Against the Stream

Christian Realism and "A Game of Thrones"

 

At Religion Dispatches, George Schmidt offers an analysis of the morality in George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, looking in particular at what Reinhold Niebuhr can tell us about the differences in leadership style between Eddard Stark and Tyrion Lannister:

Placing traditional theodicy aside for a moment, the question after all this misery is simple: Why did Eddard die? At the outset, identifying Eddard’s death as a simple tragedy misses an important point that is often made by Christian realists. Tragedy, as Reinhold Niebuhr observed in The Irony of American History, elicits “admiration as well as pity” for a man like Eddard. We pity him for such a terrible finality while we admire his conviction and compassion for Cersei and her children.

However, tragedy does not account for the way in which, to quote Niebuhr once again, “virtues are vices.” This lack of dialectical thinking, according to which human agency is essentially either virtuous or sinful, is unthinkable in Christian realism. An idealist who quickly classifies an event as tragic fails to take into account the evil that is an “inevitable consequence of the exercise of human creativity”: the evil that is in the good.

Irony, however, notes that the very quality that made Eddard worthy of praise ultimately led to his downfall. For Niebuhr, irony is fundamentally a religious category, presupposing a divine judge who “laughs at human pretensions without being hostile to human aspirations.” The Christian realist interpretatively locates irony in spaces of “hidden meaning” that “elicit not merely laughter but a knowing smile.” This “knowing smile” in turn acknowledges the failings in the virtues themselves by revealing absurd juxtapositions of “strength and weakness; of wisdom through foolishness; or foolishness as the fruit of wisdom; of guilt arising from the pretensions of innocency; or innocency hiding behind ostensible guilt.”

By contrast, Tyrion does not trust in the nobility of others:

Upon the execution of Eddard Stark, in perhaps the major juxtaposition of the series thus far, Tyrion Lannister is then appointed to the newly vacant office of Hand of the King. Eddard’s moral sentimentalism prompts his trusting of those who would ultimately betray him, whereas Tyrion devises elaborate ruses to trick would-be enemies. Unlike Eddard, Tyrion is not deluded by moral illusions and therefore capable of predicting the direction of self-interest in the pursuits of those around him.

This leads him to a consideration of Niebuhr's The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, in which Niebuhr reflects on the way in which niavety about the role of self-interest in political life has hobbled the ability of Christians to effectively and sucessfully fight for social justice:

It’s the charge of the transcendent that differentiates Christian realism from pure realism. Which is to say that Christian realism’s emphasis upon transcendence, provides an enduring, critical judgment, centered on the Gospel, upon any accommodation of the ideal in politics. In Simon Critchley’s formulation, this imperative is experienced as an “infinite demand” that interrupts the politics of accommodation that so often weigh down realist efforts. Christian realism, in other words, finds its fulfillment in a synthesis between the two Hands of the King, Eddard Stark and Tyrion Lannister.

In the main, I agree with Schmidt's analysis, though I still have cause to wonder whether or not Martin has any such transcendent moral vision in store for us at the end of his story. Thus far he's been fairly scornful of the idea that the end result of the political struggle is the establishment of social justice, and seems to be suggesting that, in the end, all succumbs to dust and entropy, or that on the whole those willing to give themselves wholly over to their will to power will ultimately prevail.

How he ends his story will tell us much about the moral world in which he dwells.

A Bit More About Materialism

Conor Cunningham offers a critique of the kind of "ultra-Darwinist" materialism, in particular its epistemological incoherence:

 

 As Cunningham points out, if everything we believe in is an illusion, including not only our understanding of God or our sense of self, but anything that we believe to be true about our world. It creates a self-destructive paradox: Materialism is in this regard no more a "true" description of the world than religion is, it is simply one meme among others, and gives us no more reliable a guide to the way that the world "really" is. Materialism this throughgoing, Cunningham points out, "fatally undermines itself.

Perhaps it is for this reason that so many materialists are so eager to keep the full implications of metaphysical materialism under wraps.

Metaphysical Materialism and the "Noble Lie"

 

In a discussion of Thomas Nagel's new book, Mind and Cosmos, Andrew Ferguson offers up an analysis of the key problem confronting metaphysical materialism as a way of describing the world:

The neo-Darwinian materialist account offers a picture of the world that is unrecognizable to us—a world without color or sound, and also a world without free will or consciousness or good and evil or selves or, when it comes to that, selflessness. “It flies in the face of common sense,” he says. Materialism is an explanation for a world we don’t live in.

Nagel dissents from the materialist fold, which includes such luminaries as Daniel Dennet and Richard Dawkins, in that he argues for an account of consciousness in which there is a reality outside of the chemical and physical processes of matter in motion, and that it is possible for us to grasp that reality. For this thoughtcrime, Fergusen notes, he has been pilloried by many contemporary materialist philosophers. The alternative offered by this particular brand of materialism:

The most famous, most succinct, and most pitiless summary of the manifest image’s fraudulence was written nearly 20 years ago by the geneticist Francis Crick: “ ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.” 

This view is the “naturalism” that the workshoppers in the Berkshires were trying to move forward. Naturalism is also called “materialism,” the view that only matter exists; or “reductionism,” the view that all life, from tables to daydreams, is ultimately reducible to pure physics; or “determinism,” the view that every phenomenon, including our own actions, is determined by a preexisting cause, which was itself determined by another cause, and so on back to the Big Bang. The naturalistic project has been greatly aided by neo-Darwinism, the application of Darwin’s theory of natural selection to human behavior, including areas of life once assumed to be nonmaterial: emotions and thoughts and habits and perceptions. At the workshop the philosophers and scientists each added his own gloss to neo-Darwinian reductive naturalism or materialistic neo-Darwinian reductionism or naturalistic materialism or reductive determinism. They were unanimous in their solid certainty that materialism—as we’ll call it here, to limit the number of isms—is the all-purpose explanation for life as we know it. 

As Daniel Dennet puts it, we are "moist robots." Based on the reaction that Nagel has provoked, one might think that he's crossed over to the other side along with religious types like me. But no, he has not reenacted the apostasy of Anthony Flew. Would that he had. It would make it much easier for his critics to dismiss him. He has simply called into question the metaphysical claims that materialists want to make on the basis of what scientists can tell us about the world:

Materialism, then, is fine as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go as far as materialists want it to. It is a premise of science, not a finding. Scientists do their work by assuming that every phenomenon can be reduced to a material, mechanistic cause and by excluding any possibility of nonmaterial explanations. And the materialist assumption works really, really well—in detecting and quantifying things that have a material or mechanistic explanation. Materialism has allowed us to predict and control what happens in nature with astonishing success. The jaw-dropping edifice of modern science, from space probes to nanosurgery, is the result. 

But the success has gone to the materialists’ heads. From a fruitful method, materialism becomes an axiom: If science can’t quantify something, it doesn’t exist, and so the subjective, unquantifiable, immaterial “manifest image” of our mental life is proved to be an illusion.

Now, for my part, I find this totally uncontroversial and indeed obvious, but it is remarkable to read an account of the degree to which it has escaped a certain brand of philosopher, who one might expect to have at least considered the matter. I've been making (and earlier hearing from others) this argument for a very long time. I'm simply glad that others have picked up on it as well.

The core problem of materialism is not only that it engages in a sort of question-begging conflation of ontic and noetic categories, but also that it utterly fails to account of human life or experience. Having opted to describe the world according to the very strictest interpretations of their materialist premise, they've managed to destroy any coherent account of the world as something which we perceive and in which we dwell. What's more, they've rendered any means of determinging how to live in such a world utterly impossible. As Ferguson notes:

As a philosophy of everything it is an undeniable drag. As a way of life it would be even worse. Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath. Say what you will about Leiter and Weisberg and the workshoppers in the Berkshires. From what I can tell, none of them is a psychopath. Not even close. 

It would be impossible, Ferguson argues, to attempt to live a human life on the basis of the presumptions of metaphysical materialism. He points out that this is a matter of some heated debate among the materialists, some of whom want to embrace the full implications of their philsophical presuppositions (which they treat as conclusions), and others of whom want to perpetrate a version of Plato's "noble lie," allowing the masses to continue to delude themselves by believing in such concepts as "self" and "morality," while allowing the cogniscenti to know better (while, apparently, not behaving any differently).

But this is a fundamental problem with materialism as a philosophy: If it can give us no account of beauty, or truth, or goodness, and allows us no resources that we can use to understand our lives and the world in which we dwell, then it's a poor kind of philosophy at the end of the day. And its failure is rooted precisely in its inability to understand that the epistemic presuppositions of scientific materialism are not the metaphysical premises of the world-in-itself. Whatever the contours of that reality may be, they aren't accessed in any uniquely authoritative way by the tools of materialist analysis, which simply provides one candidate among many for the description of underlying reality.

And, as Ferguson notes, since a thoroughgoing materialism would render us ethically monstrous, even materialists should be comforted by the shaky foundations on which they've built their metaphysical world.

The Psychology of Moral Agency

Via Andrew Sullivan, a conversation between cognitive scientist Joshua Knobe and psychologist Kurt Grey, on the subject of how our perception of another's moral agency affects our interpretation of their moral action: In particular, the idea that we tend to judge moral agents more harshly than moral victims. In other words, if we know others to be capable of goodness, we are more likely to condemn them when the fail to be so.

 

The Death of God and Apophatic Theology

Following up on my previous post, I note that Brandon Ambrosino offers an excellent defense of the theological importance of Nietzsche's "Death of God," and of the idea that maybe what we should give up for Lent is God:

Lent, the period of 40 days leading up to Easter, is meant to prepare our hearts to receive God: to receive God as God, as wholly other, as the Other who is coming, who is always coming, always arriving, always surprising us in the face of the dinner guest who shows up unexpectedly asking if we've remembered to prepare him a seat. And to ready ourselves for this meeting, Christians traditionally give something up: coffee, alcohol, the Internet -- one clever, gluten-free friend of mine mused he was giving up wheat. But the purpose of this giving up is to empty our hearts so that when God arrives -- and God is always arriving -- we are ready for the event. Our "idols," those things in our lives undeserving of worship, must be released from our hands, so that we may hold them open to the startling event that is God's Kingdom Come. ...

Indeed, the God of my rigid ideologies, of my complacent Theology; the God who validates my unwillingness to explore heresies, and rewards me for arrogantly dismissing them as sinful; the God who grounds my intellectual arrogance in His omniscience, and my politics in his omnipotence; the God who vanquishes all of His and my inquisitive foes, forever silencing their obnoxious questions with the fires of Hell; whose very Nature demands that humans separate and categorize the world into manageable divisions; the God who has made His Will known to us through Natural Law, and a Holy Book, every word of which we are to follow without hesitation or consideration; whose ethical character remains beyond discussion; whose decisions remain beyond the scope of human analysis; the God who grounds all Thought in his Being - this God, who is Himself nothing more than an idol of Modernism, is dead.

There's really not much I can add to that, though I am hoping to return with another post on Nietzsche in the coming days, if I can find the time.

The Death of God

From Friedrich Nietzsche's "Parable of the Madman":

The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. "Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? - for even Gods putrify! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!

How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife - who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event - and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!" Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him in surprise.

A passing thought in a conversation on Nietzsche and atheism: There are many Christians (like myself) who hold Nietzsche in exceptionally high regard. I think this is because we recognize that Nietzsche accurately described the moral, social, and metaphysical implications of the death of God. Our chief difference with him is over the question of whether God is in fact dead.

Do Progressive Christians Have Moral Foundations? Do They Need Them?

 

Tony Jones, as part of his "Questions That Haunt" series, raised the following question the day: "Do progressive Christians have any moral foundation?"

I was immediately struck by two things when I read the post: First, the assumption that Progressive Christians don't have any moral foundations; second, the assumption that moral foundations are necessary. At first, this may seem a bit contradictory, since if I think that they might not be necessary, that might seem to imply that I don't have any. But I'd like to suggest that they are both true in different senses: Of course progressive Christians have moral foundations in one regard, but in another, the very idea of what constitutes a moral foundation is subject to fairly serious question.

Let me take those points in reverse order. Why would I think that moral foundations may not be necessary? A lot depends on what you think it means to have a moral foundation. The question implies that a moral foundation must be some sort of absolute, unchanging, and completely infallible guide to behavior. Morality, in such a description of a moral foundation, is simply a matter of checking your behavior against the list of rules provided by whatever your foundation may be. 

Of course, almost nobody has ever held to that definition of foundationalism. Even biblical fundamentalists, divine command theorists, and Kantian ethicists understand that morality always involves ambiguity, interpretation, and application of principles to particular contexts. There is no reliable foundation, even the Categorical Imperative, that could serve as a reliable moral foundation in this regard. Nor would I think it advisable to try and construct one.

However, principles in the sense of rules or commands do certainly exist as a dimension of morality. But they are one necessary component alongside questions about what goals or ends are best or most appropriately sought, and what contexts we dwell in and how those contexts affect our relationship to both the principles and goals to which we refer. As I commonly explain it, morality has to do with the Right, the Good, and the Fitting, and all three of these components are involved in any moral decision we make.

But determining the relationship of the Right to the Good, and how they inform what we understand to be Fitting, will always be a question of judgement, which is to say that it always involves our subjective appropriation and deployment of principles and ends within particular settings and contexts, but then always must leave us in the situation of ambiguity as to whether our moral decisions are the right one, since even in the face of an infallible source of moral knowledge, we must understand and apply that source in our own partial, flawed, and fallible way.

So, in that sense, it seems to me, foundations aren't strictly necessary. But this does seem to put us into the Kierkegaardian position of being suspended over 70,000 fathoms of water -- are we in the midst of an undifferentiated moral sea, with nothing beneath us to keep us afloat? John Caputo seems to suggest something like this when he declares himself to be Against Ethics:

What I have in mind by saying I am against ethics is, unhappily, not a matter of concealing something more originary than ethics. It is a little more like confessing that the ground on which I stand tends to shift, that something that seemed to me hitherto to be firm and fixed is given to drift. My situation is to be compared to a man who discovers that the ground that he hitherto took to be a terra firma is in fact an island adrift on a vast sea, so that even if he stands firm he is in fact constantly in motion. Add to this the thought that the sea is endless, the sky starless, and the island's drift aimless, and you gain some measure of the level of my consternation.

For Caputo, this is a way of describing a moral situation into which we enter, and yet in which we find ourselves nonetheless obligated. "Obligation happens." He goes on to say. It doesn't happen because we conform our will to the Categorical Imperative or the Divine Command. We are surrounded by it irrespective of such things. Indeed, foundations are irrelavant to our sense of obligation. It. just. happens.

However, even in the absence of any infallible sense of certainty with regard to morality or any plumb line against which we can measure our moral duty, we are not totally without resources for moral discernment within the Christian community, even as we may disagree about what that discernment may imply.

The Bible certainly represents a resource for moral discernment for Christians. It is not, as the evangelical slogal has it, a set of "Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth" (ugh), but it is a testimony to the struggle of God's people in knowing, loving, and following God. It is is a record of, as William Sloane Coffin used to like to say, "a lover's quarrel with God." Thus it is not a matter of just opening the Bible to the right passage and reading what it says in order to figure out what to do, but reading it prayerfully in an attempt to discern the present leading of God in the midst of our situation. God speaks to us through the Bible, not with a megaphone, but with that still small voice that Eliaijah heard on the wind. It is not a command, but an invitation to participate in that lover's quarrel.

And of course much the same can be said about the church and the community of faith. The community carries on the Christian tradition, but even declarations of Papal Infallibility cannot disguise the fact that the church is nothing else but a community engaged in an ongoing attempt to love and know God. We can learn morally from how people have tried and succeeded -- and tried and failed -- before us. But it is no more an infallible guide than the Bible.

Nor can we point to reason and experience as infallible guides. Nevertheless all of these things give us resources to inform our own sense of judgement and discernment as to how we should be and act in the world, and crucially, how we should come to love and know God in our own lives.

In the end, the moral foundations that progressive Christians rely on are no different from the foundations other Christians rely on. The difference is that those foundations are not an infallible source of knowledge, but rather a guide to how we may act in an ambiguous world without any sense of ultimate or definitive certainty, even for those who approach the world from the stance of faith.

Absurdly Co-opting MLK

Slacktivist points us to this post at the Christ and Pop Culture blog:

Fourty-four lawsuits have challenged the ill-famed contraceptive mandate issued under the authority of the Affordable Care Act. Now, this is the Evangelical Channel, so perhaps most of our readers find opposition to contraceptives to be a bit abstruse. Consider instead a mandate that employers pay for employees’ abortions, in the name of public health. Is there a clearer case of a “code that is out of harmony with the moral law”? Should subscribing to a particular vision of society be a precondition of doing business in the United States, from Bangor to San Jose?

What would Martin Luther King, Jr. say about a government that flippantly legislates outside of its defined authority? What would he say about laws that compel citizens to commit sinful acts?

Then, after sensibly noting that King won the Margaret Sanger award from Planned Parenthood, follows up with this insight:

I’m sorry, but you don’t get to claim the mantle of King’s moral authority while also boasting of the power of your nuclear arsenal. That’s the opposite of what he preached and the opposite of what he pursued.

And I’m sorry, but you don’t get to claim the mantle of King’s moral authority while also fighting affordable access to family planning. That is also the opposite of what King preached and the opposite of what King pursued.

Claiming the mantle of Martin Luther King for causes he opposed has become a bit of a cottage industry on the right these days, so it's good to be periodically reminded that King was not an all-purpose sock puppet for whatever our preferred causes might be. He stood for specific principles and a specific philosophy and a specific way of fighting for political change. It's not always necessary to agree with him, but you can't just twist him into whatever shape suits your purposes.

Why I'm Often Pessimistic, and My Reasons for Optimism

Kevin Drum sums them up in two brief paragraphs:

I continue to be a bit gobsmacked about how little we seem to have learned from the past decade. The 2008 economic crash seems to have had close to no impact on how we view and regulate the financial system, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have had close to no impact on how we view interventionism. Conservatives still want us to go to war against every bad guy who's ever sneered at us, and liberals still want us to intervene in every humanitarian crisis that springs up.

Obama seems to understand that this framework is obsolete. No matter what motivates you—realpolitik, humanitarianism, nationalism, whatever—interventionism doesn't make sense if it doesn't work. And the lesson of the past decade, at the very least, is that interventionism is really, really hard to do well, even if your bar for "well" is really, really low.

We continue not to know how little we actually know. Fortunately, we at least seem to have someone in charge who knows what he doesn't know, which from as far back as Socrates has been seen as the core of wisdom.

"My work really means just the opposite of what everyone thinks"

 

Mike Morrell has a post up about Thomas J. J. Altizer's "Death of God" theology as seen throgh the lens of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizik. It's fascinating to read and to watch Zizik's analysis (Zizik is always fascinating to watch perform). I was struk particularly by Altizer's assessment of his project, saying that it means "the opposite of what everyone thinks."

Unfortunately, the Emory Magazine article in which the quote is contained doesn't offer much further elaboration on the nature of the "opposite" character of Altizer's theology, but it does offer a useful primer on the "Death of God" theology moment in the 1960s, along with this helpful summary:

On a most basic level, Altizer studies God not as a separate presence but as a historical force that has been transformed by death. This God began giving himself to the world at its creation and ultimately died through Jesus Christ, whose earthly demise in turn poured the spirit of God into the world. Altizer calls for a dialectical form of faith that acknowledges the coincidence of opposites: through God’s death, the sacred becomes profane, and vice versa; one cannot exist without the other. Only in modernity, Altizer believes, can we fully realize the paradox of the death of God—that the very absence of God signifies God’s presence in all things.

This is clearly very different from Moltmann's approach in The Crucified God, which continues to rely on more traditional theological categories, but it is a useful reminder that there is often a difference between what is said and what is meant, particularly when what is said is framed in highly abstruse theological and philosophical language.

That said, clearly the core of this is the idea of the via negativa, the idea of encountering God in the midst of negation, which in our very positively oriented society, is always an important qualification.

We think we can know God, but ultimately any God worth knowing must be by definition beyond our capacity to truly know. That paradox stands at the heart of all things Christian.

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