A common theme runs through the books written about the psychology of political beliefs, and it concerns their attempts to explain why some people possess "liberal" beliefs and why others possess "conservative" beliefs. Such a dichotomy, goes the prevailing explanation, is a consequence of innate differences (whether biological or cultural) between how the "liberal" mind and the "conservative" mind construct politico-moral judgments on any given issue. For George Lakoff, for instance, the difference is a consequence of "framing"; where liberals will frame issues in terms of care and compassion, conservatives will frame them in terms of responsibility and obligation. For Drew Westen, on the other hand, the difference between the two worldviews is best explained by the primacy of emotions in conservative politics as compared to the cool, rational, detached methods of the liberals (to the latter's great deficit). In the most recent book I've read on the subject, Jonathon Haidt argues that there are six different foundational systems which constitute moral thought, all of which are relevant to conservative thought but only three of which are relevant to liberal thought.
In each of these cases, the differences are portrayed as entirely natural, largely inexorable and - therefore - exculpatory. If the difference in worldview that separate liberals from conservatives are as truly pervasive and pre-rational as these authors argue, then we cannot look down on conservatives for having different moral beliefs. Such beliefs are merely an extension of the moral matrix they happen possess that is no more or less valid than that of liberals. When a conservative inveighs against homosexuals or Muslims, he is simply drawing on his more highly tuned "Loyalty foundation" that identifies and scandalises those who dissent from the norm; who are we, therefore, to judge?
I am growing a little weary of such attempts to rationalise the existence damaging beliefs (in politics, religion etc.) by simply noting that they may have a natural origin. That they do have a natural origin must warn us against simply confronting or denigrating those who disagree with us - as such approaches will likely be futile or counter-productive - and it may also (rightly) encourage us to see a given issue from the perspective of the other side. Having said that, we must also be careful not to submit to the pretense of moral neutrality where our worldview is in conflict with those of other people. That something is natural, first of all, doesn't make it right. This is the naturalistic fallacy writ large: there may be good social or biological reasons for the persistence of conservative beliefs, that doesn't mean they make society a better place. The fact that people are capable of changing their minds on important issues should also indicate to us that these "moral matrices" are not so inflexible as we might otherwise imagine.
A further difficulty is that each of these books are extremely American-centric. The American system is highly polarised1, so it makes sense to break moral-outlooks (and political beliefs) down into just two, largely non-overlapping groups. How accurate is this dichotomy, however, when applied to political systems (such as those in Europe) that are far more pluralistic? Furthermore, the analysis fails to take into account the uniqueness of American conservatism when applied to the political beliefs of conservatives elsewhere. In UK and Australia, for instance, the conservative parties - for all their faults - are still grounded and reasonable. Even where one doesn't agree with their policy, an honest and fair-minded person can at least see the rationale that might have led to its formation. Extending such generosity to the policies of Republicans, however, is far more difficult. The party has been shunted so far the the right that it fails to resemble any mainstream political ideology in any country that I am familiar with. Given that the parochial, highly anti-intellectual posturing of Republican politicians would have them laughed out of the room in any other country in the world2, regardless of how avowedly "conservative" that audience may claim to be, how can the analysts attempt to explain Republican positions purely in terms of some (universal?) psychological dichotomy?
But it's the increasing gulf separating Republicans from reality that really makes a mockery of such disinterested political psychology. With regards to taxation, for instance, Haidt might be correct in suggesting that differences in policies advocated by Democrats and Republicans are simply reflections of different approaches to fairness in the "moral matrices" of the adherents of the two parties: for Democrats fairness rests with equality, for Republicans fairness rests with proportionality (i.e. people should be entitled to the fruits of their labour, and it is not fair to disproportionately tax our most productive citizens). So far so good. Such differences, however, fail to account for the popularly held belief amongst Republicans that Obama is a socialist who has greatly increased taxes when - objectively - this just isn't the case. The rabid and entirely dishonest attacks against Obama in this regard can't simply be rationalised away as some blameless difference in worldviews. These are views predicated on mindless, tribal antagonism and cannot be treated seriously. One must admit that there is room for informed disagreement on issues such as taxation, but that in no way legitimises obscenely disingenuous position presently espoused by Republicans.
In fact, on virtually every issue the Republicans seem content on positioning themselves against objective reality. If political stances were entirely a matter of moral preferences then perhaps the difference between Democrats and Republicans could be explained as a phenomena derived from our inherently different psychological constitutions, in which case neither side could be truly "right" or "wrong", merely individuals with different (though equally moral) priorities. There are some political stances, however, that can be objectively evaluated - where the truth of the matter is clear and unequivocal - and on these stances the Republicans invariably take the wrong side. Look at their stance on evolution, climate change or virtually any other issue related to science, for instance. Look at their claim that "abstinence-only" education will lead to reduced teen pregnancies and STD rates, or that "socialised" health care in inherently less efficient. Look at their claim that the institution of marriage has remained static throughout history, or that the Founding Fathers established the US as a Christian nation. All clearly and demonstrably false, yet they are central planks of Republican thought.3
If would be difficult to neutrally explain such pathological indifference to facts through a mere "difference" in world-views. The present Republican insanity has a rather more contingent origin, and it stems from the proud American tradition of anti-intellectualism. If one accepts that one's intuitions about the world are not necessarily true, and undertakes an honest appraisal of one's views by actively seeking out objective facts to confirm or disconfirm one's views, then it becomes possible for one to discard incorrect assumptions for more accurate ones and - in doing so - come to reconcile one's beliefs with objective reality. If one believes that one's common sense and intuition is sufficient (or even morally superior) as an epistemological strategy, then one will resist science, facts and logic until one's dying breath. The consequences of such thinking are plain to see. While the former individual might never be able to claim to be in possession of "the truth", her method will (ideally) move her towards positions that are objectively true, as her baseless intuitions and prejudices come to be displaced by more considered positions. The latter can only reach "objectively true" positions by pure, dumb luck; that is, while one could never say that the positions of the "gut" thinker are inherently false, they could only have arrived at the truth by complete accident.
This process can be seen clearly in the context of history, where the progressive causes - though usually fiercely resisted at the time - generally come to be accepted as the prevailing, unquestioned truth in subsequent generations. Causes like women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, the general push towards democracy and individual liberty were - no matter how reconciled they may be with modern conservative thought - once considered dangerous and unduly progressive ideas that were strongly and sometimes violently opposed by the conservative thinkers of the day. That such progressive ideas, borne largely of facts and reason, came to win the day is no accident: they were thought upon, disseminated, tested and perfected over time until their truth became so obvious that even the most reactionary ideologue was forced to accept their validity. The opposition to these movements may well have been sincere and motivated by genuine moral concerns predicated on a certain psychological disposition, but that doesn't preclude us from making the judgment - admittedly with the benefit of hindsight - that such opposition was horribly and unequivocally on the wrong side of history. What grounds might we have for thinking that modern conservative movements will suffer a less ignominious fate, given their identically reactionary philosophy?
But history aside, there really is something particularly and especially wrong with the modern Republican Party. Present-day Republicans have long since abandoned reality for the warm, safe world of partisan political acrimony. Their positions are unjustifiable in and of themselves, which leaves them only with the myth that every issue must have two sides and that both sides are therefore inherently worthy of consideration, respect and equal airing in a public forum. The implication made by these political psychologists, that there is any aspect of the Republican Party in its current guise that is capable of contributing anything of worth or value to the current political climate, is just plainly and dangerously wrong. Let's not make excuses for these people: they have the same capacity for reason and compassion that the rest of us have, so let's encourage them to use it. The solutions to a great many problems will not be found until the Republican Party joins the rest of us in this great, majestic expanse known as reality, so let us hasten their journey.
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(1) - At the risk of being seen to be indiscriminate in my criticism of the GOP, I think the blame for the current polarisation really does lie predominantly with Republican electoral strategies. The Republican Party is comprised of a number of ideological sub-factions who - left to their own devices - probably would have torn themselves apart long ago. What, for example, do the libertarians have in common with the social conservatives? The corporatists and the Evangelicals? The neo-cons and the isolationists? The simple answer is that they are all - to one extent or another - anti-liberal. Keeping all these groups together necessitates the construction of an enemy - one that doesn't really exist - to unite them in common hatred. This explains the irrationally hostile and adversarial nature of the American right, and the current strategy of the Republican congress to just say "no" to everything the Democrats deign to propose.
(2) - With the possible exceptions of Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.
(3) - This is without even mentioning some of the more "fringe" theories, such as those concerning Obama's place of birth or religion.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Archaic Language and Religious Authority
As I have previously posted, the language of religion is often fundamentally different in nature to that of everyday language. Whereas everyday language encourages explicit and unambiguous expression (in fully-propositional forms), religious language is far more regularly composed using semi-propositional forms, which permit a greater multi-valency of meaning at the expense of specificity and exactness. I also suggested that this may partly explain the reason for the persistence of archaic language within religious traditions, as the incomprehensibility of the ancient language lends itself well to the fundamental ineffability of religious claims. There is, however, a second reason for the preservation of archaic language in religious expression, and it has to do with authority.
Every literate religious tradition is fundamentally conservative with respect to its attitude to scripture. While it is possible for attitudes towards such literature to change over time, and even for certain texts to fall into disuse, as a general rule the amount of new, authoritative textual material added to religious traditions dwindles to nothing given enough time. As such, the scriptures themselves slowly come to be treated with a veneration that transcends what they merely say. They are "fetishised", for want of a better word, and the style of language they employ becomes frozen in the traditions and rituals of the religions themselves, even if this same language falls into general disuse. These texts come to form the foundation of subsequent theology (this is especially true within the Abrahamic traditions) and therefore constitute a kind of theological constitution; a largely insuperable doctrine that all subsequent developments in the tradition must not find themselves to be in conflict with.1
This progressive sacralisation of the texts presents its difficulties, however. For instance, why is it specifically these texts that we should treat as normative to the exclusion of all others? By what means can we assume these texts to be "true" (in a religious context) in a sense that other, later texts are not? For the latter question, we (or rather the believer) must rely on the legitimacy of revelation and prophecy, such that one must accept the premise that certain texts are just simply derived from the mouths of gods, or else some other similarly supernatural origin. Certain "prophets" (or oracles, or soothsayers, or witchdoctors...) are imagined to be particularly inspired in this regard and it is their proclamations that come to be regarded as especially authoritative over and against the proclamations of others (if this processes seems a little arbitrary, that may well be because it is). In literate religions, the effective preservation of ancient prophecies lend them an inherent and timeless authority over a long-enough period, one that slowly excludes the legitimacy of newer prophetic claimants. As such, to answer the former question, it is the ancient texts, produced by men whose prophetic legitimacy has grown to be unquestioned, that comes to form the normative textual basis of all literate religions.2
This is possible within religious traditions because - as per my previous post - there is little in these "inspired" texts that can be treated as unambiguously true or false. That is the nature of most religious language. As such, the tests of the legitimacy of religious claims in literate religions often depend upon their longevity. The early Christians, for instance, are suspected to have preserved the Septuagint within their nascent canon as a means of establishing their link to much older traditions, in defence of the claim raised against them that they represented a new (and therefore perverse and dangerous) religious cult. The identification of ancient pedigree was apparently an important factor for the Romans in determining the legitimacy of the many religions that were practised within their empire and I'm sure they were not alone in this philosophy. If "ancientness" is truly an important prerequisite for the perceived legitimacy of a religious practice (in the absence of the possibility of any other kind of truth claim), then it is not difficult to see why the ancient languages that originally gave rise to these traditions are preserved conterminously.
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(1) - In most cases the flexibility or indeterminacy of religious language makes this process quite easy. "Heaven", for instance, began as the literal kingdom of YHWH in Jewish thought, and progressed in later Christian thought to a destination for departed souls. Now, in modern Christian theology, we might expect to see it defined far more abstractly as a state of being in which one finds oneself in the presence of God. Although the "original" meaning of heaven has been lost, the inherent ambiguity of religious language allows the modern Christian reader to derive any number of equally salient (and valid) interpretations from a Biblical expression like "the Kingdom of Heaven dwells within you" that would possess little intersect with the interpretations of ancient Jewish readers.
(2) - Even if the texts were not actually written by these "prophets" originally, their names are frequently attached to them post hoc. So Moses' name was attached to the Pentateuch, the apostle John's name was attached to the otherwise anonymous gospel and so on. A similar trend can be seen in the formation of the ahadith in Islam and the sutras in Buddhism, both of which can only be assumed to be traceable back to the "original" source if one treats the texts with extreme credulity. Sometimes outright fraud is evident in this quest for authority, such as the early Christians who wrote in Paul's name (i.e. the Pastoral Epistles) or the intertestamental Jews who wrote in the names of Enoch, Tobit and so on.
Every literate religious tradition is fundamentally conservative with respect to its attitude to scripture. While it is possible for attitudes towards such literature to change over time, and even for certain texts to fall into disuse, as a general rule the amount of new, authoritative textual material added to religious traditions dwindles to nothing given enough time. As such, the scriptures themselves slowly come to be treated with a veneration that transcends what they merely say. They are "fetishised", for want of a better word, and the style of language they employ becomes frozen in the traditions and rituals of the religions themselves, even if this same language falls into general disuse. These texts come to form the foundation of subsequent theology (this is especially true within the Abrahamic traditions) and therefore constitute a kind of theological constitution; a largely insuperable doctrine that all subsequent developments in the tradition must not find themselves to be in conflict with.1
This progressive sacralisation of the texts presents its difficulties, however. For instance, why is it specifically these texts that we should treat as normative to the exclusion of all others? By what means can we assume these texts to be "true" (in a religious context) in a sense that other, later texts are not? For the latter question, we (or rather the believer) must rely on the legitimacy of revelation and prophecy, such that one must accept the premise that certain texts are just simply derived from the mouths of gods, or else some other similarly supernatural origin. Certain "prophets" (or oracles, or soothsayers, or witchdoctors...) are imagined to be particularly inspired in this regard and it is their proclamations that come to be regarded as especially authoritative over and against the proclamations of others (if this processes seems a little arbitrary, that may well be because it is). In literate religions, the effective preservation of ancient prophecies lend them an inherent and timeless authority over a long-enough period, one that slowly excludes the legitimacy of newer prophetic claimants. As such, to answer the former question, it is the ancient texts, produced by men whose prophetic legitimacy has grown to be unquestioned, that comes to form the normative textual basis of all literate religions.2
This is possible within religious traditions because - as per my previous post - there is little in these "inspired" texts that can be treated as unambiguously true or false. That is the nature of most religious language. As such, the tests of the legitimacy of religious claims in literate religions often depend upon their longevity. The early Christians, for instance, are suspected to have preserved the Septuagint within their nascent canon as a means of establishing their link to much older traditions, in defence of the claim raised against them that they represented a new (and therefore perverse and dangerous) religious cult. The identification of ancient pedigree was apparently an important factor for the Romans in determining the legitimacy of the many religions that were practised within their empire and I'm sure they were not alone in this philosophy. If "ancientness" is truly an important prerequisite for the perceived legitimacy of a religious practice (in the absence of the possibility of any other kind of truth claim), then it is not difficult to see why the ancient languages that originally gave rise to these traditions are preserved conterminously.
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(1) - In most cases the flexibility or indeterminacy of religious language makes this process quite easy. "Heaven", for instance, began as the literal kingdom of YHWH in Jewish thought, and progressed in later Christian thought to a destination for departed souls. Now, in modern Christian theology, we might expect to see it defined far more abstractly as a state of being in which one finds oneself in the presence of God. Although the "original" meaning of heaven has been lost, the inherent ambiguity of religious language allows the modern Christian reader to derive any number of equally salient (and valid) interpretations from a Biblical expression like "the Kingdom of Heaven dwells within you" that would possess little intersect with the interpretations of ancient Jewish readers.
(2) - Even if the texts were not actually written by these "prophets" originally, their names are frequently attached to them post hoc. So Moses' name was attached to the Pentateuch, the apostle John's name was attached to the otherwise anonymous gospel and so on. A similar trend can be seen in the formation of the ahadith in Islam and the sutras in Buddhism, both of which can only be assumed to be traceable back to the "original" source if one treats the texts with extreme credulity. Sometimes outright fraud is evident in this quest for authority, such as the early Christians who wrote in Paul's name (i.e. the Pastoral Epistles) or the intertestamental Jews who wrote in the names of Enoch, Tobit and so on.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
How to Explain Paul's Silence on Jesus?
One of the most central points generally raised by Jesus mythicists concerns the alleged silence surrounding the existence of Jesus in the Epistles of Paul. If Paul was genuinely familiar with Jesus as a historical being, how might one account for the lack of biographical information he provides about Jesus in his letters? Why are there no details concerning, for instance, Jesus' origins, his teachings or the circumstances surrounding his death? Surely these are not insignificant details, so why were they omitted?
Scholars might reply in one of two ways:1
- In actual fact, Paul does on many occasions relate - albeit fleetingly - biographical details concerning the life of Jesus. He mentions, to give just a few examples, that Jesus was born of a woman (Gal 4:4), "was descended from David according to the flesh" (Rom 1:3-4), that he left instructions concerning divorce (1 Cor 7:10), that he had brothers (1 Cor 9:5) and that he "died" and "was buried" (1 Cor 15:3-4). Scarcely enlightening stuff, but enough to suggest that Paul understood Jesus as a human being rather than a purely heavenly one.
Or:
- As an occasional writer (meaning one who wrote only when the occasion required it), writing only to churches he had played some part in founding, there may have been no need or opportunity to go into great details concerning what he knew about the historical Jesus. Presumably the recipients of his letters already knew what he knew concerning this topic, so there was no cause for Paul to provide these details gratuitously.
Such arguments have merit, I think, and may even be sufficient to address the argument from silence by themselves. But there might be another reason for Paul's silence on the life of Jesus (and the lack of overlap with the Gospel material in his writings) that I don't often see addressed in relation to this problem. It concerns Paul's self-perception as an apostle.
Paul is frank in his writings that Jesus appeared to him "last of all, as to someone untimely born" (1 Cor 15:8) and that (for this reason?) he is "the least of the apostles" (v. 9). Although one might be struck by his humility in these verses, in other places he is rather more prickly and defensive concerning this subject. He, for instance, berates the Corinthians for being seduced by those who "proclaim another Jesus... or a different gospel" from the one he delivered to them, before going on to assert that he believes himself to be "not in the least inferior to these super-apostles" and is, in fact, a "better" minister of Christ than they (2 Cor 11:4-5; 12:11; 11:23). Quite who these "super-apostles" might be is not clear, but given the fact that they were apparently Jewish (2 Cor 11:22), is there not the possibility that they were allied with the Jerusalem Church2 and therefore heirs to a tradition that might have begun with the historical Jesus? Could these close ties be the source of Paul's jealousy and sarcastic derision?
Speculation aside, it does seem clear from other passages that Paul was tetchy concerning the teachings of those who actually knew Jesus and what they might have to say about him. In the first place, Paul emphatically asserts that he "did not receive [the gospel] from a human source" but rather "received it through a revelation" (Gal 1:12) and that after his conversion he "did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me" (vv. 16-17). Even when he did make it to Jerusalem, he refused to "see any other apostle except James the Lord’s brother" and Peter (vv 18-19) and on his second trip claimed that "those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders... contributed nothing to me" (Gal 2:6). His position here is rather unambiguous: what he knew about Jesus he knew only through divine revelation, and he had little interest in what the men who actually knew Jesus had to say about him (or what anybody else had to say, for that matter)3. Even if he had inherited material about the life of Jesus along the way, would it not be fair to presume that he might have been reluctant to include it in his letters for fear of privileging someone else's gospel over his own?
Could the reason that Paul didn't mention anything about the life of Jesus in his letters really be so petty? Did he really ignore the biographical material that eventually made its way into the Gospels for no reason more serious than the potential authority he felt it may have leant to James, Peter and the rest of the Jerusalem Church? It's difficult to muster conclusive evidence for this conclusion, but I certainly don't think it's a particularly outrageous thesis given the querulous tone he frequently adopts throughout his letters. In any case, along with the two other explanations I've give above, I think we seem to have a fairly convincing case for Paul's silence on Jesus.
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(1) - See for examples Bart Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist?"
(2) - We can see elsewhere what an acrimonious relationship Paul had with this
Jerusalem Church, especially in his account of the debates within the
early church concerning the role of Gentiles and the
applicability of the Jewish law. In this matter, Paul saw himself
plainly as an "an
Apostle to the Gentiles" (Rom 11:13) and it seems that he was "entrusted
with the gospel for the uncircumcised" (Gal 2:7) by common assent. As
such, Paul was keen to assert that it should not be necessary for
Gentiles newly inducted into the faith to observe Jewish requirements
such as circumcision and dietary laws, contrary to the
opinion of other Apostles in the early church. He saw his work with the
gentiles being undermined by those
"sent from James" (Gal 2:12), encouraging the practice of Jewish rites.
He then opposed Peter "to his face" when Peter went from dining with
gentiles
to apparently only dining with Jews again (Gal 2:11)(Paul himself
apparently was happy to "become as one outside the law" where the
occasion called for it - 1 Cor 9:21).Such
intrusions by James and his followers onto what Paul perceived as his
own territory sufficiently angered him to wish for those advocating
circumcision to "castrate themselves" (Gal 5:12) - this was apparently
not seen as a minor matter!
(3) - "For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified." (1 Cor 2:2)
Monday, April 23, 2012
On Criticising Religion
"Suppose I live under a totalitarian regime that has indoctrinated
me to venerate its leaders and accept the state’s values. I might be happy,
yet inauthentically so: my happiness is not autonomous, for it depends on the
acceptance of values imposed on me through manipulative practices. This is a
problem. Is it a subjectivist problem? It is not a problem from the subjective
point of view: I wholeheartedly endorse my values and way of life. I see nothing
wrong with my circumstances. This affirmation may persist through reflection
and exposure to the facts. You might call my attention to my lack of autonomy,
the inauthenticity of my happiness. I might agree with you on this, but then say,
‘‘so what?’’ I do not value autonomy or authenticity. As far as I am concerned,
these are the decadent values of a pathologically individualistic society. Leave
me alone.
It is worth considering what is to be done with someone like me. Deprogramming
seems the only route to enlightenment."
- (Daniel Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness, p. 207)
Few things are more difficult to objectively quantify than human happiness, but although any "hedonic calculus" will necessarily have its short-comings, the effort itself - to understand and measure happiness - remains a worthwhile one. In classical economic theory, one can measure human inclinations only in terms of material wants ("demand") and therefore define happiness purely in terms of fulfilling those wants. The rational agent, therefore, is one who maximises consumption.
There are at least two key problems with this homo economicus model. The first is that humans are not inherently "rational", at least not in terms of their capacity to dispassionately assess what actions may be in their best interest, and can on occasion be shown to act in ways which objectively serve to make themselves worse-off. A simple example is an experiment know as the "Ultimatum Game" which shows that people will reject the free provision of money on grounds as tendentious as "fairness", a proclivity that the "rational agent" approach to human nature cannot account for in its model.
The second unrealistic assumption of the "rational agent" model is that people can be made happy (or at least be satisfied) simply by getting what they want. In the first place (and this is something that classical economic models do, to their credit, accurately reflect) human wants are infinite, resources are not: hence the foundation of economics. Secondly, it scarcely needs pointing out that "getting one's own way" (particularly exclusively in the context of material satisfaction) is scarcely sufficient (or even necessary) to the living of a happy life. Do the lives of wanton excess lived by wealthy celebrities frequently lead to deep and lasting happiness?
Part of the reason for this misconception of human desire and happiness comes from the subjectivist account that people are ultimately capable of knowing what they want and that happiness emerges from the pursuit of that want. This is the basis of political and economic liberalism. People must be free to make decisions about their own lives, and it is not for us to make judgements about this: after all, how could we? Who are we to judge what is best for someone?
While this approach may hold some superficial appeal, again we require only a few simple examples to show that we all have limits on how willing we are to support this approach as an accurate reflection of human intentionality. Surely not even the most committed subjectivist, for instance, will agree that a severely depressed or otherwise mentally affected patient can have a better idea of what is in his best interests than the doctor treating him? Would we not be remiss if - in the name of self-determination - we supported without judgement his decision to refuse all medical treatment? Or how about the wife who finds herself regularly beaten by her husband? Would we take seriously her denouements that her marriage is making her happy? Of course not. Such an example demonstrates that - at least in certain cases - we can make the objective judgement that certain decisions that people make are likely to lead to unhappiness, or at least constrain their capacity for self-actualisation in some significant way. We should not withhold the provision of advice to those suffering in cases such as these, and I believe that our realm of empathetic concern should be expanded even further.
Although the "beaten wife" serves as a provocative, perhaps extreme example, I believe that we can be similarly objective in our negative judgements concerning the effect of fundamentalist religions on the mental health of believers. As much as they may protest and insist that their beliefs make them happy, even a cursory examination of their lives betrays patterns of behaviour that severely impinge on their capacity to enjoy anything even approaching "happiness". An integral part of being happy (or at least a consequence of happiness), I think, lies in the ease with which one can socialise with one's fellow human beings. We can see intuitively that the social behaviour of happy person will consist in relaxed and broadly cheerful, egalitarian behaviour with others, where the behaviour of the unhappy person will probably be governed by mistrust, resentment and crippling awkwardness. It may be too easy here to simply point to the almost disconcerting lack of social skills common to religious fundamentalists, but there is also a darker, more serious side to their asocial tendencies.
A key feature of religious fundamentalism (at least of the Abrahamic variety) lies in its exclusivism: that is to say, that the dogmas of these faiths are not only true, but true to the exclusion of all others. This creates a clearly defined in and out group, where the syncretic consideration of ideas from the "out group" are to be fiercely resisted as a matter of course. Plainly, such an adversarial conception of the world is not condusive to healthy human relationships with those seen to be in the "out group", hence the proclivity to either recede from the world or to establish hysterical persecution fantasies in which the beleaguered believers must stand firm against a great (though nebulously defined) enemy. For fundamentalist Christians we need only look at the paranoid treatment of homosexuals (who, it is often believed, are united in some shadowy, pan-global conspiracy to undermine traditional Christian values for some reason) to witness how pathetically warped dispositions to outsiders can become under fundamentalist religion.
Another important cause of (or at least indication of) happiness lies in positive self-image; or, to put it more generally, "feeling comfortable within one's own skin". Highly negative self-appraisal will invariably lead to unhappiness in one's life, if it isn't already an indicator of outright depression. In fundamentalist religions, there are few functions of the human body that are not viewed with strict disapprobation if not complete disgust. Sex is an obvious place to begin, with normal human sexuality derided as sinful under all but a few prescribed conditions. In the stricter expressions of sharia Islam, disgust at the human body can manifest itself in an almost puerile obsession with almost all bodily functions, regardless of their necessity. Virtually all substances produced by the body render one haram, or unclean. How can one have a positive self-image when one sees even the most mundane functions of one's body as abominable in the eyes of the omniscient creator of the universe?
People may say that we should leave believers alone - that they have made their choice, that it makes them happy, and that that should be the boundary of our concern. In some ways, indeed, we must be prepared to acknowledge that the quest to confront religious beliefs is at best Quixotic and at worst unduly intrusive and obnoxious. However, we should also acknowledge that certain patterns of religious belief can be seen to constrain the believer's potential for an authentic, self-fulfilling life. To this extent, we would be doing her an injustice by not pointing out the damaging, self-constraining nature of her beliefs, much the same as if we were to ignore any other forms of self-harm.
Now there may be the objection that religious beliefs have the potential to expand (rather than contract) one's engagement with the world. Certainly such outcomes are possible (theological beliefs may, for example, serve to expand one's realm of concern under the guise of agape, or generalised, fraternal love) but such religious proclivities are assuredly not the ones targeted in this post. My point is not that religious beliefs should be targeted indiscriminately or irrespective of their content, but rather that religious beliefs which restrict free, happy and authentic behaviour should not be allowed to propagate without opposition. Whether or not they are likely to accept it at the time, the airing of such opposition can be shown to objectively help people. If we are capable of facing views that contradict our own without suffering unduly for it, it is surely the height of arrogance to presume that fundamentalist believers will react any differently. Let us not be patronising: we are all adults, capable of exercising the power of reason and changing our minds. There is literally no good reason to deny someone else this same opportunity for self-growth.
Perhaps a more pertinent and practical objection can be raised about the appropriateness of interjecting our opinions where they haven't been solicited. It is, I agree, a fine line which separates honest outspokenness from the kind of reverse proselytism that has unfortunately characterised much publicly-aired atheism in recent years. Clearly choosing the appropriate battles requires a degree of tact that may not easily be taught, but - as a broad rule - it seems that publicly broadcast beliefs are almost always fair game. If one wishes to enter one's beliefs into the public realm, one cannot claim to be offended when such beliefs are the subject of criticism from others. The right to be criticised (or offended!) is both the cost and the privilege of employing one's right to free-speech. It could be objected that religious beliefs occupy a private realm that critics have no business imposing themselves upon, but - by definition - a truly private belief could not be known to anyone else. It therefore behoves us not to engage in a priori attacks on one's religion before we are in possession of all the necessary facts, but public beliefs are not entitled to such protection. Once a belief is uttered publicly, one forfeits all claims to exclusive possession of this belief: it is now a part of the public sphere, for the rest of us to address as we wish.
It's not clear that such a approach will help to erode confidence in fundamentalist beliefs or rather simply further entrench the fundamentalists in their marginal positions, but I think such concerns are largely beyond our control. If a fundamentalist wishes to be offended, or to believe that she is being heroically persecuted for what she believes, then she will be able to do so quite independently of anything we might think to say. If they are going to claim persecution anyway, there is surely little we can say to make it worse. Besides, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out, "argument [is] valuable, indeed essential, for its own sake". As a consequence of an argument, we can expect to find our beliefs either strengthened or exposed as folly by its end. For either eventuality, we should all find ourselves thankful.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Religion and Archaic Language
One curious feature of religious belief is its desire to protect (or even resurrect) archaic forms of language in its modern, everyday practice. Such examples are almost too numerous to mention, but include:
Objectively, this feature of religious expression is difficult to account for. In almost every other situation that calls for the use of human language, the evocation of archaic forms would be detrimental to the clarity of the speaker's message. Why employ language that is no longer in wide-circulation if you want to be understood? What could possibly explain the drive to shroud one's message with such deliberately abstruse prose? The answer, predictably enough, is that religious language differs substantively from everyday language.
In most uses of language, the general inclination is to make ones position as explicit as possible by reducing any potential ambiguity in what one wishes to say. "Sarah Smith holds a rose in her hand", for instance, is less ambiguous than "Sarah holds a flower in her hand", though this latter sentence is itself less ambiguous than "She holds it in her hand". Let us call the first sentence fully-propositional since its meaning is clear without any further elaboration, and let us call the last sentence semi-propositional, as while it may take the same, general form (syntactically) as a fully-propositional statement, it cannot be properly understood without further refinement, elaboration or explicit contextual clues. In everyday communication, our language is generally composed of fully-prepositional forms; that is, forms that convey a meaning that is not entirely undermined by ambiguity2 and possess a determinate content that can be judged as being either true or false.3
Take, for instance, the rather unassuming sentence "God exists in heaven". It looks like a fully-prepositional statement in form, and the meaning - on a naive reading - may seem to be relatively clear, but the point is that such clarity is deceptive. Two people cannot agree on what is signified by the word "God" in the same way they may reach an agreement on what is signified by "Sarah Smith": one's definition of the former is shaped largely by subjective experience and cannot be anchored by anything that can be pointed to objectively. In this sense, "God" is an ambiguous and highly variable term that is scarcely more explicit in meaning than the pronoun "she". Heaven suffers from similar problems; again, given the impossibility of finding an objectively shared meaning of this word between any two people, we can scarcely say it is any less ambiguous than the word "it". Even the word exists is problematic, since it is obvious (according to most theological tenets) that God doesn't "exist" in the same sense that other objects in the universe "exist". In other words, even a mundane religious utterance like "God exists in heaven" renders itself completely immune to unambiguous explication and must therefore be recognised as semi-propositional in nature.
However - and this is the important part - simply because religious language is frequently semi-propositional in nature, that is not to say that it is not at all meaningful. In fact, the very ambiguity of language allows words like "God" to be used with a kind of free-wheeling multi-valency that simply isn't possible with words like "rose". Its inherent ambiguity allows religious language to produce an almost inexhaustible supply of meaningful inferences that can be applied to almost any situation encountered. To the extent that it doesn't over-reach and creep into domains better expressed using fully-propositional forms (we might call such domains the world of the "profane") religion can create a web of self-referential meaning that is almost infinitely pliable and profoundly salient within the mind of the believer.
With respect to the archaic forms of language I introduced at the beginning of this post, I hope it is becoming clear why such language forms are preserved in almost all religious traditions. The archaic language keeps it out of the "profane" domains of fully-propositional language4, and preserves it within its own hermetically-sealed domain of the "sacred". To the extent that archaic language is incomprehensible, so much the better for the inferential salience of religious concepts. This not the only reason for the use of such language within the praxis of religion, however, and I shall explore the other possibility - the importance of ancient authority in religions - in a subsequent post.
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(1) "The fascination of [Islamic] fundamentalism is... bound up with language. Their leaders try to speak pure Arabic, untainted by dialects or foreign words... The Arabic spoken by modern fundamentalists is often appallingly trite, puritanical, conformist and, in fact, artificial. It is, however, perceived as pure and religious, mythical and, in a dull, banal sense, sublime. The mere code of the language becomes a tool used to legitimate their claim to the status of a sacred authority." - The Blackwell Companion to the Quran, pp. 116-117.
(2) Of course, all language contains some degree of ambiguity given the inherent poverty of language to adequately convey a concept from one mind to another, but I hope it is clear why the final of the three sentences can be said to be incomprehensibly ambiguous (in the absence of any context) in a manner that the first sentence is not.
(3) Not in any absolute senses of the terms, but rather in principle.
(4) I think this is why translations of the Bible which use contemporary English (usually for the edification of teenagers etc.) sound so campy: the "sacred" and "profane" domains are in conflict, which the brain struggles to reconcile in any way that doesn't utilise the release valve of laughter.
- The use of archaic forms of Arabic among radical Muslims.1
- The persistence of Latin in the Catholic mass long after it had fallen into disuse in all other social arenas.
- The rendering of The Book of Mormon (a mid-19th century document) in 16th century English.
- The persistent presence of KJV-exclusivism in various modern Protestant sects.
- The persistence of Hebrew language as an entirely liturgical language from around the 2nd century until its rehabilitation in the late 19th century.
Objectively, this feature of religious expression is difficult to account for. In almost every other situation that calls for the use of human language, the evocation of archaic forms would be detrimental to the clarity of the speaker's message. Why employ language that is no longer in wide-circulation if you want to be understood? What could possibly explain the drive to shroud one's message with such deliberately abstruse prose? The answer, predictably enough, is that religious language differs substantively from everyday language.
In most uses of language, the general inclination is to make ones position as explicit as possible by reducing any potential ambiguity in what one wishes to say. "Sarah Smith holds a rose in her hand", for instance, is less ambiguous than "Sarah holds a flower in her hand", though this latter sentence is itself less ambiguous than "She holds it in her hand". Let us call the first sentence fully-propositional since its meaning is clear without any further elaboration, and let us call the last sentence semi-propositional, as while it may take the same, general form (syntactically) as a fully-propositional statement, it cannot be properly understood without further refinement, elaboration or explicit contextual clues. In everyday communication, our language is generally composed of fully-prepositional forms; that is, forms that convey a meaning that is not entirely undermined by ambiguity2 and possess a determinate content that can be judged as being either true or false.3
Take, for instance, the rather unassuming sentence "God exists in heaven". It looks like a fully-prepositional statement in form, and the meaning - on a naive reading - may seem to be relatively clear, but the point is that such clarity is deceptive. Two people cannot agree on what is signified by the word "God" in the same way they may reach an agreement on what is signified by "Sarah Smith": one's definition of the former is shaped largely by subjective experience and cannot be anchored by anything that can be pointed to objectively. In this sense, "God" is an ambiguous and highly variable term that is scarcely more explicit in meaning than the pronoun "she". Heaven suffers from similar problems; again, given the impossibility of finding an objectively shared meaning of this word between any two people, we can scarcely say it is any less ambiguous than the word "it". Even the word exists is problematic, since it is obvious (according to most theological tenets) that God doesn't "exist" in the same sense that other objects in the universe "exist". In other words, even a mundane religious utterance like "God exists in heaven" renders itself completely immune to unambiguous explication and must therefore be recognised as semi-propositional in nature.
However - and this is the important part - simply because religious language is frequently semi-propositional in nature, that is not to say that it is not at all meaningful. In fact, the very ambiguity of language allows words like "God" to be used with a kind of free-wheeling multi-valency that simply isn't possible with words like "rose". Its inherent ambiguity allows religious language to produce an almost inexhaustible supply of meaningful inferences that can be applied to almost any situation encountered. To the extent that it doesn't over-reach and creep into domains better expressed using fully-propositional forms (we might call such domains the world of the "profane") religion can create a web of self-referential meaning that is almost infinitely pliable and profoundly salient within the mind of the believer.
With respect to the archaic forms of language I introduced at the beginning of this post, I hope it is becoming clear why such language forms are preserved in almost all religious traditions. The archaic language keeps it out of the "profane" domains of fully-propositional language4, and preserves it within its own hermetically-sealed domain of the "sacred". To the extent that archaic language is incomprehensible, so much the better for the inferential salience of religious concepts. This not the only reason for the use of such language within the praxis of religion, however, and I shall explore the other possibility - the importance of ancient authority in religions - in a subsequent post.
-----------------------------------------------------
(1) "The fascination of [Islamic] fundamentalism is... bound up with language. Their leaders try to speak pure Arabic, untainted by dialects or foreign words... The Arabic spoken by modern fundamentalists is often appallingly trite, puritanical, conformist and, in fact, artificial. It is, however, perceived as pure and religious, mythical and, in a dull, banal sense, sublime. The mere code of the language becomes a tool used to legitimate their claim to the status of a sacred authority." - The Blackwell Companion to the Quran, pp. 116-117.
(2) Of course, all language contains some degree of ambiguity given the inherent poverty of language to adequately convey a concept from one mind to another, but I hope it is clear why the final of the three sentences can be said to be incomprehensibly ambiguous (in the absence of any context) in a manner that the first sentence is not.
(3) Not in any absolute senses of the terms, but rather in principle.
(4) I think this is why translations of the Bible which use contemporary English (usually for the edification of teenagers etc.) sound so campy: the "sacred" and "profane" domains are in conflict, which the brain struggles to reconcile in any way that doesn't utilise the release valve of laughter.
Monday, April 16, 2012
Why Were the Gospels Written?
When analysing an ancient religious text, one of the first tasks we must set ourselves is to identify which religious genre it aspires to. This is not merely a banal, intellectual exercise in literary taxonomy, but rather is integral to our framing of the text, and to shaping our understanding of it. To use concrete examples, we would be remiss to read the poetic Book of Job as belonging to the same religious genre as the Book of Kings, which aspires to be a work of history. In the New Testament, we plainly can't approach the apocalyptic work of Revelation in the same way we might approach the epistolary works of Paul (though there is some eschatological overlap in this case). Or, to use a more contemporary case, our attitude to a work will be plainly different depending on whether it claims to be a work of "science" or a work of "science-fiction". In all of these cases, our understanding of the genre of the texts will inexorably shape our disposition towards them before we have begun to read a single passage.
With regards to the gospels, the attempt to fit them into pre-existing genres has been met with failure, or - at best - controversy. Some scholars see the gospels as conforming to the structures of the ancient Greek genre of the bios, which we can roughly categorise as the fore-runner to our modern literary genre of "biography". In the Graeco-Roman world, this genre was largely hortatory: that is, the lives of great figures were invoked as examples of the "good life" and the "facts", such that they were, were generally of secondary importance to the ethics. Still others have attempted to link the gospels to other ancient genres, for instance that of tragedy, myth or - most interestingly - that of the Homeric poems. Perhaps more commonly, though, scholars are prone to see the gospels as works of "theologised history" or "historicised theology" (depending on their skeptical inclinations) emerging from the same religious tradition as the "historical" books of the Old Testament.1
I'm not going to tackle such disputes here, but I am rather more interested in the categorisation of the gospels as "evangelical" works: that is to say, works constructed with the expressed purpose of spreading the "good news" about Jesus so as (presumably) to win over new converts into the faith. Sometimes this case is made implicitly, other times explicitly (e.g. the continuing designation of the authors of the gospels as the "evangelisers"), but such an assumption - and a largely unfounded one at that - can unfortunately serve to prejudice our readings of the texts by seducing us into believing certain things about the intentions of the authors that may have no basis in reality. For the non-Christian especially, the a priori assumption that the gospel authors are trying to deceive us into accepting a particular theological claim may lead us towards a degree of antipathy and skepticism towards the texts that frankly aren't warranted.
That is not to say that the gospel authors didn't have an agenda (or, rather, four largely separate agendas) that we must treat carefully when we read the texts. All authors, of course, present a necessarily subjective view of the world which shapes what they write, consciously or otherwise. In the gospel texts, we must recognise that they are primarily works of theology (pace our earlier discussion concerning the uncertainty of assigning the gospels to particular genres) that we cannot approach with the naive assumption that the authors are attempting to provide us with a dispassionate, factual history of events in first-century Palestine. Nonetheless, the kind of untethered skepticism levelled at the gospel texts by many non-believers (especially the "Jesus-Mythicists") is rather an overcorrection and stems in part I think from the implicit assumption that the gospel authors, in their "evangelism", must have been necessarily duplicitous in what they had written so as to better appeal to potential followers.2
It is this assumption of evangelism laying behind the gospels that I wish to address here. Specifically, I reject the idea of the gospels being composed for primarily evangelical purposes for the following reasons:
To elaborate on the final point, the Gospel of Mark (which serves as the archetype for the three latter gospels) contains a motif of secrecy that is difficult for even modern scholars of Christianity to make sense of. How would someone ignorant of (proto-)Christian theology in the ancient near-East have approached such claims? Why - if his goal was broad evangelism - did Mark leave so much of his theology implicit, including the resurrection of Christ? Who could have been won over by such an opaque text?
The other gospels present similar problems. For instance, given the prominence of Jewish themes and the reliance on the OT in the construction of its narrative, it is widely suspected that the Gospel of Matthew was created with the intent to evalgelise to a more Jewish audience. If that is so, the antipathy towards the Jews in this gospel is difficult to understand (e.g. the infamous "blood libel" verse at Mt. 27:25). The Gospel of Luke, often seen to have been written as a gospel for the "gentiles", is similarly difficult to comprehend as a primarily evangelical work. As N.T. Wright notes, "if one started off simply wanting to address an apologia for early Christianity to Roman authorities, one would not necessarily produce a work like Luke-Acts. There is far too much material which seems extraneous; comparison with the work of Aristides, Justin and the other second-century apologists reveals enormous differences". He adds in the footnotes the observation that "no Roman official would have waded through so much (to him) irrelevant material to reach so small an apologia"3. Additionally, Luke seems in his introduction to the gospel to be addressing his work to a specific individual, or - at best - individuals already initiated into the faith.4
The Gospel of John seems like a better place to start if one wishes to make the case that the gospels were composed with an evangelical intent in mind given its pronouncement that "these [signs] are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name" (Jn. 20:31), but even here there are problems. Firstly there are (as with gMark) secretive elements of the gospel that would appear to be counter-productive in a broader evangelical context. The rather abstruse imagery concerning various dualisms (light / dark etc.) must make for difficult work for the uninitiated, and its persistent use of the otherwise unnamed "beloved disciple" likewise betrays a certain assumption of pre-existing familiarity with the Johannine community. We can also infer from the gospel and the related epistles (i.e. 1-3 John) that this community was rather isolated from the Jewish community at large (based on passages in the gospel concerning expulsion from synagogues), had difficult relationships with other Christian communities (3 John 10) and imposed fairly strict conditions of membership within the community (1 John 2:19; 2 John 10). Put together, such evidence indicates a fairly bleak prospect of this community ever successfully producing a deliberately evangelical work.
So while I cannot for certain say what may have motivated the "evangelisers" to pen the gospels (though - for what it is worth - I lean towards the "historicised-theology" supposition touched on earlier) I certainly don't think that evangelism (at least in the sense of evangelising to a wide, uncommitted audience) can be posited as their primary motivation. If a solution to this problem is to be found, we must look for it elsewhere.
(1) See especially N.T. Wright below.
(2) Quite what their purpose might have been in collectively and nakedly lying to fulfil these ends is not clear. I suppose it might be assumed that with these lies about the resurrected Son of God they were reaching for power and influence over a progressively larger proportion of the population (a prime motivating force in modern proselytism, it must be said) but it certainly didn't help the early Christians, who were (with varying degrees of ferocity) marginalised and persecuted for their beliefs. That is, if one wants to suggest some fraudulent or conspiratorial explanation for the content of early Christian beliefs, one must also explain why it failed so miserably in a political context, at least until the 4th century. Or, to put it another way, why would they have been motivated to lie when it is plain that such mendacity didn't advance their position at all? It's easy enough to trace the trajectory of early Christian beliefs in terms of natural theological developments without needing to invoke malevolent intentions on behalf of its earliest practitioners.
(3) The New Testament and the People of God (Volume 1: Christian Origins and the Question of God), p 376.
(4) It's true that the "Theophilus" in Lk. 1:3 may be a general honorific (="god lover"), but even in this case it is clear that he is writing to individuals who "have been instructed" into the faith already (Lk. 1:4) and therefore scarcely in need of further convincing.
With regards to the gospels, the attempt to fit them into pre-existing genres has been met with failure, or - at best - controversy. Some scholars see the gospels as conforming to the structures of the ancient Greek genre of the bios, which we can roughly categorise as the fore-runner to our modern literary genre of "biography". In the Graeco-Roman world, this genre was largely hortatory: that is, the lives of great figures were invoked as examples of the "good life" and the "facts", such that they were, were generally of secondary importance to the ethics. Still others have attempted to link the gospels to other ancient genres, for instance that of tragedy, myth or - most interestingly - that of the Homeric poems. Perhaps more commonly, though, scholars are prone to see the gospels as works of "theologised history" or "historicised theology" (depending on their skeptical inclinations) emerging from the same religious tradition as the "historical" books of the Old Testament.1
I'm not going to tackle such disputes here, but I am rather more interested in the categorisation of the gospels as "evangelical" works: that is to say, works constructed with the expressed purpose of spreading the "good news" about Jesus so as (presumably) to win over new converts into the faith. Sometimes this case is made implicitly, other times explicitly (e.g. the continuing designation of the authors of the gospels as the "evangelisers"), but such an assumption - and a largely unfounded one at that - can unfortunately serve to prejudice our readings of the texts by seducing us into believing certain things about the intentions of the authors that may have no basis in reality. For the non-Christian especially, the a priori assumption that the gospel authors are trying to deceive us into accepting a particular theological claim may lead us towards a degree of antipathy and skepticism towards the texts that frankly aren't warranted.
That is not to say that the gospel authors didn't have an agenda (or, rather, four largely separate agendas) that we must treat carefully when we read the texts. All authors, of course, present a necessarily subjective view of the world which shapes what they write, consciously or otherwise. In the gospel texts, we must recognise that they are primarily works of theology (pace our earlier discussion concerning the uncertainty of assigning the gospels to particular genres) that we cannot approach with the naive assumption that the authors are attempting to provide us with a dispassionate, factual history of events in first-century Palestine. Nonetheless, the kind of untethered skepticism levelled at the gospel texts by many non-believers (especially the "Jesus-Mythicists") is rather an overcorrection and stems in part I think from the implicit assumption that the gospel authors, in their "evangelism", must have been necessarily duplicitous in what they had written so as to better appeal to potential followers.2
It is this assumption of evangelism laying behind the gospels that I wish to address here. Specifically, I reject the idea of the gospels being composed for primarily evangelical purposes for the following reasons:
- 1) The evidence seems pretty clear (based on almost total lack of surviving manuscripts) that the gospels were not in wide-circulation until at least the 3rd century. That is, even if the gospels were written as evangelising tools (introducing the good news about Jesus to as wide a population as possible) they were certainly not utilised that way.
- 2) As a corollary to the first point, the gospels went almost completely uncited by early Christian authors until the late 2nd century. Even then, they appear to have been used primarily in a sectarian context as evidence for the (proto-)Orthodox position against more "heretical" forms of Christianity rather than as a proselytising tool for convincing those completely outside the faith.
- 3) Low literacy rates in the ancient world (perhaps as low as 2%) rendered the book as a tool for the wide dissemination of beliefs rather ineffective. If one wanted to understand the content of the gospels one would either need to be either wealthy and well-placed in society (and it does seem to be true that early Christianity was relatively successful within this demographic) or else be part of a community where it would be possible to hear the texts read aloud (i.e. already a member of a church).
- 4) The content of the gospels don't seem to have been constructed with a proselytising goal in mind. That is, much of their content must strike one as unusual or counter-productive if their primary intention was to convince outsiders of the veracity of Christian claims.
To elaborate on the final point, the Gospel of Mark (which serves as the archetype for the three latter gospels) contains a motif of secrecy that is difficult for even modern scholars of Christianity to make sense of. How would someone ignorant of (proto-)Christian theology in the ancient near-East have approached such claims? Why - if his goal was broad evangelism - did Mark leave so much of his theology implicit, including the resurrection of Christ? Who could have been won over by such an opaque text?
The other gospels present similar problems. For instance, given the prominence of Jewish themes and the reliance on the OT in the construction of its narrative, it is widely suspected that the Gospel of Matthew was created with the intent to evalgelise to a more Jewish audience. If that is so, the antipathy towards the Jews in this gospel is difficult to understand (e.g. the infamous "blood libel" verse at Mt. 27:25). The Gospel of Luke, often seen to have been written as a gospel for the "gentiles", is similarly difficult to comprehend as a primarily evangelical work. As N.T. Wright notes, "if one started off simply wanting to address an apologia for early Christianity to Roman authorities, one would not necessarily produce a work like Luke-Acts. There is far too much material which seems extraneous; comparison with the work of Aristides, Justin and the other second-century apologists reveals enormous differences". He adds in the footnotes the observation that "no Roman official would have waded through so much (to him) irrelevant material to reach so small an apologia"3. Additionally, Luke seems in his introduction to the gospel to be addressing his work to a specific individual, or - at best - individuals already initiated into the faith.4
The Gospel of John seems like a better place to start if one wishes to make the case that the gospels were composed with an evangelical intent in mind given its pronouncement that "these [signs] are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name" (Jn. 20:31), but even here there are problems. Firstly there are (as with gMark) secretive elements of the gospel that would appear to be counter-productive in a broader evangelical context. The rather abstruse imagery concerning various dualisms (light / dark etc.) must make for difficult work for the uninitiated, and its persistent use of the otherwise unnamed "beloved disciple" likewise betrays a certain assumption of pre-existing familiarity with the Johannine community. We can also infer from the gospel and the related epistles (i.e. 1-3 John) that this community was rather isolated from the Jewish community at large (based on passages in the gospel concerning expulsion from synagogues), had difficult relationships with other Christian communities (3 John 10) and imposed fairly strict conditions of membership within the community (1 John 2:19; 2 John 10). Put together, such evidence indicates a fairly bleak prospect of this community ever successfully producing a deliberately evangelical work.
So while I cannot for certain say what may have motivated the "evangelisers" to pen the gospels (though - for what it is worth - I lean towards the "historicised-theology" supposition touched on earlier) I certainly don't think that evangelism (at least in the sense of evangelising to a wide, uncommitted audience) can be posited as their primary motivation. If a solution to this problem is to be found, we must look for it elsewhere.
(1) See especially N.T. Wright below.
(2) Quite what their purpose might have been in collectively and nakedly lying to fulfil these ends is not clear. I suppose it might be assumed that with these lies about the resurrected Son of God they were reaching for power and influence over a progressively larger proportion of the population (a prime motivating force in modern proselytism, it must be said) but it certainly didn't help the early Christians, who were (with varying degrees of ferocity) marginalised and persecuted for their beliefs. That is, if one wants to suggest some fraudulent or conspiratorial explanation for the content of early Christian beliefs, one must also explain why it failed so miserably in a political context, at least until the 4th century. Or, to put it another way, why would they have been motivated to lie when it is plain that such mendacity didn't advance their position at all? It's easy enough to trace the trajectory of early Christian beliefs in terms of natural theological developments without needing to invoke malevolent intentions on behalf of its earliest practitioners.
(3) The New Testament and the People of God (Volume 1: Christian Origins and the Question of God), p 376.
(4) It's true that the "Theophilus" in Lk. 1:3 may be a general honorific (="god lover"), but even in this case it is clear that he is writing to individuals who "have been instructed" into the faith already (Lk. 1:4) and therefore scarcely in need of further convincing.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
The Psychopathology of Fundamentalism
One of the most difficult problems facing the critic of religious belief is to provide a convincing explanation for the emergence of religious fundamentalism. The are two predominant issues that render it difficult to provide such an explanation:
Some commentators even take issue with identifying what might be termed a "fundamentalist mindset" in the first place. The Muslim commentator and author Walid Aly, for instance, decries any attempt to describe radicalised Muslims (or the radicalised of any non-Christian faith, for that matter) as "fundamentalists" because he views this term as pertaining exclusively to the Protestant faith, specifically the periodic movements within it to return to a faith based entirely on such "fundamentals" as scriptural innerrancy and faith in Christ (perhaps best expressed in the form of Martin Luther's "Five Solas"). Others, such as Scott Atran, reject the claim that there is any substantive difference between the mind of the "fundamentalist" and any other human mind to begin with. He suggests:
While any treatment of fundamentalism has to take such observations seriously, I don't think either constitutes sufficient reason to abandon the search for features that are universal to what we might call a fundamentalist mindset. In the first place, while the term "fundamentalism" may well be tracable to specific movements within the Christian tradition, I think it can still be retained as a general term for extreme and inflexible forms of zealotry. For the "fundamentalist" (whether religious or secular - e.g. Marxists, Tea-Party zealots etc.) all experience is framed through the "fundamentals" of their doctrine of choice: such fundamentals form the foundation of their understanding of the world in a completely intractible sense. It is this exhaustive framing of the world through a narrow set of beliefs that distinguishes the "fundamentalist" from the rest of us.
In the second place, while it is almost certainly true that fundamentalists do not universally suffer from any sort of inherent cognitive impairment, that is not to say that there must not be any identifiable differences in the operation of the mind of the fundamentalist and that of the average person. I have no doubt that the fundamentalist is capable of scoring highly on tests which measure the capacity for cognitive complexity, but the more interesting (and important) question is whether they [i]employ[/i] such capacities as readily as the average person in their day-to-day lives. The most insidious forms of ignorance are often entirely willful.
And so my theory. In my opinion, the two most characteristic traits of the fundamentalist mind are:
In some ways, the two are dependent on each other. The importance of novelty and perspicacity in humour (with respect to convention, timing etc.) mean that imagination is probably necessary for a well-developed sense of humour, and the playfulness and irreverent abandon of imaginative thought probably requires a levity that can only emerge in those of good humour.
Humour is important to the healthy human mind as it appears to be central to the way we relate to other human beings. As Henri Bergson put it:
This relation of humour to one's disposition to other human beings can expose a lot about one's personality. We invariably find something discomforting or even obnoxious about one who cannot laugh at himself or absurd situations. Even more so when one finds oneself easily offended by the expression of humour. Such a disposition betrays, I think, a severe ill-ease with oneself and with the world more generally (see next post). If we can identify in the mind of the fundamentalist a severe mistrust or misapprehension of humour (and this does seem to be true, equally, of fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, Marxists, Far-Rightists etc.) then we can probably assume that there is some severe obstacle in their thought processes which prevents them from acknowledging the absurdity of the human condition in the relaxed, good-humoured manner it deserves. What is really happening here?
Put simply, an essential tennet of fundamentalist thought lies in a fundamental mistrust of humanity and its capacity to execute its agency freely. All fundamentalists view humanity as necessarily sick and depraved, naturally drawn to immoral excess in the absense of some controlling dogma. For the Christian, this immorality - or "sinfulness" - is an a priori condition of human existence: we are sinners before we even act. Such a disposition towards one's fellow man makes one necessarily "anti-human", at least to the extent that these other humans fail to share one's world-view. This manifests itself in the absurd, paranoid construction of "out-groups" whose powers (and unity) are invariably grossly exaggerated. This out-group can take the form of such nebulous entities as "secular society" (Christians), "the West" (Muslims), "the Bourgeoius" (Marxists) or "the Left" (Tea Party). Such groups are posited as unrelentingly undermining the strength of the "in-group" (in fact, that seems to be their only function) and whose influence, on occasion, appears almost omnipresent. The imagined construction of a powerful homosexual lobby in fundamentalist American thought is the probably the most wantonly absurd example of this manner of thinking.
Of course, when the entire world is sick, depraved and populated almost entirely with enemies who pose nothing less than a total existential threat to the well-being of the believer, the relaxed, self-depricating and fundamentally egalitarian disposition towards humanity necessary for the expression of, or appreciation for, humour is completely absent. It's difficult to laugh at something you have been taught to so viscerally hate.
The total absense of imagination is also not difficult to identify. When I use the word "imagination", I'm not talking about the capacity to invent or accept fictions: the fundamentalist mind is almost infinitely pliable in this regard. Rather I use the word in a more Romantic sense, to denote ones capacity to consider the world from another perspective, or to imagine that it may be different (and crippling and inexorable fatalism also appears to be common to most fundamentalist beliefs). Concepts like hell or some future utopia (in which one's in-group has finally and definitively prevailed) are not the product of an imaginative mind, but rather a desperately constrained mind, incapable of considering, for any length of time, the complexities of human existence. Do good people deserve to go to hell? Can we be happy in heaven if we have loved ones there? How would a society remade to our precise specifications look? How can we possibly imagine that all would be happy and content there? To such questions - which require us to acknowledge the presense of human minds beyond our own, the fundamentalist has no answer. Such questions are best left unasked.
This complete mistrust of the perspectives of others is most clearly manifest in the fundamentalist's treatment of art. No fundamentalism anywhere has ever tolerated art which deviates from - let alone undermines - its narrowly defined dogmas. The Taliban banned dancing, Stalin sent poets to the gulags and American Evangelicals rail endlessly against the depravity of Hollywood and secular music: what's the difference? Such censorship is nothing more than an extension of one's mistrust of the individuality of others into the political arena. If people are fundamentally sick, then an expression of their subjectivity cannot be tolerated. Such creative exuberance is an anthema to the fearful, humourless "piety" of the fundamentalist believer.
The solution? Never trust someone who lacks a sense of humour or a sense of imagination. Chances are they don't trust you either.
1) They evade explanations proferred by evolutionary psychology, as most fundamentalist religions do not appear to promote what we might term "evolutionary successful strategies". They frequently promote behaviour such as chastity, self-abasement, social isolation, time-consuming rituals and (in the most extreme cases) suicidal matyrdom that reduce significantly one's chances of reproduction and therefore any potential for the spread of congential dispositions towards religious fundamentalism.
and
2) Fundamentalist belief is often so grossly at odds with reality that it is difficult to see how a healthy human mind could assent to some of their more central tenets.
Some commentators even take issue with identifying what might be termed a "fundamentalist mindset" in the first place. The Muslim commentator and author Walid Aly, for instance, decries any attempt to describe radicalised Muslims (or the radicalised of any non-Christian faith, for that matter) as "fundamentalists" because he views this term as pertaining exclusively to the Protestant faith, specifically the periodic movements within it to return to a faith based entirely on such "fundamentals" as scriptural innerrancy and faith in Christ (perhaps best expressed in the form of Martin Luther's "Five Solas"). Others, such as Scott Atran, reject the claim that there is any substantive difference between the mind of the "fundamentalist" and any other human mind to begin with. He suggests:
"I certainly find very little hatred; they act out of love," he says. "These people are very compassionate." Atran, who studies group dynamics at the University of Michigan, is talking about suicide bombers, extremists by anyone's standards and not representative of fundamentalist ideology in general (New Scientist, 23 July, page 18). But surprisingly, much of what Atran has discovered about suicide bombers helps to explain the psychology of all fundamentalist movements.
[...]
[D]espite the fact that fundamentalist thinking is often portrayed as simplistic, this... is not borne out by research. Measures of cognitive complexity, which describes how an individual combines, classifies and processes information, show that fundamentalists are no different from the wider population. In general they operate solid, logical and sophisticated chains of thinking, albeit thinking that is based on non-negotiable articles of faith.
While any treatment of fundamentalism has to take such observations seriously, I don't think either constitutes sufficient reason to abandon the search for features that are universal to what we might call a fundamentalist mindset. In the first place, while the term "fundamentalism" may well be tracable to specific movements within the Christian tradition, I think it can still be retained as a general term for extreme and inflexible forms of zealotry. For the "fundamentalist" (whether religious or secular - e.g. Marxists, Tea-Party zealots etc.) all experience is framed through the "fundamentals" of their doctrine of choice: such fundamentals form the foundation of their understanding of the world in a completely intractible sense. It is this exhaustive framing of the world through a narrow set of beliefs that distinguishes the "fundamentalist" from the rest of us.
In the second place, while it is almost certainly true that fundamentalists do not universally suffer from any sort of inherent cognitive impairment, that is not to say that there must not be any identifiable differences in the operation of the mind of the fundamentalist and that of the average person. I have no doubt that the fundamentalist is capable of scoring highly on tests which measure the capacity for cognitive complexity, but the more interesting (and important) question is whether they [i]employ[/i] such capacities as readily as the average person in their day-to-day lives. The most insidious forms of ignorance are often entirely willful.
And so my theory. In my opinion, the two most characteristic traits of the fundamentalist mind are:
1) A complete lack of a sense of humour.
and
2) A complete absense of imagination.
In some ways, the two are dependent on each other. The importance of novelty and perspicacity in humour (with respect to convention, timing etc.) mean that imagination is probably necessary for a well-developed sense of humour, and the playfulness and irreverent abandon of imaginative thought probably requires a levity that can only emerge in those of good humour.
Humour is important to the healthy human mind as it appears to be central to the way we relate to other human beings. As Henri Bergson put it:
The first point to which attention should be called is that the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly HUMAN. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression. You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it,--the human caprice whose mould it has assumed. It is strange that so important a fact, and such a simple one too, has not attracted to a greater degree the attention of philosophers. Several have defined man as "an animal which laughs." They might equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at; for if any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to. - Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic, pp. 6-7
This relation of humour to one's disposition to other human beings can expose a lot about one's personality. We invariably find something discomforting or even obnoxious about one who cannot laugh at himself or absurd situations. Even more so when one finds oneself easily offended by the expression of humour. Such a disposition betrays, I think, a severe ill-ease with oneself and with the world more generally (see next post). If we can identify in the mind of the fundamentalist a severe mistrust or misapprehension of humour (and this does seem to be true, equally, of fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, Marxists, Far-Rightists etc.) then we can probably assume that there is some severe obstacle in their thought processes which prevents them from acknowledging the absurdity of the human condition in the relaxed, good-humoured manner it deserves. What is really happening here?
Put simply, an essential tennet of fundamentalist thought lies in a fundamental mistrust of humanity and its capacity to execute its agency freely. All fundamentalists view humanity as necessarily sick and depraved, naturally drawn to immoral excess in the absense of some controlling dogma. For the Christian, this immorality - or "sinfulness" - is an a priori condition of human existence: we are sinners before we even act. Such a disposition towards one's fellow man makes one necessarily "anti-human", at least to the extent that these other humans fail to share one's world-view. This manifests itself in the absurd, paranoid construction of "out-groups" whose powers (and unity) are invariably grossly exaggerated. This out-group can take the form of such nebulous entities as "secular society" (Christians), "the West" (Muslims), "the Bourgeoius" (Marxists) or "the Left" (Tea Party). Such groups are posited as unrelentingly undermining the strength of the "in-group" (in fact, that seems to be their only function) and whose influence, on occasion, appears almost omnipresent. The imagined construction of a powerful homosexual lobby in fundamentalist American thought is the probably the most wantonly absurd example of this manner of thinking.
Of course, when the entire world is sick, depraved and populated almost entirely with enemies who pose nothing less than a total existential threat to the well-being of the believer, the relaxed, self-depricating and fundamentally egalitarian disposition towards humanity necessary for the expression of, or appreciation for, humour is completely absent. It's difficult to laugh at something you have been taught to so viscerally hate.
The total absense of imagination is also not difficult to identify. When I use the word "imagination", I'm not talking about the capacity to invent or accept fictions: the fundamentalist mind is almost infinitely pliable in this regard. Rather I use the word in a more Romantic sense, to denote ones capacity to consider the world from another perspective, or to imagine that it may be different (and crippling and inexorable fatalism also appears to be common to most fundamentalist beliefs). Concepts like hell or some future utopia (in which one's in-group has finally and definitively prevailed) are not the product of an imaginative mind, but rather a desperately constrained mind, incapable of considering, for any length of time, the complexities of human existence. Do good people deserve to go to hell? Can we be happy in heaven if we have loved ones there? How would a society remade to our precise specifications look? How can we possibly imagine that all would be happy and content there? To such questions - which require us to acknowledge the presense of human minds beyond our own, the fundamentalist has no answer. Such questions are best left unasked.
This complete mistrust of the perspectives of others is most clearly manifest in the fundamentalist's treatment of art. No fundamentalism anywhere has ever tolerated art which deviates from - let alone undermines - its narrowly defined dogmas. The Taliban banned dancing, Stalin sent poets to the gulags and American Evangelicals rail endlessly against the depravity of Hollywood and secular music: what's the difference? Such censorship is nothing more than an extension of one's mistrust of the individuality of others into the political arena. If people are fundamentally sick, then an expression of their subjectivity cannot be tolerated. Such creative exuberance is an anthema to the fearful, humourless "piety" of the fundamentalist believer.
The solution? Never trust someone who lacks a sense of humour or a sense of imagination. Chances are they don't trust you either.
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