It's Always Now

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.

Breakthrough

I haven't had a chance to explore the blogosphere today, so there may be a zillion people out there saying the same thing I'm about to say, but I thought it was worth mentioning:

The mainstream media - by which I mean all of the TV network news shows, the cable news stations and the newspapers I've seen - are making the lead on the election story the fact that Barack Obama is the first African American elected president of the United States.

That's certainly true, and it's also certainly noteworthy. But it's also a rather exclusionary and perhaps divisive way of stating what happened yesterday. So here's something else to think about: Barack Obama is the first person elected president of the United States whose ancestry is not solely or predominantly Northern European.

The vast majority of our presidents have been of English descent. Then there was Kennedy, who of course was Irish (as was Reagan), the Roosevelts (Dutch) and Eisenhower (German). But we've never had a president whose forebears hailed from any of the Southern European or Mediterranean countries (the only major-party nominee from that region that I know of was Michael Dukakis, who is second-generation Greek), let alone anywhere outside Europe.

In other words, throughout the history of this country, our image of what a U.S. president looks like has been a white (very white) male. But now, as the U.S. population grows more diverse, we've finally broken away from that stereotype. And given the power of the president as a symbolic figure, not only in public life but also in the psyches of individuals, that's a pretty momentous change - maybe the beginning of a complete reimagining of what this country is all about.

When Oilmen Ruled the World

As the saying goes, "One picture is worth a thousand words." This one might be worth several thousand (click to enlarge; in case it isn't clear, the light blue line is oil, the darker line is the Dow). What it shows is the cumulative daily percent change in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the same calculation for New York Mercantile Exchange crude oil futures, from Jan. 22, 2001, through last Tuesday (the most recent date for which the U.S. Department of Energy could provide crude prices).

In other words, the chart shows what an equal investment in the Dow and in oil would have returned on any given day since then, up to last week. Obviously, except for the first three years, oil would have been a much better investment than the stock market. Even after the steep decline from last summer's all-time high (when oil was up a staggering 65 percent while the Dow was up a piddly 9 percent), it's still up 29 percent overall. As of Monday's close, the Dow is down 5.5 percent over the same period.

The significance of the starting date, of course, is that it was the first trading day after George W. Bush was sworn in as president.

Just Gimme Some Truth

“Pilate said to him, Are you a king? Jesus answered, You say I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.
“Pilate said to him, What is truth?” (Jn. 18: 37-38)

This passage from the Gospel of John (chapter 18, verses 37-38) has been on my mind a lot lately, maybe because of the inexcusably prolonged presidential campaign, maybe because I’ve had to spend a lot of time the past few years dealing with marketing and PR people.

In John’s book, Jesus doesn’t answer Pilate’s question. In fact, Pilate doesn’t actually give him an opportunity to answer; it’s a truly rhetorical question. Here we have an upper-class Roman interrogating a Jewish laborer-cum-holy-man and not wanting to bandy words with him; as a presumably well-educated man of his time, Pilate has heard or read the extensive philosophical discussions of “truth” and isn’t interested in hearing some backwater crackpot’s views on the subject.

And in any case, John already has given us the answer: “Jesus said to him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” (Jn. 14: 6) In brief, Jesus himself is truth, but the overly worldly Pilate can’t see it even when it stands directly in front of him.

A Zen teaching known as the “Flower Sermon” presents, I think, a similar message: One day, the Buddha sits before his disciples and instead of launching into the expected sermon simply holds up a flower. The disciples don’t understand, they scratch their heads and whisper to each other, “What does he mean?” Except for one, Mahākāśyapa, who just smiles.

The lesson in both cases, I think, is this: Truth is what really IS. Or put another way, every real thing is true, is a truth.

Where untruth enters is in any attempt to describe or explain what is. Whenever we venture beyond the actual object and start trying to give an account of its nature or causes or relationships or meanings, we run the risk of getting it wrong, of falling short, of misrepresenting reality. It isn’t necessary to attribute this to deliberate deception or plain stupidity, either; as Plato and his followers emphasized, every representation of a reality is, so to speak, less real than the thing it represents.

Such a representation, account, explanation or description was referred to by Platonists as a “logos.” Many modern Christians are aware of that word as meaning simply “word,” because of the standard translation of the opening verse of the same Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

But that translation conveys nothing of the many implications the word “logos” would have held for John and his readers. By the time his book was written (late first or early second century), “logos” had been in use as a technical philosophical term throughout the Greek-speaking world (which included most of what we now call the Middle East) for a full four centuries at least. In Platonism, it especially referred to the expression in physical reality of an inexpressible “higher” reality: Just as a spoken sentence is an incomplete expression of a thought, a person or a dog or a tree is an expression of (so to speak) God’s idea of a person or a dog or a tree.

Another way of translating logos might be “narrative,” in the sense in which that term is used by social science types nowadays: a description of life and the world that we believe explains “the way things are,” that gives us a sense of how to fit into this complex and often confusing universe, and that helps us justify our choices and goals.

For example, the much-discussed “clash of civilizations” between the Christian (or post-Christian) West and the Muslim East might better be described as a “clash of narratives.” Similarly, the “culture wars” within American society could also be said to be a conflict between or among narratives. In both cases, I think this way of looking at it helps explain the frustration and exasperation felt by people who can’t understand why their opponents can’t see the point, why they “just don’t get it”: because both sides are looking at their narratives, not reality.

It was the ancient Greeks, of course, who invented formal logic, and I think they were impelled to do so by their own democratic traditions: They saw the risk of their institutions being hijacked by demagogues and sophists who could sway public opinion with untrue but emotionally stirring speeches about the issues. They realized that good decisions depend on good information, and saw the need for a reliable way to separate true statements about reality from untrue ones.

That analytical apparatus still exists, naturally, but judging from the blatant falsehoods so widely stated in our time – by the media, the marketers, the lobbyists, the lawyers and of course the politicians – our culture leaders obviously are confident that few of us have the time, the knowledge or the will to use it – or to “bear witness to the truth.”

Playing with Fire

I’ve been a bit surprised by the amount of agonizing in the financial media (and among politicians) over the question of what caused the recent “financial meltdown,” as it’s being called. The reason I’m surprised is because the answer is very simple and obvious.

Let me run through the background briefly before stating the obvious:

We’ve been hearing that the current “crisis” is “the worst since the Great Depression.” I’m not so sure about that, but the Great Depression is a handy place to start. During that prolonged and severe economic downturn, hundreds of banks across the United States failed. In response, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt instituted numerous regulatory safeguards intended to prevent a repetition. Among those New Deal safeguards (most of them contained in what became known as the Glass-Steagall Act):

* Commercial banking – involving the taking of deposits and making of loans – and investment banking – involving the underwriting of investment securities – were separated.

* Commercial banks also were barred from acting as stockbrokers or insurers.

* Commercial banks were required to charter separate holding companies in every state where they operated, effectively preventing any bank from doing business nationwide.

* The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was created to guarantee that customers would not lose their deposits in the event that a bank did fail.

Similar safeguards also were set up to protect the savings and loan industry, which was confined to making residential loans, in contrast to commercial banks, which could also write mortgages on commercial property.

These safeguards worked pretty well for many years from the perspective of protecting depositors and keeping the banking system out of trouble. One side-effect, however, was that bank stocks came to be regarded as dull, unglamorous, slow-growth investments, something for risk-averse old fogies to hold.

As time passed and new generations of executives poured out of the business colleges and into the banking industry, the trauma of the 1930s faded, and some of those freshly minted MBAs started looking for ways to jazz up the sector and make bank stocks a more attractive option for aggressive investors.

The first big change came mainly during the 1980s, when the industry mounted a full-scale assault on interstate banking restrictions. As those restrictions were eased, big regional and “super-regional” banks emerged through mergers. One of the most significant of those was the merger of C&S-Sovran (itself formed by the merger of Georgia-based Citizens & Southern with Virginia-based Sovran) with NCNB (formerly North Carolina National Bank) to form Nationsbank. Not quite 20 years (and numerous further mergers) later, Nationsbank is now Bank of America.

Through the 1990s, the industry continued to chip away at the New Deal safeguards. In rapid succession, banks were allowed to open securities brokerages and to sell insurance. (And just as rapidly, problems arose; the aforementioned Bank of America, for example, settled a class-action lawsuit that had accused its brokerage salespeople of misleading customers into thinking their investment accounts were protected by the FDIC.) By 1999, industry lobbyists had been so successful in persuading lawmakers to remove the firewalls and other protective measures that the final repeal of Glass-Steagall that year was largely a formality.

That this removal of safeguards was inherently very risky seems not to have crossed anyone’s mind, despite the implosion of the savings and loan industry only a few years before. That “crisis” came about when the industry was allowed to start making loans on commercial real estate. Thrift executives with no experience in commercial property started throwing money around like inebriated conventioneers in Las Vegas, rushing to offer financing for a zillion speculative strip malls. When the economy went into recession in mid-1990 and those strip malls couldn’t find tenants, the S&Ls saw their loan losses skyrocket, and eventually the federal government had to step in.

Which of course is exactly what’s happening now, and for much the same reason: because industry executives with newfound freedom from regulatory safeguards and dollar signs in their eyes and a concomitant belief in perpetual economic expansion rushed headlong into investments they didn’t understand very well. What’s more, abetted by the real estate industry, they dragged a lot of financially unsophisticated customers along with them, putting people into far more house than they could afford by creating new kinds of highly “leveraged” mortgages that were guaranteed to go sour at the first hint of economic trouble.

So to the question that’s vexing so many – “Why is the banking system teetering on the verge of collapse?” – here’s one way of answering:

Suppose your city has burned to the ground, and you learn that the cause was some kids playing with matches. You quite reasonably forbid any kids to play with matches ever again, and you rebuild your city. And after a while, after you’ve gotten used to living in your rebuilt city, some more kids come to you and say, “Can we play with matches now?” What do you expect to happen if you say yes?