Dear Mr. Lynden LaRouche Street Team Spokesman with whom I conversed outside of the post office this afternoon:
As I said, the problem with LaRouche is not his policies. Not that I think they’re good policies: I think they are such that reasonable people might advocate for them, though they are not particularly revolutionary or well thought-through. The problem is the man. The problem is that he says that he alone can predict the future of the economy, that his policies alone can save us, and that everyone else is not only wrong but conspiring. That, my friend, is the voice, not of reason and reform, but of a cult leader.
You say: But he predicted the current economic downturn.
I say: Hardly. LaRouche predicted that a second Great Depression would be upon us two years ago. Whatever pace to which our economy has recessed, this is not so bad as the Great Depression. The unemployment rate is currently at 5%. In the 1920s it was at 25%. And of course, lots of economists predicted the current economic downturn, i.e. as the correction resulting from the bursting of the housing bubble.
Of course, even those economists who did predict it were unsure—or disagreed among themselves—about the degree of the downturn. And why? Because these things are extremely difficult to predict, not because it takes special wisdom to predict them, but because there are so many variables, so the whole system behaves chaotically. And this is the real point. Imagine if one meteorologist said that he alone could predict the weather, or could predict it far better than anyone else. Let’s even say he is a generally reliable predictor. The problem is that there is no special metric for predicting the weather; it’s a chaotic system on anybody’s watch. Nothing short of psychic foresight could give one skilled meteorologist a major edge over another.
And that is essentially what LaRouche is claiming. Now, I’m no enemy of mystical authority. But it’s not a small claim. You mentioned Socrates as an example of a man with a unique claim to knowledge and authority. (In fact, he disavowed all knowledge, but that’s no matter.) But Socrates claimed to be God’s gift to Athens, to have a ‘divine sign’ that inspired him. Even if you think he was an intelligent gentleman, it hardly follows that he was the prophet of God that he claimed to be.
Or, think of Jesus Christ. C.S. Lewis is exactly right to say that we can’t dismiss the audacity of the claims he made about himself. Either he was a liar, a lunatic, or a divine representative. Whether you agree with his moral teachings or not is such a small matter.
So, why don’t I trust LaRouche? Because I don’t think he’s divine. And, given the statements he makes about his own powers of prediction, that’s the only alternative to his being a liar or a lunatic. I’d rather not call him a liar. So I’ll just conclude that he’s crazy.
I know, sir, that I came across today as a bit abrasive. It’s really not like me. But in this case, I’m soundly convinced that I’m right and that he’s dangerous. So get out while you can.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Theoretical Knowledge vs. Acquaintance Knowledge
Please forgive my egregiously lengthy silence. As you may know, I began a doctoral program in philosophy this past August, after 2 years out of school. My blog was a way to continue intellectual pursuits while in academic limbo, and now that I’ve emerged from that limbo I have another release valve for my pent-up thoughts, not to mention a whole lot of work.
I want to continue blogging, though. There are too many ideas I have that don’t ever get expressed in my papers, and too few readers of my papers. So, for whatever narcissistic reasons people keep blogs, I intend to resume regular posting.
My brother Will suggested that I use my blog for popular “riffing” on otherwise esoteric, technical philosophical topics. That sounds about right. One thing I should note, though: earlier, my blog posts were largely in response to social, political and religious issues that concerned my community. My focus, then, is likely to change somewhat, since I’m in a different intellectual community now with somewhat different concerns. So much for meta-blogging, then. On to the ideas.
Awhile back, my wife pointed out to me her observation that when she used the air conditioning in her car, her gas mileage went down. I scoffed. “How is that possible?” I asked. “The air conditioning is an electrical system, but the gas mileage derives from a mechanical system. It isn’t the drive shaft that’s powering the A/C. You must have been mistaken.”
I mentioned it to a friend who knew a bit more about machines. He told me that my wife was absolutely right. Yes, the A/C is an electrical system powered by the alternator. But the alternator generates current by the motion of the drive shaft. Put a load on the drive shaft—even an electromagnetic one—and it will take more energy to turn it: i.e., more gas per mile. Voila.
The argument is made by psycho/physical dualists that it is impossible to reduce conscious mental states to physical brain states, because physical things just don’t have conscious mental states. How could they, after all? We have no theory that could explain how physical things could have mental properties. Hence, mental properties are properties of nonphysical things; the mind is nonphysical.
Richard Taylor argued to the contrary: physical things can and do have mental properties. This we know because human beings are, quite clearly, physical things. Sure, we don’t have a theory for why some physical things have mental properties, but it’s plain that some do.
Jesus put mud on a blind man’s eyes and his sight was restored. The religious leaders were vexed. They knew that Jesus was not a godly man; he didn’t obey Sabbath regulations. So they put it to the ex-blind man: there’s something fishy about your story, since this Jesus is a sinner. The man replied: "Whether he is a sinner or not, I don't know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!"
I intend these three examples to illustrate the distinction between theoretical knowledge and acquaintance-knowledge. In each case, an empirically manifest fact is challenged because the currently held theory can’t account for it.
This is the reason I’m inclined not to believe in ghosts. What, after all, is a ghost? A thing that can interact with matter, clearly; a thing that can reflect light, typically; a thing that is spatially located, and so on. But that’s silly. What we really have in mind is a diaphanous, vaporous material thing; “spirits,” whatever those are, can’t make stairs creak. That is all to say: ghosts don’t coherently fit into my best theory of the material world. (And this is not to mention theological problems I might have.) And yet…and yet…people very frequently claim to see ghosts. What if I’m just stubbornly clinging to an incorrect or incomplete theory?
It has frequently been observed throughout the modern period that miracles represent “a violation of the laws of nature.” This is problematic, of course, if the laws of nature are never violated—if the physical forces acting on a particle uniquely and exhaustively determine its behavior. Thus it is not particularly controversial, in academic circles, to chuckle at reports of the miraculous as so much superstitious wish-fulfillment. But I say, not so fast. I know those (not ordinarily known to lie or to be excessively gullible nor with any particular motivation to lie or to be excessively gullible) who attest to witnessing dramatic, miraculous healings. Which is more rational: to say (with me, with the dualists, with the Sanhedrin) that the observer must have been mistaken—nothing of the kind can happen, because it would contradict our best theory; or to say (with my wife, with Professor Taylor, with the ex-blind man) that we know what we know, by acquaintance, whether or not we’ve got a theory for it?
I think it is for this reason that, at the end of the day, I go home with the mystics, rather than with the academicians. Our best theories are nothing to be trifled with. But it would be very foolish to insist that the wisest among us, who have direct access to the truth, whether or not they can explain it, don’t really know what they know, because we can’t currently account for it theoretically.
I want to continue blogging, though. There are too many ideas I have that don’t ever get expressed in my papers, and too few readers of my papers. So, for whatever narcissistic reasons people keep blogs, I intend to resume regular posting.
My brother Will suggested that I use my blog for popular “riffing” on otherwise esoteric, technical philosophical topics. That sounds about right. One thing I should note, though: earlier, my blog posts were largely in response to social, political and religious issues that concerned my community. My focus, then, is likely to change somewhat, since I’m in a different intellectual community now with somewhat different concerns. So much for meta-blogging, then. On to the ideas.
Awhile back, my wife pointed out to me her observation that when she used the air conditioning in her car, her gas mileage went down. I scoffed. “How is that possible?” I asked. “The air conditioning is an electrical system, but the gas mileage derives from a mechanical system. It isn’t the drive shaft that’s powering the A/C. You must have been mistaken.”
I mentioned it to a friend who knew a bit more about machines. He told me that my wife was absolutely right. Yes, the A/C is an electrical system powered by the alternator. But the alternator generates current by the motion of the drive shaft. Put a load on the drive shaft—even an electromagnetic one—and it will take more energy to turn it: i.e., more gas per mile. Voila.
The argument is made by psycho/physical dualists that it is impossible to reduce conscious mental states to physical brain states, because physical things just don’t have conscious mental states. How could they, after all? We have no theory that could explain how physical things could have mental properties. Hence, mental properties are properties of nonphysical things; the mind is nonphysical.
Richard Taylor argued to the contrary: physical things can and do have mental properties. This we know because human beings are, quite clearly, physical things. Sure, we don’t have a theory for why some physical things have mental properties, but it’s plain that some do.
Jesus put mud on a blind man’s eyes and his sight was restored. The religious leaders were vexed. They knew that Jesus was not a godly man; he didn’t obey Sabbath regulations. So they put it to the ex-blind man: there’s something fishy about your story, since this Jesus is a sinner. The man replied: "Whether he is a sinner or not, I don't know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!"
I intend these three examples to illustrate the distinction between theoretical knowledge and acquaintance-knowledge. In each case, an empirically manifest fact is challenged because the currently held theory can’t account for it.
This is the reason I’m inclined not to believe in ghosts. What, after all, is a ghost? A thing that can interact with matter, clearly; a thing that can reflect light, typically; a thing that is spatially located, and so on. But that’s silly. What we really have in mind is a diaphanous, vaporous material thing; “spirits,” whatever those are, can’t make stairs creak. That is all to say: ghosts don’t coherently fit into my best theory of the material world. (And this is not to mention theological problems I might have.) And yet…and yet…people very frequently claim to see ghosts. What if I’m just stubbornly clinging to an incorrect or incomplete theory?
It has frequently been observed throughout the modern period that miracles represent “a violation of the laws of nature.” This is problematic, of course, if the laws of nature are never violated—if the physical forces acting on a particle uniquely and exhaustively determine its behavior. Thus it is not particularly controversial, in academic circles, to chuckle at reports of the miraculous as so much superstitious wish-fulfillment. But I say, not so fast. I know those (not ordinarily known to lie or to be excessively gullible nor with any particular motivation to lie or to be excessively gullible) who attest to witnessing dramatic, miraculous healings. Which is more rational: to say (with me, with the dualists, with the Sanhedrin) that the observer must have been mistaken—nothing of the kind can happen, because it would contradict our best theory; or to say (with my wife, with Professor Taylor, with the ex-blind man) that we know what we know, by acquaintance, whether or not we’ve got a theory for it?
I think it is for this reason that, at the end of the day, I go home with the mystics, rather than with the academicians. Our best theories are nothing to be trifled with. But it would be very foolish to insist that the wisest among us, who have direct access to the truth, whether or not they can explain it, don’t really know what they know, because we can’t currently account for it theoretically.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Head-Scratching about Post-Modernism
Post-modernism, they say, is upon us: science, the modernism’s locus of authority, has been dethroned, by virtue of the fact that we humans have finally learned the limits of our rationality. The universe is not the machine we thought it was—it is fundamentally mysterious. The deeper we plumb its depths, the less we really understand—especially when we look at the smallest building blocks of creation, and when we look at the largest objects in the cosmos. We have occasion to notice just how much of the human experience we have neglected, by exalting science above all other sources of belief. Religion may be entering a renaissance of sorts.
I think there is something to this talk. But it’s terribly simplistic. The truth is that, while the scientism of the Positivists—the insistence, e.g., that only scientifically verifiable statements count as meaningful—has waned in the last fifty years, particular branches of science have hit their stride, such as linguistics, cognitive science, and molecular biology. What has happened in the last fifty years is not the collapse of the scientific enterprise. I think what we’ve realized is that the Positivists were never really justified in what they said. There has been a correction, a new realism about what science is capable of. But insofar as science has maintained that degree of modesty, it remains as powerful as ever.
One particular trend seems to go against the popular picture of the rise of post-modernism. The so-called “continental” philosophers (who are usually associated with post-Modernism) tend to remain skeptical about meaning and reference and translation. This is one of their primary objections to modernity, that modernity assumed an ease in communication that simply does not square with reality. On the contrary, we speak and listen in the context of our own enculturation. Understanding each other is a far more complex business than moderns thought, if it is possible at all.
But here’s the odd thing: this is, in fact, the conclusion that W. V. O. Quine, the most scientifically-obsessed analytic philosopher of all time, reached. His reasoning goes like this: if all we have to go on in translating a foreign language is the observable utterances of the native speaker, then there are infinitely many consistent translation manuals we could construct. When we conclude otherwise, we are importing our own concepts into the translation process, assuming that the speaker is going to say the same sorts of things that we are likely to say, in the same sorts of situations. But we can’t assume that.
That is, Quine’s indeterminacy thesis is strikingly similar to what the so-called post-modern philosophers say about language—and Quine was as modern as they get! Now, he understood himself as correcting the Positivists, who were overly optimistic about communication. But he wasn’t showing their assumptions to be flawed; he was showing that they weren’t taking their assumptions to their logical conclusions. He took scientism to the next level, and arrived at something very post-modern sounding.
In fact, it took the dethronement of Positivism, and a turn back toward common-language philosophy, to resurrect accounts of meaning and reference that didn’t fall prey to Quine’s argument. We can communicate, after all: and the reason we can is that we use more than the scientific method to interpret another person’s expressions. We use intuitions and tacit knowledge and the like.
In other words, it is scientism that threatens the viability of communication. When we allow other modes of belief-formation to enter the picture, we discover that we do communicate relatively well a lot of the time. And this is not what we would expect, on the common understanding of the post-modern critique. In fact, it looks, on my picture, that the post-modern critique of language is a hyper-modernism that we need to get beyond.
The story of the rise of science, and the rise of the cultural influence of science, is a long and complicated one, and the so-called post-Modern turn is just another part of that story. We’re not entering a new phase of history, any more radically than we always are. (What a particularly modern thing to do, to carve up history according to periods and movements and phases!) It’s just not that easy. Instead, we’re continuing to explore nature, to discover what’s real and what’s superstitious, what are reliable sources of knowledge and what aren’t, and so forth.
Instead of talking about phases of history, and of ideological movements that we accept or reject, why don’t we just stick to talking about the particular ideas that we think are good or bad, and explore reasons for thinking so? This is what intellectuals have been doing for two and a half millennia, and will continue to do till as long as curiosity continues to compel us to try to understand ourselves and our world.
I think there is something to this talk. But it’s terribly simplistic. The truth is that, while the scientism of the Positivists—the insistence, e.g., that only scientifically verifiable statements count as meaningful—has waned in the last fifty years, particular branches of science have hit their stride, such as linguistics, cognitive science, and molecular biology. What has happened in the last fifty years is not the collapse of the scientific enterprise. I think what we’ve realized is that the Positivists were never really justified in what they said. There has been a correction, a new realism about what science is capable of. But insofar as science has maintained that degree of modesty, it remains as powerful as ever.
One particular trend seems to go against the popular picture of the rise of post-modernism. The so-called “continental” philosophers (who are usually associated with post-Modernism) tend to remain skeptical about meaning and reference and translation. This is one of their primary objections to modernity, that modernity assumed an ease in communication that simply does not square with reality. On the contrary, we speak and listen in the context of our own enculturation. Understanding each other is a far more complex business than moderns thought, if it is possible at all.
But here’s the odd thing: this is, in fact, the conclusion that W. V. O. Quine, the most scientifically-obsessed analytic philosopher of all time, reached. His reasoning goes like this: if all we have to go on in translating a foreign language is the observable utterances of the native speaker, then there are infinitely many consistent translation manuals we could construct. When we conclude otherwise, we are importing our own concepts into the translation process, assuming that the speaker is going to say the same sorts of things that we are likely to say, in the same sorts of situations. But we can’t assume that.
That is, Quine’s indeterminacy thesis is strikingly similar to what the so-called post-modern philosophers say about language—and Quine was as modern as they get! Now, he understood himself as correcting the Positivists, who were overly optimistic about communication. But he wasn’t showing their assumptions to be flawed; he was showing that they weren’t taking their assumptions to their logical conclusions. He took scientism to the next level, and arrived at something very post-modern sounding.
In fact, it took the dethronement of Positivism, and a turn back toward common-language philosophy, to resurrect accounts of meaning and reference that didn’t fall prey to Quine’s argument. We can communicate, after all: and the reason we can is that we use more than the scientific method to interpret another person’s expressions. We use intuitions and tacit knowledge and the like.
In other words, it is scientism that threatens the viability of communication. When we allow other modes of belief-formation to enter the picture, we discover that we do communicate relatively well a lot of the time. And this is not what we would expect, on the common understanding of the post-modern critique. In fact, it looks, on my picture, that the post-modern critique of language is a hyper-modernism that we need to get beyond.
The story of the rise of science, and the rise of the cultural influence of science, is a long and complicated one, and the so-called post-Modern turn is just another part of that story. We’re not entering a new phase of history, any more radically than we always are. (What a particularly modern thing to do, to carve up history according to periods and movements and phases!) It’s just not that easy. Instead, we’re continuing to explore nature, to discover what’s real and what’s superstitious, what are reliable sources of knowledge and what aren’t, and so forth.
Instead of talking about phases of history, and of ideological movements that we accept or reject, why don’t we just stick to talking about the particular ideas that we think are good or bad, and explore reasons for thinking so? This is what intellectuals have been doing for two and a half millennia, and will continue to do till as long as curiosity continues to compel us to try to understand ourselves and our world.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
On Biblical Inerrancy, Part I
My purpose here is not to show that Biblical inerrancy is false, but to show its limits—that ultimately, I don’t think it provides, for those who operate within it, what they are looking for. Biblical inerrancy means something different to many people—anything from historical literalism (including a seven-calendar-day creation), to adamant application of the Sermon on the Mount, to the Bible as the ultimate authority for faith and life. The view that I want to explore could be called the ‘fell from heaven’ (henceforth FFH) view—that the Bible contains precisely those words and phrases that God wished. The common tag phrase for this view is ‘inerrant in the original,’ to acknowledge the fact that textual discrepancies exist today; but to insist, at the same time, that the original writers were inspired, in the fullest sense. Soften this view a bit, and my arguments still apply, though to a lesser degree, perhaps.
1. The Argument from Context.
Biblical inerrantists take Scripture ‘at its word’—if the plain sense of the text says it, then it is true. But this is far easier said than done, because of the difference between the context of today’s readers and the historical context of the writers—and this for two reasons.
First, there is the problem of language drift. Translation is a tricky business in any context, even today; there is no guaranteeing that two words, of roughly equivalent meaning in two different languages, in fact pick out the same concept to the two cultures. Often, they do; but when they do not, it can be very difficult to tell, except by examination of multiple usages of the terms in each language. When we are talking about translating ancient texts, the process becomes more difficult. For one thing, the further removed we are from the historical context in which the text was written, the less we can be sure that we have access to the relavent concepts. (When Paul writes of ‘law,’ or ‘justification,’ or ‘redemption,’ for example, it is not obvious that he means to invoke concepts that we are familiar with today, or at least, concepts whose nuances we are familiar with today.) For another, because ancient texts are relatively scarce, it is more challenging to verify, by way of examining multiple usages, that we have a handle on what a particular term means. The point is this: given that the Bible contains God’s very prose, that prose is still written in a particular language at a particular time, and language is slippery. Understanding Scripture’s meaning will rarely be as straightforward as translating it into roughly equivalent English words. At best, it will require a lot of work, and may sometimes be impossible.
Second, there is the problem of cultural context. Part of the meaning of an instruction is the context in which it is given—which, presumably, is not stated in the instruction. Imagine that a choir director jots a note to an assistant, to this effect: “The tenors need to sing out. And tell the sopranos to stop talking in class.” Now, imagine that this note were found, a thousand years hence, as one of very few sources of information about choral music in the 21st century. An unsophisticated reader might conclude that performance practice in our era included disproportiately loud tenor sections, and that sopranos were treated in a demeaning way, forbidden to speak in rehearsals. Of course, we know the context: presumably the tenors were singing in a timid manner and the sopranos were chatting excessively. The point is that one can’t discern these contextual matters from the texts themselves. Unless the author is intentionally gearing the writing toward those unfamiliar with a culture (which may be the case in some of the historical Biblical books), then much will be left out—most frequently, the basics, the most fundamental aspects of the culture, which no one even thinks about, let alone questions.
So, whether or not the text was dictated by God originally, it was created in a particular context, rendering the instructions given a bit idiosynchratic. This doesn’t mean that we cannot apply them to our time; it just means that doing so will be a tricky business, and will require looking outside of the text itself for contextual information. The most obvious application of this principle concerns the instructions in Ephesians 5 for wives and husbands. Perhaps Paul is, in fact, describing God’s eternal model for marriage, in the abstract. But that isn’t immediately obvious; the instructions could be idiosyncratic, responding to a particular set of circumstances, and nevertheless be ‘inerrant’ or ‘inspired.’ ‘Wives, submit to your husbands’ could read along the lines of ‘Johnny, stop hitting your sister!’ It makes all the difference in the world whether wives in Ephesus were typically demur or typically defiant, and the text can’t tell us that.
1. The Argument from Context.
Biblical inerrantists take Scripture ‘at its word’—if the plain sense of the text says it, then it is true. But this is far easier said than done, because of the difference between the context of today’s readers and the historical context of the writers—and this for two reasons.
First, there is the problem of language drift. Translation is a tricky business in any context, even today; there is no guaranteeing that two words, of roughly equivalent meaning in two different languages, in fact pick out the same concept to the two cultures. Often, they do; but when they do not, it can be very difficult to tell, except by examination of multiple usages of the terms in each language. When we are talking about translating ancient texts, the process becomes more difficult. For one thing, the further removed we are from the historical context in which the text was written, the less we can be sure that we have access to the relavent concepts. (When Paul writes of ‘law,’ or ‘justification,’ or ‘redemption,’ for example, it is not obvious that he means to invoke concepts that we are familiar with today, or at least, concepts whose nuances we are familiar with today.) For another, because ancient texts are relatively scarce, it is more challenging to verify, by way of examining multiple usages, that we have a handle on what a particular term means. The point is this: given that the Bible contains God’s very prose, that prose is still written in a particular language at a particular time, and language is slippery. Understanding Scripture’s meaning will rarely be as straightforward as translating it into roughly equivalent English words. At best, it will require a lot of work, and may sometimes be impossible.
Second, there is the problem of cultural context. Part of the meaning of an instruction is the context in which it is given—which, presumably, is not stated in the instruction. Imagine that a choir director jots a note to an assistant, to this effect: “The tenors need to sing out. And tell the sopranos to stop talking in class.” Now, imagine that this note were found, a thousand years hence, as one of very few sources of information about choral music in the 21st century. An unsophisticated reader might conclude that performance practice in our era included disproportiately loud tenor sections, and that sopranos were treated in a demeaning way, forbidden to speak in rehearsals. Of course, we know the context: presumably the tenors were singing in a timid manner and the sopranos were chatting excessively. The point is that one can’t discern these contextual matters from the texts themselves. Unless the author is intentionally gearing the writing toward those unfamiliar with a culture (which may be the case in some of the historical Biblical books), then much will be left out—most frequently, the basics, the most fundamental aspects of the culture, which no one even thinks about, let alone questions.
So, whether or not the text was dictated by God originally, it was created in a particular context, rendering the instructions given a bit idiosynchratic. This doesn’t mean that we cannot apply them to our time; it just means that doing so will be a tricky business, and will require looking outside of the text itself for contextual information. The most obvious application of this principle concerns the instructions in Ephesians 5 for wives and husbands. Perhaps Paul is, in fact, describing God’s eternal model for marriage, in the abstract. But that isn’t immediately obvious; the instructions could be idiosyncratic, responding to a particular set of circumstances, and nevertheless be ‘inerrant’ or ‘inspired.’ ‘Wives, submit to your husbands’ could read along the lines of ‘Johnny, stop hitting your sister!’ It makes all the difference in the world whether wives in Ephesus were typically demur or typically defiant, and the text can’t tell us that.
On Biblical Inerrancy, Part II
2. The Argument from Testimony.
Let us suppose that FFH is true, that the Bible contains a set of dictated revelations from God, and was henceforth passed down from generation to generation by the Church. If this is so, then the Church is the caretaker of a truly wisdom of a unique sort—wisdom that cannot be ascertained merely by common sense or reason, but a wisdom of the sort that can only be passed from person to person, in the manner of a secret. If the Church has this secret wisdom, the culture would do well to listen to it, to put itself under the tuteledge of the Church, to listen to the very words of God. But the culture doesn’t do this; by and large, the Church is seen as inhabiting a private realm (however important), largely irrelevant to public life, rather than being seen as holding the secret wisdom desperately needed by every person.
I think it would be easy for an inerrantist to point to this state of affairs as a bit of a scandal. God has given us God’s very words. And yet, as a culture, we don’t listen to those whom God has appointed as the caretakers of those words. Given that the Bible is inerrant, all who dismiss it are culpable before God as defying God’s revelation. Right?
Certainly not. The reason has to do with the nature of testimony and the nature of a pluralism. A thousand years ago, every child born in Europe was taught that the Bible consisted of God’s special message to the world, and that the Church existed to keep that message from being lost. But now, pick a dozen children born in Europe, and they will have been told a dozen different things about the Bible, and about where to find God’s special message to the world. The Bible may not have changed; the Church may not have changed; but the epistemic (read: pertaining to acquiring knowledge) environment has changed, and that dramatically. Children still rely on the testimony of their parents and communities to learn who to trust. But they are not all told the same thing.
The point is that, even if the Bible is inerrant, we still have to come to know that it is before we can trust it, because just as many would-be authority figures are telling us not to trust it as are telling us to trust it. And it’s hard to know how exactly one can come to know that the Bible is inerrant, aside from being told that it is from someone who knows that it is. But it’s equally hard to know if a person who claims to know that the Bible is inerrant can be trusted to know this information. And so on.
In other words, the Bible’s being inerrant doesn’t do any work in getting the world to believe that it is; in fact, it shouldn’t. If it did—if someone came to believe in the Bible on the basis that it is inerrant—that would be like trusting that someone tells the truth because she told us that she tells the truth, even though lots of people say otherwise. There are more or less healthy and virtuous ways of coming to believe things, ways that often involve a good deal of skepticism. It would be silly if people were reproached for employing a healthy and virtuous belief-forming process about the Bible of all things.
In sum: even supposing the Bible is inerrant, God’s very syllables, we still have the rather major problems a) of understanding it, given that it originated in a different language and culture from ours, and b) of ever finding out that it is inerrant, given the plurality of testimonies about it in our culture. Biblical inerrancy doesn’t provide us with a clear road map for our culture. At best, it provides us with a remarkable, miraculous text, that, if we can somehow learn to trust it, may give us hazy glimpses into the very mind of God.
Let us suppose that FFH is true, that the Bible contains a set of dictated revelations from God, and was henceforth passed down from generation to generation by the Church. If this is so, then the Church is the caretaker of a truly wisdom of a unique sort—wisdom that cannot be ascertained merely by common sense or reason, but a wisdom of the sort that can only be passed from person to person, in the manner of a secret. If the Church has this secret wisdom, the culture would do well to listen to it, to put itself under the tuteledge of the Church, to listen to the very words of God. But the culture doesn’t do this; by and large, the Church is seen as inhabiting a private realm (however important), largely irrelevant to public life, rather than being seen as holding the secret wisdom desperately needed by every person.
I think it would be easy for an inerrantist to point to this state of affairs as a bit of a scandal. God has given us God’s very words. And yet, as a culture, we don’t listen to those whom God has appointed as the caretakers of those words. Given that the Bible is inerrant, all who dismiss it are culpable before God as defying God’s revelation. Right?
Certainly not. The reason has to do with the nature of testimony and the nature of a pluralism. A thousand years ago, every child born in Europe was taught that the Bible consisted of God’s special message to the world, and that the Church existed to keep that message from being lost. But now, pick a dozen children born in Europe, and they will have been told a dozen different things about the Bible, and about where to find God’s special message to the world. The Bible may not have changed; the Church may not have changed; but the epistemic (read: pertaining to acquiring knowledge) environment has changed, and that dramatically. Children still rely on the testimony of their parents and communities to learn who to trust. But they are not all told the same thing.
The point is that, even if the Bible is inerrant, we still have to come to know that it is before we can trust it, because just as many would-be authority figures are telling us not to trust it as are telling us to trust it. And it’s hard to know how exactly one can come to know that the Bible is inerrant, aside from being told that it is from someone who knows that it is. But it’s equally hard to know if a person who claims to know that the Bible is inerrant can be trusted to know this information. And so on.
In other words, the Bible’s being inerrant doesn’t do any work in getting the world to believe that it is; in fact, it shouldn’t. If it did—if someone came to believe in the Bible on the basis that it is inerrant—that would be like trusting that someone tells the truth because she told us that she tells the truth, even though lots of people say otherwise. There are more or less healthy and virtuous ways of coming to believe things, ways that often involve a good deal of skepticism. It would be silly if people were reproached for employing a healthy and virtuous belief-forming process about the Bible of all things.
In sum: even supposing the Bible is inerrant, God’s very syllables, we still have the rather major problems a) of understanding it, given that it originated in a different language and culture from ours, and b) of ever finding out that it is inerrant, given the plurality of testimonies about it in our culture. Biblical inerrancy doesn’t provide us with a clear road map for our culture. At best, it provides us with a remarkable, miraculous text, that, if we can somehow learn to trust it, may give us hazy glimpses into the very mind of God.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Ad Hoc Foreign Policy
I recently read The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama. I opened it skeptically, but closed it enthusiastically. His pragmatic, nuanced approach to policymaking really resonates with me. I’ve been meaning to compile my favorite quotes from the book as examples of charitable public discourse.
But here, I want to use a quote from his book to pick a bone with him and the other Democratic presidential contenders. Obama writes about post-9/11 foreign policy—how, after the ousting of the Taliban in Afghanistan, he
"waited with anticipation for what I assumed would follow: the enuncation of a U.S. foreign policy for the twenty-first century, one that would not only adapt our military planning, intelligence operations, and homeland defenses to the threat of terrorist networks but build a new international consensus around the challenge of transnational threats.
"The new blueprint never arrived. Instead what we got was an assortment of outdated policies from eras gone by…
Instead of an honest accounting of … pros and cons [of the invasion of Iraq], the Administration initiated a public relations offensive: shading intelleigence reports to support its case, grossly underestimating both the costs and the manpower requirements of military action, raising the specter of mushroom clouds."
His critique seems to be that the invasion of Iraq was a bit ad hoc—it was as though, in the absence of any comprehensive foreign policy doctrine, the Bush Administration put all their political might behind this one idea of invading Iraq. I think it’s a really good point. Radical Islam has been spreading for several decades, largely unseen, thoughout much of the eastern hemisphere. What is the West going to do about it? Invade Iraq? Whether or not it was a good idea, it certainly wasn’t the cure-all for every case of anti-American extremism.
Now Obama and the other Democrats have their chance to cast that broad vision for foreign policy, but all we’re getting is something equally ad hoc: pull troops out of Iraq. Again, whether or not it’s a good idea, it’s simply not a guiding doctrine for global U.S. engagement. Edwards and Obama talk more broadly about ‘restoring America’s moral authority’ in the world, and as important as that may be, it’s more about what we shouldn’t do than what we should do.
What captivated me about Obama’s book was that he was willing to admit the complexity of policy issues, going so far as to say about Iraq, “When battle-hardened Marine officers suggest we pull out and skeptical foreign correspondents suggest that we stay, there are no easy answers to be had.” I expected to hear more of this even-handed, case-by-case discourse from Obama in his campaign. To my surprise, in yesterday’s debate of the Democratic presidential hopefuls, it was Clinton, not Obama, who spoke of the diciness and complexity of foreign policy decisions. “I refuse to talk about hypotheticals,” she said, indicating that foreign policy is an art, not a science, and certainly not a sound-byte.
Staying in Iraq seems to be solving little. Pulling out of Iraq will solve little as well. We need bigger and better ideas from our politicians.
But here, I want to use a quote from his book to pick a bone with him and the other Democratic presidential contenders. Obama writes about post-9/11 foreign policy—how, after the ousting of the Taliban in Afghanistan, he
"waited with anticipation for what I assumed would follow: the enuncation of a U.S. foreign policy for the twenty-first century, one that would not only adapt our military planning, intelligence operations, and homeland defenses to the threat of terrorist networks but build a new international consensus around the challenge of transnational threats.
"The new blueprint never arrived. Instead what we got was an assortment of outdated policies from eras gone by…
Instead of an honest accounting of … pros and cons [of the invasion of Iraq], the Administration initiated a public relations offensive: shading intelleigence reports to support its case, grossly underestimating both the costs and the manpower requirements of military action, raising the specter of mushroom clouds."
His critique seems to be that the invasion of Iraq was a bit ad hoc—it was as though, in the absence of any comprehensive foreign policy doctrine, the Bush Administration put all their political might behind this one idea of invading Iraq. I think it’s a really good point. Radical Islam has been spreading for several decades, largely unseen, thoughout much of the eastern hemisphere. What is the West going to do about it? Invade Iraq? Whether or not it was a good idea, it certainly wasn’t the cure-all for every case of anti-American extremism.
Now Obama and the other Democrats have their chance to cast that broad vision for foreign policy, but all we’re getting is something equally ad hoc: pull troops out of Iraq. Again, whether or not it’s a good idea, it’s simply not a guiding doctrine for global U.S. engagement. Edwards and Obama talk more broadly about ‘restoring America’s moral authority’ in the world, and as important as that may be, it’s more about what we shouldn’t do than what we should do.
What captivated me about Obama’s book was that he was willing to admit the complexity of policy issues, going so far as to say about Iraq, “When battle-hardened Marine officers suggest we pull out and skeptical foreign correspondents suggest that we stay, there are no easy answers to be had.” I expected to hear more of this even-handed, case-by-case discourse from Obama in his campaign. To my surprise, in yesterday’s debate of the Democratic presidential hopefuls, it was Clinton, not Obama, who spoke of the diciness and complexity of foreign policy decisions. “I refuse to talk about hypotheticals,” she said, indicating that foreign policy is an art, not a science, and certainly not a sound-byte.
Staying in Iraq seems to be solving little. Pulling out of Iraq will solve little as well. We need bigger and better ideas from our politicians.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Vali Nasr, Marva Dawn, and a Deficit of Imagination
Here I present two very different examples of controversies, and then use them to make a broader point.
1. I recently heard Vali Nasr, an expert on the Middle East, speak at Seattle Pacific University. I found his presentation highly lucid and instructive. One point struck me as particularly helpful. In the West, he pointed out, secularism is associated with international clout and public welfare. We call our era of theocracy the ‘Dark Ages,’ and the foment of ideas that led to the separation of church and state, ‘the Enlightenment.’ The triumph of science, the end of slavery, the possibility of upward social mobility—these all came about as clerical power diminished in the West.
But in the Middle East, the opposite is true. Ever since the incorporation of Western political ideas, the clout of Middle Eastern governments has waned. The era of political might and cultural flourishing took place under the leadership of the clerics. So it is no wonder that secular democracy takes hold in the Middle East only with great difficulty and much dissension. It symbolizes not the triumph of reason over superstition, but rather a kind of surrender, an acquiescing of power to the West.
2. In her book A Royal ‘Waste’ of Time, Marva Dawn weighs, as she sees them, the pros and cons of using hymnals vs. projectors in church. (This discussion will mean little to those who haven’t experienced the petty squabbles in American churches these days about worship, often referred to as ‘the worship wars.’) As an advantage of using projectors, she writes, “Many of the songs on the screen are texts from the Bible, so learning the songs in this way promotes memorization of Scripture.” As a disadvantage, she writes, “Words on a screen do not entail much learning of doctrine;” and, “Usually these songs are composed of only one or two Scripture verses, and they are often taken out of context.” Dawn is responding to a context in which many churches are singing aesthetically and theologically impoverished worship songs, and wants to call the church to do better. But her critique itself doesn’t make sense. The fact that many churches that use projectors also sing flimsy worship songs doesn’t mean that these things have to go together. Churches could project aesthetically and theologically sophisticated songs, just as easily as hymn books could (and often do) contain inferior songs.
What do these two issues have in common? In both of cases—the West’s endeavor to bring progress to the Middle East, and Dawn’s endeavor to bring substance to singing in church—there exists a dangerous lack of imagination, an inability to see new possibilities beyond the current state of things. In recent experience in the West, where you find progress, you also find secular democracy. In recent experience in the American church, where you find flimsy worship songs, you also find projectors. But there is no logical connection between these things. Their connection has been one of historical accident. Operating as though their connection were that of logical necessity will lead to absurdity at best, and catastrophe at worst.
These two examples help me get my mind around the problem, but they are by no means the only examples. I think that just about every controversy in the public sphere today suffers from it. If we took public rhetoric from Washington as exhaustively delineating the ideological options for us, we would come to the conclusion that there are only two: Democrat and Republican. But of course, Democrats used to argue for things now associated with Republicans, and vis versa.
Clearly, a little dose of history and/or global awareness will help stimulate our imaginations. (Another example comes to mind: in China, Christianity—which is growing at record rates—is associated with liberalism, whereas in America it is often stereotyped as backward and reactionary.) But there will not always be obvious historical parallels to our current controversies; where we can draw parallels, they may be only partial, and misleading as a result. So we just need to think more clearly, to investigate whether the ideas we associate with each other are really wed to one another, or if they only happen to correspond, for historical or cultural reasons. If we can cultivate this creative thinking, we will find new options, new ways out of currently deadlocked controversies.
1. I recently heard Vali Nasr, an expert on the Middle East, speak at Seattle Pacific University. I found his presentation highly lucid and instructive. One point struck me as particularly helpful. In the West, he pointed out, secularism is associated with international clout and public welfare. We call our era of theocracy the ‘Dark Ages,’ and the foment of ideas that led to the separation of church and state, ‘the Enlightenment.’ The triumph of science, the end of slavery, the possibility of upward social mobility—these all came about as clerical power diminished in the West.
But in the Middle East, the opposite is true. Ever since the incorporation of Western political ideas, the clout of Middle Eastern governments has waned. The era of political might and cultural flourishing took place under the leadership of the clerics. So it is no wonder that secular democracy takes hold in the Middle East only with great difficulty and much dissension. It symbolizes not the triumph of reason over superstition, but rather a kind of surrender, an acquiescing of power to the West.
2. In her book A Royal ‘Waste’ of Time, Marva Dawn weighs, as she sees them, the pros and cons of using hymnals vs. projectors in church. (This discussion will mean little to those who haven’t experienced the petty squabbles in American churches these days about worship, often referred to as ‘the worship wars.’) As an advantage of using projectors, she writes, “Many of the songs on the screen are texts from the Bible, so learning the songs in this way promotes memorization of Scripture.” As a disadvantage, she writes, “Words on a screen do not entail much learning of doctrine;” and, “Usually these songs are composed of only one or two Scripture verses, and they are often taken out of context.” Dawn is responding to a context in which many churches are singing aesthetically and theologically impoverished worship songs, and wants to call the church to do better. But her critique itself doesn’t make sense. The fact that many churches that use projectors also sing flimsy worship songs doesn’t mean that these things have to go together. Churches could project aesthetically and theologically sophisticated songs, just as easily as hymn books could (and often do) contain inferior songs.
What do these two issues have in common? In both of cases—the West’s endeavor to bring progress to the Middle East, and Dawn’s endeavor to bring substance to singing in church—there exists a dangerous lack of imagination, an inability to see new possibilities beyond the current state of things. In recent experience in the West, where you find progress, you also find secular democracy. In recent experience in the American church, where you find flimsy worship songs, you also find projectors. But there is no logical connection between these things. Their connection has been one of historical accident. Operating as though their connection were that of logical necessity will lead to absurdity at best, and catastrophe at worst.
These two examples help me get my mind around the problem, but they are by no means the only examples. I think that just about every controversy in the public sphere today suffers from it. If we took public rhetoric from Washington as exhaustively delineating the ideological options for us, we would come to the conclusion that there are only two: Democrat and Republican. But of course, Democrats used to argue for things now associated with Republicans, and vis versa.
Clearly, a little dose of history and/or global awareness will help stimulate our imaginations. (Another example comes to mind: in China, Christianity—which is growing at record rates—is associated with liberalism, whereas in America it is often stereotyped as backward and reactionary.) But there will not always be obvious historical parallels to our current controversies; where we can draw parallels, they may be only partial, and misleading as a result. So we just need to think more clearly, to investigate whether the ideas we associate with each other are really wed to one another, or if they only happen to correspond, for historical or cultural reasons. If we can cultivate this creative thinking, we will find new options, new ways out of currently deadlocked controversies.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Justice, Entitlement & Compassion
In my social circles, I hear a lot about justice. There are several reasons for this. It’s central to the mission of liberal democracies (at least, of 21st century liberal democracies); it’s especially a favorite concern among bleeding-heart liberals; and it directly resonates with a Biblically-informed Christian mission to the poor and suffering.
I have trouble with the term sometimes. It is not because I don’t care about injustice. When the innocent are treated as though they were guilty, when people groups are hated and excluded for reasons completely outside their control, when power and influence is used to funnel basic necessities away from unsuspecting citizens—these states of affairs cue my sense of indignation.
These miscarriages of justice are easy to spot. But it seems to me that the cry for justice is used to appeal to a wide range of social phenomena, and I start to wonder if we’re all using the term the same way. Consider the issue of illegal immigration. I recently visited the website of a church in San Diego. They had devoted a web page to each of their core values. ‘Justice’ is one of them. On the page devoted to ‘justice’ is a picture of protesters waving a sign that reads, ‘Immigration is Not a Crime.’ And I respond, that depends what you mean. From one very obvious angle, illegal immigration is a crime precisely because it’s illegal. I assume that the implication of the sign’s message is more along the lines of, ‘immigration should never be viewed as a crime.’ Or, more fully, no one should ever be prevented from crossing the border in the United States, nor punished for having done so. And why? Given that the the picture was located on the ‘justice’ page, it would seem that the answer is something like, because justice demands this, that denying someone entrace into our country is unjust.
The first thing to notice here is that ‘injustice’ in this sense has nothing to do with laws as they currently stand; it has everything to do with some transcendent sense of the ‘just’ society. Perhaps it could be argued that the just society is one that allows an unlimited stream of immigration. I’m skeptical that that could ever be a sustainable policy. I’m even more skeptical that ‘the just society,’ as such, could not do otherwise.
So when we call a situation ‘unjust,’ and mean something other than ‘laws were not properly enforced,’ we must be appealing to some abstract notion of the truly just society. There is nothing wrong with this; obviously there is such a thing as an unjust law—laws are meant to reflect justice, not the other way around. But it seems to me that this ideal picture of ‘the just society’ needs some spelling out. We’re not just going to agree on it. Alisdair MacIntyre invokes this sentiment in the title of his book, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? The extraordinary thing is not that people routinely make reference to transcendent justice. The extraordinary thing is that they assume we all agree on what that refers to. The English word certainly has its origins in proper legal proceedings, where the guilty are punished and the innocent go free. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the term has more to do with personal moral uprightness. It seems to me that most references to justice these days have at their core a notion of rights—that people, in virtue of something, have certain entitlements, from fellow citizens, from the state, etc. ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ are acknowledged as such in our country’s founding documents. But contrast this with Plato’s notion of justice: for him, the just society was one where everyone did his or her duty, fulfilled the proper need in society. It had to do with duties, not entitlements. At any rate, a philosophical concensus is not forthcoming.
I think the notion is particularly problematic when it is employed as the driving force behind do-gooding for Christians. We care for others because we seek justice, we say. This must mean that the unfortunate state of affairs in which others find themselves is a miscarriage of justice. If so, then whatever they lack—food, water, immigration, education, clothing, dignified treatment, freedoms of speech or religion, etc.—are a matter of distributive justice: these are things to which every person is entitled.
But I understand neither a) in what sense everyone is entitled to these things, or b) how we could know to what people are entitled and to what they are not. Is everyone entitled to relatively accessible water? To running water? To purified water? To unlimited, running, purified water, for free? In virtue of what are these entitlements bestowed, and how do we find out what they are? It seems to me a discussion that leads to absurdity, based on a supposedly shared intuition about natural rights.
But this intuition—which, in some fashion, is no doubt shared by many who live in 21st century liberal democracies—is only a few hundred years old, if that. As best I can tell, ‘entitlement’ language was meant, by the 18th century thinkers who employed it, to guarantee genuine well-being for the common folk, over against the wealthy and powerful—who, more than not, tended to be associated with institutional religion. So ‘natural rights’ serve as an alternative to religion-based doctrines of societal good. But this is totally unhelpful. ‘Natural rights’ are at least as abstract and elusive a concept as religious notions of ‘the good’. Why not say that institutional religion simply failed to actually take care of people? It’s not that we need a non-religious reason to do good to the poor and suffering. It’s that we need to actually do good to the poor and suffering.
I propose that we reserve ‘justice’ language for its rightful place: a) the courtroom, in terms of punishing only the guilty; and b) the metaphysical discussion about the nature of the ideal society. When it comes to doing good to the poor and suffering, let’s just say that we’re doing good to the poor and suffering, not because we know that they are entitled, in some obscure sense, to X, Y and Z; but because we care about them.
After all, compassion, as an alternative to ‘social justice’, seems so much warmer and personal, reflecting the genuine motivation behind work of this sort. Ultimately, the activists who oppose the deportation of illegal immigrants don’t hold their position because it violates their notion of the ideal society in the abstract. Rather, they know and care about these people, these hard-working men and women who have struggled to make a life for themselves, albeit by sneaking across the border.
We don’t know, ultimately, what the ideal society looks like; nor do we know the list of things to which every human is entitled, whatever that might mean. Let’s stop pretending that we do. It’s not only philosophically convoluted, it’s also a bit pretentious. So let’s dump the ‘entitlement’ language and just do what we know: love people. Doing so doesn’t give us obvious policy answers. But it has been our true motivation from the beginning, so we might as well admit it.
I have trouble with the term sometimes. It is not because I don’t care about injustice. When the innocent are treated as though they were guilty, when people groups are hated and excluded for reasons completely outside their control, when power and influence is used to funnel basic necessities away from unsuspecting citizens—these states of affairs cue my sense of indignation.
These miscarriages of justice are easy to spot. But it seems to me that the cry for justice is used to appeal to a wide range of social phenomena, and I start to wonder if we’re all using the term the same way. Consider the issue of illegal immigration. I recently visited the website of a church in San Diego. They had devoted a web page to each of their core values. ‘Justice’ is one of them. On the page devoted to ‘justice’ is a picture of protesters waving a sign that reads, ‘Immigration is Not a Crime.’ And I respond, that depends what you mean. From one very obvious angle, illegal immigration is a crime precisely because it’s illegal. I assume that the implication of the sign’s message is more along the lines of, ‘immigration should never be viewed as a crime.’ Or, more fully, no one should ever be prevented from crossing the border in the United States, nor punished for having done so. And why? Given that the the picture was located on the ‘justice’ page, it would seem that the answer is something like, because justice demands this, that denying someone entrace into our country is unjust.
The first thing to notice here is that ‘injustice’ in this sense has nothing to do with laws as they currently stand; it has everything to do with some transcendent sense of the ‘just’ society. Perhaps it could be argued that the just society is one that allows an unlimited stream of immigration. I’m skeptical that that could ever be a sustainable policy. I’m even more skeptical that ‘the just society,’ as such, could not do otherwise.
So when we call a situation ‘unjust,’ and mean something other than ‘laws were not properly enforced,’ we must be appealing to some abstract notion of the truly just society. There is nothing wrong with this; obviously there is such a thing as an unjust law—laws are meant to reflect justice, not the other way around. But it seems to me that this ideal picture of ‘the just society’ needs some spelling out. We’re not just going to agree on it. Alisdair MacIntyre invokes this sentiment in the title of his book, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? The extraordinary thing is not that people routinely make reference to transcendent justice. The extraordinary thing is that they assume we all agree on what that refers to. The English word certainly has its origins in proper legal proceedings, where the guilty are punished and the innocent go free. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the term has more to do with personal moral uprightness. It seems to me that most references to justice these days have at their core a notion of rights—that people, in virtue of something, have certain entitlements, from fellow citizens, from the state, etc. ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ are acknowledged as such in our country’s founding documents. But contrast this with Plato’s notion of justice: for him, the just society was one where everyone did his or her duty, fulfilled the proper need in society. It had to do with duties, not entitlements. At any rate, a philosophical concensus is not forthcoming.
I think the notion is particularly problematic when it is employed as the driving force behind do-gooding for Christians. We care for others because we seek justice, we say. This must mean that the unfortunate state of affairs in which others find themselves is a miscarriage of justice. If so, then whatever they lack—food, water, immigration, education, clothing, dignified treatment, freedoms of speech or religion, etc.—are a matter of distributive justice: these are things to which every person is entitled.
But I understand neither a) in what sense everyone is entitled to these things, or b) how we could know to what people are entitled and to what they are not. Is everyone entitled to relatively accessible water? To running water? To purified water? To unlimited, running, purified water, for free? In virtue of what are these entitlements bestowed, and how do we find out what they are? It seems to me a discussion that leads to absurdity, based on a supposedly shared intuition about natural rights.
But this intuition—which, in some fashion, is no doubt shared by many who live in 21st century liberal democracies—is only a few hundred years old, if that. As best I can tell, ‘entitlement’ language was meant, by the 18th century thinkers who employed it, to guarantee genuine well-being for the common folk, over against the wealthy and powerful—who, more than not, tended to be associated with institutional religion. So ‘natural rights’ serve as an alternative to religion-based doctrines of societal good. But this is totally unhelpful. ‘Natural rights’ are at least as abstract and elusive a concept as religious notions of ‘the good’. Why not say that institutional religion simply failed to actually take care of people? It’s not that we need a non-religious reason to do good to the poor and suffering. It’s that we need to actually do good to the poor and suffering.
I propose that we reserve ‘justice’ language for its rightful place: a) the courtroom, in terms of punishing only the guilty; and b) the metaphysical discussion about the nature of the ideal society. When it comes to doing good to the poor and suffering, let’s just say that we’re doing good to the poor and suffering, not because we know that they are entitled, in some obscure sense, to X, Y and Z; but because we care about them.
After all, compassion, as an alternative to ‘social justice’, seems so much warmer and personal, reflecting the genuine motivation behind work of this sort. Ultimately, the activists who oppose the deportation of illegal immigrants don’t hold their position because it violates their notion of the ideal society in the abstract. Rather, they know and care about these people, these hard-working men and women who have struggled to make a life for themselves, albeit by sneaking across the border.
We don’t know, ultimately, what the ideal society looks like; nor do we know the list of things to which every human is entitled, whatever that might mean. Let’s stop pretending that we do. It’s not only philosophically convoluted, it’s also a bit pretentious. So let’s dump the ‘entitlement’ language and just do what we know: love people. Doing so doesn’t give us obvious policy answers. But it has been our true motivation from the beginning, so we might as well admit it.
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