This is an edited (for length and focus, not meaning) conversation that M and I had on his blog. I liked it a lot, so I thought I’d tidy it up and post it.
Disclaimer 1: this post is not about Christianity. It’s about how to interpret the experience of being in a large-scale system. I’m not in the business of telling people what to believe unless they ask me directly for help.
Disclaimer 2: I’m conscious that this post effectively gives me the last word. Two reasons: (i) I had to stop somewhere, and (ii) I’m pleased with my last comment, which sums up something important I want to say about systems. I trust M to respond wholeheartedly in comments, but if he wants me to post a ‘guest post’ response from him then I’ll happily do so. Also, the conversation is still going on, so there might be subsequent posts.
F: …if you’re going to be thinking about ethics in society, you could do a lot worse than The Sermon on the Mount…. it’s also a fascinating exercise in system dynamics. How did the man whose credo is ‘turn the other cheek’ become the figurehead for [atrocities]?
M: …as a guide to individual spiritual practice, the Sermon has few matches…
As a tool of religion, it amounts to little more than a divine injunction to sit the hell down and shut the hell up, or you won’t get any dinner.
Maybe that needs a little explanation… religion I can take or leave alone, in that I can see them as producing good or evil. In the western world (the only one I have meaningful experience of), religions tend to accumulate capital, become institutionalised, and identify and act as conservative forces. I don’t condemn religion unreservedly, even in the narrow sense that I’ve experienced it. I can see social benefits from religion in terms of mutual support for believers. I can even see that where they operate in alignment with their spiritual origin they are capable of bringing benefits to those outside their congregation (although this is obviously fraught with dangers – the role of British chaplains in the Indian Mutiny/Uprising, the support offered to Franco by the Catholic church, collective blindness to the plight of Jewish refugees – the set of evils perpetuated by organised religions is not infinite, but it is large).
To return to The Sermon, where we started, I’ve heard the argument that you will be rewarded for poverty and powerlessness in this world with everlasting life in the next repeatedly, and, strangely, it’s rarely an argument deployed by the poor and the powerless.
… [redacted for length, including a whole entry from me]
…it is very interesting that I see religion as an instrument of control, and you see it as a path to happiness..
F: … I don’t think I see religion all that differently from you … I see it in exactly the same way as I see sex or the Internet – something that is in the hands of man, rather than God, and therefore has as many instantiations as there are people. To say ‘religion is good’ or ‘religion is bad’ is a nonsense statement to me. It can lead to transcendent miracles of grace and also appalling tragedy and abuse of power, and these things can both happen very effectively in the absence of religion as well. It is a man-made construct.
M: …I wish I could agree completely with you here. Unfortunately, context is all. I’m not talking about a one person – one religion mapping here. I’m not even talking about the hundreds of organised religions that are beyond my direct experience. I’m talking about direct experience of the religions of the book, and in particular of Christianity, since we started from SoTM and its appropriation by the church. I’d never say that religion is bad, I think there is a case to be made that a church is bad, in the way it uses a particular religion.
F: …I do think it’s more complicated than you say.
Yes, I agree that there is a system effect. It’s not sufficient to say ‘some Christians enact doctrine in a way that’s valuable and some in a way that’s harmful’. Some of this is a numbers game – if 90% of priests, say, do the latter then you probably have a system that’s primarily causing harm, and vice versa. (I don’t think we can gauge that.) Some of it is an open systems thing – in a culture that is grasping for certainties, for example, or starving, Christianity (or any other religion) will land differently from a prosperous first-world country that’s experienced the Enlightenment.
But some of it is beyond additive synthesis. Justin tweeted from Synod that ’80% of primary healthcare in developing countries provided by Christian organisations’. Assuming that it’s true – which I don’t know – this statement is subject to more than one interpretation. For me to use it in an argument that ‘Christianity is a force for good in the world’ would be insufficient. We don’t know the conditions under which this takes place and we can’t therefore deconstruct it. We just don’t know.
I don’t think your argument is sufficient to generalise either. Some instances of the Christian church use religion as a tool of social or political oppression. Others use it to help people lead very rich spiritual lives and be of social service. Even if you could calculate the numbers – and we can’t – we can’t gauge the effect.
If we look back at Christianity and the world, in a hundred years, we might find ourselves saying that the conservative social policies of the RC church led to massive overpopulation, spread of AIDS, retardation of emancipation and high social cost. Or we might say that the Church’s leadership on environmental issues in the US … made a qualitative difference to our approach to climate change.
I just don’t think we can judge a whole system from our experience of it, ever.
July 22, 2009 at 7:12 am |
I’ll comment more when I get to a keyboard. Initial thought, though: does that mean systems cannot be judged at an individual level? Is there any tool which allows us to judge a system at all? And, of course, what do we mean by judgement?
July 26, 2009 at 11:13 am |
Well, that’s another post
I think I covered some of this in my response to David below. Mostly I think it’s about how we hold our judgments, and in particular whether we see them as ‘true’.
July 22, 2009 at 8:37 am |
I so wish I could talk to you about this in person. When I get trapped in Richard Dawkins Makes Me Crazy dialogues, I end up shrieking something like this in anthro-speak. Having a different vocabulary to get at these ideas is always helpful. And, in the general thesis on systems is very interesting in a broadly applicable way as well.
July 26, 2009 at 11:14 am |
How does it read in anthro-speak?
July 26, 2009 at 8:44 pm |
Ooh: sorry, I didn’t realize there was a response here (I forgot I don’t get e-mail notifications from this blog platform).
I’ll forward you two e-mails I sent a Dawkins Athevangelist that addresses some of your points from my professional POV. They’re loooong, so not helpful to cut and paste here.
July 22, 2009 at 10:13 am |
Justin tweeted from Synod that ‘80% of primary healthcare in developing countries provided by Christian organisations’.
No! 80% of PC in China and India provided by Christian organisations? No way. Some African and South American countries perhaps.
July 26, 2009 at 11:11 am |
Does it depend on how one defines developing countries? I could ask him if you like.
July 22, 2009 at 5:54 pm |
I’m sort of with Michael here, I guess.
So, OK, “we can’t judge systems from our experiences as individuals”. I agree with this as far as it goes, sorta, though what I would actually say is that if we do so, our judgments will be incomplete and biased and unreliable and misleading, so it’s best not to rely on those judgments when we have a choice.
But.
I would *also* say, at that level, that we can’t judge individuals from our experiences as individuals.
And.
Sometimes we don’t have a choice. Sometimes we have to make decisions, and we make them on the basis of the limited perspectives we have, because they’re the only game in town.
I don’t necessarily *have* to make a judgment of Christianity. OTOH, I *do* have to decide, for example, whether I’m going to practice Judaism. And I’m going to do that based on my (limited) judgments of Judaism, whether I can judge systems (and religions) from my experiences as an individual or not.
July 26, 2009 at 11:12 am |
I’d agree with all this. I guess there’s something about how you hold your judgments, whether you consider yourself as viewing a whole system or a part of it.
I don’t think people are automatically obliged to try and gather enough information to view a system as a whole – indeed, I don’t think it is possible. But I do think there are circumstances in which some obligation holds. And I think it is important to remember and signal that we are only viewing part of a system, when we communicate our judgments.
July 26, 2009 at 1:15 pm |
> there’s something about how you hold your judgments,
> whether you consider yourself as viewing a whole system
> or a part of it
Yes, very much agreed.
I find it manifests for me often in terms of how I approach contradictory ideas or perceptions.
If I’m aware that I’m only seeing a fragment, then contradictions are no big deal… in fact, they can be a huge source of insight, since they suggest the possibility of triangulating the thing itself. (Back when I was posting a lot about figure drawing, this came up over and over.)
Conversely, if I find myself getting anxious about contradictions, that’s usually a sign that I’ve allowed myself to get too invested in a single perspective.
July 27, 2009 at 5:32 pm |
It’s taken a while to get me back to a keyboard… I’ll comment back on my journal about the religious stuff (where we seem to be separated only by a fundamental divide and an ocean or two) and comment here on:
“I just don’t think we can judge a whole system from our experience of it, ever.”
This seems to me to be true but not particularly useful statement. It looks like a special case of the general rule that “It’s always more complicated.”
I can point to a several cases where it’s not only possible but imperative to judge a whole system from our experience of it – without running foul of Godwin’s law. The Inquisition, say. Witch burning. Thatcherism. Actually, and because I really DO want to leave the Nazis out of it, let’s look at Thatcherism. A wide, systems view, would take into account world economics, the decay of manufacturing industry, the desirability of cheap labour and the utility of a politicised police force, and probably come up with something pithy and balanced to say. My personal experience was of incredible hardship and poverty inflicted on a lot of people. For me not to come to judgement on that would not only be less than useful, it would be less than human.
July 27, 2009 at 6:57 pm |
If everyone made judgments on that basis, we’d never make any hard decisions ever, and we’d all be worse off. We don’t have infinite resources. Societies are complex systems: actions that are very beneficial to one group of people will be inevitably harmful to another. Sometimes decisions have to be made on a system level. (I couldn’t do it. But I do think sometimes it needs to be done.)
But I think this is actually a different point. It’s possible, in fact, to hold both views. I don’t disagree with your view, but I want it held in a context. In some contexts, that harm is easier to accept than others. For me, in the context of Thatcher’s administration, it’s difficult to accept because I can’t point to system-level good. The systemic effects that I’ve observed (through a variety of sources, including but not limited to my personal experience) are pretty harmful. But in a different context, my view might be different.
July 27, 2009 at 7:38 pm |
“in a different context, my view might be different”
That’s probably the crux – that all of our views are context dependent, and that includes those of us trying to hold the systems view.
It’s years since I read much Rawls, but his “Theory of Justice” had a huge impact on me back in the days when my brain was still flexible enough to take new inputs.
Apologies if you’ve been there, but the fundamental thought is that a just system can only be formulated if you aren’t aware of where you will fit in it – that you have perfect knowledge of everything, every consequence, except your own position. Then you’ll be in a position to decide if the harmful consequences are worth enduring if they might affect you, and not some unknown prole (there’s some juicy stuff about our willingness to gamble, which came along later, but that’s the basic idea).
My lack of comfort with decisions based on a systems view is that they tend to be implemented by people (ok, they’re always implemented by people) who don’t have to experience those harmful consequences themselves.