See also the review.
In the preview for the Long Reflection reading list, I wrote some about what I want to get out of my reading of On the Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by Carol Diethe, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson).
Other than that, I think I will add that my approach will be, over all, to see what the text provokes me to say in a fairly open way (not intentionally hold onto the agendas I already have, but let the agendas come up naturally as I read).
See also the postview of this reading list.
I want to think more about the Long Reflection. As I understand it, it is a search for the truth about moral values, a long process of reflective reason that seeks some kind of coordinating value set for our species as a whole.
So I want to do some readings, related to this. These readings have been chosen somewhat unsystematically. Given my resources at this time, this project will have to be provisional.
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Here are the things I want to read or re-read:
The parts of The Precipice (by Toby Ord) that refer to the Long Reflection. This gives a basic definition of the Long Reflection. [My copy is the hard-bound / ISBN 978-1-5266-0021-9]
I decided that the discussion in The Precipice of the Long Reflection, which is brief, belongs in this preview, because it helps validate whether my concept of what the Long Reflection is (in the sense of a basic definition of the phrase) is in line with Ord's, which I'll take as either "the established view" on the Long Reflection or "likely enough basically the established view". Michael Aird, in a reading list on the EA Forum doesn't list a lot of other sources. Looking at the "long reflection" tag,I see that I have read all the other articles (few in number) that are in the category (as of 22 August 2022) except Gloor's and Vinding's, and I just read the short one about Robin Hanson's views on the Long Reflection. I have listened to a majority of the podcast episodes on Aird's list, and my sieve-like memory can't support me saying the guests never saying anything to the contrary, but I feel like if they radically disagreed, I might remember that. (Similarly with the articles I read.) [I see in Hanson's post a link to another critical article on the Long Reflection by Felix Stocker. I may include Hanson and Stocker in this reading list, as well as Vinding, and maybe Gloor if I have time. Also through the EA Forum tag page, I see this post by Paul Christiano. There may be other articles not directly accessible from the EA Forum, but for a provisional post like this, I think I have done enough research. // The Precipice notes are in blockquotes.
A list of blog posts and EA Forum posts about normative uncertainty, the future of ethics, and moral progress:
Cold Takes (Holden Karnofsky): Defending One-Dimensional Ethics, Futureproof Ethics.
How moral progress happens: the decline of footbinding as a case study - EA Forum post by rosehadshar.
What does moral progress consist of? - EA Forum post by jasoncrawford.
Thinking Complete (Richard Ngo): Making decisions using multiple worldviews, Which values are stable under ontology shifts?
Teaching Children to Care (Ruth Sidney Charney): Where does morality come from? Maybe from teaching children to care as part of managing classroom behavior.
On the Genealogy of Morality (Friedrich Nietzsche): Where does morality come from? (Whatever Nietzsche says.)
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Here are some preliminary thoughts that I have about the Long Reflection.
Some problems I see with the Long Reflection:
I have supposed that it is a search for something that can coordinate action as a society. That means that it must be some way for all / most of us to come to the same views. I see two ways to do this. One is to find the "epistemic answer" (good reasoning) which will convince everyone / most people of the truth. The other is for everyone to agree on a pragmatic society-wide behavior, despite the fact that people disagree.
Is it really the search for something that can coordinate action as a society? Ord says (p. 191 / ch. 7 "Grand Strategy for Humanity" section): --If we achieve existential security, we will have room to breathe. With humanity's longterm potential secured, we will be past the Precipice, free to contemplate the range of futures that lie open before us. And we will be able to take our time to reflect on what we truly desire; upon which of these visions for humanity would be the best realisation of our potential. We shall call this the Long Reflection--
Who is "we"? "We" is a plural word which means that there is some kind of collective thinking to produce collective action. I guess from this Ord might not think that we all have to be part of the same collective, but he might.
Later, same page, continuing to p. 192: --The ultimate aim of the Long Reflection would be to achieve a final answer to the question of which is the best kind of future for humanity. This may be the true answer (if truth is applicable to moral questions) or failing that, the answer we would converge to under an ideal process of reflection. It may be that even convergence is impossible, with some disputes or uncertainties that are beyond the power of reason to resolve. If so, our aim would be to find the future that gave the best possible conciliation between the remaining perspectives.[10]--
In the note at the end of that passage ("[10]"), Ord discusses deal-making between the different worldviews, dividing up the galaxies between them. The "we" in question is some kind of species-wide (plus AI?) elite, maybe? And the dividing up of galaxies is coordinated action.
My verdict, for now, is that the Long Reflection is conceived of as a way to coordinate action on a very broad ("species-wide+") scale.
I think that the question of "how much would everyone agree with the Long Reflection", as a process of discovery and then of the implementation of the fruits of that process of discovery, is open and could easily be answered by "the Long Reflection will leave a lot of people out, while the pro-LR people will think they were doing the best thing for all sentience-kind, if measures are not taken against that". For instance, if the pro-LR people (the kind of people who would show up to the discussion), with their lengthy reflection come to see that people who disagree can only do so through lack of reflection, they may not have sympathy for the views of those unreflective people, and thus (therefore sort of, or really) not have full sympathy with those people.
In other words, assuming reflectiveness as the main criterion for finding values of worth is a major assumption, which can exclude the values of less-reflective people.
Ord brings up the parallel to the Renaissance in note 12 of Ch. 7. Most people weren't involved in the Renaissance, but that's how we remember that time period. So, did humanity decide, collectively, to go through the Renaissance? Or was it a (semi-intentional) band of artists, philosophers, etc. who made it happen? If you asked a random sample of people at the time "Do you want to see X, Y, Z result of the Renaissance?" what percentage would say "yes" vs. "no"? Was the Renaissance humanity's decision, or did we sort of stumble into it? The Long Reflection is trying to be more deliberate, but is it humanity (or humanity+, to include AI or even animals in the process) making the decision, or is it just a subset of humanity(+)?
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Semi-related: Is the Long Reflection a case of moral progress? We come to know the better views after "reflection"? Moral progress as a pursuit only makes sense if we know what better morals are supposed to look like, which means we have to have some minimalist a priori moral knowledge. Otherwise we have moral motion, but we have no idea if we have moral progress. I wonder what assumptions are baked into "reflection", which might give people a sense that they are value-neutrally evaluating moral change in such a way that they can somehow know that there has been or will be moral progress.
The problem with finding the epistemic answer is that we can't even know how to go about finding it. For instance, I personally believe that reason is the interrelationship of every piece of evidence, however gathered. To me, intuitions and things seen noetically or imaginally of all sorts are evidence. For another group of people, while intuitions are supposed to have something to do with reality, sense perceptions are weighted much more. Also, there are people who seemingly reject the idea that evidence has to come together in one whole. To them, it's fine for there to be a wider body of evidence, and then some other idea or experience that overrides everything else. We can discount evidence and reason as a whole because we have some overriding intuitive knowledge.
Who is right about the nature of reason? How do we know what the right foundation of reason is? I don't know that there is a way out of that dispute. But there might be. I feel like, despite all the skepticism that one could muster, we do have direct, unmediated access to the truth through personal experience. Each of us can be a witness to what we observe.
I think that if it is possible to come to know the truth, it partly comes from acquiring the right intuitions about how to approach reality, including how to be rational. Where do these intuitions come from? One source is through interpersonal relating. Each of the witnesses relates to each other, establishing their trustworthiness with each other both explicitly / intentionally and subtextually / by osmosis. So the Long Reflection can't be just an armchair exercise, but also one of relating to other people. How can you know that a Stone Age tribe has the wrong worldview (the wrong implicit attitudes toward reason), without at least talking to them and really seeing things the way they do? That worldview shapes their moral values.
Maybe this means that the Long Reflection will have to try to resurrect extinct Stone Age cultures, foster new ones being made, foster entirely new cultures. If subcultures of digital humans, no longer fearing death, start to believe that 2 + 2 = 5, the Long Reflection has to consider their point of view, as well as the faction that believes that 2 + 2 = 6.
We don't really know what rationality is supposed to be, so how can we use rationality to find the right moral values? And yet, naively, I feel like I know exactly what rationality is. So I can find the right moral values. Can't we all just be rational?
One could think of the Long Reflection as being a data-processing process. Cultures can generate an infinite number of "X is good" statements. But maybe it's a bounded infinity. Once you know how to answer the "is it 2 + 2 = 4, or 2 + 2 = 5?" question, maybe you know how to answer "is it 2 + 2 = 6?". Maybe, then, once you have talked to enough Stone Age people, you basically know the full range of their intuitions.
Normative and epistemic uncertainty can help us sort through many different worldviews. Our method of dealing with uncertainty may have a large, or even majority, determining effect on our agreed-upon beliefs, the output of the Long Reflection. But can we know how we ought to be normatively and epistemically uncertain? Could different cultures view that differently? Even if naturally, people tend to gravitate toward certain reasonable views about normative and epistemic uncertainty, couldn't there be unreasonable views that some digital human could hold, someone who isn't tethered to physical reality as essentially as we are, perhaps? (Is less affected by "physical reality bias".) How do you know that such a hypothetical person wouldn't be right, no matter how ridiculous their approach to normative and epistemic uncertainty may sound to you?
I see problems with the idea that the Long Reflection could be a sort of armchair philosophy that discovers the epistemic truth about what we should all do. The epistemic truth is something that is observed and witnessed to in the living of life. Being an armchair philosoper is living real life, but only the armchair philosophy part of it. Because people have to be involved with each other in order to produce "that which people as a whole agree on to coordinate their actions", and that involvement isn't just a technocratic "a few people observe everyone without being personally involved with them and come up with an answer for everyone", the Long Reflection has to be something that everyone works on, and has to be conceived of in the most open-minded way possible, to be open to everyone's witness to reality.
So the Long Reflection seems to have to be a partly political process. The difference between one person communicating their intuitions to another, and politics, may not be very big. We want to come to real harmony in our beliefs and intuitions, and that is part of the Long Reflection, but we also have to make decisions as a body of people. So, people trying to solve the problem that the Long Reflection needs to solve need to understand how to set up processes whereby people make pragmatic decisions together despite disagreement. Politics is the overriding of some people's witness for the sake of producing a pragmatic group decision. That sounds horrible, so it is best to produce real harmony instead.
(The overriding of the witness occurs in the implementation phase of politics, and it also chills people's witness when they internalize the thought that "someone else will decide rather than me, whether I want to or not, so I don't need to see things for myself". Politics (in general / the politics that would compete with the Long Reflection) is ongoing / iterative. Perhaps the Long Reflection people could try to encourage people to see for themselves -- "your view / witness may someday affect what decisions we make". Particularly in cases where people are, or suspect they are even if they aren't, in a minority that can't hope to compete with the volume of mainstream opinion.)
In a lot of cases, I would say "but we don't have time to really get everyone on board, thus the need for pragmatic decisions rather than group harmony". But the Long Reflection (The Precipice, Ch. 7, note 7) has an open-ended timeframe: --It is unclear exactly how long such a period of reflection would need to be. My guess is that it would be worth spending centuries (or more) before embarking on major irreversible changes to our future -- committing ourselves to one vision or another--
Isn't it possible that everyone's witness could be wrong? I don't know how to correct for that kind of systematic bias. A correction for that systematic bias could be itself compromised by however everyone is wrong. But we could remember a kind of holy fear as we go forward in our consensus, and be open for revision. The Long Reflection seems to require that at least in some practical sense, we come to The Answer once and for all, so we can go ahead and execute on moral value. But that is dangerous.
Maybe, though, we can show to ourselves that the set of moral values is a bounded infinity, and satisfy ourselves that there is no more that we can suppose about morality that we haven't accounted for? In principle, this process could work, but how could we ever know that it had really reached its completion?
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Do I honestly believe that there's no way to do armchair philosophy to find the epistemic answer? No. Being honest, I admit that I feel like it can be done.
Everyone is an armchair philosopher, already having figured out their own personal Long Reflection sufficiently to forge ahead and execute on their views of moral value.
We are (whether we realize it or not), running away from skepticism. Our method of running away from skepticism shapes what we say about reality. Here is how I run away from skepticism:
I exist. Something which is not-me exists. I personally relate to what is not-me. Everything that touches me is experience. The way experience touches things is by experiencing them, and experience, in what it is in itself (experience) can only be touched by experience. So everything that can directly or indirectly interact with me is experience. When I relate to "all things" (everything that exists), that relationship connects me to "all things". That which connects me to all things, facilitating that relationship, is conscious of all things.
That which should not be, at all, does not exist. To be is to ought to be (at least temporarily). To ought to be is to measure up to a standard which is enforced. The standard and the enforcer are made of experience. They must connect to all things, so that all things are validated. The enforcer of a standard must be legitimate. To be legitimate requires being willing to undergo the law, if possible. The law is the standard and its makers and enforcers. If possible, the law must include, be made by, a person who lives and dies like a person, not knowing all things (this is the law we are under). So the law must be (at least) two conscious beings: one who validates and experiences all things all the time, and one who can live a life as a limited personal being. To be legitimate requires that one keep the law, and part of any ultimate moral law is that we must put it higher than anything else, and thus be willing to die for it. So the standardmakers and enforcers of the law must be willing to die for the law.
So that's the foundation of moral value: what a specific set of personal beings decided was right and wrong. This set includes one person who experiences firsthand what everyone experiences, so we know at least that much about what is right and wrong, that bad experiences are disfavored by the law which must experience what we do. And we also know that one of the fundamental values that they have and must submit to is the willingness to risk everything for the law.
But I feel a kind of fear when I write this, because couldn't someone come from out of nowhere and prove it wrong? Aren't I making some assumptions with what I write? Wasn't I taught in Western schools, shaping how I think about things? Maybe if I had been raised as an Aborigine, or in India, they wouldn't make sense. What about the as yet unimagined culture of the digital humans of the 24th century, who live on a specific part of some specific server? The outside view is terrifying and rules out any belief. But the inside view of what I have described makes sense to me. So it is my witness, and perhaps by asserting it, I force someone else into the terror of the outside view.
Perhaps I can make my ideology that of normative and epistemic uncertainty. But what is implied by that view? It's not perfectly agnostic. Here is my attempt to make it my creed:
I exist. (Uncertainty doesn't matter to me unless it's relevant to me, which requires that I exist.) (And I exist in full thickness, because the word "I" when I say it implies all of me: hopes and profound fears, all that I have done and all that I intend.) I should think that some things are knowable, and that others are not. There are many worldviews held by many people. I don't know (I shouldn't say that I know) in advance which are correct. I should weigh all of them, considering the consequences of them supposing they are true. Somehow I should come up with some sort of guide for how I believe, act, and trust, given what I know.
I think (maybe tentatively) that the "should"s in the above paragraph are necessary either for normative and epistemic uncertainty to fit their (normative uncertainty's and epistemic uncertainty's) own definitions, or for them to be used as an input into finding moral guidelines. But all those "should"s make me ask, do we know that we have enough of a foundation for normative and epistemic uncertainty (the epistemic practice), in order to even begin with normative and epistemic uncertainty?
We could say "Well, we're just uncertain about moral and epistemic uncertainty. It's uncertainty all the way down." One thought that occurs to me is that the methods by which we evaluate uncertainty, are things about which we might have uncertainty. If uncertainty says "there's an X% chance, given uncertainty, that uncertainty is itself valid", maybe we spawn a meta-uncertainty about uncertainty. But that meta-uncertainty has a Y% chance of being valid. Now, X and Y are each between 0 and 1. So every layer of meta-uncertainty is multiplying increasingly many numbers between 0 and 1, which, mathematically, should eventually produce an infinitesimal / Pascalian number -- effectively zero, even if technically non-zero. (The implication being that stacking uncertainties and meta-uncertainties high enough undermines all of our credences, leaving us no way to rationally prefer an action over another.)
But maybe math is the wrong way to evaluate these things? I feel like not everything is math-apt, something which I see most clearly with Pascal's Mugging and the difficulty of defining exactly what is a Pascalian or non-Pascalian non-zero number. Maybe we can escape from the math? (Or maybe I've messed up some detail in the previous paragraph.)
Assuming that we can't escape from the math, is there any way to come up with the certainty needed to get a worldview of normative and epistemic uncertainty off the ground, such that we can use it to live our lives? Let's say that you are an uncertainty-using person, read the previous paragraph and say "Your explanations sound like they make sense, but I can just intuitively tell that normative and epistemic uncertainty makes sense to practice. I have some kind of certainty that can ground that method. I don't know where it comes from, but I have it." If you don't know where it came from, should you trust it? I'm not sure you can be certain either way. But I think from my own experience, there are things I can be certain about. For instance, I can see the computer screen of my laptop (and at this moment, you are likely looking at one as well, or that of some other device, or printed words on a page). We see images that are words, the words that I am typing right now. I am 100% sure that I am seeing the words that I'm typing. Similarly, if I see a cup on a table, I see a cup. No amount of philosophy makes the cup anything other than a cup. I could name it something else and think of it as having a different function. But the object, whatever its meaning to me, would remain, and I could see it, touch it, and so on, and interact with it as part of my ordinary human life. So maybe we can be certain about the validity of a worldview of normative and epistemic uncertainty, (be certain on the level of meta-certainty) in the same way. We just see it. If other people don't see it, maybe they don't have the equivalent of a cup on the table in front of them. I wouldn't be concerned if a blind person said they couldn't see something I saw. Or if a young person didn't understand my perspective, having not lived through the unique experiences I've lived through. I would go on having my perspective, understanding that they don't understand what I do. This sounds like a case of "some people witness some truths, others others".
Now it looks as though, given the above, that the very worldview of normative and epistemic uncertainty is something that is witnessed, and is not an absolute frame that can be relied on to form top-down judgments about reality.
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However, let's look at the problem of meta-uncertainty again. What's going on when we evaluate the uncertainty and meta-uncertainty of something? Well... we exist, we evaluate. These are elemental actions that go into any reasoning about uncertainty and validity. Just as I can in complete reality reach for the cup on the table, I can in complete reality reach out, in my mind, to an uncertainty, which is a thing that is not me. What does it mean for "we" to exist, and for us to "evaluate"? We are applying a standard, and a standard about standard-application. These things (or at least enough of them) we know like we know that in this sentence there is the word "that". We have the standard in even our uncertainty, and through the standard we can be uncertain. So, a standard exists, absolutely, regardless of meta-uncertainty. Meta-uncertainty, and thus would-be self-destructive meta-uncertainty, has no validity without the standard.
So we exist, each of us in our own full-fledged personhood, and a standard exists. A standard validates each standard, so it's standards all the way up. We can see that the chain is valid, because we know that arguments can be invalid, 100% invalid. These standards cannot be argued with. There is no infinite regress of standards that validate standards, because there is a meta-standard that immediately validates all other standards. So this is moral value. And what can we know about it? (At this point, maybe just the things from my personal belief system, like that it must live up to itself, put itself first in such a way that it risks itself, and subject itself to its own laws, and even that it be a conscious being.)
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I'm currently planning to read Nietzsche, who I think will provide a cynical, weird, and (perhaps) implausible account of how morality came to be, as well as Charney, from whose book I can make a laminar, reasonable, and plausible (possibly "just-so") account of how morality comes to be. Despite Nietzsche's weirdness and (likely) wrongness, I think he will problematize "genealogy of morality" more vividly than Charney, who after all (I assume) isn't trying to talk about where morality comes from.
If morality comes from somewhere -- somewhere political, or from evolution -- does that make it invalid? Is the concept of morality even worth defending, if it has nothing to do with what is real, and is simply an artifact of how humans choose to program humans, or how human biology gives us certain instincts? Why even care about maximizing value? Most or perhaps even nearly all of us have natural instincts to seek value. But why should we care? Could we just get rid of them, or let them wither away? I have reasons for caring, because I believe that standards / law / morality / legitimacy have their own existence, and in themselves inherently call for them to be made first. "Should" refers to something real which I directly experience, and which must in some form come before any events in a genealogy of the morality we currently have.
The Long Reflection is what (more or less) apolitical people would favor. The "rough and tumble" (brute force) political process is what often runs the world. People who care about the Long Reflection probably would or ought to care about how "values are created" through the application of socially mediated psychological power. Nietzsche connected with brute force things, and maybe his book will have discussions of them. If morality is something that is witnessed, then teachers have a special witness to children as they "teach them to care". The "physics" of teaching people may be a limit on what things they can be taught, especially when what is being taught is conducive to the teaching process. It could be that the Long Reflection would favor beliefs that are practical to spread and believe, and that are conducive to the education process. It could do so by being agnostic(-enough) about value and not do anything, and then lo and behold, education-aligned values would outcompete ones that go against education. (Or, "education as practiced by the 21st, 22nd, etc. century education system".) If the Long Reflection people say "X is best", but everyone else says "Y is best", probably Y will be done. If the Long Reflection is careful and diffident, political and educational actors will not be, and it may be difficult for Reflective people to effectively object, if they feel like they ought to.
(So should the Long Reflection have some political muscle of its own? Probably it would have to find a way to be culturally competitive, or better, connect with everyone in a non-competitive but thoroughgoing way, without compromising its own process.)
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Here's an earlier attempt to address the same topic as this, with a lot of overlap [now the blockquote indicates something other than content responding more or less directly to The Precipice]:
(Troubling?) Questions for the Long Reflection
This is a draft of a post I would have posted to the EA Forum. My (preliminary) answers to the issues raised in it are in []s.
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The Long Reflection is a time in which we will (may) try to find the best possible values, so that we can propagate them through space and time far into the future. We don't want to mess up this process, because if we do, we will forego a lot of value (or cause a lot of disvalue).
I like the thought of trying to search for the best values, and I also like using reason and reflection to do so. I'm a religious person and the kind of approach to religion I like is (aspires to be) rational and reflective. I like thinking of the Long Reflection as a time where we finally get to the bottom of what is good in all of human culture.
But I feel like there are some potential important questions to answer about whether the Long Reflection is even feasible.
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What is the best way to go about finding the best values? Does reflection actually help? Should we use reason?
[My working definition of "reason" is the "interrelationship of all evidence / premises, however we gather them". Reflection is that processing that enables us to interrelate. If we want to talk about the truth as a whole, then it looks like reason is how we know the truth. In principle, reality is a whole and thus is known through reason. It's hard to imagine reality (that which may become relevant to us) not being a whole of some sort. I am not sure this 100% proves that reason and reflection is the best way to go about finding the best values. But maybe it lends enough weight to reason to favor it. Also, a big part of "reason" involves saying "this is a valid premise, but that is not" and so "reason" can be a loaded term, loaded with "what the habitus of the people speaking consider acceptable or unacceptable as premises". It's not as clear that our culture's loading of "reason" produces a "reason" which is the way to go about finding the best values. Similarly with "reflection". We think about what are reflective people? What is the vibe of a reflective person? Isn't there a bias there?]
Can we prove that non-reflective thinking is less reliable than reflective thinking?
Can we prove that irrational thinking is less reliable than reflective thinking?
Assuming we are rational, I suppose we have premises and logic, which lead to conclusions. Where do we get our premises from? In areas of value, many of our premises seem to come from interpersonal relationships. Will we try to interpersonally relate with all kinds of people in order to inform our premises? (In principle, I don't see why not, although in practice it might or might not be feasible.)
Whose minds are we trying to make up?
If we don't try to make up everyone's minds substantially in accord with our own, then are we going to force the consequences of our ideas on them against their will / preferences when we start to implement policies based on the conclusions of our Long Reflection?
If we do try to make everyone's minds up, can we deal with obstacles like "different, supposedly rational versions of reason" (for instance, the idea that you can have the entire world of truth, and then some other basic belief that is not part of that interconnecting world of truth takes precedence over it and that's just fine -- (a thought inspired by Alvin Plantinga in Warranted Christian Belief, which I think says something similar).
Our intuitions about what are true, the bedrocks of reason, come from culture and biology. What happens when we can change biology freely? Can we have a coherent definition of what is rational, if future biological brains, or AI, or digital humans, have radically different intuitions about what is rational? Should we defer to them as being more rational than us, or insist that we are more rational than them for some reason? Or take a kind of normative / epistemic uncertainty approach, where we can find a way to consider all the different possibilities and "collapse it down" into concrete action? How many different rationalities can be evolved? Is it possible to take them all into account to form a practical rationality (one which we can act on)?
(One version of rationality is based on something like Yudkowsky's illustration of the shepherds, where one character ignores physical reality, dies, and is thus not represented in the gene pool. But what if a) we don't think that this life is the only one, or b) just don't care about non-existence? What if the actual best values are to not exist? Or if values themselves don't matter? Can anything constrain our definition of what is rational then?)
[The Yudkowsky story can be found here.]
If we come to figure out what the best values are, will we freeze cultural evolution so that new values are not evolved? How would we do that? Maybe we want to ensure that we have considered all possible values before doing that. Is that possible?
Will thinking about values be dominated by "epistemic utility monsters"? (Hell being maybe the ultimate one.) Will all our values be based on "avoiding the worst possible hell as proposed by religion X"?
If you look at human beliefs currently, you see the unfortunate scenario that there are two huge religions that preach hell (some form of Christianity and some form of Islam), and these two religions seemingly teach very explicitly that either "You have to accept a God who is somehow more than one person" and "You cannot accept a God who is more than one person." Apparently there is no right answer. Naively it looks like you just flip a coin between the two of them, and hope you guessed right (although their adherents are convinced that there are reasons to pick one side over the other). Is there a rational way to "gate off" Islam and Christianity, to where their competing infinite disutilities do not affect how we think rationally at all? Or to determine that one of them is more rational than the other, and is the one we should actually follow? But then, what if someone evolves a new religion, consisting of 1,000 adherents, and they also have a belief in hell? Are they less valid for only having 1,000 adherents? What if the religion only has 1 adherent? Could someone make up an ad hoc religion to push whatever value they care about? Would there be any way to rule out that they should be taken seriously?
Mentioning the tactic of making up ad hoc religions leads to the question of "is what this is all about more a competition of preferences"? Instead of using reason, using rhetoric, or stronger psychological force. Will the Long Reflection become, rather than a search for the truth that's "out there", more of a political process whereby people promote their own values, whatever they may be, which is to be "won" by whoever can? Maybe this warrants a different name than "Long Reflection", but would go on at the same time and contest some of the same issues, and perhaps the two processes would fight each other. How, and why, would reason be safeguarded against personal preference?
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I'm not sure that these questions can't be answered in a way that allows the Long Reflection to go forward, but they seem like things that might be a problem.
Some guesses where to find answers: I didn't finish reading the Sequences, so maybe that addresses these issues? As mentioned, wrestling with "alternative rationalities" like Reformed epistemology or maybe something in Buddhism.
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I think that's all I have to say on the topic for now, so I will see what I see in the readings.
Some Christians seem to believe that pride is the chief evil. Humility is also seen as one of the best virtues. It's true that pride can be dangerous, but so can a certain kind of humility.
Who is your worst enemy? Is it you? Then you have to guard against yourself, not trust yourself. Is that a Christian answer, that you are your own worst enemy? It's sometimes popular in the church, but my naive impression is that that isn't Jesus' emphasis. I feel like for him, Satan is the main enemy, and he often wants to encourage us to have confidence in ourselves. (Like telling people to go sin no more -- who does he think we are, people who can just not sin? Perhaps so.)
Who do you think hates you more, you, or Satan? Do you benefit from being your own worst enemy? You generally don't, but Satan does. Who would benefit from you falsely thinking that you are your own worst enemy? You don't, but Satan does. It takes the focus off him, and tempts you to sink into a state of giving up on yourself. This makes you less effective in doing good, which furthers Satan's agenda. If you give up on yourself, you are a conduit for a spirit of giving up on yourself, which affects other people.
If you try to be humble, you may think "poor little me" and give up on yourself. You may think that you are unworthy of holiness and thus unworthy of repenting.
You need to overcome all of your sinful habits and, most importantly, change yourself away from any way in which you do not share God's values. God can take away your sinful habits, but you are the only person who can do anything about what values you have. You are the only person who can repent (change your heart, at the level of your intentions and not just the feelings you have, which God could give you), and you need to repent 100%. You have time in which to do this, more than this life, but you can't put it off forever. You need to learn to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength someday. Giving up on yourself keeps you from giving your whole heart, whole soul, whole mind, and whole strength.
Pride is dangerous, but "pride is dangerous" is also dangerous. Humility is dangerous, too, if it gets in the way of repentance.
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A related danger is that if you give up on your ability to seek the truth, you will tend to believe more lies than otherwise, and will live accordingly. You have to fight to discover or sometimes even to believe the truth.
Something I cut from another post:
I think that we can locate value in what people do, and an action is both "from" an actor and "to" a goal. On the "from" side, people do things for petty reasons with petty views of themselves, or, they can do things for non-petty (ambitious? noble? something else?) reasons. (Or, in a more, or less, petty spirit, or with a more, or less, petty heart or soul.) And then when they are acting "to" a goal, that goal could be more petty, or by contrast, more large-aimed. I think that the best "from" component to action is "the cross", in some form emulating Jesus, especially insofar as he went to the literal cross. (A rough idea of "the cross".)
In principle, the goals of perfection and control, that things turn out the best way possible, are of utmost importance (by definition). But perfection and control themselves are spiritually dangerous. Not even God perfects and controls everything, so why should we? Behaving irrationally with respect to what is best is (at least sometimes) better than being rational, if it keeps you from succumbing to perfection and control.
In order to actually do good on any big scale, and to be whole-hearted and to give all your strength, you have to trust ... something (de dicto) ... which is to some extent, or entirely, really you trusting God (de re). Otherwise you'll worry about small risks of your own life, fearful of dying, shame, failure, or others. These will make you be responsible, in a bad way. Your temporal (and, metaphorically, "spatial") horizons will be clamped down on by that responsibility. You won't be able to believe God when he appears to you, telling you to bless the whole.
In order to love, to have deep feelings and deep intentions, you have to trust.
Perhaps there is a tradeoff, between being good at being responsible for the little things, and being good at being responsible for the big things. Whether we can accomplish big things in our lives is largely up to a lot of things beyond our control, but we can approach life as people who are responsible for what is big (deep, real, the heart of the problem), and risk neglecting some of the things that are shallower, less real, less the heart of the problem. The little details that are crucial are part of something bigger.
Epistemic status: This is valid as an explanation of MSL, but it should be compared against the Bible at some point, and I'm not at a place in my process right now to do that.
There is a recognizable Father and Son (terms taken from the Bible) in MSL, in that, in legitimism, in order for God to be legitimate, part of him had to undergo a human life (being a finite being, unaware of the many things that God is necessarily always aware of at all times), if that was possible. It is possible, if Legitimacy comprises more than one person, if the entities that make things the way they are include one who could live a finite life. So we have the "Father" (who is also the Speaker and can be partially seen through the image of the Metaphysical Organism), and the "Son" (who can go and live a finite life and face the existential situations of finite personal beings, including death).
It's more or less as though MSL predicts the existence of both Father and Son for reasons that are core to its own functioning. One can certainly think that Legitimacy can include other beings, who also create with the rest of Legitimacy. There could be an arbitrarily large number of them. Among them could be some kind of Holy Spirit. But, there is no special need to assume that there are any of these additional beings, including the Holy Spirit.
Or, maybe I can think of one for the Spirit, which wouldn't necessarily predict any other beings.
When two persons overlap, we could say that they create a new person between them. We can see this in friendships and marriages, and other relationships. In fact, a relationship and a shared spirit may often be the same thing. So, when God relates to other persons, there is a third person who comes into being between them, which is both God and the other person, and in a sense is its own thing. We could call this the Holy Spirit.
Is the Holy Spirit a person? Yes and no. Relationships are impersonal phenomena but they are also just parts of persons that are working together. What are persons, if not parts of persons who work together? So relationships are persons, persons that have two bodies? But the Spirit is part of God (the Spirit of God), like a body part. The Father is a Spirit, and his Spirit is an extension of him. So the Spirit is one being, because the Father is aware of all of his relationships with all other beings. (One could say that persons need to be one being in order to be a person, but, the Father is that one being -- and yet the Holy Spirit doesn't perfectly reduce to him, because it is made up of our wills as well.)
Given all this, when the Father created the Son, the Spirit necessarily and automatically came into being between them. (Or, in keeping with orthodox Christianity, when the Father and Son eternally co-existed, the Spirit necessarily and automatically always existed between them.) God relates to all of us and thus the Spirit is everywhere, but his Spirit (he) can be much more deeply connected to us, depending on his unilateral action and our welcomingness (receptiveness, safeness) for him to come close to us in that way. So it makes sense to say that God sends his Spirit to people.
The more personal the Spirit is, the more it is just us relating to the Father, because all the Spirit is is the relationship between him and us. But the outer layers of a person are their powers, and when we do not know God as well, his Spirit is a taste of his power without connecting us to him as kin.
This is an important topic, and maybe I haven't done it justice here, in terms of content. The form, as I re-read it, is scattered, as well. In theory I could make a better version of this, and maybe I will. But at this point, I don't have the energy/focus to. A lot of times I write these blog posts as notes to myself, which I happen to share online with some hope that others will read them, and I'll say this is one of those.
In Establishedness and Loving God, I wrote in one of the sections about why it is valuable for people to live in this life, rather than going straight to heaven, or to the Millennium. This meant that we have a reason to not abort the unborn. Otherwise it might seem like aborting the unborn could be seen as better than letting them live in this life, so that they could be better off spiritually in the next life.
The explanation I gave there was that while the Millennium is a better place, where Jesus is king, it is a more "established" place, in which the spiritual benefits of disestablishedness are lacking.
But then I thought about how unfortunate it would be to withhold disestablishedness from people in the Millennium, if it would be spiritually beneficial. Would God let them be lost if all it would take to not be lost was some kind of difficult experience? And I thought about how it sounds like in the next life there will be bad times for those who were rich, full, and laughing in this life (Luke 6:24-25), and "weeping and gnashing of teeth" in the outer darkness -- hell? or simply corrective experiences in the Millennium? As I recall, Philip Brown's opinion, for what it's worth, is that these dark passages are about the Millennium, not about hell. My sense, without doing the work to really be sure, is that ruling out the possibility that these could be only about the Millennium (the Millennium and not hell) would be difficult.
So I thought that that explanation for why it's worth living in this life (that this life is distinctively beneficial for being disestablished) is not a solid one. It should be possible for there to be disestablishedness in the next.
But then it occurred to me that this life could be valuable as an addition to the Millennium. In other words, the Millennium is a finite amount of time, as is each of our lives in this life, and thus our lives in this life extend the work of the Millennium.
The period of time called the Millennium might be literally 1,000 years long (the Millennium gets its name from Revelation, which is a vision and might not be literal, but details in it could always happen to be literal). Let's say I live 80 years in this life, and then 1,000 in the Millennium. 80 is 8% of 1,000, or if you want to do the math differently, it could be 7.4% of 1,080. That is a decent percentage of the total time. Presumably, getting more time to mature spiritually is better than getting less -- unless this life is particularly bad for people spiritually. Maybe there are too many temptations, not enough temptations, too few anti-temptations, too many anti-temptations in some way, too few influences of any sort that make us change (the result being that we get into hardened habits), or some other problem with the environment in which we decide for or against God. It's possible that this life is bad for people spiritually, more than good, but optimistically, people do grow spiritually (become more in tune with God) in this life, something we have some evidence of, and I think at worst I would judge myself uncertain as to whether this life is so much worse than the Millennium that to live here is a net-negative. So once again, I don't think we have a clear reason to abort children for the sake of their spiritual well-being.
1,000 is much greater than 80. I would guess that 1,000, if it is not the literal number of years in the Millennium (hm... I probably should have called it the Resurrection, an alternate biblical name according to the New Wine System, for cases like this), is meant to not mislead, and so we should think of the time in the Millennium/Resurrection as being "large but finite", I would guess somewhere around the same order of magnitude if not greater. It would be weird for the Bible to say 1,000 when it really meant 1, also if it really meant 10, and also if it really meant 100. Maybe it could really be 900 or 800 years? I can't really be sure. So maybe this life matters more, or less, but probably is no more than about 10% (80/800) of the amount of life that is at play. So if a person were to be aborted, or was miscarried, it's probably only a moderate disadvantage for them spiritually, but not a stark and terrible one. Still, the ethical/practical scales are tilted toward being pro-life, at least to some extent.
From an MSL perspective (MSLN without reference to the Bible), how long should we think the Millennium/Resurrection would be? It's hard to say. I would assume that since God wants to save everyone, he would allocate enough time that most people could sufficiently make up their minds to follow him (or if they want, to reject him, knowing what they are doing). But, some people would be basically eternal procrastinators, and need a deadline to come to a decision. So, I will speculate, if I were designing this system, my naive first thought would be to allocate enough time that the non-procrastinators could make their decision, and then maybe a certain amount extra so that the procrastinators could do their relatively rapid, "night-before-the-test" changes to reach their final decision. (God might say "You have 1,000 years to fully repent and come into tune with me." and then extend the deadline to accommodate procrastinators, those who were motivated by the impending end of the 1,000 years, developed a good spiritual "velocity" at the last minute, and asked (individually or collectively) for an extension of the deadline.)
I don't know that God could predict in advance how many procrastinators there would be and exactly how long it would take the non-procrastinators to get through their decision-making processes. There must be a final deadline, because the duration of illegitimacy must be finite (God (Legitimacy) can only endure illegitimacy for a finite time for it to be illegitimate), and that deadline might be "rough", and some people could be lost at the deadline, for not being able to repent fast enough. So I don't think procrastinating on becoming holy is a good idea, and the more that people don't procrastinate, the fewer will be lost.
I still don't know how much time to guess the Millennium will be, apart from the rough clue given in the Bible. I think whatever it will be will be adequate -- generally speaking, basically -- and will be more adequate the more seriously we take the process of becoming holy.
How does this affect the math done in the previous section (80:1000)? Is the ratio between this life and the Millennium (given MSL) more like 1:10 (relatively close to 80:1000)? Is it something like 1:5? 1:2? 1:1? I can only guess based on my sense of how spiritual growth works in this life, but 1:1 is probably too fast for most people (in other words 80 years of this life, followed by 80 years of "Millennium"). The longer the "Millennium", the more plausible. 1:5 starts to feel like it might be generous. 1:10 and beyond is at least as generous as the literal-biblical 1,000 years. So, I guess this life might be as high as 80/400 (20%) or 80/480 (16%), in terms of how much of a person's development happens during it, for calculations of how bad abortion is in terms of depriving people of time in this life. A really safe assumption might be to make the "Millennium" even shorter, but it seems less plausible the shorter you get. Again, I find 80:80 to be hard to believe. This paragraph is guesswork that for me has at least that much structure.
Notice that prolonging a person's life gives them an advantage spiritually (important caveat: as long as this life is more spiritually beneficial than not, which I think is currently the case and probably always has been up to now). So attempts to prolong people's lives (using things like insecticide-treated bednets to prevent malaria) could be significantly valuable even with respect to the second death, which they do not directly address. But people could end up in local environments where this life is more harmful than good spiritually. Perhaps in some seemingly utopian future, every part of civilization will be more harmful than good spiritually.
Now, in an artificial world, what if people are prolonging their lives with life extension technology, but hardening themselves in the process? They could live 10,000 years in this life -- then, the ratio given above could turn out to be 10,000:1,000 or 10:1, roughly the opposite of the biblical 80:1000. The pessimist in me says that that would be terrible, and that we should avoid doing that kind of thing. Life extension might be one of the most dangerous technologies we can develop, from a spiritual point of view. I do think we should be very careful with life extension, given that risk. But, the less pessimistic side of me hopes that even after 10,000 years of shallowness, ease, emptiness, and lack of loving, 1,000 years in the Millennium could still undo a lot of that, all of that for many people. Still, I wouldn't risk a spiritually shallow extended-life world if I were the designer of things.
(Could God extend the Millennium in response to human life-extension? I don't remember everything I may have written relevant to that, but I do think that if the "size" of God is limited, and if your past is a necessary part of who you are that only exists if it is remembered ("to be is to be perceived"), God may face a tradeoff between extending the Millennium and creating more people because he would run out of resources to remember everyone's pasts. In that case, a further argument against life-extension could be that with enough life-extension, the Millennium might have to be shortened, and that people in the era of history in which they can extend their lives would have an unfair advantage (assuming their lives brought them closer to being in tune with God) than those in the past who could only manage to live 20, 50, or 80 years. The difference between living 5 years and 80 years isn't enormous with respect to 1,000 years, but the difference between 100,000 and 5 years is, and enough 100,000 year lifespans could draw down the Millennium so that it's only 500 years long or something like that.)
What if the Millennium is actually 1,000,000 years long? I think that is consistent with the Bible calling it "1,000". The reader of the Bible could be uncertain whether it means "literally 1,000 years" or "a really big number of years; an age or eon". 1,000 years enables us to trust God to a certain extent, to expect a certain number of years for our spiritual development. So if it's at least 1,000 years, then either the "literally 1,000 years" and "age or eon" interpretations are good in terms of delivering on whatever promise we see in "1,000 years". So 1,000,000 years could be biblical. And there is no reason to think, from MSL, that a 1,000,000-year Millennium is impossible. A ratio of 80:1,000,000 is even more generous than 80:1,000.
In that case, life extension isn't that bad, at least, if it's not extreme. But we don't know that we actually have a 1,000,000 year Millennium.
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Some of the unfairness of modern or transhuman life extension can be ameliorated (perhaps) by God not giving life-extended people as much time in the Millennium. So, if they live 500 years + the usual 80, and if the Millennium is normally 1,000 years long, they get 500 years in the Millennium. This works out okay, but not if people are extending their lives more than the length of the Millennium. This suggests that some life extension might be okay (maybe 100 or 200 years beyond 80?), as long as it's high-quality from a spiritual standpoint, such that the person whose life was extended wouldn't be at a disadvantage for missing out on the Millennium.
Another thought counterweighing the unfairness of modern or transhuman life extension, is that generally when people live less than, say 60 years, or 40, or 20, it's because their lives are hard. Disestablishedness may be better than establishedness, because it's a more ready teacher of "the cross". So they might not be at as much disadvantage as their shorter lifespans would indicate. Should we still help people in that life live longer? It's good for our spiritual well-being (all else equal), as wealthy people, to live for someone else, and we tend to have atheistic sides to us which say that "this life is all there is", so from that perspective, it still makes sense to help people live longer. From a spiritual perspective, it's for our sakes, but from an atheistic perspective, it's for theirs, and it's because it's for theirs from an atheistic perspective that it's particularly good for us from ours. But even an MSLN theist should care about alleviating unbearable suffering, because that's something God cares about. I think, spiritually speaking, there are diminishing returns on suffering beyond a certain point, and low-hanging fruit for would-be generous people to pick in their own lives by helping those who suffer.
When we are young, we need to feel like we are loved. We need attention, fun, and validation as well. If we are young enough, we need people to give these things to us, and it is right to provide such things for those who really have to have them. But, if those are provided in such a way that people are kept from growing up, they do serious harm and are possibly worse in the long run than if the children are not given enough attention, fun, and validation.
As we grow up, perhaps we need to be loved, or perhaps we do not. But all of us must learn to love, and that is the most important part of maturing. If we put "to love" first, we must be willing to give up "being loved".
Adult children have a kind of equality in their relationships with their parents. There is a kind of reciprocalness to the relationships. The children relate to their parents similarly to how the parents relate to them.
God is our father and he is not bound to us because we love him. He is bound to us because he loves us. So, if we are to have a reciprocal relationship with him, we should be bound to him not because he loves us, but because we love him. We someday have to love in a mature way, in order to love as God loves and have the heart that God has.
If God does not love, then he loses his legitimacy and ceases to exist. For God, to love is life or death. But he can survive not being loved.
Some people choose to be small. For instance, they only want money (lots of money, perhaps) and not "power". Money is power, but distinguishing "money" from "power" makes a certain amount of sense. "Power" is bigger-aimed than "money". Someone with a lot of money can rule over 100 servants or employees, but someone with a lot of power can rule over an entire nation. Someone with power might have a grand view of themselves, a noble view. This could be the case with someone with money as well, but the money person could more easily have a small view of themselves, and I would guess would be less prone to having a grand or noble view of themselves. They might then look at the "power" people as "pretentious", "ambitious", "tryhards", or something like that. The "power" people might look at them as "petty".
One would think that at the level of national government, everyone would be ambitious. This might be somewhat true. But, there can still be pettiness at that level. For instance, government corruption is a characteristically petty phenomenon, redirecting public (larger-aimed) resources for personal (smaller-aimed) purposes. But, even on the level of grandness, there can be pettiness.
If you are fighting for your own nation (tribe, religion), have you considered fighting (or working) for what is higher? What is higher than for everyone to be like God? Maybe your nation / tribe / religion has a unique insight into being like God that must be preserved and shared. Wouldn't cross-cultural, ideally interpersonal, contact involving trustworthy people do more to help that happen, than wars or other coercive actions? Wars and coercion make a stink out of you and make your beliefs seem (or even be) untrustworthy.
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The petty can say "well, yes, we are petty, but at least we are not... prideful, arrogant, self-aggrandizing, pretentious". I think that these potential twisted versions of large-aimedness are a valid concern for anyone who does not want to be petty. Any path can be well-pursued, well-implemented, or not. Was Jesus prideful, arrogant, self-aggrandizing, or pretentious? People may have thought he was, but was he? There is a way to not be petty and still not be abusive or fake.
Perhaps it is good to distinguish "ambitious" from "reality-aimed". The ambitious person wants to do large things. But it is their residual petty-mindedness that allows them, once they have done a large thing, to be twisted about it, for instance to feel or express a sense of superiority gained from it, to feel justified to do bad things because of it, or feel entitled because of it. Because if they were aimed at reality, they would be aimed at something so rigorous and total that it would call from them more than they could ever give. They could merely devote 100% to pursuing that reality.
Moral truth is satisfied only when there is no more good that needs to be done, and desires that all sentient beings are 100% in tune with the good.
Is full maturity required by love?
Is salvation to love, or to be loved? Arguably, a loving parent would love their children by teaching them to love. It might then be odd for a parent to be content with their adult children who do not love as fully as the parent does, or at least seem likely on their way to love as much as the parent does when the child is the parent's age.
Is there an MSL reason to think that we need to love like God someday? We need to come into tune with God in order to be saved. Part of this involves our hearts being like his.
If we have an unforgiving attitude toward someone, then that prevents us from being saved. We can't perceive or relate to all people, like God can, but we can become the kind of people who would relate to each person the way God would. Then, we will love like he does. Our values will be aligned with his.
God loves the truth, particularly the moral truth, which is rooted in legitimacy, which is he himself. God loves the good, and so we must love the good. God is unilaterally inclined to forgive everyone. But we all still need to come to love the good ourselves, and if we do not, at some point he can't accept us and we can't exist anymore.
So is it the case that fully mature love is needed in order to enter God's rest? If our hearts are the same as God's, what else can we do? I'm not sure exactly what goes into the word "mature", but maybe "mature" can mean "having a heart that is inclined correctly" (perhaps inclined toward responsibility / burden-bearing). Another dimension to "mature" being "exhibiting some sort of full-grown skill, strength, security, wisdom, etc."
What's important is who we are, and thus if there's any aspect of loving as God loves that we are incapable of, then that's only a problem with what we are which God can remedy in the end if it makes sense to do so. What is up to us is to be inclined, in who we are, to love to the full extent of our abilities. This is God's love, how he loves to the full extent of his abilities. In our lives on earth, or in the Millennium, we may have to develop our abilities to act to their full extent in order to love to the full extent of our ability to love. Sometimes in order to really love, you must become more mature, and it is a good thing to seek to become more mature, as mature as you can be insofar as love requires it.
In contrast to "patient vs. impatient", which are loaded such that patience is good and impatience is bad, or "complacent vs. engaged", where complacency is bad and engagedness is good, I could say "relaxed vs. urgent", hoping that that is not loaded.
A good time for urgency is to prevent a child from walking into oncoming traffic. A good time for relaxedness is at the end of the day so you can fall asleep. Relaxedness (to the point of a lack of urgency) is bad in the former case, and urgency is bad in the latter. So there is a place for both.
I listened to talk radio a bit and wrote my impressions:
Listening to NPR is like sitting in a cafe on an overcast day. Low key jazz is playing in the cafe. The information you get from NPR is your tea that you sip. Sometimes it makes you feel sad. Sometimes it makes you feel calm, or contemplative. You can spend hours in the cafe, more or less relaxed.
Listening to conservative talk radio is like driving around on a hot day, trying to get things done. Somebody cuts you off in traffic. You have to do business with a supplier and you think he might be screwing you over. You think back to the fight you had with your wife last night and feel angry about it.
NPR is part of relaxed culture, and conservative talk radio is part of urgent culture. I don't know that either are very good for motivating sustained productive work. At least, I don't feel like it after listening to either. I feel passiveness or even despair after listening to them, though they each have their own flavor. But if there was a talk radio that resembled the works of J. S. Bach, that would image a kind of relaxed engagedness. (As well as some other traits from my notes:)
We face a world full of things that need doing. Maintaining a kind of urgency is good, but during your afternoon rush hour, maybe you need to be calmed down. But you can remain engaged, without being dragged down into the despair of NPR or conservative talk radio. That's what "Bach Talk Radio" is for.Listening to both liberal and conservative talk radio makes me think of a third kind of talk radio. It's something I can't really do myself, but here is the show I would make:
It airs during the afternoon rush hour. It is called "Bach Talk Radio" (or a better name than that). It promotes the vibes of J. S. Bach, specifically "delayed gratification", "prolificness / productivity / diligence", "solidity / stability", "patience", "complexity".
(BTR would feature public domain Bach recordings, practical life advice, no-spin news analysis (or news analysis spun by Bach values), an emphasis on the bigger picture, and a segment where people call in with problems and people call in with advice and support. It would have a lighter side, and would emphasize the listener's agency.)
Academics have (or used to have) job security, and their jobs are more based in being thoughtful, relative to many other careers. They have developed a form of writing that is relaxed, even if abstruse. You have to think to understand it, and that makes you contemplative. Academic thinking is something to be sipped on in a cafe. When it denounces things, it often sounds like a kind of poem, and when academics read their writing out loud, it often sounds like the reciting of a speech, and beautiful speech is a kind of wine. Academic culture influences NPR.
Entrepreneurs have very little job security (they could always go out of business). They have to go out in the city and deal with people. Relatively few people have their backs, and relatively many are indifferent to their well-being, some directly hostile or treacherous. Business culture influences conservative talk radio.
I grew up in an academic-influenced church, which had the upsides and downsides of relaxation. I also spent some time with a church that was headed by a man who ran a business to make a living. I could sense that that church had some of the upsides and downsides of urgency.
Reality calls for urgency, but urgency is like a fruit that can go bad. Health calls for relaxedness, but relaxedness is also like a fruit that can go bad. My sense is that we need high-quality urgency, as much as possible, and when that is not possible, high-quality relaxedness. Or I think it's possible to have both at the same time.
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As I think about this some more, I'm not sure that Bach exactly has an urgent side, but I think something that is close to urgency is profundity (something I think I've heard mentioned by other listeners to Bach which I am not sure I have noticed, but which I can believe), because both are forms of connecting with importance. BTR could emphasize the profound among its other values.
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Is life life or death? Or do we have so much abundance that we do not have to think about survival? What do the facts say? Not everyone is going to be saved, and God will feel their loss eternally. Despite the fact that God exists, some may be eternally destroyed, no longer existing -- so, dead. So we have life, and death, as possibilities in life. Therefore life is life or death.
When we try to save lives, it often can be effective to be relaxed in a productive way (whether living a Bach-like work life, or resting so that we can go back to work fresh). Relaxedness has a lot going for it. But the truth remains that life is life or death.
If you want to promote holiness, you will tend to promote self-control. Perhaps for those undergoing some kind of transition time, while they come to naturally see things through God's eyes. Certainly receiving the Spirit from God can help you be holy, but maybe that Spirit sometimes is a voice that tells you to do something that is unnatural to you at first.
It is best for your nature to be calmed by God so that you lack the desires to sin. But much of life is lived in a state of being possessed by those desires. We don't want the desires to give birth in the world, because we love the world, something God loves. By loving the world, we shape ourselves more into being like God. So we practice self-control, because it's the best thing that we can do sometimes.
A message that exerts energy toward you controlling yourself can be socialized into a social group exerting energy toward you controlling yourself, and that isn't far from a social group controlling you.
So, (a theory:) the stronger the social group, the more it has to downplay holiness (especially in the form of good behavior) or else it risks becoming controlling of its members. Being called to moral excellence, a life well-lived, as soon as possible, puts pressure on a group to control its members so that it can look like there is moral excellence, and the group has to feel like it's pursuing moral excellence, because that's the best thing it can pursue. So, terrified of that controllingness, we downplay moral excellence, to protect ourselves from control.
If this threat is real, what can we do? Maybe the thing to do if you want to develop a movement that is not controlling of its members, but does emphasize holiness or any other high commitment to God, involving the will, is to be as libertarian as possible, where it counts.
Interpersonal libertarianism is the freedom that people have from each other in direct personal relationships. ("Social libertarianism" is the term I would prefer, but I think that already has a meaning of "political libertarianism on so-called 'social' issues".) That's the most important dimension. Then, freedom in the structures that are closest to the interpersonal (church, family, friend group) are a close second in importance. Then, freedom in the other social structures, as they bear on the question of how other people might try to manufacture or engineer who a person is.
This isn't necessarily freedom from the need to help other people, but rather, freedom from them trying to control you in the name of making you a better person. Ideally, you help other people not because you are obligated to, but because you love them and love helping them. But the sheer quantity of service that may be required in the world may exceed the amount that can be provided by those who love without obligation or something like it. The responsibility to help flows from the person or situation that needs help and still calls to us, even if we are free from interpersonal control. The responsibility is a fact, and we can proclaim the truth of that fact, but some are tempted to try to control people to make them act in accordance with the fact.
I think there is a difference between telling people the moral truth and saying things that you hope will change people's minds and get them to do the right thing. I don't see a problem with speaking the moral truth, no matter how strict. But trying to change the world (i.e. other people) with words, I'm not as sure of. I know I have done things that could have the effect of the latter myself, although generally I do not desire to change other people, at least not instinctually. But I think I trust the former more now. So I want to speak the moral truth and design ways for people to act on the moral truth, rather than exerting my will to change other people to do what's right.
People like thickness in their relationships. With interpersonal libertarianism, human relationships may thin out to enable freedom, but your relationship with God should become thicker. You can't control God.
("Connectional" -- "grabby", involved, well-being mixed up with others', attached, emotionally close.)
Jesus was (I think) more interpersonally libertarian than interpersonally authoritarian or "connectional". He was holy, and grew in wisdom when he was young. He was oriented first toward the Father, and secondarily toward people.
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Is it possible to love God if someone forces you to? God doesn't seem to think so, or else he would force us to love him. So this is a reason to practice a libertarian form of holiness culture.
So no matter how urgent it is to bring people to a state of holiness -- you can't really "bring them" to it, they have to come themselves. And yet it is important for you to do your job of anti-temptation in keeping with the urgency of reality.
Could there be a forceful anti-temptation? Could you force moral values on people such that they will come to love them for themselves? We do this with children. I suspect that often this tactic only teaches people to love the good as children, and prevents them from developing a mature love of the good. There may be a tradeoff, where you can get people to buy into a religion as children, seemingly successfully, through applying that force, but inhibit them from really becoming mature, thus, really fully loving God with all of their beings. (Maybe we hope that children grow up later on in their adult years, once given their liberty?) But on the other hand, the libertarian way can seem to not get enough people to buy into religion at all, though the ones who do, really do so.
I hope that some of the failure of libertarian religion comes from it not being practiced energetically, and that it's possible for those pursuing libertarian holiness to have something like the force and urgency of authoritarians (the energy and sense of necessity of their force and urgency, for example, or an endemically libertarian urgency), without being authoritarian. People could practice libertarian religion with libertarian actions and attitudes toward people, with the spirit of those who believe that inner character (their own and other people's) is of life and death importance.
Love often requires going through the desert, in which you do not feel like loving. Obligation also makes you do what you do not feel like doing. Love is good and obligation is bad (those words used in this paragraph). When we love in the desert, we still love, with who we are, although with what we are, we do not want to love. But when we do things out of obligation, we feel like not doing what we do out of who we are. Why do we act out of obligation? Perhaps out of fear for ourselves or out of our own hungers, or maybe other reasons. A test for whether you are doing good out of desert love, or out of obligation: do you resent what you do? Generally, love does not resent the difficulties and sacrifices that go with it.
It is better to choose desert love over obligation, and, I guess, counterintuitive though that sounds, it is entirely up to our free choice as to which we choose. "Who we are" is somehow entirely within our power to shape, although it doesn't feel like it. Perhaps there is a certain level of service that "what we are" can sustain, and given that, it is entirely up to us whether we pursue it out of love (including desert love), or out or obligation.
(When you love someone or something for long enough, you will enter periods of the desert, where it doesn't feel good or you don't feel like remaining committed. If it is only "what you are" that doesn't feel like it, then that's fine (although subjectively it's hard and can be hard practically as well). But if "who you are" doesn't feel like doing good, that is not such a good thing. Perhaps if you intend to love someone or something, you may at first obligate yourself fakely. But that is not so bad, since really you ("who you are") want to love.)
Normally I am against fakeness (at least, I aspire to be). But I think a certain kind of fakeness is instrumental in becoming real. Better to increase your fakeness temporarily if it leads to you becoming more real in the long run.
Children (or other young people), sometimes begin to be a real ... something ... or to embody a real value, by being seemingly or really insincere in valuing it, by acting as though they are something they seemingly or really are not.
When we sleep, we pretend to be asleep, as though inviting the spirit of unconsciousness into ourselves by acting like it, maybe to show we are kin to it. Some spirits need to trust us to make their homes in us.
It's true that people who exhibit an immature or fake form of a role or value may not be reliable at that point, if you want someone to do a job or validate a value. But their fakeness may be headed toward greater realness.
Note that if you aspire to pursue "good fakeness", you have to go to realness at some point or else it ends up being just fakeness.
