Let God sort 'em out

Well, I had a nice neat post prepared to follow up on my post on inclusivity and exclusivity, but Joanna stole most of my thunder. Communities interested in growth and stability should be wide open at the entry-level, but then set and enforce communal standards that make membership ultimately self-selecting.

Another analogy to use (if it doesn't seem to crass in spiritual contexts) is that of sales. (Augie Turak, God bless 'em, is a consummate salesman and the first and last spiritual teacher I've ever found to unabashedly use business language in a spiritual context.) Most businesses try to make it as easy as possible to engage their products; they even come to you to tell you about them, in advertising, phone calls and appointments. At some point, though, potential customers are qualified, and the qualification process usually requires an increased commitment from the prospect (answering more questions, getting on waiting lists, making deposits, undergoing credit checks, etc.) until they finally buy. A community goes through the same process, reaching out widely to new prospective members but eventually going through some kind of qualification process before ultimately demanding a commitment.

Sounds good on paper. But all the art and science of business and culture hangs on where you set those threshholds and standards, and how you communicate and enforce them. You can describe the essential nature of a community by the following factors:

• How much commitment does it require? Some communities, like a pick-up basketball game, are ephemeral and don't require much commitment at all. Others, like a basketball league, require much more commitment. Usually, greater rewards require greater commitment.
• How are the standards communicated? Some communities have very explicit standards: written policies, rulebooks, codes of conduct, etc. Others have more implicit expectations: e.g. nobody said you have to bring some food to the party, but it's still expected.
• How are the standards enforced? Some communities have designated enforcers: authorities that let people in or kick people out, according to explicit or implicit criteria. Others have peer-enforced standards; other members exert pressure to get people to comply. Sometimes standards are enforced explicitly ("Congratulations! You have been admitted to Duke University") or implicitly (you stop getting invitations to the parties.)

Successful communities can be found throughout the spectrums of commitment, communication and enforcement. (If I was more industrious I would give lots more examples, but I will leave it as an exercise for the reader.) But if you're going to try to consciously build a new community, you probably need to figure out where you're going to stand on all these factors.

Do I have to think about "have to"?

Yesterday was all the abstract philosophical stuff about "have to," the projection of necessity upon our daily situations. But what I didn't really talk about was the personal . . .

I confess there are times when I've felt like Gil Buckman in Parenthood: "My whole life is 'have to.'" A neurotic, performance-minded guy, I've always felt an inexorable pressure (wholely self-generated) to meet certain standards of success and to be liked and admired by all. Since it is wholely impossible to please everybody, and probably not even desirable, it makes for a life of constant frustration and tension. I spend a lot of time feeling like I "have to" do things that are not achievable.

Fortunately, I have had a few bosses who have helped me past those hang-ups. The conversation always goes something like this:
"I have to do X for so-and-so."
"Why?"
"Because if I don't he's not going to be happy."
"So . . . ? Let him be unhappy. It's more important to do Y."
"Oh . . . I guess you're right."

When you're working too hard to please all the wrong people, you tend to get burned out. Burnout = no joy in your work = everything is "have to." You work out of duty, or habit, or sense of obligation, rather than whatever motivated you to the work in the first place. And that can be deadly.

When talking about building spiritual communities with Augie Turak, he told me, "All I know is that nothing really creative and powerful can happen until people are working on things they really want to do. So ask yourself, 'What do I want to do?' And then go do it."

In my spiritual life, in my career, and in my life in general, I'm at a point where it makes sense to ask, "What do I really want to do? What kind of life do I really want to have?" I've lived out most of my life driven by a sense of necessity; to see my path as freely chosen is an altered state of consciousness.

Do I Have To?

So, yesterday I suggested you consider the difference between "want to" and "have to," and question the motivation beneath "have to." I ran this experiment myself, and here's what I found:

• "Have to" is a rhetorical way of removing choice from a situation. Although the truth of the matter is that we always freely choose our actions (and are therefore fully responsible for them), sometimes we take choice off the table.
• Sometimes we are deliberately taking choice off the table. Sometimes there are good reasons to do so; we want to deny ourselves choice in certain circumstances, because we know we might make the wrong choice in if given the chance to do so. "I have to do my homework tonight" is another way of saying, "I have chosen to do my homework tonight, and the decision is not open for reconsideration." Sometimes our reasons for removing choice are not so good: "I have to have a drink now" takes a conscious moral decision and turns it into an inevitable consequence of powerful forces beyond one's control. Or, more sinisterly, "I have to; I have orders."
• If "I have to" is freighted with all sorts of hidden meanings, then it is doubley so for "you have to." Someone can impose all kinds of restrictions on you with only the slightest of justification, by cloaking the command in the rhetoric of necessity: "You simply have to come to my party this weekend," or "You have to fill out this paperwork first." These rhetorical gambits are the equivalents of: "Do this, but I'm not telling you why." Listen to politicians and salesmen: they lace their speech with have to all the time, building urgency without having to make long explanations or justifications.
• There is nothing necessarily wrong with any of this. I am not suggesting that you banish all have to language from your speech. I am suggesting, though, that you need to be conscious of how the language is being used, and what is being left unsaid. So much psychotherapy and marriage counselling is a long drawn-out process of the patient claiming, "I have to," and the the therapist asking, "Really? Why?" All kinds of flaws in reasoning are exposed, all kinds of misunderstandings eliminated, once the language of necessity is translated back into explicit motivations and purposes.

Necessity and Desire

"I don't care if you want to do it, you have to do it."

How many times have you heard something like that? If you're a parent, you might find yourself even saying it dozens of times a day. And yet, Marshall Rosenberg's nonviolent communication insists that it's simply not true: there is no "have to."

"Nonsense," you say. "I have to do lots of things I don't want to do. I have to go to work. I have to get my kids to school. I have to brush my teeth. There's all kinds of things I have to do."

But what do we really mean when we say that? No one is holding a gun to your head, telling you to brush your teeth in the morning. You brush your teeth because you decided to do so. You consciously decided that you like have clean teeth, that you don't like having bad breath, and you definitely don't like going to the dentist and having your teeth drilled. You brush your teeth because it gives you something you want.

"Po-tay-to, Po-tah-to," you say. "It amounts to the same thing. I still have to do some things that aren't fun."

Maybe it is just semantics. Maybe it is "just" the way you express it. But why express it that way? Why would you want to take something freely chosen -- something you want to do -- and turn it into a compulsion -- something you have to do? One way of looking at it implies freedom and choice; the other, restriction and limitation. Why would you want to go through life seeing everything as forced? You may end up like Steve Martin's character Gil Buckman in Parenthood. When his wife asks him if he "has" to go to Little League practice, Gil snaps, "My whole life is "have to"!"

When you find yourself saying "have to," you have removed freedom from the situation. You probably just become disconnected from the real reasons you do what you do: you have literally forgotten why you do it. If you reconnect with those reasons, maybe it won't feel so forced. You often hear: "Ah, now I remember why I got into medicine to begin with," when someone reconnects with their original motivations.

If you can't find that original motivation, a compelling reason to want to do what you do . . . well, then, maybe you really don't want to do it. Shouldn't you stop doing it, then? If you can't find the reason, then you are, literally, doing things for no good reason.

It makes for a good mindfulness meditation. Every time you think "have to," stop and ask yourself, "Really? Why?" See what happens.

Jackals and giraffes

Yesterday I started watching a video of Marshall Rosenberg, the developer of Nonviolent Communication, a method for "compassionate" interaction that totally eschews moralistic judgements and seeks to get everyone's needs met without coersion. I had heard it mentioned in various Attachment Parenting circles . . . evidently it's AP-squared, an even more counter-cultural viewpoint on managing conflicts, especially with children. Janet had gone in on a set of training videos with a group of AP leaders, and when I was completely burned out on programming yesterday I decided to watch something totally squishy and psychological.

Rosenberg started talking in his seminar, and I was settling into the usual talking-head seminar mode, and then he said, "Here's a song that says what I mean," and he picked up a guitar and started singing. That totally blew me away. Of course I'm thinking, "Hey, why not sing a song to say what you mean? Perfectly valid media." Still, in our culture only Mister Rogers moves from didactic lecturing to singing a song without missing a beat. The effect was only intensified when Rosenberg put on a wolf handpuppet on one hand and a sheep puppet on the other hand. There he was sitting in a chair, talking about dehumanizing Nazi speech like any other academic, but he's got some freakin' puppets on his hands. He hadn't introduced the puppets yet, but that didn't stop him from making a few casual gestures with a sheep on one hand. It was mildly surreal.

And yet effective. Rosenberg talked about "jackal language," judgemental right/wrong, win/lose modes of talking frame situations as conflicts where none need exist. Then he moved on to "giraffe" language (he has a giraffe puppet, too) that comes from the heart (giraffes have really big hearts, evidently.) It's corny, but it works. Rosenberg offers these labels with a wry grin, and manages to simplify a complex idea without being condescending.

I'm interested in his approach. I'm sure I'll have lots of intellectual nits to pick, but it's clear that he's trying to accomplish something that is emphatically not about analytical judgement.

Anti-poverty measures

I got a few responses from yesterday's post on social justice. One writes:

The thing that always keeps me fundamentally a liberal, despite having so many
points of disagreement with the liberals and Democrats on a variety of issues,
is this: there are people who were born into a position so low that their merits
simply don't matter. No matter how smart, hard- working, honest, and thrifty
they are, they simply do not have the opportunity to succeed. Furthermore, these
people are not a tiny minority: they are, in fact, the vast majority of the world.

This is a typical liberal viewpoint. It starts with the assumption that economic freedom (and the inequality that it inevitably creates) is the polar opposite of helping the poorest of the poor. Both conservatives and liberals concern themselves with helping the poor; they just have radically different philosophies about how to do it. The liberal answer is, in a nutshell: let's build a government that takes care of everyone. The conservative answer is, in a nutshell: this is too important to leave in the hands of the government -- WE need to take care of this problem.

I know, all the liberals are groaning: "Oh, God, don't get started with that compassionate conservatism crap." But consider this: conservatives give more time and money to charitable causes than their liberal peers, at all economic levels. American economic freedom has created lots of greedy, self-centered millionaires; it has also created generous people who give freely to help others. Conservatives are not uncaring souls who don't care about the poor: conservatives really believe that government cannot address social and economic woes as well as individuals and private organizations . . . and they put their money where their mouths are.

This is why Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are my all-American heroes. Instead of futzing about with U.S. politics (which, in the grand scheme, is rather like carping about Imus) they are quietly channelling billions of dollars to help the poorest of the poor. They demonstrate that it is possible to use capitalistic freedom to create wealth and then share it with those who need it most.

The conservative and liberal philosophies on social justice have other key disagreements, most notably about the importance of economic freedom. I think most liberals believe that world poverty is caused by evil capitalist corporations who exploit the world's resources and people. The vast majority of the world is living in poverty because men with guns oppress them. Thugs, warlords, militias, armies, governments oppress people. These men are not capitalists, trying to create wealth; they are thieves who take wealth. The people are poor because anything they try to build of lasting value can (and is) taken away from them. All the other ills of the world -- disease, hunger, ignorance -- ultimately flow from a lack of basic civil rights, especially property rights. Capitalist corporations might be complicit with this oppression, standing on the sidelines or maybe even supporting the dictators . . . but it's the dictators, or the rebel warlords trying to become dictators, who are the real oppressors.

(That doesn't mean that unfettered capitalism is always good. It is possible for capitalism to oppress and destroy. I just think the evils of capitalism are miniscule compared to the evils of, well, evil: bands of men using their power to steal, kill, and rape.)

I Am Not a Strange Loop

I've been lingering on the theme of non-intuitive truths for the last couple of days, and just by strange coincidence Douglas Hofstadter's new book, I Am a Strange Loop, goes on sale on Monday. Hofstadter did more than anyone to popularize Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which is a widely-accepted proof that there are some truths that cannot be proven (or disproven) within the realm of any formal logical system. Ever since he won a Pulitzer Prize for Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Hofstadter has been the patron saint of head-twisting paradoxes, especially those related to consciousness.

Good news! Hofstadter is finally going to get down to business and really drill into the question of consciousness.

Bad news! Hofstadter calls consciousness a "mirage." D'oh!

I suppose I should read the book first before passing judgement. (I just placed my order.) But I find it aggrevating when people use such ephemeral language to describe what is actually the most obvious truth which we can directly apprehend. The one thing that we know for sure, more than anything else, is that we are aware. Another Douglas H. spent most of his life demonstrating to people that our apprehension of awareness was more fundamental than anything else we knew. Mirage, my ass.

Consciousness Ensnared?

The New Yorker recently did a story on Paul and Patricia Churchland, two philosophers who have worked together on the mind-body problem for all of their 37-year marriage ("Two Heads," by Larissa MacFarquhar, February 12, 2007). The Churchlands are avowed materialists when it comes to the consciousness question -- they are so sure, in fact, that consciousness is identical to the brain that they look to neuroscience to provide an explanation for the apparent mind-body dualism. This is somewhat unusual, even among materialists and especially among philosophers of mind, who do by and large believe that the brain gives rise to the mind, but who don't like to entangle themselves in the squishy and seemingly arbitrary complexity of a living brain.

The Churchlands are attacking the non-materialist, non-reductionist views of mind, especially those articulated so well by Kenny Felder in his "Are You a Robot?" lecture. Those arguments run something like this: no matter how complex a computer gets (and the human brain is an exceedingly complex one) it still doesn't explain what consciousness is. Doing lots of really complex operations in no way necessitates the rise of a subjective observer who witnesses those operations happening, and is aware of the witnessing. That awareness of thought and experience is, to the subjective observer, completely irreducible. It just is. That's what leads meditators and mystics to conclude that consciousness is what philosophers call a "primative," a fundamental building block of reality itself. This line of thought is also the bedrock of my own personal theology, so I take this question very, very seriously.

The Churchlands critique of this line of reasoning runs like this: OK, you can't imagine how a mechanistic brain gives rise to experience. So what? The history of science is chock full of truths that were unintuitive and completely unimaginable until scientific disciplines and knowledge evolved sufficiently to make sense of them. At one time, it was perfectly obvious that the world was flat, and no one could imagine how you could explain the experience of earth and sky any other way. And yet, eventually, that "obvious" truth was eventually overthrown, and everyone takes for granted their current concept of a round earth. Consciousness is just another phenomena that will eventually be explained. To argue otherwise -- "I don't believe it because I can't imagine it" -- is to essentially argue that ignorance is absolute, and is indistinguishable from the position of those who would have killed Galileo for suggesting the world was not the center of the universe. It is the same sort of reasoning creationists use to establish the existence of God: "I can't imagine how such a complex world could come to be without a Creator; therefore, there must be a God." To which most scientists reply: "No, that doesn't mean there must be a God. It just means you have a pretty lousy imagination."

The Churchlands don't really have a compelling explanation of mind; they just don't want people to assume that all truths must be intuitively compelling to be acceptable or true. And I think that's a perfectly legitimate (and troubling) bit of epistomology to wrap your head around. You can't assume that you will recognize the truth when you first meet it. Nor can you assume that the mysterious and irreducible will stay safely mysterious.

Evaluating your year

Everyone is reflective on New Year's Eve, which is to say, everyone is mildly depressed. This is the time when we look back on the previous year and realize that our achievements are, however great, still in the past. Our more stubborn faults and tendencies, the ones that have defied our will year after year, have returned again to tweak our noses and dare us to give it another go. If we are lucky, we are thankful, and mindful of the preciousness of our passing time. If we are not so lucky, we are downright morose. No wonder everyone gets blotto.

So, how should we evaluate the year? There is a strong temptation to go back and tally up your progress in quantifiable terms: how much money did I make? How many hours did I bill? How many projects did I complete? How many books did I read? How many books did I write?

Or, you could look at things at a process level: did I do things better this year? Have I improved the way I live and work? Am I more efficient, less wasteful, kinder, gentler, less filling? Am I better off?

There are no absolute answers to those questions, so we have to settle for the relative ones. You can only tell if you're succeeding in your life if you are hitting your explicit goals. If you set out to do something, something that is worthwhile and in accordance with your deepest values, then you go do it . . . what could be better than that?

So . . . how'd you do?

Language Games

Towards the end of James Hall's philosophy of religion class, he makes a subtle shift in focus. Most of the class has been concerned with establishing the truth about religion -- arguments for (or against) the existence of God, and the rebuttals to those proofs. But as the proofs keep running out of steam, scholarship backs up a step and tries to evaluate the whole game. Kuhn gave us the notion of paradigms, but even before that Wittgenstein had deconstructed philosophy, science, and religion into separate "language games," or what he called "forms of life." He said, in effect: "Look, science is all about the objective description of the world -- but describing the world is not the only thing we do as human beings. It may not even be the most important thing we do. There are other things we do with language." Those different "language games" had their own rules (or felicity conditions) that governed them, but they were different enterprises altogether. While Wittgenstein did not explicitly apply these notions to religion, the religious scholars quickly picked up a convenient shield; none of the skeptics could touch religion, because "we're playing a different game." It's not even a question of competing paradigms, different approaches to explaining the appearances; it's a truly incommeasurate activity. From the skeptics' point of view, the theists have stopped arguing and starting dancing a jig.

Professor Hall's tone is skeptical here; he makes haste to point out that just because you're playing a different game doesn't mean that your game doesn't have rules, nor does it immediately imply that your game is worth playing. Nonetheless, he seems to accept it, because for the rest of the course Hall no longer talks about the relative truth of religious discourse, but rather the role religion plays as a social and moral phenomena. Suddenly, we're playing a new game.

Fundamentally, I know this is the only sensible approach one can take. Lots of scholars, especially Ken Wilber, have demonstrated that spirituality can only be understood correctly as a process of transcending problems rather than solving them. But it still feels a little bit like, literally, "changing the subject." "I can't show you that God exists, but I can make a pretty good case for religion being a positive force in the world." Nor does such a redefinition of language necessarily solve any of the questions that drove us here in the first place; redefining religion as a social phenomena or moral imperative does not bring us one step closer to knowing whether we ought to do it.

Intentionalist paradigms

The philosophy of religion turns almost entirely on the question of intentionalism; that is, whether things can be understood primarily as events that just happen through a chain of causation, or whether they can be understood according to the intentions that precipitated them.
This may seem really obstruse, but it's fundamental to how we understand the world. It is a more fundamental question than even the existence of God. In fact, most of the proofs of the existence of God seem to run into more trouble with intentionalism than with anything else. Most people do not have a hard time conceiving of an omnipotent, omniscient being that could create an entire world. What bugs them is the notion that such a Being could have deliberately, intentionally created this world, with all its flaws and evils and shortcomings. Because, if you believe in God, you have to believe that everything that happens is happening according to God's intent, which means you have to believe God allows all kinds of deplorable, unspeakable horrors to happen. The whole "problem of evil," as it is called, turns on the problem of intentionalism. It's bad enough that bad things happen; but if they happen because someone intended them to happen, then you "take it personally."

I think most people, if they think deeply on the matter, will find absolute intentionalism to be unacceptable. It is inconceivable to me that absolutely everything that happens is happening to an exact, calculated end. You have to go through some pretty extravagant apologetics to make everything part of a master plan. It does not, as philosophers say, "save the appearances" -- it simply doesn't jive with our most basic perceptions of the world.

What makes the matter more perplexing is that the opposite of absolute intentionalism -- rank materialism, and with it, Skinnerian behaviorism -- does not save the appearances, either. Every rock and tree may not be the result of someone's intent, but we certainly believe that we have intentions. Consciousness and awareness are phenomena that materialism struggles to contain and inevitably fails. And that mystery that defies explanation is sitting right in the middle of all of existence -- even right in the middle of the materialist's attempt to explain it away.

Is it possible to have a theology that can believe in God and spirit, and yet not believe in absolute intentionalism? I think it is, but it's more of an intuition than a firm conception for me right now. It would mean questioning our very conceptions of what it would mean for God to be God.

This way of life

Last week I heard no less than three news stories that cited people mourning the loss of "their way of life":

• Aging residents of Shanghai lamented the tearing down of their old neighborhoods, with houses designed with communal kitchens and tight-knit communities
• Farm-Aid organizers, including Willie Nelson, bemoaned that the independent American farmer was becoming a thing of the past
• Bushmen who had been expelled from their native lands in the Kalahari Desert were allowed to return to continue their hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

(And let's not pile on every administration press release and stump speech that reminds us that we have to defeat radical fundamentalist terrorism because "they hate our way of life and want to destroy it.")

I have always been a little perplexed by the glorification of "the way of life." Obviously it means a lot of different things to different people, and its broad sweep tends to allow for all kinds of equivocation. It conflates sacred ideals and beliefs with the accidental characteristics of daily life.

When I hear stories about an economic displacement -- family farmers or Maine lobstermen no longer able to make a living -- I feel bad for the people who are displaced, but it doesn't really inspire an genuine mourning in me. What, exactly, was lost? People used to have a certain job, and do it a certain way, and it was fun. Now that way is gone, and everyone who used to do it will do something else. Did you think that "way of life" would last forever? Do you think the Neanderthals grieved for the passing of their "way of life" as youngsters started getting into agriculture instead of hunting all the time, and building huts instead of living in caves? Such attachments to livelihood, while undeniably real, are purely personal and sentimental. It feels like the world is ending . . . but it's not.

Cultural displacements -- the loss of a native language, the dying of old traditions -- fare a little better in my mind . . . but only a little. People who love the stories and songs in an old language will mourn their passing. But just like the passing of an individual person, it is a death that is inevitable, a loss that is strictly personal. No language, story, or song will live forever, any more than a human being. And while it may be a tragedy for the native Urkuskian, that his traditional stories will no more be told, I don't feel all that deprived. It is someone else's loss, not mine.

So what, if anything, does matter in the "way of life" that everyone is so eager to preserve? The only thing that really matters to me is philosophic principles, ethical ideals and cultivated character traits. If, when you say that "the terrorists want to end our way of life," you mean, "they want to destroy personal freedom, democratic government, capitalist free markets, and respect for the individual," well, then I guess I'm on board to fight them. But if you mean, "they want to take away our shopping malls and 200 channels of television and internet porn and cubicle jobs" . . . um, well, if they wipe that out I won't mourn too much. Some "ways of life" deserve to die.

Does this paradigm make me look fat?

I am coming towards the end of the philosophy of religion tape series I've been listening to, and we're starting to delve into the more subtle dimensions of religious discourse. Dr. Hall has laid out the notion of paradigms as Thomas Kuhn described them in The Stucture of Scientific Revolutions, and the notion of incommeasurability -- that no paradigm can be understood or criticized by a different paradigm's language and rules. That line of thinking is particularly handy for many religious thinkers, who would maintain that religion and logical positivism are simply separate paradigms that shouldn't have much to say about each other.

Hall goes on to give a resounding rejection of incommeasurability and the seeming relativism that it entails. He declares that paradigms can be evaluated, based on all the same criteria normally invoked to prefer one argument over another: parsimony, simplicity, elegance, consistency, flexibility, rigor, etc.

What I find most fascinating about these criteria for evaluating paradigms is that they are subjective and immediate. Like Pirsig's "Quality," they are properties difficult to quantify but immediately recognizable. They are properties so basic to human thought that they challenge language to contain them. A logical positivist might think that he is grounded in something tangible and firm, but the bedrock of his whole worldview rests in something as intangible, intuitive, and indescribable as the average mystical experience.

It's yet another vindication for the primacy of self-knowledge. No matter what paradigm you are operating in, wisdom begins in recognizing why you believe what you believe.

The High Price of Contradiction

One cool factoid I picked up from my philosophy of religion lectures:

I'm used to formal logic being very picky about finding contradictions in starting assumptions. However, I didn't realize how important it was. According to the formal rules of logic, if two contradictory premises are allowed in an arguement ("P" and "Not P"), then all possible conclusions can be shown to be true. A single contradiction can thus completely invalidate everything that follows, not because it fails to make sense but because it makes exactly whatever sense we want it to make.

It almost seems unfair, like the Devil has the deck stacked against us. A single error can spawn an infinite number of lies.

Hope left for Western philosophy

This lecture series on the philosophy of religion is redeeming formal academic philosophy for me. Just on the drive down to Charlotte and back, I picked up four or five really solid ideas that bear more scrutiny. It gives me hope that maybe there is a place for me in academic thought after all.

One of the things that James Hall mentioned in passing was, "There are very few scholars who are both good philosophers and good theologians. Usually they are either strong theologians with only a rudimentary grasp of philosophy, or they are solid philosophers with only a dim understanding of what it means to see the world religiously."

Something about that rang inside me. I immediately thought, "I could be both." That might even define what it was that Augie saw in my Kierkegaard paper -- the ability to bring a genuine spiritual perspective to an otherwise impossibly tangled philosophy. And that might even be a calling worth the trouble -- to redeem thinking for those who believe in more than thought.

Some areas that might be worth a deeper look:

• The logical realm of philosophy seems to have a very hard time with paradox. "P" and "Not P" do not mix without violent explosions of nonsense in the logician's world . . . but it would be good to provide a framework to address paradox sensibly, recognizing the possibility of paradoxical truth without surrendering to complete nonsense.
• Intuiting premises. Rational philosophy freely concedes that all conclusions are dependant on the premises from which one starts. But I've read very little about the actual process by which one evaluates premises. It seems that this is the realm where immediate knowledge is not only possible, but absolutely necessary.
• Applied leaps of faith. What are the principles, if any, that guide us in action when we don't know everything? What's the right way of acknowledging intuition while still testing it?

That's _Lord_ God to you, buddy

I've been gulping down large sections of a "philosophy of religion" taped lecture series, and I've been enjoying it very much. The course focuses on the philosophical questions of ethical monotheism, i.e. "Is there a God?"

I'm no stranger to many of the arguments for the existence of God, but one thing that surprised me was the fact that we had to go back and define what, exactly, we meant by God. It only shows how emeshed I am in the culture that it didn't occur to me at first that it needed to be defined. Moreover, some aspects of the definition surprised me. You would expect God to be perfect: omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and of infinite goodness. But tack on to that one more property: God must be deserving of worship, or else he doesn't deserve to be called God. And that struck me as well -- "God" as we typically understand the word is a title, not merely a person. I can almost imagine the personals listing: "Seeking: Deity. Must be all-seeing, all-knowing, infinitely loving, and deserving of wonder and awe. No smokers."

Time-stopping technology

Listen to the advertising for cameras, and it always boils down to two taglines: "Capture the moment. Share the magic." You take pictures (or video, as is much more common now) to preserve a moment in time, and to share that moment with others.

Ever since I was quite young, I always felt a little uneasy about this quest to "capture the moment." I'm not like my son, who usually resists all efforts to photograph him, nor like my grandmother, who actively removed and destroyed all photos of herself when she found them. I think they both, to different degrees, could not stand the self-consciousness induced by seeing themselves. But I feel is a certain futility in the quest. Even as young as ten, I remember seeing all the Kodak ads of smiling grandmothers mooning over photo albums, and thinking, "Is that all you get at the end of life? A big book of pictures? But that's not real."

I am a parent now, and I probably take as many pictures as the next guy. I do not think taking pictures is futile. I have no doubt that I will treasure these pictures the rest of my life. But philosophically, I do question the notion of life as one long effort to "capture moments." We have extended our greed for things into a more subtle form of materialism: a greed for experience. We want more experience, better experience, and we want to capture it, keep it, hold it. Most people believe they will be able to take those memories and experiences with them into the afterlife . . . after all, what's the point of living, if not to accumulate experience? Isn't that what God is doing here? Piling up mountains of Kodak moments, to hold forever in heaven?

We have all seen the zealous docu-moms and docu-dads, videotaping every birth and birthday and milestone. At times we admire them for their dedication to "capturing the moment." Perhaps their kids will appreciate it someday. But when I see such parents spending their lives stooped, walking backwards, and perpetually separated from their children by a viewfinder, I feel a visceral rejection. This is not what life is about. I imagine nobody is videotaping soccer games in heaven. If life is to have meaning, it must have its significance in the moment it is lived, and not only in retrospect. Memory is not the meaning of life.

Learning by teaching

In a really ironic way, many of the things I have learned to do well, I learned because I had to teach them to other people.

• I taught courses in "writing as a spiritual discipline" for years, but always felt like a fraud because I didn't have a really solid writing discipline myself. It was that cognitive dissonance that forced me to daily blogging, where I rediscovered and internalized many of the things I was teaching.
• In the SKS, I'm always teaching the students about the value of making and keeping commitments . . . which invariably forces me to reevaluate my own capacity to make and keep commitments (which sometimes has been less-than-stellar).
• As a consultant, this is a regular part of business. Sometimes people hire me because of my specific knowledge in a specific field, but given the breadth of my projects and their very nature (systems integration) there are always lots of things I'm learning on-the-fly. And, with most technical things, you don't have to know that much more than everyone else to become the local expert.

It comes down to making the committment to learn. Once you get up in front of a bunch of other people to teach them something, you feel an awful lot of pressure to know what you're talking about. And because the teaching always has a deadline -- an explicit time and place when the class takes place -- you don't have a lot of room to procrastinate or fudge.

If we embrace this approach, it turns into a kind of conscious hypocracy -- teach the things you know nothing about, model the behaviors you yourself are lacking. Weird. But, as Hamlet said, "Assume a virute if thou hast it not." We will fake it until we make it . . . or, more precisely, fake it in order to make it.

This also is why I think teaching should be a core part of the curricula in education at nearly all levels. The process of trying to model and transfer skills and understanding is a powerful way to motivate and reinforce your own learning.