Meditation on Easter

    Traditional Christian theology understands God to be both perfectly just and perfectly loving. Human beings, due to our inherent sinfulness (i.e. attachment to the alienated ego and its self-serving fantasies and desires), are separated from God and subject to the consequences of sin, which include spiritual death. To reconcile humanity to himself, God's justice demands a payment for sin, while his love seeks to rescue and redeem humanity. The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is seen as a sacrificial atonement for the sins of humanity. Jesus, being both fully divine and fully human, voluntarily offers himself as a sacrifice to satisfy the demands of divine justice. By undergoing crucifixion, Jesus suffers the punishment that humanity deserves for sin, thus making reconciliation with God possible. Jesus' willingness to endure crucifixion is an act of solidarity with humanity. By taking on human form and experiencing suffering and the worst death, Jesus enters into the human condition fully. Through his sacrifice, Jesus bridges the gap between humanity and God, offering a pathway for reconciliation and salvation.

     The crucifixion is not merely a tragic event but is part of God's redemptive plan. Through his death and resurrection, Jesus triumphs over sin and death, offering humanity the hope of new life and reconciliation with God. The resurrection demonstrates that death is not the final word and that through faith in Christ, humanity can be restored to relationship with God. That is the official version, largely supported in the Gospels themselves (i.e. that is how many or most of the early Christian groupings, especially those with a background of Judaism, understood the crucifixion).

    It’s like God, having made the eternal law that condemns us – not as individuals but as a race (all sinners by nature through Adam) – can’t live with the consequences and out of pity takes the only way allowed by his own eternal law: he allows himself to be sacrificed to the Devil, thus paying the price to get our race out of Hell, or at least such of us that believe in his sacrifice.

   It doesn’t make sense to me that God required his “son” – part of himself translated into flesh and blood – to be tortured to death to build a bridge to us. That the God – who Jesus reveals as Love – would be the source of such a law makes no sense. That the law of God would bind God to make a deal with the Devil to free us makes no sense to me. It doesn’t make sense to see humanity in every case – even children – as damned to hell because of the actions of past generations (Adam) and the unjust, sinful human world that does seem to be endemic to human nature (in its “fallen” state). I don’t deny that something is not right with our race; that we have a propensity to sin. But tracing that back to the sin of our original parents makes sense only if I understand the significance of the apple (the forbidden fruit) as the desire to be “autonomous”: to be the final judge over what is Real, what is Good, what is Beautiful; over how we live, how we “identify”, and how we interpret. That is the fruit of the ego alienated from reality: from other people; from nature (as Creation); from community; from the spiritual life; from God. That is the modern self, pounded into us moderns from birth by our culture. It is born of the twins of the fear of being vulnerable and the desire to protect itself at any cost from pain – at the extreme, by acquiring power over others and the environment, the power to make us invulnerable and the legislators of good and evil.

    But the remedy for this disease is love, wisdom; not God having to give himself over (temporarily) to the Devil (the negative energy that drives the high priests and the damned Romans). At least that makes for sense to me. God freely translating himself into flesh and blood to reveal his true mind to us, insofar as we are capable of understanding it, knowing He would have to suffer for it. That is analogous to a father who leaps into a burning house to save his children. Just leave out the pact with the Devil, the ransom He owed the devil.

 

I think the theology I am criticizing is most intelligible to me as C. S. Lewis depicts it in fantasy, in his novel The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. In the story, the "deep magic" is portrayed as an ancient and unchangeable law that governs the land of Narnia. This "deep magic" represents a form of divine justice and order within the narrative, one that predates the creation of Narnia. Similarly, within Christian theology, there is a concept of divine law and justice that governs the universe, including the consequences of sin. Aslan must sacrifice himself on behalf of Edmund, who has committed treason against the rightful ruler of Narnia. This act of sacrificial atonement echoes the Christian belief in Jesus willingly laying down his life as a sacrifice for humanity's sins. Aslan does not have to power to set aside the “deep magic”, according to which the evil Snow Witch is owed all traitors (sin is conceived as treason against God, the Ruler of the universe). Despite being bound by the "deep magic" to undergo death, Aslan is aware of a deeper magic, a magic of which the servants of evil are blind: that to give your life for love of another brings with it a resurrection after the physical death of the body. Aslan's resurrection embodies the theme of victory over death and the triumph of good over evil. His resurrection brings hope and renewal to Narnia, just as Jesus' resurrection brings hope and new life to humanity in Christian belief. If Aslan is analogous to Jesus, he is one with the Creator of the “deep magic”, the law that requires Hell for traitors (final alienation from God). But as translated in flesh and blood in the physical universe, Aslan/Jesus, though identical to the Creator, did not fully share the mind of the Creator – Jesus because he was human. Thus the metaphor of Father and Son: distinct modes of consciousness. Thus, despite some knowledge of the mind of the Father, faith was required to accept the torture and death as a condition to bring about the forgiveness of the traitor.  

     But the reason the novel was more plausible to me is because Aslan sacrificed himself to save one child, Edmund. The other siblings were not completely innocent but were not “traitors.” But in our current form of human existence, we are all considered sinners (children of Adam, as the creatures of Narnia refer to us) – we are all Edmund. Jesus comes to save our race, which is corrupt. To me that means that we cannot overcome attachment to our alienated egos – egos that define themselves apart from other egos, nature, our own potential souls, and God – even in a difficult rebellion (as, for example, girls who do not conform to the physical standards of capitalist beauty, embodied by the “model”, can sometimes come to find themselves beautiful through a difficult rebellion against the capitalist standards). No, grace is required: the self-sacrifice of Aslan/Jesus/God himself as incarnated in flesh and blood, both embodying the divine mind but as embodied not fully identifying with it. Without that grace / self-sacrifice of God, we would be condemned to inhabit a state of sin (alienation) and no matter how sincere our wish to escape, we would be powerless to overcome it. The most virtuous among us would still be a traitor, a sinner, addicted to the alienated mode of self.

   I can agree with that, understood in a certain way. It’s just the “deep magic” that compels God to be sacrificed, this limit on God’s freedom, that bothers me. He appears primarily to be sacrificed rather than to enlighten (and correct all the false images of Himself as a stern patriarch demanding obedience, punishing disobedience; setting up a system where those who follow the rules (ritual washing, ritual praying, sacrificing, not eating pork, etc.) are righteous (like the elder brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son) are “righteous” and the rest hell-fodder.

    Human beings do on rare occasions sacrifice themselves for someone or someplace even that they love – or even because we see strangers in the same light as we do those we love. Parents sacrifice for their children; a man jumps on the train tracks to save the life of a stranger; soldiers sacrifice for their fellow countrymen, etc. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” To be able to see others as intelligible objects of such sacrifice is also probably a gift of grace: “…he appeared and the soul felt its worth.” People did sacrifice for their own – look at the Spartans. The idea that humanity as such is one metaphorical family – that is a gift of grace. We are programmed by nature and culture to feel normal with our own, with those who are intelligible, familiar to us. We tend to reduce others outside our groups. I find the idea that Jesus in some sense sacrificed himself. But why?

    “Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.” We know from the prophets and from iconic people like Socrates that bearing witness to the truth in a world constructed on lies, fantasies, and ideologies is a dangerous undertaking – constructs upon which power elites rely to justify their power. The God of the high priests and Pharisees was an idol. The true nature of God was unknown. Nature itself partly – millennia of small bands of human beings fighting for survival in environments of scarcity –  and a long history of unjust societies (intensified by the advent of agriculture) formed our unconscious minds. Cultures in which minorities oppress majorities form the egos of people. Cultures in which at a certain time mankind is seen at war with all of nature – bad conditions for knowing God if God is love. And that is what Jesus reveals God to be – contra the entire Old Testament, except for some prophets who picture God as loving his Chosen People but not humanity as such. The priestly construct of “God” has him setting up brutal laws: stoning the adultery to death. Jesus contradicts and asks those who would stone to look into their own hearts. The priestly construct of “God” who commands complete genocide against the peoples living in the lands he promised the Israelites. Jesus contradicts and says love and pray for your enemies. The priestly construct of a “God” who demands sacrifices and obedience. Jesus contradicts and says the Law and the Sabbath are there for people, not people there for the Law and Sabbath (thus undermining the power of the priestly caste). The priestly construct of a “God” who demands group conformity and othering of everyone outside the in-group. Jesus contradicts and tells us the despised Samaritan who helps the injured man is closer to God (again undermining priestly authority).

      However it happened, however you want to interpret it, God (assuming God is real as a personal being who is also absolute – hard to make sense of that) reached out to us through Jesus to correct the idolatrous misconceptions of the pharisees and high priest and reveal whatever of his true nature (his and her perhaps, of their true nature) as we could comprehend. And for that, Jesus took himself into the lion's den, the lions' den being for me a metaphor of the alienated ego and the world constructed by the alienated ego; Satan, at least as metaphor. In that sense, Jesus did have to give himself up to the power of Satan. Overcoming "the world" means overcoming the "fat, relentless ego," it social embodiments, and indeed that part of nature we think of as "dog eat dog" or "eat or be eaten," the part of nature that is probably the source of the alienated ego [reconciling that with the "Creation" is another theological problem.] He had to challenge the powers that be, and they killed him in the worst way.

    In this reading, there is no ransom. God saw a need. God addressed that need at enormous sacrifice. We were elevated by that sacrifice. But there is no need for the “deep magic” here, an eternal justice that demands the ultimate punishment for all humanity. That is a very pharisaic conception of God, one Jesus came to undo. It makes more sense to say that God was moved by compassion alone and not a need to find a way to satisfy his justice. On the gate to Hell in Dante’s Inferno, we can read: “Justice moved my great Creator, Divine power made me.” Sin must be punished – so the Old Testament God.  Jesus says sin must be forgiven, that we may not cast the first stone. God is not a slave to his own commands – which are more like the commands of a Stalin than Jesus. Jesus came to bear witness to the truth, to undo all of that.

    How then did the ransom theory enter into Scripture and Church teaching? Scripture, first, was in the service of church-building. Jesus left no writing. The memory of the Sermon on the Mound, the parables, the story of the adulteress – here we have the pure water of Jesus. But the pure water is muddied by church building, by trying to harmonize Jesus with the Old Testament, to reintroduce the Idol that justified the priestly caste, which then came to justify the Emperor. As Tolstoy put it in his Preface to A Gospel in Brief – I will quote at length:

 

But now to understand the teaching of Jesus it is necessary to know clearly the chief methods used in these false interpretations. The most customary method of false interpretation, and one which we have grown up with, consists of preaching under the name of Christianity not what Christ taught but a church teaching composed of explanations of very contradictory writings into which Christ's teaching enters only to a small degree, and even then distorted and twisted to fit together with other writings. According to this false interpretation Christ s teaching is only one link in a chain of revelations beginning with the commencement of the world and continuing in the Church until now. These false interpreters call Jesus God; but the fact that they recognize him as God does not make them attribute more importance to his words and teaching than to the words of the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, the Apocalypse, or even to the decisions of the Councils and the writings of the Fathers of the Church. These false interpreters do not admit any understanding of the teaching of Jesus which does not conform to the previous and subsequent revelations; so that their aim is not to explain the meaning of Christ's teaching, but as far as possible to harmonize various extremely contradictory writings, such as the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Gospels, the Epistles, and the Acts-that is, all that is supposed to constitute the Holy Scriptures. Such explanations aiming not at truth but at reconciling the irreconcilable, namely, the writings of the Old and the New Testament, can obviously be innumerable, as indeed they are. Among them are the Epistles of Paul and the decisions of the Councils (which begin with the formulary: 'It has pleased Us and the Holy Ghost'), and such enactments as those of the Popes, the Synods, the pseudo-Christs, and all the false interpreters who affirm that the Holy Ghost speaks through their lips. They all employ one and the same gross method of affirming, the truth of their interpretations by the assertion that their interpretations are not human utterances but revelations from the Holy Ghost.

 

The pure water of Jesus teaching does not give us a church with a priestly caste, but as a teaching that gives us the meaning of life.

    Thus though the resurrection is something I would love to believe – it is not the ‘miraculous’ nature of it that bothers me but the idea of the Old Testament God construct behind it that causes me problems – my ‘faith’, such as it is, would not suffer without it. I agree that Jesus was more than just a wise and good man. Beyond that, I cannot say. I respond to the truth of the pure water of his teaching, as expressed in the Sermon on the Mound, the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the saving of the adulteress from stoning, the healing of the sick, the feeding of the hungry. The line “For God is love” gets it right.

   A religion of laws, such that the righteous are separated from the unrighteous according to who follows the rules; a religion that divides humanity into two camps: the righteous and the unrighteous (based on who obeys the rules) – that is not for me: “he who considers himself good (i.e. relative to others) will not be good”; that is one form taken by the “fat, relentless ego.”  That is to neglect the prime directive – to love your neighbor as yourself – in preference to man-made laws (e.g. not eating pork, ritual washing, etc.) made to divide a group of so-called “righteous” from the rest of the “unrighteous” – and prop up a privileged caste of priests. The main principle of the alienated ego is here at work: to de-mean the other as a prologue to doing violence against them, or at least not doing good to them. According to all the laws the priestly caste had set up, Jesus - God - was rightly crucified. He flaunted them. 

  Of course, I am speaking personally, as we all must when it comes to such things. (Tolstoy – and I don’t uncritically take over all his theology – has been an important conversation partner for me.)

 Thoughts on Good Friday

 The Easter time has been a time of longing for me – especially since I have been living in Germany. I have experienced it as a bit magical: the sun, spring flowers, birds, green grass, church bells during the day; the deep black sky and the glowing moon at night. I have my favorite music: Bach’s Matthäus Passion, Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, and other pieces. I can only long for the times when I felt the longing. That is not the same as “the wasteland.” In the wasteland, I would be devoid of longing altogether. If I go to Mass, then on Good Friday. The Easter Mass, or the Midnight Mass on Saturday – too much for me. I can’t feel the joy that is performed. I’m not even sure what I think about the resurrection, great symbol of hope that it is.

   One can only speak personally about the ultimate realities. I am a bad Catholic, a bad Christian. I know that. Grace – divine love – gets through, but it’s like trying to get a radio station far away with a weak and broken antenna. I work on receiving that signal, but often I just have to do my duty, or fail to do my duty.

   I cannot see The Bible as such as sacred scripture, as almost all other Christians do in one form or the other. It is too clearly a work of human minds and editing. Except for the first chapter of Genesis, I can find nothing sacred in the Old Testament. Except that it forms the Matrix in which Jesus’ teaching took place, I would see it as a collection of myths masquerading as. I love myths, but the Old Testament myths are not as pleasurable to read as the stories of Thor and Odin, for example. It kept me far away from Christ’s teachings for many years since I believed that to accept the latter I had to embrace the former as scripture. There are a couple of small diamonds in it. But overall it burdens Christianity for me. Conservative Protestants prefer it, for they can quote to justify all kinds of nasty things that violate the word and spirit of Christ’s teaching. (Trump selling patriotic Bibles for 59 dollars and 99 cents – I want to vomit just thinking of it.)

    The Old Testament – the Torah – is the story of God’s relationship with his Chosen People: not with the rest of us. From the stories of ethnic cleansing to the ritual contempt for those not included in the Chosen People – the Samaritans, for example – the character revealed therein starts good, but then becomes a tyrannical, genocidal, punishing, Patriarch whose commandments are law and by definition “good.” I don’t like him. If he were more than a character in that story, he could destroy me with his power. Perhaps in terror I would submit. But only in fear, not love.

    Even the New Testament is not a sacred text for me. It contains sacred texts – the teachings of Christ, as they come filtered down through the decades after his death. But these are diamonds in the rough. Much of the New Testament consists of attempts by Christians still in the Jewish tradition to understand what of Jesus’ teachings, life, and death had been passed on; other parts of it consist of attempts by people with little or no contact with the religion and culture of old Israel to understand. Some of these attempts to make sense of Jesus are valuable or moving (e.g. the first chapter of John); others alienate me (Jesus as the sacrificial lamb: the so-called “ransom theory”). Jesus, like Socrates, left nothing written behind. Unlike Socrates, he did not have a Plato to pass on to us a living memory of his teachings, life, and death.

   Scripture for me would require culling the diamonds – the authentic teachings of Christ, his own words (and critical scholars agree some of the Gospels stem directly from Jesus, and were not added later). The closest approach to a Scripture for me is Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, a somewhat idiosyncratic translation of the diamonds contained in the New Testament, leaving out the rough. It is this translation that brought me back into contact with Christianity after a long absence in which I couldn’t take it seriously.

 

The meaning of the Cross. if divine love truly reached out to his Creatures ensnared by sin (as though now part of our DNA) through the incarnation, and died on the cross as a consequence, then it would be most ungrateful indeed not to honor that sublime sacrifice. Christians are Christians partly in gratitude for the sacrifice: they are grateful to the man Jesus, to God who sent and inspired him. Trusting that Jesus was a window into divine love, my theological problem ‘was Jesus a unique prophet (similar to how Muslims think of Mohammad) or did God become human in the person of Jesus’ becomes practical when the Christian wishes to express gratitude, love: how to love Jesus? As God’s special prophet and the embodiment of unfallen Man? Or as a person of God the Trinity? To whom are we grateful? How much does it matter? Does everything depend on getting the answer right? As a Christian one must rely on tradition here, on a trust in the Church.

     These are the salient facts.

Jesus prayed in fear to be spared the cross, but submitted to God’s will. If Jesus and God share one mind, then it is not a father willing his son to be crucified, but God willing himself to be crucified – a kind of suicide. Unless, of course, he was as the man Jesus powerless to alter the course of events. To be one of us, God had to submit to our powerless, to torment, fear, and death just like so many others. No Red Seas were parted to save himself from the worst humanity has to offer.

A core of Jesus’ teaching can be found in the Old Testament – Isiah 1:11

“The multitude of your sacrifices— what are they to me?” says the LORD. “I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals; I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats.

Again and again, Jesus by word and example flaunts the older conception of a God who demands sacrifices and blind obedience. After all, it is understandable why the priestly caste found him dangerous, considered him to be a blasphemer: by their light, according to their conception of God, quite rightly. Thus to introduce the “ransom theory” to understand his death seems inconsistent with his own life and teachings, as tempting as the metaphor must have been to Jewish Christians of the time.

     The "ransom theory" dates back to the early Church Fathers and was particularly popularized by theologians like Origen and later by St. Augustine. It has some textual support in the New Testament. The theory suggests that the death of Jesus Christ on the cross was a ransom paid to Satan to liberate humanity from the bondage of sin and death. No human sacrifice could have been enough to pay this debt, so God had to pay it himself.  According to this theory, humanity, represented by Adam and Eve, had fallen into sin and thereby came under the dominion of Satan. Since Satan had a claim over humanity due to sin, Jesus' death was seen as a payment of ransom to Satan in order to free humanity from his power. This payment of ransom is often depicted metaphorically, with Jesus offering his life as a sacrifice to satisfy the demands of justice and redeem humanity. I don’t wish to take this away from anyone who finds it essential, but the idea of God owing the devil a sacrifice to free us from his prison is an idea I can’t reconcile with God as Jesus reveals him, a God of love and Creation.

[C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe gives the most sympathetic understanding of the ransom theory I know of, when Aslan sacrificed himself for Edmund’s betrayal: even Aslan could not per fiat command the debt be paid as that would have violated the old magic, the law made at the founding of the world. Lewis comes as close as anyone can come in this fantasy story of making sense of the ransom theory to me.] 

This is my rather idiosyncratic attempt to understand the insane image of God on the cross. The world is beautiful but way before Adam and Eve animal life was structured by the cruel struggle between predator and prey. (Image a lion devouring a zebra while the poor creature was still alive. Out of this struggle for existence, Adam and Eve emerged, the first self-conscious human beings. (That is not the Garden of Eden, but bear with me.) Nature implants in predators cruelty towards their prey; otherwise, they could not hunt and would die out. The movie Madagascar portrayed this humorously when the friendly zoo lion Alex, starving to death, regresses to his primal nature and while running after his zebra friend Marty no longer sees his friend but a steak. The predator reduces a living creature to food – which is what we do too. And extend this reduction to “enemies” and “others” – to threats to the community. People get reduced to orcs – or Samaritans, or Philistines. The cruelty in nature sprang over to the human world, symbolized for many Jews by the Romans and their crucifixions.

    God as Creator brought this into being. (The attempt to let God off the hook by claiming the all of nature “fell” with original sin – that before original sin the lion lay down by the lamb – is a beautiful myth, but doesn’t make sense of what we know of nature.) And the only picture of God in a monotheistic religion was Jahve, who often seems very much embedded in the cruelty of nature. The very idea of the Chosen People with their Promised Land pit them against enemies, who thus had to be reduced even as the enemies had to reduce the Chosen People. The entire Creation groans, as St. Paul put it.

    Jesus’ entire life and teaching showed God as overcoming these dichotomies: starting with friend and enemy/other: the command to love and pray for your enemies; not to condemn sinners (the adulteress); to overcome the divisions between ruling classes and the poor; to reject the hypocrisy of the righteous and unrighteous, subordinating the Law (and the priests) to love and humanity; to reconcile humanity (not just a Chosen People) to a God who is the source of their being; to die to your selfish ego and discover your soul.

    Imagine now that Jesus was the translation of the mind and spirit of God into flesh; that becoming mortal and living among us was the only way to communicate these truths. Communicating those truths, revealing God’s true being would be the purpose of the “incarnation” – the unity (in some mystical sense) of God and man. Not to ransom us from Satan, but to help us, to save us by giving us a chance to overcome the fearful predator in ourselves and giving us a less anthropomorphic image of God to guide us.

    To do this for us, to give us a chance at “salvation” (i.e. the overcoming of all the dualisms in us) Christ-God was willing to suffer the cross. “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” Well, some people have been trying to comprehend for 2000 years. I am trying, however unsuccessfully. (The truly Good get killed: seems to be a law of society. Socrates met a similar fate, even if the Athenians executed him much more humanely than did the damn Romans Jesus.)

   That, with my bad antenna, is the best I can do.

We can't see light  

I am reading an introduction to cultural anthropology. The following passage about a woman from the Mixtech people (who live in Mexico) struck me as philosophically important:

The Mixtec like other Mesoamerican people believe that living things that come into the world at the same time are fundamentally linked to one another. An animal and a human born at the same moment will thus share life experiences, are often said to have a single soul, and will at times share a consciousness. This latter most often occurs through dreams, which may be interpreted as the world seen through the eyes of one’s co-essential animal (so labeled because the animals and their human counterparts are essentially linked). In Nanuu Maria's case, her kiti nuvi is a small, playful, furry creature called a coati. (This has been determined years beforehand through divination and because, like the cootie, she had a special liking for bananas.) It was on one of its nocturnal journeys that the coati had been hit by lightning.

     The idea of the co-essential animal is something that to us seems a bit far-fetched. But the Mixtec case is far from unique, and ethnographers report many examples of traditions that hold that things not physically attached to the body are an intimate part of the self. For the Mixtec, the concept of the co-essential animal is at least as complex and comprehensive as the Id or super ego and has no less basis in empirical science: it explains good and bad luck, sudden and even deadly illnesses, the nature of dreams, and even why some individuals have more wealth and power than others, since those with big ferocious animals such as jaguars stand higher in the social hierarchy than those with small, innocuous animals such as rabbits.

      Mixtec thus clearly conceived their selves – their essential being in the world – is not being bounded by the body. Maria is linked to her kiti nuvi, not as one discreet hole is linked to another, as one of us feels linked to a lover or a child, but as a fellow creature whose experiences are hers and who shares her experiences in its own dreams, both in a physical as well as a psychic way. In contrast, we in the West tend to view ourselves – and our selves – as consisting at the core of an essentially unitary whole, unique and enduring. Generally, this shows that even so fundamental a facet of our experience of life as our concepts of who and what we are, concepts that seem to constitute a primary basis for common sense are in fact subject to extraordinary variation from culture to culture. This, in turn, has profound consequences for the ways in which societies are constituted socially, economically, and morally. When we in the West see ourselves as persons, we tend to see ourselves as autonomous individuals, each of us master of our own destiny and not part of a wider continuum of entities that might include a coati. Coming out of that kind of conception of ourselves – and our selves – is a sense of limitless possibility. Children in the United States, for example, are often told in elementary school that anyone can grow up to be a president. Historical and political reality to one side, this notion points to a concept of personhood, and here we use the term person to refer to the way ideas about the self articulate a more comprehensive political ideology – which bases personhood on shared capacities and rights. In other words, persons in this context are defined based not on what makes us different, but on what makes us the same. This view of persons is enshrined in the United States Constitution, which endows all citizens with the same social and political rights. In fact, the most recent amendments to the Constitution have all been concerned with denying the relevance of class, ethnic, racial, religious or gender differences in social arrangements, economic decision making and political participation. [emphasis mine]

   John Monaghan and Peter Just, Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2000), p. 131-132.

     

   This interests me because it implies that our conceptions of self – of human nature, of who and what we are – might make sense (or not) of our lives in a particular world-matrix (lifeworld) but have no basis in science. Here mythical thinking and metaphysical thinking merge.

    In it curious that in “philosophy of the mind” as it is taught and practiced in philosophy departments in North America and Europe, there is no theory of “co-essentialism.” You get theories like these:

1.    Physicalism: Also known as materialism, this theory posits that all mental states and processes are ultimately reducible to physical processes in the brain. It suggests that the mind can be fully explained by neuroscience and the laws of physics.

 

2.    Functionalism: According to functionalism, mental states are defined by their causal roles in relation to inputs, outputs, and other mental states. It focuses on the functions and operations of the mind rather than its physical substrate.

 

3.    Dualism: Dualism proposes that the mind and body are distinct substances, with the mind comprising non-physical or spiritual elements that are separate from the physical brain. Variants include substance dualism and property dualism.

 

4.    Identity Theory: Identity theory asserts that mental states are identical to specific brain states. It suggests that each type of mental state corresponds to a particular type of neurological state, offering a type of reductionism while maintaining a monistic perspective.

 

5.    Eliminative Materialism: This theory contends that common-sense understanding of mental states and processes is fundamentally mistaken, and that they will ultimately be eliminated or replaced by a matured neuroscience. It proposes that our current folk psychology is inadequate to explain the mind.

 

6.    Panpsychism: Panpsychism suggests that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe, present in all things to some degree. It proposes that mental properties are inherent in all physical entities, from subatomic particles to complex organisms.

 

7.    Epiphenomenalism: According to epiphenomenalism, mental states are byproducts of physical processes in the brain, but they do not have any causal influence on physical events. Instead, mental events are caused by physical events, but cannot cause physical events themselves.

 

8.    Emergentism: Emergentism posits that complex systems, such as the brain, give rise to novel properties (like consciousness) that cannot be reduced to the properties of their constituent parts. Consciousness emerges from the interactions of simpler elements.

 

I like the last one: it leaves the nature of what emerges completely open – co-essentialism could emerge as well as any other. Panpsychism may also be consistent with the Mixtec beliefs.

    The point: the Mixtec metaphysical understanding of the self is no more or less a possible subject of scientific inquiry as any of the others. None have a purely factual basis. All attempt to make sense of aspects of our self-conscious lives – as embodied in particular cultures. In the end, the only reason the Mixtec belief seems far-fetched to us is that it can play no role in our form of life. But the Western liberal belief in the autonomous individual, the belief in an immaterial soul, or the Catholic belief in the soul as the living form of the body – none of these would make sense of the Mixtec form of life. There is no external reality beyond our conscious experience (always embedded in a form of life) – no fact of the matter – to which to refer these different ways of making sense. Prove the Mixtec woman didn’t have a coati as a co-essential animal! Prove by some scientific text that we are autonomous individuals – or prove that we are purely physical entities ruled by the equations of physics! You can’t. Nobody can. The  belief in an immaterial soul or a self-brain identity or an autonomous self with rights is no more objectively rational than Maria’s belief that she shared consciousness with a coati. All are equally…magical, when seem from a perspective from outside the forms of life where they may make sense.

        As Schopenhauer put it: “That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.”  Consciousness of always consciousness of something, taken in a certain way: but being conscious of consciousness is impossible. The self – consciousness of oneself as a self – is always a representation, or an interpretation of that which cannot be directly experienced (like a bit of God). We can only make sense of its effects in the world as we experience it. It is the light that opens up the world for our vision – our minds and spirits. But you can’t see the light. You can only interpret it, or speculate about it, on the ground of what it reveals.

 Faith and Reason

St. Thomas Aquinas

Faith and reason; theology and philosophy: thesis. We know what God - which for us means "our concept of God" or what it make sense to say about God (our idols?) - ... we know what God (the Christian concept) revealed by faith and trust. We do not know it, directly, though reason. The story related about Jesus and the woman condemned to be stoned for adultery speaks to the purest part of my heart, the most sacred part of my soul. ‘This comes directly from God’ my heart tells me, and my intellect follows. I trust the source that relates this story and believe in the man that the story is about. My reason judges thoughts about God. God – the sacred, the divine – is beyond me or any man, woman, or even child. If I am to understand anything about God’s reality or will, God must reveal it to me. I could never reach God with my intellect alone. If there is any telepathy with God, it is not through the head but the heart.

      But given faith, I can come to understand many aspects of God through the use of my intellect. If somebody tells me God willed the terrorists to fly into the World Trade Buildings, approved of the Holocaust as a punishment to Jews, “meant” for me to betray my wife, or for the church to burn heretics in the Middle Ages then I know they are wrong because such things contradict the goodness of God as revealed to me through Christ as portrayed in the Gospels.

      If someone responds that I am mistaken because whatever God might will is simply “good”, such that if God wills that I hate homosexuals or adulterers or Jews or Germans (and so on), hating them would be “good”, then I remain certain that God could never possibly will such things. If someone then points to other passages in the Bible that seem to support God approving of something that we think evil, then I say that passage must be understood in the light of stories from the gospels like the one that revealed God to me (for Jews it would be something in the Torah; for Muslims, something in the Koran).

       If a theologian tries to convince me of the “divine command theory” of God – whatever God wills is good – and points out that I am guilt of imposing my sentimental human concept of goodness on God, then I say I find Aquinas’ solution true and the “divine command theory” false: God’s will is goodness itself, as revealed through Jesus and understood by my heart and soul, because God created both. 

      I offer this as a picture – condensed to be sure – of how faith and reason belong to the same family, faith being the loving parent of reason. But without reason, the family would be incomplete. This is my understanding of Augustine’s well-known principle: “I believe so that I may understand.” I believe in God’s goodness so that I may understand the world.

      The most fundamental divide in religion for me is this: between those who believe all the answers are clearly expressed in Scripture in the form of divine commands, and “ours is not to question why, but to do or die”; and those who (like me) believe that God also communicates through reality (Nature, the Creation) itself, through what is Good, True, and Beautiful. A kind of faith – not blind, fanatical faith but trusting your heart when it is inspired by love – is necessary to believe such an interpretation of Being more real than other possible interpretations (e.g. the materialism is a Carl Sagan, the nihilism of a Woody Allen).  Scripture – interpreted not as clear and distinct commands but as something we also need our intellects to grasp – can also reveal realities beyond our ability to grasp with our unaided intellects, but we need our minds and hearts to understand it and strive to conform our lives to it. 

      The mind cooperates with faith and love. To me this is the main difference between most forms of Protestantism and Catholicism as understood in the tradition of Aquinas: the former rejects the use of the intellect as hopelessly corrupted by sin (egotism, passion), whereas the latter, while acknowledging the influence of sin (ego) darkening the intellect, holds that the intellect can also be driven by a love of Truth and must participate in grace by seeking the Truth always.

The Bible. It is so far from being transparent that 1000 different people could read it in a thousand different ways. Churches and indeed individual pastors try to impose some unity of interpretation. For Catholics there is a tradition of interpretation that serves as a guide.  But to say: it is clear, my interpretation is God's interpretation; all other interpretations are from the devil. So don't think,  just live your lives according to my (i.e. God's) interpretation - that is the danger of Protestantism. 

   To me, the center of the Bible are the direct teachings of Jesus - the sermons, the parables,  the stories. The Sermon on the Mound,  the Good Samaritan, The Prodigal Son,  the story of the Adulteress. This is not because that is or should be obvious to any reader. That is because my mind informed by my heart can only make sense of much of the Bible - almost all of the Old Testament, and much of the New - by understanding it in light of this center. So far, I am also in the tradition. 

    In some moods, only those passages for me are Scripture. The Bible would cause less confusion and strife, I think, if it consisted of about 10 to 20 pages of Jesus' own words.  I think even that critical scholarship can be an aide here. There I am out of the tradition, out on a limb, I guess, though not alone there. Tolstoy also believed something like this. 

  In terms of understanding things literally, I think a handful of passages do make that demand on us: for example

“But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:43–44).

Literally, that means not demonizing or dehumanizing people considered to be enemies. (Can any current political regime do without demonizing some enemy?) But what does it mean to love your enemies? What does it mean to love a Trump? There not just your heart but your intellect must struggle to understand. And not only understand the words of Jesus, but reality - what an enemy is, who Trump is, etc. You can't separate faith and reason in real life.  

It's just a thought. 

Capitalist and Fascist Culture, Left and Right 

  Capitalist culture's attitudes toward the biological body may not indicate a rejection of simple biological facts like birth and death, but does seem to deny any link between such facts and what meanings may constitute our sense of self and world. It does seem committed to denying that anything inherent to the life of the flesh should condition any cultural understanding or norm regarding birth, sexuality, birth, death. Why do I think this? In this social form, it is not so much that our only access to nature is by means of “discourses,” but that nature is nothing but an "effect of discourse."  [You can substitute "narrative" or "construct" for "discourse" - same thing.] And discourses are all in some way implicated in the striving for power – that is, are potential moralities justifying some life forms, rejecting others. Thus if we want to live in a reality with 72 genders, we can. If we want to live in a reality in which Trump is a demigod and the rightful president, while the rest of the country is an evil swamp, we can. Constructing reality to suit your will. 

      What is real is relative to an individual or a group. It doesn't condition how we live; we are inclined to live this way or that way, choose to identify with this or that - and then tailor our constructs of reality to justify it. It doesn't make any sense within this culture to question your life choices - if choices they are - by referring them to an independent reality. Referring choices to reality is one discourse among others. Ultimately it is just a personal attack on your identity and lifestyle choices since there is no objective reality, at least outside of natural science and math (for some, not even there).

     Compare to Mussolini:

 

If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we Fascists conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable.

 

I think it is an essential feature of fascism that it denies reality (i.e. is insane) - that it denies reality in the deeper sense that it reduces all possible reality to human constructs and nothing more. The idea of non-reducible reality is itself a human construct. It does this in order to impose its fantasies of power and godlike omnipotence onto nature and human nature. Left fascism, right fascism, the same. Without reality as a measure and a limit, anything goes. 

      Reality comes down to what is intelligible to us, what ultimately makes sense.  In most cases, we have to understand reality, interpret it - like a book. Perhaps their are different readings of reality that are plausible. We can talk about these readings only with reference to the book, to reality. Our readings must make sense of the book, of reality.  We cannot impose our readings onto reality, as though it were an inkblot. Reality talks back to us if we would only stop and listen. 

 Meditation on Happiness and a Thought of J. S. Mill

Happiness is a mediocre concept. Why do I say such a thing? Aren’t I happy to be happy, and sad to be sad? Of course I am. But the important thing is whether my happiness, when I am happy, is worth anything; whether my sadness, when I am sad, is not a fault. Only the happiness of a truly good man matters, one who is happy doing precisely what love requires of him, living precisely as love would have him live. Which of us can say what should make us happy is not sometimes a burden, a duty. Which of us can say that we are not sad merely over the frustration of petty desires?  What does the happiness of a man like Trump matter? As J. S. Mill wrote: "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question.”

 

A profound concept. Aristotle argued that the point of all striving was eudaimonia, which has traditionally been translated (badly) as happiness. Thomas Jefferson made “the pursuit of happiness” – no longer Aristotle’s eudaimonia, but subjective happiness feelings and states of mind – a natural right. I’ve been reading about Kierkegaard’s crazy thought (in Philosophical Fragments) that God – a perfect being – could actually experience something like grief and unhappiness. He – from our perspective insanely – desired to be loved by his creature, man, a creature who did not know or understand him. Love cannot be commanded, although it is said to be the highest commandment to love God. We cannot love God in all God’s power and infinity – our being would simply be absorbed in worship and adoration by God’s infinitely higher being: the beatific vision. 

       Perhaps God doesn’t want our adoration and worship; he wants our love. He wants us to know him. To make it possible for us to love God, God had to descend, to enter time and flesh, to become one of us. God suffered for his love. God didn’t enter into our existence to make himself happy. From God, we learn that the point of all striving is not happiness – especially not the trivial sense of subjective happy-feeling (though I have nothing against that in general). The point of all striving, our quest so to speak, is love. I confess: this is crazy. And yet if I think a universe without a loving God, well, would I choose to be born into such a universe? 

   Yes, there is the Good. You feel it when some absolute limit confronts you: impossible for me to do that! Or not to do it! I see a gang beating up on someone weaker. As fat and old as I am now, I would have to intervene no matter what; I could not live with myself otherwise. Or the spontaneous joy over the birth of my child. Or the awe and wonder of really beholding and contemplating the starry sky. Etc. God or no God, I would say yes to a universe like that. But to hold such things to be real, I think they must have a source, cannot just be part of the furniture of the universe like atoms and molecules. These experiences force the concept of God as love on me, not that I really understand what that means. In any case, such experiences make or break one's attitude toward life, give life or death to the soul. They - or their absence - goes so much deeper than happiness - i.e. the state of mind that accompanies the fulfillment of my desires. Kili is happy when he gets the new toy he wanted. 

         Indeed, “God is love.” Love is the union of two distinct lives, transcending the distinct individuality of the lovers without destroying it, completing it rather. In the case of God and man, two radically unequal lives. Love is what makes possible the most profound judgment: good, wonderful that you exist! Love makes us glad of our own existence, which makes the true love of our own souls possible. Even in human terms, this is true: who would rather not be unhappy (in Jefferson’s presumed sense) ‘in’ love with the ones you love than happy ‘outside’ of love and apart? What kind of a soul could be happy alienated, cut off from the love of God and other human beings? What is such happiness worth?

 

 Two truisms. In the end, all unhappiness is frustrated love. All sin is a failure of love.

Conscience is a Mediocre Concept 

Interesting how the conscience is socially conditioned. I have learned that for many Muslim men living in Germany, leading a white woman on for a sexual relationship doesn't make a dent in their conscience. Wanting their own child aborted doesn't make a dent. Disobeying a father, even one who takes money from his children, causes a crisis of conscience. That is why he will always be haunted by disobeying the patriarch, not by an aborted child, not by  the woman he seduced. 

   Many Nazis acted according to a strong sense of duty, according to their conscience, as they committed the most vile acts. The slave master suffered no genuine remorse for raping his property in the form of a slave woman. He would not have found it intelligible to suffer remorse because the body and sexuality of an African he had already so demeaned the rape that it was beyond his imagination that it could be an object of love, of a gentle caress. He would have ridiculed someone who made the argument that his property was an intelligible object of sexual love.

      If conscience were the whole story, the human conscience would be nothing more than Freud's super-ego. Conscience can be conditioned by culture – or ideology (false consciousness) communicated through media, as in the case of MAGA, or many feminists when it comes to the unborn, or the Hamas terrorists and their counterparts in Israel, or (at a qualitatively different level of evil) the Nazis. Conscience can be colonialized. I could spend the rest of the decade making of list of people and groups who did evil with a good conscience: not people who rationalized the evil done to deceive their conscience; people who did evil with a pure conscience. Culture or propaganda can invade and take over the conscience. Brains can be hacked and the conscience hijacked. I put no faith in it.

         To matter morally, conscience must be informed by the real Good. How do we know the real Good? Conscience itself doesn't tell us. I guess God's commands as revealed in the Old Testament (variously and mostly opportunistically interpreted) for most protestants, as revealed in the Koran and Hadith for the Muslims, or as revealed in the Torah and Talmud for the Jews. Reason determines the Good for the philosopher (and I would agree if Reason includes hope, faith, and love).

   Aquinas makes the most sense to me on this. The will – conditioned by the virtues – must conform what a clear mind and a pure heart recognize as Good into a duty to respect or love.  Christ's supernatural love reveals the Good for the Catholic and Orthodox; God's love for the world - the Creation - reveals it (John 3:16). Even if you want to think of this a metaphorical, it points you in the right direction. To me, it is revealed in Jesus' parables, the prodigal son, the good Samaritan, and in his compassion for the adulteress for example. Without love, there is no real Good. The Good is revealed in and through love. Jesus said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." An implication of that could be “where your love is, there will your conscience be also.” It’s love that does all the work. The good is what can be loved by a clear mind and a pure heart.        

    Needless to say, our human hearts and minds are to a greater or lesser extent darkened by injustice and sin; by fantasy, sentimentality, and the narcissism of the damaged, alienated ego . We are for much of our lives creatures living out fantasies - some of our own making, but usually emanating from some power complex. Our failures are failures of love, and failures of love happen because fantasy replaces a clear mind and a pure heart i.e. replaces Reason: that which apprehends reality and thus the Good, through thought and feeling. 

      But that which is in itself lovable – or beautiful (a kind of love) – is like the Northern Star or a compass for the conscience. I think the best most of us can do is start with our children - some can't even love their children but only sentimental fantasies of children. But for those who can love their children, imagine others - including those desperate people seeking not just a better life but survival at our southern border - as someone's child, as held by Christ, as a loving God's children. ["I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." - see Matthew 25:40-45] Even if you think of it as a metaphor, that works better than abstractions. Perhaps the first act is the steadfast refusal to reduce and demean other people, especially those you think of as "enemies." (There was a reason why Christ told us quite literally to love our enemies - not to like them, but to love them, to will their good, to pray for them: not to reduce them to orcs or liberals.) 

 

 Do we love it because it is good, or is it good because we love it? Indeed, the good is only revealed through love – at a minimum through it being intelligible that someone could love it even if I can’t. But if our loving it alone made it good, then good would have no reality. The Good is the real. Evil is a corruption or perversion of that which is real (as the Christian tradition teaches). Therefore loving it alone does not make it good. Through love, the deepest aspects of reality accessible to us are disclosed. We can only know our children, for example, through loving them. Outside of love, their reality remains hidden from view. 

see my entry from November 22, 2023

 Hamlet and Horatio

     Any attempt to limit what can possibly count as real by means of a metaphysical theory is bound to be reductive. There are either “more things in heaven and earth (i.e., in reality) than are dreamed of in your philosophies (i.e. including science).” Or: there are fewer things that we take for real: this seems to be the consequence of making a metaphysical philosophy out of the axioms and methods of natural science. For example, if all events involved agents consisting of matter-energy, and all things consisting of matter-energy are subject to the laws of cause and effect, then reality is denied to human freedom and to spiritual phenomena. Even something as fundamental to humanity as love or courage would be reduced to caused events of matter-energy, subject to the same kind of explanation of the orbit of the planets of the freezing of water. Another possibility broadens the second to include into the real other phenomena we can explain in human, worldly terms. 

        The first possibility seems true: there is the fact of mystery: why anything exists rather than nothing, why exactly this universe and not another, what exists beyond our sensory and cognitive limitations; the feeling of amazement over the beauty of the earth or the eyes of a beloved person; the sublime vastness of the universe, of some music, of Shakespeare and Dante…. The first option leaves open fundamental mystery, all so many of our most important experiences and insight presuppose Mystery. Reality as such, Being imagined as a limited whole, can never be one factual state-of-affairs among others. The second possibility reduces the fundamental Mystery into a Sherlock Holmes type mystery: there seem to be phenomena that science cannot explain; it is like a detective game to find the scientific explanation that do not so much explain these phenomena as explain them away, showing that only what science can investigate is real and in need of explanation.  Like in Star Trek (or Scooby Doo) – the apparently magical or divine always had a scientific explanation. I grew up thinking there was a scientific explanation to everything because of Star Trek.  Spock was my hero. Believe only what the scientific evidence supports, nothing more, and have faith that there is always a scientific explanation, which is to say have faith that all of reality without remainder is scientifically explainable.

        The third possibility – the Real is the rational and the rational is the Real – also leaves no space for Mystery. While more inclusive than reductionism, this “humanism” denies the reality of the sublime, the transcendent, which the first possibility leaves open. And that also makes it reductive, given that a border to drawn between the world and the other-worldly, although some phenomena just are other-worldly – Jesus’ actions to save the adulterous from stoning can be explained in worldly terms, but that would miss the essence of the action, for example. Metaphysics (or ontology) is a conception of Being as a limited whole, from the point of view of eternity as it were, which we can only access through imagination and our deepest core emotion-and-thought pregnant moments of most intense life. (A terrible mistake to think of

metaphysics as a dry logical or pseudo-scientific exercise in abstract thought.)

       Indeed it seems a blessing that we cannot know reality as such. A true metaphysical theory would tend to be dogmatic and totalitarian. We know how the Catholic Middle Ages, which believed themselves for long periods of their history to be in possession of such a theory, dealt with dissenters. A parallel case existed in the countries of real-existing socialism in the 20th century. [The metaphysical significance of the Hamlet quote was pointed out to me by Peter Kreeft in The Philosophy of Tolkien.]

Response to Sabine Hossenfelder on Free Will

 Here is the link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI5FMj5D9zU&t=321s

   Very interesting presentation! Is this a valid criticism of the basic argument? I put this forward in fear and trembling, having admired your logical prowess in many other videos.

   The basic assumption of the argument is that reality – absolutely, not just an aspect of nature, nature as it reveals itself to physics – is a closed, deterministic system. Not only physically, but metaphysically. What makes sense as an axiomatic assumption in physics – it yields interesting results – may or may not make sense as a metaphysical interpretation of reality as a whole. I agree that free will (in any meaningful definition) is incompatible with nature as a deterministic system – and therefore, with physics. The area of disagreement is over whether physics is not only valid as science – if I doubted that, I wouldn’t be here; I love physics – but whether science also provides us with a metaphysical interpretation of reality as such.

   The assumption that reality as a whole, in an absolute sense, is a closed system is not a possible scientific proposition. No experiment could prove it. No logical-mathematical proof could establish its soundness. The assumption that reality is not a closed system (e.g. the “strong emergence” view) is also not a scientific proposition for the same reason. It is an attempt to make sense of our experience of the world: the experience of being responsible for our actions, of being amazed over the goodness of certain people and actions, horrified over the evil that exists, of loving – find a person or a place good (‘good that you exist!), of being self-conscious (my particles change but the form of my particles show a kind of unity and I am conscious of it). I could go on. I don’t see how any conceptual space for the genuine experience of love, meaning, goodness, beauty, or freedom can exist in a closed system. Or rather, our experience of love, meaning, goodness, beauty, or freedom could reveal nothing about the world (or ourselves) if we in advance adopt a theory of determinism.

   I think such things reveal a deeper level of reality than physics can, as much as I love physics. The lived experience of all these spiritual qualities is powerful evidence that at some level determinism does not apply but our inner lives emerge, like Bach’s music emerges from the physics of sound; the fugue does not violate the laws of physics but it is qualitatively different and cannot be reduced to the latter. Physics is blind to the reality of the fugue.  (No I don’t think this implies a ghost in my machine; it does imply that my body is not a machine, or at least that it is more than a machine.)

    Equating all of Being to the closed systems studied by natural science is a possible, logically consistent version of the world. But to adopt it, if it makes sense to you, then you will have to reinterpret much of our experiential lives. When most of us say, for example, “The earth is beautiful”, we do not mean ‘when I see a picture of the earth my brain, following algorithms, produces a certain response in my organism, and we call that beauty.’ This is subject to further reductions until we get to the right equations. No, when we say the earth is beautiful we mean the earth is beautiful, really. The deterministic world interpretation reduces our experience to other categories – equations in the end. Our biographies could be translated without remainder into equations. Etc. It's like we lived in a Matrix. As though we must subject all experience to doubt and radical reinterpretation to see the world right: like we correct our experience of the sun rising.  Only one class of experience, science, reveals the world as it really is. I don’t really love my children, at least not in the common meaning of love; I am programmed by evolution, which reduces to particle physics, to behave and feel in certain ways about them, all things being equal. Same with the grief when a parent loses a child. I can’t refute that reductionism because to refute it we would have to get out of determinism and my common-sense worldview (“folk metaphysics”) and compare our versions of the world to the world as it is in itself, undescribed, unperceived, unconceptualized.

     You quoted Wittgenstein, perhaps the most powerful critic of reductionism in metaphysics. Philosophy leaves the world as it is. The urge to reduce it, to make one practice, science, epistemologically absolute, is the problem here, as I see it.

     Believing in reality as a closed system is no less an act of faith – of what makes sense – than my belief that at a certain level of complexity, determinism doesn’t apply. That all of reality conforms to one human epistemological construction, even one that gives us such power over nature, is a breathtaking leap of faith.

     I agree many conceptions of free will don’t make sense. We are never absolutely free – we are conditioned by our culture, our families, and much more, no doubt. But the kind of causality and determinism that makes sense in physics doesn’t make sense in a courtroom, for example, or in a family. As a physicist trying to understand nature, I can understand how determinism makes sense. But when the physicist leaves the laboratory, I can’t imagine how it can make sense without turning the world upside down.

       

 

 Loose Reflections on Representative (or Indirect) Democracy

    Direct democracy is not a good idea, except for very specific questions. But it is always a risk to entrust questions of fundamental importance to the people – in a referendum, say, Brexit being one glaring example. Representative democracy, or indirect democracy, however, is worthless if the representatives do nothing but vote according to public opinion polls – or much worse, special interest lobbying, a form of legalized corruption – or even worse, representatives who just do whatever Trump wants them to, no matter how toxic for the country.

  The criteria to vote for a representative should be emphasized in education. Above all competence – a person of independent judgment, experience, and virtuous character (wisdom, self-restraint, justice, courage). This means that a representative must be willing to lose the next election if necessary. There is little a political process can do to guarantee only competent, virtuous representatives will govern. You can take away all the corruption – legal and illegal – by getting the money and lobbying out of the system: elections should be publicly financed; instead of TV ads designed to pull emotional strings, only rational debates with competent moderation and editorial pieces in newspapers and magazines. Books of course. And speeches. This presupposes an enlightened public, which is not given in any current liberal democracy, though some are closer to it than others. This also presupposes a sense of community, which alone can give people a deeper sense of who they choose to represent their interests. There must be a healthy political culture if there is to be good representation, and this is sadly missing. The growing of a healthy political culture is paramount. Actually, if there were a healthy political culture and an enlightened public, the arguments against direct democracy would be correspondingly weakened.

   In Germany, the problem of competent representation is dealt with by the party system. The parties select their list of candidates based on internal criteria – political promise, character, intelligence, etc. (ideally). If elected to the Bundestag (Parliament), they are assigned to committees – foreign policy or military policy, for example – where they acquire expertise and experience. It’s like starting to work for a company. You get promoted if you show ability (or have good connections). By the time you reach the top policy-making positions, you will have usually already proven yourself over time. For example, the current minister of the health system, Dr. Karl Lauterbach,

 

Curriculum vitae

Born in Düren on 21 February 1963, career: university professor.

1982-1989: Medical studies at the RWTH Aachen, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, University of Texas San Antonio (USA), (PhD in Medicine).

1987: Research residency at the University of Arizona, Tucson (mentor: Prof. Dennis Patton).

1985 to 1990 PhD in Medicine at the Institute for Nuclear Medicine of the nuclear research facility in Jülich (mentor: Professor Ludwig Feinendegen).

1989-1990: Master of Public Health (MPH) at the Harvard School of Public Health focusing on Epidemiology, and Health Policy and Management.

1990-1992: Master of Science in Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.

1992-1995: Doctor of Science in Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health (mentors: Professor Marc Roberts and Professor Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences).

1992: Fellowship in Ethics and the Professions at Harvard University (Director: Professor Applbaum)

1993: Fellowship at Harvard Medical School’s Division of Medical Ethics (Director: Professor Lynn Peterson).

Since 1996: Guest lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

Since 1998: Director of the Institute for Health Economics and Clinical Epidemiology of the Medical Faculty of the University of Cologne.

C4 professorship offers from the Ernst Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald and the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen.

Since 2008: Adjunct Professor at the Department of Health Policy and Management of the Harvard School of Public Health.

Main research focus: Primary and secondary prevention of chronic disease, in particular disease management of diabetes mellitus, hypertension, COPD, and hypercholesterinaemia. Health economics and health policy.

1999 until 2005: Member of the Advisory Council on the Assessment of Developments in the Health Care System.

2003: Member of the Commission on Sustainable Financing of the Social Security Systems (Rürup Commission). Member of the SPD Cologne Programme Committee.

2004: Member of the SPD Party Executive’s working group on citizens’ insurance.

Since 2005: Member of the Bundestag, on leave from his post as the Director of the Institute for Health Economics and Clinical Epidemiology of the Medical Faculty of the University of Cologne. (In his absence, Professor Stephanie Stock is Acting Director).

2013-2019: Deputy parliamentary party leader of the SPD.

Since December 2021: Federal Minister of Health.

  

  Note that he only became a minister after years of experience making law in the Bundestag and within his party. Of course, other parties disagree with many of his policies. He is not popular among the doctors. But no one can doubt his qualifications. His personality and policies are well known. Disagreements with him are like two accomplished pianists disagreeing over how to perform the end of a Bach piece than between an accomplished pianist and an amateur like myself over the same subject. We have very few such qualified people in Congress, and why should we? Congress is not responsible for making policy, though they do have the power to wreck policy and leave the country without a policy – as is the case currently with Ukraine support, immigration policy, and many other issues.

  And of course, in the German system, the Bundestag produces the government. Should the SPD (Lauterbach’s party) not be part of the next election, Lauterbach would still be in the Bundestag and take part in debates about policy as a critic. These debates – ideally – would contribute to the political education of the citizens. Unfortunately, few citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany follow the discussions in the Bundestag. They – like everywhere – increasingly tend to get their news from Instagram or whatever. The public media does regularly cover Bundestag debates, however.

   Since our Congress does not make policy but only approves or disapproves the policies of the executive – or make deals with the executive to secure their approval – discussions, such as they are, have a very different quality. The fact that Congress has only this negative role reduces the need for expertise. At present, our Congress is so dysfunctional – a ground for shame.  But that is connected with the structure of our government: a debating society with the power to reject policy or make acceptance conditional on all kinds of things (concessions to big Pharmacy to the oil industry to the political needs of a certain congressman to the will of Trump) – that is so unworkable; only representatives of amazing character could overcome it, but how our representatives get chosen has nothing to do with the way Karl Lauterbach was. Money is usually all important, and of course public persona, which is a function of media access.

    The German system tends to produce better representatives because of the discipline imposed by the party system. To advance a representative is beholden to the party – not special financial interests or media access. Anything human is imperfect however: we have some fine representatives (too few) and there are some idiots in the Bundestag. But overall the Parliamentary system with the parties governing produces better representatives. I suppose the disadvantage is that party discipline means that policy decisions are made at the top; for a lower-level legislator to reject the policy decisions of their party leadership means an end to their political career. This is not necessarily bad: policy is made by the most experienced, the most proven. But every system needs the occasional maverick to buck it.

 

Parties in the Federal Republic of German and the United States

    I would like to have a system without parties, in which a representative was elected for their competence and character. But that requires a level of enlightenment and investment of time on the part of the voters that is utopian in the current society. In Germany, people vote for parties first, personalities second if at all – under normal circumstances. The general orientation of the parties is well-known enough for people to cast their vote without the kind of investment of time my party-less idea would require.

   Germany uses a mixed-member proportional representation system, which allows for a greater diversity of political parties to be represented in the national parliament (Bundestag). This system encourages the formation of coalition governments, as no single party typically wins an outright majority of seats. In contrast, the United States primarily employs a first-past-the-post electoral system for congressional elections, which tends to favor a two-party system. 

   German political culture places a strong emphasis on consensus-building and compromise, particularly due to the proportional representation system and the prevalence of coalition governments. German parties are often more ideologically disciplined, and there is generally a higher level of trust in political institutions compared to the United States. American political culture, on the other hand, tends to be more adversarial and polarized, with a focus on winner-takes-all elections and ideological purity within parties.

    Since the American system is a winner-take-all, we have only two parties. Within the two parties – before Trump – different groupings would have their own parties in Germany. For example, within the Democratic Party, there are so-called progressives, that are close to the Social Democratic Party or the Green Party in Germany. And you have liberals who are more friendly toward the corporate economy – like Clinton and Obama. Our system forces them into the same bed, which can become quite uncomfortable for the one or the other.  Sometimes compromises are made to ensure harmony going into an election – Biden was certainly moved to the left by the progressives, pissing off many “moderate” (hilarious ideology) Democrats like Joe Manchin. This is like the Social Democrats having to work out compromises with the Greens to form a government. In the German case, the compromises are worked out after the election, and the agreements are like a governing contract that is public. But Green voters don’t have to stomach voting for the SPD and vice-versa.

    Again, in my ideal of party-less candidates, the working out of compromises would be so complex as to be unworkable. Parties seem to be a necessary evil. German political parties tend to have a more centralized and hierarchical structure compared to American parties. Decision-making within German parties often involves party leaders and officials at the national level, with a strong influence from party headquarters. In contrast, American parties often have a more decentralized structure, with considerable autonomy given to state and local party organizations – i.e. less control over who is elected, who advances, etc. – and more beholden to private sources of money. When representatives represent corporate or billionaire class interests, we can no longer speak of indirect democracy. Indirect Plutocracy would be a better term, and that is where we increasingly were going in my home country. There has been under Biden hopeful movement in Democratic Party to correct this. 

 

    In the end, while the structure of a political process is important, it all comes down to how healthy is the pollical (democratic) culture; how enlightened are the voters; how competent and virtuous are the candidates. Political systems that encourage or make difficult these things, but not guarantee them. A democracy is only as good as its voters and representatives.