Thursday, May 25, 2017

MUTUAL SELF-DESTRUCTION AND THE PURSUIT OF PEACE - Part II

"The peace... which passeth understanding..."
Philippians 4


FEELING AT PEACE

Mutual self destruction may appear to be a new phenomenon that has emerged in our collective consciousness as a result of living in a nuclear age, but as I have hinted in my last post, the fear of mutual annihilation is rooted in our instinctual past.   The reason I feel confident in saying this is that the pursuit of lasting peace is as old as human history.

Peace is an abstract concept that does not exist without a context. While many may think of peace as a feeling, I would suggest that peace can neither be felt nor is it an emotional state.  Peace is a condition brought about by absence.  In other words, peace requires that a disturbing or disrupting precondition is removed or ended in order to "feel" at peace.

What we define as "feeling at peace" are emotions associated with an absence that have disturbed and disrupted our sense of normalcy which result in feelings of relief, joy, and/or security.  As such we tend to make such emotional feelings synonymous with a "feeling" of peace, but for the purpose of these posts, peace is defined as absence.

Why this is important to understand I hope to make clear in this post.  The primary reason peace is so difficult to maintain is, among other things, that humans are not natural peacekeepers. We are the descendants of prehistoric predators who have risen to the top of the food chain only to realize that we are the only creatures on the planet who pose a challenge to our own survival.

This realization has been around since the dawn of human history.  In my opinion, realizing our proclivity towards self destruction contributed to the rise of civilization and turning us into the religious animals we are.  What living in a nuclear age has changed is in regard to how easily accomplished this is and how tentative maintaining peace as the absence of all out war has become.

PURSUING PEACE

The pursuit of peace is rooted in the polar functions of the Impulse of Religion and the Differentiating Paradigm of Religion. In past posts I have used these terms to identify two early phases of religious development; the recognition of needing others to survive and differentiating what it means to be same and other.

Hypothetically speaking, one can identify the Impulse of Religion with the intellectual mind and the Differentiating Paradigm of Religion with the instinctual mind.  The Impulse of Religion seeks to reason and  recognizes the need of the other; whereas, the Differentiating Paradigm of Religion sees differences in the other as a threat to me and mine and leads to clumping around that which is familiar and fearing that which is different.

In these two functions is found the roots of civilization and the ideologies that bind us together into religious communities.  In this post, I want to ponder how the fears we have are related to the concept of peace and how the perception of fear and the pursuit of peace to rid us of our fear created a religious (binding) reaction that led to theism and civilization.

Fear is what brought us to our intellectual senses, so to speak. Once we rose to the top of the food chain, annihilated the competition, and started to populate and spread out over the world as tribal nomads, the biggest creature hazard we faced was ourselves. The other threat to our existence was natural disaster and the unseen.   Harnessing nature turned out to be an easier task than harnessing our predatory instincts which we turn on ourselves.

Theism arose to address that which humans found difficult to control or subdue in themselves. Initially the focus of theism was an attempt to placate what was understood to be an even higher level of creature, the gods, who were believed to control the unseen hazards and the forces of nature.
Human intuition (an enormous leap beyond instinct) deduced that every action involving inanimate substances in nature had a creature cause behind it.

Even though humans were at the top of the food chain on earth, intuition led our earliest ancestors to conclude there to be higher levels of the food chain, the gods, who were causing all sorts of havoc; earthquakes, floods, storms, and volcanism, not to mention the causes of disease and plagues.  Human and animal sacrifices to the gods give evidence to the primitive understanding that the gods were considered part of the food chain we needed to fear.  Simply put, the gods were a tough crowd to please.

Eventually, intellectual theism addressed and attempted to abate the innate forces within ourselves that caused us to engage in acts considered self destructive.  The greatest feat in early human history was the domestication of ourselves.  We call it being civilized.

Like domestication, civilization requires elements of control in order to ensure order and avoid chaos. Civilization led to consistent practices that people began to rely on; a familiarity that, for the most part resulted in contentment.  In that respect very little has changed about being human.  As long as we're content, we abhor change, but we are rarely content for long.

Unfortunately, history demonstrates that humans are poor at self regulation.  Curbing our predatory instincts as individuals became a communal effort and remains so to this day.  Even when regulated, contentment is fleeting. We live in a universe of polarities that is reflected in our genetic makeup and evident in our ideological interactions.

This polarity finds expression in almost every human activity.  Take our attraction to sports; for example, and the attraction of both seeing people win and lose.  Consider the daredevil: The greater the risk of failure, the greater the feeling of accomplishment - surviving a momentary brush with death leads to the exhilarating feeling of being alive.  Of course not everyone is a daredevil, but you can catch my drift.

THE VOID OF PEACE

The difficulty with maintaining peace is that it presents a void.  In the short term, peace "feels" good because we fill the void with transient feelings generated by the absence of that which we found disruptive and disturbing.  Over time these feelings dissipate and feelings of ennui set in. Boredom is a reaction to the absence of stimulus.  Peace is not very stimulating.  The key to maintaining peace is how to stave off the ennui that will eventually ensue and lead our species to engage in disruptive and disturbing behaviors.

Peace may be too abstract for us to fully realize due to its transcendent nature.  The Christian apostle, Paul, captures this sense of transcendence in his letter to the Philippians, "And the peace of God which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." (Philippians 4:7 KJV) While such a peace sounds tangible to our longing ears, Paul's concept of a peace that passes understanding grasps the abstract transcendent nature of peace.  What Paul's comment brings to bear on the concept of a lasting peace is the notion of agency in order to still (quiet) the mind and heart of a predatory species that is subject to ennui.  Paul's identifying agency  of God's peace is the agency of faith in his concept of "Christ Jesus."

Peace requires agency.  We are an addiction-prone species that craves stimulation.  When we are not feeling stimulated, we feel the void; we feel empty and bored.  Peace, in and of itself, is boring and boring is not bad.  Experts will tell us that boredom serves a purpose.  It's nature's way to make us pause and consciously quiet the mind. It is ironic, then, that we grew up in a world where parents and authority figures enforced the notion of "go out and play outside" - do something - when we complained of boredom.  It might have been better if they said, "Think about that for a moment." 

On a personal level "thinking" and quieting the mind is readily accomplished, but on a global level boredom is a problem.  Globally speaking, are we bored?

Are certain global populations prone to engage in activities that disturb and disrupt merely to feel stimulated. This may sound like a trite assessment of situations involving suicide bombers and mass killings, but is modern terrorism, for example, in reality a response to global boredom that has been brought about by a relative prolonged period of peace?

Has the void of  peace caused a polar reversal to occur in what former President Obama called the trajectory of history, which, until recently, has tended towards inclusiveness?

Until next time, stay faithful.


Sunday, May 21, 2017

GETTING TO KNOW AN UNKNOWN GOD - A homily

[Delivered on May 21, 2017 at Christ Episcopal Church, Yankton, South Dakota]

Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ From Acts 17
It’s not every Sunday one can give a homily based on Greek legend, Geek mythology, and the New Testament. So I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to do so.
In order to fully appreciate our first reading from Acts 17, we need to know why Paul addressed the Athenians at the Areopagus and why he cites two poems about the Greek god, Zeus. The author of Acts, Luke, likely assumed that everybody of his day, two thousand years ago, would have known why, but knowledge can get lost in two thousand years.  So let’s take a moment to rewind and review:
The Areopagus is a rock outcropping in Athens that was used in Paul’s time for conducting public trials. Here the Athenians wanted to discern if Paul was introducing a new religion into their city as Paul’s preaching about Jesus and his resurrection seemed to indicate.  Introducing a new religion was considered corruption, a serious crime in ancient Athens; a charge that resulted in the death of Socrates in 399 BCE. 
On his way there, Paul passes an altar to “The Unknown God,” the history of which Paul uses in his effective defense, along with citing two early Greek poems to support the premise that he was not preaching something new.
The first poet cited is Epimenides who wrote a poem called, "Cretica." In "Cretica," Epimenides argues with his fellow Cretans that Zeus was very much alive as evident in our being alive after they had built a symbolic tomb declaring him dead:
They fashioned a tomb for you, holy and high one,
                        Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies. 
                        But you (Zeus) are not dead: you live and abide forever,
                        For in you we live and move and have our being[1]

 As a side note, the line about Cretans being liars is cited, verbatim,  in Paul’s letter to Titus (1:12) and is the basis for Epimenides Paradox which states if being a Cretan himself, Epimenides, in calling Cretans liars is also a liar by telling a truth applicable to himself.
In fact, the altar to The Unknown God has a close connection to Epimenides:
During the time of the great Athenian law giver, Solon, the Athenians suffered a horrendous plague attributed to an act of treachery on people who they granted asylum and then killed. To rid themselves of the resulting plague, they tried appeasing their gods through sacrifice, but nothing was working. 
So they approached the Oracle at Delphi who informed them that there was a god they failed to appease.  When they asked which one, she said she didn’t know but they should send for Epimenides, a prophet in Crete, who would help them.  So they did.
When Epimenides arrives in Athens he comments that they must be very religious because of the many gods and goddesses they have. He told them there is a good and great unknown god who was smiling on their ignorance but was willing to be appeased. When they perform the proper rituals throughout the city, the plague is ended and they erect altars to this unknown god throughout Athens. [2]
The second “poet” Paul cites is the philosopher Aratus, from his work Phenomenon:
… always we all have need of Zeus. For we are also his offspring[3]
* * * * * * * * * * *
Avoiding the name Zeus, Paul infers, via his reference to the unknown god, the philosophical idea of a Superior God whose nominal identity is simply “God” which we monotheists have adopted.  As a result, Paul’s catechesis on God and who we are in relation to God boils down to this: 
Question: Who is God? 
Answer: God is that Being in which we live, move, and have our being. 
Question: Who are we? 
Answer: We are his offspring.”
In my opinion, this is the best definition of God and our relationship to God found anywhere. God is the active force of all that is, has been, and will be, and we are the incarnate manifestations of that activity. We live because God is living, we move because God is moving, we are because God is.  This concept of everything existing in God – panentheism – is found in Paul’s understanding of the Risen Christ. Jesus, as the Risen Christ, is, in Paul’s theology,  the cosmic nexus between God and humankind.
Paul’s personal encounters with Jesus occurred in his visions of the Risen Christ.  The only historical information about Jesus that gets any press began in Paul’s epistles begins on Maundy Thursday and ends on Easter Morning. Consequently, his epistles never mention Jesus’ parentage, his miracles, his parables, his disciples other than Peter, or his ministerial teachings other than the words of institution used in Holy Communion. 
For Paul, the Resurrection was the reset point of God’s original relationship with us. Jesus as the Risen Christ is declared by Paul to be the first born of a new creation who, as a man was sown a physical body and, as the Christ was raised a spiritual body as stated in his first letter to the Corinthians (15)
* * * * * * * * * *
In his defense at the Areopagus, Paul also accused the Athenians of becoming too religious for their own good, as demonstrated by their many idols. They had become God-blind – a problem every age encounters, including our own. Paul knew something about being God-blind. 
It took his vision of the risen Christ on his way to Damascus to experience literal blindness which led him to see how blind he was about God.  He went from being Saul, the Pharisee, a devout believer in a God of laws and strict discipline, to Paul, a prisoner of Christ, a man of faith, hope, and love who became shackled to a God of faith, hope, and love in us.
It was the wide embrace of God, the God and Father of all, as expressed in the poetry of Epimenides and Aratus that prompted him to a make the revolutionary claim echoed in every social/religious debate to this day:
“For there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one in the risen Christ,” as he writes to the Galatians (Galatians 3:28).
Too often it is the Christians of today; especially those of rigid inclination who treat the Bible as being the literal inerrant word of God that are not only God-blind but also Bible-idolators.  After all, it was Paul who entered into their inerrant view of the Biblical record the words of Epimenides and Aratus, the poets of Zeus, giving Epimenides’ Paradox a new twist:
If the word of God is literal and inerrant, are the quotes by Epimenides and Aratus found in the New Testament, inerrant also? 
By extension, does not Paul’s use of their definition of Zeus make Zeus another name for God?
* * * * * * * * * *
God is known by many names; and yet, no single name can describe the ineffable, intimate, pervading sense of BEING that God is.  So in our liturgies and hymns when we reference God’s name, we capitalize the word “Name,” as in today’s opening hymn:
Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes, most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days, almighty, victorious, thy great Name we praise.
To all life thou givest, to both great and small; in all life thou livest, the true life of all.  We blossom and flourish, like leaves on the tree, then wither and perish; but nought changeth thee.[4]
To which, I am confident, Aratus, Epimenides, and Paul would say, “AMEN!”  
* * * * * * * * * *
Until next time, stay faithful.



[1] Translated by Prof. J. Rendel Harris in a series of articles in the Expositor (Oct. 1906, 305–17; Apr. 1907, 332–37; Apr. 1912, 348–353;  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides
[2] “To An Unknown God,” Christians in Crete, Connecting God’s Family http://christiansincrete.org/news/to-an-unknown-god/
[3] “Phenomenon” translated by G.R. Mair; http://www.theoi.com/Text/AratusPhaenomena.html
[4] “Immortal, invisible, God only wise” by Walter Chalmers Smith (1824-1908), number 423 in The Hymnal 1982.

Thursday, May 4, 2017

MUTUAL SELF-DESTRUCTION AND THE PURSUIT OF PEACE - Part I

With this post, I begin to ponder the  concept of mutual self destruction and the pursuit of peace.  In this posts I will speculate on why there appears to be a strong connection between fear and peace in the human mind.


MUTUAL SELF DESTRUCTION AND WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT OUR SPECIES



I remember being in grade school in the late 1950's and early 60's and having to participate in atomic bomb drills, by climbing under our desks and hunkering down. These were, of course, acts of futility should we have been under a real atomic attack as anyone from Japan would have told us.  I suspect the drills served another purpose; to bring the reality of mutual self-destruction home to the average U.S. citizen and provide some sense of hope about surviving an attack by doing something. I also remember the television commercials about building fallout shelters which my family couldn't have afforded.  I grew up feeling that disaster was upon us at any given moment.  I didn't obsess about it, but it was always there, ready to pop up into my awareness.

Since that time, our ability to destroy each other has vastly improved; with larger nuclear, chemical, and biological arsenals at our disposal.  Deterrence is the foundation upon which modern defense is built.  A relative sense of world peace is maintained by the fact that an all out global war involving any or all of these weapons would ensure the annihilation of life on this planet. We have witnessed their effectiveness on a small scale in Japan, Iraq, and Syria.

This fear has kept us from all out war for nearly three quarters of a century, but it has become an increasingly tenuous deterrent as the rise of nationalism amongst first world nations is evident and the treatise that they agreed on are being questioned.

Peace based on the fear of mutual self destruction is porous.

This foundation holds only on the assurance that those who possess such weapons will not use them and keep them from those who would.  This worked as long as the knowledge and technology needed to make such weapons could be withheld, however, knowledge is fluid and eventually is leaked.  The only thing staving off world-wide proliferation is control of the materials needed to make such weapons.

This is where philosophy becomes pragmatic. Science can tell us how to make such destructive weapons but it cannot prevent us from using them. As I have mentioned in other posts, there is a tendency in the field of science to "do it" if something is thought to be theoretically possible; that if  your side doesn't "do it" another side will.   This has been born out in the development of nuclear and other weapons.  It is that reality that has pushed us towards making a philosophical solution that is rooted in the ethical mandate to refrain from doing that which one wouldn't want done.

It is no longer a question of refraining from doing to others what one doesn't want done to oneself.  It is an imperative of not doing it at all because doing it is suicide.

What the concept of mutual destruction demonstrates is that fear remains the most potent motivation in the human drive for survival.  While most would say that peace is what we desire most, our desire for peace, by itself, is not potent or visceral enough to prevent us from self destruction whereas the fear of it is.  Fear produces a tangible feeling that peace does not.  We can gauge fear better than peace and there may be a reason for that.

PREDATORY FEAR

Fear is a predatory instinct related to environmental factors. When factors that contribute to fear are present they can be measured by the intensity of the fear we feel.  Peace, on the other hand, is largely an absence of these factors which then results in a feeling of safety and wellbeing.  We experience a momentary sense of relief in the removal of that which we feared.  A sense of peace quickly evaporates into the mundane, however, as the absence of the factors that led to fear is sustained. This can eventually lead to a numbing of the fear factor, something we are witnessing in the world today.

Predation as an instinctual motive for species survival is not prone to maintaining peace.   What has prevented us from killing ourselves off as a species millennia ago has been the recognition that we are the only species on this planet capable of doing so. I believe that warfare evolved as an attempt to curb the predatory instinct and define it in terms of conquest rather than annihilation. The crusades are an example of the papacy trying to maintain peace in Christendom by directing and expending the nobility's war prone tendencies to annihilate each other on freeing the Holy Land from the Arab domination through conquest.

War was largely thought of in terms of military game theory throughout most of warfare's history.  Civilian populations were largely left out of the fray of military battle, but that changed drastically in the First World War when towns and cities became deliberate targets for indiscriminate aerial bombing. World War Two saw cities firebombed for no other purpose than to bring a nation to its knees by terrorizing its population and destroying its infrastructure.  The war with Japan ended with the near total destruction of Hiroshima's and Nagasaki's civilian population by two atomic bombs as a way of securing the end of that war and establishing peace.  It exacted a terrible price and led to an arms race that ensured mutual self destruction.  No amount of rationalization can explain away this gargantuan leap by our species towards self annihilation.

The real victims of war are the civilians in modern warfare.  In the past, armies were defeated and populations conquered and enslaved.  Today cities are destroyed and civilian centers targeted in which hundreds of thousands civilians perish or are forced from their homes while military losses are relatively minor in comparison.

In our narrowing world, conquest is an anachronism that risks annihilation.

Nationalism is a fundamentalism that the world cannot sustain.

A PROFOUND EMBARRASSMENT

We have come to a point in our existence as a species where we hold the keys to our own mass extinction.

So while we can, let's ponder how profoundly embarrassing that is.   Seriously!

Here we are the most intelligent animals on the planet who managed to survived any number of obstacles, who are on the verge of human space exploration while continuing to rely on what basically amounts to a primeval fear of the predator in order to ensure world peace. 

Grant it there are layers of diplomatic rationale in which this fear is couched, but the core upon which world peace is maintained is the looming reality of mutual self destruction which brings me to wonder about the evolution of human intelligence and the role it plays in the pursuit of peace.

We have outsmarted every other species, including the annihilation of many of them along our ascent to the top of the food chain.  As Yuval Harari explained in his book, "Sapiens," this included the probable annihilation of our closest hominid relatives more than twenty thousand years ago.

But what is it that continues to make us fear ourselves and, in turn,  requires such an enormous intellectual effort to prevent us from self annihilation? 

Why do we continue to prey on our own kind?  

While we hold the keys to our self destruction are we capable of forging the keys to lasting peace?

These are and should be uncomfortable questions for us to ponder.  Evolution perhaps holds an answer that, ironically, may not be totally related to evolution itself.

Allow me to speculate, since I really don't know: 

THE INTELLECT

From what little I know of evolution, I have surmised that human intelligence/consciousness developed faster than evolution should have allowed. In fact, we are still accelerating in this intellectual development by evolutionary standards. What actually clues me to this seeming acceleration is the fact that we have not lost our pre-intellectual instincts.  Intelligence does not appear to have necessarily evolved from our instincts or by having opposable thumbs and the ability to manipulate our environment manually.

We have retained our basic predatory survival instincts in spite of being intellectually aware or conscious.  Our instincts remain intact and as I have indicated they are very operative in the pursuit of peace.  We have, however, subdued them intellectually to the extent that we no longer think of them in terms of instincts and have largely intellectualized them as emotions.

So if intelligence is not a direct product of evolution, what is it?

Is learning evolutionary or is it something else? 

For instance, I have been pondering in recent past posts the fact that we get ahead of ourselves intellectually before we can fully process the ramifications of our intellectual endeavors in terms of what it means to our survival.  Of course, we have no sure way of knowing what our intellectual pursuits will result in causing.  It has been only in the last century that we have begun to explore and understand the scientific basis for human intelligence.

It is the intelligent mind that appears to be using our instinctual fears to prevent us from self destruction by seeing a need for the other of our species as necessary to our survival.  This was probably not an a-ha moment, but a gradual awareness preceding from repetitive experiences of seeing the mutual benefit of working with the other.

Nevertheless, our own kind poses a challenge to us and is why we ended up with warring clans, tribes, and nations.  We have yet to rid ourselves of the notion that race and ethnicity pose a threat. 
It's embarrassing that we possess such great intellectual abilities, but find them hostage to a primal fear of the other, even though the other is much the same as oneself. 

Intelligence requires a great deal of energy on a personal level. As a species we have mitigated this expenditure by the process of consensus. [I'm taking a giant leap forward in the story intellectual development.]  The ability to communicate ideas and perceptions have made us the masters of our own reality.  We have been able to convert, corral, and conceptualize our fears into ideologies, moral codes, and laws that minimize the amount of intellectual energy needed by an individual to process or convert our fears in a constructive way.

We have banked on the fear of a more powerful other in order to establish behaviors that preserve our species and maintains our sense of reality.  In other words, we became civilized.

This, in my opinion, was not evolutionary in the sense of a natural, organic evolution. There was a seismic leap to intellect that bypassed instinct while leaving instinct intact. What probably contributed the most to this shift was our ability to communicate discrete information.

One can speculate that the homo sapiens brain's  response to this relatively sudden shift was to shrink in size.  Why?

Shared communicative thought processes requires less space and energy.  Our brains became leaner and more efficient as a result of processing information in a communicative manner rather than solely relying on figuring things out by themselves.

According to anthropologists, Neanderthal brains were larger than the brains of homo sapiens. What this may indicate is higher reliance on the Neanderthal self to process information; that Neanderthals lacked the discreet communicative skills of homo sapiens that gave our species the edge on survival.

ABSTRACTION

Much of what we communicate is conceptually abstract.  We don't think of it as such because much of what is abstract is treated concretely because of its common and regular usage.  Where our ability for abstraction came from is anyone's guess, but it is indicative of the intellectual mind. The intellectual mind is a creative mind, it seeks a tomorrow, whereas the instinctual mind is not and lives for the day.

As such, human beings are of two minds that function simultaneously.   If I were to provide an analogy, I would liken this two minded approach to two tectonic plates colliding with each other with the instinctual mind being subducted under the intellectual mind. What we see is largely the intellectual mind at work, but what we feel remains largely instinctual.

Sticking with this geological analogy, peace is an abstract concept that rides above the subducted predatory impulse that gives rise to fear which periodically emerges into our intellectual consciousness when environmental conditions draw our instinctual drives to the surface.  On the surface of intellectual consciousness, we feel fear that is rooted in our subducted instinctual mind and desire peace as means to ease our collective tremors.

In my next post, I will offer a brief review of the role fear and pursuit of peace has played in defining civilization and religion.

Until next time, stay faithful.