An Ancient Take on a Modern Question: Morality in Our Changing World
by: Michael Hogue on September 23rd, 2010 | 13 Comments »
I mentioned in my last post that the question I was raising – how to respond morally to change when even our moral sources are changing – is an ancient question.
Consider the story of the ancient Greek philosopher Cratylus, who was influenced by the philosophical vision of Heraclitus. Though the name Heraclitus may be unfamiliar, his dictum that “you can’t step into the same river twice” is probably very familiar. Heraclitus was one of the original philosophers of process and flux – everything is dynamic, whatever is, is in motion.
Cratylus was deeply influenced by this idea and followed it to what he deemed to be some of its logical consequences: he argued that not only can one not step into the same river twice, but one can’t step into the same river once.
For Cratylus, if everything is in constant motion, then nothing very precise can be said or claimed about anything. Once a claim is made about some thing, the thing about which we are making that claim has already changed. The flux of the nature of things, according to Cratylus, always destabilizes our claims to certain knowledge about them.
In other words, for Cratylus, flux makes knowledge impossible (at least the kind that aspires to certainty). The changing nature of things continuously subverts our claims to knowledge. In light of this, Cratylus entirely gave up speaking and resorted to merely pointing.
Though change is one of the only constants in our world, pointing at it just won’t do. For Cratylus, the constancy of change presented problems for reason and language. Those are important concerns, no doubt. But what I’m concerned with, and what I was “pointing” toward [with words] in the previous post, has more to do with a moral problem. Though concern with change is ancient, its moral character is peculiarly complex in our time.
Change is not new. What’s new is the velocity of change. Moral concern with change is not new. What’s new is the scale and urgency of our moral concerns amidst the increasing pace of change. The questions of moral responsibility (what is right?) and moral value (what is good?) in a changing world are not new. What’s new is that these questions are complicated by both the velocity of change (in all aspects of nature and culture) and the scale and urgency of moral problems in our world.
On the velocity of change, consider our technological transitions from oral to literate cultures, from literate to digital, from digital to…we know not what – virtual telepathy? (whatever that would be). The velocity of change from one communication age to the next is increasing and the span between them is shrinking.
Consider another example: the planetary climate system. The climate system is and has always been a dynamic, changing system. But the rate/pace/velocity of change since the industrial revolution is out of sync with historic natural fluctuations. This increasing pace of change is at the heart of the case for anthropogenic climate change.
On the increasing scale and urgency of our moral challenges, consider our broader ecological crisis. The Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas argued that never before in the history of humanity has the whole of the biosphere been an object of moral concern. The moral scale of biospheric demise exceeds the scale of all previous moral challenges. So too does its urgency.
The problem is that the increasing velocity of change in our world, and the scale and intensification of our moral problems may be out-pacing (velocity) and out-spacing (scale) and out-deepening (intensity) our existing moral visions.
Until recently, the range and impact of human alterations of the world were relatively limited. Further, the scope and concerns of traditional moral systems have been calibrated to the relatively short reach of human power. But if the range of human power is dilating and the impact of human power is intensifying then our moral systems may need recalibrating.
Are we up to it? Are our moral and religious traditions capable of the radical changes called for by our contemporary challenges? If we’re up for it, how will we go about it? Might there already be changes underway in our moral and religious communities that can generate the kind of collaborations our new challenges demand? Religious and moral revolutions are not about tweaking things; they are not simply about adjusting principles and norms or reinterpreting symbols and rituals. They emerge through deeper change – change in the deeper infrastructure of religious consciousness and moral practice: changing the world depends on changing lives (minds, hearts and hands).
“Changing lives to change the world” is what I take to be the contemporary challenge of progressive religion. At Meadville Lombard Theological School, where I teach, this is our pivotal concern. On first glance, it may not sound like an especially profound idea, but it is. It’s a radical commitment stitched together by a number of implicit theological threads.
Being committed to “changing lives to change the world” implies something about the nature and tasks of human becoming (theological anthropology): we and our world are not usually or often the way we should be; we need to change our lives to change the world into what we hope for ourselves and our world to become.
There is also an implicit theological claim about the nature and tasks of religious community (ecclesiology): the church (in my tradition) exists as a gathered assembly called together and called out to represent, imagine, and embody (imperfectly) what we and the world hope to become. Our religious communities and institutions are some of the most powerful channels for “changing lives to change the world”.
Of course not all change is morally constructive, and religious communities have an ambiguous moral history. But our religious communities and institutions, for good and for ill, are the world’s most powerful transformers of cultural imagination and moral practice. “Changing lives to change the world” is a social commitment, deeply linking personal transformation and social change as reciprocal imperatives.
Along with these commitments, there is also an implicit theological view of the nature and tasks of human culture and history (eschatology): though “the arc of the universe may be long, it bends toward justice” (King, paraphrasing Theodore Parker). This is a faith commitment more than an empirical claim. And as a faith commitment, it’s also a call to action, for the arc doesn’t bend of its own accord. History and the future are open. Justice is co-created through the joining of deep neighbor-love with delight in the holy.
“Changing lives to change the world” is a hard gospel. But in the face of the constancy of change, amidst the swirl and flux of existence, if we care to repair the world, we must not resign merely to pointing.
This reminds me of one of the most exciting books I’ve ever read — Tom Driver’s Christ in a Changing World. If I may be so bold as to attempt to summarize, he says that the Bible makes clear that God is not static, and is never in the past, but always in the present leading into the future. The great blasphemy, then, of the Christian tradition, is locking God in the Christ event that took place in and through Jesus in the 1st century, causing the Christian church to essentially look backwards for the past two thousand years. Driver argues that that, though, is the one place we are sure not to find Christ, because the essence of Christ is change, transformation. This blog post, read through that lens, is even more fascinating.
Hi, Erik,
Thanks for your comment. I will look up the title you mention, as it sounds spot on. Part of what I take you to be (more than) “pointing” at is the event structure of the Christ. The Christ need not be understood as a singular historical person, incarnating the divine in one time and place, toward whom we are ever looking backward, but as a character of personality continually calling out for imitation in the present and into the future. There’s a long history of christologies and theologies of atonement that approximate something like this idea: against the substitutionary atonement, the Christ is understood as an exemplary model of the kenotic (self-emptying), radically other-regarding life of faith. Thanks again for your reply.
“Justice is co-created through the joining of deep neighbor-love with delight in the holy.” I love that sentence.
thank you, Mike and Erik, for this fascinating post. I link to it from my own post, http://theyeschurch.blogspot.com/2010/09/crisis-flux-practice-as-usual.html. I also posted Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, “Daily” in my comments section, pointing out how some of our most powerful practices evolve more slowly and organically.
This post both comforts me and calls me to change my life to change my world. Thanks!
I hope we also remember that charity begins at home. or the idea that a child will lead us
If you’ve watched any recent documentations re how children about 5 or 6 or 7 view the technology that pulls their parents attention away from them…you will see provocatively the kind of impact our ‘change’ is making on the hearts and minds of our children. Yes, sure they adjust. They find other role models. And who or what will that be….their avators no doubt. The manifestations of their imaginations, dreams, hopes and concerns on line. If we all stay with our communicators, we may be well-known. How that will impact our world much less our work remains to be seen. But seen and seen soon, it shall be. God bless us.
This is a beautfully articulated and fascinating post, to me… I also enjoy the synchronicity of its urgency with a post on which I am working, and find that you have done such a handsome job of just cataching us up in both concern and wonder at the dynamicism of our times.
and in which i am interested in your take and that of others…but first i would like to say that one of the concepts of G-d that has been precious to me since my studies in religion at Fordham, is: “Dynamic Transcendence: The Correlation of Confessional Heritage and Contemporory Experience in a Biblical Model of Divine Activity” by Paul D. Hanson.
Also, THE SHAKING OF THE FOUNDATIONS and the NEW BEING by Paul Tillich…who may have been the first to asert that G-d IS dynamic transcendence, at least from the perspective of the Abrahamic traditions.
But what i am concerned about is the notion of personal choice, accountability, responsibility, and action as an agent of Love. I will say right off, my favorite Jesus scene in the Bible, even over young Jesus studying his elders and learning from the discussion of the learned sages in the Temple, raising Lazarus, healing the halt, and the Sermon on the Mount, is Jesus overturning the moneylenders’ tables. Jesus’ Love in action does not preclude force and setting limits, and that seems to me to be pretty essential when we think about how many Christians believethat they can do anything they like in this life and be welcomed into heaven because Jesus has already died for their sins.
i truthfully appreciate the theology of all religions because it is often in study and discussion that ills that otherwise may accrue to belief systems over time and become problems instead of solve problems, are so much more likely to be healed by contemplation, meditation, inspiration and prayer. But anyway, i came up in a period of religious philosophy when existentialism was having a positive and profound impact on virtually every field of science and humanities, and i include religion in the humanities. Existentialism to me offers still a vital and precious and currently under-utilized approach to change theory for the millenium.
Rilke wrote “Choose to be changed and experience the Rapture of the Fire..” unfortunately this morning when i sought the full poem, i found only that the rapture as a term had been hijacked. LOL–but true..in any case, the vital word here is CHOOSE.
for all the New Age rhetoric and Abrahamic faith fundamentalist dogma about change, it seems to me that rather than change self, most of us do gooders are sincerely trying to change others to be more like ourselves. That to me requires a caution–and self-awareness, and checks…none of us and no school, has a monopoly on G-d, or on righteousness, or on religion, spirituality, philosophy, psychology, or scientific thought and endeavor.
So let us think about the importance of offering , rather than LEGISLATING or DEMANDING, what we believe to be positive alternatives, which often coexist with other positive alternatives, and certainly co-exist with the devil’s own alternatives, and hence result sometimes in multiple choices and nurtured change…which is supported extremely well by communities of UNDERSTANDING and TRUSTWORTHINESS, where folks are SAFE and VALUED. When schools and learning environments are structured in such a way, pretty exciting things generally happen.
My fear is that we will continue to see our world as one in which our particular view, race, creed, or other partisan subgroup to being human and American, and a global citizen as we all are now, is the only one with value, and fight to the death over rrules and laws that nobody can actually enforce.
The only way for actualized social change to occur, unless we succumb to totalitarian dictatorship, which allows for a few heros of resistance but is terribly unsafe and soul crushing for the majority of people who are NOT rocket scientists of the spirit or endurance atheletes of the soul,
is that people CHOOSE to change.
When i was searching for the Wlater Kaufmann translation of Sonnets to Orpheus, which in Xii is i believe the quote i just shared, i found some extrordinary translations of the Panther and the elegies and sonnets…by many people, some of whom are just bloggers on the web with a knowledge of german and a love for Rilke that shone through their work. In each translation, though they differed greatly in words, came through the tremendous power and beauty, richness adn inspiration, and dynamic transcendence of the original to which each ptranslator very visibly truthfully and conscientiously referred. Yet each was as beautiful for the spin on it of the individeual as the original…it puts me to mind of texts sacred to us …i hope we can approach our mporal dilemmas with such faithfulness and creativity to Source, and to exegesis
Can there be change without memory?
If you hold that there is a mind-independent world, a reality outside of mind, then yes, there is change without memory. There is plenty of change in the world, it seems to me, that isn’t dependent on conscious memory. I do think, however, that the moral questions regarding change in the world (is it good or not, in what ways, how can/should change be directed?) only arise with consciousness and memory.
I think I would like to respond to the concept of deep neighbor-love by stating–and then confessing–some things about myself. First, the statement: I have an ability which I have read is fairly rare, particularly in men–color memory. My wife is amazed at my beagle-like ability when it comes to color. Show me a color and I can days or months (or years if I especially like the color) exactly match it whether it’s a paint chip or fabric or a work of art. Actually, to be more accurate, it’s not that I can remember colors; it’s that I can’t forget them. I have no idea how I can do this and I have no idea why not everyone can. The point is that since I didn’t learn how to do this, I have no idea how I could teach this to someone else. I suspect it’s like having perfect pitch in this way.
Here’s the confession: I have no idea how to have deep neighbor-love. I’m not all that sure I understand the particulars of actualizing the concept, as I think about it. It sounds very profound but, unlike remembering colors, it doesn’t sound effortless, it isn’t just there for me to use whenever I want to. But like color memory, I’m skeptical that flatly stating that one ought to have deep neighbor-love constitutes a lesson in or recipe for having it, even for those who sincerely want to. Judging by the effort priviledged classes of people put into distancing themselves from the moral reality of the world–and by how effectively they manage to do so–it would seem that “ought to” messages in and of themselves fail to cause the behaviorial changes that equate with deep neighbor-love. Even coupling such messages with dire predictions about the future of our species (or an individual’s probability of spending eternity someplace desirable) should we fail to cultivate deep neighbor-love seem to have a similarly negligible effect, statistically speaking. In other words, deep neighbor-love might be a moral imperative but an observation of this alone is not a blueprint for success.
It might in fact be the case that teaching a feeling a deep neighbor-love to others is no more doable than is teaching color memory or perfect pitch. However, I am highly doubtful that the concept can be spread to “tipping-point” sufficiency absent such attempts.
Good questions Ean. The question of whether or not moral virtue can be taught is also a classic moral question (e.g. Plato’s Meno, which opens with Meno asking this very question). I don’t think that the practice of deep neighbor love is either something one has or doesn’t have, like color memory or perfect pitch. I don’t think there are many folks these days who would argue that moral virtue / goodness is something that’s innately present. The other point raised, unless I’m mis-reading your reply, is whether simply expressing an ought statement (e.g. “we ought to practice deep neighbor love”) is sufficient to the actual behavioral exercise of neighbor love. Of course it’s not. There’s a huge gap in many (all?) of us between knowing what should be done and doing what should be done, between moral knowledge and moral will. St. Paul puts it very well, I think:”The good that I would, I do not do” (Romans 7: 15). In other words, deep neighbor love, like any other moral commitment, entails practice beyond words (pun intended).
Listening to/reading various individuals speaking about their lives and their experience… and introduction to–initiation into–deep neighbor-love, I suspect that it’s substantially a learned thing. Xavier Le Pichon, a scientist who helped move us from the belief that the earth was a fixed thing to the understanding we have of plate tectonics, was so immersed in his work (for years) that he says he lost the ability to see the suffering of others. When he realized that, he took some rather radical steps, and immersed himself in serving the suffering–working for some months with the profoundly poor and suffering in Calcutta, for example.
It’s work, for most all of us. I suspect that there are people who have a natural talent–a sensitivity, a knack–for it, just as Ean has an unusual capacity for color. But few people (and particularly men!) train themselves to such perceptions, just as few train their awareness of pitch–in the West. Yet rare as perfect pitch would *appear* to be, it isn’t in China, where the language depends on it; the pitch of one’s pronunciation is critical to being comprehended. And thus, astonishingly, essentially everyone has perfect pitch there. It’s a question of what neurological capacities we hone, train, and call forth. A non-Han child raised in China will have the same experience learning pitch; it’s not a genetic thing. No doubt there are those who master it more easily–and probably so young that few people even notice it as anything more than cleverness or a bit of precocity. Because that’s all it is–there.
Here, where the pitch hardly matters, it’s rare.
Now ask… where in our culture do we hold up, admire, train, learn, and affirm the need of deep neighbor-love? Given the rarity of such in the culture, what makes us imagine that we’d elicit and evoke it very well, or even really feel it… or at least feel we “get it” or understand it? It’s hard. It’s hard because it’s a minimally used and little exercised set of skills and feelings.
There is, in my family, a history of world-class musical capacity. But I’ve not really every trained myself to it, nor have my siblings, nor have we pushed our children towards it (mine personally–but the whole generation as well). We just didn’t make anything of it.
–Ah, I see my colleague, Charlotte, has made the same point as I’ve been writing this (belaboring the point, perhaps).
Like many middle-class, progressive, justice seeking people, I am instantly drawn to the concept of deep neighbor-love as a deeply religious and spiritual concept that we might all do good to follow. But, I, too, am prone to abstractions and reading Ean’s post took the air out of my over-inflated good feeling. I think it might do me some good just to know my neighbors–literally. But Ean, I am not sure this concept is innate, I understand it to be a practice. One that requires commitment and focus and constant attention. And as reflected in Dave Belden’s blog post, an equally deep awareness of one’s place in our class structure and all of the paradoxes and challenges to deep neighbor-love that position brings. An awareness of knowing what I am afforded by my middle-class and what I might be willing to give up or re-frame or pay more attention to. That is all is rumbling around in my consciousness (as opposed to subconscious) feels like one small step in the right direction.
Just a thought for Ean Behr: If you can open yourself up/train yourself to see people’s aura’s (or as a friend of mine puts it, “someone’s colors”, then maybe you can develop “deep neighbor-love.” Attaching a different visual to the empathic experience may make it easier to focus on this learning.