Ends and Means

I grew up in the midst of the cold war, which for many of us was a clash between "godless communism" and democratic political systems organized around the judeo-christian tradition. The fact that such a division left out huge parts of the planet did not much concern us.

At the time I was taught (and learned) that the difference between them and us was they believed the end justifies the means. You could explain both fascists and commies by saying they were willing to do evil things if they believed in the importance of the ends achieved. Which is why we were better: we knew that the evil is evil, and no outcome excuses evil deeds.

So excuse me if, over the years, I've been a bit confused at the actions of some of those who define themselves, outspokenly, as christians. The so-called pro-life movement is one example: "violence against clinics, and against doctors, etc., is okay because: ..." --  you know the argument. Let me be clear, I do not say that all christians accept this reasoning. I do say that too many christians, especially those in positions of political influence and power (e.g., Randall Terry), do not make it clear that such logic is immoral and counter to their principles.

At the same time, I don't really think it should be only christians that reject the ends-justify-means formulation. From a humanist point of view, one big problem is that the ends are a promise; the means are the actions taking place in the present. If I'm being asked to trust in a promise I'm being asked to trust intentions, and I have no way to judge intentions. It's all about faith in another mortal. And mortals are inherently unknowable and therefor untrustworthy. So it's more realistic to judge actions on their own terms and leave intentions to individual meditation.

For instance, Dick Cheney et al. may have believed, even knew, that there really were WMDs in Iraq, no matter what the intelligence was saying. So invading Iraq, and incurring more than 4000 US dead, and many (200?) times that number of Iraqui dead, was OK because their intentions were good. Because intentions are as good as ends.

I have come to believe that the most important reason to deny ends-justifies-means is because it explicitly says that a superior moral position allows one to force acceptance by others. "I know what's best for you, so just do what I say." Which, while not only despots might say, is what despots always do say.

One of the other key lessons from growing up as a devout protestant (Lutheran) was that what differentiated christians from Old Testament believers (and other faiths) was the operation of choice. What made christianity meaningful, divine, a clear break from the past, is that it gives us the freedom and responsibility to choose belief. If one is coerced into righteous action, it is no different from sin. The ends are justified by the means.

When Christ commanded his followers to spread the Word, he did not say the evangelist's responsibility was to get everyone to believe. The charge to the faithful was to give a true accounting of the gospel, so that others could make the choice, the commitment, to follow. It is a way to make a believer consider his whole life an example of the power of the Word. Success would be measured by what happens on the inside, not the outside.

I have no doubt that my early upbringing in faith led me to be profoundly skeptical of organized christianity and any other belief expressed as a creed. I find almost all of them have been seduced by the desire to tell other people how to live. Religion becomes just another arena in which humans play out their lust for power. We give lip service to the idea that morality can't be legislated, and then we go try to do just that. And the US ends with up the highest total documented prison population in the world.

My early learnings have left me with the conviction, now tested by decades of experience in many different social settings, that freedom is better than coercion for forming constructive citizens, and building cultures (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc.). My travels have also left me with the clear understanding that American culture does not (yet?) have the experience or vocabulary to fully deal with individual and cultural freedom. If it is a learning curve, we are ahead of many, but lag behind others.

There is also the very real possibility that human beings, as a group, will always swing between the dark sureties of faith, putting me squarely at the the center of the universe, and the unsettling brilliance of science, illuminating my insignificance in (and interconnectedness with) the vastness of the universe.

I suppose that sense of interconnectedness may be the most important thing I took away from my early experiences of faith. And it may the  thing I see the least of in most people who seem to connect to traditional belief. Are we all part of this universe (which I have come to think of as god), or are we each separate, vulnerable, estranged? Whichever reality I see, you have to find your own. That's what Jesus would do.

Religion: A Modest Proposal

Critic James Wood, in a recent article in the New Yorker (subscription required to read the entire article), looks at the dispute between "God and the new atheists." With recent books by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hithchins attacking "the god delusion" there have of course been a number of counter-arguments defendng the power of faith. As there have been for hundreds thousands of years. Nothing new.

In this particular dispute can I ask for one point of linguistic clarity? Can we make a distinction between that which is "spiritual" and that which is "religious"?

To wit: the word religion describes a community of belief much more than it describes the relationship of the individual believer to whatever is held to be holy. There may be one Holy Roman Catholic church, but there are many beliefs about the specific nature of god or Jesus or specific saints or teachings held by the members of that church, no matter what the pope says. Perhaps as many beliefs as there are self-professed catholics.

The article looks at a recent work by the Oxford don Terry Eagleton, who pulls off being both a Marxist and a Catholic. As soon as Wood tries to summarize Eagleton's defense of faith you can see the basic problem.

On the one hand Eagleton recognizes that the god of Aquinas (or Maimonides) is so far distant from the concerns of this planet that he (god) can only be talked about as the sum of all reality, the Thing that Is. This language is indistinguishable from the way that even atheists talk about the universe, or from the descriptions of the Tao or of the operations of sub-atomic particles. That is the Spiritual view, human beings trying to come to grips with the limits of our minds in comprehending the vastness of the exterior world. There may be elements of faith in the spiritual discussion, but it is still grounded in the open-ended process of approaching the numinous in the swirling, random dust of our lives.

It's when Eagleton starts to talk about the specific nature of god and the relationship to our daily lives that he goes to a different level entirely -- that of professed and shared belief whose main value, in the manner of Wittgenstein, is to connect us to the culture around is. That is Religion -- and it has almost nothing to do with spirituality. It may have much to do with social orthodoxy, and obviously has a great deal to do with forging political support and religious armies prepared to do battle with ... whomever.

When we talk about creeds or sects or organizational entities, we are talking about Religion, not about the nature of god or spiritual transcendence. When we try to understand why Life (in every sense) is what it is we have entered Spiritual realms.

For one thing, the individual on a spiritual path is, almost by definition, on an individual path. This has always been a major problem for any church -- keeping firm control of all those shining-eyed mystics who have experienced god for themselves, and don't need to go through a priest. Individual knowledge, then, threatens priest and church, while shared superstition and fear strengthen them.

At pretty much any period in human history (since the rise of cities and government and all that) religion was a kind of counterbalance to kings and earthly power, with dangers to both sides from either too cozy or too hostile a relationship. But both sides gain from subjugating the spiritual individual to the religious/political organization (and promising an afterlife better than this one -- the ultimate retirement benefit).

Somehow, the spiritual has survived, and perhaps you and I can agree (as individuals) to treat religion as Religion and spirituality as Spirituality. That might be a good start.