One night recently, I was watching “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and was introduced to a writer named Sam Harris who was plugging his new book, The Moral Landscape. The discussion indicated that the topic of the book is Mr. Harris’ claim that science can be used to produce or discover moral facts or principles, and should replace or supersede religion as a source of moral understanding.
My immediate response was, “Bunkum!” or some less nice words to that effect.
I haven’t read the book, nor have I read any of Mr. Harris’ previous works, though I have learned by visiting his website that he is one of those people who believe religion is bad, science is good, and the two are opposed, and that he has received praise from, among others, Richard Dawkins.
From what I read on Mr. Harris’ site, it appears that he agrees with Dr. Dawkins that religion is an unnecessary excresence on human history and we would all be much better off if it would just go away. (Dawkins, of course, has expressed the opinion (in The God Delusion) that religious belief only persists because of bad parenting, and if “we” could just stop people from propagating these erroneous beliefs, religion would indeed just go away, and we could all go forward with an ideal life in a science-ruled world. More about that later.)
I also learned from a column that Mr. Harris wrote for the Huffington Post that he is dismayed by his observation that many scientists agree with many religious believers (including me) in concluding that science simply is not equipped to deal with moral principles: It can study what people say and do about morality, but it can’t say what is or is not truly moral.
This is in fact the most serious roadblock that the pro-science crowd has found to its agenda of eliminating religious belief and basing all social, political and personal life on scientific principles. My impression – and I must reiterate that it’s based on the one interview and a fairly speedy reading of the online sources – is that Mr. Harris has written his new book precisely in order to try to knock down this obstacle and clear the way for the Golden Age of Scientific Rule.
I don’t plan to read the book itself because I think I have better things to do with my time than waste it reading something I already know is an exercise in futility. That may sound narrow-minded, but in fact it’s based on a thoroughly rational appraisal of the prospects. As it happens, there’s an airtight and surprisingly simple argument:
1. “Nature,” by which I mean the aggregate of physical data that modern science restricts itself to studying, is inherently amoral. There is no moral good or bad in the physical cause-and-effect processes that materialist scientists insist are the sum total of what the universe is. Ultimately, it’s all random.
2. “Rationality,” by which I mean in this instance the use of more-or-less-formal logic, is also inherently amoral. Logical analysis says nothing about whether a conclusion is morally good or bad, only whether that conclusion is based on a valid argument.
3. “Science,” then, if defined as the application of rationality to natural phenomena, is inherently amoral: Its objects of study and its manner of study offer neither moral content nor moral analysis (AIAO: Amorality In, Amorality Out).
Thus, if a scientist is proposing moral principles or advocating a course of action as morally positive, he or she must be basing this proposition or advocacy on something other than science. In practice, of course, the moral principle generally is inserted into the discourse at the beginning as an assumption. (Harris seems to be assuming that a scientific morality would somehow be “more moral” than one based on religion, because science is better than religion as an understanding of reality.)
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has addressed these issues in considerable detail in Sources of the Self and has shown that the adherents of the atheistic/materialistic/secular-humanistic worldview(s) are unable to account, using their own logic, for the moral principles they espouse. Their moral imperatives exist as part of our Western cultural legacy, having entered the cultural stream from religious sources, but are treated as “self-evident” because the proponents of this view can't allow themselves to acknowledge the original religious source.
In general, what the atheist/secularist crowd espouses are the “Enlightenment” values of individual liberty and humanitarianism. And certainly there’s nothing wrong with them as values. But based on their own materialist-rationalist principles, the atheists-secularists can’t explain why these things are worth valuing.
Absent such an explanation, it becomes easy for some people to conclude that they aren’t truly worth valuing. This then allows them to proceed to behave with disregard for others’ liberty or well-being, as in Social Darwinism, Objectivism, Straussianism, etc.
Harris’ approach apparently relies at least in part on “human flourishing” as a yardstick of value, but Taylor has already shown the inadequacy — indeed, the danger — of that standard.
Obviously, how one defines “flourishing” has a major effect on what one wants to propose as a moral good. If “flourishing” means mere physical well-being, for instance, the argument must tend toward the kind of hedonistic, consumeristic society we already live in, and which so many of us find objectionable on various levels, including the environmental and the spiritual.
Which raises another objection: Obviously, if one automatically rejects religion as a moral source, one is rejecting spirituality as a moral value. So any moral system one constructs on that basis will offer no satisfaction for anyone who believes in the reality of spiritual rewards. And it will automatically denigrate any system or society that does accord value to spirituality, while overrating a system or society that ignores spiritual value or meaning and looks instead at physical well-being as a standard.
Of course, the pro-science crowd delights in detailing the many abuses that have been committed in the name of religion, and there certainly is no denying that terrible abuses have occurred, and continue to occur. But the advocates of science as a standard are far less inclined to take note of the rather unencouraging track record of science and scientists on moral issues in the relatively short time they’ve had the upper hand.
Individuals pursuing an amorally conceived science have, notoriously, placed their work at the disposal of morally dubious governments such as those of Nazi Germany and the USSR. (And one might note that the USSR was ruled according to an atheistic-materialistic ideology, which didn’t prevent it from killing as many as 60 million people (Solzhenitsyn’s estimate) in programs of collectivization, forced migration and forced labor.)
Then there are the morally dubious projects of governments regarded in the West as more legitimate, such as the recently revealed deliberate infection of 696 men and women in Guatemala with syphilis by U.S. researchers in the 1940s. Add that one to the Tuskegee experiments, the eugenics projects in which women were sterilized based upon their race and class, the CIA experiments in mind control using LSD and God knows what else, and let us not forget the atomic bomb, poison gas and biological warfare.
None of these things could have proceeded without the willing participation of scientists. What it all ultimately demonstrates is the obvious fact that the amoral includes the immoral.
No doubt, the researchers in all these projects argued that their work helped save American lives, thus serving a “greater good.” This is precisely why utilitarianism is worthless as a moral source: In the pursuit of the “greatest good for the greatest number,” everything depends on who decides what the “greatest good” is and how they decide it, and how much evil they’re willing to inflict on the lesser number. A less "scientific" view of morality might propose that inflicting horrible suffering on even one person is wrong.
Scientists go where the funding is, of course. When the funding is provided by the government, they do the work the government wants, such as creating weapons of mass destruction. Today, of course, they mostly are placing their work at the disposal of profit-seeking corporations, sometimes because that’s where the government funding (i.e., yours and my tax dollars) is being funneled. That’s one reason why the pharmaceutical industry has grown so huge.
And here is an example of amorality serving amorality. The “science” of economics — according to some of its practitioners, generally those who are viewed most favorably by large corporations — informs us that one reason governments must not try to regulate business is because doing so injects moral considerations into markets that will “flourish” best by operating unimpededly according to “nature.”
As Taylor’s work shows, modern science and the worldviews it has most strongly influenced are geared toward the control and exploitation of Nature, including human nature. And there have been many people in the past couple of centuries who sincerely believed they were part of a movement toward the overall improvement of human life through that type of manipulation. And improvements obviously have been made by some measurements, though there also have been obvious losses.
But for every selfless philanthropist or courageous existentialist (a la Camus’ Dr. Rieux, admittedly a fictional character), there have been multitudes of social-Darwinist, para-Nietzschean scoundrels and bullies whose only interest in science is determining how it can help them increase their wealth and power.
Time and again, the resistance to such people and their bogus ideologies has come from people motivated by religious belief — because it’s only because of such belief that we can arrive at a point of view that sees something better or higher than the things of this physical world.
I don’t believe religion, or religious aspiration, can be eradicated. Unlike Dr. Dawkins, I don’t think it’s a purely cultural-educational phenomenon. I think it’s a basic constituent of human nature, because the divine is a basic formative and ordering principle of reality.
But it does worry me that there are people who believe it can and ought to be eradicated, people who are involved in creating drugs and machines that can do great harm to our minds and souls, and who have considerable clout with our lawmakers and sociocultural opinion-shapers.
In the latter days of the Soviet Union, the authorities found it expedient to classify dissidents as psychologically aberrant rather than politically unorthodox, and to confine them in mental hospitals instead of labor camps. It seems to me that the biggest difference between here and there, now and then, is that in the United States we’re letting ourselves be persuaded into self-medicating ourselves into irrelevance, into letting “the system” decide what’s best for everyone.
When we live in a world where resistance to abuse or stupidity can be “diagnosed” as “oppositional defiant disorder,” we really need to think carefully about what we value and how we can know what is truly good or evil.
Showing posts with label ethics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ethics. Show all posts
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Monday, July 12, 2010
Control Thyself
I don’t know if it has always been this way (I suspect it has), but people today do seem to have a tendency to want to control the world around them by dictating what other people should do.
I’ve spent a lot of time driving, possibly more than average, and I’ve observed myself and others while doing this. We aren’t just driving, we’re also judging every other driver we encounter. Ultimately, each of us is thinking, “Why can’t everyone just drive the way I drive?” But the sad fact of the matter is that they are driving the way we drive; they’re driving along thinking, “Why can’t everyone just drive the way I drive?”
We bring the same attitude, the same self-justified view of things, to life in general: “Why can’t everyone just live the way I live?” And the problem is the same: Everyone does live the way we live: self-absorbed and thinking we know better than everyone else.
The philosophical attitude is of course somewhat different: We should examine ourselves first, and only when we’re sure we’ve gotten it all figured out (which of course, philosophically speaking, is never) should we turn our attention to telling other people what to do.
This approach tends to strike people as unrealistic, impractical, other-worldly. And those criticisms are true. The truly philosophical life contributes nothing to the growth of the economy, the advance of science and technology, the expansion of human domination over nature. On the contrary, it tends to heap scorn on the pursuit of such things, to call attention to the impermanence, and thus the emptiness, of all achievements along these lines.
This leaves philosophers open to the criticism of being anti-humanistic: Science and medicine and so on have improved the human condition immeasurably over the centuries, and surely no one can claim that there’s no value in this improvement. There’s a certain amount of exaggeration in this claim of progress, but there’s also a certain amount of truth: People do live significantly longer today than they did even a century ago, and anyone who wants to argue that this isn’t an improvement is going to have a hard time convincing anyone.
At the same time, however, we seem to have paid, and are continuing to pay, a steep price: in consumption of the Earth’s resources, destruction of the environment and deterioration in our social, political and spiritual circumstances.
There are lots of rhythms in life. In human life in particular, there’s an upbeat, an inhalation, a rising tide in our youth as we grow and go out into the world to make our mark, raise families, change the institutions and situations into which we’re born. And there’s a downbeat, an exhalation, an ebbing tide in our later years as we seek to preserve and conserve what we’ve learned and what we’ve found worthy of valuing, and to protect what we’ve acquired.
There will always be a tension between these movements, and likely a swinging of the pendulum between one and the other. What seems likely to be most harmful, most likely to render us unable to keep our social world going, is the belief that we can freeze the pendulum at some point in its swing, to believe we can say, “This much freedom, this much exploration, and no more.” And that applies to the carved-in-stone principles of science as much as it does to the conventions of bourgeois society or the commandments of religion.
It’s precisely at the point when we think we have it all figured out that the stuff we don’t know comes up behind us and clubs us on the back of the head.
I’ve spent a lot of time driving, possibly more than average, and I’ve observed myself and others while doing this. We aren’t just driving, we’re also judging every other driver we encounter. Ultimately, each of us is thinking, “Why can’t everyone just drive the way I drive?” But the sad fact of the matter is that they are driving the way we drive; they’re driving along thinking, “Why can’t everyone just drive the way I drive?”
We bring the same attitude, the same self-justified view of things, to life in general: “Why can’t everyone just live the way I live?” And the problem is the same: Everyone does live the way we live: self-absorbed and thinking we know better than everyone else.
The philosophical attitude is of course somewhat different: We should examine ourselves first, and only when we’re sure we’ve gotten it all figured out (which of course, philosophically speaking, is never) should we turn our attention to telling other people what to do.
This approach tends to strike people as unrealistic, impractical, other-worldly. And those criticisms are true. The truly philosophical life contributes nothing to the growth of the economy, the advance of science and technology, the expansion of human domination over nature. On the contrary, it tends to heap scorn on the pursuit of such things, to call attention to the impermanence, and thus the emptiness, of all achievements along these lines.
This leaves philosophers open to the criticism of being anti-humanistic: Science and medicine and so on have improved the human condition immeasurably over the centuries, and surely no one can claim that there’s no value in this improvement. There’s a certain amount of exaggeration in this claim of progress, but there’s also a certain amount of truth: People do live significantly longer today than they did even a century ago, and anyone who wants to argue that this isn’t an improvement is going to have a hard time convincing anyone.
At the same time, however, we seem to have paid, and are continuing to pay, a steep price: in consumption of the Earth’s resources, destruction of the environment and deterioration in our social, political and spiritual circumstances.
There are lots of rhythms in life. In human life in particular, there’s an upbeat, an inhalation, a rising tide in our youth as we grow and go out into the world to make our mark, raise families, change the institutions and situations into which we’re born. And there’s a downbeat, an exhalation, an ebbing tide in our later years as we seek to preserve and conserve what we’ve learned and what we’ve found worthy of valuing, and to protect what we’ve acquired.
There will always be a tension between these movements, and likely a swinging of the pendulum between one and the other. What seems likely to be most harmful, most likely to render us unable to keep our social world going, is the belief that we can freeze the pendulum at some point in its swing, to believe we can say, “This much freedom, this much exploration, and no more.” And that applies to the carved-in-stone principles of science as much as it does to the conventions of bourgeois society or the commandments of religion.
It’s precisely at the point when we think we have it all figured out that the stuff we don’t know comes up behind us and clubs us on the back of the head.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Where There's a Will There's an Excuse
Looking back at the stuff I’ve written since I reactivated this blog a few weeks ago, it struck me that a casual reader might get the impression that my thought processes are pretty chaotic. I could claim that I’ve deliberately been picking random topics as a way to enable “emergent order” to work its magic on my muddled thoughts in the same way it’s supposed to account for the existence of order in physical processes that are alleged to be random in their underlying dynamics. But just as I believe that the order in our cosmos is there from the beginning, I also want to claim that there has been method in my madness all along.
One of the nagging questions about human beings, one that gets asked over and over again under all kinds of circumstances, is this: How could anyone do that? We hear about some awful, horrible thing that has happened, something that seems to violate every rule as we understand the rules, and we wonder how or why another human being could behave in such a grossly and grotesquely wrong way: committing serial murders, genocide, child-rape, conning old people out of their life savings, condemning miners to unmarked graves in unsafe coal pits, feeding children toxic chemicals with their formula, aiding and abetting dictators just to get at the minerals buried under their subjects’ homes, etc. etc. etc.
Frankly, I don’t think the answer is as difficult or mystifying as people seem to believe. Let’s start here: Socrates said (according to Plato) that no one does evil willingly. And Aristotle said, famously, “All beings by nature desire the good.” People do what they do because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that what they’re doing is good – if not for the world at large, at least for themselves.
And people are able to convince themselves that very bad things are actually very good things. Even a psycho- or sociopath may have some inkling that society in general disapproves of the bad, terrible, awful things he or she wants to do, but there’s always a way to claim that “I am right, you (all) are wrong.”
Because we all live in a constructed reality, each of us in his or her own constructed reality: an intellectual or psychological bubble built with the materials at hand, personal, social, political, intellectual, what have you.
As I pointed out here, it’s impossible for a human being to have a complete picture of the universe as it really exists at any moment. As a result, we're forced to go through life with an understanding of the universe and our place in it that is, and will always remain, largely hypothetical. The nature of reality forces us to fill in a lot of blanks with our best guesses, which often are supplied to us by those around us.
That gives us wide latitude to indulge whatever predispositions we bring to the table, whether from personal or social conditioning or out of the fundaments of our souls. In essence, we learn to construct arguments in support of whatever it is we want to believe, whatever we want to do.
We can make anything fit, if we just put our minds to the task: skimping on safety equipment in mines and on oil platforms so as to keep our costs low and our profits high, for instance; selling drugs (“prescription medications”) that ravage people’s bodies or minds, because we can whip out a “clinical study” that shows that 51 percent of the test subjects felt slightly better after swallowing our pill, and only 10 percent had “adverse reactions;” forcing the migration of indigenous people or just chewing through the ground beneath their feet because they didn’t understand the value of what was down there and weren’t exploiting it like we can; or “she said no but I could see she really meant yes.”
There does remain some fairly widespread agreement, even in our fragmented world, about what’s right and what’s wrong. Unfortunately, it seems more and more as though the people who share that agreement are the least able to do anything about it. The social, political and economic predators not only have clawed their way to the top, they’ve embedded their self-justifications at the heart of our society, to the point where demanding that a (foreign) corporation compensate people for the catastrophic damage it has caused through its utterly unconscionable activities can be characterized by a “people’s representative” as a form of extortion.
This is exactly what I mean about living in a “bubble”: Anyone who could see British Petroleum as the victim in the current catastrophe is living in his imagination, not reality. Man may be, as Aristotle said, a rational animal, but he’s very talented at putting his rationality to work in the service of what pleases him most, no matter how destructive or downright disgusting that may be.
One of the nagging questions about human beings, one that gets asked over and over again under all kinds of circumstances, is this: How could anyone do that? We hear about some awful, horrible thing that has happened, something that seems to violate every rule as we understand the rules, and we wonder how or why another human being could behave in such a grossly and grotesquely wrong way: committing serial murders, genocide, child-rape, conning old people out of their life savings, condemning miners to unmarked graves in unsafe coal pits, feeding children toxic chemicals with their formula, aiding and abetting dictators just to get at the minerals buried under their subjects’ homes, etc. etc. etc.
Frankly, I don’t think the answer is as difficult or mystifying as people seem to believe. Let’s start here: Socrates said (according to Plato) that no one does evil willingly. And Aristotle said, famously, “All beings by nature desire the good.” People do what they do because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that what they’re doing is good – if not for the world at large, at least for themselves.
And people are able to convince themselves that very bad things are actually very good things. Even a psycho- or sociopath may have some inkling that society in general disapproves of the bad, terrible, awful things he or she wants to do, but there’s always a way to claim that “I am right, you (all) are wrong.”
Because we all live in a constructed reality, each of us in his or her own constructed reality: an intellectual or psychological bubble built with the materials at hand, personal, social, political, intellectual, what have you.
As I pointed out here, it’s impossible for a human being to have a complete picture of the universe as it really exists at any moment. As a result, we're forced to go through life with an understanding of the universe and our place in it that is, and will always remain, largely hypothetical. The nature of reality forces us to fill in a lot of blanks with our best guesses, which often are supplied to us by those around us.
That gives us wide latitude to indulge whatever predispositions we bring to the table, whether from personal or social conditioning or out of the fundaments of our souls. In essence, we learn to construct arguments in support of whatever it is we want to believe, whatever we want to do.
We can make anything fit, if we just put our minds to the task: skimping on safety equipment in mines and on oil platforms so as to keep our costs low and our profits high, for instance; selling drugs (“prescription medications”) that ravage people’s bodies or minds, because we can whip out a “clinical study” that shows that 51 percent of the test subjects felt slightly better after swallowing our pill, and only 10 percent had “adverse reactions;” forcing the migration of indigenous people or just chewing through the ground beneath their feet because they didn’t understand the value of what was down there and weren’t exploiting it like we can; or “she said no but I could see she really meant yes.”
There does remain some fairly widespread agreement, even in our fragmented world, about what’s right and what’s wrong. Unfortunately, it seems more and more as though the people who share that agreement are the least able to do anything about it. The social, political and economic predators not only have clawed their way to the top, they’ve embedded their self-justifications at the heart of our society, to the point where demanding that a (foreign) corporation compensate people for the catastrophic damage it has caused through its utterly unconscionable activities can be characterized by a “people’s representative” as a form of extortion.
This is exactly what I mean about living in a “bubble”: Anyone who could see British Petroleum as the victim in the current catastrophe is living in his imagination, not reality. Man may be, as Aristotle said, a rational animal, but he’s very talented at putting his rationality to work in the service of what pleases him most, no matter how destructive or downright disgusting that may be.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Insanity Defense
I'm not at all confident that yesterday's post ended up saying what I set out to say, so I want to try to clarify it a little, if possible.
Perhaps the main fault of the Sophists' definitions of justice (diakosynē) as "the advantage of the powerful" or "everyone guarding against everyone" is that both suppose that justice (and by extension any ethical imperative) varies according to incidental factors such as social status or political role.
We certainly see this type of thinking in contemporary culture. The very existence of theories of business ethics makes this clear, as it assumes that my ethical imperatives or obligations as a business owner or manager are different from those I must meet purely as a human being. Plato, Hans-Georg Gadamer and I all reject this approach, as Gadamer states succinctly in one of the passages I quoted yesterday: "Justice does not exist when each person watches the other and guards against him, but when each watches himself and guards the right and just being of his inner constitution."
To put it as plainly as I can, my ethical obligations don't change just because my social or political status does. But our society widely assumes just the opposite: There are different ethical standards for different kinds or classes of people. If I accumulate great wealth, if I buy or open a business, if I'm elected to political office, if I achieve a position of leadership in a church or other religious or social movement, a whole new set of rules is assumed to apply to my behavior. And these new rules invariably seem to be formulated in terms of how much I can get away with in my new position.
I don't think this is right. I believe Plato is quite right to argue that the real basis of all ethics, and thus the only firm foundation for a society, is each person knowing right from wrong and persistently trying to live in accordance with this knowledge. And I'm convinced that we all know "on some level" what really is right or wrong, even when we're bending over backwards mentally to find some rationalization for doing what's wrong. As I said before, some things are always wrong. Moreover, we know they're wrong: murder, rape, theft, dishonesty, failure to keep promises, cowardice, scapegoating, etc. etc. etc. What's to debate?
We all know from watching "Law and Order" that the legal definition of insanity is the inability to tell right from wrong. Today, there are armies of lawyers, advertisers,political consultants and other clever people - Sophists, in other words - who labor to convince us that up is down, white is black, day is night and, yes, wrong is right. To the extent that our society accepts their arguments and adjusts its laws and social norms to incorporate them, our society is legally insane. No wonder, then, that so many people look at what's going on around us and conclude that the inmates have taken over the asylum.
Perhaps the main fault of the Sophists' definitions of justice (diakosynē) as "the advantage of the powerful" or "everyone guarding against everyone" is that both suppose that justice (and by extension any ethical imperative) varies according to incidental factors such as social status or political role.
We certainly see this type of thinking in contemporary culture. The very existence of theories of business ethics makes this clear, as it assumes that my ethical imperatives or obligations as a business owner or manager are different from those I must meet purely as a human being. Plato, Hans-Georg Gadamer and I all reject this approach, as Gadamer states succinctly in one of the passages I quoted yesterday: "Justice does not exist when each person watches the other and guards against him, but when each watches himself and guards the right and just being of his inner constitution."
To put it as plainly as I can, my ethical obligations don't change just because my social or political status does. But our society widely assumes just the opposite: There are different ethical standards for different kinds or classes of people. If I accumulate great wealth, if I buy or open a business, if I'm elected to political office, if I achieve a position of leadership in a church or other religious or social movement, a whole new set of rules is assumed to apply to my behavior. And these new rules invariably seem to be formulated in terms of how much I can get away with in my new position.
I don't think this is right. I believe Plato is quite right to argue that the real basis of all ethics, and thus the only firm foundation for a society, is each person knowing right from wrong and persistently trying to live in accordance with this knowledge. And I'm convinced that we all know "on some level" what really is right or wrong, even when we're bending over backwards mentally to find some rationalization for doing what's wrong. As I said before, some things are always wrong. Moreover, we know they're wrong: murder, rape, theft, dishonesty, failure to keep promises, cowardice, scapegoating, etc. etc. etc. What's to debate?
We all know from watching "Law and Order" that the legal definition of insanity is the inability to tell right from wrong. Today, there are armies of lawyers, advertisers,political consultants and other clever people - Sophists, in other words - who labor to convince us that up is down, white is black, day is night and, yes, wrong is right. To the extent that our society accepts their arguments and adjusts its laws and social norms to incorporate them, our society is legally insane. No wonder, then, that so many people look at what's going on around us and conclude that the inmates have taken over the asylum.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Sophistry Then and Now
Americans have always liked to think of themselves as the heirs of ancient Greek democracy and Roman republicanism. Certainly, the Founding Fathers, imbued with the Neoclassicism of their era, looked to these ancient civilizations as models in establishing our democratic-republican political system. But the parallels between our society and theirs are far from perfect. In many ways, our picture of our ancient forerunners draws more from nostalgia than historical accuracy, and our picture of ourselves owes at least as much to our ideals as to a sober assessment of the facts.
One characteristic, however, which I believe we do share with ancient Greece is the presence in both societies of significant numbers of Sophists, and the social-political-ethical disruptiveness they invariably produce.
The ancient Sophists were teachers, often itinerant, who claimed to be able to inculcate the sons of the well-to-do with the “wisdom” (sophia) necessary to be successful in life. In practice, this meant teaching them some basics of what we would call today the “liberal arts” but more particularly the art of rhetoric, with special emphasis on developing the ability to persuade anyone of anything, to argue both sides of a question with equal skill and thus to win any argument – and by fair means or foul.
As Hans-Georg Gadamer points out (in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, translated by P. Christopher Smith; Yale University Press, 1980), the rise of sophism had a deeply disturbing effect on the Athenians. The ability of the Sophists to confound any argument led to something of a crisis of confidence in the principles by which the citizens had lived for centuries. And it was this crisis that led the citizens to condemn Socrates to death, because they believed (mistakenly) that his questioning of people’s assumptions and values was just more of the same sophistry. Plato, of course, believed that Socrates’ dialectical method aimed to uncover truth, not to stultify it as the Sophists did, and spent the rest of his career trying to demonstrate this difference through his dialogues:
Plato’s most famous dialogue, the Republic, is devoted in its entirety to the question of what justice really is. It’s important to note that the Greek word translated as justice, diakosynē like so many ancient Greek words, has no exact synonym in English. As Gadamer explains, “Diakosynē is the true political virtue. It means more than the justice which distributes justly … It has the ancient and traditional sense of the quintessential civic virtue underlying any community and any authentic government … Diakosynē is what justice, integrity, rule by law and a civic sense are, all in one.”
The dialogue, in part, pits Socrates against two Sophists, Thrasymachus and Callicles, who claim that justice is “the advantage of the powerful.” In other words, what is called justice is really nothing of the sort, but rather is what rulers use to keep the citizenry cowed, complacent and cooperative. Alternatively, these Sophists argue, justice refers to the structures that the masses create to try to protect themselves from the predations of the powerful. Either way, they see justice in terms of the uses or abuses of power. Socrates (and Plato) naturally reject these claims, as well as the larger sophistic worldview from which they spring. As Gadamer puts it:
Now, not to be invidious, but despite the lip service paid by modern historians to the influence of Greek philosophy on the Western world, anyone who looks carefully at the state of our politics and our culture generally must conclude that the teachings of the “great philosophers” have had far less influence on us than those of the Sophists.
To take but one example from contemporary society, there’s a widespread view that the term “business ethics” is an oxymoron. This cynical opinion is based, sad to say, on the actual observed behavior of some business people. But a lot of the things that businesses do – and here we’re talking more about large corporations than small, sole-proprietor-type companies – that have such obviously harmful effects on individuals, communities and the nation as a whole are perfectly allowable under prevailing theories of ethics in business.
There are two main lines of thought in the study of ethics as applied to business, “shareholder values” and “stakeholder values.” The first argues that the sole purpose of a business, and the sole legitimate goal of a business’ owner or owners, is to earn a profit. In the process of doing so, the company will inevitably produce benefits for the community in the form of jobs created, taxes paid and so on. However, these are merely side-effects, and the business’ manager(s) mustn’t allow them to distract him or her from his or her profit-seeking. And equally, any negative effects that follow from the owner’s profit-seeking decisions – pollution of the air and water, destruction of communities by factory closings, perversion of the legislative process through influence-peddling, etc. etc. – should be ignored, because the decision ultimately will conduce to the “greater good” through the always-efficient and semi-divine workings of the free market.
The stakeholder approach differs by arguing that because businesses do not operate in a vacuum, their decisions and practices have an impact on wide swathes of society. Thus, many people besides the owner(s) have a “stake” in what the business does. Certainly, it’s in society’s best interest to have healthy, successful businesses creating jobs and paying taxes, but it’s also important to make sure those businesses aren’t doing more harm than good by causing those negative effects I mentioned above. So if they do cause harm, they must be required to make up for it in some way; for example, by “remediating” polluted sites or destroyed wetlands, or by “investing” in socially laudable enterprises such as job-training programs.
Which of these “theories” is really a sophistic way of evading the demands of a real ethics? Both, actually. The “shareholder” school is simply an updated version of the claim put forth by Thrasymachus: Justice is the advantage of the powerful. And the “stakeholder” view is Callicles’ claim, in modern dress, that justice is “keeping an eye” on each other.
The basis of these sophistic rationalizations is the same modern sociopolitical theories that represent people as atomistic “rational agents” whose pursuit of their own individual benefit will automatically benefit everyone else. Likewise, theories of business ethics claim that corporations also must be allowed maximum freedom to pursue profit by any means they see fit. If coal miners die, if oil-drilling rigs explode and pollute entire seas, if the whole financial industry implodes under the weight of its own misrepresentations, these are just “perturbations” in the process of the economy finding its “equilibrium.” The “greater good” – our energy- and money-intensive lifestyle – will still be served if we just overlook these minor, short-term, isolated, unrepresentative problems (sorry, “challenges”) and remember that the market will eventually sort everything out to everyone’s ultimate benefit.
The very fact that these things are presented as debatable shows how far we’ve strayed from a real understanding of what is ethical; that is, it shows how much we’ve allowed the Sophists of our time to blow smoke and cloud the issues. What the economists and “ethicists” are doing with these “theories” is nothing more than providing a veneer of intellectual justification for businesses doing what they wanted to do in the first place. And the proper response is not to debate the Sophists point-by-point, but to tell them, in all seriousness, “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”
Forget the “greater good.” Some things are just wrong.
One characteristic, however, which I believe we do share with ancient Greece is the presence in both societies of significant numbers of Sophists, and the social-political-ethical disruptiveness they invariably produce.
The ancient Sophists were teachers, often itinerant, who claimed to be able to inculcate the sons of the well-to-do with the “wisdom” (sophia) necessary to be successful in life. In practice, this meant teaching them some basics of what we would call today the “liberal arts” but more particularly the art of rhetoric, with special emphasis on developing the ability to persuade anyone of anything, to argue both sides of a question with equal skill and thus to win any argument – and by fair means or foul.
As Hans-Georg Gadamer points out (in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, translated by P. Christopher Smith; Yale University Press, 1980), the rise of sophism had a deeply disturbing effect on the Athenians. The ability of the Sophists to confound any argument led to something of a crisis of confidence in the principles by which the citizens had lived for centuries. And it was this crisis that led the citizens to condemn Socrates to death, because they believed (mistakenly) that his questioning of people’s assumptions and values was just more of the same sophistry. Plato, of course, believed that Socrates’ dialectical method aimed to uncover truth, not to stultify it as the Sophists did, and spent the rest of his career trying to demonstrate this difference through his dialogues:
Plato must have asked himself how a Socrates was possible in a polis [city] whose political sense was as corrupted as the political sense of the Athens of that time. What power could have enabled someone, quite in contrast to the usual ways of doing things, to hold to what is “just” as though it were something real beyond all question and all dispute? Must not the “just” have been as tangibly evident and inescapably real for him as the tangible facts of our existence are for the rest of us? Plato’s answer to this question was the doctrine of ideas. What is just is not something valid by a convention whose bindingness could be disputed; rather it is something so overwhelmingly real that its existence transcends all behavior established by the social convention and all of a society’s beliefs (doxai). (“Logos and Ergon in Plato’s Lysis,” p. 4)
Plato’s most famous dialogue, the Republic, is devoted in its entirety to the question of what justice really is. It’s important to note that the Greek word translated as justice, diakosynē like so many ancient Greek words, has no exact synonym in English. As Gadamer explains, “Diakosynē is the true political virtue. It means more than the justice which distributes justly … It has the ancient and traditional sense of the quintessential civic virtue underlying any community and any authentic government … Diakosynē is what justice, integrity, rule by law and a civic sense are, all in one.”
The dialogue, in part, pits Socrates against two Sophists, Thrasymachus and Callicles, who claim that justice is “the advantage of the powerful.” In other words, what is called justice is really nothing of the sort, but rather is what rulers use to keep the citizenry cowed, complacent and cooperative. Alternatively, these Sophists argue, justice refers to the structures that the masses create to try to protect themselves from the predations of the powerful. Either way, they see justice in terms of the uses or abuses of power. Socrates (and Plato) naturally reject these claims, as well as the larger sophistic worldview from which they spring. As Gadamer puts it:
Plato’s Socratic insight was that a binding political ethos … no longer existed once sophism had come to define the spirit of education. To be sure, justice and the virtue of the political man were precisely what the Sophists’ education sought to inculcate, too. But Socrates had uncovered the real content and dogma of their new ethos. For the Sophists, justice is only the conventions of the weak which protect the interests of the latter. For the Sophists, ethical principles are no longer valid in themselves but only as a form of our mutual “keeping an eye” on one another. The “just” is that by means of which one person can assert himself against another with help from everyone else, and as such, it is adhered to only out of mutual distrust and fear … And whether the Sophists conceive of themselves as conservative or revolutionary, indeed, even when the Sophists think that they are giving a foundation to the authority of civil law, in principle they have already perverted the sense of justice … Thus Callicles’ and Thrasymachus’ declaration that might makes right only serves to disclose the mentality which prevails in all sophism: No one does what is right voluntarily.
[To Plato, in contrast] What is right and just is not the right that someone has in opposition to another. Rather, it is being just: Each is just by himself and all are just together. Justice does not exist when each person watches the other and guards against him, but when each watches himself and guards the right and just being of his inner constitution. (“Plato and the Poets,” 50-51; emphasis in original)
Now, not to be invidious, but despite the lip service paid by modern historians to the influence of Greek philosophy on the Western world, anyone who looks carefully at the state of our politics and our culture generally must conclude that the teachings of the “great philosophers” have had far less influence on us than those of the Sophists.
To take but one example from contemporary society, there’s a widespread view that the term “business ethics” is an oxymoron. This cynical opinion is based, sad to say, on the actual observed behavior of some business people. But a lot of the things that businesses do – and here we’re talking more about large corporations than small, sole-proprietor-type companies – that have such obviously harmful effects on individuals, communities and the nation as a whole are perfectly allowable under prevailing theories of ethics in business.
There are two main lines of thought in the study of ethics as applied to business, “shareholder values” and “stakeholder values.” The first argues that the sole purpose of a business, and the sole legitimate goal of a business’ owner or owners, is to earn a profit. In the process of doing so, the company will inevitably produce benefits for the community in the form of jobs created, taxes paid and so on. However, these are merely side-effects, and the business’ manager(s) mustn’t allow them to distract him or her from his or her profit-seeking. And equally, any negative effects that follow from the owner’s profit-seeking decisions – pollution of the air and water, destruction of communities by factory closings, perversion of the legislative process through influence-peddling, etc. etc. – should be ignored, because the decision ultimately will conduce to the “greater good” through the always-efficient and semi-divine workings of the free market.
The stakeholder approach differs by arguing that because businesses do not operate in a vacuum, their decisions and practices have an impact on wide swathes of society. Thus, many people besides the owner(s) have a “stake” in what the business does. Certainly, it’s in society’s best interest to have healthy, successful businesses creating jobs and paying taxes, but it’s also important to make sure those businesses aren’t doing more harm than good by causing those negative effects I mentioned above. So if they do cause harm, they must be required to make up for it in some way; for example, by “remediating” polluted sites or destroyed wetlands, or by “investing” in socially laudable enterprises such as job-training programs.
Which of these “theories” is really a sophistic way of evading the demands of a real ethics? Both, actually. The “shareholder” school is simply an updated version of the claim put forth by Thrasymachus: Justice is the advantage of the powerful. And the “stakeholder” view is Callicles’ claim, in modern dress, that justice is “keeping an eye” on each other.
The basis of these sophistic rationalizations is the same modern sociopolitical theories that represent people as atomistic “rational agents” whose pursuit of their own individual benefit will automatically benefit everyone else. Likewise, theories of business ethics claim that corporations also must be allowed maximum freedom to pursue profit by any means they see fit. If coal miners die, if oil-drilling rigs explode and pollute entire seas, if the whole financial industry implodes under the weight of its own misrepresentations, these are just “perturbations” in the process of the economy finding its “equilibrium.” The “greater good” – our energy- and money-intensive lifestyle – will still be served if we just overlook these minor, short-term, isolated, unrepresentative problems (sorry, “challenges”) and remember that the market will eventually sort everything out to everyone’s ultimate benefit.
The very fact that these things are presented as debatable shows how far we’ve strayed from a real understanding of what is ethical; that is, it shows how much we’ve allowed the Sophists of our time to blow smoke and cloud the issues. What the economists and “ethicists” are doing with these “theories” is nothing more than providing a veneer of intellectual justification for businesses doing what they wanted to do in the first place. And the proper response is not to debate the Sophists point-by-point, but to tell them, in all seriousness, “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”
Forget the “greater good.” Some things are just wrong.
Monday, November 3, 2008
The Good, the Bad and the Evil
One of the things that seems most apt to discourage people about religion is the problem of “theodicy,” or how to reconcile the idea of a good and just god with a world in which evil exists. One way people look at this question was expressed in the title of a bestselling book of a couple of decades ago: “Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?”
Part of the reason people and churches have such a hard time with this issue is that the question isn’t expressed very well; the terms are ill-defined. Part of the fault for that lies with fundamentalists of the Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell stripe, who tell us, for example, that Hurricane Hugo was God’s way of punishing New Orleans for its stubborn immorality.
What that sort of claim fails to recognize is that there are two kinds of good, and two kinds of bad: practical and ethical. On a practical level, Hugo was very bad for New Orleans, but whether New Orleans’ prior behavior was ethically bad is a subject that’s open to debate.
Another example may serve to clarify the distinction: Somewhere in the cold, snowy forest, a wolf catches a rabbit and eats it. This is very good for the wolf, very bad for the rabbit, and for the same reason in both cases: because life is good; that is, to have life, to be alive, is good. So for the rabbit to lose its life is as bad as it gets, on a practical level, while for the wolf, eating the rabbit helps sustain its own life, so that’s good.
As a loose definition, let’s say a “practical good” is anything that produces, sustains or improves life for whatever living thing has this good, while a “practical bad” is anything that injures or otherwise causes suffering in or shortens the life of the living thing that has that.
Where the moral or ethical dimension enters the fray is in the question of intent. No rational observer, for example, would suggest that our wolf killed our rabbit purely with the intent to harm it. Rather, the wolf’s intent (as far as that word can apply to a four-legged mammal) was to get a meal by the only means available to it; harming the rabbit was its only option.
As for Hurricane Hugo, no rational person would claim that a hurricane is capable of forming an intention to target a particular coastal region. Less easily dismissed, perhaps, is the notion that God – who presumably is capable of forming an intention – conjured up this storm and used it to express his displeasure toward the ostensibly loose morals of the Big Easy.
Leaving that aside for the moment, however, we might look around to see who else is capable of forming intentions of a similar type, for good or ill. And that would be us, of course: human beings.
To summarize: Practical goods or ills can come about because of purely natural events or processes, but moral goods or ills come about only through the decisions and actions of human beings (and perhaps gods).
Ancient religious writings tend to refer willy-nilly to harmful things as “evil” or “ill” or the like, without distinguishing the accidental or practical from the intentional and immoral. To avoid confusion, I’ll use the words “bad” or “ill” to refer to harm caused by natural processes, broadly speaking (which can include some psychological and social processes), and the word “evil” to designate the deliberate or unconscionably reckless infliction of harm by entities capable of thinking.
Now we can break the question of theodicy down into two parts.
First, why would a good and just god create a world in which natural events or processes sometimes cause harm to living things?
The answer to that one is quite obvious: because no other kind of world can produce or support life. For example, an atmosphere that enables living things like those on Earth to breathe, and therefore to live, must be dynamic; if it were to cease moving and changing, it would rapidly become unbreathable. Similarly with the Earth’s waters: Stop them from flowing, and they would quickly become poisonous. To put it a bit crudely, the occasional hurricane or tornado or flood is the price we must pay for having life in the first place.
Many traditional religious or philosophical systems acknowledge this as fundamental to the nature of the cosmos: Hinduism, with its cycles of creation and destruction; Buddhism, with its key recognition of “impermanence” as the essential character of material existence; Greek philosophy, with Heraclitus’ famous teaching that “Nothing is constant save change” and the idea that all physical things are either coming to be or passing away; and of course Taoism, with its teaching of the interplay of yin and yang and its Book of Changes. But in systems that posit a deity who’s prone to fits of anger, we find an inexplicable belief that storms or whirlwinds or deluges are somehow unnatural, and are visited upon the world only to chastise a rebarbative humanity – a bizarre projection of moral concerns onto the purely practical.
Now for the second part of the question: Why would a good and just god create beings who can intentionally cause harm to other beings for no good reason; that is, who are capable of doing evil (as defined above)?
Let’s return to the wolf and rabbit I mentioned earlier. The reason the wolf’s killing of the rabbit contains no moral or ethical component, as I said, is because the wolf has no capacity to form a different intention: If the wolf wants to live, it must eat the occasional rabbit. It cannot choose not to harm the rabbit.
But now suppose a different sort of creature, one that can choose not to harm rabbits, even when it’s hungry; in other words, a creature that can choose to bestow something good (life) instead of bestowing something bad (the loss of life). Being capable of making that choice is what renders this creature a moral or ethical being; if the choice were taken away, if this creature were allowed only to do good, then it would be no more a moral being than the wolf.
So to answer the second question, if beings are to exist who can intentionally do good for other beings, then they also must have the ability to do evil, and the responsibility for choosing the one over the other is theirs, not God’s. Or as Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, “The line between good and evil runs straight through the middle of each human heart.”
What I’m saying, in sum, is that as far as good and bad, or good and evil, are concerned, we can leave God out of the question, even if we want to credit him or her or it as First Cause: We exist because the cosmos is the kind of constantly moving, changing thing it is, and wishing it were otherwise would be to wish ourselves out of existence. What we should be wishing instead is that we and those around us would prefer to contribute to the good in each other’s lives instead of adding to each other's suffering; in other words, that we might approach life and our fellow beings with goodwill, not ill-will.
Ill-will, then, is about as purely evil as anything can be said to be. Conversely, pure goodwill – unselfishly wishing good for others, without seeking or expecting any sort of reward or payback, out of nothing but the love of humankind (that’s “philanthropos” in Greek) – is, as far as I can see, the highest good of which a human being is capable.
Part of the reason people and churches have such a hard time with this issue is that the question isn’t expressed very well; the terms are ill-defined. Part of the fault for that lies with fundamentalists of the Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell stripe, who tell us, for example, that Hurricane Hugo was God’s way of punishing New Orleans for its stubborn immorality.
What that sort of claim fails to recognize is that there are two kinds of good, and two kinds of bad: practical and ethical. On a practical level, Hugo was very bad for New Orleans, but whether New Orleans’ prior behavior was ethically bad is a subject that’s open to debate.
Another example may serve to clarify the distinction: Somewhere in the cold, snowy forest, a wolf catches a rabbit and eats it. This is very good for the wolf, very bad for the rabbit, and for the same reason in both cases: because life is good; that is, to have life, to be alive, is good. So for the rabbit to lose its life is as bad as it gets, on a practical level, while for the wolf, eating the rabbit helps sustain its own life, so that’s good.
As a loose definition, let’s say a “practical good” is anything that produces, sustains or improves life for whatever living thing has this good, while a “practical bad” is anything that injures or otherwise causes suffering in or shortens the life of the living thing that has that.
Where the moral or ethical dimension enters the fray is in the question of intent. No rational observer, for example, would suggest that our wolf killed our rabbit purely with the intent to harm it. Rather, the wolf’s intent (as far as that word can apply to a four-legged mammal) was to get a meal by the only means available to it; harming the rabbit was its only option.
As for Hurricane Hugo, no rational person would claim that a hurricane is capable of forming an intention to target a particular coastal region. Less easily dismissed, perhaps, is the notion that God – who presumably is capable of forming an intention – conjured up this storm and used it to express his displeasure toward the ostensibly loose morals of the Big Easy.
Leaving that aside for the moment, however, we might look around to see who else is capable of forming intentions of a similar type, for good or ill. And that would be us, of course: human beings.
To summarize: Practical goods or ills can come about because of purely natural events or processes, but moral goods or ills come about only through the decisions and actions of human beings (and perhaps gods).
Ancient religious writings tend to refer willy-nilly to harmful things as “evil” or “ill” or the like, without distinguishing the accidental or practical from the intentional and immoral. To avoid confusion, I’ll use the words “bad” or “ill” to refer to harm caused by natural processes, broadly speaking (which can include some psychological and social processes), and the word “evil” to designate the deliberate or unconscionably reckless infliction of harm by entities capable of thinking.
Now we can break the question of theodicy down into two parts.
First, why would a good and just god create a world in which natural events or processes sometimes cause harm to living things?
The answer to that one is quite obvious: because no other kind of world can produce or support life. For example, an atmosphere that enables living things like those on Earth to breathe, and therefore to live, must be dynamic; if it were to cease moving and changing, it would rapidly become unbreathable. Similarly with the Earth’s waters: Stop them from flowing, and they would quickly become poisonous. To put it a bit crudely, the occasional hurricane or tornado or flood is the price we must pay for having life in the first place.
Many traditional religious or philosophical systems acknowledge this as fundamental to the nature of the cosmos: Hinduism, with its cycles of creation and destruction; Buddhism, with its key recognition of “impermanence” as the essential character of material existence; Greek philosophy, with Heraclitus’ famous teaching that “Nothing is constant save change” and the idea that all physical things are either coming to be or passing away; and of course Taoism, with its teaching of the interplay of yin and yang and its Book of Changes. But in systems that posit a deity who’s prone to fits of anger, we find an inexplicable belief that storms or whirlwinds or deluges are somehow unnatural, and are visited upon the world only to chastise a rebarbative humanity – a bizarre projection of moral concerns onto the purely practical.
Now for the second part of the question: Why would a good and just god create beings who can intentionally cause harm to other beings for no good reason; that is, who are capable of doing evil (as defined above)?
Let’s return to the wolf and rabbit I mentioned earlier. The reason the wolf’s killing of the rabbit contains no moral or ethical component, as I said, is because the wolf has no capacity to form a different intention: If the wolf wants to live, it must eat the occasional rabbit. It cannot choose not to harm the rabbit.
But now suppose a different sort of creature, one that can choose not to harm rabbits, even when it’s hungry; in other words, a creature that can choose to bestow something good (life) instead of bestowing something bad (the loss of life). Being capable of making that choice is what renders this creature a moral or ethical being; if the choice were taken away, if this creature were allowed only to do good, then it would be no more a moral being than the wolf.
So to answer the second question, if beings are to exist who can intentionally do good for other beings, then they also must have the ability to do evil, and the responsibility for choosing the one over the other is theirs, not God’s. Or as Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, “The line between good and evil runs straight through the middle of each human heart.”
What I’m saying, in sum, is that as far as good and bad, or good and evil, are concerned, we can leave God out of the question, even if we want to credit him or her or it as First Cause: We exist because the cosmos is the kind of constantly moving, changing thing it is, and wishing it were otherwise would be to wish ourselves out of existence. What we should be wishing instead is that we and those around us would prefer to contribute to the good in each other’s lives instead of adding to each other's suffering; in other words, that we might approach life and our fellow beings with goodwill, not ill-will.
Ill-will, then, is about as purely evil as anything can be said to be. Conversely, pure goodwill – unselfishly wishing good for others, without seeking or expecting any sort of reward or payback, out of nothing but the love of humankind (that’s “philanthropos” in Greek) – is, as far as I can see, the highest good of which a human being is capable.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Put to the Test
A story that came out of the Vatican a couple of days ago has left me a bit shocked. I first noticed it in a CNN crawl that said something like, “Vatican approves psychological testing for priest candidates.” A thorough and sober story from the Catholic News Service is headlined Vatican recommends some use of psychological testing in seminaries.
As that story, written by John Thavis, explains, a document released by the Vatican on Oct. 30 says “seminary candidates should undergo psychological evaluations whenever there is a suspicion of personality disturbances or serious doubts about their ability to live a celibate life.” The document, “Guidelines for the Use of Psychology in the Admission and Formation of Candidates for the Priesthood,” doesn’t sanction routine psychological testing for all seminarians; rather, it says, “the use of psychological consultation and testing [is] appropriate in ‘exceptional cases that present particular difficulties’ in seminary admission and formation,” according to Thavis.
However, during a press conference announcing the policy document, Thavis writes, “Archbishop Jean-Louis Brugues, secretary of the congregation, said that, in fact, many dioceses currently have mandatory psychological evaluations for candidates to seminaries.”
Naturally, all of this is linked to the scandal of sexual abuse by priests that has been widely reported over the past several years, and much of the coverage of this week’s announcement has assumed that the new policy is meant to stop homosexuals from being ordained. (“Vatican: Screen for possible gay priests” was the headline on the Seattle Times online story.)
That’s not what I find perplexing. Here’s where I’m having problems:
The word “psychology” is of course Greek in origin and derives from “psyche,” meaning “soul” and “logos,” meaning “word” but also, as I’ve discussed previously, “description,” “explanation,” and so on. So the literal meaning can be taken as “study of the soul.”
As we all know, the Catholic Church has held itself out for almost two millennia as the authority par excellence on the soul and matters pertaining thereto. And it has a long-established “psychology,” largely adapted – through such church fathers as Origen and Clement of Alexandria, Ambrose and Augustine, and pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite – from Platonism.
But while the “psychological consultation and testing” now being proposed, and the “mandatory psychological evaluations” already being practiced aren’t specified, it does sound rather like the church is now conceding that the modern materialistic-mechanistic psychiatric/psychological establishment is a better evaluator than it is of men’s souls. (Not women’s, because of course the Vatican still refuses to countenance the ordination of women.)
The Catholic Church has, for about a century now, been relatively accommodating toward science, unlike the more fundamentalist sects that, for example, deny the reality of the evolution of species by natural selection. Some of that may be a result of lingering embarrassment over its despicable treatment of Galileo and Giordano Bruno and so on. But this latest concession may be going too far.
Psychology these days pretty much has discarded the psyche. In fact, many practitioners have dropped that term and prefer to be called behaviorists. The consensus (leaving out Jungians, who are widely derided as “mystical”) seems to be that the mind is nothing but a sort of secretion of the brain, and any abnormal behaviors – the “disorders” that seem so numerous these days – can easily be fixed through chemical modification. So “psychological evaluation” consists basically of seeing which set of symptoms in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual a person matches, and treatment consists of selecting the right medication to “control” it – because no “cure” is possible.
Now, I’m not suggesting that the church shouldn’t do something to prevent pedophiles from becoming priests. I’m just saying there may be better ways to solve this problem. One rather obvious example: Until about the 12th century, priests were allowed to be married and have families; it was only with the reform movement led by Bernard of Clairvaux and others that a monastic-type celibacy was universally prescribed for parish priests. Other religions allow, and even encourage, their clergy to marry, and don’t seem to have such widespread problems with sexual misconduct.
There’s also a very long-standing system of what one might call “vetting” that might be more harmonious with the church’s mission as a spiritual organization. This system was practiced in the Greek philosophical schools and the early Christian monasteries, and it continues to be practiced today in Eastern Orthodox and Buddhist monasticism, and the Sufi schools.
In all these traditions, students or aspirants or candidates for initiation or whatever must undergo a lengthy period of what one might call “spiritual apprenticeship” under the watchful eyes of a community of aspirants who are undertaking the same struggle. The emphasis from the outset is on ethics: the cultivation of virtue and the eradication of vice; only when the school’s leaders are satisfied with the genuineness of the aspirant’s progress is he or she led to the next level of practice.
While there are still some vestiges of this tradition in Catholic monasticism (reflected to a degree in the works of Thomas Merton), the church doesn't especially encourage either its clergy or its laity to undertake this sort of inner conquest of the Self. Instead, like other Christian sects, it turns its energies, and those of its members, toward worldly affairs and outer victories.
Viewed that way, this announcement about psychological testing makes perfect sense: In a world obsessed with appearances, it gives the appearance that the church is doing something decisive about a festering problem. But from another perspective, one might conclude that the church itself is failing a test and paying the price for neglecting its own soul.
As that story, written by John Thavis, explains, a document released by the Vatican on Oct. 30 says “seminary candidates should undergo psychological evaluations whenever there is a suspicion of personality disturbances or serious doubts about their ability to live a celibate life.” The document, “Guidelines for the Use of Psychology in the Admission and Formation of Candidates for the Priesthood,” doesn’t sanction routine psychological testing for all seminarians; rather, it says, “the use of psychological consultation and testing [is] appropriate in ‘exceptional cases that present particular difficulties’ in seminary admission and formation,” according to Thavis.
However, during a press conference announcing the policy document, Thavis writes, “Archbishop Jean-Louis Brugues, secretary of the congregation, said that, in fact, many dioceses currently have mandatory psychological evaluations for candidates to seminaries.”
Naturally, all of this is linked to the scandal of sexual abuse by priests that has been widely reported over the past several years, and much of the coverage of this week’s announcement has assumed that the new policy is meant to stop homosexuals from being ordained. (“Vatican: Screen for possible gay priests” was the headline on the Seattle Times online story.)
That’s not what I find perplexing. Here’s where I’m having problems:
The word “psychology” is of course Greek in origin and derives from “psyche,” meaning “soul” and “logos,” meaning “word” but also, as I’ve discussed previously, “description,” “explanation,” and so on. So the literal meaning can be taken as “study of the soul.”
As we all know, the Catholic Church has held itself out for almost two millennia as the authority par excellence on the soul and matters pertaining thereto. And it has a long-established “psychology,” largely adapted – through such church fathers as Origen and Clement of Alexandria, Ambrose and Augustine, and pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite – from Platonism.
But while the “psychological consultation and testing” now being proposed, and the “mandatory psychological evaluations” already being practiced aren’t specified, it does sound rather like the church is now conceding that the modern materialistic-mechanistic psychiatric/psychological establishment is a better evaluator than it is of men’s souls. (Not women’s, because of course the Vatican still refuses to countenance the ordination of women.)
The Catholic Church has, for about a century now, been relatively accommodating toward science, unlike the more fundamentalist sects that, for example, deny the reality of the evolution of species by natural selection. Some of that may be a result of lingering embarrassment over its despicable treatment of Galileo and Giordano Bruno and so on. But this latest concession may be going too far.
Psychology these days pretty much has discarded the psyche. In fact, many practitioners have dropped that term and prefer to be called behaviorists. The consensus (leaving out Jungians, who are widely derided as “mystical”) seems to be that the mind is nothing but a sort of secretion of the brain, and any abnormal behaviors – the “disorders” that seem so numerous these days – can easily be fixed through chemical modification. So “psychological evaluation” consists basically of seeing which set of symptoms in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual a person matches, and treatment consists of selecting the right medication to “control” it – because no “cure” is possible.
Now, I’m not suggesting that the church shouldn’t do something to prevent pedophiles from becoming priests. I’m just saying there may be better ways to solve this problem. One rather obvious example: Until about the 12th century, priests were allowed to be married and have families; it was only with the reform movement led by Bernard of Clairvaux and others that a monastic-type celibacy was universally prescribed for parish priests. Other religions allow, and even encourage, their clergy to marry, and don’t seem to have such widespread problems with sexual misconduct.
There’s also a very long-standing system of what one might call “vetting” that might be more harmonious with the church’s mission as a spiritual organization. This system was practiced in the Greek philosophical schools and the early Christian monasteries, and it continues to be practiced today in Eastern Orthodox and Buddhist monasticism, and the Sufi schools.
In all these traditions, students or aspirants or candidates for initiation or whatever must undergo a lengthy period of what one might call “spiritual apprenticeship” under the watchful eyes of a community of aspirants who are undertaking the same struggle. The emphasis from the outset is on ethics: the cultivation of virtue and the eradication of vice; only when the school’s leaders are satisfied with the genuineness of the aspirant’s progress is he or she led to the next level of practice.
While there are still some vestiges of this tradition in Catholic monasticism (reflected to a degree in the works of Thomas Merton), the church doesn't especially encourage either its clergy or its laity to undertake this sort of inner conquest of the Self. Instead, like other Christian sects, it turns its energies, and those of its members, toward worldly affairs and outer victories.
Viewed that way, this announcement about psychological testing makes perfect sense: In a world obsessed with appearances, it gives the appearance that the church is doing something decisive about a festering problem. But from another perspective, one might conclude that the church itself is failing a test and paying the price for neglecting its own soul.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Loose Morals
So far in this blog, I’ve done a lot of ranting about the role of randomness in the prevailing Western worldview and the resulting lack of “focus,” as defined in my first posting here. As I’ve indicated, I think it’s a wrong view of things, an inaccurate description, account or narrative.
But what difference does it make? What does it matter if scientists and economists and so on are working from a faulty conception of the overall cause and meaning of the cosmos? As long as they get the lower-level details right, and the electricity still makes my lights work and I can still click a link and look at stuff on the Internet, is there any reason to care about overarching theoretical stuff that may not be provable anyway?
Well, certainly in the case of economics, we’re seeing what happens when a wrong theory holds sway: Vast sums of money vanish in the blink of an eye, people lose their jobs, and political consequences follow.
In physics, there’s apparently some possibility that we might see even more disastrous results in a few months, when the big new CERN supercollider is fired up again, after it blew a fuse on the first try several weeks ago. Some physicists have expressed concerns that when their colleagues start smashing tiny bits of matter together, it might possibly cause the end of the world. Others scoff at that idea, though; I guess we’ll find out who’s right eventually.
However, I think we’re already living every day with almost equally disastrous results from this materialist-atomist worldview, because it leaves us with no “higher good,” no center-of-the-universe, no focus. What we’re left with is an absurdist value-neutral universe in which every action is pretty much as valid as any other. If, as Nietzsche proclaimed, “God is dead,” then by what standard do we judge our own or others’ words and actions?
The answer for Nietzsche and many others: the individual will, or what a lot of people might prefer to call the personal ego. From that perspective, “good” is what’s good for me, “bad” is what’s bad for me.
Amazingly enough, this position is in fact the stance of orthodox economics, though in that discipline the concept is sugar-coated with the notion of “rational agency,” which in essence claims that people (or at least those who make economic decisions such as whether to buy or sell stuff) act out of what some refer to as “enlightened self-interest.” Meaning that people are generally aware that the effect of their decisions on other people is something they need to keep in mind; for example, if you’re stealing food from others, you need to leave them enough so they don’t starve to death, if you want to be able to keep stealing from them.
But as we’ve seen in the banking industry, some people don’t get that part of the theory; instead, in their egotistical greed, they’re willing to burn their own house down to keep the fires lit. “Rationality” wouldn’t seem to have much to do with it, except in the sense that some of them were able to find plausible-sounding rationalizations for what they were doing.
Now, I’m not aligning with those upholders of religious orthodoxy who decry “situational ethics” and “moral relativism.” I think any ethics that doesn’t vary somewhat depending on the situation is too limited to be valid, and I think all morality is relative – relative to the true, final good.
I don’t agree, either, with those who claim it’s possible to establish a valid ethical system on a purely materialistic-scientistic basis. Any moral system that posits the “highest good” as some physical thing – prosperity, social order, the pursuit of scientific knowledge – will lead eventually to immoral results. For example, if you suppose that the highest human good is social order, you’ll inevitably end up making utilitarian compromises, seeking “the greatest good for the greatest number,” which means some “lesser number” will be hauled off to prison whenever it’s convenient, without violating your moral rules.
As for “scientific knowledge” as a “highest good,” it sounds nice and noble, but of course in the real world, research gets done when someone – the Pentagon, the pharmaceutical companies, the cigarette makers, etc. etc. – is willing to fund it.
So is there a way to find the true “highest good,” and to do so objectively, without recourse to traditional authority, such as religious dogma? I believe there is, and I’ll go into detail in a posting in the next few days.
Right now, I’d like to make a brief comment about reader comments. I’m delighted anytime anyone wants to leave a comment here. I’ve set it up so you don’t have to register or anything like that. I do say things from time to time that I think are fairly provocative, and I don’t mind anyone disagreeing or criticizing or challenging any of it. However, I won’t allow obscenity, libel or hate speech. So please feel free to critique, but please be grown-up about it.
But what difference does it make? What does it matter if scientists and economists and so on are working from a faulty conception of the overall cause and meaning of the cosmos? As long as they get the lower-level details right, and the electricity still makes my lights work and I can still click a link and look at stuff on the Internet, is there any reason to care about overarching theoretical stuff that may not be provable anyway?
Well, certainly in the case of economics, we’re seeing what happens when a wrong theory holds sway: Vast sums of money vanish in the blink of an eye, people lose their jobs, and political consequences follow.
In physics, there’s apparently some possibility that we might see even more disastrous results in a few months, when the big new CERN supercollider is fired up again, after it blew a fuse on the first try several weeks ago. Some physicists have expressed concerns that when their colleagues start smashing tiny bits of matter together, it might possibly cause the end of the world. Others scoff at that idea, though; I guess we’ll find out who’s right eventually.
However, I think we’re already living every day with almost equally disastrous results from this materialist-atomist worldview, because it leaves us with no “higher good,” no center-of-the-universe, no focus. What we’re left with is an absurdist value-neutral universe in which every action is pretty much as valid as any other. If, as Nietzsche proclaimed, “God is dead,” then by what standard do we judge our own or others’ words and actions?
The answer for Nietzsche and many others: the individual will, or what a lot of people might prefer to call the personal ego. From that perspective, “good” is what’s good for me, “bad” is what’s bad for me.
Amazingly enough, this position is in fact the stance of orthodox economics, though in that discipline the concept is sugar-coated with the notion of “rational agency,” which in essence claims that people (or at least those who make economic decisions such as whether to buy or sell stuff) act out of what some refer to as “enlightened self-interest.” Meaning that people are generally aware that the effect of their decisions on other people is something they need to keep in mind; for example, if you’re stealing food from others, you need to leave them enough so they don’t starve to death, if you want to be able to keep stealing from them.
But as we’ve seen in the banking industry, some people don’t get that part of the theory; instead, in their egotistical greed, they’re willing to burn their own house down to keep the fires lit. “Rationality” wouldn’t seem to have much to do with it, except in the sense that some of them were able to find plausible-sounding rationalizations for what they were doing.
Now, I’m not aligning with those upholders of religious orthodoxy who decry “situational ethics” and “moral relativism.” I think any ethics that doesn’t vary somewhat depending on the situation is too limited to be valid, and I think all morality is relative – relative to the true, final good.
I don’t agree, either, with those who claim it’s possible to establish a valid ethical system on a purely materialistic-scientistic basis. Any moral system that posits the “highest good” as some physical thing – prosperity, social order, the pursuit of scientific knowledge – will lead eventually to immoral results. For example, if you suppose that the highest human good is social order, you’ll inevitably end up making utilitarian compromises, seeking “the greatest good for the greatest number,” which means some “lesser number” will be hauled off to prison whenever it’s convenient, without violating your moral rules.
As for “scientific knowledge” as a “highest good,” it sounds nice and noble, but of course in the real world, research gets done when someone – the Pentagon, the pharmaceutical companies, the cigarette makers, etc. etc. – is willing to fund it.
So is there a way to find the true “highest good,” and to do so objectively, without recourse to traditional authority, such as religious dogma? I believe there is, and I’ll go into detail in a posting in the next few days.
Right now, I’d like to make a brief comment about reader comments. I’m delighted anytime anyone wants to leave a comment here. I’ve set it up so you don’t have to register or anything like that. I do say things from time to time that I think are fairly provocative, and I don’t mind anyone disagreeing or criticizing or challenging any of it. However, I won’t allow obscenity, libel or hate speech. So please feel free to critique, but please be grown-up about it.
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