I’ve been seeing a lot of news stories lately in which people (or politicians, if they qualify) are claiming that one thing or another is part of “God’s plan.” For example, the oilwell blowout that’s destroying the Gulf of Mexico is part of “God’s plan,” according to some. And various candidates for elected office are claiming that they’re running because it’s part of “God’s plan” for them personally.
Oddly enough, these kinds of statements are being made by self-professed Christians. I had thought Christianity was a monotheistic religion, but apparently I was wrong: According to probably the most rigorous monotheist ever, Plotinus, God doesn’t plan, and saying that He/She/It does plan is saying that God is multiple.
Instead, Plotinus says, God causes reality to exist by a timeless, eternally instantaneous, simultaneous, spontaneous sort of explosion of creative goodwill.
Frankly, the idea of God planning things is pretty silly. First, you have to imagine that God doesn’t know precisely what’s going to happen; instead, the all-knowing deity must form an intention to make something happen, then decide what is going to happen, and only then actually make it happen.
It’s only from the point of view of time- and space-limited beings (e.g., humans) that one thing appears to follow another, and thus that one thing appears to cause another. Through a kind of back-fitting, we thus imagine that an omniscient God knew ahead of time that a given phenomenon was going to be the cause of a certain effect; in other words, that God “planned” it that way.
This way of thinking posits that God has “foreknowledge” of events and thus gives rise to all the arguments about predestination and free will. But it’s actually an act of anthropomorphism: We’re imagining a God who “sees” things from a human-like perspective and needs to control, manipulate and micromanage like a power-drunk CEO.
In fact, there can be no “fore” knowledge if there’s no before or after; as I like to say, “It’s always now.”
One implication of this difference of perspective that I haven’t heard discussed much: From our time- and space-bound point of view, there’s a lot that’s “not here” or “not yet,” and this is precisely what enables humans to practice dishonesty on each other, if they’re so inclined.
For example, I could offer to sell you some shares in a gold mine, promising that there is in fact a mine where I say it is and that it will in fact produce gold when I start digging there. Or I could tell you that nasty little brown-skinned people are tunneling into your garden and planning to steal all your goodies and ravish your wife and children, and you need me to stop them.
From your time- and space-restricted perspective, you might not be able to verify what I’m saying, so you might just take my word for it based on your desires or predispositions. But from the point of view of what Meister Eckhart called the “eternal now,” everything is present. So no one can deceive God.
Plotinus and Plato (and Eckhart and lots of other people) taught that the “highest part,” so to speak, of the human being exists in that “eternal now,” but our fragmented, matter-focused way of life keeps us so distracted that we’re disconnected from it — unaware, in fact, that any such part of ourselves exists.
The whole point of real philosophy (and true religion, which is the same thing) is to transform ourselves so as to (re-)connect with that highest, timeless part, which is in fact the true self and the central unity of the self and the one part of the self capable of knowing God. So to put it bluntly, anyone who claims to know “God’s plan” doesn’t know God.
Showing posts with label oil spill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oil spill. Show all posts
Thursday, July 15, 2010
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.
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