Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Giving Up On Self-Defense

Say you are a pacifist and the first thing someone will do is throw a hypothetical self-defense or defense of innocents situation at you. "What if a robber broke into your house and threatened to kill your wife and children..."

What this reveals is that for the most part violence is already understood to be illegitimate by most people in most circumstances. Very few are willing to argue in favor of unilateral aggression, or retributive violence. The difference between a pacifist and most people is that a pacifist says, " even in the case of violent threats I choose to refrain from responding violently." So we are not arguing about 99% of violent scenarios. We are arguing about 1%.

I could go into detail about various hypothetical scenarios, or historical scenarios arguing from a pacifist viewpoint. I could point out (as I have in the past) why these scenarios are dishonest, but here I want to make a different point about why it is crucial to give up on self-defense even in that vanishingly rare hypothetical situation. The reason is this: self-defense inevitably becomes a cover for other types of violence.

Think about the wars the US has waged in the past century. Which one of them was not justified on the basis of self-defense? Even in the most extreme cases of obvious unilateral aggression such as the most recent Iraq War the justification was "weapons of mass-destruction", "Iraq-AlQaeda link", "defending Iraqi people from an evil dictator" etc... The doctrine of pre-emptive warfare is just self-defense stretched beyond the breaking point. WWI? Self-defense. WWII? Self-defense. Korean War? Self-defense? Vietnam? Self-defense. We've been defending ourselves from Nazis, communists, and terrorists over and over again by spending billions of dollars to fly overseas and bomb other countries.

In the case of an individual - when am I entitled to defend myself with violence? When someone physically attacks me? When they threaten me with a gun? When they loom over me menacingly? When they verbally abuse me? Is me feeling scared a sufficient justification for violent response? How can I even make a wise decision about proportional response to danger when I am in a state of terror? It seems like begging for a tragedy to me.

As long as we keep self-defense on the table it will continue to be a universal justification for any kind of violence that we can pretend falls under that umbrella. We adamantly refuse to see ourselves as anything other than paragons of nobility and peaceful intentions beset by violent bullies on all sides. If you want peace the only option is to give up the ways of war.

Speaking theologically I think this is a reason we need to cling to some language about Christ that is repugnant to some feminists and liberation theologians. To understand Christ as submitting himself to evil, or as a willing sacrifice may indeed be problematic from the perspective of victims of violence and the oppressed. It certainly has been abused by those in power to encourage passive acceptance of injustice. I understand this critique - but is there anything more urgent for those who walk the corridors of power or for any budding peacemaker to grasp than the truth that we absolutely cannot, under any circumstances, return evil for evil? Is it not close to the heart of the gospel to say that we must endure calamitous injustice rather than lift a finger in retribution? Isn't that what Christ actually does on Good Friday and Easter?

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

God Out of Bounds: Brain/Mind Science

This post struck even me as a tad long, so I am starting off with a cheat-sheet with some main points from the post:

* The human brain is wired to connect and cannot help but do so; this seems to be the imago of a trinitarian dei
* We are born with structures and templates already in our brains which guide our development. Some of these structures appear to be moral, and when we talk about utter depravity we must also account for an apparent inborn capacity for altruism
* Our brain has developed as three general 'layers', reptilian, mammalian and human, and theologically we should account for each when we speak of sanctification
* Consciousness is mysterious - how much more so is God's consciousness?
* Though "mental health" is troublesome to define, there does seem to be a collective human intuition about what whole personhood is, including living peacefully with others, forming loving relationships, and being able to exhibit trust - we as Christians might see this as an intuition of Christlike personhood


I want to get back to my Out of Bounds series, because I realized I'd neglected it for a while there, and being only about 2/3 employed, I have a lot of free time compared to most of my adult life.

For this round, I wanted to talk about God and brain/mind science. Brain/mind science is clunky, but terms like neuroscience are a little too limiting, and there isn't a good term in common use (that I'm aware of) that covers the functioning of all levels of the brain (lizard, mammal, human) and nervous system as well as the mind, which I take at the moment to be an emergent property of the brain and nervous system but not synonymous with it.

I'm also not a brain nor mind scientist by any stretch of the imagination. You're getting the collected thoughts of an enthusiastic dabbler here, in case you were wondering. I'll try to cite some of the things I'm drawing upon, and otherwise if this is of interest, feel free to comment or email me or doing research yourself to form your own conclusions.

Limbic Resonance and Mirroring
Most of your communication has nothing to do with the words you use. I think this is part of why the Internet is so chock-full of flame-wars and trolls and fighting and argument, why I have found it to be such a faulty medium for communication - it is missing the most important components.

Sitting across a table from someone and talking to them, your brains are passing cues back and forth to each other in thousands of snippets, far more cues than you could cram in words. These little cues come from the limbic systems in your brains, the parts of the brain that mammals have which reptiles, for example, lack.

Rapport is when these cues line up. It is possible to watch people flirting, for example, and see how their shoulders and pelvic areas align, how they blink at the same rate, how they put their weight on the same side of their body, how they lean at the same time, how their voices change pitch and so on. If these things happen, you know the people like each other. If they don't, buying drinks isn't likely to help you.

You can record someone's face and see hundreds of micro-expressions, changes in facial muscle tension, eyelid adjustment and pupil dilation over the course of a short conversation. The more emotion is at stake, the more these signs become obvious. This limbic information accounts for anywhere between half and 95% of our communication depending on different articles and books I've read.

In short, we are wired to connect. It is impossible to avoid. We are in relationship insofar as we are mammalian - that is to say, constantly and entirely. I can see an easy connection to the Trinity here, that God is in relationship as well at the core of God's being, that God is not sole and alone and impervious like a Greek statue.

Templates
We are not born as blank slates. There is already a lot of ground-work done in brain-building and mind-building. I remember holding my neice Grace-Ann literally an hour or two after she was born, and I remember (apart from being petrified I'd drop her or something) thinking "Holy crap, this is a person." She had that glazed, perpetually-startled baby look of course, and had good reason to look that way, but behind it I could already see an intelligence trying to make sense of things.

If we were not born with templates in our brains, it would take too long to make sense of everything. Every brain would have to start from scratch, and we'd never mature - it would be as if everyone had to build their own personal computer from raw materials without any help from others.

We have instincts which are functional from the moment of birth and likely in the womb in our late development as well. Grasping, sucking, crying, making little encouraging noises, following lights and movement with our eyes - those are all present from the start. Branching out with more nuanced noises, laughing, exploring and so on are built on those early templates. Trial-and-error is a method for learning and protecting ourselves we don't have to learn by...trial-and-error. There is even a kind of morality present (see below) upon which more can be built.

Baby birds, fresh from the egg, will exhibit fear when shown an outline of a predator bird, but will not show that fear when shown a very similar outline of a non-predator bird. We are only really beginning to understand what is already hard-wired into our brains at birth and shortly after, but we're a lot more complex than baby birds.

Stacking
I've alluded to the general structure of the brain, and I want to say a little more without getting too complicated or going farther than I understand. I've seen and heard the human brain described more than once as a lizard with a mammal brain stacked on top of that and a human brain stacked on top of that. We still have the lizard and the mammal, but we also have something that, say, a rabbit doesn't have as much of - that's the human part.

The lizard brain is what lets us predict the flight of a baseball, dodge a falling book-case, fight competitors and run away from predators. All the stuff a lizard can do. It rewards us for eating fatty and sugary foods and tells us we're hungry or have to go to the bathroom. It is the base of our brain, and also seems to house a lot of our base desires.

The mammal brain is the limbic part I talked about earlier and some other parts attached to it. It is the part of our brain that connects us to other brains and, therefore, to other living minds. It is what makes a group of prairie dogs or a pack of wolves behave differently from a school of fish or a swarm of newborn sea turtles. The prairie dogs and wolves have complex communication. They work together. They form relationships with each other of dominance, submission and mutual benefit.

The human brain is what houses our imagination, as well as our ability to conceptualize and plan ahead. It lets us use symbols and complex tools and various kinds of language. It is what separates you from your dog (besides blunt teeth, brittle claws and dull senses).

One thing I like about religion is that it engages all of these levels of the brain. We eat together, dance and play games, and spend time with people who don't provoke our fight-or-flight response. We make relationships and maintain them with personal contact and one-on-one communication, and we acknowledge our connections even to people we don't know personally. We also talk about ideas and use imaginative imagery and manipulate symbols and language to communicate with each other and with God.

I believe that a robust theology of sanctification needs to work with each level of the brain and see how it is redeemed.

Consciousness
No one understands consciousness. That's a bold claim but I'll stand by it for now. As I said, I believe that the mind, or consciousness, is an emergent property of the brain and nervous system. This is just because no one without a functioning brain has been recorded to demonstrate qualities we associate with consciousness - that is, knowledge of the self as an individual, object permanence, complex decision-making and communication.

From my own study, I've come to understand consciousness a something that I trust exists but cannot prove. I cannot prove that anything I do isn't predetermined. I cannot prove that my feeling like I make choices means I am making choices. However, trusting that I am conscious makes my life worthwhile and a lot more meaningful, and doesn't seem to detract from my life at all.

If our consciousness is mysterious, how much more so is God's? Can we even say God is conscious? Is consciousness too limited a term for God? What can we possibly mean when we say that God "intends" something, or "plans" something, or "says" something? I take these to be metaphorical statements, since I don't have any idea what it means for an infinite and incomprehensible being to intend or plan or speak. We can trust that these things are meaningful, but we cannot get anywhere near proving that they are, anymore than I can prove that...I am.

Self-Consciousness
This is yet another layer of consciousness, the thing that theoretically human beings have but other very intelligent animals, like dolphins or chimpanzees, do not have.

Self-consciousness is the "I Am" of the mind. It is continuity and identity and various kinds of memory. Like consciousness, I'm not sure we can prove it. I'm not convinced that there is a difference in quality between me and a dolphin, or me and a chimp - more in quantity at best, as in I have more ways to communicate than a chimp, or more tools than a dolphin.

Then again, every time "language" is defined, some ape somewhere demonstrates that it can do whatever language is. So language seems to be becoming 'the thing that other animals can't do', and that's a stupid definition if I ever heard one.

This consciousness and self-consciousness question is a big reason behind vegetarianism and veganism. If no one can point to this magical line between human and animal, how can I justify eating an animal? I have long seen a connection between this view and the Noahic limitations on eating meat. Even in ancient times, there was a sense that animate life was special - after all, it was the animals that God brought to be the first human's companions.

Infant Morality
I heard about this on NPR and was really surprised, and not only because I find babies to be frightening little critters with nefarious plans. Apparently, studies of baby behavior at the Yale Infant Lab have found that altruism can come to the fore very early, and that moral reasoning of some kind, altruistic or not, seems to be present even in six-month-olds.

This is yet another mark against the "blank slate" idea, and I think adds some nuance to the "utter depravity" argument. There is a big difference between being inclined toward evil and being evil, having distorted capacities for good and having no capacity for good. I think Reformed language can get out of control in this arena, and I'm glad the babies are representing.

Mental Health
Our concept of mental health is flawed, but it is also influenced by what I perceive to be a collective conscience. There are traits that we associate with a healthy, functional adult human being, for example, and when these traits are lacking or are perverted in some way, we suspect that something has gone wrong.

For example, if someone commits serial violence, or if they are unable to form close relationships, or if they experience the world to be frightening and adversarial, we seem to have a sense that something is wrong. Conservatives might say that the person in question needs to grab hold of their bootstraps and liberals might say they need to be coddled by government-paid therapists, but we all have a sense that this person's personhood has gone awry.

What this indicates to me is that we have a sense of a potential wholeness, the perfection of which is perhaps out of our grasp, but part of that wholeness is being able to live peacefully, forming close supportive relationships, and being able to exhibit trust that the world isn't out to get you. These are just examples. Mental health is incredibly sticky and difficulty to talk about because it is so subjective, but our collective subjectivity points toward a kind of full personhood that, for the Christian, is found in Christ, and is approached by sanctification.

Sam Harris
Religion does something, even when the world is explainable in other ways, politics can try to divorce itself from overt religion, relationships and communities do not depend on it, and it is not compulsory. It serves a function that seems to be deeply rooted in what it means to be human, what it has always meant to be human.

I don't agree with some things Sam Harris says, but he is an accessible writer who is very interested in the intersection between religion and neuroscience.

My own suspicion is that ultimately there will be no "there" to be found there. That is, we won't find the Easter-egg of the God Gene or the God Lobe or the God Particle. I have this suspicion because I believe God exists and I believe that the world is interesting, and if I combine those two beliefs, it rules out any reducible place where God is located. However, on the way, as we are looking, we consistent find out some really interesting stuff.

Works Consulted and Recommended:
The Bible: esp. Genesis 1-3, 8-9; God in the whirlwind at the end of Job; Jonah
Experimental Theology, Dr. Richard Beck's blog
Dr. Oliver Sachs, author and neurologist

I have a few other books that are in storage and I'm blanking on the names. I'll add them as I find them.

These are all pretty accessible sources - I'm not a genius or an expert or anything like that. I just like thinking about the thing I use to think...

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Cliche Driven Pastors

I find this study, depressing. It's a look at what pastors around the country are reading. I suppose the good news is that there isn't much commonality. The bad news is the one thing everyone seems to have in common is Rick Warren's "Purpose Driven" series. More ministers have read it, and more cite it as influential in their ministry than any other book (I'm hoping this study excludes the Bible). Furthermore, the bigger your church is the more likely you are to regard Warren as influential to your thinking.

There are definitely worse books out there than Warren's drivel, but there are also much better. Pastors it seems are largely reading fluff books from the Christian living genre, instead of serious theology. More pastors have read something by Joel Osteen than by folks like Bonhoeffer, Yoder, Hauerwas, Brueggeman, Wright, Barth, Wink, Niebuhr, or Tillich. We are more likely to be influenced by Rob Bell or Mark Driscoll than by David Hart or Karl Rahner.

Despite how it sounds this isn't an elitist whine. It is anti-elitist. I have no problem with the C.S. Lewis popular style of writing. Marcus Borg, Brian McLaren, Sara Miles and Carol Howard have all written books of this type I enjoyed and have encouraged others to read. But if anyone should be mining the riches of James Alison, or Marilyn McCord Adams, or Gustavo Gutierrez, shouldn't it be pastors? How else is this kind of vibrant beautiful theology going to get into our churches? Don't we lose something if the only level of discourse we are having is at the "purpose driven" level?

Friday, October 30, 2009

Hamas Not Using Hostages

A key defense of powerful nations that terrorize with their military is that civilian casualties are unavoidable because the real terrorists fight dirty using hostages. When Israel besieged Gaza last year they alleged that Hamas was using mosques and hospitals and schools as weapon storage lockers and stuffing them full of civilians in order to incite international outrage when Israel bombed those sites. According to the UN this was a lie. When Israel bombed these locations, the civilians were there, yes, but not the armaments.

Ken Silverstein interviews "Desmond Travers was one of the four members of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which produced the controversial Goldstone Report":

We found no evidence that Hamas used civilians as hostages. I had expected to find such evidence but did not. We also found no evidence that mosques were used to store munitions. Those charges reflect Western perceptions in some quarters that Islam is a violent religion. Gaza is densely populated and has a labyrinth of makeshift shanties and a system of tunnels and bunkers. If I were a Hamas operative the last place I’d store munitions would be in a mosque. It’s not secure, is very visible, and would probably be pre-targeted by Israeli surveillance. There are a many better places to store munitions. We investigated two destroyed mosques—one where worshippers were killed—and we found no evidence that either was used as anything but a place of worship.


So Israel's justifications for targeting these locations proves to be baseless. Will people stop screaming "anti-semitism" now every time the subject of war crimes comes up in relation to Israel? Probably not.

Here's the thing about the hostage argument: if a madman is holding hostages in a building the solution to the problem is never going to be to bomb the building. Negotiate. Wait them out. Prepare to pounce when they make a mistake. Do not, under any circumstances, start lobbing grenades into the room with the hostages! Hamas was not holding hostages, but even if they had been it would be unconscionable that Israel launch an assault under those circumstances.

Yes the terrorists fight unfairly. Sure their tactics are designed to inflict maximum international pressure on Israel. So why give them more ammunition by bombing mosques and hospitals? It just proves there are two madmen in this situation and they are holding everyone else hostage between them.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

But What Will Protect Us From Orthodoxy?

Aric just put up an insightful post pointing out the speciousness of the argument that orthodox doctrine will save us from catastrophe. I must ask the question, however - What will save us from orthodoxy?

It is a fallacy to claim that orthodoxy is necessarily, or even on balance, a force for good in the world. For the vast majority of the history of Christianity, orthodoxy has been a stated justification for preventing women from being ordained, warfare, assassination, torture, execution as "heretics" of whoever is inconvenient to the status-quo, slavery, imperialism, genocide, repression, censorship, and any number of awful things you can think of.

Now I'll be the first to support the claim that political and theological motivations are complex. Sex, money and political power are caught up in claims of orthodoxy - of course they are, and we can't lay bad stuff at the feet of orthodoxy alone. What we can do is easily look back in history to find loads ways that orthodoxy has been used as a justification for really horrific things. Far from saving us from catastrophe, orthodoxy has been an engine of catastrophe.

Is it without value? Not at all. But the idea that orthodox = good does not hold water after even a cursory glance at history. So even given a case where we can point out where orthodoxy has staved off disaster, we must also acknowledge places where orthodoxy brought disaster upon us, or was called upon to justify what we would now identify as evil.

Perhaps I should say "what passes for orthodoxy", since too often supposed orthodoxy seems so distant from Christianity as I understand it that I feel like my head is going to explode. It must be said, however, that moving toward orthodoxy does not mean moving toward good, and the orthodox have been villains (as well as, yes, heroes) many times in our past.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Doctrinal Orthodoxy Doesn't Work

People I like and respect, and even people I usually agree with, sometimes repeat this idea that a certain theological doctrine is important or correct or true or good because it will protect us from... (insert atrocity here, bonus points if it involves Nazis). The version of this argument which pops up most frequently in the circles I navigate is the one about Barth, Barmen, and the Confessing Church in Germany.

The story goes like this: liberal protestantism, infected with natural theology, a loose-cannon Holy Spirit, romantic progressivism, the relics of christendom, (or your favorite theological punching bag), sold its soul to the national-socialists and contributed to the Holocaust. Barth in a stroke of unmitigated brilliance saw the doctrinal roots of this problem and courageously spoke against it, helping to write the Declaration of Barmen and thus nipping that problem forever in the bud.

The moral of this story is that if your theology is not Barthian you are a Nazi (or will soon become one).

This is not a new story. It is the same story that has always been used to command doctrinal orthodoxy. If you don't hold the right ideas, you will be responsible for disaster x. The church has spent the past two millenia, for the most part, doing exhaustive historiography to support this idea. Every bad thing that has happened, ever, has been explained somewhere by a champion of all that is pure and noble as stemming from heterodoxy. Orthodox doctrine could protect us from all of this, they allege. The question which never seems to get asked is, "does it work?"

I mean, according to the orthodox, the right doctrine has been available for a long time and it hasn't changed. It's been out there. People have believed it. Lots of people. Did it work? Did it protect them from... whatever it is this stuff is supposed to protect us from?

Orthodoxy certainly hasn't succeeded in eradicating heresy. Every heresy the church has ever named is alive and flourishing today. There are probably more Arians and Unitarians in the USA today than Chalcedonians. There are definitely more semi-pelagians around than "saved by grace through faith" reformed-types. Orthodoxy doesn't eliminate or diminish heresy - it's the opposite actually. Orthodoxy is the ground-of-being for heresy and vice-versa. They can't live without each other.

Even if orthodox doctrine could somehow "protect" us from bad ideas - and there are plenty of bad ideas out there - so what? Who made it a priority to be protected from the intellectually inane and the logically laughable? Besides that isn't what people claim. People claim orthodox ideas can actually save us from life-threatening catastrophes like the holocaust. So show me, in practical, non-ideological terms, how orthodoxy has accomplished this in the past. How many Jews did Barth save because he had the correct theological insights? Where are the concentration camps that would have existed if it hadn't been for his courageous opposition to the heresies of German liberal protestantism?

Honestly. I'd love to see the proof. Show me how orthodoxy protects us from something deeply and obviously harmful. You can't use Hell, either. Why? Here's why: if you don't finish reading this sentence a meteor will fall out of the sky and crush you where you sit. Aren't you glad you read that sentence now? I just saved you from a terrible fate you can't ever prove wasn't going to happen if you hadn't done as I commanded. Be grateful.

For the most part, ironically, I am a pretty orthodox guy (yes in my own estimation the same as it is with anyone else). But I'm really tired, in theological discussions, of everything being cast in apocalyptic terms as if the consequences of disagreement were really anything other than the usual social awkwardness of realizing that reasonable people frequently come to different conclusions, and yes sometimes those conclusions are downright wacky. Wackiness, however, is not a credible cause of genocide.