--not just in principle, but in practice...In intentional, psychological terms, the new front end for the model 'xyz' car was designed by Chris because he wanted to make the 'xyz' more crashworthy in frontal impact, he wanted to keep his job, and so on. This provides an answer to the 'why?' question...The 'how' questions, though, are answered rather differently. The new front end was designed using the four-stage process described, through which novel designs for that part of the car were tested against the 'pass' criteria laid down in the problem statement. One of them was selected from the variety of proposed solutions, and the end result is a front end that is intellectually descended from, though a significant evolutionary improvement upon, the existing design" (181).

(8) Memes underlie culture (in all forms: Distin talks about [a] science, [b] religion, and [c] society), which we inherit (rather than creating from scratch for ourselves). We cannot decide what memes we will inherit, but we can decide how to use them. So the situation in which we find ourselves as individuals is one that we control provisionally, not absolutely.

[a] "The structure of the scientific community will also affect the selection pressures on theories: the professional standing of an individual scientist will have a bearing on the reception of his work, and politics will affect funding and thereby the progress that can be made in any given discipline. The lifespan of novel scientific theories may well be affected by such factors...Thus the memetic perspective on science reveals little that is really surprising, but it does help to demystify some of the processes at work. Somewhere between the traditional view of scientists as invincible warriors in the battle against ignorance and confusion, and the more recent cynicism about their relationship with government and other vested interests, comes the claim that their work is but one branch of cultural evolution" (187-188).

[b] "On the one hand there is some objective truth about the nature of the universe, our place in it, and whether God exists...On the other hand there are questions about how (or indeed if) we can discover the facts of the matter, and how we feel about what we learn...On the one hand religious ideas, like scientific hypotheses, evolve towards what we hope will be the most accurate possible representations of the world and our place in it...On the other hand these ideas are accepted or rejected by human beings, and it may well be true that some people set aside their usual capacity for rationality and restraint when it comes to religious matters, just as others do when dealing with politics or family feuds" (193-194).

[c] "A significant piece of evidence in favour of gene theory was its ability to explain various apparent empirical contradictions, such as altruism. Is meme theory able to explain apparent contradictions that arise from gene theory, such as suicide or contraception? In fact, this seems to be one of the theory's strongest candidates for success. Clearly, a gene for suicide, self-sacrifice, or contraception could not replicate successfully without various complex strategies to compensate for its lack of fecundity; similarly, at the level of the individual such behavior is inexplicable. Viewed in meme terms, however, such examples are easily explained [as memes coming through meme-complexes embraced by individual minds]" (195).

"[C]ulture's development will ultimately be determined by a complex interplay between memes and their environment. The content of those memes, however, is our responsibility" (207).

Distin's discussion raises a number of ideas that help me make sense of my personal experience with culture. I grew up inside several competing meme-complexes, integrating memes from both "secular" and religious ideologies into my evolving persona (the filter my mind uses to recognize and utilize memes). Eventually, the persona I was manufacturing became so incoherent that I could not live with the dissonance: the meme-complexes I was integrating into my life contradicted one another in important ways. I had to make a decision about what filters to use when accepting, using, creating, and handing down my own personal memes. Being who I am, I did not want to renounce either religion or "secularism" utterly to follow the other: I saw problems with both. I was (and am) particularly bothered by the fact that all ideologies in practice manifest a tendency to deny, denigrate, and/or otherwise distort anything valuable that lies outside their purview. My own experience investigating human health shows me that science is no more free from this tendency than religion: no human culture is safe.

So I remain an incurable skeptic: I doubt everything, but especially anything that comes to me lavishly praised by important men in imposing suits. No organization is above suspicion. No meme is unquestionably good. All are potentially useful tools. All are potentially worthless trash. The only way to know the difference is to examine them for myself and see what works from my own perspective (which like every perspective is in constant transition, changing all the time: no matter what the men in suits say, no human perspective is permanent; there is no unmoving vantage point from which everything makes the same kind of sense all the time). This does not mean that I have no values, only that I acknowledge a fact that many people like to deny--the fact that values are re-negotiated every time we make a decision (which is why we have courts of law: they make sure that particularly sensitive decisions get the kind of thorough re-thinking we have learned that they need). There are no easy answers to any really important questions: the best culture can do is provide you some basic generalities and show you how others have put them to specific practice in the past (whether fictional or historical: from a practical standpoint, these often amount to the same thing).

The great thing about culture as we know it is that it can take all kinds of disparate minutiae (information about things in the external and internal environments of the human being) and turn them into something larger and more powerful than anything any one of us could come up with on her own (like Mormonism or modern, industrialized agriculture). The terrible thing about culture is that it sometimes produces atrocities (which it is very good at rewriting into acts of heroism). From my perspective, it will be a long time before I accept anything from any group uncritically again. In fact, I may never do so. I can accept that I am human and desire to live safely, happily, securely in a community that "values" me and the stuff I find important. I can accept that, but I cannot accept achieving it at the price of ignoring the fact that my happiness is built on someone else's misery. Maybe I do decide to make others miserable (as indeed we all do in order to live); even so, I want to see what I am doing (and at least preserve the capacity to think about ways of alleviating the pain I cause others by existing: think of this as me being selfish if you like--I don't like stepping on your toes on the way to my own happiness, so I look for paths outside of the normal to have my cake and eat it too). Enough for now.

God vs. gods

2010-09-19T15:54:00.006+03:00

Daniel Quinn. The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit. New York: Bantam, 1996. ISBN 0553379011.

In my last post, I included this quote but did not really say much about it (Quinn, The Story of B, 300-301):

Let me begin with the great secret of the animist life, Louis. When other people look for God, you'll see them automatically look up into the sky. They really imagine that, if there's a God, he's far, far away--remote and untouchable. I don't know how they can bear living with such a God, Louis. I really don't. But they're not our problem. I've told you that, among the animists of the world, not a single one can tell you the number of the gods. They don't know the number and neither do I...What's important to us is not how many they are but where they are. If you go among the Alawa of Australia or the Bushmen of Africa or the Navajo of North America or the Onabasulu of New Guinea--or any other of hundreds of Leaver peoples [as opposed to Takers, the agriculturalists] I could name--you'll soon find out where the gods are. The gods are here...I mean here. Among the Alawa: here. Among the Bushmen: here. Among the Navajo: here. Among the Kreen-Akrore: here. Among the Onabasulu: here...

This isn't a theological statement they're making. The Alawa are not saying to the Bushmen, 'Your gods are frauds, the true gods are our gods.' The Kreen-Akrore are not saying to the Onabasulu, 'You have no gods, only we have gods. Nothing of the kind. They're saying, 'Our place is a sacred place, like no other in the world.' They would never think of looking elsewhere to find the gods. The gods are to be found among them--living where they live. The god is what animates their place. That's what a god is. A god is that strange force that makes every place a place--a place like no other in the world. A god is the fire that burns in this place and no other--and no place in which the fire burns is devoid of god. All of this should explain to you why I don't reject the name that was given to us by an outsider. Even though it was bestowed with a false understanding of our vision, the name animism captures a glimmer of it.

Unlike the God whose name beings with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis. Can you imagine that? Any one of them can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb--silenced, driven away, enfeebled. Sit in the middle of a shopping mall at midnight, surrounded by half a mile of concrete in all directions, and there the god that was once as strong as a buffalo or a rhinoceros is as feeble as a moth sprayed with pyrethrin. Feeble, but not dead, not wholly extinguished. Tear down the mall and rip up the concrete, and within days the place will be pulsing with life again. Nothing needs to be done, beyond carting away the poisons. The god knows how to take care of that place. It will never be what it was before--but nothing is ever what it was before. It doesn't need to be what it was before. You'll hear people talk about turning the plains of North America back into what they were before the Takers arrived. This is nonsense. What the plains were five hundred years ago was not their final form, was not the final, sacrosanct form ordained for them from the beginning of time. There is no such form and never will be any such form. Everything here is on the way. Everything here is in process.

The picture of deity given here is one that appeals to me a lot in the wake of my faith crisis. Contrary to what many people seem to expect (and to what this blog may sometimes appear to indicate), my conversion to disbelief did not make me an immediate "expert" on life, the universe, and everything. When people ask me "why?" now, I give them guesses (like the one I posted in my last entry) not once-and-for-all answers (like the truth I was certain of as a believer). My lack of knowledge regarding the ultimate causes of things means that I am necessarily still comfortable with the idea of "unknowns" -- in theory, I have nothing against referring to these unknowns with names (like "God"). But in the wake of considering the world as I see it (and reading Quinn), I think "gods" is a better name for life's unknowns as I experience them than "God". Let me try to explain what I mean by this.

In the world I live in, life consists of multiple mysterious systems in balance (from galactic star clusters down to atoms, with everything in between, including the planet's biosphere with its different ecosystems, and the bodies of individual plant and animal organisms, each of which is an ecosystem unto itself). I cannot know what keeps these systems running (hence the mystery), but I can see that they are all running at different rates, in different ways, with different points of interface linking them to one another. I see that when something disturbs the equilibrium of one system and not another (when someone runs my buddy over with a car but does not hit me, for example), the disturbed system suffers (and may die), while the undisturbed one continues on (to an inevitable dissolution: all systems are eventually recycled). So each system has its own unknown, its own mysterious center of balance that holds it together until it falls apart: its own "god" (if you will). My "god" (the unknown center of the complex of systems that is me) presides over the interface of several other "gods" within me (multi-organ systems, individual organs, cells, and independent organisms who live inside me), and is presided over in turn by other "gods" (which define the ecosystem that is my habitat, the planet that houses that ecosystem, etc.). These "gods" are real. I interact with them in a material and vital way every day. They are also vulnerable. As Quinn says, a flamethrower (or shopping mall) has the power to destroy or weaken them. Unlike the almighty God I imagined as a Mormon, they represent something I might actually destroy in a careless fit of whatever it is that causes people to detonate bombs, deplete soils, and generally waste resources wantonly.

I am not adamantly opposed to the idea of some almighty uber-controller managing all systems: I do not deny the possibility that a big "God" exists out there somewhere. But when I examine life as I experience it, it makes more sense to posit lots of smaller, more local, weaker "gods" who manage the mystery of life between them. When I look into the world, I do not see a grand, unitary purpose rolling forward to inexorable fulfillment: I see multiple purposes, some realized and some not, some great and some small. I do not know the causes for all things, but I do get the feeling that there are causes (in the plural) rather than a single cause (Aristotle's Prime Mover). More urgently, I see that my previous focus on the possibility (which I regarded as a certainty) of a single ruling cause led me to neglect paying too much heed to smaller causes. Since I assumed God was capable of restoring whatever havoc I might wreak in his world, I was not particularly worried about overtaxing the environment: I was philosophically down with killing many small (real) gods wantonly in the name of my big (imaginary) God.

Before you decide to ignore me as some kind of crazy, New Age hippie, you should know that I have no illusions about "saving the world" as it is. Like Quinn says above, there are no eternal, Platonic forms for life as we experience it: it is a journey, not a destination. Today's gods must die to make way for those of tomorrow. I know this fact, and embrace it: life is death (as Heraclitus would say). But I also know what follows from this: to waste death is to waste life. If we kill all the bison for sport today, there will be none left when our grandchildren are hungry tomorrow. If we strip all the soils down to bedrock today to feed our modern civilization, our grandchildren (billions of them) will have to discover some new life to take if the race is to continue. Based on our past experience (the lessons of history as I read them), we cannot subsist happily writing blank checks for unlimited resources and hoping God (the big one) will honor them with manna from on high. Rather than consume the small gods today and hope the big one sends us a fat paycheck tomorrow, picking up the tab for our indulgence, we need to cultivate the small gods: we need to refocus our efforts toward intelligent production. Make every life lost count for something valuable, something that preserves (as much as possible) the integrity of the whole system as it moves into eternity.

In Search of Human Ethics

2010-09-11T18:06:00.006+03:00

Marvin Harris. Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures. 1977. New York: Vintage, 1991. ISBN 067972849X.

Daniel Quinn. The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit. New York: Bantam, 1996. ISBN 0553379011.

Losing the perspective brought by Mormonism meant losing the ostensible purpose of my life ("I am here to serve God and his church in whatever way I may decide and/or church leaders may require"). When I no longer had this as my ultimate "reason" for everything (the final "because" to the toddler's "why?"), I had to take a step back and ask myself why I did things. What was I trying to do? What were communities (like the church) trying to do? Part of my faith crisis involved looking intensely at human communities and discovering that they exist to perpetuate themselves (not fixed moral codes); this became problematic when I realized that the church was no different: its leaders said what they said, did what they did, so that we would all keep on "keeping on" as members, regardless of what Joseph Smith really said or did (maybe he was a bit crazy, but that's not worth looking at too carefully), or what the reality of man's destiny was (your purpose is to build our society with work and offspring: don't get distracted by other stuff). Unfortunately for me, I really cared about these things (especially the latter), and found I had little interest in the LDS church without them. So I was left wondering why people do what people do (i.e. create societies that must go on and--ideally--get bigger to the point that they fill the earth)?

Enter Marvin Harris. My interest in human fitness led me eventually to the "paleo diet," the premise of which was that the agricultural revolution that occurred some 10,000 years ago paved the way for the introduction of many anti-nutrients into the human diet, leading ultimately to the set of "civilized" diseases currently plaguing much of the world (metabolic syndrome, diabetes, auto-immune disorders). Knocking around the Internet in search of "paleo" information to flesh out this thesis, I found the immense website of Ricardo Carvalho, which is named after Harris' book title (translated into Portuguese). (Carvalho also recommends the book on his extensive Amazon reading list, which I have consulted several times when searching for good reads.) I was intrigued and checked the book out from my local university library. Its thesis is relatively simple: human societies shape their behavior to match the quality of the resources available to them, changing behavior as the surrounding environment succeeds (or fails) to supply what they need to survive (adequate food, shelter, and reproductive possibilities). Most interesting is his explanation of Aztec cannibalism, which he traces back to a chronic lack of animal protein (a precious resource): in the absence of domesticated herds or wild game, the Aztecs were reduced to eating other people. They did not eat people because they were any more "wicked" than others; what they needed was not "repentance" but food. Contrary to everything I would have thought in my life as a Mormon, their problem was not one to be remedied by civilization (the "gift of the gods"). Instead, civilization (and the exploding population that has always accompanied it since the agricultural revolution) was the problem (Harris, Cannibals and Kings, 165):

Mesoamerica was left at the end of the ice age in a more depleted condition, as far as animal resources are concerned, than any other region. The steady growth of the population and the intensification of production [two things that always come with civilization in the wake of the agricultural revolution] under the coercive managerial influence of the classic highland empires virtually eliminated animal flesh from the diet of ordinary people. The ruling class and their retainers naturally continued to enjoy such delicacies as dogs, turkeys, ducks, deer, rabbits, and fish. But, as Harner notes, the commoners--despite the expansion of the chinampas [floating gardens]--were often reduced to eating the algae skimmed off the surface of Lake Texcoco. While corn and beans in sufficient quantity could provide all of the essential amino acids, recurrent production crises throughout the fifteenth century meant that protein ratios were frequently depressed to levels which would have biologically justified a strong craving for meat. In addition, fats of all sorts were perennially in short supply.

Mesoamerican cannibalism was just one extreme example of the kind of crisis of availability that has defined human civilization from the agricultural revolution. (As an aside, the astute reader will notice that this protein-starved Mesoamerica looks very different from anything in the Book of Mormon, whose theories of cannibalism and "Lamanite" life in general are clearly folklore from nineteenth-century New England.) The crisis works as follows: (1) a society produces crops (usually some kind of grain, i.e. grass seed); (2) grain production allows for a higher birth rate; (3) more numbers provide the resources necessary to take over more land, dispossessing people and animals living in a less "civilized" (and more ecologically sustainable) way; (4) the cost of having more people is that many are under-nourished, especially as the rest begin putting major dents in the best non-agricultural food sources available; (5) in the end, society is either saved by technological revolution (a farming break-though that allows us to sustain the burgeoning population) or falls prey to warfare (which agriculture fosters by creating hordes of people) or famine (which agriculture fosters by creating hordes of people). Basically, Thomas Malthus was right (though he did not know that grain is poisonous to humans individually as well as collectively).

Harris' thesis was a compelling analysis of human community, for me, but I was left rather stranded by it: after several thousand years in living in constant debt (to the earth, other species, and ourselves), how are we supposed to transform ourselves back into productive mode (a way of living that does not inevitably kill everything around us)? Harris was the doctor who informed me that I had an incurable disease, dissecting the disorder minutely when all I could really hear was "incurable." In addition, I now had way too much "technical" information to share whenever people asked me about my increasingly odd opinions regarding diet, religion, and politics. A simple question deserves a simple answer, not a litany of jargon. I had worldview that made sense to me logically. What I needed now was a simple narrative for relating to it more personally (and pro-actively) and sharing it with others: in short, I needed a myth. Enter Daniel Quinn.

Quinn tells an engaging story, a fictional account of a modern Catholic priest sent to Europe to spy on someone who may be the Antichrist. Upon making contact, the priest discovers that the Antichrist (a mysterious character called "B") is preaching against civilization (the agricultural revolution and everything that has followed from it), which he regards as a disease inasmuch as it reduces complex, beautiful reality (life) to simple, ugly reality (death). The book is extremely interesting (with an ending which I will not give away), and I will not attempt to summarize it here. Instead, let me offer one of my favorite passages (Quinn, The Story of B, 159-161):

Let me begin with the great secret of the animist life, Louis. When other people look for God, you'll see them automatically look up into the sky. They really imagine that, if there's a God, he's far, far away--remote and untouchable. I don't know how they can bear living with such a God, Louis. I really don't. But they're not our problem. I've told you that, among the animists of the world, not a single one can tell you the number of the gods. They don't know the number and neither do I...What's important to us is not how many they are but where they are. If you go among the Alawa of Australia or the Bushmen of Africa or the Navajo of North America or the Onabasulu of New Guinea--or any other of hundreds of Leaver peoples [as opposed to Takers, the agriculturalists] I could name--you'll soon find out where the gods are. The gods are here...I mean here. Among the Alawa: here. Among the Bushmen: here. Among the Navajo: here. Among the Kreen-Akrore: here. Among the Onabasulu: here...

This isn't a theological statement they're making. The Alawa are not saying to the Bushmen, 'Your gods are frauds, the true gods are our gods.' The Kreen-Akrore are not saying to the Onabasulu, 'You have no gods, only we have gods. Nothing of the kind. They're saying, 'Our place is a sacred place, like no other in the world.' They would never think of looking elsewhere to find the gods. The gods are to be found among them--living where they live. The god is what animates their place. That's what a god is. A god is that strange force that makes every place a place--a place like no other in the world. A god is the fire that burns in this place and no other--and no place in which the fire burns is devoid of god. All of this should explain to you why I don't reject the name that was given to us by an outsider. Even though it was bestowed with a false understanding of our vision, the name animism captures a glimmer of it.

Unlike the God whose name beings with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis. Can you imagine that? Any one of them can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb--silenced, driven away, enfeebled. Sit in the middle of a shopping mall at midnight, surrounded by half a mile of concrete in all directions, and there the god that was once as strong as a buffalo or a rhinoceros is as feeble as a moth sprayed with pyrethrin. Feeble, but not dead, not wholly extinguished. Tear down the mall and rip up the concrete, and within days the place will be pulsing with life again. Nothing needs to be done, beyond carting away the poisons. The god knows how to take care of that place. It will never be what it was before--but nothing is ever what it was before. It doesn't need to be what it was before. You'll hear people talk about turning the plains of North America back into what they were before the Takers arrived. This is nonsense. What the plains were five hundred years ago was not their final form, was not the final, sacrosanct form ordained for them from the beginning of time. There is no such form and never will be any such form. Everything here is on the way. Everything here is in process.

Quinn's solution to the problem of civilization posed by Harris (and Malthus) is conceptually very simple. Stop increasing human food supply every year. We already produce more than enough for everyone; our problem is not lack, but something else (the inevitable inequality in distribution created by civilization). Quinn illustrates his solution with a story about mice. A population of mice fed more than it needs to survive always increases in number (even as some mice starve to death because others don't let them at the food), while a population fed no more than it requires to survive inevitably (without any form of birth control whatsoever) remains stable, replacing itself without growing any larger. To top things off, you can slowly cut down the overall population of the mice by gradually decreasing food supply, without starving any of them (Quinn, The Story of B, 300-301):

Someone says, here's what to do. Yesterday five hundred kilos of food went into the cage. Today we'll reduce that by a kilo. Oh no, another objects. A kilo is too much. Let's reduce it by a quarter of a kilo. So that's what they do. Four hundred ninety-nine and three quarters kilos of food go into the cage. Tension in the lab as everyone waits for food riots and famine--but of course there are no food riots and no famine. Among sixty-four thousand mice, a quarter of a kilo of food is like a flake of dandruff apiece. Tomorrow four hundred ninety-nine and a half kilos of food go into the cage. Still no food riots and no famine. This procedure is followed for a thousand days--and not once is there a food riot or a famine. After a thousand days only two hundred fifty kilos of food are going into the cage--and guess what? There are no longer sixty-four thousand mice in the cage. There are only thirty-two thousand. Not a miracle--just a demonstration of the laws of ecology. A decline in food availability has been answered by a decline in population. As always. Semper et ubique. Nothing to do with riots. Nothing to do with famine. Just the normal response of a feeder population to the availability of food.

To me, this looks like the most painless way to accomplish what we are already doing anyway. If we do not find some way to keep our civilized growth in check, we will run out of food eventually. We can wait for nature to fix that problem with diseases, real famine (sudden withdrawal of all sustenance), or something worse, or we can put ourselves on a diet (and get back to something like health: I have a feeling Quinn is right to say that involves a radical transformation in the way we live, the things we value, and ultimately what it means to be human). This does not mean that we should all begin living in caves, hunting wild animals for food, or going naked all the time (though some of us might choose to do this: good luck to them--they'll need it in spades). What we need is a way forward, a road that leads beyond agricultural civilization rather than back to whatever existed before it. Quinn provides a very easily accessible account of the best route I have found to date, proving that all other alternatives are really just so many ways of ignoring the same problem: civilization, or modern life as we know it since the agricultural revolution, is killing us, de-stabilizing our moral values, destroying our homes, and inexorably taking away with one hand what it pretends to offer with the other.

Living with Relative Truth

2010-08-07T14:52:00.009+03:00

Renzo Gracie. Legacy. Satchel Films, 2008.

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

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

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

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

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

Apostle Meets Skeptic

2010-06-16T16:46:00.022+03:00

C. S. Lewis. The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. ISBN 0061208493.

C. S. Lewis. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Ed. W. Hooper. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970. ISBN 0802808689.

Thanks to my mother, I grew up with C. S. Lewis. Ever since I was old enough to think about religion in any remotely systematic way, I have lived in the intellectual shadow of the keen but simple genius behind Narnia, Screwtape, and Mere Christianity. Receiving my own collection of Lewis' greatest hits from Mom was an unexpected bright spot in my disaffection from LDS Mormonism and the kind of fundamentalist Christianity that it embraces. It gave me pause to think about aspects of Christianity that are still very much part of my evolving worldview.

I think I still have a lot in common with Lewis. For one thing, my break with literalist Mormonism left me very much convinced in the reality of that which he calls "the Tao" in The Abolition of Man. Although my walk with Mormonism ultimately took away my belief in gospel as history, it did not leave me convinced that life was meaningless or moral standards unnecessary. I still had a strong sense of right and wrong: it was more malleable on some points (like what combination of partners can constitute a healthy marriage), but still grounded in some basic absolutes (adultery is always wrong). So, even as the myths of Mormonism and Christianity ceased to be literally true (true as history) for me, the ethical standards behind them remained a fundamental part of my moral and philosophical outlook on the world. I discovered Lewis' natural law ("the Tao") as something objectively true, in my own experience: whether I think of myself as Mormon, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, or agnostic (and in the last few months I have been all of these, sometimes simultaneously), I experience it as a constant reality, a standard I can trust even as the faces of the gods that guard it blur and fade, sometimes to nothing. The Christian version is the Sermon on the Mount, a re-composition of the Jewish Ten Commandments. Muslims have the Five Pillars of the Faith, and Buddhists the principle of compassion that is an integral part of the life of the bodhisattva. Atheists and agnostics have similar standards rooted in the symbiotic relationships between individuals that can be observed among humans and in nature. The term "Tao" comes to Lewis from Lao-tzu, who may just be the master of all when it comes to teaching religious truth: I am excited to read his Tao Te Ching, which I have heard of and seen quoted but have never seriously digested.

The one quarrel I have with Lewis, the only one serious enough to mention in this little essay, is the sentiment behind this statement (from page 132 of God in the Dock):

My conversion, very largely, depended on recognizing Christianity as the completion, the actualization, the entelechy, of something that had never been wholly absent from the mind of man. And I still think that the agnostic argument from similarities between Christianity and paganism works only if you know the answer. If you start by knowing on other grounds that Christianity is false, then the pagan stories may be another nail in its coffin: just as if you started by knowing that there were no such things as crocodiles then the various stories about dragons might help to confirm your disbelief.

This statement rests on what I regard now as a false binary: either (1) Christianity is entirely true, or (2) it is entirely false. If (1) it is true, then it is the completion (the actualization, the entelechy) of every human religious impulse. If (2) it is false, then it is a bunch of silly stories with no meaning that anyone should take seriously. From where I now stand, philosophically, there is no merit in either of these positions. This is because Christianity is not any more pure than human life in general: as I experience it, it is an amalgam of true and false, useful and silly, myth and history. Why should I deny the truth that is in Christianity because of the many falsehoods that are also in it? Why pretend that it represents the last word on human ethics and spirituality, when (in my experience) it clearly doesn't? For me to do so would be dishonest and emotionally (not to mention religiously) impoverishing. Thinking analogically shows why Lewis' dichotomy between absolute truth and absolute falsehood is ridiculous: the fact that the sledgehammer is not a good tool for brain surgery does not mean that it has no valid uses! A tool can be useful without being the one and only tool we ever use, and the same is true of ideas. Christianity can contain truth without containing all truth.

One more example of Lewis' tendency to over-simplify in dividing religious truth from error. Just as I reject Gordon B. Hinckley's assertion that Joseph Smith was either a complete charlatan or God's best buddy ("If [the First Vision] did not [occur], then this work is a fraud": quoted from "The Marvelous Foundation of Our Faith," Ensign [November 2002]), so I reject Lewis' attempt to say what amounts to the same thing about Christ (from pages 50-51 of Mere Christianity in The Complete Signature Classics):

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was a man and said the sort of things Jesus said [think of Joseph Smith here] would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon [think of Joseph Smith again]; or you can fall down at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great moral teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to [somehow, people who over-simplify always end up speaking for deity instead of letting it speak through them].

So in theory the Sadducees and Pharisees had the right idea when they went about trying to destroy Christ as a devil? Or maybe they should have just ignored him? What could they possibly learn from him, as long as they were not willing to fall down and kiss his feet? If I read Lewis right, he is saying that we should meet extravagant theological claims either with active disinterest (for the lunatic), outright rejection (for the devil), or unqualified acceptance (for God). This is plainly a false trilemma, especially when you do the research (some of it impossible in Lewis' day, to be fair) necessary to approach the historical Jesus, who may not have made all the assertions put into his mouth by gospel writers (just as he may not even have existed). Like Mormons who assert that their mythical Joseph Smith must be historically true or the vibrant religious life they have built around him is completely false, Lewis falls into the trap of confusing myth and history, making reality an illustration of myth instead of the reverse. If he took himself seriously he would have to ignore, abominate, or worship a lot more than I am willing to. Take Joseph Smith, for example. Despite my status as a doctrinal apostate, I am not willing to define the first Mormon prophet categorically as either a "lunatic" (more so than the rest of us) or "the Devil of Hell" or the sainted martyr that the modern LDS proclaim. I live in a world where both Jesus and Joseph Smith have useful contributions to make to human ethics and religion, even if we do not believe in the literal, historical truth of everything they are reported to have said or been (or any of it, really). The ethical reality in my life that Christian and Mormon myths touch does not depend on those myths being historically true: I can practice charity without believing that a man who was also God rose from the dead. I can receive personal revelation from the universe without worrying about the exact nature of what Joseph saw or did not see in the Sacred Grove. Why impoverish my life by assuming that all myths are either worthless (to be ignored), disgusting (to be abominated), or perfect (to be adored without criticism, accepted without qualification)? Where do such myths exist? As of now, I find them only in overly simplified apologetics (like Lewis' trilemma here). The real myths, like real life, are equal parts truth and falsehood, serious thought and wild speculation. To ignore them is stupid (because they are the lab notes in an ongoing human experiment in which I must participate: like just about every other person I have ever met, I create stories that give meaning to my life; my stories are better when I can compare them to others). To abominate them is pointless (since hating the stories of others does not make mine any better). To worship any of them as literal truth is dangerous (because each ignores as much truth as it creates: you cannot get too many perspectives on a problem as difficult as living well--picking a single story as your "one and only" is about as smart as deciding to use no tool but the hammer for the rest of your life).

There are many more things I could say about Lewis. The outlook expressed in his works is by and large a valuable one that I am glad to carry with me, even when I find it too simple to handle complex reality: in particular, I regret not being able to say more here about the really interesting portrayal of divinity in his space trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength), a portrayal that I find aesthetically and philosophically compelling on many levels. For now, I conclude by saying that I love learning from C. S. Lewis as I love learning from Christianity: both are sources for good ideas, but neither offers the last word on the the astonishingly rich and complex thing that is the universe.

Religion without Integrity

2010-05-17T19:52:00.010+03:00

Will Bagley. Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. ISBN 0806134267.

My first memorable encounter with cowboy historian Will Bagley took place while watching the 2006 PBS documentary on the Mormons. True to character there, he posed a question that defines the problem faced by anyone who tries to understand the Mountain Meadows Massacre, one of the bloodiest incidents to take place in the history of America's overland trails. Bagley's question: "How did these decent, religious men who had sacrificed so much for what they believed in—how did they become mass murderers?" Before Bagley, I was vaguely familiar with the incident (Mormons and Indians killed some non-Mormon pioneers on the way through southern Utah sometime in the nineteenth century), and the question (why?), and I even had a grasp on something like the usual LDS apologetic response (local vigilantes took justice into their own hands and got really carried away). As my testimony of the church's unadulterated moral goodness began to crumble, however, I became more curious. In the end, answering Bagley's question to my own satisfaction became one of the most difficult and painful processes of my life (so far): it turned my mental world upside down and made it impossible for me to be religious in the way I once was.

Bagley's book does more than clarify the fuzzy picture I had of the Massacre (which took place Friday, September 11th, 1857): it sets the Massacre in historical context, showing (as much as possible) how it happened that a group of staunch Mormon pioneers took it upon themselves to murder 120 men, women, and children in cold blood. To be brief, I will say that reading Bagley has convinced me (1) that Brigham Young and other men high up in the Mormon hierarchy (notably apostle George A. Smith) knowingly stirred up the Saints of southern Utah against non-Mormons; (2) that Brigham Young tried his best to rouse the Utah Indian bands against non-Mormons; (3) and finally, that Brigham Young and the church hierarchy later did everything they could to obscure their involvement and blame everything on Indians and local Saints, notably John D. Lee (Brigham's adopted son who definitely played a crucial role in the killing, however you read the sources). Each of these points raises troubling issues that I can only treat briefly here.

(1) Decent men such as the killers at Mountain Meadows do not rise up unprovoked. What provoked them? Several things. The immediate provocation was the coming Utah War (an armed confrontation with the US government), which the Saints and their leaders alike regarded with understandable fear and anger. Beyond the war were the Missouri killings (like the massacre of Mormons at Haun's Mill), the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, and the recent murder of apostle Parley P. Pratt (whom non-Mormon Hector McClean killed after Pratt converted McClean's wife Eleanor against his will and then married her). These grievances were kept alive in the oath of vengeance administered in early LDS temple ceremonies, an oath to avenge the blood of the prophets upon those responsible for shedding it. The war and the oath of vengeance were not the only factors pressing for violence in southern Utah. Coming hard on the heels of the Mormon Reformation (which involved a lot of public humiliation inflicted by church leaders determined to make the Saints less worldly and more obedient to church authority) came a rash of directives and sermons by church authorities (notably Brigham Young and George A. Smith) making bellicose statements against non-Mormons--statements like the following:

Brigham Young to stake president Isaac Haight of Cedar City, one of the Saints responsible for the massacre (from a letter dispatched with apostle George A. Smith in August of 1857): "Save your ammunition, keep your Guns and Pistols in order, and prepare yourselves in all things--particularly by living your religion--for that which may hereafter come to pass...Save all grain, nor let a kernel go to waste or be sold to our enemies. And those who persist in selling grain to the gentiles, or suffer their stock to trample it into the earth I wish you to note as such" (quoted in Bagley, p. 84).

George A. Smith to the people of Parowan (August 1857, as remembered later): "As for the cursed mobocrats, I can think of nothing better they could do than to feed a tree in Zion [with their corpses]" (quoted in Bagley, p. 84).

George A. Smith to the Cedar City militia (August 15, 1857, speaking of the US army): "I say damn the man who feeds them; I say damn the man who sympathizes with them; I say curse the man who pours oil and water on their heads" (quoted in Bagley, p. 85).

So the Mormons who pulled the trigger at Mountain Meadows experienced powerful social pressure from the church (in the form of codified oaths and incendiary statements), pressure which characterized vengeance against the wicked, gentile non-Mormon as something desirable, something righteous, something God and his chosen representatives on earth expected from the faithful.

(2) The newly discovered testimony of Dimick Huntington (see pages 113-114 of Bagley's book) indicates that Brigham Young's rhetoric about the Indians becoming "the battle-axe of the Lord" in the Saints' war against the people of the United States was more than just hot air. When Brigham convened the tribal chieftains and gave them license to raid wagon-trains in Huntington's presence on September 1st, 1857, right before the Massacre, he recognized that innocent people would die as a result, and he condoned it. This attests the literal understanding Young and other Saints had of scriptures like 3 Nephi 21:12 ("a remnant of Jacob shall be among the Gentiles, yea, in the midst of them as a lion among the beasts of the forest, as a young lion among flocks of sheep, who, if he goeth through both treadeth down and teareth in pieces, and none can deliver"). The nineteenth-century LDS fervently believed that the second coming of Christ was around the corner, to be brought on by a bloodbath in which the United States would perish and the rediscovered "remnant of Jacob" (the Indian tribes) would unite with the LDS to establish God's kingdom on earth. In the end, this vision failed to materialize: the western Indians never accepted their role in the Mormon world and remain still aloof (even as the modern LDS church looks for new candidates to take their place as God's remnant).

The actual role played by the Indians at Mountain Meadows is something of a mystery. My reading of the evidence has some tribesmen joining the expedition primarily for plunder, then bailing out after the non-Mormons proved too tough to kill easily (the train was heavily armed and fought back hard against the initial attack, forming a wagon-circle fortified with trenches and exchanging fire with the raiders for 5 days). Fearing recognition if they allowed survivors to escape, the Mormons then secured the surrender of the surviving non-Mormons by promising protection from the (increasingly absent) Indians, only to turn traitor and shoot every one dead but a few very small children. Some Indians may have participated in this final butchery, but it is clear that the bulk of the killing was done by white men.

(3) All of the foregoing is problematic: it involves church authorities willfully inciting their followers (and the hapless Indians, caught between the US army and the Mormons) to violence. Was this incitement without any justification? No! Unfortunately, the fury it ultimately released was very poorly directed, coming to rest upon an innocent wagon-train that happened to pass through Utah territory at just the wrong moment. From Brigham Young's public and private statements before the Massacre, especially his conversation with the Indians referenced above, it seems clear to me that he doomed this train, perhaps without realizing the full extent of what he was doing at the time. Like many other Saints, he was caught in a sea of boiling adrenaline, scared by the prospect of the US invasion and all fired up to avenge the blood of Joseph and Hyrum upon the infidels. To his credit, he desired to call the thing off once he got wind of it actually going forth, but it was too late. You can only wave a red flag in front of a angry bull so long before it charges. He and George A. Smith sowed the wind in southern Utah, and their dutiful followers (as many as valued obedience to the prophets above personal conscience) reaped the whirlwind in Mountain Meadows. The fallout was (and still is) terrible: some good Saints refused to participate and came under suspicion of apostasy (which in those days could still result in bodily harm or death); others followed orders (from local authorities channeling the rage of the prophets and apostles) and lived the rest of their lives suffering the consequences.

What bothers me the most about all of this, however, is not even the awful fact that it took place. Bad things happen in the world. Leaders say the wrong things, and their followers let zeal for the group overcome personal integrity, translating bad words into worse actions. But how does denying the leaders' role in the process make the resultant mess any better? Why did Brigham and his fellow apostle George A. Smith not see fit to take responsibility (even a little) for their role in the tragedy at Mountain Meadows? Why did they try to shift blame off onto the Indians? Why, when that did not work, did they foster lies about the character of the emigrants who died wrongly there? And why, above all, did they countenance the scapegoating of John D. Lee for something that, in a very real way, was the fault of the whole LDS community? Lee's rehabilitation in recent years is a tiny step in the right direction, as are efforts of goodwill that the church has directed toward the offspring of the survivors of the Massacre. But these efforts are undercut by our leaders' persistence in refusing to acknowledge the guilt that belongs to church headquarters. (This persistence gives our "anti-Mormon" enemies a big fat target, which they pummel pretty hard, with pretty good reason.)

This for me is the crux of the problem posed by Mountain Meadows, a problem which the LDS church has been ignoring ever since that awful day in 1857. Then, as now, we LDS are seemingly incapable of seeing flaws in our church leadership and (duly correlated) church programs. We are like little children with a hammer: everything we see is a nail, and we just love putting all the nails in place with our perfect hammer. But in fact not everything is a nail, and hammers can sometimes be put to very bad use, especially when you make the mistake of supposing that they are good for any operation requiring tools (e.g. brain surgery). Until we recognize that the church has a dark side (like every human institution), and that there are ways in which leaders and followers alike can turn religious faith to seriously evil ends, we run the risk of hurting ourselves and other people. Until we recognize that the gospel raises more questions than answers, that the righteous zeal of our pioneer ancestors was not always a positive asset, and that our own unexamined obedience to community rules may be causing as much harm as it does good, our religion lacks integrity. Responsible religion does not pretend like it never makes mistakes: it acknowledges mistakes, learns from them (repenting where necessary), and moves forward. I really wish church leadership could be honest with members (and the world) about our chequered past and what we have learned from it, rather than publishing whitewashed legends that deny its existence and perpetuate a mental environment in which the faithful follow their ancestors lemming-like over the proverbial cliff.

Sex in the City of God

2010-05-11T19:09:00.032+03:00

Todd Compton. In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith. Salt Lake City: Signature, 1997. ISBN 156085085X.

My first encounter with LDS scholar Todd Compton occurred when I ran across his fascinating book on the persona of the poet in ancient Indo-European societies (Victim of the Muses: maybe I will review it here some other time!). I was impressed with his creativity, as well as the careful attention to precise detail which is very evident in all his work. As time went by, I became aware (through his website and various other sources) of his other magnum opus, which is the inspiration for this essay.

In Sacred Loneliness is without doubt the most honest, even-handed treatment of Mormon polygamy that I have ever encountered. It is not an expose: there are no lurid details. It is not an apology: there is no attempt to "put to rest" or trivialize the fact that polygamy was a fundamentally important part of nineteenth-century Mormonism. Rather than delve into the morass of questions often raised about polygamous morals (then and now), Compton merely tells the life stories of 33 women who were married to the Prophet Joseph Smith. For him, as for them, polygamy is interpreted as a revelation from God through his prophet: some embrace it willingly; others are more reluctant. All are given ample time to express, through their deeds and their own words wherever possible, how they thought and felt about "the principle" and other, more mundane things: this aims to be as complete a record of their lives as Compton's sources allow. I was impressed with the fortitude some of these women displayed: it is hard to be married to two men at once (as some of them were) when you have been raised to regard monogamy as the rule (like most early converts to Mormonism). I was impressed at the highly developed spirituality they showed, joining together in close-knit groups of sister-wives whose community of friendship and faith did much to cover for the continual absence of their shared husbands. They even performed priesthood ordinances, healing the sick by the laying on of hands and speaking in tongues on numerous occasions. Compton has done a wonderful job of rescuing these and other precious details from the dustbin of history, where modern LDS Mormonism's dislike of its feminist and sexually "deviant" roots has consigned them to lie forgotten too long.

Reading In Sacred Loneliness forced me to take a hard look at the doctrine of the family as taught by Mormons. Our current position, adopted in the wake of a century-long effort to make up with Protestant America, is that family = 1 man + 1 woman + offspring. This is a hard-won reversal of Joseph Smith's teaching (still with us after a fashion in Doctrine and Covenants 132) that family = 1 man (in practice maybe 2: one for time and another for time and eternity) + x women + offspring. I grew up with the dissonance of this position echoing in my head: on the one hand, thanks to Hugh Nibley I became acquainted with sermons by the early brethren arguing passionately for the morality of polygamy; on the other, I listened to LDS prophet Gordon B. Hinckley sternly denounce it from the pulpit in General Conference. The more I learn about polygamy, the more conflicted I am about the LDS church's position (as articulated by Hinckley in the link above) that we LDS have nothing to do with it and are perfectly willing to sit by and let the government break up the families of those who practice it. "God wanted it then (in the nineteenth century), for some reason," we acknowledge, "but he has no use for it now, and people who practice it should repent or be punished." Hinckley (again in the link above) declares that Mormon fundamentalists do not even exist, denying the historical fact that there are non-LDS practitioners of Mormonism, and some of them choose to live principles of Mormonism that the Brighamite LDS have relinquished. How is that position any more charitable toward modern Mormon polygamists ("you aren't really Mormons: you're just a bunch of sick weirdos") than the default Christian position toward modern Mormons ("you aren't really Christians: you're just a bunch of sick weirdos")? We take fellow Christians to task when some of them deny our claim to belong to the Christian club because of a few historical differences, then turn and pull the same trick on our "fundamentalist" Mormon brethren when they claim membership in the Mormon club. Jesus has something to say about this: "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" (Matt. 7:3).

Compton's book ultimately became one piece in the puzzle of evidence that led me to rethink my (LDS Mormon) attitude to sexuality completely. While I cannot share all the details here (though I will probably explore them elsewhere), I can provide a basic outline of my new understanding of sexual morality.

(1) The ethical appropriateness of a sexual relationship is not defined by number. There are polyamorists (including polygamists) whose standard of ethical behavior rises as high as that of the most virtuous monogamist (or celibate).

(2) The ethical appropriateness of a sexual relationship is not defined by gender. There are homosexuals (practicing and not) whose standard of ethical behavior rises as high as that of the most virtuous monogamist (or celibate). The argument that homosexuality goes against nature falters on the fact that nature is not necessarily interested in creating as many copies of a species as a given ecosystem can possibly hold (or a given heterosexual couple produce) before all resources are used up and everything dies. Furthermore, homosexual behavior occurs in nature. Maybe we should put a new initiative on the ballot in California, warning the owners of all those randy farm animals (not to mention lewd pet dogs) to look out for falling brimstone?

(3) The ethical appropriateness of a sexual relationship is defined by fidelity. The thing that holds all healthy relationships (of any kind) together is mutual trust and transparency. Instead of lying to one's partner about the others (as Joseph Smith repeatedly did), the responsible thing to do is discuss desires honestly with the other party and move forward from there, taking full responsibility for one's actions and making every effort to accommodate one another. Before my LDS relatives go haywire, let me hasten to assure them that, like Joseph Smith, I am a very heterosexual man (close to "0" on the Kinsey scale) married to a woman who is jealous of her husband's love. Unlike Joseph Smith, I do not intend to break her heart. I am also leery of the emotional alienation between partners that seems to accompany some forays (including the Mormon one Compton chronicles) into polyamory. Therefore, I remain a happy, heterosexual monogamist.

(4) Irrational shame and guilt do not build healthy relationships. This is particularly true when we insist that our neighbors' sexual status is causing (1) natural disasters or (2) human conflict. The first is simply not true (though promiscuous sexual behavior of any kind can pose significant health risks to the promiscuous and those who come in contact with their vital fluids), and the second can become a dangerous, self-fulfilling prophecy (when people decide to cleanse the world by doing God's work for him at the ballot-box or on the battlefield). As long as people are not sexually abusing one another (rape is always rape, and no child should be sexually active with an older person), what they do in the bedroom is none of my business and should not keep me from sleeping at night. The more concerned and obsessed I become with the perceived immorality of my neighbors who do not happen to resemble me in every detail, the more I run the risk of becoming another Joseph Smith, Ted Haggard, or George Rekers. All these men were obsessed with forbidden sex and became involved with it as a result. There is a definite lesson to be learned from their experiences, and it is not one any of them taught from the pulpit.