Monday, October 30, 2006

Worship All That You See

© 2000, Troy K Spears

Always, always looking for miracles and some sign of God's presence in the world. But what if God existed? Would it change any of my decisions here and now? Call me a devout agnostic — or an apatheist, if you will — God exists, but so what? And yet, the presence of miracle in the world absolutely must exist for me in a perceived way in order for me to retain any sense of real happiness.

GOOD & EVIL:
GOD AS GUARANTOR OF CONSEQUENCES

Socrates, in the Euthyphro, explored the problem with using divine authority for establishing the rightness or wrongness of decisions. Socrates confronted an Athenian priest who was heading to the authorities to turn in his father for the abandonment and death of a slave who had murdered another slave. Dad had thrown the murderous slave into a dry well and left the slave to starve to death. The priest was going against his filial duty toward his father in order to show his civic duty to the city and its rules governing the institution of slaveholding.

Socrates was always confused by the fact that the Delphic oracle had pronounced Socrates the wisest man on earth. Socrates knew that he knew absolutely nothing except ... that Socrates knew that he knew nothing. If Socrates really was wise, and if Socrates did not know anything, then all these other people who pretend to know great things must be foolish, mistaken, or they were just flat out lying. With this in mind, Socrates began questioning the learned priest on the question of right and wrong.

He asked the priest if we obey God (1) because of the harsh consequences of disobedience or (2) because God's will is right? The priest said we obey God because God's will is right. Socrates then posed the question how do we know that God's will is right. The priest tried to "beg the question" by stating that God's will was right because it was God's will. But this merely makes the two ideas trivially synonymous, neither concept adds anything to the other. But if the concept of a powerful God is a different idea from our notion of the Right, then conceptually, we can imagine an instance where the powerful God wills something that we would consider wrong.
[Compare Kierkegaard's question concerning Abraham, posed at the beginning of Fear and Trembling: If God tells you to take your only son up to an altar and slay him as a sacrifice, how do you know it is God that is speaking? And assuming you do know it's God speaking, do you obey and why?]
Socrates suggested that we already know what is right regardless of whether we know what God's will is — the notion of Right is more familiar and accessible to us than God's will is. The priest agreed that we had some inborn knowledge of right. To which Socrates then queried, if we already know what's right and that we should do the right, then what force is added because the right decision also happens to be God's will. If we already know what is right, and God wants us to do something wrong, should we obey God out of fear of his wrath, or should we do what is right regardless of God's will?

Though God devour me, I will still trust him, but I shall maintain my own ways before him. — Job 13:15, sort of.

Assuming that doing the right is God's pleasure, would we continue to obey the Holy Will if there were no reward or punishment attached? Better stated, would we continue to do God's will for the sole purpose of pleasing God? Better still...
Would we continue to do God's will if there were no God?

God is dead and we are his murderers! How shall we live up to such a crime?
— Friedrich Nietzsche, sort of.

The concept of Right is akin to the concept of Beauty. If you and I do not agree on what is beautiful, I may refer you to things you already do see as beautiful, and then lead you to see the similarities of a thing you already see as beautiful, and the thing you do not now see as beautiful. If I cannot lead you to agree with me on the beauty of a thing, I can do no more. You think don't think it's pretty, and I think it is. There we leave it, because it is only an issue of how you decorate your room and how I decorate mine.

With Right, we come to our shared living space. This is where Beauty dons the executioner's mask, because I do not want to live in a world where you can display your vision of Beauty which I might consider Very Ugly. This is where our disagreement leads to quarrel and ultimately one of us will be forced to go underground, either figuratively or literally.

Virtue, from Latin vir, warrior, is cognate with English war. Value, from Latin valor, means bravery during combat, and is cognate with English valiant and valor. The Greek word used by Socrates for virtue was arete, which also stood for bravery during combat, and is cognate with Ares, the god of war.

It has been suggested that the reason that these words have come to be taken as words describing the Right is that the notion of the Right has changed from that held by the ancient Mediterraneans. The European culture, once warlike and only valuing warlike qualities, has now broadened to include non-martial values based on capitalism and socialism. We have been tamed by organizational Protestantism (individual rights and a mercantile economy) and Catholicism (organized welfare for the unlucky).

I would like to suggest instead that these words, virtue and value, have not changed their meanings all that much in that the Right is still necessarily warlike. As soon as a person determines something is Right, that person is prepared to fight. With the move from Beauty to the Right, we see people becoming more and more aggressive.

We can see the transition at a city zoning meeting concerning community aesthetics. For example, one group of people wants unused and "ugly" cars off the street, and another group owns the "ugly" and unused cars. The question becomes heated as soon as the discussion moves from the aesthetic quality of the neighborhood to the discussion of each sides "rights." "We have a right to live in a beautiful community." "We have a right to keep our property that we intend to make useful and beautiful." Next we come to fist-to-cuffs with the police on one side and angry rioters on the other.

The Right is something that is personal, and perhaps to some extent, genetic. After all, a culturally selected set of principles with punishments attached — such as taking away the wherewithal to flourish in the form of extracting fines, or removing a person from the breeding population by incarceration and execution — is going to have some impact on the selection of genes in the culture.

The Chinese took this selection, perhaps not knowing its genetic consequences, to the extent of wiping out whole clans for the serious crime of one of the clan's members. I say perhaps not knowing, because humans have known for millenia that different personalities could be bred into their domestic animals by proactively selecting breeding pairs and reactively removing an animal or group of animals from the breeding series.

The idea of God adds nothing substantive to the concept of Right, but it does create an alteration in one's degree of commitment to Right if an eternal reward or punishment is also believed. The believer is more likely to commit suicidal and homicidal acts in promotion of the Right if Heaven or Hell are part of the wager.

MIRACLES:
GOD AS REPRIEVE FROM CONSEQUENCES

Worship all that you see and more will be revealed.

Many look to God for intervention into the normal everyday sequence of events, looking for some serendipitous relief from unlucky catastrophe or stupid decisions. Many look for miracle to achieve a feeling of the extraordinary or the dramatic in an otherwise humdrum life.

A miracle is an irreproducible event. Contrast this to an event that is ordinary in the sense that we believe that we can come to understand the ordinary event's causes and then use the understanding to arrange our lives more to our liking. A miracle does not bear scrutiny into why it occurred. By its nature, it is a freak occurrence and it is unjust. It is often believed to come from God's grace, or God's undeserved favor of one person and not another. This type of miracle is one that conflicts with my sense of Right. I find no comfort in believing that Fickle Inscrutable Favoritism is the driving force of the universe, instead I choose to believe in Dumb Luck.

However, I do notice that my definitions of miracles and ordinary events leaves open an option for seeing miracles everywhere. The choice is mine and involves active decisions to make myself see miracle everywhere. Because in the bigger idea of an event — a slice of universal space-time — the Moment — all events are irreproducible because there is no way to adjust all things back into the same order they were at any time in the past. The universe is not amenable to laboratory study. The Moment is here ... and is gone. It is Miracle!

Science, if it existed, would be justice — the same principles governing all events at all times, the creed that the same causes lead always to the same effects. Science would be no respecter of persons.

However, the universe is such that the pursuit of science has been forced to more intricate abstractions in order to find this desideratum of the "reproducibility of events." Expected results do not occur, and it's back to the drawing board. This has been carried on to the point that the reproducibility is now said to be found statistically at the level of quanta.

The importance of this microscopic and theoretic reproducibility is trivial for human ethical decision until the reproducible principles can be fashioned into a macroscopic product like a pharmaceutical or a weapon. Moreover, all the sciences that deal with the macroscopic world, such as meteorology and electronics, concern the math and movement of large aggregates, and therefore, predict probable outcomes. But again, these sciences, however interesting, are still ethically void.

With History, we encounter stories about humans that have ethical appeal, governed by probable narrative-bound links between antecedent and consequent. We have drama and storytelling. We understand internally how one event led into another; however, we also see how an entirely different outcome could have resulted. Historic events, ethically understandable events, lie somewhere between miracles and ordinary events. They are to some extent causal and to some extent irreproducible because you never know what variable will change the predicted outcome.

But for the want of a nail...

Introspective and emotive thinking are key to historic understanding because the subjects of our inquiry are believed to be, to a greater or lesser degree, like us. History has substantive value for the area of human ethical decision and for the fashioning of Law. History is philosophy's laboratory. History is enjoying the spectacle of ourselves. Theoria, theory, originally referred to the joy the gods (theoi, Old Attic for watchers) have viewing their deeds portrayed in theater. In History, we entertain the pride and joy of the great deeds of our predecessors and the great deeds we feel we are capable of.

The difference between bare proposition and suggestive storytelling is the difference between Science and History and between the laws as written and capital-L Law. There are two versions of teaching ethics — one rule-based and the other role-based. In the former, I list a set of rules. As situations emerge which create ambiguity as to what rule will apply, a judge makes a determination, and this becomes a new rule or part of the annotations to the set of old rules. In the latter, I show you a great ethical individual, real or imagined, in normal and difficult situations, with the hope that you will also see the greatness and be inspired to imitate. Your life becomes an annotation to the great role model that inspired you.

OURSELVES

And you will be as gods, knowing good and evil. — Serpent's promise to Eve.

The creed of the reproducible and a chosen lifestyle of repetition dull the sense of Miracle and numb the beginner's mind. I choose not to see Miracle in events, because this that I see in front of me is the same as I saw the day before. I do the same things over and over, choosing not to understand the immediacy of all things, and I become bored and unimpressed with everything. I try to do the correct and ordinary thing all the time, and then fail to see the historic opportunities which might allow me to swerve the direction of things in an unexpected and different way, becoming an Angel of Miracle, freshening the world.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home