We hear a lot in the world today about terror. There is terror in the newspapers, terror on the news channels, terror when leaders speak, terror warnings if you travel anywhere in public. Terror, terror, TERROR! I'm suffering a bit from terror overload. Apparently, I am meant to live my life ever vigilant that, at any moment, some person may decide to make his or her bid for eternal glory by killing me. Well, its unlikely to be me because I hardly ever go out and I doubt I live anywhere that a terrorist has ever seen on a map. But that selfish point aside, you get the picture. If you live in London, Paris or New York it might feel a bit closer to home. Terrorists are hardly ever likely to strike in Buttfuck, Arizona (which is not a real place).
Yesterday I was minding my own business and just sitting thinking. It occurred to me how many of these blogs I write are tinged with my own existentialist, nihilist beliefs and these inevitably seep into the narrative. My mind built on the thought and I considered a meaningless world without purpose that ends in a nothingness of death. I then pondered that for many people this comes across as a dour and hopeless creed that takes all the joy out of life and maybe even strikes fear into the hearts of some, those who need meaning in their lives in order to go on living. There are people who this vision of life actually frightens. But I am not one of them. For me the idea that life is basically purposeless, we are here for no reason at all except it just happened and that we die and that's the end are, perversely, things that strengthen me and bring me some comfort in the void that we call our existence.
But then I considered another side of the story, the religious one. I am not a stranger to religion. Like many, I was a victim of my parents' good intentions as a boy. My mum tried to get me to go to Sunday School. I found it boring but they had cakes and the stories were kind of interesting - for a 9 or 10 year old boy at any rate. And did I mention they had cakes? Later in life I went to university and there I studied the Bible in an academic way. (I should point out that my university was set up by atheists who banned the teaching of religion when they set it up in the 19th century). I was very good at studying the Bible - linguistically, historically, as literature and ideologically and I am no stranger at all to its ideas. Indeed, I have letters after my name which I don't really like to talk about and am now somewhat embarrassed by. I studied The Historical Jesus as part of my doctorate.
So I know a bit about the Bible and this guy Jesus. Jesus, we are told, was thought of as The Son of God. There is some debate as to whether he ever said this of himself though and references are very sketchy. It is thought to be more something others said of him. Jesus is often painted as a peaceful fellow who loved the little children and healed sick people. But even his own followers report that he said things like "I have not come to bring peace but a sword" (that's in Matthew's Gospel if you care to look) and that doesn't sound very peaceful to me. This same guy is reported to have gone to the Temple and tipped up tables and caused a hassle. Imagine what would happen if someone did that today in our world of security cameras and armed guards. But apparently it was all for some great religious reason and so, you know, its OK. By the way, Jesus is also regarded as one of Islam's highest prophets. And he was put to death by the Romans as a (possibly religious) criminal.
You have to question this guy's "dad" though. God seems to do a lot of killing and smiting. Perhaps that's why many of his followers do the same thing? If you read the Old Testament (which is what the Christians call a collection of books they stole from Judaism because they claim its really their story and not Judaism's) you find that this guy God (I assume its a guy) loves wiping people out. Usually its Egyptians or Hittites or Assyrians or Midianites or people like that. Arabs basically. If you were an Arab reading the Bible for the first time I would think you'd find this God a bit anti. He certainly doesn't seem to much like people like you. So, coming back to Jesus meek and mild, you have to worry about a kid who has a dad like that.
We move forward to the modern world. We find that hundreds of millions of people now believe in Jesus as if he were a god himself! (Although its not quite clear how this works. Christians have something called the Trinity but it makes no sense and no one has ever adequately explained it.) There's another religion called Islam and they believe in a god too. I'm not sure if its the same one or not. Now many of the people who believe in these gods (or maybe just one god) are quite tame. They are people like my mum who has believed in god for 35 years but basically knows nothing about her religion or its beliefs and doctrine and can barely explain what or why she believes anything at all in the first place. Ask her about the Bible and you get the blank stare of someone who has barely read it for herself much less understood it. I'm quite willing to believe that pretty much anyone who says they "believe in god" in first world countries is much like her. They hold a largely inconsequential belief they can barely explain, probably for reasons of imagined metaphysical comfort.
But if only it were that simple. Because the problem with believing in an almighty super being is that it sets up a context for everything you do. Why do ISIS killers brag and laugh on camera as they chop off heads? Its because they think Allah awaits them in glorious paradise. And the beauty of their belief is that should some bomb drop from the sky and spread them across the desert in pieces they will never know any different. The reason for this is that they hold a belief that can't be defeated. You can't prove a religious belief wrong. Why do white, Christian Republicans all across the USA shoot guns at New York Times editorials advocating gun control (I saw this on Twitter on Saturday night) and talk about "the land of the free", a land they think is protected by Jesus' dad? Why do people ask you to pray to their god to help them kill their enemies when their enemies might be doing the same thing and even to the same god? You see, it doesn't matter to these believers, militant or passive, that a lot of what they say and/or do doesn't make sense and can't be explained. They have a belief and it sets up a context. The details, well, "god moves in mysterious ways" just about covers how they go about explaining it. Which is to say they don't explain it. They excuse it, ignore it and obfuscate about it. Because much of what they believe doesn't make any sense. It was never meant to be explainable because it was always meant to be unquestioned.
So, you see, for me the terror is that there is a god or that people would think there was one. If there is a god right now who made everything and everyone then he is responsible for the life I've led. He's responsible for the mental trauma and illness I've lived through decades of. He could have stopped it. Or maybe even created a human being that didn't have the defects in his brain that I probably do. He could have stopped children being kidnapped, women being raped and innocents being captured and slaughtered. He could have stopped slow, painful diseases and people starving in cardboard boxes in the middle of winter. But he didn't. So that means we have a god who is OK with suffering.
Some Christians have a neat little discussion that covers this that they call "the problem of evil" or "the problem of suffering" but I don't really think that covers what I'm discussing here. The problem, if there was one, would be why all these gods (or god) happily allow or even cause pain, suffering and death. All the believers agree their gods are powerful enough to stop it. But none of them can explain why they don't. Pardon me if I find the idea here that gods are much cleverer than us and their ways are beyond me more than a little insulting. To my mind, if there are all-powerful super beings in charge of things then the only explanation for why they allow or cause pain and death is because they want to. And that makes them malicious not gracious.
So that is why, to me, it is not that life is meaningless and without purpose that is the terror. I find nothing to fear in the fact that things happen at random and are largely beyond our control. There is, if I may say so, a kind of poetry to that. Bad things happen but not for any real reason. Its just that they can and so sometimes they do. But if you make someone in charge of all that it changes everything. Then someone can stop it, change it, make it better. Or at least different. But they don't. They just watch on never correcting or challenging anyone, never stopping people from committing atrocities of pain, suffering and death. I find it hard to believe that any being like that could be moral, or just or a lover of peace and harmony - or even almighty or powerful. And its because this god or gods does nothing that people kill other people, innocent people, that people decide they need to start wars or claim territory or declare flesh and blood people, in most other respects just like them, as their enemies. Believing in this theistic, putrid, undemonstrable, undefeatable belief, in the existence of some almighty super being, now becomes the line that you need to decide which side you stand on.
And believing in it is what I would truly call terror.
PS Why do believers in almighty super beings always seem to think that their almighty super being of choice needs them to stand up for him? Is not being an almighty super being enough?
Showing posts with label beliefs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beliefs. Show all posts
Monday, 7 December 2015
Wednesday, 25 November 2015
The Worst General in the World
Its not at all difficult to find. I found it yesterday so much that I'm sitting here now typing out this blog. That's how much it has animated me. I can immediately think of at least 4 or 5 examples just from conversations I happened to stray across or take part in yesterday just watching my Twitter timeline scroll by. The subjects weren't necessarily remotely related and yet they were by having a common bond, a poisonous thread, running through them. Its a thread that is insidious and, to my mind, dangerous. Its a way of thinking, a lazy way, a closed-minded way. But what has this to do with generals? A lot when the worst general in the world is generalization.
Think about it and I'm sure you'll very easily be able to come across these generalizations in your own conversations too. Maybe it is someone asserting that ALL the people from this country or that are dangerous. A favourite one right now in my part of the world is Syria. Maybe you take part in gender debates. In that world lots of statements are made, and beliefs held, about men and women. It often seems that activists hold many generalizing statements to be true. They even have hashtags for it #notallmen, #allmen, etc. I find it somewhat enraging. Another area where the generalizations occur is black/white race relations. Here generalizations are held on both sides. To some whites all blacks are crooks, thieves and criminals. To some blacks all whites are racist descendants of slave owners who want to kill them. The point to me is not which side you take but how you think.
So let me be clear. Wherever you come across the generalizations and whatever debate you are watching, reading or taking part in, I'm not here to take sides in any of them. Of course, I will have my opinions just like everyone else. Having opinions is something people do. And people also decide which things in their world they think are important enough to have opinions about. It is true that something some other person thinks is vitally important you may find to be barely important enough to think about. That's allowed. Each person has their own set of attitudes and beliefs and, as far as I can tell, this is how it should be. Mandating people to believe the things that you happen to believe is called fascism and is generally thought to be a bad thing.
But human beings are also persuasive beings, social beings, communicative beings. And one aspect of belief, and holding beliefs, is that they can (or, should be) able to change. I'm not sure how many people in the real world have views about beliefs and how they work or have mused on patterns of thought. But, as one who is interested in philosophical discussions, I have. In my thinking about that I have come to be persuaded by a pragmatic view of beliefs. This view, briefly, is that human beings cannot help holding beliefs in normal circumstances and that this is just something they do. In order to hold beliefs they would normally be able to give some kind of justification for why they believe something and how it fits into their overall scheme of things. And a current belief, or a new one, must have some way of attaching itself to other things you believe. But it is also the case that over time these beliefs can change. There is a sort of mysterious open-endedness to holding beliefs. They modify over time. Beliefs are things we feel justified in believing and can provide reasons and evidence for. It may not satisfy someone else but it satisfies us in some way that we can explain.
But there is another aspect to beliefs. And this is that they can be questioned. Beliefs are not absolutes. That is why they are called beliefs. But the problem with many of these generalizations I see every day, generalizations that make a lie of the world and demonize people by treating them as a member of some (negative) class rather than as individuals in their own right, is that they are beliefs that are unquestionable. They are shibboleths for their holders. ("Shibboleth" is from a story in the Bible where one side used "shibboleth" as a password because their enemies could not pronounce the word correctly. "Shibboleth" thus served as a way to detect their enemies much as some beliefs do today for various social groupings.) I do not believe that ANY belief should be beyond question. Beliefs are not things that are beyond question. Beliefs, on the contrary, are things which should always be in question, in doubt, up for debate, things to be further refined, things that can change.
This is why closed-minded people really frustrate me so much. It is not that they hold beliefs and find certain things to be true that I don't agree with. I expect that. People's views of the world are molded, at least to some degree, by their own experiences of life. But I'm not sure the generalizers think that. They seem to think that all people should think what they think and that it is some moral failing to think otherwise. But this cannot be true. Its simplistic and, worse, closed-minded to think that way. I really do see it as a new anti-intellectualism at work today in, it must be said, first world societies. In these societies debate is not driven by justifying your beliefs, conversation with those who take a different point of view (which may well influence yours) and the simple act of persuasion by giving good reasons for why you think what you think. Instead, we see ranting and raving, generalizing hashtags and the splitting of societies into a million subcultures, each with their own beliefs, attitudes and shibboleths. Beliefs are much less likely to be open to question, able to last a meaningful debate or withstand good natured questioning if you hold on to them tightly as badges of identity in your cosseted ivory tower. But it seems that that is what some want to do. They are, incidentally, probably not very good beliefs if they can't be questioned either.
So what do I want? I want people to be viewed as individuals and not members of some class be that men, women, black, white, arab, jew, etc, etc, etc. Call me naive if you must but I think we are all people first and foremost. I think our humanity is much more fundamental than any of the differences we can make up, and the generalizations that are made of them. I think that what we share is much greater, and always will be much greater, than what divides us. But I also think that in many first world places today people have become masturbatory and inward-looking. They care more about their own identity, which may be based on a few cherished and unchallengeable beliefs, than the mass of humanity and the good of all. There are Twitter accounts, Tumblrs and Facebook pages dedicated to the stupid, unchallengeable beliefs of others. Feel free to go and read some to educate yourself about the anti-intellectual corners that people will willingly back themselves into.
For myself, I find myself always wanting to challenge those who put their own identity first. Not only does it seem egotistical on their part but it also always seems based on silly generalizations, ones damaging to human polity and social cohesion. I tend to do this generally but if you're reading this already trying to work out which side I take in various debates then you've probably missed the point. The point is that yes we all have views. But they should be open and debatable. There is no place for shibboleths, not when people's lives depend on it. And in many of these debates they ultimately do. When presidential candidates judge people based on their country of origin, when races judge and condemn other races based on skin colour and when one gender categorizes another gender based on lazy sloganizing these are not issues we can just pass over as "the way of the world" or with some such other lazy epithet. How we think matters and we have a duty to ourselves, for the health of our own beliefs, but also to everyone else, as fellow human beings, not merely to believe whatever we want to but to do it in ways that make sense of others too. A private belief is a contradiction in terms and, in my view, a terrible belief. The more light you can shine on it, the better it becomes.
In closing, I'd like to mention one last conversation I took part in last night. It was with a shepherd on Twitter that I follow who tweets his daily shepherd's life. He put up a picture of his three beautiful sheepdogs. They sleep in pens in his barn and the picture was of the dogs in their pens which looked somewhat like cages or prison bars. This ruffled the feathers of a few of his followers who (I generalized!) seemed like town dwellers not used to the outdoors and country ways. For them, dogs are pets who live in the house. The shepherd seemed a bit exasperated with this response and pointed out, as calmly as he could manage, that these are not pets but working dogs. He explained that two of them don't even like being petted and stroked that much. So they work outdoors all day and then go back to the barn at night.
What struck me about this little exchange was that, for most people, the limits of their world is the limits of their own experience. And they never look any further than this. This is where the beliefs are fostered - within the safe world of "my experience". My point is that we need to make an effort to understand the experience of others too. We also need to be able to explain ourselves and our beliefs to these people too. This benefits not only us but them as well and, by extension, everyone. I hope you would agree with me that a community that can discuss its beliefs and experiences one with another is much better than one in which everyone believes what they like and keeps it to themselves. The first would seem to me to be a much better, and safer, world to live in. And that's what we want, right? You will never foster peace and harmony based on division and difference. The nasty generalizations I see in discussions online every day are based on the latter and not the former. They are based on keeping to your own version of the world and refusing to interact with others. Identity trumps the multiplicity of reality.
The best thing I ever did in my life (from an admittedly small selection of things) is live in another country. It opened me up to so many new people, new views and new attitudes. Perhaps that's why I'm writing this now. But the experience has stayed with me. And the conviction that what we see is only skin deep. But we are so much more than what we can see. Let's have a little understanding, the ability to share and the vulnerability of having to accommodate others in our beliefs.
Think about it and I'm sure you'll very easily be able to come across these generalizations in your own conversations too. Maybe it is someone asserting that ALL the people from this country or that are dangerous. A favourite one right now in my part of the world is Syria. Maybe you take part in gender debates. In that world lots of statements are made, and beliefs held, about men and women. It often seems that activists hold many generalizing statements to be true. They even have hashtags for it #notallmen, #allmen, etc. I find it somewhat enraging. Another area where the generalizations occur is black/white race relations. Here generalizations are held on both sides. To some whites all blacks are crooks, thieves and criminals. To some blacks all whites are racist descendants of slave owners who want to kill them. The point to me is not which side you take but how you think.
So let me be clear. Wherever you come across the generalizations and whatever debate you are watching, reading or taking part in, I'm not here to take sides in any of them. Of course, I will have my opinions just like everyone else. Having opinions is something people do. And people also decide which things in their world they think are important enough to have opinions about. It is true that something some other person thinks is vitally important you may find to be barely important enough to think about. That's allowed. Each person has their own set of attitudes and beliefs and, as far as I can tell, this is how it should be. Mandating people to believe the things that you happen to believe is called fascism and is generally thought to be a bad thing.
But human beings are also persuasive beings, social beings, communicative beings. And one aspect of belief, and holding beliefs, is that they can (or, should be) able to change. I'm not sure how many people in the real world have views about beliefs and how they work or have mused on patterns of thought. But, as one who is interested in philosophical discussions, I have. In my thinking about that I have come to be persuaded by a pragmatic view of beliefs. This view, briefly, is that human beings cannot help holding beliefs in normal circumstances and that this is just something they do. In order to hold beliefs they would normally be able to give some kind of justification for why they believe something and how it fits into their overall scheme of things. And a current belief, or a new one, must have some way of attaching itself to other things you believe. But it is also the case that over time these beliefs can change. There is a sort of mysterious open-endedness to holding beliefs. They modify over time. Beliefs are things we feel justified in believing and can provide reasons and evidence for. It may not satisfy someone else but it satisfies us in some way that we can explain.
But there is another aspect to beliefs. And this is that they can be questioned. Beliefs are not absolutes. That is why they are called beliefs. But the problem with many of these generalizations I see every day, generalizations that make a lie of the world and demonize people by treating them as a member of some (negative) class rather than as individuals in their own right, is that they are beliefs that are unquestionable. They are shibboleths for their holders. ("Shibboleth" is from a story in the Bible where one side used "shibboleth" as a password because their enemies could not pronounce the word correctly. "Shibboleth" thus served as a way to detect their enemies much as some beliefs do today for various social groupings.) I do not believe that ANY belief should be beyond question. Beliefs are not things that are beyond question. Beliefs, on the contrary, are things which should always be in question, in doubt, up for debate, things to be further refined, things that can change.
This is why closed-minded people really frustrate me so much. It is not that they hold beliefs and find certain things to be true that I don't agree with. I expect that. People's views of the world are molded, at least to some degree, by their own experiences of life. But I'm not sure the generalizers think that. They seem to think that all people should think what they think and that it is some moral failing to think otherwise. But this cannot be true. Its simplistic and, worse, closed-minded to think that way. I really do see it as a new anti-intellectualism at work today in, it must be said, first world societies. In these societies debate is not driven by justifying your beliefs, conversation with those who take a different point of view (which may well influence yours) and the simple act of persuasion by giving good reasons for why you think what you think. Instead, we see ranting and raving, generalizing hashtags and the splitting of societies into a million subcultures, each with their own beliefs, attitudes and shibboleths. Beliefs are much less likely to be open to question, able to last a meaningful debate or withstand good natured questioning if you hold on to them tightly as badges of identity in your cosseted ivory tower. But it seems that that is what some want to do. They are, incidentally, probably not very good beliefs if they can't be questioned either.
So what do I want? I want people to be viewed as individuals and not members of some class be that men, women, black, white, arab, jew, etc, etc, etc. Call me naive if you must but I think we are all people first and foremost. I think our humanity is much more fundamental than any of the differences we can make up, and the generalizations that are made of them. I think that what we share is much greater, and always will be much greater, than what divides us. But I also think that in many first world places today people have become masturbatory and inward-looking. They care more about their own identity, which may be based on a few cherished and unchallengeable beliefs, than the mass of humanity and the good of all. There are Twitter accounts, Tumblrs and Facebook pages dedicated to the stupid, unchallengeable beliefs of others. Feel free to go and read some to educate yourself about the anti-intellectual corners that people will willingly back themselves into.
For myself, I find myself always wanting to challenge those who put their own identity first. Not only does it seem egotistical on their part but it also always seems based on silly generalizations, ones damaging to human polity and social cohesion. I tend to do this generally but if you're reading this already trying to work out which side I take in various debates then you've probably missed the point. The point is that yes we all have views. But they should be open and debatable. There is no place for shibboleths, not when people's lives depend on it. And in many of these debates they ultimately do. When presidential candidates judge people based on their country of origin, when races judge and condemn other races based on skin colour and when one gender categorizes another gender based on lazy sloganizing these are not issues we can just pass over as "the way of the world" or with some such other lazy epithet. How we think matters and we have a duty to ourselves, for the health of our own beliefs, but also to everyone else, as fellow human beings, not merely to believe whatever we want to but to do it in ways that make sense of others too. A private belief is a contradiction in terms and, in my view, a terrible belief. The more light you can shine on it, the better it becomes.
In closing, I'd like to mention one last conversation I took part in last night. It was with a shepherd on Twitter that I follow who tweets his daily shepherd's life. He put up a picture of his three beautiful sheepdogs. They sleep in pens in his barn and the picture was of the dogs in their pens which looked somewhat like cages or prison bars. This ruffled the feathers of a few of his followers who (I generalized!) seemed like town dwellers not used to the outdoors and country ways. For them, dogs are pets who live in the house. The shepherd seemed a bit exasperated with this response and pointed out, as calmly as he could manage, that these are not pets but working dogs. He explained that two of them don't even like being petted and stroked that much. So they work outdoors all day and then go back to the barn at night.
What struck me about this little exchange was that, for most people, the limits of their world is the limits of their own experience. And they never look any further than this. This is where the beliefs are fostered - within the safe world of "my experience". My point is that we need to make an effort to understand the experience of others too. We also need to be able to explain ourselves and our beliefs to these people too. This benefits not only us but them as well and, by extension, everyone. I hope you would agree with me that a community that can discuss its beliefs and experiences one with another is much better than one in which everyone believes what they like and keeps it to themselves. The first would seem to me to be a much better, and safer, world to live in. And that's what we want, right? You will never foster peace and harmony based on division and difference. The nasty generalizations I see in discussions online every day are based on the latter and not the former. They are based on keeping to your own version of the world and refusing to interact with others. Identity trumps the multiplicity of reality.
The best thing I ever did in my life (from an admittedly small selection of things) is live in another country. It opened me up to so many new people, new views and new attitudes. Perhaps that's why I'm writing this now. But the experience has stayed with me. And the conviction that what we see is only skin deep. But we are so much more than what we can see. Let's have a little understanding, the ability to share and the vulnerability of having to accommodate others in our beliefs.
Thursday, 17 September 2015
Is Conservation Contrary to Nature?
The blog that you are about to read might confound or upset your own personal beliefs. But before you decide that I am an anarchist who wishes to see wanton and random destruction I want you to read the full blog, attempt to understand it on my terms and give me a fair hearing. You will then have the task of taking on board what I've said and bringing it into critical interaction with the beliefs you already have. This, as I understand it, is something like how our belief systems progress anyway. And so I ask for a hearing.
My blog today starts from one of my own beliefs. This belief is that conservation, not just ecological conservation but pretty much all forms of conservation, are contrary to nature. What do I mean by saying this? I mean that the nature of the universe, the way it works, the way things are ordered, the way this universe progresses, is not based on the conservation of individual specific things. The universe, for example, does not have as one of its guiding principles that you or I must be saved. It does not think that lions or elephants or rhinos or whales or planet Earth or our sun or our galaxy should exist forever. Indeed, it doesn't think that anything should. It just is. Conservation is not a part of its make up. The universe is a big engine of change.
So what is a part of its make up? From observation it seems that constant, radical, permanent change is a part of its make up. The universe, left to its own devices, is merely the living history of forms of energy if you break it down to basics. These forms of energy interact with one another to produce the things we see, hear, and experience. More importantly, they interact to produce things that we will never see, hear, experience or even imagine. Existence, in this sense, is just energy doing what energy does. There are no over-arching rules for it and nothing is mandated to exist or not exist because the universe is impassive and uninterested in what is - or is not. Its just random, chaotic energy. Out of this random chaos came us - quite inexplicably to my mind but that's another discussion. We human beings are not impassive or uninterested. Indeed, we need to be concerned and interested in order to survive. And so from this universe of chaotic energy we interested beings were produced.
I have observed the interest in ecological conservation as a phenomenon with my own growing interest for many years. Its one debate which can get some human beings very hot under the collar. When I hear people saying that we need to "save the planet" I often ask myself "What for?" For me its never really good enough to assume the rightness of an agenda merely because it seems to be either moral or, in some sense, on the side of good. I know both morality and goodness as interested ideas which are in no sense neutral but always serving some interest. You might think that the interests of saving the planet are very good ones but I would always seek to undermine the foundations of a belief to ask what presuppositions it stands on. Our beliefs always have these groundings and they are often very revealing and easily toppled. Such are human belief systems.
Of course, conservation is about more than wanting to save the planet or some species upon it (whether that is a rare kind of insect, a cuddly mammal or even us). I had a think and I reasoned that you could connect capitalists (who want to preserve their economic status in society as well as the value of capital), theists (who want a god to be the guarantor of everything that is as it is right now), Greens (who want to preserve the planet and species of life as we have them now) and Transhumanists (who want human beings to outlive our current surroundings and even our planet) all as types of people interested in conservation broadly understood. You may be able to think of others. Conservation is, of course, most commonly associated with the Greens but, as we can see, the drive to conserve things is actually apparent wherever people want things to stay roughly as they are right now (or in an idealized, utopian form of right now). My point, as I've said above, is quite simple: this is contrary to the way things are, contrary to nature, against the organizing principles of an indifferent universe.
You may argue that this is to misunderstand the way things are and that's a fair point to challenge me on. You may say that I am right and the universe doesn't care what stays or goes. It will just keep rolling on until the energy all dissipates in the eventual heat death of the universe in some trillions of years. In that context you may say that what is is then up to those species who can make something of it and that if the universe allows us to make and manufacture things a certain way, guided by our principles, then we should. I don't actually find this position all that wrong. My concern here, I suppose, is with those who reason that there is some form of rightness or naturalness or in-built goodness with this drive to conserve. To me it is entirely manufactured and interested as a phenomenon. It is the activity of self-interested and self-important beings. To want to save the whale because you have an impulse to save whales is one thing. To say that we have a responsibility to save whales is to use rhetoric in the service of an agenda. The universe doesn't care if whales live or die. It follows that there is no imperative for me to care either - although I may choose to and may give reasons for so doing. But these reasons will always be interested and (merely) rhetorical.
So what am I arguing against? I'm arguing against those who want to find or impose imperatives. I'm arguing against those who think that something put us here to "save the world". I'm arguing against those who see us as over and above nature as opposed to merely an interested and self-interested and self-important part of it, a species and individuals with a will to survive. I'm arguing against those who see us as anything other than a rather pathetic bug-like species on a nothing ball of rock in a nowhere solar system in an anonymous galaxy floating in a space so big you cannot begin to quantify it. I'm arguing against those who regard life as nothing to do with power and its operations and how those dynamics play out in human societies. Human beings are very conscious of their station in life and will seek to preserve or increase it. This, amongst other things, is why there are differing sides of the Green conservation argument. People have empires to protect. But seen from that angle life just becomes a power struggle between forms of energy marshalled to power differing agendas. We, instead of being the savior of our world, the universe and everything, are merely just more energy acting in the vastness of space until we dissipate.
So yes when I hear the slogans of Greens I chuckle. I wonder what we are saving and why. I smile at the naivety, if that's what it is, that just assumes this is the right thing to do. I wonder at the hubris that thinks we and our planet in some sense deserve to live. I wonder how these people have factored in the assumptions of our eventual destruction. I wonder how they explain away the fact that well over 90% of things that ever lived on Earth are gone forever without any human action whatsoever. Because that's what things just do - have their time and then cease to exist. I wonder where they reason the meaning they ascribe to things fits in. For nothing exists in a vacuum. (Feel free to ponder on the vacuum of space here and how that affects my last sentence.) The reasons we give for things, the beliefs we hold, are supported by other things and it is they, when articulated, that support our actions and drives. Life is wonderful and random. But it is not permanent. And, as far as I can see, it was never meant to be nor can it be. The drive to conserve is an interested human drive, just one contingent outworking of the energy that drives a form of life. This doesn't mean we shouldn't care or should ravage and destroy. Its just a context for something humans want to do for their own, personal reasons. It is, in the end, just one more example of the universe doing its thing, its the energy that exists exhausting itself until there's no more left.
Its an example of the kind "Anything the universe allows is allowed".
Now you may feel free to think about this and decide who is right or wrong and, just as importantly, why.
My blog today starts from one of my own beliefs. This belief is that conservation, not just ecological conservation but pretty much all forms of conservation, are contrary to nature. What do I mean by saying this? I mean that the nature of the universe, the way it works, the way things are ordered, the way this universe progresses, is not based on the conservation of individual specific things. The universe, for example, does not have as one of its guiding principles that you or I must be saved. It does not think that lions or elephants or rhinos or whales or planet Earth or our sun or our galaxy should exist forever. Indeed, it doesn't think that anything should. It just is. Conservation is not a part of its make up. The universe is a big engine of change.
So what is a part of its make up? From observation it seems that constant, radical, permanent change is a part of its make up. The universe, left to its own devices, is merely the living history of forms of energy if you break it down to basics. These forms of energy interact with one another to produce the things we see, hear, and experience. More importantly, they interact to produce things that we will never see, hear, experience or even imagine. Existence, in this sense, is just energy doing what energy does. There are no over-arching rules for it and nothing is mandated to exist or not exist because the universe is impassive and uninterested in what is - or is not. Its just random, chaotic energy. Out of this random chaos came us - quite inexplicably to my mind but that's another discussion. We human beings are not impassive or uninterested. Indeed, we need to be concerned and interested in order to survive. And so from this universe of chaotic energy we interested beings were produced.
I have observed the interest in ecological conservation as a phenomenon with my own growing interest for many years. Its one debate which can get some human beings very hot under the collar. When I hear people saying that we need to "save the planet" I often ask myself "What for?" For me its never really good enough to assume the rightness of an agenda merely because it seems to be either moral or, in some sense, on the side of good. I know both morality and goodness as interested ideas which are in no sense neutral but always serving some interest. You might think that the interests of saving the planet are very good ones but I would always seek to undermine the foundations of a belief to ask what presuppositions it stands on. Our beliefs always have these groundings and they are often very revealing and easily toppled. Such are human belief systems.
Of course, conservation is about more than wanting to save the planet or some species upon it (whether that is a rare kind of insect, a cuddly mammal or even us). I had a think and I reasoned that you could connect capitalists (who want to preserve their economic status in society as well as the value of capital), theists (who want a god to be the guarantor of everything that is as it is right now), Greens (who want to preserve the planet and species of life as we have them now) and Transhumanists (who want human beings to outlive our current surroundings and even our planet) all as types of people interested in conservation broadly understood. You may be able to think of others. Conservation is, of course, most commonly associated with the Greens but, as we can see, the drive to conserve things is actually apparent wherever people want things to stay roughly as they are right now (or in an idealized, utopian form of right now). My point, as I've said above, is quite simple: this is contrary to the way things are, contrary to nature, against the organizing principles of an indifferent universe.
You may argue that this is to misunderstand the way things are and that's a fair point to challenge me on. You may say that I am right and the universe doesn't care what stays or goes. It will just keep rolling on until the energy all dissipates in the eventual heat death of the universe in some trillions of years. In that context you may say that what is is then up to those species who can make something of it and that if the universe allows us to make and manufacture things a certain way, guided by our principles, then we should. I don't actually find this position all that wrong. My concern here, I suppose, is with those who reason that there is some form of rightness or naturalness or in-built goodness with this drive to conserve. To me it is entirely manufactured and interested as a phenomenon. It is the activity of self-interested and self-important beings. To want to save the whale because you have an impulse to save whales is one thing. To say that we have a responsibility to save whales is to use rhetoric in the service of an agenda. The universe doesn't care if whales live or die. It follows that there is no imperative for me to care either - although I may choose to and may give reasons for so doing. But these reasons will always be interested and (merely) rhetorical.
So what am I arguing against? I'm arguing against those who want to find or impose imperatives. I'm arguing against those who think that something put us here to "save the world". I'm arguing against those who see us as over and above nature as opposed to merely an interested and self-interested and self-important part of it, a species and individuals with a will to survive. I'm arguing against those who see us as anything other than a rather pathetic bug-like species on a nothing ball of rock in a nowhere solar system in an anonymous galaxy floating in a space so big you cannot begin to quantify it. I'm arguing against those who regard life as nothing to do with power and its operations and how those dynamics play out in human societies. Human beings are very conscious of their station in life and will seek to preserve or increase it. This, amongst other things, is why there are differing sides of the Green conservation argument. People have empires to protect. But seen from that angle life just becomes a power struggle between forms of energy marshalled to power differing agendas. We, instead of being the savior of our world, the universe and everything, are merely just more energy acting in the vastness of space until we dissipate.
So yes when I hear the slogans of Greens I chuckle. I wonder what we are saving and why. I smile at the naivety, if that's what it is, that just assumes this is the right thing to do. I wonder at the hubris that thinks we and our planet in some sense deserve to live. I wonder how these people have factored in the assumptions of our eventual destruction. I wonder how they explain away the fact that well over 90% of things that ever lived on Earth are gone forever without any human action whatsoever. Because that's what things just do - have their time and then cease to exist. I wonder where they reason the meaning they ascribe to things fits in. For nothing exists in a vacuum. (Feel free to ponder on the vacuum of space here and how that affects my last sentence.) The reasons we give for things, the beliefs we hold, are supported by other things and it is they, when articulated, that support our actions and drives. Life is wonderful and random. But it is not permanent. And, as far as I can see, it was never meant to be nor can it be. The drive to conserve is an interested human drive, just one contingent outworking of the energy that drives a form of life. This doesn't mean we shouldn't care or should ravage and destroy. Its just a context for something humans want to do for their own, personal reasons. It is, in the end, just one more example of the universe doing its thing, its the energy that exists exhausting itself until there's no more left.
Its an example of the kind "Anything the universe allows is allowed".
Now you may feel free to think about this and decide who is right or wrong and, just as importantly, why.
Saturday, 29 August 2015
Forces of Nature
Who wants to live forever? Well, not me, that's for sure. I have never been seduced by the idea of a life that never ends. A life that stops? Now that is much more attractive. Its true that there was a time, in my formative years, when I was seduced by the dark side, by Christian voices speaking of an "eternal life" in "heaven" where all the "believers" went to. But the problem with that was that the older I got, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to be a childish fairy tale. It is now many years since I gave it any thought at all as a serious proposition. A current version of this belief, in new, technological guise, is held by some transhumanists who hope to build machines we can become and therefore expand our lives into the far future.
Another problem with this "eternal" talk (and there are problems with it, to be sure) is our growing knowledge of the universe. It would take only basic scientific knowledge (such as I have) to know that in the last five centuries or so our knowledge of what is out there beyond our planet has increased enormously (in relative, if not actual, terms). Five hundred years ago you could have pointed up into the sky and said that that is where God lives (whichever one you happened to believe in). Its a bit harder to do that these days and believers in gods have had to modify and make slightly more sophisticated what they say they believe in. For when we look beyond our planet's borders now, as we are increasingly able to do, we just see the endless soup of space, a billion planets in a solar system here, a billion more there. And that pattern seems to be repeated everywhere that we can see, minus an anomaly or too.
It remains true, of course, that we humans have pathetically tiny perspectives on things. That same interest in our universe informs us that we live on an insignificant planet that orbits a nothing star. We have gone from being the centre of God's creation to being just another planet in only a few short centuries. What's more, rather than a feeling of permanence that we often have about our lives, we know that this star we orbit will not last forever. Our sun is burning itself up and one day (in about 5 billion years) the fuel will have run out. At that point the sun will have expanded to such size that life on Earth will have ended long ago and our planet itself will be destroyed. So we humans are here on an extended holiday and we can't stay because the planet itself is scheduled for destruction by the universe.
My new album is called Forces of Nature. In making it I was thinking about those things that seem somewhat more basic, more fundamental, more eternal, if you will, than all the others. Most things around us, our (lack of) insight into them notwithstanding, are very temporary. Indeed, in a world obsessed with things material (and not least scientists, who hold materialism as a tenet of their scientific faith) it is brought home to us very strongly that physical things are things that are not meant to last. To be sure, by our counting some things last a long time. But human eyes and human time spans are as nothing. A mountain range may last 50-100 million years before it is no more. That is age upon age to us. But in terms of the universe it isn't that much. The mountain seems permanent as we climb it but it is going away as surely, if more slowly, as we are. It shows us that how you see informs what you see. Leave anything on our planet lying around for long enough and it will crumble to dust.
So what things did I think of as those basic forces of nature? I started very scientifically with the four actual primary forces (or interactions) of nature that scientists cannot, as yet, break down into any smaller or constituent processes. These forces are gravity, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear. These four are the interactions in physical systems that don't appear to be reducible to more basic interactions. But then things became interesting for me. I wanted to add some things to the list, things not quite so.... material such as our materialist scientist friends might add. Could I think of four non-material things to add to the list, things which, as far as we might be able to conjecture, were equally as basic to the universe, equally as prevalent, equally as universal? What I came up with will surely be controversial but is none the worse for that. As a thought experiment alone my exercise was worthwhile. The four items I came up with were as follows:
Time
Life
Consciousness
Decay
We can quibble over many things regarding my four items and I hope you will think about them as "universals". The four are, at least, ideas. I will also concede that at least three of them are connected to physical things. "Decay", for example, is a process that happens to all physical things (even if it happens so slowly that we humans, here today and gone tomorrow, can't see it). "Time" is the name we give to the fact that we can order things as events, some before others and some after. "Life" is the name we give to certain processes that seem to indicate an organism. "Consciousness" is what we have called a sense of awareness.
But these things, attached to a world of physicality such as we inhabit, are also somewhat more mysterious (as perhaps all things are). They also point us in a direction which says something about us too. For all these things are our universe as seen through human eyes. The universe knows nothing of time or consciousness (unless it is itself conscious - an intriguing thought!). The universe decays daily and knows nothing of it nor cares. Life, in the terms of the universe, is just another energy process, the universe being understood in its entirety as merely the history of certain forms of energy and their processes. There are no more or less important things in our universe. But there are to us and, in that sense, these things become ideas which are important to people and to the ways they understand things. And so they become constituent parts in the tales we tell us about ourselves, where we live and who we are. They become part of the myth-making we humans have needed to inform ourselves since we could first string words together. In other words, these fundamental forces of nature are part of a human story.
And so Forces of Nature, an electronic, instrumental album made with synthesizers and drum machines, turns out to be a story about the universe and our place in it. In that story there are fundamental, primeval forces at work, inscrutable forces, forces we can neither grasp nor understand. They could be seen from one angle as mechanical processes and from another as the properties of things. I conceive of them, in some ways, as fields of vision on our universe which unite scientific, physicalist points of view with ones more spiritual. In my story all things are mysterious. Human beings are tiny beings stretching out their puny hands to know more but lost in the void of all time and space, not realizing just how BIG and beyond them everything really is.
My myth of the universe is of a universe unknown, barely grasped, sometimes intuited. It is a universe of physical conditions and as yet unknown possibilities. It is a universe that contains life and consciousness, both things we don't understand, things more than the merely physical. But it is also a myth of a universe with an end. Decay is a constant, on-going process and it occurs daily in the form of change. I have tried to add these ideas to my myth in the form of two bonus tracks to my album, The Void and Heat Death. The Void acts in my myth as the context of everything. The universe is described as a big, dark, meaningless place. There is no logic to this place, no order. There are no rules for how it works. It just is. Make of it what you will. Or can. But then there is Heat Death. Heat Death is our event horizon. It is the terminal limit of this universe of my myth. Scientists tell us that the universe is cooling and in some trillions of years it will effectively become completely dead as it goes cold.
So these forces of nature of mine are a part of my myth of the universe. It is the universe we live in and my way of trying to explain it to myself and situate myself within it. It is, unlike religious myths, not a story of how I may or may not please implacable gods. It is not a story of how they are ultimately in charge of things. It is a story of a universe shaped by forces and processes. To be sure, this seems a lot less secure than it might. But who said that the universe is a place of safety? And it surely does not care what happens to anything. In my universe things just happen. Sometimes in the change and decay beautiful moments occur and sometimes these things can be beautiful destruction. Imagine, for example, a star exploding. My myth does, I think, help us to recognise just something of our place in the order of things. We are not at all important. But we do get to play the tiniest part in the history of all things.
And that should be enough.
Forces of Nature is available now at MY BANDCAMP.
Monday, 8 June 2015
Personal Beliefs
It seems, in a way, particularly trivial. A nursery worker (that's a kindergarten worker for you Americans) gets fired for telling her gay colleague that "god is not alright with her". It's pretty clear to see what is going on here. The Christian worker has let her personal beliefs come out whilst at work and her gay colleague has felt insulted and discriminated against by it. So those who employ them both decided to fire the Christian one. However, at a later employment tribunal it was ruled that she was discriminated against on the basis of her religious beliefs.
Now what are we to make of this? There will be those who think that the Christian is a bigot pure and simple. And bigotry is wrong so she should have been fired. She is clearly a terrible person. And we have other cases too. There was, for example, a Christian couple who ran a guest house. They refused to allow gay men to share a room. They were taken to court for discrimination and lost. Because they were being discriminating.
So far, so good. It all seems fairly straightforward. But then I think about it for a while and I read some of the online comments concerning the case. And some of them seem a bit confused. We are told by some that "religion should be kept out of the workplace". But that Christian nursery worker wasn't threatening to set up a church at the nursery. She wasn't insisting that her colleague face Jerusalem and pray before lunch. So I don't see what commenting about "religion" has to do with it. Another comment I read stated "When will these people realise that religion doesn't trump real life?"
I expect that the answer to that last question is something along the lines of "At that point, if they ever get to it, when an imaginary friend in the sky who is in charge of everything seems to be no longer a justifiable belief". For what we are talking about here, at the end of the day, is personal beliefs. Things that people hold dear. Things that they could no more stop believing than they could willingly cut off their own arm. It is not for this Christian nursery worker a trivial thing that there is, according to her, a god. She does not, I am sure, believe it lightly. Beliefs, indeed, are those things that you cannot help believing. Do any of us have a choice about the things that we honestly hold to be true? "But she is a bigot," you will say. I wouldn't disagree with you. But she cannot be blamed for acting in accordance with something she holds to be true anymore than you can. And I don't understand why anyone would think she should be. Are the trueness of her beliefs to her any less true than the beliefs you hold true are true to you? There are other grounds to condemn her. But this is not one.
People in general seem to have an issue with personal beliefs - as well as with its brother in arms, free speech. They try to delineate areas where only certain things can be said and certain beliefs held. This, it seems to me, is largely because they have a negative view of the beliefs concerned and, often, the worldview of those holding the belief. Free speech, it seems, is only free if you agree with me, for some at least. Unlike in the USA, where there is supposedly some constitutional protection of these things, I grew up in the UK where there is not even a general bill of rights. So expressing beliefs in public or uttering certain kinds of speech can be a dangerous thing and you never really know where the line is. So if I utter my unacceptable personal belief in public am I to be judged harshly for that? How can a person who believes in an all-powerful super being be expected to "keep it private"? How can they judge that this belief is not a matter of "real life"? What, indeed, could be more real, or more important, than a belief that you have a personal relationship with the being who made everything?
People are always trying to privatize religion. One problem is that religion takes no prisoners (if you'll pardon the pun). Religions generally tend to make universal claims. The god believed in is not usually the god of one or two people. It's the god of everyone and, whether you believe or not, this god makes claim over you. Over everything, in fact. Is this not why, according to the Westboro Baptist Church, "God hates fags"? But why, in a suburban nursery, should we fear the woman who believes that her imaginary friend is "not ok" with gay people? And what should we do about it? Should we ban her expressing any personal opinions? What personal opinions, in that case, are allowable? And what of freedom of speech?
I think we need to take some time to get things straight in our heads here. Religions are always going to make universal claims. Because that is what religions do. Asking religions, or religious believers, to keep their religion to themselves is asking any honest, upstanding, practicing religionist to do the impossible. It is consequent on their genuine belief in their imaginary friend that they act in accordance with their honestly held beliefs about him. (It is usually a him.) The request that they become a hypocrite by believing one thing and doing another is not going to find any favour with a genuine believer. How, indeed, can it? If you believe that a super being is in charge of everything and holds certain attitudes regarding people of certain sexual orientations it would be a remarkable feat of self-discipline (and inauthenticity) to keep quiet about it. And so I find the oft heard request that people "keep their beliefs to themselves" to be somewhat incoherent and lacking in insight. Surely whether you can or should keep your personal beliefs quiet depends exactly on what those personal beliefs are? At least, it will to you.
But, nevertheless, the argument extends to the public sphere too. We are told by some that personal beliefs should play no part in public life, places like politics, work and schools. But how can that be? To be a human being is precisely to hold personal beliefs - and to be held by them. These, so we think, inform our intentions, our decisions and our choices. To act in the public sphere, to live life in public, is to have personal beliefs (maybe even terrible ones) and to act upon them. Unless it is thought that what is best is a society in which no one acts according to the things they genuinely hold to be true then I am not sure what is being asked for. Are we looking for a two-faced society?
But this, of course, is not what is being asked for. What is being asked for is that the people concerned, the people with the personal beliefs we don't like, stop acting according to their beliefs and start acting according to our better ones instead. The problem is that you don't believe the same things as I do. And you are wrong. For your views are "bigotry hiding behind belief". And my views are just a perfectly good set of personal beliefs. Does anybody see the problem here?
And so we try to filter out all the nasty beliefs, the ones that involve telling gay people that god is not alright with them. But the people who believe that god is not alright with gay people still exist. And they haven't stopped believing it. Now, perhaps, they feel victimized for their belief, a belief they honestly hold and maybe even could justify in their own way. But we would not accept their justification, more than likely, especially if it maybe relies on holy books and the dogmas of their church and private messages received in prayer. For we do not accept these sources of authority. We have other, different, better ones. But let's be honest. It's not just about theists and their crazy beliefs here. Homophobes, sexists and racists alike have no need to believe in gods in order to share and act on beliefs that we don't like.
So what are we to do? We believe in free speech but we are always trying to curtail speech that we don't like. We believe that people should be free. But we are always censoring people who use their freedom in ways we don't approve of. We believe that people are allowed to form their own opinions but then fire them if they share their opinions with other people at work. If only there was some way to adjudicate between all these beliefs in a world in which we seemingly all act contrary to the things that we say we all want.
The fact is that there is and there isn't such a way to adjudicate. There isn't a way because there is no central point about which we can gather, no "library of true facts" to which we can go and check out which of the beliefs are true and false. There is, ironically, no god who can tell us who to believe and allow and who to disbelieve and sanction or ignore. There is no language that we will ever be able to speak that could fully express an unarguable truth. And yet it is also true that there is a way. For we each have the networks of belief and contacts with which we have grown up that have formed us as human beings and given us the beliefs that we hold today. These beliefs, the beliefs that were formed in exactly the same way as the person that you don't agree with, the one who should not be allowed to utter their beliefs in public, are, in fact, the only platform that we will ever have for deciding which beliefs are ok to utter and which beliefs should, in our humble opinion, never be uttered. We will never be able to get past these socially situated and rhetorically justified beliefs to something more solid, more permanent, more able to shut up all those other beliefs that we think shouldn't ever get an airing in public. All we can ever do is keep justifying the things we believe to be true along with the moral or other basis for holding these things as beliefs in the first place in the hope that this might convince more and more people that what we hold to be right and true is more worthy of belief than what our bigoted neighbour does.
In short, we are all in the same boat and the issue is how to sail without the boat rocking too much or without the need to throw anyone overboard. And that's really all there is to it.
Now what are we to make of this? There will be those who think that the Christian is a bigot pure and simple. And bigotry is wrong so she should have been fired. She is clearly a terrible person. And we have other cases too. There was, for example, a Christian couple who ran a guest house. They refused to allow gay men to share a room. They were taken to court for discrimination and lost. Because they were being discriminating.
So far, so good. It all seems fairly straightforward. But then I think about it for a while and I read some of the online comments concerning the case. And some of them seem a bit confused. We are told by some that "religion should be kept out of the workplace". But that Christian nursery worker wasn't threatening to set up a church at the nursery. She wasn't insisting that her colleague face Jerusalem and pray before lunch. So I don't see what commenting about "religion" has to do with it. Another comment I read stated "When will these people realise that religion doesn't trump real life?"
I expect that the answer to that last question is something along the lines of "At that point, if they ever get to it, when an imaginary friend in the sky who is in charge of everything seems to be no longer a justifiable belief". For what we are talking about here, at the end of the day, is personal beliefs. Things that people hold dear. Things that they could no more stop believing than they could willingly cut off their own arm. It is not for this Christian nursery worker a trivial thing that there is, according to her, a god. She does not, I am sure, believe it lightly. Beliefs, indeed, are those things that you cannot help believing. Do any of us have a choice about the things that we honestly hold to be true? "But she is a bigot," you will say. I wouldn't disagree with you. But she cannot be blamed for acting in accordance with something she holds to be true anymore than you can. And I don't understand why anyone would think she should be. Are the trueness of her beliefs to her any less true than the beliefs you hold true are true to you? There are other grounds to condemn her. But this is not one.
People in general seem to have an issue with personal beliefs - as well as with its brother in arms, free speech. They try to delineate areas where only certain things can be said and certain beliefs held. This, it seems to me, is largely because they have a negative view of the beliefs concerned and, often, the worldview of those holding the belief. Free speech, it seems, is only free if you agree with me, for some at least. Unlike in the USA, where there is supposedly some constitutional protection of these things, I grew up in the UK where there is not even a general bill of rights. So expressing beliefs in public or uttering certain kinds of speech can be a dangerous thing and you never really know where the line is. So if I utter my unacceptable personal belief in public am I to be judged harshly for that? How can a person who believes in an all-powerful super being be expected to "keep it private"? How can they judge that this belief is not a matter of "real life"? What, indeed, could be more real, or more important, than a belief that you have a personal relationship with the being who made everything?
People are always trying to privatize religion. One problem is that religion takes no prisoners (if you'll pardon the pun). Religions generally tend to make universal claims. The god believed in is not usually the god of one or two people. It's the god of everyone and, whether you believe or not, this god makes claim over you. Over everything, in fact. Is this not why, according to the Westboro Baptist Church, "God hates fags"? But why, in a suburban nursery, should we fear the woman who believes that her imaginary friend is "not ok" with gay people? And what should we do about it? Should we ban her expressing any personal opinions? What personal opinions, in that case, are allowable? And what of freedom of speech?
I think we need to take some time to get things straight in our heads here. Religions are always going to make universal claims. Because that is what religions do. Asking religions, or religious believers, to keep their religion to themselves is asking any honest, upstanding, practicing religionist to do the impossible. It is consequent on their genuine belief in their imaginary friend that they act in accordance with their honestly held beliefs about him. (It is usually a him.) The request that they become a hypocrite by believing one thing and doing another is not going to find any favour with a genuine believer. How, indeed, can it? If you believe that a super being is in charge of everything and holds certain attitudes regarding people of certain sexual orientations it would be a remarkable feat of self-discipline (and inauthenticity) to keep quiet about it. And so I find the oft heard request that people "keep their beliefs to themselves" to be somewhat incoherent and lacking in insight. Surely whether you can or should keep your personal beliefs quiet depends exactly on what those personal beliefs are? At least, it will to you.
But, nevertheless, the argument extends to the public sphere too. We are told by some that personal beliefs should play no part in public life, places like politics, work and schools. But how can that be? To be a human being is precisely to hold personal beliefs - and to be held by them. These, so we think, inform our intentions, our decisions and our choices. To act in the public sphere, to live life in public, is to have personal beliefs (maybe even terrible ones) and to act upon them. Unless it is thought that what is best is a society in which no one acts according to the things they genuinely hold to be true then I am not sure what is being asked for. Are we looking for a two-faced society?
But this, of course, is not what is being asked for. What is being asked for is that the people concerned, the people with the personal beliefs we don't like, stop acting according to their beliefs and start acting according to our better ones instead. The problem is that you don't believe the same things as I do. And you are wrong. For your views are "bigotry hiding behind belief". And my views are just a perfectly good set of personal beliefs. Does anybody see the problem here?
And so we try to filter out all the nasty beliefs, the ones that involve telling gay people that god is not alright with them. But the people who believe that god is not alright with gay people still exist. And they haven't stopped believing it. Now, perhaps, they feel victimized for their belief, a belief they honestly hold and maybe even could justify in their own way. But we would not accept their justification, more than likely, especially if it maybe relies on holy books and the dogmas of their church and private messages received in prayer. For we do not accept these sources of authority. We have other, different, better ones. But let's be honest. It's not just about theists and their crazy beliefs here. Homophobes, sexists and racists alike have no need to believe in gods in order to share and act on beliefs that we don't like.
So what are we to do? We believe in free speech but we are always trying to curtail speech that we don't like. We believe that people should be free. But we are always censoring people who use their freedom in ways we don't approve of. We believe that people are allowed to form their own opinions but then fire them if they share their opinions with other people at work. If only there was some way to adjudicate between all these beliefs in a world in which we seemingly all act contrary to the things that we say we all want.
The fact is that there is and there isn't such a way to adjudicate. There isn't a way because there is no central point about which we can gather, no "library of true facts" to which we can go and check out which of the beliefs are true and false. There is, ironically, no god who can tell us who to believe and allow and who to disbelieve and sanction or ignore. There is no language that we will ever be able to speak that could fully express an unarguable truth. And yet it is also true that there is a way. For we each have the networks of belief and contacts with which we have grown up that have formed us as human beings and given us the beliefs that we hold today. These beliefs, the beliefs that were formed in exactly the same way as the person that you don't agree with, the one who should not be allowed to utter their beliefs in public, are, in fact, the only platform that we will ever have for deciding which beliefs are ok to utter and which beliefs should, in our humble opinion, never be uttered. We will never be able to get past these socially situated and rhetorically justified beliefs to something more solid, more permanent, more able to shut up all those other beliefs that we think shouldn't ever get an airing in public. All we can ever do is keep justifying the things we believe to be true along with the moral or other basis for holding these things as beliefs in the first place in the hope that this might convince more and more people that what we hold to be right and true is more worthy of belief than what our bigoted neighbour does.
In short, we are all in the same boat and the issue is how to sail without the boat rocking too much or without the need to throw anyone overboard. And that's really all there is to it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)