The Catholic?

Rick Santorum, now challenging Romney to head the Republican ticket, is almost a caricature of what I oppose in my ethical model which I call Integrity.

He exemplifies moral certainty (which Cullen Murphy describes in God's Jury, the history of the Inquisition and the making of the modern world).  He bases his morality and his policies on the Bible which is God's Word to him.  He pretends that the USA is founded on Christianity and that the nation is and should be a Christian.  He condemns secularism as an evil opposed to Christianity and the nation.

He believes that he has a duty to oppose artificial birth control (condemned by the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy), "radical feminism" (which removes women from their proper role in the family), military women in combat (because it is naturally distracting to men), pre-natal examinations (since they could result in abortion), abortion (which is murder because human life is fully present, a soul infused, when the egg is fertilized), government support of the poor and aged (because that should be left to God and family; and socialism is evil),  homosexuality (because it is forbidden by the Bible and the Church), gay marriage and the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" in the military (because it condones homosexuality).  He wants to minimize government role in economic policy, but maximize it in cultural policy (e.g. related to women, gays, sexual mores).

His passionate sincerity and moral certainty are unquestionable.  He is the "good Catholic" as the current Pope, the Bishops, and most clergy would define that.  But, as Catholic journalist E.J. Dionne has often said,  Santorum is far from being a Catholic in the tradition of Pope John XXIII, Archbishop Romerro, Dan Berrigan, Telhard de Chardin, Karl Rahner, Rosemary Reuther, Jack Egan, Dorothy Day, Graham Greene, Dominick Crossan, Thomas Merton, David Steindl-Rast, and the American Bishops who sent the Pastoral Letter on the American Economy.  He does not know, probably because he was never taught, the rich Catholic tradition of social teachings which he castigates as a Marxist heresy called "liberation theology."

Ironically, though he condemns the theology of the secularists, he has no theology.  Theology is the questioning of religious doctrine and ritual in the light of reason in order to bring the Church in dialogue with the contemporary world towards a continue transformation of Church and World towards a free, just, and open society.  He does not know theology, he only knows dogma as it has been approved by authority.  He is a Catholic ideologian without a Catholic theology.

Like George Bush, he is not evil.  He is a likable, nice guy and a true believer.  But his true belief and moral certainty would be a near occasion for evil policies in the world as it was for George Bush who permitted two wars killing hundreds of thousands of people, condoning torture, increasing an obscene disparity in wealth, capitulating to big corporations leading to a huge economic downturn for ordinary people (not the very wealthy), a further sacrificing of the health of the planet, and a disparaging of science.

As Eric Hoffer pointed out long ago and Cullen Murphy today, it was true belief and moral certainty that led to the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and most wars of genocide.  Cardinal Torquemada, Innocent III, Bloody Mary, Pius XIII, Benito Mussolini, Generalissimo Franco, Adolph Hitler, Joe McCarthy were all Roman Catholics and supported by the official Roman Catholic Church.  Many of them were pious in their private lives and nice people socially.

Obama's people attacked Romney for having no "core."  If that means not having absolute principles, true beliefs, or moral certainty, then I think that is a good thing and I hope Obama has none either.  If that means pragmatically putting religious values to the test of humaneness and making sure that no principle gets in the way of treating others humanly, go Romney.  I don't mind your Mormonism as long as you don't pretend America has to be Mormon and as long as it does not obstruct your sense of human fairness here and now.

We sure don't want another sincere, true believing, nice-guy Christian in the White House.

The Problem of Evil

The other evening we watched Slavery by Another Name, a PBS presentation based on the book by Douglas Blackmon.  Anyone who could watch this without tasting disgusting evil has little sensitivity or reason.  How could you not condemn the perpetrators, those who made profit by keeping African Americans in abject bondage even after “emancipation”?  How could you not condemn community leaders, even Teddy Roosevelt (formerly one of my heroes), who, like the banal Eichmann, refused to acknowledge, must less stop, this atrocity?

And how could you not praise Blackman and PBS for letting us know this part of America, land of the free?

There is a problem of evil that has nothing to do with a good, omnipotent god creating or permitting bad things on earth while supposedly forbidding them in heaven.  Rather it has to do with our new understanding of physics, social conditioning, and neuroscience.  Recognizing the determinism in science even quantum and emergent physics, the role of the environment in shaping behavior, and the modular nature of the brain, do we let people, including ourselves, off the hook? 

(Recall the joke about the judge who said to the murderer, when he claimed in his defense that he was predestined to this crime, “I’m sorry, I am predestined to sentence you to life in prison.”)

Is there evil that must be opposed vehemently?  What makes it evil?  And when are we practicing and being evil while attributing it to others: terrorists, communists, criminals, racists, anarchists, Republicans, atheists?  Can we hold people, institutions, and nations accountable?  And ourselves?  Should we not make those southern aristocrats, plantation owners, and businessmen who perpetrated such horrors on African Americans pay for their actions?  Should we make amends for our and our ancestors’ silence?  Or just forget it?  Like the Holocaust, Vietnam War, American Indian and Armenian genocide, Japanese brutality, Dresden, Hiroshima.  Just chalk them up to our naturally selected proclivities for violence, selfishness, righteousness, domination!

Elsewhere I have argued for an ethical model based on the structure of our humanity, our existence in the world, as revealed through biology, psychology, and neuroscience.  Good behavior enhances that structure.  Bad behavior diminishes it.  Evil is much more than breaching the customs of a culture, much more than desecrating religious codes of some holy book, and much more than breaking the laws of civil society.  Evil is violating existence itself, destroying that which makes us human, obstructing our collective progress, and devastating our common future. 

Some philosophers of science following Plato have argued that evil is lack of knowledge.  They argue that our way of dealing with evil, whether earthquakes or wars, is knowledge by problem solving.  But I prefer to say that lack of knowledge is a source of evil—especially when we neglect or refuse that knowledge. 

Evil can be attributed to acts, persons, institutions, and situations.  An act that treats another as an object for personal gain is a violation of one’s own dynamic relationship with others as co-creators.  A mine owner identified by a pattern of behavior that cohorts with a justice of the peace to arrest a black man and sell him to that mine owner to work off a fine is an evil person.  An institution is a complex pattern of behavior involving many persons with stable rules.  An institution, like an economic system that depends on slave labor or unequal wealth creation is evil.  So is a church whose rules keep women or races in a subordinate position and that legitimizes and sanctifies ignorance.

Here is the problem, really crisis, of evil.  Evolution, accidentally or by some overseeing “Providence” if you want (I don’t!), has brought us to a point where we can take responsibility personally and collectively, for our past and our future, for the place and condition of our very being.  It comes with the power of reflection, the ability to think scientifically, to choose freedom with our existence. 

I am not saying we are totally, unconditionally free or powerful or thoughtful.  I am saying that we together in association can take responsibility to become free, thoughtful, and powerful.  Freedom and power and thoughtfulness are not granted by the state, by the church, by aliens, by angels, by gods, or by nature.  They are achieved through thought and action with others of our species.  Wise people have indicated this for as long as we can remember, but it is only since the Enlightenment, the Age of Revolution, and the New Science that this is dawning on our species globally. 

We live in a time and space in which we can acknowledge our past and shape our future to achieve a world in which people can become free and powerful and thoughtful or its opposite.  It is an awe filled responsibility. 

There are acts, persons, institutions, and situations that are evil—that obstruct human progress, that undermine the dynamism of human existence.  However, because ours is an ambiguous existence, evil is not absolute. Acts can be forgiven, persons can change, institutions can reform, and situations can transition.  To demonize a person or an institution is just another evil. 

Some politicians and pundits pander to the ignorant and the fearful, using hateful labels and slogans about the other side even though they know better, because it increases their ratings and profits “from the base.”  In doing so they promote popular ignorance, fear, and even violence.  These panderers indeed are most despicable.  But even they are not absolute evils to be dehumanized as they do to others.   

Anger towards these people, institutions, and situations, as found in Slavery by Another Name and often on talk radio and stump speeches, is appropriate.  We must do all we can to stop their injustice, but never participate in their belief and action that would make an enemy an object, a thing, an alien—a “devil.”  When we do this we become them and participate in their evil—as Malcolm X came to understand with his growth in Islam.  Indeed all institutions including religion are to be judged and reformed by the standard of our humanity and our capacity for progressive understanding and love. 

Let human morality not be founded in or judged by the oracles of the gods.  But let the oracles of the gods be founded in and judged by human morality.

From Nothing?

Philosopher Martin Heidegger asked it as have many before him:  "Why is there something rather than nothing?"   Well Quantum Physicist and Cosmologist Lawrence Krauss answered it in his book "A Universe from Nothing."

I read the book once and need to read it once again.  But I think he shows how it could have happened without appealing to any supernatural being or event.  Though it is still quite full of wonder.

He demonstrates that we live in a "flat" universe where the average energy, including gravity, is zero, how empty space can fill with energy that can give rise to virtual particles through quantum fluctuations, that particles of matter and anti-matter self-destruct unless one of them falls into a black hole.  All that seems to be born out by the discovered and verified laws of physics.

Then he speculates with other theorists that our universe is part of a multiverse with infinite, or at least indefinite, paths of possibilities. Eternity really has no meaning without space and time and space-time emerges in a quantum universe.

The bleak side of it all is that in a few trillion years our universe will spread out so far and so flat as to return to the nothing it came from.

Well, I don't understand all that.  But I'm starting to get it.  I dare everybody to read it with an open mind.

As Darwin and following biologists have demonstrated, the development of life, mammals, and humans without recourse to some extraneous outside nature event, so Krauss is showing the same for matter, space, time, our total universe.

I suppose some will find this bad news and so will not accept the science.  That is their prerogative. William James spoke of the need of both tender minds that value emotion, poetry, religion and tough minds that value reason in science.  Krauss I think brings the two together in this statement: ". . . we continue to marshall the courage to live meaningful lives in a universe that likely came into existence, and may fade out of existence, without purpose, and certainly without us at the center."

This, the courage to face reality, I believe is the real courage to be. It is the faith that is ultimately the source of meaning, the basis for truth, love, and morality.

Quotes on Religion in America

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Thomas Jefferson


The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion . . .
George Washington, Treaty of Tripoli


This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.  John Adams

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.
Thomas Paine


It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
Albert Einstein


Religion, comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.
Sigmund Freud


Religion is the end of love and honesty, the beginning of confusion; faith is a colorful hope or fear, the origin of folly.
Tao Te Ching


A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
Carl Sagan


If you believe in the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden you are deemed fit for the bin. If you believe in parthenogenesis, ascension, transubstantiation and all the rest of it, you are deemed fit to govern the country.
Jonathan Meades


A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Albert Einstein


When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? It is because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
~ J. Krishnamurthi


We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
~ Gene Roddenberry

The Ethics of Divine Love

So now let me put on my Jesuit theology hat.  Steven Hawking in Brief History of Time indicated that scientists were approaching the Grand Unified Field Theory of Everything and, when achieved, would look into the "Mind of God." He was confronted and assured his followers that, like most scientists, he did not find use for any entity outside or beyond nature and was just using the phrase as "a metaphor."

Well, of course, metaphor (e.g. symbol, image, model) is all we have to advance knowledge.  According to Karl Popper, John Dewey, and all students of scientific method, we use our imaginations to make conjectures and then check them out by making predictions that can falsify the models we postulated.  The question is: is the metaphor "God" at all useful in our post enlightenment, post modern world.

Earlier I discussed morality from an evolutionary psychologist point of view.  Moral rules preserve and advance the species by helping us get along with other people.  Those rules are legitimated through laws and sanctified through religion.  And from what I read there are three orders of "other people": 1) family, tribe, spouse for reproduction, protection, and emotional support, 2) friends and community (including neighborhood, congregation, service club, association) for social relevance and intellectual support, 3) city, state, civilization for cultural, artistic, and scientific education and support.

Ethics is a critique of the moral rules so that 1) we can adapt to changing and new environments and 2) we can satisfy a personal and collective yearning, wonder, hope for knowledge (including moral knowledge) and further growth as human beings.

The model for a universal ethic that I have postulated I call "Integrity" and find it in the structure of our human knowing and acting in the world as we discover it through science and express it philosophically.

Just as ethics is a critique of moralities (e.g. comparative moralities in history or the operating ones in our culture), so is theology the critique of religions, their expressions, institutions, rituals.  Theology means "study of god/s" and is taught in seminaries and divinity schools.  The "God" hypothesis is problematic.  It is not a scientific statement because it cannot be falsified (Popper) and it is often a hindrence to science by blocking the search for universal explanation.  In that sense I could argue that literal theism is immoral since it impedes the human moral imperative.

Supernatural entitites by definition (admitting of no explanation in nature) are pretty useless for actual knowledge though quite a delight for fantasy and fiction.  However, because gods can incite imagination and imagination is a vital part of science, there may be a way to reflect on religion and thus do theology as a useful human venture.  Can one be an non-theist and a theologian?  In my theological tradition, I will try to do that now.

The definition of God that I like most is the one in the Johannine tradition that "God is Love and we who live (and act) in love, live in God and God in us."  This ties into Paul's morality that there are three key virtues, "faith, hope, and love and the greatest of these is love" and Luke's indicator of the ideal community: "see how they love one another." And then there is Matthew 25, the beatitudes, which is love for the least of these.

But what is love?  If I can provide an explanation of love--especially through science--maybe I can vindicate theological thinking that God is Infinite Love and the purpose and meaning of human existence. Though I am not sure I care about vindicating theological thinking.  I am more interested in using the imaginative aspect of theology to further our human quest and prospect.

Human thinking, action, and existence are about relationships, relationships at all levels, micro and macro.  We use our symbolic capacity--images, words, models, metaphors, formulas--to discern, develop, and verify relationships.  The arts and sciences are primary means by which we exercise this capacity.

We can use the three orders I described above to define "love" as a uniting relationship among people.  In the first order, there is affective and erotic love--that of family and admirers.  In the second order, there is friendship love--that of companions and colleagues. And in the third there is transcending love--that of mystics, poets, seekers, and adventurers.

The third order of love is linked to the search for universal explanation and to progressive knowledge and transformation of the world or what David Deutsch calls the "beginning of infinity."  Infinity refers to the ongoing reach of ideas, the progressive search for explanation, the totality of relationships.

Perhaps here is a moment to resurrect the theory of Omega Point advocated by Teilhard de Chardin and Frank Tipler.  Dennett I think rightly criticizes Chardin by inferring an inevitable progressive intentionality and directionality in Evolution.  Tipler is criticized for giving Omega Point, occurring at the Big Crunch, unwarranted characteristics.  Both identify Omega Point with God--one that is becoming through the progress of universal understanding or explanation.

Bernard Lonergan analyzes human understanding in scientific method and discovers infinity in the "unlimited and unrestricted desire to know" and defines Being or God as the objective for the unrestricted desire to know.  The notion of God is our experience of our collective and progressive search for knowledge of our world and for unity in our relationships.  This notion can be identified with universal truth and love and is beginning of infinity.

I think this notion gives meaning to the God metaphor without postulating some supernatural entity or order beyond or above nature, that is, should one want to use "God-talk" (e.g. theology) at all which I seldom do.  More important to me is the commitment to thought and action that will progress our knowledge and relationships which we make by continuing to question, to think, to problem-solve, to act, and to keep learning, never settling for old language and answers especially in the form of creeds and institutions.  That, I think, is the "faith"beyond the religions and moralities to which great prophets, philosophers, and poets have pointed us.

And so, as a non-theist and a theologian, I think there can be a place for God-talk in good philosophy and science if you recognize its metaphorical character.  Nevertheless, I want my church or temple to be without revelations from angels and gods, without creeds or infallible pronouncements, and without an institution that pretends to be founded by God.  I want the clergy, not as conduits of infallible pronouncements or mediators to truth, but guides to faith in existence/truth/love, encouraging us to go on searching and exploring even without finding.

I guess that makes me a unitarian, universalist, catholic.  In faith a universalist accepting the ambiguity of diversity; in hope a unitarian trusting that unity will eventually be achieved, and in love a catholic, inclusive of all without condition. If God-talk leads to this, so be it. But when God-talk gets in the way of this (as it often does), then I disdain it.

Hypocrisy

Just finished Robert Kurzban's book, Why everyone (else) is a hypocrite: Evolution and the Modern Mind. Pleasant, fast read.  I thought it might be useful for my project in New Ethics.  And it was.

But if you've already read as much as I have in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology (Gozanniga, Pinker, Dawkins, etc), you will find it pretty much a summary of the findings for a modular brain.  It is another good attack on the Cartesian dualism we've inherited culturally and biologically along with the illusion of a wizard of Oz "self" behind all the curtains.  And it is a rather fun critique of self-deception, self-control, self-help, self-interest, and even self-actualization with all their silliness.  It certainly helps to explain what's happening in the Republican primary debates and an electorate desperately wanting purity, certainty, righteousness.

Inconsistency is a well-evidenced way of the brain for a lot of evolutionary adaptations related to diverse modules, some conscious, some not, with very diverse functions developed in the course of natural selection.  What is seen as hypocrisy in others, is often just what we would call "flexibility" in ourselves.  Knowing this makes me a bit less judgmental.

However, when Kurzban does do some ethical reflection, he finds that in the long run hypocrisy is not good for the species.  Morality was developed primarily because we need to live and act with other people to survive and thrive, i.e. achieve "reproductive advantage." Rules were developed to limit other people's negative behavior.  When rules were not applied to all (e.g. not to the sovereign or some elite), they could not be sustained.  So people are held accountable to the rules through publicity.  We can be as inconsistent as others allow us to be.  That's the extent of liberty, e.g. do your own thing as much as you want as long as you don't harm others (meaning as much as others allow you.)

His is not a very deep ethical reflection, but I suppose mirrors what most people say--and maybe even live by.  Kurzban does believe that some antidote to hypocrisy is found in linking your speech and action to consistent mutually agreed upon principles.

I find that Kurzban is somewhat inconsistent himself (though I certainly do not judge him a hypocrite!).

• While he denies a unitary self, he does an awful lot of "I" talk.  
• He makes morality mainly a negative act, a condemnation of others harmful (to me) behaviors.  Maybe--but I think an ethics can be created on a more positive basis--which is what I am trying to do in my attempt for a "universal ethics."
• Principle based rules can I think lead to rigidity, i.e. the consistency of religiously based war and torture.
• His "reproductive advantage" criterion is certainly good evolutionary biology, but I think doesn't show the new option beyond simple reproductive advantage that our evolution for reproductive advantage is providing us.
• He adopts a sort of naturalistic fallacy (Hume's "ought" from "is") without showing why or how.  
• Maybe saying the same thing, his is a pretty static view of human existence, ironically more machine-like than organic, much less emergent.  

I argue in my "Integrity: the Search for the Universal Ethic" that good human behavior is more than non-hypocrisy to be achieved by simply limiting other people's behavior; that while there is no "real" or "being" self, there is a "becoming" self; that while integrity is not an achieved reality, it is an achievable reality and even a being-achieved reality.

Much more later.

Political Integrity and the Presidential Campaign

Looks like the campaign is set:   Obama/Biden vs. Romney/(Santorum?).

Now character and capacity are important in a candidate.  It is important to reflect on a person's integrity.  But I am more interested here in the integrity of our political system including the integrity of the campaign.

______________________

Mr Obama and Mr. Romney, could you stop any name-calling (e.g. "socialist" vs "vulture capitalist"), reject all statements that earn Pinocchios from the Washington Post or have not been fact checked through Snopes, not use broad characterizations that cannot be verified or falsified but are just designed to spur feelings of disgust and are simply ideologically pure to appeal to some "base" or "talk show host?"

Would it be possible to have a political campaign through which citizens are actually engaged in civil discourse about specific issues, about the shape of the political order and role of government that we need at this moment in our history, and about the direction we want to take not only as a nation but as human beings?

I think it is okay to be negative, but can you stick to the issues and quit personal attacks and broad unsubstantiated characterizations? Neither of you are evil or inadequate to be president.  In fact I will go so far as to say that both of you are very decent Americans concerned about our welfare as a nation.  And I don't care which of you I would rather have a (root)beer with.  But I do think you represent very different approaches to government (differences which have been with us for over 200 years).  The question is which approach do we want now?

Here are some of questions I suggest to be posed, discussed, and answered.  You will notice the questions are not ones of belief (which usually indicates a fixed ideology or religion) but of thought (which usually indicates deliberation, discussion, and education).



Do we or do we not think that a role for Government is providing a safety net to citizens in the areas of income, income security, housing, health, and employment?

Do we or do we not think that our Government should come to the aid of areas hit by natural disasters?

Do we or do we not think our Government should provide support for research and development in new and promising economic, health, energy, and scientific ventures where private investment is not sufficient?

Do we or do we not think our Government should use fiscal and monetary policy in controlling inflation and deflation, in softening the effects of business cycles, in regulating private banking and investment policies that can affect the health of the public?

Do we or do we not think that our Government should regulate private and corporate practices that relate to medicine, food, health and safety?

Do we or do we not think our Government should determine the morality and practice of birth control, homosexuality and same sex marriage, profanity and pornography, and define when human life begins in embryo?

Do we or do we not think that we are living in a multi-polar world, that the US is no longer the sole arbitrar of right and defense?

Do we or do we not think our government has a role in dealing with world conflict, securing fair trade, maintaining diplomacy, and a strong military?

Do we or do we not think that America needs to honor its commitment to Israel's security?  Do we think that both Palestine and Israel should be secure, free, sovereign countries?

Do we or do we not think that our nation should provide a path to citizenship for persons who have lived here a long time (eg 5 years) although without legal papers, worked here, raised children here, paid taxes here while at the same time stop the practice of illegal immigration?

Do we or do we not think that climate change is occurring, that human action in carbon emissions is contributing to climate change, that it could effect the human condition negatively, that we need to do something about it personally and collectively, that governments have an important role to play in this?

Do we or do we not think that economic disparity is a problem both within our nation and its cities and with the world, and that our government should play a role in dealing with it?

Do we or do we not think that government has a role to ensure non-discrimination related to race, ethnicity, religion, sex, personal sexual preference in public policy and in publicly supported or chartered and protected organizations?

Do we or do we not think that science and its method, rather than religious or cultural beliefs, should be used in determining what is real and in providing education?

Do we or do we not think that it is urgent that government support alternative energy production to diminish America's dependence on fossil fuels?

Do we or do we not think that America and its government needs to follow Christian beliefs in making decisions relating to domestic and foreign policy?

Do we or do we not think that civil service is an honorable profession, that public purpose (including community development and housing) can be served by non-profit organizations supported by government, that national government has a role in supporting cities that are in trouble?

Do we or do we not think that in general (outside of extreme crises) government should pay as it goes, that is collect sufficient revenues to pay for all its programs and administration?

Do we or do we not think that taxation should be progressive, i.e. be less of a burden on those who earn or have less?

Do we or do we not think that private corporations both profit and non-profit are vital to American democracy but should not be subsidized except through fairly awarded contracts to do government public purpose business?

Do you think that economic recovery and more jobs will be achieved by removing regulations from private enterprise and allowing them to hold on to more profits for investment or by government action to invest in infrastructure or some combination of both?

Do we or do we not think that wealthy special interest and corporate lobbying and contributions have too much influence in government and that SuperPacs need to be reigned in and held more accountable?

I would love to see these questions posed in NPR Newshour, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal along with your responses--as long as you want.  Then I want to see a team of respected political thinkers discuss them, make observations, and raise further questions in forums throughout the nation.

Of course, if we think that we should do something, how we do it is also fair game for questioning--as long as we recognize that the how is often worked out in a process of compromise and conciliation.

To my fellow citizens I ask: please add any other questions or suggest changes to these to make them more acceptable for thinking and deliberating as to who we want to be as a people.  And let's demand answers based on and challenged by thought.

Letter to Friends

Happy New Year to a friend and fellow sojourner!

First let me say that “retirement” agrees with me and I am grateful to Social Security, to former employers’ 401K and health plans, and ultimately to the American people that are allowing me to live modestly well while choosing my employment without regard to making money.

I write to recommend some reading.  You know that I have been on a philosophical quest for many years to discover and define a universal ethic that would inform our morality and guide our politics so that our grandchildren will progress in the happiness that we have known.  (See my blog at my website rolliesmith.us.)  And you know that I have been an avid amateur in science. 

The most informative sciences in my ethical quest have been Evolutionary Psychology and Neuroscience.   I just read three books that I recommend to you:  Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain by Michael Gazzaniga, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain by Terrence Deacon, and The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker.  Five stars all—though know that I award stars not by how much I agree with the books, but by how much they make me think and help me in my own inquiry.

Gazzaniga gives a good summary of his research into the modular workings of the brain, the primacy of emotional response and the illusion of conscious volition, and especially the interpreter function of the left hemisphere.  He helped me revise my ethical model, which I call “integrity” (see my Jan 1 blog) and redefine what freedom and responsibility mean in a contemporary society that values science.

Deacon provides the most up-to-date evidence for my own Philosophy of Symbolic Act that grounds my ethics and politics—filling out and correcting what I learned through Merleau-Ponty, Dewey, and their followers about the defining characteristic of human behavior: language and other symbolic forms through which truth, beauty, good, meaning, and happiness are achieved. 

But it is primarily Pinker’s book that I am recommending to you because of the insights it incites into our contemporary human condition.  For example, I could not understand the depth of the disappointment in Obama on the part of independent and liberal leaning Americans; nor could I understand the breadth of visceral and vituperous fear and hate of what Obama represents to people on the right.  But now I begin to understand the polarization in our body politic.

Here is a review of Pinker’s new book:

But first a confession.   I was more interested in his neuroscience than his philosophy of history—so I read the last three chapters much more carefully than I read (i.e. skimmed) the first seven. 

In the first seven he makes his case for the decline of violence even with 20^th century world wars, genocides, and serial killings.  He traces the decline in warfare, crime and punishment, infanticide, abuse of women and children, slavery, and hate-crimes through a combination of historical forces including civilization, pacification, humanitarian and rights revolutions where last year’s Whigs become this year’s Tories in a gradual rationalization and liberalization process.  In the last three he gives the science of violence and its decline.

Whether or not you agree with his history and with his values (less violence is better), you will find this a very hopeful book demonstrating a moral progress in humanity at a time of forgetfulness when we tend to romanticize the past; e.g. the tremendous political polarities and corruption of 19^th Century America far outdoing anything we see today, the inquisition and religious wars, the imperial pacifications.

But it is hardly Pollyanna.  The sources of devastation and of improvement, the inner demons and the better angels, are with us.  Pinker’s scientific treatise identifies these and points the way to how we might want to use them to become who we want to become.  That’s the part that helps me most in my inquiry.

In these chapters he describes the “seeker” and “rage” circuits of the brain and indicates five triggers for violence and the reasons for their selection in evolution: 1) practical—using force to get something wanted, 2) dominance—overcoming rivals especially sexual; 3) revenge—restraining tribal harm; 4) sadism—pleasure in hurting; 5) ideology—true belief to maintain group.  His description of the fifth trigger for violence is especially cogent and very important for our understanding of ourselves.

He also describes the restraint and reconstructive mechanisms, the “better angels,” of our nature.  These include 1) empathy (“mirror neurons and all that) and its growing circle, 2) self-control through the civilizing process, 3) morality and taboo to protect the group and the species, 4) reason and its perhaps accidental side effects.  Reason which may have developed through the symbolic ability that allows the species a critical means of survival by learning through anticipation of the future (see Beacon above), makes game theory possible, the reflection and anticipation of payoffs for behavioral responses.

This is a great read from which I drew many lessons including:

1)   Reflecting on the decline of violence is a potential cognitive therapy for the depression this country has seemed to settle into with all its negative think and talk—usually by old fearful white men like us. 

2)   Know thyself.  Just thinking about what is in us naturally that leads to violence and its restraint can provide us with options.

3)   Pure evil is a harmful myth because it promotes an attitude of victimhood over responsibility.  It is connected to the myth of nostalgia and utopia, which underlies the fifth, most powerful trigger for violence.

4)   Empathy, like love, alone won’t cut it.  There is a strong case for broad, liberal education.

5)   Pinker is no “moral realist” who looks for an ethical formula and truth the way that physicists seek and verify explanations in the physical universe; he uses game theory instead.  However, I do think he gives grounds for a universal ethic—my own quest.  But I’ll try to show that as I continue my work. 

6)   Freedom, including “free will” (see Gazzaniga above), and moral truth (see Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite by Robert Kurzban) are not discoverable realities, but projects for possibilities.  -- Hmmm! Let that roll around a bit.

Happy New Year!  And happy reading!  I would love to discuss these with you and invite you into my quest for a universal ethic. 

Rollie, http://rolliesmith.us, rollie@bernienrollie.net 

PS: why Pinker helped me understand the reactions to Obama is in appreciating 1) how interpretation follows emotional stimulus and 2) the strength of ideology including the victim narrative.  Lefties heard Obama say what he didn’t.  Righties see in Obama a threat to their in-group status, the cause of America’s shrinking influence.

“Combine narcissism with rationalism, and you get … ressentiment: the conviction that one’s nation or civilization has a historic right to greatness despite its lowly [or lessening] status, which can only be explained by the malevolence of an internal or external foe.  Ressentiment whips up emotions of thwarted dominance—humiliation, envy, rage—to which narcissists are prone.”  P. 524

Integrity: The Ethics of Being Whole -- A proposal

Introduction

After a long bout with Alzheimer’s disease, my father died.  One of the calls of condolence I received was from the director of the Cleveland Foundation where Dad had volunteered on community projects after his retirement.  “I’m sorry he is gone,” he said. “He had integrity.”

Is this the best you can say? I thought.  What about what a good businessman or civic leader he was?   Yet over and over the words I heard most often about Dad: he was a man of integrity.  And then I realized that was the best you could say about my father.

Not that he was a good family man or a good Catholic or effective or loving or generous—though he was all that too.  Not that he was always correct in his judgments either.  We had sharp running disagreements on science and religion and politics and the economy. Articulate, smart, persuasive, successful?  Perhaps, but not that extraordinary.

But integrity, yes!  And I realized that was for sure the best thing you could say, not only about my father, but about anyone.  And that is what I would like to have said of me—above anything else.

What is integrity?  Why is it so important?  That’s what I will discuss here.  I will argue that integrity is the source, the means, the goal, and the highest characteristic of our humanity.  It is the ethical principle par excellence.

We sure know integrity when we don’t see it especially in leaders who don’t “walk their talk.” We see it in overly righteous preachers who pass by strangers.  In priests who molest children, bosses using their position to get sex, politicians making false statements to get money and votes, professors who do not foster a critical attitude in students.  We expect a lack of integrity in “used-car salesmen” whose income relies on commission.  We see it in scientists and other professionals who are working for private interests and use their skills to advance causes (cigarettes, suburban sprawl, unregulated carbon production, cures, tax policies) that are aimed for private profit.  We see it everyday on email as people pass on trash they know to be incorrect, or refuse to check out whether they are correct, simply because it fits with their own prejudices.  Deception, including self-deception, seems to be a part of our nature.

At the same time we know that integrity can be present in persons who make mistakes, fall into sins of the flesh, fail to achieve certain goals and standards of excellence, lose or never gain fortune, and are quite ordinary in all other aspects (like most of us).   We are sometimes too quick to judge persons as without integrity or name them or blame them as evil just because we disagree with them and without carefully considering the evidence and our own prejudices.  And that speaks to the lack of integrity we find in ourselves.

Read a novel by Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard and, besides laughing at the dialogue and crazy situations, you will meet the most unsavory characters, 90% of them without integrity.  But you will also meet a few that may be a little crazy and maybe a little crooked; but they have a sort of integrity that you admire and pull for.

We know that we are sometimes fooled into thinking that persons have integrity because they are so sincere, so convinced they are right, treat us so nicely, speak or write so persuasively, hold such a position or office, are so smart and good looking, and have lots of money and friends.   But usually not forever.  There is something in us that recognizes the con, even if they do not, the fact we are being used, the contradiction in the core—although sometimes too late to avert harm.

We can never be sure if lack of integrity is a choice or a sickness.  But most of us are sure that we want to avoid those without integrity as dangers to us and to our society.   

So we know integrity by its absence and we know that its dearth is evil (if chosen) or at least wrong (if a sickness).  I will argue that the lack of integrity is the ultimate, that is, “core” or “source,” illness of human persons, their associations, and their nations. 

More positively, I will argue that integrity is not necessarily the truth, but the source of the true; not necessarily perfection, but the source of the good; not necessarily agreeable, but the source of beauty; not necessarily health, but the source of healing; not necessarily heroic, but the source of courage, the source of justice, the source of virtue, the source of the meaning of existence.  I will argue that integrity is the cardinal principle of our ethics and politics, the behavior of us humans in person and in community.

But what is it?  How do we recognize it?  How do we get it?  How do we foster it? Why is it the cardinal virtue, the source of justice and the good?

Integral means “whole,” as an integer is a whole number.  And in simple arithmetic the whole is the sum of its parts.  But in the math of postclassical science, especially quantum mechanics, biology and Gestalt psychology, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.  The whole is the dynamic union and interaction of all its parts.  And so it is with humans as persons and as societies.  And so it is with the worlds within which humans interact.

Integrity in human affairs, therefore, is the dynamic unity of all the interacting elements and dimensions that make a person and a social order whole.  “Whole,” we remember, is the root notion for “healing” and “health.”  But that still begs the question.  We cannot understand integrity unless we understand the elements that need to be integrated.

I propose to do that in the first part of this essay by proposing a model for integrity starting with the various dimensions in the human phenomenon and condition.  I rely on the tradition of philosophy beginning with the pre-Socratics but also on the major religious and spiritual traditions in our development but informed, tested, and corrected by science and in particular evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. 

In the second part of this essay, I propose to show how this model of integrity compares to other ethical models that have developed in human history.  Those models have used the images of tool or utility, contract or covenant, law or prescription, scale or balance, cornerstone or foundation in order to advance their theories.  All have made a contribution to ethical and political inquiry.  I want to acknowledge their contributions, but also understand and critique them with the model of integrity.

Finally I want to apply this model to real life situations.  For that will ultimately be the test of the model’s usefulness and veracity.  Does it fit our experience?  Will it work to guide our behavior into the future?  Can it claim universality? 

Essay Outline:

Introduction: A question of integrity

Part One:  A Model of Integrity

I lay out my method, my sources, and my formulation of the theory or model of integrity.  I explain my method of experimental philosophy, an inquiry into experience as it is occurs in human interaction with each other and the universe, with the findings of philosophers and scientists, especially in the area of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, whose conclusions shape my formulation of the model.

My method: experimental philosophy, the analysis of perception and consciousness as it appears in human communication.

Three dynamics in the human condition: time, space, and association

•          The experience of time:  temporal dimension:  history, tradition, culture, vision, transcendence .
•      The experience of space:  spatial dimension:  intentionality, inner and outer reality, subjective and objective, presence, spatial dimension of time.
•          The social dimension:  social reconstruction, personal development in interaction, the development of the self and other, social dimension to time and space.

And a fourth dimension: integrity:  unifying the other three.

The theory:  Ethics, politics and the meaning of justice, truth and the good. 

Part Two:  Ethical Models Compared and refined

I review the major and most influential ethical theories or models that have been handed down to us and still exert influence on our thought and behavior.  Each of them has a dominant metaphor.  I attempt to compare, critique, and complement them with the theory and model of integrity.

1.    The Parental Command (family and tribe):  Divine and Natural Law Theory:  Theology and the Religions of the Book.  Purity and Loyalty.

2.    The Foundation (civilization):  Theory of First principles:  Classical Philosophy (Plato to Hegel); Authority and Respect.

3.    The Balance (trade market):  Practical Ethics: East and West (Pre-Socratics, Skeptics, Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Jesus); Care, Reciprocity

4.    The Tool (industrialization):  Theory of the best for the most:  Utilitarianism (Bentham, Hume); Equality Matching

5.    The Deal (capitalism):  Contract theory and Fairness (Locke, Rawls)

6.    The Organism (evolving complex systems):  Relational theory:  Pragmatism, Existentialism, Postmodernism, Rational Choice (Nietzsche, Dewey, Heidegger, Sen)

Part Three:  Questions of Ethics and Politics here and now

I identify the major ethical issues that confront us: those events and trends about which we must make choices simply to endure.  I do not pretend to settle them, but to show how the ethics of personal and interpersonal integrity might provide a path in dealing with them now and in the future.

•          The Singularity:  Artificial Intelligence; Everlasting life; Cloning (Bio-ethics).
•           Truth in Politics and the Possibility of Civil Discourse (Political ethics). 
•           Social inequality and fairness (Social ethics).
•        Punishment, Social control, and Justice--consequential, retributive, restorative (Criminal and Civil legality).
•         Religion and Politics; Postmodernism, relativism, and universality (Culture and Ethics)
•         Population control, Earth change, and urbanism (Eco-ethics) 
•        Nationalism and Globalization; Role of the corporation (Economic Ethics)

Conclusion:  The challenge for post-tribal, post-modern, post-industrial, post-national humanity.  Choosing integrity.