Interesting Times

[f4f3]

I took an afternoon off today to go off and do some professional development. Given my perilous position as a consultant, I don't get paid for time off, and consequently take such things seriously
This afternoon's session was at Oran Mor, just round the corner from home, and I thought, "hell, at least I can stay on afterwards and get pished, even if the session is crap."

It turned out not to be crap:

Professor Barry Schwartz turned out to be a very savvy chappie. I'd read and enjoyed his paper on "The Tyranny of Choice", and agree with many of his conclusions that once you go beyond a certain level of choice it becomes a burden rather than an opportunity, but I hadn't had time to do much more than skim his new work on Practical Wisdom and, for want of a better word, the remoralisation of the professions. I can't say I agreed with everything that he said, but it certainly made sure that I'll be searching this out again, for the first time in 25 year.

There was much chat afterwards in Oran Mor's beer garden, then Marie and I went and got pished. So it all worked out fine, then.

Comments

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

I am truly, truly, truly not trying to proselytise. But if you're going to be thinking about ethics in society, you could do a lot worse than The Sermon on the Mount.

It's also a fascinating exercise in system dynamics. How did the man whose credo is 'turn the other cheek' become the figurehead for this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectarian_violence#Northern_Ireland), this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westboro_Baptist_Church), et cetera?

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

I do have thoughts on this, and the Sermon on the Mount in particular, and I'll reply in a good bit of depth when I've had some sleep.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

Strangely enough, this isn’t the first time The Sermon on the Mount has come up in the last week, and the context explains a lot about my views on ethics, spirituality and religion.
As a guide to individual spiritual practice, the Sermon has few matches. The advice on guarding your thoughts and feelings as well as your actions was a revelation and a guide for me.
As a system of ethics, it’s damn near faultless.
As a tool of religion, it amounts to little more than a divine injunction to sit the hell down and shut the hell up, or you won’t get any dinner.
 
Maybe that needs a little explanation. Interior practice is very, very important to me. I find a lot of inspiration for that in Eastern thought, and in the teachings of individuals.
Ethics, also, are very important to me. Ethics do not need to be based on spiritual practice, but they do need to be based on wisdom, and spirituality can be the basis of wisdom. Not all wisdom comes from spirituality – I’m a great believer in empiricism, and you can find most of what I believe about deriving a system of ethics in the work of David Hume. Ethics are important to me because I see them as the foundation of codes of laws, and I view law as the protection of the good and weak from the strong and evil (very little protection is needed from the weak and evil, or the strong and good). Not all laws need to be based on ethics, but all good laws do.
Religion I can take or leave alone, in that I can see them as producing good or evil. In the western world (the only one I have meaningful experience of) religions tend to accumulate capital, become institutionalised, and identify and act as conservative forces. I don’t condemn religion unreservedly, even in the narrow sense that I’ve experienced it. I can see social benefits from religion in terms of mutual support for believers. I can even see that where they operate in alignment with their spiritual origin they are capable of bringing benefits to those outside their congregation (although this is obviously fraught with dangers – the role of British chaplains in the Indian Mutiny/Uprising, the support offered to Franco by the Catholic church, collective blindness to the plight of Jewish refugees – the set of evils perpetuated by organised religions is not infinite, but it is large).
To return to The Sermon, where we started, I’ve heard the argument that you will be rewarded for poverty and powerlessness in this world with everlasting life in the next repeatedly, and, strangely, it’s rarely an argument deployed by the poor and the powerless.
 
In summary then, I very much admire the Sermon on the Mount, and I’m not a great fan of how its teachings have been employed by the religion originally inspired by its author.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

I don't think I disagree with any of this.

Thing is, I don't get to pick the context. We're here. The only bit I get to pick is what I'm going to do.

There are lots of good valid strategies. Fighting the system is absolutely one of them. There are many ways to do this and many people I admire who've done it, successfully or not. But it's a very, very hard spiritual path to walk and many people on that path lose their way.

And, actually, I do disagree with one thing you've written - this: I’ve heard the argument that you will be rewarded for poverty and powerlessness in this world with everlasting life in the next repeatedly, and, strangely, it’s rarely an argument deployed by the poor and the powerless.

Actually that's not necessarily true. I think many of the world's humblest people really are among the happiest and most free, because they take this route. This does not mean it's okay that their worldly conditions are so inequitable. It's a different level of problem.

But for the individual who wishes to lead a spiritual life - even, I would argue, the individual who wishes to lead a happy life - I still think this is the surest route.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

I think there is a fundamental divide between us on this that relates to the acceptance of and submission to a higher power. I have no real problem with the existence of a higher power. It's always seemed an irrelevance to me - either god doesn't exist, and, while I don't know this for a fact I'm pretty much certain that it's the case, or he does exist, and I wouldn't give him the time of day until he answered a few pointed questions.
I do have a problem with the submission part.
Thus, "I think many of the world's humblest people are really amongst the happiest and most free" is an interesting statement. Are you choosing humble to mean of poor personal circumstances? I originally read it as the state of mind.
I like the fact that you see your route as the surest way to a happy life (and if you didn't it wouldn't make much sense to follow it) but that you see it as only one route. That's a view that didn't have much currency in the Christianity of my childhood.
It is very interesting that I see religion as an instrument of control, and you see it as a path to happiness. The divide, as I say, seems to be pretty fundamental, and I wonder how much relates to our upbringing.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

But SotM really isn't about God. It's about how to be with man in the world.

I think there is a compelling argument that says 'the problem with living in peace with your fellow man is that it's implicitly accepting profound injustice, and your overriding moral duty is to fight'. I don't agree with it, but I think it's compelling.

Here's why I don't agree with it, which is what I was trying to get at above.

(1) I think that path is spiritually and morally high-risk and you need a certain kind of character strength to walk it, which many people (certainly including me) do not have. Many times we see people who start in this place and end up taken over by anger or desire for control or the conviction that they are right at all costs, and this contributes to the original problem or creates new ones.

(2) There is an implicit assumption that I do not buy, which is that the only way to change the system is to fight it. I think it's Gandhi who said 'be the change you want to see in the world'? There's a subtext that humility and acceptance are somehow the same as submission, and I don't buy that. It's possible to live by the tenets of the Sermon on the Mount and still be outspoken against injustice - in fact, it's mandated, because it's part of telling the truth. (And, yes, I absolutely agree that humility is a state of mind.)

Other stuff.

From what you wrote in your last-but-one comment, I don't think I see religion all that differently from you (although I might well be wrong about this because you and I clearly do often use language differently). I see it in exactly the same way as I see sex or the Internet - something that is in the hands of man, rather than God, and therefore has as many instantiations as there are people. To say 'religion is good' or 'religion is bad' is a nonsense statement to me. It can lead to transcendent miracles of grace and also appalling tragedy and abuse of power, and these things can both happen very effectively in the absence of religion as well. It is a man-made construct.

I distinguish religion from God. The ostensible purpose of religion, and certainly one of its genuine purposes in society (although I agree that at a systemic level there are others) is to provide a structure to help people approach God. As it happens, that structure works for me. Others' mileage varies. But I do not think religion is a path to happiness. I think that leading a spiritual life is a path to happiness and I think that doing good in the world is a path to happiness.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

I'll have to give this some thought, but I suspect we agree pretty much completely on spirituality, and happiness, and that I have more problems with religion than you do.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

I have a lot of problems with religion. I think I'm better off in my relationship with God with religion than without it (although I might be wrong), but I still have a lot of problems.

Having said that, I don't think it always deserves the press it gets from liberals. For example, I think the contribution of religion to community is often overlooked.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

Just to be clear, I am totally playing for the liberal team anyway.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

As I said way up there somewhere, I greatly admire SoTM as guidance on living with man, and I'd hate you to think that I didn't. My difficulty is with religion, not with spirituality.

I also agree greatly with the dangers of taking up any sort of arms against injustice. For one thing, it reminds me too much of the old adage that fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity, and for another there is a very fine line between righteousness and self-righteousness, and I don't particularly trust myself on that tightrope.

Just to clarify one small point, though, and that is on submission. I didn't mean to talk about submission to an Earthly power, but to a Heavenly one.

"I see it in exactly the same way as I see sex or the Internet - something that is in the hands of man, rather than God, and therefore has as many instantiations as there are people. To say 'religion is good' or 'religion is bad' is a nonsense statement to me."

I wish I could agree completely with you here. Unfortunately, context is all. I'm not talking about a one person - one religion mapping here. I'm not even talking about the hundreds of organised religions that are beyond my direct experience (the most transcendent religious experience I've had by far was at a city sacred to Hindus) I'm talking about direct experience of the religions of the book, and in particular of Christianity, since we started from SoTM and its appropriation by the church. I'd never say that religion is bad, I think there is a case to be made that a church is bad, in the way it uses a particular religion.
As Tom Waits sings somewhere, "You say that it's Gospel, but I know that it's only Church."

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

"For example, I think the contribution of religion to community is often overlooked."
There are a lot of cheap shots I could take at that statement, but I actually agree that in some places, and in some communities, that is a good thing.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

A statement I heard from a Chief Rabbi of a few decades ago, ran along the lines that "A religion that asks nothing is worth nothing." I still like that.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

I'm really glad you came back and said more about this here. I thought your Communism post was in part a response to this debate but that didn't seem like the right place to respond.

I'm pretty sure we've just reached the point where we see stuff fundamentally differently and we should just say 'okay, that's fine' and stop.

So I'm really not trying to change your mind and get you to see things my way, really not.

But I do think it's more complicated than you say.

Yes, I agree that there is a system effect. It's not sufficient to say 'some Christians enact doctrine in a way that's valuable and some in a way that's harmful'. Some of this is a numbers game - if 90% of priests, say, do the former then you probably have a system that's primarily causing harm, and vice versa. (Actually I don't think we can gauge that.) Some of it is an open systems thing - in a culture that is grasping for certainties, for example, or starving, Christianity (or any other religion) will land differently from a prosperous first-world country that's been through the Enlightenment.

But some of it is beyond additive synthesis. Justin (http://twitter.com/justinbrett) tweeted from Synod that '80% of primary healthcare in developing countries provided by Christian organisations'. Assuming its truth - which I don't know - that is a statement that is subject to more than one interpretation. For me to use it in an argument that 'Christianity is a force for good in the world' would be insufficient. We don't know the conditions under which this takes place and we can't therefore deconstruct it. We just don't know.

I don't think your argument is sufficient to generalise either. Some instances of the Christian church use religion as a tool of social or political oppression. Others use it to help people lead very rich spiritual lives and be of social service. Even if you could calculate the numbers - and we can't - we can't gauge the effect.

If we look back at Christianity and the world, in a hundred years, we might find ourselves saying that the conservative social policies of the RC church led to massive overpopulation, spread of AIDS, retardation of emanciation and high social cost. Or we might say that the Church's leadership on environmental issues in the US - led by Rick Warren, who is in general not the sort of person for whom I'd expect to have very much time - made a qualitative difference to our approach to climate change.

I just don't think we can judge a whole system from our experience of it, ever.

Would you be okay for me to turn this conversation into a post, if I email it to you first so that you can edit as you see fit?

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

No problem at all with the posting - I will respond to this, of course. Not because either of us is trying to convert the other (to which part of me instantly responds, "Why the hell not?") but for the pleasure of extending the dialogue.