The Right Side of History?

Quite often these days I’ve heard someone claim that they, or their political party, is “on the right side of history.” 

I’m afraid that this bit of bluster conceals the truth: There is no right side of history.

First, there is certainly no short-term right side of history. Having lived a short 65 years I’ve seen my own life, country, and world change directions so many times that every prediction about the right side of history over the short term is at best unreliable.

On a longer scale there are three contemporary basis for claiming that history has a right side and that some people and movements are on it and some aren’t. 

The oldest claim, based on some form of revelation, is that God (or some sort of divinity)  created the universe with an inexorable purpose, and continually guides it according to that purpose. If you knows that purpose you can be on the right side of history, 

The problem with this model is that among those who claim to understand God’s purposes there is intense disagreement concerning just what God wants. To claim, while holding a minority view of the correct interpretation of scripture (and they are all minority views) that one is “on the right side of history” goes beyond bluster to arrogance. 

Other religions such as Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism also have multiple variations on whether and in which direction history moves, and in none is there a single widely accepted answer. Even the idea of a final judgement, shared by Christians, Muslims, and Jews is subject to multiple temporal and eschatological variations.

A second claim to know the right side of history comes from the assertion that the world is progressing along certain historically discernible lines. The leaders of the American and French revolutions believed they had discerned these lines, as did Karl Marx and eventually the Communists. The problem with this claim is twofold. First, if Tom Holland in Dominion is correct then all of these are just variations on some form of Christian eschatology rooted in the wider culture of Christendom that preceded modernity. But even if these modern interpretations of history broke free of their cultural heritage they are sufficiently contradictory as to call the whole project of finding an arc of history into question. 

The third possibility is that the direction of history is determined by the purely natural causes characterized by scientific theories of evolution. 

Initially evolutionary theory seemed almost completely antithetical to the high ideals of progress found in the revolutionary movements of the 18th and 19th century. Survival of the fittest seemed to imply the inevitable triumph of the strong over the weak and a process of human history characterized by continual conflict over the control of resources. The peaceable kingdom dreamed of by religious people was definitely the wrong side of history, as were the egalitarian dreams of the founding fathers. 

Science has now taught us that nature is a complex system made of complex subsystems all possessing degrees of equilibrium and change. The equations that characterize this change are non-linear, making prediction of future changes impossible. What we do know from the study of the past is that the fittest in one situation (like dinosaurs) can quickly become extinct, replaced by others more suited to the ever changing system. Species that hold within their gene pool the greatest diversity of potential paths forward will be the survivors in the long run.

Diversity, as it happens, is a key survival characteristic of both species, eco-systems and societies. Under the right circumstances the weakest and most marginal may be the key to the future for the strongest and most central. Maybe. 

Because history in evolutionary theory is much like a mutual fund; past performance is no guarantee of future success. All it takes is a meteorite or a virus to change the course of history and rewrite the evolutionary list of the survivors and the extinct. 

As a result, to get to the present we humans must always rewrite the past, keeping historians and scientists always in business. The arc of history must be constantly redrawn, as indeed it always has been. The objective evidence shows us only this: humans have learned to value those things which help us to survive. Then when we survive we attribute to history the affirmation of our values, calling it progress. The only thing that puts you on the right side of history is living long enough to write it.

The view that humans determine the future by their choices, and calculate its arc by constantly recalibrating the effects of those choices may seem antithetical to Christian tradition. It is not, although choosing the Christian alternative is purely a matter of faith. 

The teaching of scripture, the key teaching from God for Christians, is that we humans have been put in charge of three things: the care of the natural world, the development of our social world, and the writing of its history. In short: making history and writing history. The first two were bequeathed to Adam, and the third to the prophets. God reveals God’s self as the judge of our efforts, not the doer of our work. 

There isn’t an arc from Eden to the New Jerusalem, only human decisions sometimes faithful to God’s calling and sometimes not. The End described in the Bible isn’t the conclusion of a logical progression. It is a sudden intrusion of a force more powerful than either comet or virus, with the assurance that no one will know the day and hour when it will come. God redeems history, we write it.

We live in the meantime. It is the time in which God has charged us to bend history to our will with the caveat that if we wish to survive God’s will must be our own. Be fruitful and multiply, essentially survival, is our only mitzvoth. We already know enough to know that the few signposts toward survival God has revealed continue to serve remarkably well, but only if, in our making and writing of history, we continue to take note of them. 

For now, if you ask who is on the right side of history well, I am. At least until I become history, or at least hopefully a couple of good anecdotes at the wake.

Moral Convictions - the Wrong Start in Human Relations

Recently on the PBS show "Hidden Brain” they discussed recent research on moral convictions. What research shows is that psychologically these moral convictions are seen as facts, objective facts in the world, even though if the person holding them could step back they could see that they are subjective states of mind.  

But the problem isn’t merely that we see moral convictions as objective facts. We associate our own moral character with upholding our moral convictions.  Thus, if someone disputes our moral convictions they are equally calling into question our moral character.   If they cannot be convinced to agree with us, at the very least we have a deep psychological need to remove them from our presence in order to maintain our psychic balance. Or we need to remove ourselves from their presence.  Either way, the emotion associated with this need to move apart from somebody is hatred.  The person who disputes our moral convictions is a person that to some degree we have a psychological need to hate. 

Of course any Christian can see that  the psychology of moral convictions demonstrated through scientific tests and reasoning comes into direct conflict with the command of Christ that we love one another without reserve. But to fully understand how we can learn to love and include those who do not share our moral convictions we need to talk about the Bible, and some rather unfortunate history. 

Part of the long story of the Hebrew Bible, our Christian Old Testament, is a story of how the Hebrew people became more and more aware of the breadth and diversity of God’s love. By the time we reach the 8th century prophets we have learned, with Israel, that God’s love and concern for humans is truly universal. In Amos chapter 9 God reminds Israel that Divine guidance not only led Israel out of Egypt, but the Philistines out of  Caphtor and the Arameans out of Kir. Whether in blessing or judgment Israel has no special place. 

In the Psalms, in Isaiah, in Malachi we find the same affirmations not only that God cares for all humanity, but that all humanity in some way worships and honors God. 

This idea, hinted at poetically when Psalm 87 asserts that all the peoples have their birthplace in Zion comes to its fulfillment in the universality of inclusion found in the teaching of Jesus. He not only finds faith among the nations of the earth, the universal impact of his death and resurrection breaks down the last barrier between righteous and unrighteousness. All, are saved when he is lifted up above the earth, and he draws all people to himself. 

Unfortunately at a fairly early stage in its history our Christian community turned away from the trajectory that began when Abraham was called to be a blessing to all the families of the earth and the apostles were send to the ends of the earth. 

By its second and third century the church, instead of focusing on the breadth of God’s love began obsessing over who was saved and why. Rightfully eschewing the divisions Paul so clearly decried the church instead focused on new divisions:  between the baptized and unbaptized, between those who held orthodox beliefs and those who didn’t. 

In Christ there may be neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free. But for the emerging Catholic Church there was certainly a difference between the saved and the damned, or the orthodox, the heretics, the apostates, and the pagans. The old categories that might have divided the nascent Christian church in the time Paul were replaced by new categories suited to an empire, a civilization. Everything was based on whether you were baptized or not, whether you held the right beliefs or not. The practice of damning the pagans and anathematizing fellow Christians became a Christian habit.  

These new divisions were complimented, if we may use the word, by a hierarchical view of the created order drawn from the Genesis account of creation and neo-Platonism. Paul’s poetic vision aside, his own hierarchical understanding of the orderliness of God’s creation eventually justified the perpetuation of social hierarchies as exclusive as any in the pagan world. 

Nor were these finally overcome by Enlightenment egalitarianism and universalism, which the church fought tooth and nail. Instead Enlightenment Christians like Schlieremacher would devise their own hierarchies, now all quite scientific. And in the United States emerging scientific theories of race were readily read back into biblical accounts of ethnic distinctions to justify the enslaving of Africans.  The mark of Cain, the descendants of Ham, were blessed with forced conversion and then cursed with slavery. 

The result of all this is that contemporary Christian church inherited a dearth of traditional resources for comprehending diversity of its world in its emerging forms. And it is thus ill-equipped to realize in its life, or the larger life of society, the inclusiveness that is the natural result of the universality of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ. 

Instead, and indeed despite a century of ecumenism, differences in belief quickly devolve into differences between the saved and the damned, and a diversity of cultures and customs is all too quickly mapped onto the distinction between the righteous and the unrighteous.  

And this brings us directly to what I spoke about earlier in terms of moral convictions. The traditional church has imbued us with a set of moral convictions, and indeed a moral order, that only grudgingly makes way for genuine diversity and inclusion. 

But we do have a resource and that resource is Jesus Christ and his teaching. It takes little effort when one reads of the conflicts between Jesus and the teachers of the law to see a new revelation that actually interrogates moral convictions. That is what Jesus does with great consistency - he questions the moral convictions by which the Jews of his day lived, and loved, or hated. 

Even the disciples of Jesus are sometime aghast at his breaking of conventional moral codes, whether in conversing with the woman at the well or mixing with the unclean and uncouth. 

In our time Jesus is the one who leads us into the questioning of our own moral convictions. It is precisely the old law law written on our hearts and leading us into hateful hearts that we need to question. It is that old law that must be replaced by a new law, the law of love. 

Instead of letting our neighbor’s disagreement with our moral convictions lead us into just another form of ritual cleanliness and isolation, another variation on the old hatred for apparent unrighteousness, we need to see in our neighbor the probing of Jesus himself. The neighbor who will not let us rest easy in our convictions is just ike the prisoner, the sick, the hungry, the naked: an incarnation of Christ demanding that we love our neighbor as ourselves. Not merely when, but particularly because he or she is puncturing our posture of moral confidence and asking us to find ourselves not in our own righteousness, but the righteousness of Christ. 

In a time of deep divisions, exclusion, and hatred the teaching of Christ provides a guide for those who have been blind guides. 

34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

And on these we must hang together, or we will fall apart.

Civil Society and Social Distancing

Part 1

1. The concept of civil society in the West begins in Greece and Rome over 2000 years ago. But it really takes on meaning in the Enlightenment as political philosophers try to reimagine how a society can be organized. 
1. They recognize that businesses in general, whether in the form of guilds or emerging corporations and companies, represent one aspect of every society.
2. They recognize that government, meaning kings and associated parliaments, nobles and etc were another aspect of every society. 
3. But what about everyone else? At one time the church had been considered a third critical part of society, but in England and later the US the church was officially “disestablished.” For practical purposes it dis-integrated into competing sects. Religion was theoretically moved to the realm of private belief rather than being a public institution. 
4. Civil society then becomes the name for all those individuals and organizations in a democratic society whose political behavior determines the shape of that society. When civil society is strong, then the citizens control government and shape society to suit their interests. When civil society is weak then other interests (churches, businesses, media, and so on) take control of the state to their own benefit.
2. The US constitution recognizes the importance of civil society in the first amendment: 
1. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
2. Freedom of conscience or religious belief, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom to demand that the government stand by its promises are the fundamental basis for civil society. These insure that individuals are free to act together politically in a democratic setting. Civil society thus embraces both individual freedom and forming communities of action.
3. BUT freedom isn’t the only thing necessary for civil society. Equally important are constraints on public behavior that make it possible for individuals to work together. People have understood this from the dawn of time and it appears in the ethics of Aristotle, Confucius  and the Hindu Laws of Manu. If people do not discipline their own public behavior so that they can work with other people, then they become weak and fragmented, and ultimately are subject to tyrants and oligarchs.
4. So the big question is how people learn to discipline their own behavior so that they can cooperate in the task of building up society as a whole. Institutions, whether business, government, or church impose standards of behavior on those who work in them. But civil society can only exist when citizens freely constrain their own behavior; when they discipline themselves. It is self-discipline that is the basis of civil society.
5. And as the title of this talk suggests, this seems to be more difficult in a time of social distancing. So now a few notes.

Part 2

    

1. First it is useful to remember that what we call “social distancing” is really physical distancing that creates barriers to face to face communication. 
1. This is important because a key constraint on our public behavior is the presence of other humans.
1. With the exception of some specific individuals, we all possess in our brains circuits that specifically respond to the facial expressions and tones of voice of our fellow humans. And these create empathy, a sense of having the same feelings. 
2. Take away face to face interactions and it takes an imaginative effort to remain empathetic. As a result empathy eventually begins to disappear. 
1. As it disappears our behavior may well become more and more selfish and quite possibly hurtful. 
2. Or alternatively our behavior becomes more and more rule driven, and thus inflexible and unable to distinguish between different persons and their unique situations.
3. This same capacity for empathy means that we are always watching how others respond to us. We don’t want to make fools of ourselves in public, and this is a second important source of self-discipline. And again, this form of self discipline dissipates with physical distance and barriers to face to face interaction. We’ve all seen the jokes about people gaining weight, not wearing pants or skirts, and etc while locked down at home. They reflect a truth about what happens in the absence of full body social interactions.
2. But remember that communicating over physical distances has been a problem in every society, and in a minute we will look at the legacy of solutions to this problem. 
3. Our current situation isn’t just caused by physical distance. It has been created over the last century by what is the rise of REAL social distancing. 
1. Modern Americans work too many hours in isolation, change jobs too frequently, move their residences too frequently, and spend too many hours in front of a TV or other screens to have regular interaction with their neighbors.
2. Our cities and suburbs are effectively built on economic segregation. At work everyone may be on a first name basis, but in the parking garage and at home there will be a large physical difference between executives, their subordinates, and the PA’s and admin assistants. They live in different neighborhoods, eat at different restaurants, shop in different stores, and watch different TV shows. 
3. At the same time both the fragmentation of mass media and the rise of social media allow us to create new affinity groups that have the false intimacy found among people who agree with each other but never look each other in the eye. The size of our social groups has gotten bigger but much less diverse.
4. As a result we don’t have a chance to practice being part of civil society, to the point that we’ve almost forgotten how civil society actually works. 
2. Beyond the distancing we’ve created ourselves, a second contemporary problem is the rise of anonymity and the avatar. 
1. The home becomes a castle, surrounded by locked doors, shaded windows, privacy fences and entered through garages whose doors open and close automatically. It is quite possible that most of us never know or meet our neighbors. We live anonymous lives. 
2. But worse is the rise of the avatar, the substitute image of ourselves, a mask that hides our real selves from those with whom we socialize.
1. The philosopher and sociologist Charles Taylor notes that one aspect of European culture, and indeed most cultures, is the masquerade. It is the creation of a social space in which identities are hidden. And it is associated with a period of social chaos. In Christian culture it is typical of the period before Lent, called Carnival, Fasching, or Mardi Gras. These periods are associated with, allow, and even encourage every form of what is normally bad social behavior; excessive drinking, sensual displays and overt eroticism, lasciviousness, and even violence. 
2. But while this masquerade was limited to a brief part of the year, it is now a permanent feature of all those forms of socializing that are digitally mediated. The use of avatars has put us all in a perpetual state of social chaos. 
3. So until early this we year had two choices for socializing. 
1. We could meet people face to face and know exactly who we were meeting and use the full set of human communication skills. 
2. We could use digitally mediated communications and never be quite certain who was behind the mask. And the masks were, and are, getting better and better. Already I’ve been experimenting with a virtual 360 meeting room called Spatial that creates a lifelike avatar based on a photo of your head. It wouldn’t fool anybody, but such avatars are already emotionally compelling. 
3. Even current video conferencing only helps a little with anonymity and avatars. We’ve all seen how people use the possibility of an avatar to essentially hide what they are actually doing from the people in the video conference. 
4. Back in 1973 Roger Daltry of The Who sang “can you see the real me, can you, can you”. Today the answer is probably not. But I can see your pet dog, your grandchild, or Darth Vader standing in for you. 
3. In the end it isn’t so much physical distance, but social barriers such as isolation, anonymity, and avatars that have weakened civil society to the point that we are in real danger of losing the freedoms that make democracy possible and protect it from tyranny or oligarchy or both. 
4. What has changed with the COVID 19 crisis is that the residual physical contacts important to civil society have been curtailed, making us conscious of what we have actually been losing for decades. 

Part 3

1. So how do we maintain a civil society. I think we can learn from the ways civil society has been maintained when physical distances kept people from face to face communication. We can learn from people who wrote letters, for example, or communicated by the wireless to use that old word for the radio. And here is what we can learn.

1. First - we must do away with avatars when we socialize via social media. 
1. A key concern of socializing from a distance is always knowing to whom you are speaking. From letters sealed with wax, to trusted messengers, to passwords and codes it has always been essential that we speak directly and intimately only with those whom we know, and know about. 
2. This is why that old school “anonymous letter” was rightly rejected as a credible basis for action except in totalitarian societies that were already socially degenerate. Protecting the real identity of a whistleblower is far different from allowing slander behind the mask of an anonymous avatar. 
3. For my part I simply do not relate to anyone who doesn’t give me their name, and a picture of themselves, and enough information for me to identify them.  
2. Second - we will need to reintroduce the kind of formality in communication that characterized social life in the early 20th century and before.  We may not think of it this way, but formality actually protects all of us from emotional abuse and makes civil discourse possible.

1. First it establishes the respect we owe each other. Civil society is always hierarchical and never fully egalitarian. Formality simply recognizes this reality and establishes that every member of society has a respected place.
2. Salutations in email actually need to get more formal so that we establish an atmosphere of mutual respect. Or in the case of close friends they need to be more intimate to establish a common humanity. An email that begins, “Hi” simultaneously establishes the false intimacy of informality while encouraging disrespect. 
3. Secondly, formality in addressing people establishes the respect we want others to show our colleagues. In private I call my colleagues by their first names. In public, especially in front of students they are all Dr. so and so. This isn’t being stiff. It’s being realistic about a real hierarchical relationship. You cannot fairly grade a student that you want to also befriend. You don’t give an F to a friend, you give it to someone subordinate to you. The same is true of giving a raise or a demotion. Formal language simply acknowledges the reality of the role of power in our relationships and creates clear communication. 
4. Thirdly having a formal language that excludes derogatory terms, curse words, bigoted references, and so on insures that we don’t offend people who can’t see that we were only joking, or who we may not even know. And indeed most modern companies have strict guidelines for communications to insure that discourse stays civil. Until recently such guidelines were found among politicians. And they still remain in the military and civil service. But this is hardly new. The British Navy had such regulations in the 16th century and the language of diplomacy goes back even further.
5. In other words we cannot have civil society if we do not have the discipline to maintain a civil tongue, to use old fashioned language. Name-calling, innuendo, slander, curse words, derogatory references to political affiliation, race, gender, physical appearance, handicaps, and age all destroy civil society by destroying civil speech. Their acceptance in public speech destroys civil society. Their current use by the public and by politicians will destroy America.
1. Third - and this is new in our society, we need to be attentive to how our words will be received across physical and cultural distances.  
1. In the business world it is now common for an office of human resources to be dedicated to working out the formal language that can be used across various cultural divides. The business world knows that civility is critical to profitability and the mission of the company. 
2. Now the rest of us must learn that lesson with regard to social media. A Tweet, a Facebook post, and LinkedIn posting, and Instagram photo: All of these will travel instantly beyond the closed culture of the person from whom they originated into the wide, diverse, world. And if they are insensitive to cultural differences in communication they will create offense, alienation, and contribute to the breakdown of civil society. 
3. In social media we all speak through a megaphone. We do not know who is listening, so we need to guard carefully what we say. 
2. Forth, those of who really wish for civil discourse, should consider staying within civil spaces among civil friends.
1. An old friend of mine reminded me “if you wrestle with pigs you are going to get muddy.” Or as my mother said, "you know who you are by the friends you keep. And so do others.”
2. And since then I’ve stayed away from Twitter. Twitter is the social equivalent of a group of drunken adolescent boys in a strip bar. If you have a so-called “conversation” on Twitter it is likely to be interrupted or drowned out by someone you don’t know and will never want to know. Unrestrained, it is the opposite of a civil society with civil discourse. 
3. Facebook isn’t quite so bad, but I diligently unfriended and unfollowed anyone on Facebook that engages in uncivil behavior. Why would I want you as my Facebook friend when I would avoid you in real life? 
4. But note a problem: the commercial success of Facebook and Twitter, like that of most cable news, depends on uncivil, divisive, conversation. That is what draws eyeballs to the screen, that is what drives advertising revenue, that is what pays. So again, it must be the self-discipline of the public that uses these tools that keeps us civil. 
1. Fifth, we need to get out more often and leave behind our various “screens.” 
1. The best thing in my neighborhood about so-called social distancing is that all the young families are stuck at home. With their children. And as a result they are getting out of the house as often as they can. Suddenly for the first time in a decade I actually see all of my neighbors and can greet them from safe distance. 
2. And related to this - all the yards are looking great. Because we are all now conscious that there are other humans out seeing our houses and yards. Instead of waiting for a visit from code enforcement or the HOA because an anonymous neighbor reported us, we clean things up because we conscious that our behavior affects others. 
3. Civil society is built in public, in public spaces like restaurants, parks, museums, the theater, and most of all the neighborhood, which is the modern equivalent of the old village or town. We don’t need to rub shoulders with each other. And we can wear masks. But we need to be conscious that we occupy the same space with our fellow human beings, and that keeping that space safe, clean and healthy for all us is the fundamental task of civil society. 
4. Groups like the Rotary, or Sunday school classes that are currently meeting online are great. Online maintains relationship built face to face. But ultimately however much we adapt age old lessons for communicating across a distance they are only a temporary substitute for face to face encounters. Assuming of course, that in those encounters we show the value we have for our fellow humans by maintaining a social distance and wearing a face covering.

Lost without Translation

When I was first sent as a missionary to Austria I was almost immediately invited to a theological commission meeting for churches in Central Europe.  This seems like a great idea until I realized that in the commission meetings everyone spoke German.   Suddenly my PhD didn’t really mean a whole lot.  Even when I could understand what the discussion was about, I really couldn’t say anything.  And if I did say anything I sounded like a five-year-old because that was about the level of my German at the time. Without the language all your knowledge, all of your insights, and all of your experience is locked up inside of you and it cannot be communicated.  

It is no different when we come to the cultural realm of digitally mediated relationships.  It is a realm and a culture with its own language.  It is a visual language, and an aural language. It is a language with its own forms and grammar.  And if you don’t communicate in that language then you can’t be heard, or you will seem like a metaphorical five-year-old. Even if you have a PhD. 

My own podcast efforts are a pretty good example.  The content is good.  But I haven’t learned how to speak the aural language of the medium, and I don’t yet really understand the forms and grammar.  So my podcasts do not sound good.  What am I going to do?  In this case I don’t have time to learn to use the tools to bring the quality of my podcasts to where they need to be.  So I’ve hired an expert.  And experts are available on sites like fiverr.com and others for a reasonable cost. You can hear the problems I’m trying to overcome. https://interfaith-encounters.simplecast.com

On the other hand, learning to speak the visual language of the new media fascinates me.  And I have spent considerable time trying to learn it.  I’m getting better.  But I didn’t learn German in just a few months, and it is foolish to believe that I will learn the visual language of the new media in just a few months. But we're getting there: But I’m getting there: https://www.youtube.com/c/InterfaithEncounters

People with PhD‘s tend to look down on those they see as mere technicians. But the scriptwriter, the cinematographer, or the audio engineer has had to work every bit as long and hard and master every bit as great a body of knowledge as anyone with a PhD in theology, history, psychology, or math. And we need them, because without them we cannot translate our insights into the language of contemporary society. 

And when they become partners with theologians the result can be spectacular. More importantly, if theologians don’t want to be their partners then we will  lose our voice, as we have been losing it steadily for the last century. 

The same thing is true of the English language spoken between generations.  And I don’t just mean the mastery of a few idiomatic terms. There is been a good deal of research done on how people respond emotionally to certain words and phrases, depending on their generation. I have a doctoral student doing just this kind of research now and her bibliography runs to dozens of contemporary works dating to the 1990’s. 

What is notable is that words and phrases that create a positive emotional response in the baby boomer generation can create a profoundly negative response among Millennials and Gen Xers. They are as powerfully discriminatory as sexist and racist language.

This means pragmatically is that a lecture, or Sunday school lesson, or a sermon that has a strong positive impact for one generation can have a strong negative impact on another generation. And this is not necessarily because of the content. It is simply because of the selection of words and phrases used to convey that content.  The difference can be even more dramatic if the two generations are also raised into different cultural environments, for example the environment that exists entirely outside the church and the environment that exists inside the church. 

This does not mean that the situation is hopeless. It simply means that we must attend to the way we appear to others, whether it is visually, linguistically, or aurally. 

Living and working in Austria it became paramount for me to learn German. Just as living and working in Malaysia it became paramount for me to learn Malay.  I now regard it as paramount to learn the visual and aural language of contemporary culture and society.  Because grownups don’t pay attention to five-year-olds, however otherwise precocious. 

Reason vs Science and COVID-19

That which is reasonable isn't necessarily scientific, and is frequently untrue. 

Should America be locked down? More and more reasonable voices say no. And they have their reasonable advocates. The problem is that reason in this case isn't scientific, just as a reasonable hypothesis can be totally false.

For example. Given all we know about the relationship between disease and death we can reasonably say that there are usually multiple causes of death, and frequently multiple diseases involved. This leads to the reasonable hypothesis that the COVID-19 disease caused by the corona virus may not be any more fatal than the seasonal flu; that it is simply one of many co-morbidities involved in the deaths of those who have it. And it reasonably follows that drastic steps taken to halt its spread are ill conceived. 

To move beyond reason to science we would now need to test this hypothesis. The obvious test is to expose a large population to the corona virus and then see if mortality rates are significantly above normal. Of course we would need to control for other factors as well: things such as available health care interventions, overall health of the population involved, and of course population density, climate, and patterns of social interaction. But it could be done.

The problem, and this has always been the problem for epidemiology, is that the only definitive experiments must be run in real time on real humans. And that means that the if the reasonable hypothesis turns out to be wrong a lot of real people die unnecessarily. This is why when human lives are at stake epidemiologists recommend public policy based on the worst-case reasonable hypothesis. In this case the hypothesis that a disease such is COVID-19 is likely to be the leading cause of death, increasing greatly the risk of death, and not merely being on of many factors. 

And we've been here before. Stringent measures to reduce air pollution, the banning of smoking indoors, the removal of potential carcinogens from food, the imposition of mandatory vaccinations, requiring seat belts and airbags in autos, and a thousand others public policies flew in the face of reasonable hypothesis concerning causes of death from smoking, cancer, disease, and auto accidents. Whole industries labored to produce reasonable hypothesis to maintain the status quo. And these policies that we now take for granted were the implementation of the worst case hypothesis long before full data was available. They were, quite frankly, experiments on human populations. They happen to be experiments that have uniformly shown that their hypothetical basis was accurate. 

But they haven't just saved lives. They have been the basis for a robust economy. Because there is nothing more valuable to an economy than human lives. Only humans, when they have enough, immediately begin to imagine new things to want. And that includes humans "sheltering in place." Like our deep ancestors hunkered down in a cave against lions and the cold we stand apart from our primate cousins in that we want entertainment and we love to create. From chalk art on sidewalks to YouTube videos to home-knitted sweaters to electronic concertos (even now being written) to cures for diseases we haven't stopped wanting or creating just because we're currently in the cave. 

And what that means, or so I reasonably hypothesize, is that what we'll see in the future isn't a ruined economy, but a changed economy. We are learning to want different kinds of more than we already have. And we'll discover some things we thought we desperately wanted are not all that important. But of course the results aren't in from the only experiment that can test my ideas.

Offering Reasonable Hope

A number of years ago I was asked to sit in on the United Nations conference studying near earth objects, or NEOs.  The purpose of the conference was to discuss how people should be alerted if there was the possibility of one of these objects striking the earth. Two moments in the conference really stood out for me. 

The first was a short talk by a gentleman who specialized in communicating danger to the public.   He said, and I believe he is right "no one understands risk communicated in percentages. If there’s a chance of rain just tell people to take an umbrella." 

The second memorable moment came at the end of the first day. I was sitting at the back of the room being quiet while all the officials and scientists talked. Then one of them noticed my presence and asked me who I was and why I was there. I answered that I was a guest of one of the organizers and was just observing. Then I said that I was a teacher in a theological school. He quickly shot back, “A theologian. Good. We need a back up plan.“

This may be a little hard to take for those of us who are religious leaders.  But the reality is that in some situations we really are just the back up plan. Indeed, in contemporary society, God or an appeal to God is almost always just the back up plan.

In the face of a crisis Christians have had traditionally two things to say. One is that God is all powerful. “Expect a miracle.“  Second the second is that God is all loving. “His eye is on the sparrow so I know he watches me.” 

The first message comes across these days as the claim that God is like the Wizard of Oz. Too bad that curtain has been pulled back and the claim no longer has  any practical credibility.  That God is all powerful by definition is a theological fact.  But even taking the experience of the Christian community as a whole through time God’s deployment of God‘s power is utterly unpredictable. But then God, and God’s revelation warns us of this. God makes the rain fall on the just and the unjust alike.  

Within the natural realm that reality encompasses our bodily existence. In this world there is no Divine reward for good or punishment for evil. The wheels of justice may grind finely, but boy do they ever grind slowly. And if God does not deploy God’s power on the basis of morality, then on what basis can we imagine that it is deployed? "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” is a claim based on faith, not observable evidence. 

In any case the identification of an event as a miracle isn’t a claim based on a direct relationship between the event and God’s use of God’s power. The claim of the miraculous is based on the faith claim that God loves us and that God is the power behind all the powers of the earth.  It is made on the basis of the deep insight through faith that God loves God’s creation and God's creatures.  The claim that a friend was cured of cancer is a miracle, or that a child was conceived when it seemed impossible is a miracle, are witnesses from my faith, not my study of medicine. 

But this gets us to the second important claim that we as Christians make about God. God is Love.  And thus we are encompassed by God’s love.  The real problem is how to make this claim credible to others. In our time this requires that we offer reasonable hope rather than irrational or unreasonable claims.  

And the reasonable basis of Christian hope is not difficult. Clearly, against all odds, humanity in both the physical and moral sense has emerged within the natural world.  We have emerged as a species capable of understanding the order of nature and intervening on our behalf and behalf of other creatures for the good. And equally against all odds the natural world of which we are a part turns out to be predictable.  And it becomes more and more predictable the more and more we understand its complexity.  And the more we understand its complexity the more we can appreciate our human ability. And the more we can create tools that can effectively do good in the midst of that complexity. 

I’d like to say that the long odds make this a miracle, but that would make winning the lottery by betting on a single number a miracle as well. In short its an evangelistic dead end that puts Christian claims in the same category as those of gamblers who claim to have a system to beat the slots. 

What makes our situation amazing, wonderful, humbling, and indeed miraculous is the reasonable claim that our world springs from God’s love. This does not mean that we must somehow claim that God has been busy tinkering with evolution, in a sense loading the dice in one direction or another. That’s even worse than the gambler’s system; it is God cheating against God’s own rules in a way that undermines the stewardship of creation God assigned to humans. 

Worse, it becomes just another claim to be debated among scientists. It bears no relationship to the fundamental witness of Christianity that God incarnate came among us, ministered to us, died on the cross out of love for us and was resurrected from the dead. It is this witness alone that makes clear to the eyes of faith that God, who from a place outside of space and time created our universe, created it out of love and continues to love us beyond our death and non-existence in this same universe. It is the witness that God, as God, is all encompassing Love. 

Reasonable hope is offered in the claim that if you enter into the community of faith, if you cultivate an understanding of God‘s love among those who have sought to understand that love through the millennia, then you will begin to have true insight into the fact that God loves you and God loves the world. “Taste and see that the Lord is good.“ Evangelism is not an invitation to believe. It is an invitation to join the community that over long eons has learned hope from its constant engagement with the Spirit of Christ. By our constant effort to live into eternity through Christ we know what scientists and gamblers cannot know because they haven't made the effort. 

Anything else we offer as a Christian community will ultimately be unreasonable, and indeed beyond the scope of our competence. 

Yet for those seeking hope our invitation is utterly reasonable. If you seek knowledge you join the community of scholarship. If you seek power you join the community of the rich and powerful. If you seek wisdom you sit in the councils of the wise. If you seek hope you join the community for whom the cultivation and spread of hope is and always has been the sole concern. “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” That is the Gospel, that is reasonable hope. 

Science not Sacrifice

Recently Dan Patrick, Lt. Governor of the state of Texas suggested that he, and by extension other “Sr. Citizens” should be willing to risk infection and COVID-19 rather than sacrifice the country and its economic prospects. And thus by extension the lives of children and grandchildren.

He got pretty beat up for it. But for the wrong reasons.

Religious people took him on for the implied suggestion of the sacrifice of the lives of the elderly to save the economy. That was my first response but it was misguided. Gov. Cuomo said there didn’t need to be a tradeoff between public safety and the economy. A good tweet but not backed up by an actual strategy. On the sentimental side folks said that children and grandchildren would rather have parents and grand parents than a quick return to economic prosperity. I’d like to think so myself but its not an evidence based assertion. 

And that’s what is really wrong with Mr. Patrick’s suggestion. Instead of acting on evidence he is suggesting that decisions be made on the basis of the Christian religious concept of sacrifice. By turning policy decisions into decisions about who should sacrifice he turns what should be a rational scientific discussion into a journey into sentimentality. And by turning to the Christian religious concept of sacrifice he makes political decisions into personal decisions and commitments. 

This is a common move in contemporary US political culture, but it draws on the wrong portions of our cultural inheritance.

A state, and a nation, cannot long survive when it replaces rational decisions about public policy with opportunities for sentimental personal decisions based on quasi-religious concepts of sacrifice. This is one of the reasons the US founding fathers kept religion out of government and focused on the common good. And that Enlightenment culture of rationality is the culture we need right now. 

The science of epidemiology demonstrates that epidemics spread through a population until all those who are too weak to resist the disease die and the rest develop immunity, or the virus is so isolated it isn’t readily transmitted. How much of the population is affected directly depends on how easily the disease is transmitted and how quickly immunity is developed. The science says that the most lives are saved, not just elderly lives, when the spread of the disease is slowed as much as possible. 

And economics tells us that the basis of any economy is healthy workers producing goods and services that healthy customers can buy. A decrease of even 1% of the population hurts an economy badly. And if that decrease is accompanied by spikes in unrecoverable medical costs, distortions in production and consumption, long term lost productivity, and a failure in confidence in the government to save lives it is even worse. Mr. Patrick didn’t factor any of these into his policy ideas, focusing instead on his utterly irrelevant personal willingness to sacrifice. 

It isn’t the task of government, or government officials, to offer citizens a way to construct meaningful lives. It is, if I may quote the US constitution. “To establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Ultimately Mr. Patrick, or indeed any of us, may wish to find meaning through our willingness to serve larger aims than our personal health or prosperity. Religion may well guide our understanding of those larger purposes. Or we may find those purposes in our larger social world. But let’s keep that out of policy making in a time of crisis. We need science, not sacrifice. 

The Religion of Human Sacrifice - Good to Go in Texas.

On March 19th Gov. Gregg Abbott (corrected to add: suspended the Texas Open Meetings act) and declared a ban on meetings of over 50 persons state wide. He then noted in a TV interview that it didn’t include religious bodies because he wanted to protect their religious freedom. https://www.kxan.com/news/coronavirus/gov-abbott-freedom-of-religion-means-churches-not-in-covid-19-order-but-many-making-changes/amp/

This is a completely bogus reading of the meaning of religious freedom. We do not offer religious freedom to people who practice human sacrifice. And letting religious groups hold large gatherings that create vectors for the spread of the corona virus will be followed inevitably by an increased numbers of deaths, an overstressed hospital system, and then even more deaths. It is apparently Gov. Abbott’s affirmation of human sacrifice as a legitimate religious option in the State of Texas.

I note as well that this effectively allows religious groups to continue to hold open meetings to promulgate and organize their political agenda while preventing all others from doing so. It is yet another attack on political freedom of all except Abbott's religious allies.

Finally, I note that in the interview Gov. Abbott referred only to churches, not to mosques, temples, synagogues, gurdwaras, and other religious groups. Apparently religious freedom in Gov. Abbott's world is religious freedom for Christians only. Or maybe he just doesn't realize how religiously diverse his state really is.

Religious people need to reject this immoral, inhuman, unconstitutional, and anti-Christian understanding of religious freedom. We need to stand for the freedom of our fellow humans to live, and to live in safety. That is the single overriding freedom of a nation that claims to live “under God."

Do Muslims Worship the Same God as Christians? 

Lets take a look. 

Does Islam Teach Muslims to Lie?

For a number of years Islamophobic politicians and pundits have been saying the Islam teaches that Muslims can lie to non-Muslims. In this short video I suggest we look at the facts.

Women in Islam

All too often I'm asked about the status and role of women in Islam. 

There is a lot to be said, and in my book Muslim Faith and Values Muslim women speak with their own voice. Here I want to point out a much bigger context that Christians often forget.

The Islamic State in the Modern World

Part 2 of my introduction to the Islamic State - now focusing on the modern development of the idea.

Just What is the Islamic State?

The Islamic State, part 1. What Christians (and others) need to know.
For more videos on Muslim Faith and Values: A Guide for Christians visit Interfaith Encounters on YouTube

Science, Subjectivity, and Life after Death.

In a recent article about the nature of consciousness the author Jesse Bering asserts that the mind is created by the brain, and that therefore when the brain quits working the mind is gone. Then going further Dr. Bering states that "the dead are inanimate carbon residue." (SA Mind, 19(5) 34-41, Oct/Nov 2008) This is a relatively common view among scientists, and is reflected in numerous articles related to the one above. 

But there is a problem with this assertion. Dr. Bering notes that the dead are remembered and thus have at least an objective existence that carries on within the minds of those who knew them. Which reminds us that the "self" is always and only a social self. It exists within a matrix of minds. While it may most strongly identify with and be identified with a particular body this experience itself is mediated by society and shaped by culture. The actual embodiment of the self is much broader than the brain and its associated body. 

The social nature of self-hood is well recognized in most cultures. This is why although their pictures of an "afterlife" are naturally anthropomorphic, the concept of an "afterlife" is not necessarily naive. While the "hungry ghosts" of Chinese myth may seem like a mere superstition they are in fact imagined as acting out a role in interpersonal relationships just like the role a person in their condition would act out. And their actions are really taking place in the fearful, vengeful, spiteful, hateful minds of those who knew them because they are experienced as causing fear and anxiety. Is it really naive to ascribe to them subjectivity and agency? 

How else would one imagine them? Why is ascribing such subjectivity and agency to them different from ascribing it to an embodied person sitting across the table and behaving in ways that have the same effects? The human brain is the body of many selves. Projecting them into other brains is a useful exercise but it is impossible to verify whether it is an accurate representation of reality. We know what people are doing in our mind, we're only guessing what they are doing in theirs.

There are roughly three ways that cultures have more thoughtfully (albeit in thoughtful myths) expressed the reality that those whose bodies have died go on living. That most familiar to Christians asserts that the self, having put away one body, inhabits another body especially created for the new environment of God's Reign. I'll reference II Corinthians and I Thessalonians for those who care to read the efforts of Paul to describe how a self remains embodied when its original body is gone. 

Many indigenous religions believe that the self is diffused into nature and its community. The people and their environment then become its embodiment and the realm in which to observe how whatever remains of its subjectivity is acted out. (The worldview of the Iban, whose culture I had a chance to study are only one example.)

And then there are the religions (Hinduism and Buddhism we know best) that build a picture of life after death in terms of karma, or more generally a network of causality that may or may not condense into a new living creature that embodies the old self. But regardless, the self endures in its power as a cause of effects yet to happen.

(As aside: these three frameworks are not mutually exclusive.)

In none of these three frameworks is the self simply disembodied. But neither is it imagined as having ceased. Because it is self-evident that it has not. So long as the dead person continues to have an effect on the living then surely it is reasonable to ascribe the cause of those effects to that person. 

Of course if one believes in God as understood in the Western traditions (which is in no way dependent on belief in an afterlife) then it is God who is the ultimate embodiment of all selves. Whether they are objects remembered or subjects given agency will depend on how God's nature is interpreted. 

Religion is often thought to be a naive and now outdated response to the environment driven by human evolution, both biological and social. Yet in the same volume on The Mind in which Dr. Bering wrote other neuroscientists noted that the relationship between brain and mind remains largely unknown and even lacks a robust theoretical framework through which such knowledge might be pursued. The direction of cause and effect in that dialectic is not uni-linear. What is naive is believing that the dead are merely "an inanimate carbon residue." So maybe there is wisdom in a broader dialogue between science, religion, and philosophy.