THEY

THEY are really the problem, aren't THEY? People around the world agree on that. They just don't agree about who THEY are. Some point to the police and say, "THEY are all a bunch of racist thugs on a powertrip." Others point to the poor, and say "THEY just want to lay around and take handouts." Right now there are people looking at Ferguson, Missouri, pointing to African-Americans who live there, and saying, "THEY just need to settle down and stop tearing up their own community." Over in the Middle East, there are Jews looking at Arabs and saying, "THEY are a bunch of terrorists who want to wipe Israel off the map." And there are Arabs looking at Jews and saying, "THEY are Zionist extremists who won't stop until the Palestinians are dead or driven away." Whoever THEY are, THEY are to blame for most of the society's ills. WE certainly aren't.

The problem is, THEY is just a word, and an inadequate one--even a deceiving one. "THEY" takes a whole group of individuals, each one different, and tries to fit them all under an umbrella that can never cover fully cover them. When people rant about THEY, they seem to see THEM as a sort of faceless, homogeneous mass. But that's a cartoon view of reality, and an ugly one at that. THEY aren't like that. Some of THEM, are, sure. Some cops, for example, are racist thugs on a powertrip. And many of them aren't. Some of them are good, brave people doing their best in a hard job. I've known both kinds.

Same goes for all the other THEYS. Take the African-American community in Ferguson. To hear some people tell it, you would think THEY could do no wrong. To hear others tell it, THEY have only themselves to blame. Both views are ridiculous, because there is no THEY. There are just many different individuals, with many different points of view, acting many different ways. Some of them, obviously, are looters and rioters (though many of those are from outside the area). But some--I would say most--are horrified and embarrassed by the looters and violence. I would think most of them are angry and feel like they have every right to protest (and I think they're probably right) but they're horrified and embarrassed by the violence and looting. Many of them are calling for calm and peace, and some of them have even taken to guarding stores from looters. As in any group of people in a volatile situation, there are all kinds of reactions. Cooler heads are trying to keep the peace, but there are always a few hotheads (usually young men after a few drinks) who they may not be able to control. It's always been like this, in every community under pressure and composed of...well... human beings. And the rest of the community sees the violence break out and thinks, "People are going to blame us all for that. They're going to think we're all that way."

And they're right. People will do just that, saying, "See, just look at how THEY act." Whether THEY are poor, or rich, or black or white, or Arab or Jew or Christian or atheist, or liberal or conservative, or police or protesters; people will look at the worst elements and say, "Yep, that's how THEY are." And people need to stop doing that, because it's just stupid. It's a simplistic and jaundiced way of looking at other people, and it's done untold harm in the world--maybe as much harm as those few hotheads and thugs that cause most of the violence. After all, they're are thinking that way too. And if the hotheads are the spark, the widespread THEY attitude is the fuel. And that fuel is inside all of us, if WE let ourselves slip into lazy, cartoonish, cynical habits of thought, and start thinking THEY are all alike.

On Tolerance and Other Paradoxes

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. - Karl Popper

Reading the news the last few weeks has me thinking about tolerance. In a previous post, I wrote about how I had come to see the wisdom in my dad's contention that before people try to "love they neighbor" they should try to master "tolerate thy neighbor". It's simply a more attainable goal, and a glance at the news on any random day will tell you we haven't even gotten there yet. Walk before you run, and all that.

Of course, "first tolerate, then try to work your way up to love", isn't as simple and self-contained as it sounds. It can only go so far, because not everything should be tolerated. Some religions say we should feel compassion and even love for thieves, liars, and murderers, but they don't generally argue that we should tolerate what they do, and for good reason. You can't have a workable society which looks at a murderer and says, "Oh, that's just Joe. Sure, he stabs somebody every now and then, but that's just his personality, you know?"

So, if tolerance is going to be more than just a bumper sticker, we need to really think about its limits. Like most good things, it's only good in moderation. In fact, tolerance has the strange feature of being self-destructive when taken to an extreme. Take religious tolerance--many religious groups are intolerant of people who don't share their religion. Just yesterday, the Sunni extremist group ISIS killed dozens of people of the Yazidi faith after they refused to convert to Islam. Should ISIS' intolerance be tolerated? Surely not. If you tolerate active, violent intolerance, aren't you just promoting intolerance with your tolerance?

Tolerance, like the related concept of ethical/cultural relativism, self-destructs when taken too far. There may be a few college freshmen clinging to relativism hard enough to say we can't judge ISIS because what they're doing is right in the context of their culture. But what about the Yazidi culture, or the culture of the Chaldean Christians who are also in danger? Relativism and tolerance both have limits, and for similar reasons.

Tolerance, it seems, is a bit like oxygen. You have to have it, but only at appropriate levels. Raise the concentration too high, and things start to explode.

So how do you figure out what the appropriate level is? That's the hard part. Some people think the appropriate level is close to zero. This was the view in the Christian world for hundreds of years. Heretics were seen as endangering not just their own soul, but the souls of others, so killing and torturing them was considered the lesser evil. Tolerating them would have seemed like madness. After the Protestant revolution, people slowly began to realize that the religious diversity was here to stay, and started trying to figure out ways to live with it. People like Locke argued that it was useless to try to force belief on people anyway, because you can't. All you can do is make them say they believe a certain way. You've forced them to lie, and put yourself in a position of not knowing what they're thinking. This is a lesson the extreme PC crowd could still stand to learn: all you do when you suppress ideas is drive them underground, where you can't see what they're up to. This sets the stage for some nasty surprises in the future.

Later thinkers, notably John Stuart Mill, tried to find the appropriate line between freedom and tolerance on the one hand, and restriction and suppression on the other., with the Harm Principle. Mill, in an uncharacteristic burst of brevity, summed up this principle nicely: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

Put in the language of tolerance, this means society should tolerate individual actions up to the point where they interfere with the freedom of others. We can't tolerate active intolerance. If someone wants to say, "Eggplants have souls and it's wrong to eat them!", that should be tolerated. If he starts yanking people's eggplant parmesan off their tables, that should not be tolerated. As the old saying goes, "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."

The harm principle is wonderfully simple, and I find it pretty appealing. But it's not without problems, because the line between fists and noses can be surprisingly fuzzy. If a man develops a gambling problem, and his kids suffer because of it, his actions aren't just affecting him. If I decide to ride a motorcycle without a helmet, I can't honestly say that only affects me. I'm raising my chances of dying in an accident, and if that happened, it would affect my friends and family as well. Mill would probably say, "Yes, but that doesn't mean the law should get involved." Maybe that's true, but what if I wrecked and had massive head injuries, and couldn't pay the medical bills? Should society help me pay them? Some libertarians would say, "No way. You made your decision (as was your right), and you don't deserve to be helped."

But others don't want to live in a society where those who make stupid decisions are simply allowed to die. Who hasn't made a stupid decision, at least as a teenager? They would argue that it would be better to just require people to wear helmets and get medical insurance, because their decisions don't just effect them. So, the harm principle doesn't simplify everything as much as it first seems to. Even the phrase about your fist and my nose originated among temperance advocates arguing that alcohol should be regulated or outlawed, because drunkenness doesn't usually affect only the drunk. They thought alcohol was hitting too many innocent bystanders in the nose.

Still, I think the harm principle is a useful rule of thumb, and I tend to think we should err on the side of freedom, at least when it comes to individual actions. But I also want to suggest another rule of thumb. Let's call it the evidence principle. If I want to force another person to speak or act in a certain way (you can't really force people to think a certain way) then I should be able to provide real, empirical evidence to show that their actions are harmful to others. And appealing to tradition or scripture isn't good enough. Maybe the tradition or scripture is a good one, but if so, it should be possible to show why that's true. No intolerance without evidence, that's my slogan.

One of the places this principle could be best applied today is on the question of gay marriage. If you ask people why they oppose gay marriage, oftentimes they simply point to tradition or the Bible, as if that settles it. But it doesn't, because it may be that both are wrong. Slavery once had hundreds of years of tradition behind it (and you better believe people used that to argue in its favor) but that didn't make it right. Similarly, the Bible can be wrong. People may argue otherwise, but they don't really believe it. How many people are really going to say the following passage is something we should follow?

"If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear." - Deuteronomy 21:18-21

Nobody in their right mind, that's who. Both tradition and the Bible can be wrong, and that's why those who want to be intolerant to the point of forcing others to comply with their beliefs should be able to make a very good case--with real evidence--that the practice they're against is harmful to others. If people want to speak intolerantly, I think that's their prerogative (just as its the prerogative of others to denounce them for it). But if they want to practice active intolerance--forcing their views on others--then the burden of proof should be on them. Tradition and scripture won't cut it. As a judge in Virginia recently put it, "tradition alone cannot justify denying same-sex couples the right to marry any more than it could justify Virginia's ban on interracial marriage." Of course, this "evidence principle" doesn't just apply to gay marriage. It applies any time someone is so sure of their beliefs that they're willing to impose them on others, or even--as in the case of ISIS and the Inquisition--kill those who follow their own conscience.

One of the best arguments for tolerance of other cultures and views is that it's so easy to be wrong. The world is full of different lifestyles, ethical beliefs, and traditions--should we really be so convinced ours are the right ones? What if the other guys are right? Some of the world's traditions are mutually exclusive, which means they can't all be true. That means some ancient traditions and scriptures are dead wrong. As far as I'm concerned, that's the main reason we should err on the side of freedom and tolerance, and put a heavy burden of proof on those who want to be intolerant. There are some things that can be shown not to be tolerable, and I think one of those things is unfounded intolerance.  

Blasphemy, Certainty, and Wild Conjectures

I've been reading a book called God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World, and Why Their Differences Matter, by Stephen Prothero. In the chapter on Judaism, I came upon this passage that I liked a lot:

“Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God's behalf. This 'blasphemy of certainty' is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side.”

I liked the whole idea here, but I especially liked the phrase "blasphemy of certainty". When I started looking to see where it came from I ended up in one of those intellectual pinball games I sometimes find myself in on the internet. Turns out it's a quote from an essay called The God of the Desert, by Richard Rodriguez. Which I intend to read, but so far I haven't. Anyway, the passage it comes from is this:

“The blasphemy that attaches to monotheism is the blasphemy of certainty. If God is on our side, we must be right. We are right because we believe in god. We must defend God against the godless.”

Seems true to me. But I also found a similar passage while Googling, from an excellent article by Andrew Sullivan:

The 16th century writer Michel de Montaigne lived in a world of religious war, just as we do. And he understood, as we must, that complete religious certainty is, in fact, the real blasphemy.

These passages linking certainty, war, and blasphemy resonate with me, even though I'm not sure blasphemy isn't, as they say, a victimless crime. If God does exist, and She is in fact omniscient and beyond any human understanding, then surely being certain that we know Her thoughts is hubristic and disrespectful. I don't know if I would call it blasphemy. That word makes me nervous, because it's been the charge brought against far too many people who ended up being executed for it.

But what if that such killings, based on the lesser crime of certainty, is the real blasphemy? I don't believe humans were created in God's image, but for people who do, you would think killing Her special creations would be blasphemy if ANYTHING is blasphemy. Misplaced and prideful certainty is one thing, but killing in the name of that certainty--and doing so in the name of God-- is surely quite another. Both Montaigne and the current Pope have similar points. Montaigne noted that:

"It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account."

While Pope Francis, in a radio address last year, said:

"this ‘closing off’ that imagines that those outside, everyone, cannot do good is a wall that leads to war and also to what some people throughout history have conceived of: killing in the name of God. That we can kill in the name of God. And that, simply, is blasphemy. To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.”

Hear, hear, gentleman.

As for certainty, even if we could have absolute certainty about everything, would it really be such a gift? Elsewhere in Andrew Sullivan's essay (I'm really bouncing around here, huh? There's a reason this blog's called Ramblebrain) I find a quote from the German playwright Lessing, who said:

"If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left hand only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand, and say, Father, I will take this--the pure Truth is for You alone."

That one bowled me over. It started me thinking in a different direction (ramble, ramble), not about blasphemy, but about truth and certainty. I realized I would make the same choice Lessing did. Sure, I might be tempted by the offer of the full truth, but what would I do with it once I had it? Where would I go from there? If you know all truth, there would be no surprises; nothing to look forward to. Sometimes I lament the fact that my lifespan won't be 1/10th long enough to get any real foothold on Truth with a capital T. Maybe not 1/1000th. But is that really such a tragedy? Maybe it would be a bigger tragedy to actually have the full truth.

I wouldn't know, but I would think it would be mortally boring to be omniscient. To ever find anything interesting, you would have to make yourself forget things. Some people think of God as existing in some kind of state of ultimate sublime wholeness, but would that in fact be a sublime existence? I can't imagine what this hypothetical state even means, or if it exists, but it certainly doesn't sound very interesting to me. You would want to have new things to learn, wouldn't you...new things to create, or see created? You would crave some excitement, and you wouldn't want the spoilers omniscience would give you. It would be like knowing the outcome of every story that will ever be told. It would be the universal spoiler.

What if (and now I'm getting into the wildest kind of speculation) there is or was an omniscient God in possession of omniscience and the full truth, and She found Her existence boring and lonely? And so She decided to forget what She knew, and to allow Her wholeness to fragment--in order to really feel alive? What if that's how this fragmented universe of broken symmetries and diversity came about? What if it's even why it came about? Maybe it was more interesting to create--or even become--a contingent universe that eventually came to include billions of sentient beings with billions of points of view? None of them would have the full truth, but that's the point: they wouldn't know the outcome of the play before the curtain lifted.

Is there a theology similar to this? I imagine there is, but if so I don't know what it's called. It reminds me of the Hindu idea of lila, which I've heard expressed as something like, "The universe is what happens when God wants to play." It's probably not how it happened at all of course, and I don't have a clue if there's a God at all, much less whether She would find her omniscience boring. These are wild conjectures, and I don't put much stock in them--certainly not enough to roast anybody alive. I don't have that much certainty in anything. I don't know the full truth, and I probably never will. And I'm realizing that's a very good thing.