Category Archives: Religion

Ten Variations on the Good Samaritan

Ethics, Middle Way Philosophy, Religion,

Original

A man was on his way from Jerusalem down to Jericho when he was set upon by robbers, who stripped and beat him, and went off leaving him half dead. It so happened that a priest was going down by the same road, and when he saw him, he went past on the other side. So too a Levite came to the place, and when he saw him went past on the other side. But a Samaritan who was going that way came upon him, and when he saw him he was moved to pity. He went up and bandaged his wounds, bathing them with oil and wine. Then he lifted him on his own beast, brought him to an inn, and looked after him. Next day he produced two silver pieces and gave them to the innkeeper and said “Look after him; and if you spend more I will repay you on my way back.” (Luke 10: 30-35, Revised English Bible)Good Samaritan

Variation 1

A drug addict was sheltering for the night in a car park under a block of flats, when he was set upon by muggers, beaten up and stripped of what few possessions he had. A business man living in the block, on his way to his car, passed close by the unconscious drug addict. However, the business man was preoccupied with thinking about a hostile bid that had been launched against his company by an asset-stripping corporation, and was intent on finding ways to foil the bid and save the jobs of his staff. He completely failed to notice the unconscious drug addict.

Variation 2

In the late evening on a side street in London, a homeless man was set upon by muggers, beaten up and stripped of what few possessions he had. A philosophical writer passed by, his mind full of the book he was writing, that he was sincerely convinced could change the world for the better by challenging fundamentally wrong thinking. The writer dimly glimpsed the homeless man across the street, but thought it likely that others would look after him, and did not want to be distracted from his train of thought.

Variation 3

Late at night in a dangerous area of downtown Karachi, gang warfare resulted in a shootout in which one gang pursued the other down a street, shooting. Three people from the losing gang were injured and lay at different points along quite a long street. The victorious gang just left them there and went off. There was no sign of the police or any medical attention for the injured people. A little later a local shopkeeper crept down the street. He was shaking with fear but had to get home. When he passed the first injured person, he thought it best to leave him alone, because he didn’t want to take the risk of getting involved with the gangs in any way. When he got to the second some way further down the street, he again made the same decision. However, his conscience then began troubling him, and he began to feel that it was his social and religious duty to help injured people, whoever they were. When he reached the third man lying injured, he changed his mind. His shop was now not far away, so the shopkeeper dragged the injured man to his shop, and, with the help of members of his family, began to give him first aid. Some hours later, he managed to get an ambulance to take the man to hospital.

Variation 4

In a back street in a rough neighbourhood of Chicago, a black man was seen lying on the ground, apparently with blood smeared all over him. A white Christian man, who had always believed in the example of the Good Samaritan and that it was right to help strangers in distress, came across him and was determined to help him. However, as soon as he came close, the black man sprang into action and his accomplices appeared from nearby hiding places. The white man was beaten up and robbed.

Variation 5

A promiscuous homosexual in a precarious state of mental heath, desperate for sex with someone, had been cruising from one gay bar to another but failed to find a partner for that night. Finally, on his way home, he found a man lying injured in a side street. The injured man was quite young and attractive, so the gay man took him home and bandaged up his wounds. The injured man was grateful, but was neither gay, nor in any state to be interested in consensual sex. The gay man then raped him, but afterwards took him to hospital for further attention as though nothing had happened.

Variation 6

A destitute young woman is attacked, raped and robbed in the back lane of a Mumbai slum. She lies there seriously injured and unconscious, and an older woman from a nearby shack goes out to help her. She mutters and curses as she brings the young woman into her house. This is just one more thing in a life of constant stress. Her husband is a drunkard, her teenage sons are drug addicts, she finds it hard enough to keep her family together when she receives no gratitude and much abuse from them. Nevertheless, she feels it is her duty to look after the young woman when she has been attacked, and she takes her in, bandaging her with strips of her own clothes, whilst complaining about the sacrifice she is making as she does so. When one of the older woman’s sons comes back to the shack early the following morning, he finds the injured young woman still lying there, and his mother hanging from a beam, having committed suicide.

Variation 7

A young Spanish woman is in a hurry to get to her office, in a street in Barcelona. She is afraid of losing her job if she is late, and has already been warned by the boss about her punctuality. Unemployment is very high amongst young people, and it will be very difficult for her to get a new job if she loses this one. She notices an injured man lying unconscious on the pavement, and nobody seems to be helping him. She gets out her mobile phone and rings the emergency services to inform them, but then hurries on.

Variation 8

A young man has a painful memory of a time when he was a teenager, and he tried to help his cousin who was choking. However, he did not know what to do to clear the obstruction, and actually made the situation worse. By the time help from others arrived, his cousin was dead. As a result the young man has resolved never to get involved with people who need help, and has an instinctive lack of confidence, believing implicitly that he will make things worse for them. Thus when he is driving along a remote highway and sees an injured man lying by the side of the road, he only half-consciously decides not to get involved and to simply pass by.

Variation 9

In the past a lorry driver used to pick up hitch hikers and talk to them. He quite enjoyed having some company on his long drives. However, recently he has been sternly told by his boss that he must not pick up any passengers, and that to do so will invalidate the firm’s insurance policy in the event of an accident.  One day the lorry driver is passing along a remote moorland road, when he sees an injured man lying helpless and unconscious by the side of the road. He stops and looks down at the man and feels helpless as to how to start dealing with his extensive injuries. He takes out his mobile phone to call an ambulance, but there is no signal. He thinks of taking the man with him in his cab to the nearest hospital, but remembers his boss’s stern warning. So, with some regret he then leaves the injured man by the side of the road and goes on.

Variation 10

A man is attacked and robbed by outlaws in a remote place on a road in nineteenth century Australia.  A poor man, an ex-convict, finds the injured man, takes him on his horse and takes him back to his own house, which is not too far off but is the only house for some distance. There he tries to help him, but the injured man soon dies of his injuries. A few days later, a sheriff comes to the house. Having heard about the robbery, he is trying to find out what happened to the victim. The ex-convict shows the sheriff the grave where he buried the victim, and explains truthfully what happened. However, because of his criminal past the sheriff does not believe him, and assumes him to be the robber. He is immediately arrested and imprisoned.

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 Moral plurality

A university researcher, in what became known as ‘The Good Samaritan experiments’, once set up a situation in which a man (actually an actor) was lying in a hallway apparently in need of help. A group of theology students were told to come to a certain venue in the university for a seminar where they would give a presentation about the parable of the Good Samaritan, but things were so set up that all these students would have to pass the ‘injured’ man in the hall. Only a minority of the students stopped to offer help, and the rates of help were lower in those who were late for the seminar.

Is this an example of the hypocrisy of ‘religious’ ethics? Actually I think we should think about this is a wider perspective, letting go of the framework of reactions to ‘religion’ that distorts people’s responses to it. It seems that the story of the Good Samaritan encapsulates for many people something about moral good – that we should feel and act upon our compassion for those who are suffering, and that we should follow the same kinds of expectations of care we might have in intimate relationships and extend them to wider society. However, this is overwhelmingly only a theoretical view, and not even the majority of those who have thought carefully about the story (if we are to believe the results of the experiment) value this more than the other values that they have developed over their lives as embodied beings. These would include the value of existing social duties and relationships (including the duty to turn up and give a presentation in a seminar on time), as well as perhaps the value of individual goals and aspirations.

People’s responses to the Good Samaritan story, then, often seem riddled with hypocrisy. A little while ago I saw a video posted on Facebook where a similarly needy-looking person was lying on a pavement in a crowded city street and calling for help. But the vast majority of people did not stop to offer any. What struck me most about this Facebook post was not so much the video itself but the comments, all of which attacked and blamed the people who had failed to stop. Yet all the indications seem to be that most of the people who commented in this way would not themselves have paused to stop. Most of us are like the priest or the Levite, not the Samaritan (and in that I’d realistically include myself, in many situations). What’s more we have lots of good reasons for not stopping: fear that the person apparently in need may be deceiving or take undue advantage of you, reluctance to drop other pressing actions that we value, and the fair likelihood that there will be other better-qualified people around to offer help instead (and indeed that we might just be in the way) are perhaps foremost amongst those reasons. To dismiss the people who do not stop as ‘uncaring’ and ‘selfish’ is both inaccurate and shows a very crude understanding of ethics.

So, there seems to be a big mismatch between people’s perceptions of the Good Samaritan as a moral ideal and the psychological context in which moral judgements are often made. I’d suggest that’s a good exemplification of the huge and unnecessary gap that is often found between ethics and psychology. People assume that ethics must involve conforming to some sort of absolute (and completely abstract) ideal, and then either fail to take it seriously in practice or feel unnecessarily guilty about not doing so. Then on the other hand, psychological observations, conventionally limiting themselves to a scientific mode that is assumed to exclude ‘values’, quite unnecessarily avoid drawing out the moral implications of their findings. I would argue, instead, that justifiable ethics need to combine a realistic understanding of our own processes, of the kind offered by psychology, with a degree of ‘stretch’ – that is, a challenge for us to face up to conditions just a little more than we might have done otherwise.

I wrote the ten variations on the Good Samaritan as a way of exploring some of the implications of that perspective. I don’t want for a moment to suggest that the original Good Samaritan is not good – he is. Presumably there was a chance that he could have followed the priest and the Levite in passing by on the other side of the road, but he didn’t. He must have had some of the necessary conditions there – for example a ready sympathy and a degree of courage – but he also chose to apply those qualities and to stretch himself in doing so. All that is very admirable. But there are a host of other people who could have similar, or quite different, responses, in similar circumstances, who are equally good, and who are also slightly stretching themselves. The variations are an attempt to explore what different forms goodness can take, and are thus an exercise in moral plurality.

Moral plurality must not be mistaken for relativism. It does not imply that any response is as good as any other response. What I mean by moral plurality is that there are many different ways of morally stretching oneself in different circumstances. There may, indeed, be a ‘best possible’ response in any given circumstance, but we are seldom in a position to know what that ‘best possible’ response is. Moral practice, instead, needs to face up to our degree of ignorance as well as our situatedness. There is moral plurality – that is, a variety of different good options – both from the wider viewpoint we are taking here when we compare different ‘Samaritan’ type stories, and perhaps even from the particular standpoint (given their degree of ignorance) of one of the characters in the stories. Nevertheless, wider judgements are better and more adequate than narrower ones.

In the different variations, I wanted to explore how different base conditions might make actions that we consider ‘bad’ in some respects nevertheless good – perhaps even the best in the circumstances.

In variation 1, the business man fails to notice the man in need of aid because he is preoccupied with saving his company. He has motives that we would probably regard as good in saving his company, but as an embodied being his capacity for attention is limited. Yes, he could have been more aware, but it may also be the case that saving his company was far more important than helping the drug addict.

In variation 2, the philosophical writer did not want to be distracted from his train of thought. He could have been seriously deluded there, and his train of thought probably wasn’t nearly as important as helping the homeless man. However, it is also possible that he was not deluded and that his train of thought really was extremely important. It is also possible that he was just offering a weak excuse to himself in thinking that others would look after him – but in a London street, there was probably also a good chance of that. The question is perhaps more how much of a delay there would be. So, the writer may have been acting badly, but he may also have been acting well. We need to recognise our degree of ignorance here before we heap blame on him based only on an unrealistic application of social conventions.

In variation 3, the shopkeeper helped the third man, even though he didn’t help the first two. Perhaps we could apply this to the priest and the Levite in the original story. Maybe they didn’t help the injured man in the story, but they helped someone else later. Obviously it is better to help one person, even if you leave the other two, than to help nobody. Are we really going to blame the shopkeeper too much for his limitations?

In variation 4, the white Christian has all the intentions of being a good Samaritan, but it turns out badly for him. To judge him harshly because the results were bad is obviously unfair – this is a matter of moral luck. He deserves praise for trying to help, even though the outcome is bad. Similarly, if he failed to be a ‘Good Samaritan’ in future due to this bad experience, we could hardly blame him. The racial element in this story is realistic in the context, but obviously should make no difference to our judgement.

I imagine that variation 5 may be the most controversial for many. Here the ‘Good Samaritan’ actually commits a violent crime against another in the course of being a Good Samaritan. His motives for helping another were very mixed, and obviously he deserves blame for rape (the gender of his victim making no difference). Nevertheless, I’d want to suggest, he deserves praise for the help he did give, and the mixed context should not stop us appreciating that. Instead of helping the injured man, he could have just raped him and left him in the street – but he did more than that.

In variation 6, the ‘Good Samaritan’ is so desperate and alienated that she is on the verge (it turns out) of taking her own life. Yet, even in this situation, she has a little space in her heart to help another. Given her degree of alienation, it is hardly surprising if she complains about it at the same time as helping the young woman, but nevertheless, her actions show a degree of openness in her judgements. She is perhaps the most praiseworthy of all the characters in these variations.

In variation 7, the young Spanish woman’s anxiety about her job stops her doing any more than merely phoning the emergency services. But that was a helpful thing to do, for which she deserves praise in the circumstances.

In variation 8, the young man is motivated by not wanting to make the situation worse. His worries about this are probably exaggerated and deluded, but nevertheless, we need to think realistically about what he could do given this condition. If he had stopped and overcome this anxiety, we might praise him even more, but we could hardly expect this given his psychological state.

In variation 9, the lorry driver really wants to help the injured man, and carefully considers how to act. Perhaps he is mistaken in his interpretation of the consequences of taking the injured man in his cab, and he is interpreting the rules of his company too legalistically. Nevertheless, he is reflecting, and sincerely trying to do the best thing. He deserves a fair amount of praise in my view, for trying to do the best thing in the circumstances.

Finally, in variation 10, as in variation 4, the Good Samaritan’s actions turn out worse for him – in this case both because of the mortal severity of the man’s injuries and because of the Samaritan’s criminal record and resulting social reputation. This can act as a reminder of how much of our socially-driven moral judgements are actually dependent on luck and subject to ignorance.

All of these ‘Good Samaritans’ are good to some degree – obviously some better than others – though some did not help the injured man at all, and others helped in ways that were loaded or compromised in other ways. If we want to help and encourage ‘Good Samaritans’ in the world, I would argue, we need a far more adequate understanding of the complexity of the moral context than is usually applied to such cases.

 

Other Middle Way parables:  Achilles and the Tortoise, An Acre of Forest, The Lute Strings, The Ship, The Boredom of Heaven

Picture by John Salmon (CC BY SA 2.0 – Wikimedia Commons) from All Saints Church, Bracknell

The boredom of heaven

Middle Way Philosophy, Myth, Religion,

As soon as Dilbert arrived in heaven, he was greeted by St. Peter, who warmly but somewhat formally shook his hand. This was odd, as he no longer had a hand. It was also odd that he could see St. Peter, as he no longer had any eyes. But let us leave such details aside.

“Welcome to heaven” said St. Peter briskly. “We have a brief half hour orientation session before full heaven conditions become operative. That allows me to explain to you how the place works, and you to ask any questions you may have. After that we’re straight into eternity. I hope you had a good trip here?”

“Er, yes, thanks – apart from dying, that is. A bit painful.”

St. Peter waved a dismissive hand. “Dreadful what they make you put up with when you’re dying these days. I do sympathise. But it’s all over now. Let me explain the ropes in heaven.”

St. Peter led them through the pearly gates into an area where a number of seated figures could be seen. They were all completely immobile and expressionless, spaced at some distance from each other and not communicating or interacting. Suddenly one of the immobile figures abruptly disappeared, as though a trapdoor had been opened up right underneath him, and he had immediately fallen through it.

“Oh, there he goes!” said St. Peter in a slightly jolly fashion.

“Where’s he gone?” asked Dilbert.

“Hell” said St Peter. “Now, the first thing about heaven I really must impress upon you is that it’s perfect. No imperfection allowed. As long as you remember that, and take it to heart, you’ll be fine.”

“But I thought heaven was a place of love!” protested Dilbert. “Surely the love of God allows a little imperfection here and there?”

“Oh, well, love is fine, but it’s got to be perfect love, you know. The Church is quite clear about that, and we always take their instructions seriously. It’s very easy to think you’re being good and loving, but because of all that imperfect conditioning you’ve had down there, to slip into imperfection. Any love you express has to be totally without reservation, even unconsciously. And then you have to think of your neighbour. If you start talking to them about heavenly love, and they start responding to you but haven’t got it perfect, then they’ll soon start breaking the conditions of heaven.”

“So what happens when you break the conditions of heaven?”

“Well, you go to Hell, of course. You saw what happened to that fellow just now. He must have had a stray impure thought. So off he went, down to the Other Place. It happens to most people sooner or later. We have to be very strict, I’m afraid, because there really is no wriggle room where perfection is concerned.”

“Straight to Hell with eternal torment? Is there nowhere in between? No Middle Way?”

St. Peter chuckled. “Middle Way? What are you, some kind of Buddhist or something? That’s a completely unintelligible concept. No, either you’re in heaven or you’re in hell. If you can’t stick it out here, it’s eternal torment for you. There’s purgatory of course, for Catholics, but that’s only to prepare you for heaven, and Limbo for unbaptised babies, but I take it you haven’t come via purgatory?”

“No, I’m a Protestant – and not a Buddhist” said Dilbert with some indignation. “Look, I was always told that I would be saved by my faith, and that heaven was eternal. God has mercy on sinners if they have faith in Christ, doesn’t he?”

“Oh yes, that’s doubtless why you’re here. And heaven is eternal – for as long as you can stick it. The trouble is that since the Reformation we’ve had all sorts of people up here who really aren’t prepared properly. They may have faith, but it’s a bit of a big leap from being faithful and imperfect to being perfect all of a sudden. If you ask me, just between you and me, I preferred the old system: at least when people have made their way up through all the levels of purgatory they’re a bit more ready for what heaven is like, and last a little bit longer. The descent rates for Catholics are a bit lower than for Protestants.”

“What about Jews, and Muslims?”

“Oh, they’re stuck in the grave for now. They have to wait until the Last Judgement. But then it will suddenly get crazy, I’m sure: millions of Jews and Muslims all arriving here at once.”

Dilbert looked back at the people seated in complete passivity. “So, don’t these people do anything?”

“I don’t think you’ve fully understood the rules” said St. Peter, “If you do anything you’ll very quickly find yourself in a state of imperfection. So, no activity. Remember, you don’t need to do any of the things up here that you had to do down below – no need for eating, or defecating, or even breathing. Souls don’t need any of that any more. So you can just be still. Some people get used to it after a while.”

“Do they think, then – compose books or play games of chess in their heads? Or do they meditate?”

“Oh no, none of that. Thinking is an especially quick way to perdition. You’ll get to impure thoughts pretty quickly if you start thinking. No meditating either – you’ll do it wrong at some stage and get distracted.”

“It sounds pretty, well, boring.”

“Boredom is the condition of the imperfect, my friend. I can assure you that Hell isn’t boring – oh, no, not a bit of it. Just in case you get bored with one torment they keep varying it so that you try them all. Here, you’ll either have to get over your boredom or go to Hell – shape up or ship out.”

There was a pause.

“So, do you have any more questions, or shall we start eternity conditions now?”

As he was increasingly unable to distinguish the prospect of the torments of heaven from those of hell, Dilbert desperately sought some more questions to put off the hour.

“Does anyone make it? I mean, is there actually anyone who stays in heaven for eternity and puts up with the boredom?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. From a human point of view, you’d have to wait an eternity to know the answer to that question.”

“Well, is there anyone – a saint or somebody – who has lasted, say, a hundred years?”

“We no longer measure time in earthly units, once the half hour orientation period is over. All I know is that heaven has never been empty, for there are always fresh recruits coming up with a hunger for perfection.”

“Are there any great saints still here who died centuries ago? St. Francis? St. Theresa? And what about Jesus Christ? Surely if he took human birth for the sake of our sins, he wouldn’t be perfect, would he? So he wouldn’t last long in heaven?”

“That’s all classified information I’m afraid. Releasing it might undermine the credibility of the Church, and stop the flow of recruits that keeps us going. Our very existence as an institution would be at stake.”

For the minute or so that remained to him, Dilbert stood dumbfounded.

“Now, I’m afraid your half-hour of orientation is up. Let me lead you to your place. Once you have settled into it, heaven-conditions will start to become fully operative.”

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 The irrelevance of perfect goodAscent_of_the_Blessed Bosch

It is not too difficult to grasp evil in terms of human understanding. We may often over-simplify by projecting an archetype of evil onto those who are mixed, but nevertheless there are some aspects of evil we can readily access as part of our experience. When it comes to good, however, we have no such facility. Since good involves avoiding dogmatism and addressing conditions, and there are many ways of doing that, there are many apparently conflicting goods. The good of compassion conflicts with that of wisdom, justice conflicts with freedom, courage conflicts with prudence, honesty conflicts with tact. Good is multiple (though not relative), in my view, because it is human and imperfect. However, for most of human history we have been confronted with views of good that are strikingly at odds with the very possibility of imperfect goodness. Instead, good has been constantly idealised and put into absolute forms. Good is seen as deriving from some sort of state of perfection, whether that perfection is the rational perfection of Plato or Kant, or the religious imagination applied to belief in God and heaven. The result of this has been a great deal of confusion, as we have tried to reconcile metaphysical beliefs about perfection from beyond experience with our actual experience of plural and imperfect goodness.

This story highlights the implications of that confusion as it applies to our understanding of heaven. Heaven is necessarily seen as perfect in the way that God is perfect, yet the implication of this is that humans could not exist there in any form. Religious teachings through the ages have tried to deal with this through the claim that only non-physical souls go to heaven. Imperfection has been identified with the body, leading to confused arguments about sex and other bodily functions, and whether these were intrinsically evil or good because designed by God. This approach failed to appreciate how much our entire experience, including our mental experience, is dependent on and shaped by our bodies. In effect it has adopted a narrow left-brain view of the self as sufficient and ultimate, completely ignoring the right-brain recognition of the wider conditions of our bodily experience. Not only could a person ascending into a perfect state not have a body – they couldn’t have thoughts, either. In fact, in removing all evil from them you would also be removing all good, and in removing variety of experience you would be condemning people to a new form of torment. Heaven and hell would be indistinguishable.

Heaven is more frequently imagined as a place of delight, but delight is not compatible with an eternity of perfection. Earthly delights are then explained to be mere analogies for the more subtly heavenly delights that we cannot yet imagine. Thus the Islamic tradition seems unembarrassed about offering the delights of sex with lots of virgins (houris) to the (presumably male) martyrs after their deaths, with the theological explanation that this is just an analogical way of imagining delights that will actually far surpass those fleshly pleasures. But pleasure of any kind needs a contrast with other states to continue being appreciated as such. The conquering martyrs will soon be bored with their virgins and want to be off killing infidels again. Even the ‘purest’ pleasures, coming from religious ecstasy, meditative states, or drug-induced release of dopamine, require contrasts if they are not soon to become ends in themselves that lose their meaning in human life. What is good about these sorts of states arises, not from their indefinite continuation, but from the ways in which they can contribute to balancing of judgement and sustainable equanimity in our lives. Pleasure, on all the indications, cannot be eternal without ceasing to be pleasure.

There will probably be some Christians who think I have misinterpreted heaven. Believing profoundly in the loving and forgiving nature of God, perhaps they will admit that heaven has to be imperfect and accommodating to our sins. If so, will it seek to help us to improve further, by reducing and ultimately eliminating our sins? If so, it is not heaven but purgatory. Or will it simply allow us to continue with our sins as they are without any moral goals? If so, this seems more like a continuation of earth than it is heaven. No, if we come to terms with our imperfection, perfection merely drops out of the picture and becomes not merely irrelevant, but unhelpful. If, on the other hand, we do actually achieve perfection of any kind, it seems that the torments of eternal boredom follow.

The fact that heaven turns out to be just as much of a torment as hell has profound implications. It throws us back on the Middle Way, in which we recognise and come to terms with our imperfection, and no longer seek to appeal to ideas of perfection. It also makes it clear that the perfections we may have idealised as good are actually evil, since it is beliefs about perfection that are evil, whether those beliefs pose as ‘good’ or ‘evil’. That means that there is no moral difference between belief in God and belief in Satan or evil, as it is the absolutised beliefs that create the evil, even if they are beliefs about good.

Such a recognition is consistent with the very poor track record of absolutised religious belief. Many of those who sincerely believed in peace have instead brought endless conflict, whether that conflict occurred on the battlefield, in the debating chamber, or in the individual psyche. It is not your belief in peace that potentially creates peace, but your ability to engage with conditions, and the more strongly you identify with an absolute formulation of the right way of acting, the more that is likely to bring you into conflict with those with a different formulation. The whole concept of heaven is ludicrously contradictory because the moral basis on which it has been built is contradictory. It is time for a new understanding of morality to be based on the Middle Way.

For other recently posted parables by Robert M Ellis, see the following links:

An Acre of Forest

The Lute strings

The Ship

The MWS Podcast 58: Philip Kitcher on Life after Faith: The case for Secular Humanism

Ethics, Meaning, Philosophy, Podcast, Religion, ,

Philip Kitcher is the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at the University of Columbia. He’s the first recipient of the American Philosophical Association’s Prometheus Prize for his work to expand the frontiers of science and philosophy. He’s written many books including ‘Philosophy of Science: A new introduction’, ‘Preludes to Pragmatism’ and ‘The Ethical Project’. His latest book is ‘Life after Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism’ and that will be the topic of the conversation today.


MWS Podcast 58: Philip Kitcher as audio only:
Download audio: MWS_Podcast_58_Philip_Kitcher

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Max Weber and the iron cage

Economics, Great Thinkers, Religion, ,

Recently reading a review of a new book about Max Weber (1864-1920), I was reminded of how much of an effect his thinking in ‘The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism’ had on me when I was first writing my Ph.D. thesis (which was when I first started to develop Middle Way Philosophy about 15 years ago). He’s often thought of as a pioneering sociologist, but you could also see him as a kind of historian and/or philosopher, and his interests took in religion, politics, and economics among other things. In effect, he was one of those great thinkers who refuses to be pigeonholed. He famously said “I am not a donkey and I do not have a field”. He was also relatively uninterested in most of the trappings of academia, and managed to maintain a relatively objective political position through the First World War in Germany without being dragged into what he called the ‘politics of vanity’.Max Weber

In ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ he points out the important historical link between Catholic monasticism, Protestant worldly asceticism, and Capitalism. The story is roughly this: the medieval monks developed an ascetic mentality of self-denial in a higher cause, together with an individual relationship with God in which they felt accountable to him for their deeds. The monks were also used treating the monastery’s property as corporate. In the Protestant countries at the time of the Reformation, this asceticism was taken over into wider society rather than being confined to the monasteries. The Protestant began to have an individual relationship to God that went together with the literacy and accounting that had formerly been a monastic preserve. Capitalism then began to develop in Protestant societies because the basic requisites for it were there: an ascetic culture of self-denial allowing investment for future profit, a culture of book-keeping (whether moral or financial), the specialised organisation of free labour, and the separation of corporate property. Though of course, trade and industry had existed before this, it is these practices that enabled it to really take off in Europe and create the capitalist world we know today.

What makes this particularly interesting from the standpoint of the Middle Way is the way in which it shows the increasing dominance of a left-hemisphere formed, regularised, bureaucratised view of the world in Western culture. Far from being separated or antithetical, the worlds of ‘religion’ and ‘economics’ also turn out to be deeply inter-related, both shaped in parallel ways by this narrowly focused view of the world. To begin to loosen the grip of that narrow perspective and integrate it into a wider one, it helps to understand some of the conditions that formed it for us. These conditions have now spread into nearly every other area of life, where they tend to take the form of what is often called ‘managerialism’: if you can represent things and keep close control over them, this view goes, they will fulfil your desires more fully in the future. Max Weber seemed to understand clearly, more than a hundred years ago, how much of a delusion resided in this approach to life.

The last few pages of ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ offer a remarkably prescient account of the ‘iron cage’ created by this narrowed, bureaucratised view, and the ironic way this has emerged from religious other-worldliness. Though written in 1905, it begins to foreshadow modern concerns about sustainability. I will finish with a quotation from there:

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling: we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic production, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilised coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment”. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

(A more detailed discussion of Max Weber’s arguments and their critics can be found in my thesis here.)

Sacred relics

Middle Way Philosophy, Religion,

The other day I found a piece of the Berlin Wall: a rough shard of concrete about 3cm x 1 cm, largely grey apart from red on one side, and gift-wrapped in cellophane with a ribbon. It was given to me by a student from Berlin in 1990 (when I was teaching English as a foreign language to German students). When I re-discovered this piece, though, I began to wonder why this otherwise insignificant piece of concrete had been preserved, what it ‘meant’, and why we preserve such things. I began to realise that what I held in my hand was a sacred relic: along with the many splinters from the true cross, phials of the Virgin’s milk, bones of saints and teeth of the Buddha preserved around the world.

Those of a naturalistic (or perhaps just a Protestant) leaning tend to sneer at sacred relics on the grounds that they are fraudulent. It is most unlikely, and indeed can probably be proved by further investigation (carbon dating etc.) that most of the sacred relics in the world are not literally what they claim to be. If one thinks of religion in terms of belief that is a matter of concern, but from the standpoint of meaning prior to belief it matters little. I don’t want to defend fraudulent claims about medieval relics, but at the same time the significance of those relics to religious practitioners probably has little to do with their material origins. Instead they are objects invested with a certain symbolic significance: fetishes, idols, charms, souvenirs, mementos.

I have rather less reason to doubt that my shard of the Berlin Wall is ‘authentic’ – but if it Berlin Wall hole Jurek Durczakwasn’t, this would really have no impact on its significance. Its value as a symbolic object depends only on its connection with the destruction of the Berlin Wall. If one was looking for an event to poignantly symbolise the Middle Way and integration, the destruction of the Berlin Wall might well be it. Entrenched ideologies swept away and false divisions removed by the autonomous actions of the people – what better symbol of Migglism is there than that? It’s all the more poignant as a symbol of the Middle Way because most of the people destroying the Berlin Wall probably didn’t think of it explicitly in that way – but nevertheless they felt the joy of integration and recognised the widened horizons that occur when dogmas are removed.

The significance of the relic, then (whether medieval or modern, ‘religious’ or ‘secular’) comes not from its physical origins but from the projections we put on it. Those projections can themselves often become stuck. I think this is what the monotheistic religions mean by ‘idolatry’ (in Islam, where it’s a very important concept, the term is shirk). If you start to think that the object, rather than just reminding you of some other significant event, concept or person, in some way gives you a shortcut to the fulfilment or integration you would get directly from them, then you are starting to fetishise or idolise the object. That means that you are giving it absolute qualities that it cannot possess. If I were to set up a Migglist shrine giving pride of place to my shard of the Berlin Wall, and expecting veneration of the shard to provide the fulfilment that the destruction of the Berlin Wall (or its equivalents in my life) actually does, then I would have turned my previous mere appreciation of the meaning of the shard into a set of obstructive metaphysical beliefs about it. This would be failing to appreciate why it does have significance to me – that is, as something that relates to my bodily experience rather than a copy of the thing-out-there.

How do we know when we have crossed that line of absolutising a mere reminder? Well, one test might well be whether we can treat the mere reminder as such – changing it or even destroying it in the full appreciation that by doing so we do not change what it symbolises. There’s a well known story about a Zen monk burning Buddha images to keep warm. If you have a shrine of objects you venerate – whether they are Buddhas, family photos, souvenirs or special books – could you happily destroy those objects? Could I take the shard of concrete that I believe to be from the Berlin Wall, throw it away and substitute another shard of concrete? Could the Catholics who venerate a splinter from the True Cross substitute another splinter from a handy nearby fence? Destroying our idols sounds to me like quite a therapeutic exercise, provided you do have a strong sense of the continuing value of what the object symbolises apart from the object.

The problem with this approach is that it can easily get confused with the long history of iconoclasm (destruction of icons) in Christianity and Islam. The original iconoclasts smashed up the icons in Byzantine churches, and the Islamic tradition followed by destroying Christian, Hindu and Buddhist ‘idols’, which they regarded as false gods interceding in our relationship to the true God. To this day you won’t see any pictures of people or animals in a mosque – only perhaps calligraphy or abstract ornamentation based on vegetation. I think the trouble with this is that in the place of fetishized objects or pictures Muslims have substituted words – the words of the Qur’an which were believed to be God’s words. Although they seem to have understood the dangers of absolutising objects or pictures, those dangers lie in the beliefs we have about them, not in the objects themselves or even their significance to us, and it is no advance to substitute other more abstract absolute beliefs for absolute beliefs about objects.

So, my suggestion is that we need to recognise that we all have sacred relics, in the sense of objects to which we attach special significance. The use of terms like ‘mantelpiece’ rather than ‘shrine’ for the places we keep these objects does not stop them being sacred or having a religious dimension. We can enjoy and celebrate that special significance – whether in art, ritual, reflection or conversation – without absolutising those objects or having metaphysical beliefs about them. If we are to stay with the meaning of those objects and enjoy them positively, a recognition and exploration of the distinction between meaning and belief seems crucial, as does a critical sense of when we might be investing our sacred relics with properties they cannot possess.

 

Picture: Hole in the Berlin Wall by Jurek Durczak – CCA 2.0