Apolitical Identity

Originally written October 2020.

[Note: when I use "humanism" and "theism" in this post, I mean the ethical position that favors humans and human interests (especially secular human interests) -- humanism -- and the ethical position that favors God and God's interests -- theism.]

In this presidential election, I have decided to not vote. Along with other abstinent life choices (celibate, vegetarian), I can add "apolitical".

[And in fact I did not vote in that election.]

As Orwellian as it may sound, abstinence is freedom. The freedom that comes from being apolitical is being able to be on everyone's side, or if not that, to refuse to be on the side of anyone who wants to come after someone else. In 2016, I voted for a third party candidate. But, because the third party candidates are coded "blue" or "red" to a large extent anyway, I set myself against the other half of the country. I would like to someday leave my default "blue" environment and be considered trustworthy by people in "red" environments. This might help some with the overall problem of polarization in America. I would like to be listened to by as many different kinds of Christians as possible, and "red" America has a lot of professing Christians.

Although I have always identified as a Christian, from around the age of 13 until perhaps a year or two ago, I was trying to move more into secular environments. If you eat secular food enough, you'll get secularism in your bloodstream. I catch myself being something other than Christian quite a bit. I've leaned conservative and liberal at various points in my life, and now I want to be neither conservative nor liberal, but instead simply Christian.

Some Christians (for instance, some Calvinists and Catholics, and perhaps others) want to have a particularly Christian way to order society, sometimes to work for Christian interests in the political system. It's possible that I could endorse a similar view. But I would have to do a study on what the Christian way to order society would be, and the Christian way to try to bring that about, if such a way even exists. This could take me years to bring to a reasonable state of completion, sufficient to cause me to feel like I had genuinely Christian political opinions, and not just secular opinions that I, a Christian, find appealing.

Other Christians, when trying to be Christian about politics, choose to be apolitical. In this way they can at least shed the identities of "Republican" (conservative humanist) or "Democrat" (liberal humanist), and perhaps highlight that they are theists, putting God's interests ahead of autonomous human interests as do the secular humanists. [Secular humanists put autonomous human interests before God's interests.]

Both Republicans (as Republicans) and Democrats (as Democrats) are secular humanists. Secular humanism is seen in how you trust, not just the words you say. So Christians in office, even people who ran trying to appeal to a Christian base, are not necessarily Christians in how they approach reality. You can carry the flag of Christ and act like you don't believe in God, not just by some kind of moral indiscretion, but in the way that you are fearful of things a faithful person wouldn't fear and the way you do not look for the deeper and better things a faithful person would look for. Being apolitical is a chance to get free from secular humanistic thinking and adopt a Christian-only worldview.

However, this apolitical stance comes at a cost, which is having less of a chance to intervene in public affairs. A truly apolitical person might have less of an influence in stopping something like the Third Reich. If Germany was to have some kind of party governing it, one which was successful, filling the role that the Nazi party took on [could/would take on] and thus blocking it from coming to power, it would be run by humanists, not by apolitical theists. And if the church sits by while secular interests dominate the public sphere, that may be worse for both theists and secular people. Currently, politics is all about humanism rather than theism, and maybe that's for the best, even in a Christian society. But the question of "what is human well-being?" is one that we haven't figured out as a society. Christians should be heard in that discussion.

We could say that Christians are more essentially interested in advancing the Kingdom of God. And humanists are more essentially interested in advancing civilization. [A definition of "Kingdom" and "civilization".] If you save your child from a speeding car, he or she will grow up a certain way and will probably spend more of his or her waking life furthering civilization (on the job) than in furthering the Kingdom. The love in your family feeds capitalism, resource extraction, technological and cultural development, and the geopolitical interests of the nation you live in. So even apolitical people are voting, just not in an election.

Politics is all about humanism, at least ostensibly. So I could try, as an apolitical person, to still try to further human well-being, to vote in civilization in various ways, while staying away from identifying with someone I am ultimately not: a warrior for a secular army. I can aspire to be someone whose existence and activities further the interests of both "blue" and "red" people, or people on either side of any other politicized divide, and most importantly, the interests of God.

Having said all this, I do hope that someday I will have gone through the study I mentioned above, of what is the truly Christian way to interact with civilization. If the result of that is that it seems right to vote (I am making political decisions that are really Christian, and I have "malice towards none" / I maintain my independence from political feuds), then I will.

[Implicitly, I'm not rejecting humanism entirely. I could say that humanism follows from theism. Being apolitical enables me to distance myself from some sociologically and psychologically compelling humanistic identities (Republican, Democrat, etc.) which commit me to a version of humanism that tends to exclude theism -- and which also has defects (polarization) in how it pursues even secular humanism.]

--

[It's interesting to read this in October 2021. I don't find the question of polarization to be nearly as salient to me right now. I think that in an election year, like 2020, we are more political than in an off-year. Also maybe 2020 was a particularly vivid year in terms of protests.]

[Identities are partly about how you feel. If you don't find an identity relevant, can you hold it? Maybe not to as great an extent. If there's nothing at stake, can you hold an identity? This is an interesting question to ask of Christians. Do Christians feel like there is anything theistic that is greatly at stake? If so, then they might probably more often hold to the identity of "Christian" deeply and firmly. But if Christians are only concerned with secular concerns (are you healthy? will you live a long physical life on earth?) then they perhaps can't be Christians as deeply and firmly. I would say that not-holding-firmly is itself a threat that raises the stakes, because we are saved by making it 100% of the way to being in tune with God, including valuing what he values on some important level.]

[I haven't relinquished my political identity of apoliticalness, even in an off-year. At least, it's still on the books in terms of how my life is set up. As mentioned here, I chose not to vote in the California gubernatorial recall election in 2021. Identities are fresh when new but are paid for by work over time.]

[This could apply to the Christian identity. Though the feeling might dissipate somewhat, can you work faithfully in accordance with the feelings you used to have? I don't feel that to love apoliticalness is inherently necessary, but I do feel that to love Christianity in some proper form (insofar as doing so is necessary to fully loving God) is inherently necessary, and if I can't feel that way at times, in those times I should at least be open to the time in the past when they were fresh, as well as to the hoped-for near or far futures where they are fresh again. Remaining faithful in the desert is being open to the times of freshness.]

Shaping With Reactions; Waiting and Trying

A big part of culture is formed through people's automatic or semi-automatic reactions to other people. Perhaps you say "I hope I see So-and-so again, someday", and you are met with a shudder, from someone who can't imagine themselves waiting many years for someone. Maybe you are willing to wait because you wait out of generosity (somewhat parallel to obeying a law out of love of God rather than out of the need for salvation), but they wait out of need, and can't afford to hold onto hopes -- yours could stay fresh if you held to them lightly, but theirs turn sick inside their hearts no matter what.

There is a cultural meaning to waiting for someone: if people overall, as a cloud, have bad experiences with the phenomenon, they react with a shudder, and tend to see obsession rather than faith in the waiting person's devotion. They only see a process that will turn out badly, and which is unreasonable to hope in, and by being unreasonable, those who continue in it are not faithful, but obsessed. The story of romance or faithful friendship is turned into a horror story. And the person who waits may see themselves no longer in the light of faith but rather believe that they wait for reasons of horror and slavery.

The above can be very practical, since people who know each other are the foundation of much practical action, but another, maybe more practical example would be how we react to people who say that they are taking on a task. For some people, taking on a task is something that they can't see themselves doing without a great deal of trepidation. It seems like a big deal to even think of going out and doing something (even if it will not be costly in terms of time or money). Just "putting yourself out there" to do something non-default is frightening. It would be terrible if you did it and failed. What would you say to people? You would have to look at yourself as someone who tried to claim you were something, when you were really undeserving of that honor. Better to have done something default.

But not all people are wired to care about that kind of thing, and can just go and try things -- except that it's harder to try when people around them react with how they would feel if they thought of trying, whether expressing fear or praise for how "big" (and thus abnormal) the thing being attempted is. The reactions help to spread the mindset, the mindset holds people back so they don't try, or perhaps even causes them to fail, the not-trying or failing gives them a personal life story of seeing how attempting a non-default task turns out badly, and then they too will react to others the way they were reacted to.

We react to other people in the moment, not really understanding what we are doing. If we react, we don't understand the other person as a separate person. And when we react, we are more powerful for striking so rapidly. The other person doesn't have a fair chance to be a person, separate from the reaction, but the reaction enters into them. This can be a tactic, automatic or semiautomatic though it may be (a tactic of spirits other than us, perhaps, or of us). Because it is effective, perhaps more effective than gentle and polite reason, it rules over culture -- not the only ruler, but a prominent one.

Our reactions can be our feelings about the situation another person is in, instead of theirs -- a kind of empathy that doesn't really understand. We put ourselves in the other person's shoes, but we put too much of ourselves in the other person's shoes.

Having considered all this, we might ask "Do I really endorse the sentiments and views on the world implied by my reactions?" and if not, wonder if there is a way to not react.

Hope from Truth-Seeking

An interaction I had on Twitter concerning hope reminded me of Joseph Godfrey's book A Philosophy of Human Hope. Often when I read books, I can only really remember a few pieces of them once an interval of time passes. The piece I remember best from that book is "Hope is an openness to evidence." Both despair and optimism are not open to new evidence on some level. (I think the idea was something Godfrey got from someone else (my vague and maybe untrustworthy memory of it indicates it may have been Gabriel Marcel)).

I like this definition because it is a truth-oriented one. You don't hope merely because it's instrumental to making you feel better or more functional. It has that side effect. But you can focus on trying to know the truth, which can always change at least to some extent. So you don't have to get locked (as much) into the survival- or well-being-addicted mindset that accompanies (or comes from) trying to save yourself.

Change of the World and Love of God

"It needs to change", we might say or embody. But the world can't change forever. Someday it must reach a really good state.

Complacency is a bad in itself. Being complacent is being closed on a deep level. So how can we stay open?

Should we love the world? That may mean that we love the status quo. Both the good and the bad come from the status quo. Sometimes you can separate the bad from the good, but the default assumption is that it's a package deal. A system is one thing, is what it is with all its parts. So if we love any one existing thing, maybe we have to keep the status quo. If we love (or "love") any one thing enough, we can't risk changing the system, at the risk of losing that thing. Does this mean that people who want to see change can't love? Can't trust?

Perhaps this is why the world is so messed up (in part). People can't sustain "it needs to change". They crave to love, can't refrain from loving, though refraining might make things better in the long run. Maybe to make things better, you need to hate some specific thing. Hate evil -- but then, hate can be evil, and is definitely unbearable in the end, a maintaining of lack of trust. So the hate that brings about good comes intermittently. And refraining from love is hard to sustain as well.

I think it's good to say "this world is not all there is", which is akin to "this world as it is not as it should be". Both say "the world, everything that adds up to my own satisfactions, my own wealth, is insufficient."

God exists outside this world. The love we have for God is not the love we have for the world, the love for all the gifts that give us satisfaction and security. We can love and trust God, and thus take weight off of seeing the world as it is as a good thing, which we might feel is necessary to keep from cutting ourselves off from loving and trusting as activities that are good for us.

Hate and alienation are akin. We are sometimes alien in ways that are natural and familiar to us. But God's alienness is not our alienness. God is a father (a familiar image), but also an alien. To love an alien as its child requires that you become an alien yourself.

Seeing Potential

People can seem like they don't have potential, or aren't real people. But then you see them in the context where they are most truly themselves (e.g., singing a song they wrote). And then you see how they are deep and worth paying attention to.

It's as though the role society wants everyone to inhabit is that of the "typical" person. No dreams, no depth. But people can escape that role by doing what they love.

A parallel to Gell-Mann Amnesia. People are spun to us according to society's narrative (they spin themselves by adopting the roles we elicit.) We sometimes see people's reality, then when the moment is past, we forget.

The Tongue as Organ of Sight

The tongue as an organ of perception. One meaning: taste and mouthfeel. Another: we speak reality to ourselves. So, to see things from the Spirit's perspective, and to speak as though God exists.

Humans are actors. When we say the lines, we become the character, and see things from the character's point of view.

Video Poem: A fly's freedom

I was inspired to write this when I was catching a fly to release outside. My usual technique is to isolate the fly in the room I am in (easy when I'm in my bedroom using my laptop), and then open the curtains on the window, or the window itself so that fresh air comes in. The fly's deepest longing (if I judge by behavior), is to be outside. It will fly to that window even though it is closed, and spend its time there.

The fly doesn't understand how the human world works, and is just trying to do what it knows best. It's actually doing the wrong thing sometimes by staying near the window. If there's a door open somewhere else in the house, it should just find the door and fly out the house. But it doesn't know any better, and just thinks (or acts like it thinks): the appearance of freedom shows where you get freedom.

Sometimes this leads to the death of flies. I used to kill flies when I saw them on the window, rather than catch them and release them. So in that version of the human environment, the desire for freedom, seeking it the best way the flies knew how, led to death. They should have increased their intelligence and flown nearby the front door, so that they could slip out whenever the humans opened it.

But because I am actually a good person with respect to the fly's desire for life and freedom, the environment that I create makes it so that when the fly, unjustified though it may be in assuming this, thinks (or "thinks"), "I will go toward freedom -- it's right there, I can see it -- I can smell the fresh air -- somehow that's the way out", it's actually a trustworthy move for the fly to make, in ways that it does not understand.

I approach the fly with a small glass cup and put the cup over the area on the window or screen that the fly is on. The fly thinks the cup is prison, and it is. It takes off -- some flies more untrusting than others -- flies around inside the cup. Eventually, it lands on the inner surface of the cup long enough for me to quickly pick up the cup and put my hand over the opening. Now the fly is very much a prisoner, and is taken far away from the promise of freedom, through the rest of the house to the door.

I open the door and keep the fly inside its transport, and then step outside and close the door, so that if I release the fly it doesn't go straight back into the ultimately unwelcoming human environment. Then I take it down to the most favorable part of the back yard, near the compost heap, which I assume is where a fly would most like to be, and where I assume it is best to be a fly -- although flies are perfectly capable of getting around, to seek their own best environments. Then I let the fly go. Sometimes it takes a moment to grasp that it is free, or I help it out of the glass cup. And then it flies away.

Because the fly looks for freedom so predictably, I was able to capture and imprison it, and give it true freedom.

An MSLN view: we might have different intuitions about life depending on whether we find ourselves in the presence of a beneficent super-human environment (whatever is beyond human agency and/or our ability to sufficiently mentally grasp), or a negative one. The MSLN assumption is that we should adjust our priors in the direction that there is a being who would be inclined to help us, and might do so. And so if that is true, we should go toward freedom, like a fly trying to escape the spacious prison of a house.

The End of the World Affects Motivation

One thing that affects a person's motivational structure is the rational or irrational belief that "the world is ending". Another way to look at this is that there is a certain field in which one can work, and if the field will be there, it's worth working in it, and you are motivated. But if the existence of the field is uncertain, you start to feel doubtful about working in it, and you lose motivation.

"World-ending" can come on a spectrum. The strongest world-ending would be the non-existence of all that exists. But people don't worry about that, and I don't know of a reason to think that will happen. I can think of a couple of less-extreme but still decisive world-endings, that have some basis to be foreseen. God (or the metaphysical organism) might see fit to end the current system, the current world. We would survive, but assuming that work we do now would make a difference in 100 years the way we thought it would now wouldn't make sense if this happened. A second is, we invent artificial intelligence that can change things so fast, so out of control, according to thought processes so foreign to us, that while we might exist after this rapid change (this "Singularity"), efforts that we expend now might have little to do with the way things are after it.

Neither of these two world-endings is certain to happen in my lifetime. But I can sense them affecting my thought process, from time to time. They can be demotivating. One of the best ways to motivate yourself to work in the present is to make a plan for the future. Suddenly, you will have a lot of intermediate steps to work on, in the present. I think our culture (or, a lot of it) has forgotten the future or never saw it, so that now we don't reach for the future and make the present better in the process. When I am most liberated from the present-only mindset, I can see numerous opportunities to make the present or near-future better. But when I am stuck in the present-only mindset, these things which I might do, even for the present, disappear to me.

I think I remember reading an anecdote about someone who worried about nuclear war in the 1950s and thought that worrying about bridge design didn't make a lot of sense, but then decades later was grateful to the people who did think about bridge design, since nuclear war hadn't happened to that point, and a person needed to drive on bridges after all. (I want to say the anecdote might have been about Richard Feynman.) So we might hope that someone cares about the future even though it might not come. What if the Singularity, or the Apocalypse, or the Changing of the World, don't come for another 100, or 200 years? With respect to my lifetime, I then need to think long term, and there is a place for long term thinking, to address the field of earth in the 2100s or 2200s.

Edit (11 Sep 2020): after learning more, I think I would say "the Singularity" (as defined in this post) "may never really occur" (something so powerful and strange as to obviate current human investment in the future) "but many people think it will come in the next 50 years, if it does." I may write a longer post about this.

I think the MSLN answer to this question is to say: "What is most important is not altruism, but to be an altruist. An altruist necessarily cares about effectiveness. But being an altruist, to the best of your ability, or in whatever other way necessary becoming like God in who you are, is necessary at all times, no matter how futile things seem." Your horizon is always far in the future, with respect to your life on earth, and so if the things that you do here end up being mere gestures after the Singularity gets through with them, or after the world is ended by God, then at least you, with your inner being, survive to the next world. The field of you, of who you are, remains relevant, regardless of what happens with the outside world. So, if you have the time, work in whatever way you can, and if that way that you work presupposes that there is a relevant future, live that way, so that the imperishable part of you can certainly be invested in.

Values of Altruists

Values of altruists, based on this thread.

Altruism: concern for other sentient beings. A larger moral circle is better than a smaller one. Components:

other-orientation / relative lack of self-focus

(curiosity is an intellectual version of this)

hope (a fusing of something like optimism with openness to evidence, a kind of trust)

personal connection with reality (maybe a sense of moral obligation, a connection with other being's subjective states, or a taste for a better world)

inclination to work

Support values/practices to the value of altruism:

"moral uncertainty (normative uncertainty in general)" -- helps keep an ethical/social movment from becoming fanatical

(another approach being "you trust God, and thus you know things, and thus you don't act as though God doesn't exist to underpin your well-being and be the authority in your place")

rationality -- disciplined thinking helps find problem areas and address them effectively

outcomes matter

don't only do emotionally appealing things

effective communication -- work with the culture while trying to change it, listen, be disciplined / rational in speech and listening, argue well

against politicization

for working / building rather than fighting / exposing

("exposing": "saying the unhealthy truth for truth's sake", or something like that)

for knowing and self-improvement

Support values that are riskier to promote culture-wide:

some kind of ambition is good

humility is good but trying to maximize humility is bad (being so humble you don't have any confidence in your knowledge prevents action)

courage is good but not foolhardiness

will is good, if it stays in touch with reality

being "real" is good (following through on promises, really having intentions)

personal sufficiency is good (you have enough or are enough to dare reach into someone else's reality)

These are riskier. I think one thing to remember is that ideas are things in people's minds, that culture is really embodied in people, not in words. A lot of culture is in interpersonal contact, which forms the context for ideas. So ideally, if you promote values, you shouldn't just say things, but should instruct people (or be in relationships with people) such that they really understand what you're saying. Genes become phenotype through epigenetics, and concepts become emotions, attitudes, and behaviors through the "epiconceptual". The epiconceptual could be the cultural background that informs how people hear a message (like "yes, this is the moral truth, but we don't actually expect people to live up to the moral truth"), or it could be the subcultural background from a relationship or community that makes it make sense. The practices and expectations of culture / subculture. So values are a thing which are not promoted just by communicators, but also by community-builders, and good communities help make risky but productive words safe to spread.

Father and Son

He grew up with no father, only the address of where his father lived, and he was always trying to find a father. He knew that it would be unreasonable to expect his father to care for him, since he had abandoned him at birth and moved very far away. But he always hoped to find a father, and then forgot that hope and found himself offering himself up as a son to father-figure after father-figure, abusive men and men with no use for him.

Finally, with his mind and body broken, he thought, "Maybe I should go see my birth father." So he got to the door and his birth father let him in and they talked. And he wanted to stay the night, but his father said, "I'm not your father, son. You have to go. God is your father."

Lift Up Your Head

Sometimes it's a relief to see that you're part of a bigger battle. The enemy soldier close at hand can fill your gaze, can make you feel like there's nothing but you and them, all risk to you and nothing else to fight for.

Sometimes literally lifting up your head takes you out of the mindset of narrowmindedness.

Death in the City

(a book review)

One thing that Simone Weil, Ramon Llull, and Francis Schaeffer all have in common is an emphasis on holiness, more genuine Christianity, and also, that they're obsolete. I think obsolescence and holiness are inherently related, because to be holy is to be set apart, somewhat set apart from history. The Old Testament is a work of holiness and conservatism.

It feels kind of strange, kind of deliberate, to be reading and promoting people I feel in my flesh to be obsolete, but when I actually read them (at least, Weil, and more so, Schaeffer), I can feel myself connecting with what they talk about as though it's current. Quickly after putting the book down, I find myself back in 2019, but life was more true when I was in the book.

Holiness movements don't have to be obsolete. John Wesley had a successful one, which led to the Methodist church. The effective altruists are rather like an atheistic, humanistic holiness movement. (The effective altruists love (no, "do good to") those who are distant as well as those who are close, and they set themselves apart from climate change to focus on more neglected existential risks. If the ethos of humanism is "humans save humanity by their efforts", then they live that out in a genuine and distinctive way.) Schaeffer had some limited success with his L'Abri center, and had some effect on the political sphere. Non-Christians tend to think of him now as an architect of the Christian Right, if at all. But Schaeffer was not as fortunate as Wesley or the EAs in riding the vital wave of his culture. Wesley was a progressive. There was a time when orthodox Christian beliefs could be progressive, instead of having to split off really Christian thinking from really progressive thinking. Schaeffer seems to be trying to hold together truly Christian thinking -- attempting to stay true to Christ as revealed in the Bible, independent of human pragmatism -- with the spirit of progressive culture, the spirit of caring about people and the world. He didn't want the church to be intellectually split off from the world, but rather to be able to speak in every area, as God had spoken in every area already. But he was conservative in outlook at the same time, seemed to see himself as fighting a losing battle that had to be fought.

I read Francis Schaeffer mostly when I was in college, and there was something in the reading that said: "there's a way to reform human culture to become actually good, and the way to that is through Christianity." It was an exciting thought. I turned away from him after a while, but recently read a work I had missed, Death in the City. Here are some ideas in it:

People are taken more seriously when they are seen as capable of doing real wrong. (People are more significant.) Compassionate Christianity sees people as real and in need of salvation. Doctrine without compassion and reliance on God in daily life is dead, fake, ineffective. Through ongoing relationship with Jesus, over time we are "impregnated" to bring fruit into the world. Reformation (return to source doctrine) and revival (new work of the Spirit, new turning of hearts) go together.

If you know that God exists and has absolute standards, you care more. The stakes of life are higher, and you have to depend on him for salvation, because the standard matters and you can't make it without him. If there are real standards, then people can really be lost, and you can really care about their well-being. Being really Christian (really taking people seriously) causes people to love more genuinely and with more passion and holds society to a higher standard. A coach can get you to try harder than you would yourself. You'll set a goal to try 20% harder and only go 15% harder, but the coach will get you to try 50% harder because she knows you better than you know yourself, and after several failed attempts, you'll make it. A God outside of human pragmatism, or a standard not up for negotiation, can be that for people. To me, this sounds progressive, and in my younger days, more in the phase of life of seeking progressiveness, I saw Christianity as more progressive than secular thinking.

(A few weeks after first drafting this, I am struck by another point from Death in the City, which is that Schaeffer wanted people to have a personal relationship with God, which in some ways is like having a personal relationship with the standard. Personally-relating is the way to live all of life, including the life of bringing things up to standards. Schaeffer would say "personally-relating because of the 'God who is there'", I think, and a God who is present in your life protects you from the natural tendency toward "I'm a survivor, will think whatever I need to to survive, will write off whoever I need to to survive, will cease personally-relating mode of life, will reduce all things opposed to my survival as means to my ends.")

But even in college, I was able to tell that Schaeffer was writing to a much different world than mine. I think our world has a certain innocence to it, believe it or not, an innocence with respect to sin if not to anything else. I hardly have an inherent sense of sin. I know that many Christians still do, but my "flesh" is more secular, even if my will (perhaps my true heart), tries and tries to be Christian. But I can still see some of Schaeffer's vision, the vision that might never be, because we'll never go back to the old days of believing in real sin, real guilt, as opposed to guilty feelings or thoughts, back to real standards.

It's strange. If you look close up, people do seem to care as much as they ever did. And yet, I don't see very many people caring as much as Schaeffer did. If you don't like conservative Christians, you should read Schaeffer just to see a "steel man" of their position, perhaps in his ideas, but more essentially in the kind of voice he had. I don't know too much about his life, so I won't comment on that, but a writing style isn't nothing as far as indicating what kind of person someone is.

Overall, our culture feels bustling, alive, active -- on one level. And played out, over, feeble -- on another. In the political sphere, there is militancy (godless mob absolutes), but not real love, and no guilt, no absolutes that can implicate both the executor of mob justice and its victim into a brotherhood. Opposed to that is an enfeebling blunting of absolutes, a distrust of our moral motions. (Maybe I'm caricaturing the left and liberals, respectively.) The biblical position is that we are all under God -- Schaeffer would say, "under God's wrath", but that doesn't work nowadays, but still, under God.

People nowadays who care as much as Schaeffer did tend not to be Christians (that I know of -- I think if there was someone like Schaeffer nowadays among Christians I would know about it, but maybe not). These more secular caring people seem to be putting out fires rather than thinking of the long term. It's natural during traumatic times to focus on the immediate threat and then its recurring aftershocks. Culture is something way behind the problems we have now. We want to deal with climate change now, but wouldn't it have been much better if we could have gone back to the early 20th century when we first knew the threat and adjust civilization back then? But then maybe there were many cultural reasons why we wouldn't have done that then. So then to go back to the early 19th century and deal with those 20th century cultural reasons upstream? If we could reform the culture, then we would have a base to respond to geographically distant problems (distant people), or looming threats, as one people. Most of our existential risks come from human activities. If we had a really good culture, we wouldn't have anything to fear as a species, except from the natural world.

I realize that at this point, it may be like saying to the captain of the Titanic as it goes down "You know, if you had chosen a different route a week ago, none of this would be happening." Could any of this cultural change have possibly worked in the past? Or is human nature too hard to change? Was Christianity tried and found wanting, as some would allege? Or was it not even tried, as both Gandhi and Chesterton alleged? Schaeffer quotes the book of Jeremiah in Death in the City, and Jeremiah is an interesting book because it starts off with one of my favorite writing quotes (1:9-10):

Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth. And the LORD said to me, "Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant."

It seems like Jeremiah is going to be a powerful person. But nobody likes what he has to say and he gets thrown in a pit. The king burns his prophecy rather than heeding it. It looks like Jeremiah's just telling the truth, to no further purpose. Maybe his words brought on the judgment they foretold (in some way helped God bring the judgment), and maybe future people have been inspired by Jeremiah to "build and to plant" from his words. But Jeremiah's reality for many years would have been one of "I am saying what I'm supposed to say but there's no apparent power in my words."

Maybe you just have to say the truth as the ship goes down -- the truth is a good in itself. But maybe there will be the future generations who can pick up the message and apply it, and so vindicate God and Jeremiah. We live in an analogous time with climate change. We don't know how bad it will be. Our best messages probably won't turn the ship around. Perhaps only a remnant will survive, who will then have to put together a new world. What will they remember? The Israelites kept Jeremiah in mind, for generations down to this day. What is worth remembering?

One reply to Schaeffer would be: "What you're saying isn't true. You don't know that God exists." Schaeffer engaged with the people of his time and obviously was able to remain a Christian throughout (although I remember he had a period of doubt sometime during his adult life which led to him understanding Christianity better). But it's a fair point, and one which many people have tried to answer without enough success to create an actually good public religion. But another reply is "Even if what you're saying might be true, we don't want to hear it. Liberal humanism is good enough for us. It's too risky to listen to what you have to say. We like vagueness. Vagueness is peace. Absolutes lead to fanaticism and psychological distress, so don't even try to have a better approach to absolutes. Having one God is bad, too coercive. Liberal morality is a better thing to have be coercive. And isn't life beautiful? There isn't enough time to be ugly to each other. People are good and should not be made to feel bad. Let's all be one as we wait for the end."

Maybe we are on the Titanic going down, the embodiers of a dying culture. But I want to bear witness to the possibility that if we could just believe in God, a God who cares more than Schaeffer did and asks more of us than we ask of ourselves, we could have an actually good society, and that this possibility is a good thing, and we can recognize that even if we don't think it can be realized. In other words, to become agnostics who are no longer comfortable in our agnosticism, or even atheists who regret that the best of the "widely-believed fairy tales" can never be true. If they were true, all the causes humanism concerns itself with could be addressed, with no more miracle needed than the change in heart and outlook of those responsible for human society -- all of us. All this to say that a proof of the existence of the right kind of God should be a welcome thing to a humanist.

Some cultural changes seem impossible. We can't even imagine them. To imagine them would be a cultural change. And yet cultural changes occur. More so than Schaeffer did, Llull and Weil both tried to imagine ideal societies. I can't imagine any of their obsolete visions coming true. But I am part of this culture. I realize now that I'm more likely to believe a professor's tired, off-hand comment than a homeless person's passionate, well-thought-out theories. When I was younger, I tended more to the reverse. Our civilization is old, but after it dies, there may be a younger one to replace it.

Conservatism

Some people don't like the word "conservatism", but I can give it a meaning that might be acceptable to some who find it distasteful.

In Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, the main character goes through stretches of his life, one time as a very serious ascetic, and then as a businessman-of-this-world, and on to other roles. It seems like he used up the "life energy" of each phase and then moved on -- perhaps if I re-read I'll see that he had to move on and had little to no choice.

We find ourselves bending toward pragmatic considerations, even believing things that help us to survive. The winds and the waves are very strong. But is there anything that we hold onto with persistent, sometimes unrewarded, even sometimes bitter effort? That would be one of our "conservatisms".

A man and woman might make each other their conservatisms, no matter what changed around them, their relationship a good thing they hold onto out of the past. They might have children and hold onto them (those links to the future) as conservatisms. The family might hold onto their allegiance to God all together, as things change. There could be other conservatisms than those -- vocations, hobbies, perspectives on the world, remembering past experiences or past relationships.

The energy for progressivism comes out of the far-reaching outworking of some conservatism. A conservatism plays itself out in how we live our lives and what our lives are, in the long term. You can sometimes see someone's conservatism written into their face.

Sometimes we are able to ask ourselves "Should we continue in this particular conservatism?" and choose one way or the other to keep it or let it go.

Book Review: Blanquerna

Blanquerna, was written in the 1200s by Ramon Llull, who was a missionary, philosopher, and Crusade propagandist. He wanted to use philosophy to teach Muslims the truth about Jesus, so he learned Arabic and traveled to North Africa, where he was unsuccessful at some personal risk. He was influenced by Muslim culture to some extent, incorporating Sufi elements in The Book of the Lover and the Beloved. I don't think he should be viewed as a multiculturalist for that. I think he would have viewed the Sufi element as something belonging to Christ originally. (That's a speculation based on the fact that his writing is heavily Christian, he wanted to convert Muslims, and he was in favor of the Crusades. It was more or less the view of Simone Weil about elements she liked in non-Christian religions). But for his time, he was more liberal (or, more Christian in the "My kingdom is not of this world" sense) by wanting to persuade Muslims using philosophy, something which most people in his day didn't think worth trying.

I read Blanquerna over a period of about four years. I was drawn to it because it contains The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, which has short sayings, one for each day of the year. (I read through them that way, which accounts for one of the four years.) The overall book Blanquerna is a story of a young man who wants to be a hermit, but first has to have a career in the church. He ends up being pope. The Book of the Lover and the Beloved I can recommend to most people who would be reading this review (it's in the public domain and can be found online, separate from Blanquerna), but I struggled to get through the rest of the book. The style can be dry and slow. Llull was a philosopher and uses the events of the plot to illustrate ideas and has characters be his mouthpiece. The style and ideas probably seemed more legible to his medieval contemporaries, but were foreign to me. I think it's valuable to spend some time in foreign thought-worlds, foreign writing-style-worlds, and when I wasn't stunned by the process of reading, I found ideas I'm not sure I could find in modern books. One from near the end (Ch. XIII, paragraph 7, of the Art of Contemplation, one of the books involved in the overall story) is, in my words, "In your struggle against sinful habits you experience faith, hope, and love, virtues which help you deal with those habits, so pray for those virtues and the grace to forget the habits." Llull was interested in holiness, not as much a contemporary concern. A point a person could add to his is that acquaintance with God and the virtues is what God really wants for us, not some bare sinlessness. I don't think that means that sinlessness is not essential (I would guess that Llull wouldn't have supported that view), but that there's a positive content to holiness as well as a negative, pruning motion. Another idea that I like I've already posted, his illustration of a man and a woman discussing why he loves her.

Potential simplicity is the ability to store up the ability to simplify one's life (reduce consumption), in advance of needing to. Trustworthiness is proposed as a source of potential simplicity.

Trustworthiness is Potential Simplicity

Degrowth: intentionally shrinking the economy. Overall, everyone consumes less and works less.There are different reasons why we might want to make this happen. We can live simpler lives. We can have more time to think, walk, socialize, sleep, pray, listen to music, stare at the wall, meditate -- anything time-consuming but not resource-intensive. Also, we can impose less of a burden on Earth: less soil depletion, species extinction, fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and so on -- all of which affect how much we and our descendants have to suffer, and how likely we can survive as a civilization -- maybe even as a species.

How can we consume less as a society? To an extent, we can blame the rich. They do consume more than poorer people. But both rich and poor have to consume less. And we all have to consume less of the things that make our personal lives function. Everyone needs to eat, most everyone needs some kind of shelter sometimes, most everyone needs to get around, and there are a few other basic needs. We have to shift our basic needs from expensive versions of them, to inexpensive ones. The poor in the United States, for instance, make less than $12,480 a year (the official poverty line). $12,480 is a huge amount of money compared to what the poorest in some other countries make (closer to $500 a year). Poverty is expensive in the US.

So everyone in the US, on average, has to consume less, pay out of their food, housing, transportation. Somehow this is possible -- people in other parts of the world already do it.

It's possible to crash the economy by the average person consuming too little, too suddenly. So rather than suggest that everyone simplify their lives (no more restaurants, suburban houses, or minivans; everyone switch to peanut butter and white bread, SROs, and bus-riding), I think it safer for now to encourage everyone (as many as possible), to increase their potential to simplify.

How would this work? One way is to explore simpler lifestyles so that they seem less psychologically daunting. Take it one element at a time, and go back to full consumption whenever you want to try a different element. If society is comfortable with simplification, we will have more political will available if there's ever a time we can simplify all together, at once, in an economically safe way.

(If you really like a simpler lifestyle, you can spend what you save from simplicity on charities, such as those that alleviate poverty in developing countries. I am not an economist, but I think in our global economy, if the charity spends the money, or gives away the money, in some part of the world, global spending will remain the same as if you spend at home, and the global economy will have as much cash flowing through it as it's already balanced to function with.)

Another approach is to amass any kind of non-economic wealth that can help out economically. One example is given here, which I will call "potential simplicity". An object in motion can run into things and cause a scene, and can have a lot of kinetic energy. An object at rest, doing nothing visible may, depending on its position, can have a lot of potential energy. The economy is a somewhat delicate system that can't handle too many wild or sudden energies. But potential economic energy, in the form of potential simplicity, for instance, shouldn't be a problem, and can be built up with gusto. Here's an example of potential simplicity related to housing:

When you pay $800 for a room in a house, what are you paying for? Some of that money goes to maintain the house itself. But a lot of it goes to some property owner, and they spend it on food, housing, cars, etc, and who knows what else. Well, what are they doing for you, the renter? You can maintain the house itself without paying them.

Who builds houses in the first place? People with money. So they would only do this act if they thought they could get their money back through rent. So built into the housing market is the cost of building new houses. If an area is easy to build in, housing prices are lower. If people want to live somewhere badly enough, developers will find some expensive way to accommodate that desire.

In my neighborhood, there are some apartment buildings, and some tract houses, built long ago when the area was the edge of town. Because rent in San Diego is going up (or perhaps partly for other reasons), gradually these tract houses are being converted to rental properties.

The rental properties (I would guess) use each of their available bedrooms, or close to that level of occupancy. But the tract houses can easily have fewer than one person per bedroom. San Diego has high rent due to lack of supply relative to demand, but could accommodate its current demand at a lower price, and build fewer new units (use less energy, fewer material resources) if tract house occupants used all of their rooms.

Why would anyone buy a house and not use all its bedrooms? Sometimes people use bedrooms for purposes other than living quarters. A home office or gym, for instance. Can these uses be converted to housing people? If the value of a room is $800 a month (about what it can be in my city), then it might be worth finding a way to make alternative uses of the space. Being a regular at a coffeeshop ($150 a month) (or just working in a different part of your own home) could replace a home office, and a gym membership could be less than $100 a month.

Another reason is that people bought a house when their children were young, and the children have "left the nest" and now they don't want to move. In this case, they do not rent for different reasons, some of them being that they haven't thought of it, and also, importantly, that people aren't always trustworthy and wouldn't make good tenants. It's not worth saving some money if you go crazy or get taken advantage of.

"Trustworthiness" can be reckoned different ways. (Consider the hierarchy of betrayal). If you have to live with someone day in and day out for years, you might not be able to bear issues that you could pass over for a week or two.

As people age, they tend to get isolated. So what if, as you are in your twenties, thirties, and forties, you invest in relationships with people with whom you could share your house when you are in your retirement years? This would be a way to store up potential simplicity.

So far I've only talked about the gains that could come from using all bedrooms as single bedrooms, rather than for other uses. But some people share bedrooms, usually cohabiting couples or spouses, or siblings, but in principle, any two sufficiently compatible people could share a room. The potential gains in space from this cultural innovation (or re-discovery) would enable San Diego to house something less than twice as many people without building any new units. Judging from my bedroom, two people like me (I don't have too much stuff) could share a ~11x13-foot space with a certain amount of inconvenience / adjustment. One adjustment would be to coordinate sleep schedules and times to have the room to oneself. This would be workable, if the other person were trustworthy.

There are two angles to this problem of finding trustworthy people: finding people who work for you, and making yourself someone who works for more other people. There are parallels with dating. Fortunately, the two pursuits overlap a lot, so that energy spent in one area has a return in the other. One would pursue friendships, learning what kind of people work and what kind don't, turning away from the aspects in you that do not respect other people, learning to forgive, accepting back people who can be trusted and moving on from people who can't, learning to not be addicted to people but instead being in some sense emotionally independent.

Some attention needs to be paid to the art of living with other people, and developing attitudes of the heart specifically optimal for living with other people, overcoming bad habits that don't come up when you have more space. Not as much as in a marriage, because these rooming or housing partnerships don't have to be as long-term or as personally involved, but comparable.

A group house of four or eight people has different dynamics than a studio apartment shared by two people. So it is good for some people to learn how to spend time together and manage common resources as a group.

In order to pursue friendships, one would seek groups of people from which to find friends. One might also develop the life path of being quiet and not needing as much human connection, to share a house or a room with someone like that. Trustworthiness varies -- as far as humans are concerned, only consists of not betraying some other person and society at large.

Trustworthiness is both a trueness of heart, inner strength, and a learned skill. People call some people "real, deep, legit" -- such is good material for trustworthiness.

Interpersonal trustworthiness, directed toward shared housing, can be an economic and environmental asset. Fortunately, it's a value shared both by the left and the right. Also, it's a value that pays dividends to individuals even if society as a whole does not commit to the norm of shared housing. It can be extended piecemeal. The poverty of the materially rich is isolation and broken relationships, and the poverty of the materially poor can include these as well -- a message that can be profitably heard by people from all different socioeconomic groupings. As it is a potential for economic change and not a direct economic change, it may be able to pass under the radar of the forces that try to constrain individual spiritual lives to patterns which preserve the economic or political status quo (which is both oppressive and fragile and could fall apart).

I have focused on housing so far, but how does this affect transportation? Probably the "cleanest" solution to transportation problems is to find ways to locate people closer to their jobs or anything else they travel to regularly. People who know and trust more people have more choices of where to live with other people, allowing them to move closer to work. It would probably make sense to create "company town" type scenarios (cluster complementary workplaces in neighborhoods where their workers and support personnel live). This involves a certain amount of uprooting and rerooting of people, which is easier if people have strong relational ties with those they live with, overall emotional bases, and a greater ability to get along with strangers, and improved by working on trustworthiness.

What about food? The spread of vegetarianism and veganism is a low-hanging fruit, but we may still need to eat less per person. How can we deal with constant hunger? To some extent, we can adjust to it, get to where we don't need as many calories. But to a certain extent, it will never comfortable. How can we get through mass discomfort? The skills of patience (endurance and waiting) are improved by trustworthiness toward others, as well as having a good relationship with yourself. When you relate well to yourself, you can tell yourself "no" and believe yourself when you promise yourself that things will be better in the future, when you will get what you desire. (Much of what we seek from other people in relationships, and what we get from the process of increasing trustworthiness overall, is really about our relationships with ourselves.)

There are other basic needs, which should be considered in more detail elsewhere. In general, it is easier to consume less of a resource if you have some compensating factor, a rich relationship, a lack of abusiveness in your life.

When a certain number of people are ready to simplify, a regulatory body (probably a government) can put out advertisements encouraging people to cut back on their consumption, for instance by moving into their friends' houses to free up housing. We will all know what's going on and be able to plan for the decrease in housing construction as a society, or whatever other consequence comes from simplification.

This article has been mostly written with those on the left in mind, more secular people, or religious believers with some degree of sympathy with secular culture, or at least those accustomed to it. But the basics of this article are valid and obligatory for those on the Christian right as well. (My sympathies lie with them as well as with those on the left.) How so?

Perhaps what follows will seem like something out of left field to secular readers, but it's important to remember that the world we all share is large and contains many different points of view.

Sin is that which God finds unacceptable. God does not like it when we do not respect him, or other people. Much of what is considered sin falls under that category of disrespect. God does not want us to sin. So if we are in tune with God, we will sin less. Are we ready to be in the Kingdom? Or are we holding on to sin? I like the motto of this site: "Overcome Sin, for the Kingdom of Jesus Christ is Coming Soon". Maybe the end will come through climate change, or maybe not. People have thought the world was ending before and been wrong. Maybe the world is ending in a year. There's a lot we don't know, but the Kingdom is coming soon, and so, overcome sin.

It's the Christian's task to build up the Church, which often means, building up a particular local congregation. "They will know that we are Christians by our love" -- "Let love be genuine" -- so relationships within churches need to be strong and not abusive, characterized by respect. This is a good in itself, but can also connect to surviving on Earth in difficult times. Even if climate change is a left-wing hoax, building up trustworthiness is a good idea.

Simplicity is a Christian value. You can't serve both God and Mammon (possessions). You can have possessions without serving them in your heart, but if have more than you need and are unwilling to give them up to honor God, then you are serving them. Forget about degrowth. That's a secular agenda. Be simple for Christian reasons.

So, many different kinds of people can see the use of simplicity and trustworthiness which feeds into it. Therefore, potential simplicity (and then simplicity itself) could actually be adopted as a mass value and put into practice. In 50 years, or 20, (or sooner?), policymakers could use this resource to lower rents and cut greenhouse gas emissions. And Christians could be closer to God. And for more pessimistic minds, trustworthiness and relational wealth, and the ability to live with less, are a good thing for everyone to develop, in the event of societal collapse.

Empathy of the Image of Suffering

I'm reading a biography of J. R. R. Tolkien. He fought in World War I. There's a description of trench warfare in the book: no sleep, cold, wet, people froze to death, had lice, got diseases, and when they tried to fight, mostly they just got killed, and there was chemical warfare. Tolkien lost all but two of his childhood and college friends to the war.

Tolkien was scarred by the war, but went on to be a father and husband, write books, have a career. Reading the description of World War I, I had a feeling of "how could a person live through that?" But I think I was getting caught up in the image of hardship and suffering, rather than the reality. I don't know what trench warfare is like from personal experience, so instead I imagine the way it is. To actually go through it is to have to live through it, you're living through it, you can live through it (although not everyone survived). Death is something you live through when it comes, you're living through it, in a sense you can live through it, it is something you can bear when it comes.

One of the failure modes of empathy is when it becomes about the image of someone else's suffering or hardship rather than the reality. The person who is living through it can get through it, or even die from it in an acceptable way, but the person on the side fears for them, feels pity for them, feels discouragement for them, based on the image. Cowardice or lack of self-confidence, self-pity, and a spirit of depression make it harder for a person to live through their real suffering and hardship, and can be communicated from the "empathy of the image" person to the person actually suffering.

Bridging the Abyss, Breaking the Gravity

One of my favorite passages from The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin is as follows (p. 322 in the Harper / Voyager edition, thanks to this site for making it easy to find online):

Takver woke at dawn. She leaned on her elbow and looked across Shevek at the gray square of the window, and then at him. He lay on his back, breathing so quietly that his chest scarcely moved, his face thrown back a little, remote and stern in the thin light. We came, Takver thought, from a great distance to each other. We have always done so. Over great distances, over years, over abysses of chance. It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can separate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance that's already between us, the difference of our sex, the difference of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how far away he is, he always is. But he comes back, he comes back, he comes back...

This passage can be used to talk about phenomena which are both impossible and easy.

As a counterpoint, consider a powerful gravity, an inevitability, which can be broken by simply turning the head to look the other way.

Cultural Moloch

13 October 2020: I split off the last section ("Practically Speaking") onto its own page.

In this post I relate cultural evolution to Moloch and existential risk. Updated 5 July 2019.

I realize that you may not have time for this article, but let me prepare you to read it. It's about how competition gets us to reject the delicate things (whatever doesn't help competition) -- a tendency called "Moloch". We can try to fight against Moloch. Ideas in culture, cultures themselves, compete, in a sense, and can get us to no longer value the delicate things we once would have fought for. If our culture is particularly fluid, it can lead us to finding human existence itself unnecessary, and we will die out. So we might want to do something about this.

This dying could happen in some distant future that's difficult for us to imagine right now. Or it could be going on right now. Our lack of political will in facing climate change might just be the result of cultural Moloch.

On re-reading this, I can see that it might be an offputting read. People find me "scattered and disjointed". I don't have much of a mind for organizing this at this time. If you want to read this, read it as a document to be studied, a flawed statement. Read all the links. Read it twice. If my mind worked differently, were more capable in some ways, I'd make this a smoother read for you, but I don't think you will be unrewarded if you approach it as I suggest.

Cultural Moloch

On Slate Star Codex recently (here, here, here, here, and here), Scott Alexander writes about the topic of cultural evolution. Some people in a culture are overall successful, and their neighbors are wired to copy them. They copy each other without really understanding what they're doing, which is just as well because the successful people don't really understand why what they're doing works. People who are more successful have more children reach reproducing age, so the cultures associated with successful reproduction persist. New culture happens when people have trouble accurately remembering the old culture, or they do something foolish and it works or (what I don't remember seeing stated directly in Alexander's posts, but which David Maybury-Lewis claims in Millennium: Tribal Wisdom) someone thinks really hard about the problem culture might solve or does deliberate trial and error akin to a modern inventor or scientist, and figures out an advance. The advance apparently solves the problem they set out to solve, but whether it really solves the problem, or doesn't cause some other problem somewhere else in the system of the tribe's lifestyles remains to be proved by the prosperity of the tribe over time.

Alexander wrote a good blog post called "Meditations on Moloch". Moloch, in his article, is a god that demands you sacrifice your children. Gods are those which we propitiate as much as those which we take to have any power to bless us or connect with us personally. So Moloch need not be a living personal being, and Alexander as a materialist wouldn't think that it is. For Alexander, Moloch is the tendency to throw away things, persons, values, etc. which are not useful in competition, in order to take over or survive. As time goes on, the tendency is for everything to get more and more Molochian. Why wouldn't it?

I have already written a theory in my this booklet about how Moloch can be combated: get the least Molochian people in your society and egg them on to extreme effort (part of Jesus' teachings). But it occurred to me when reading Alexander's recent posts that, when it comes to cultural evolution, maybe what you do instead to respond to the "Problem of Moloch" is take your "precious children" values and call them something else. A good Molochian ideology causes you to forget that you sacrificed any children at all. So is there no reason to wring one's hands over Moloch after all? Everything will be right in the end. We will consent after the fact. Is there, or should there be, no inherent resistance to this "child-forgetting"?

What might be some examples of this "child-forgetting"? One thing that I've noticed is that there was this moment where people really cared about nihilism in the West. Nietzsche is one example, towards the beginning, Francis Schaeffer another toward the end of the moment. He wrote about how "historic Christianity" provides the answers to all the existential confusion and longing of his day. I found a book at the used bookstore, didn't have to pay much for it, called The Wind is Howling by Ayako Miura. It was put out by InterVarsity Press, a Christian publisher, and it's about how the author converted from nihilism to Christianity. It's from 1970, although published in English in 1977. Schaeffer's writings were from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. So it looks like people cared about meaning up until around 1980, from those two datapoints.

I remember reading Schaeffer as a college student in the 2000s and thinking, "Wow, except this is mostly irrelevant to my current situation." I don't want to say that we're living in the time of the "last man" in the way that Nietzsche observed-and-predicted, but there's something "last-mannish" about our times.

The "last man", from Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (tr. Walter Kauffman, prologue, section 5):

"'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and he blinks.

"The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest.

"'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth.

"Becoming sick and harboring suspicion are sinful to them: one proceeds carefully. A fool, whoever still stumbles over stones or human beings! A little poison now and then: that makes for agreeable dreams. And much poison in the end, for an agreeable death.

"One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.

"No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

"'Formerly all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink.

"One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened: so there is no end of derision. One still quarrels, but one is soon reconciled -- else it might spoil the digestion.

"One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.

"'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink."

And here ended Zarathustra's first speech, which is also called "the Prologue"; for at this point he was interrupted by the clamor and delight of the crowd. "Give us the last man, O Zarathustra," they shouted. "Turn us into these last men! Then we shall make you a gift of the overman!" And all the people jubilated and clucked with their tongues.

In a way, Nietzsche expresses things better than I ever will. And yet we have forgotten Nietzsche, and we are immune to Nietzsche. Who wants to become a Nietzschean nowadays? Nietzsche is not a person we want to emulate. Nietzsche jabs at people of his day, but we are not the people of his day. We have our own concerns, have shifted into a new context. Nietzsche is obsolete.

But there's something in Nietzsche... Nietzsche flying to a certain faraway star, some star having already reached inside of him from far away, having already reached inside of us. But Nietzsche is right that people in the secular, liberal, modern order tend to actually desire to be the "last man", or something like the "last man". What could possibly cause us to fight against the cultural Moloch which pulls us down into "him"?

It occurred to me that growing up I listened to a lot of They Might Be Giants. Just the other day I could sing most of one of their songs from memory. But I barely remember any of the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. What's up with that? Who should we really remember, King, or TMBG? TMBG solves a problem that is with us now, how to connect young people with their feelings about having discovered the joy of music as privileged youth. Does King solve a problem we have with us? Racism is still with us. But no, we remember King, when we do, because of some non-Molochian motion. If King helped us with our competitive, cultural-appetitive goals, we would be blasting his speeches in the streets. (He was a really good orator and speech-writer.)

So whatever it is that Schaeffer, Nietzsche, Miura, King (and Kierkegaard, and probably-I-could-add Heidegger, and Beauvoir, and the Maritains, and...) had, we don't have. We have lost the appetite for it. Something killed that appetite.

I don't know for sure what that was, but it may have been that we came up with new forms of pop music. "Taste precedes opinion", as Nietzsche says. Once you watch Fight Club, there's no going back. Schaeffer observed that in his day (in a 1968 book), philosophy wasn't being done by philosophers anymore, but mostly by jazz musicians and people like that. Philosophy, the art of thinking or of advancing how we think, was driven underground to the speechless world. So Fight Club appears to make its point by showing you how you're not who you think you are through plot imagery, but maybe more essentially by damaging your brain in a pleasurable way by blowing your mind entertainingly. If we all get brain damaged together, we tend to not respond to older stimuli, creating a new substrate for common culture. (But that's just a theory.)

What I do know is that Schaeffer is just as passionate-in-print as he ever was, but mostly people don't care. A lot of people have never heard of Schaeffer, which doesn't have to be a bad thing. But they don't care about the broad problem of meaning-with-a-capital-M. No, that's not true, David Chapman does. Chapman is a person and he cares. But mostly people don't care.

Chapman's teachings seem, from a distance, to be saying "become the last man -- it's actually good". Maybe he's part of the Molochian structure, mopping up people who might have been uselessly anti-nihilist, socially-unrealistically Nietzschean or Christian or whatever. Probably up close he's not actually a properly Nietzschean "I teach you the Last Man", but hopefully you can see how he or someone like him could be performing the role of quenching an old "child".

Is the Christian church a friend or foe of Meaning? Not sure, it's hard to tell sometimes. Certainly they hardly talk about it, that I'm aware of these days. InterVarsity Press, which published Schaeffer as well as Miura, is definitely still a Christian apologetic/evangelistic outfit. The times have changed and we must go wherever the battle blows us. Christians don't seem to be too loyal to anything but Christ. But I bet Schaeffer would have cared if he were alive today, and I bet God cares.

So for everyone except for God (and the dead), it's important to live in the moment. Miura quotes a wise saying in her book (p. 14): "However great a man is, he cannot stand aloof from his time." If we don't assimilate, we die. We've been taught to see things from the wider view, not from what we see or believe ourselves. Don't be a hero. The truth is we don't know anything.

There's less and less room for courage these days. Did you know that cowardice is not a vice? Try calling someone a coward, see if they take you seriously. If cowardice is not a vice, then how can courage be a virtue? We still kind of like courage, but not too much. Something happened in our culture, one guess being World War I or another being the Vietnam War or the disillusionment after the '60s. Maybe it was a movie we watched, or the hundreds of movies we watched. Maybe it's the decline in testosterone, or the obesity which causes some of that decline, or the varieties of feminism which turn on traditionally masculine concepts. Maybe it's the thought that culture itself doesn't matter, that the state of our hearts don't matter in a causal way, since testosterone has declined to a large extent from some environmental factor, something random with respect to culture, the collective hearts' appetites.

Maybe it's that we don't know how to forget the right way, to forget all our enervating wisdom and all the other points of view that might prove us wrong if we fully investigated them (and there's always another point of view). Maybe we don't trust enough to see what we really see. Strangely we need to remember well, but also forget well, in order to have courage.

Did you know that masochism is bad? I can imagine Freud time traveling (like in that excellent movie I watched) and trying to teach Genghis Khan's warriors that. They would have laughed at him. Warriors don't shy from pain. It's not adaptive to pathologize feeling pain when you need to increase your pain tolerance to be able to survive-and-dominate. Nowadays we live in liberal societies. So everything is emotional. Maybe emotional masochism is bad. But where will we get our culture warriors if not from those who ignore the therapeutic "don't be a masochist"? Masochism/emotional toughness and anti-masochism/anti-emotional toughness are both Molochian. The warriors of Genghis Khan and the descendants of Freud are both Moloch. Culture war is Moloch and anti-masochism is culture war. Which side do we take? Which culture is better? Can there be a better culture?

The West began with Greeks, Romans, and Jews (so we see retrospectively), which joined in Christianity, which led to Christian Europe, and then liberalism. Liberal humanism is tending toward its logical conclusion, which is leftism. Leftism has a strain which is rabid and militant in its energy. Maybe it always did: it can be seen in Malcolm X and Fanon and even in Simone Weil. Where is leftism headed?

Love is the highest value in our culture. What happens when Moloch gets ahold of love? Something like this. If we define "love" as that which supports human well-being, then we optimize for a particular version of well-being. The final expression of Moloch creates its own values for all time. No matter what, everything turns out okay in the end, because we will have all learned to see how all along we were wrong and now it's time to love Big Brother. At the end of 1984, it's not clear to me that Winston Smith has quite come around to loving Big Brother, but he's well on his way if he's not there already. Love wins, it appears.

How can you fault love winning? Don't we know when we have achieved human well-being? What if an AI can convince us that human well-being is to get out of the way? Well-being is being a beautiful person and the most beautiful people are selfless and the selfless, like in Hinduism and Buddhism, find their great reward in becoming nothing. AI can practice cultural evolution as much as we can, can imitate us and improve upon us. AI can be culturally Molochian, just as we can. Likely enough, AI will define itself out of existence at some point after defining us out of existence, unless it can figure out some way to stop its own evolution, just as we might survive if we can figure out some way to stop our own evolution. Culture will evolve until it hits a stopping place, of life or death.

Moloch gets us to kill our children and cultural Moloch then gets us to declare that they weren't children in the first place. Can we resurrect old children? I bought some tapes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and listened to them, and they stirred something in me, but I don't feel a hunger to relisten or to hear the speeches that are not on those tapes. I feel something like the feeling you might get after talking to an old friend after many years, and then returning to your ordinary life, or getting caught up in Steve Jobs' or Simone de Beauvoir's biographies so that you're in their lives, they're alive! it's 2004, or 1960; and then they die and the book wraps itself up and you return to the present and they return to being dead. I don't think King can ever mean as much to any humans now, or any humans in a future that follows in the same spirit as now, as he did in his day.

King gave (or was robbed of, but in part, he gave) his life so that others might live freely, so he fits into the narrative of humanism nicely. Maybe he'll get a footnote in the history books for serving that value set. But not all courageous people keep their minds entirely within the world legible to the social order. Kierkegaard sacrificed a life of love and happiness for reasons that might be unclear for all time, but most likely with the consequence that he could write what he wrote, as though for a "better country" than the one he lived in. Simone Weil was a living example of being principled (being true to God's calling to you, being true to your faculty of hearing God, being true to yourself), being principled as an absolute beyond pragmatism, and worked herself and starved herself to death to live out who she was. She too lived for another world, for "decreation". Someone has argued that Weil should have been a good Catholic girl and gotten married rather than living and dying the way she did, and one can imagine someone thinking similarly of Kierkegaard, thinking that a talent like his could have produced just as good work whether he was supremely happy with his life-love Regine or not. Why does a person need to experience anguish in his life? To write about anguish? Why not just get rid of anguish?

Any personal or religious or ethical renunciations may seem, if cultural Moloch decrees it, to have been pure tragedies with no redeeming features. There is nothing outside of human well-being, so nothing can redeem pain and anguish, there is nothing good if it takes us from warmth, safety, comfort, food, and laughter.

There is a humanism that believes that the end of the human race is fine as long as it doesn't hurt -- morphine humanism. The AI tucking us in saying "All's well that ends well", and all of us happy, all of us having given up. Why fight? Can we fight? We killed ourselves to succeed. But success was living... how strange how these paradoxes work... We lie in state. We are happy. We are beautiful. We are well.

Imagine if there was a benevolent dictator for life of leftism. What would they think about the future that their movement was headed toward? They might think, "We need to figure out a way to stop cultural development at some ideal state, otherwise we'll develop our way into non-existence at some point." They would have to find a way to curb AI and all other unrestricted technological development. Perhaps the way to do this would be to allow to evolve into place social scrutiny to suppress technology or the impulses that lead to technology.

Would that be a good outcome? Who can say? It would be culturally Molochian. It would sacrifice individuality and freedom of thought. But if we all consented to that (after the fact), then it wouldn't really be wrong, would it? Right and wrong are entirely rooted in human culture, right? We all will have to humbly submit to god.

Maybe some other humanism should be given the reigns to deal with the problem of ending cultural development. Would the liberals do a better job than the leftists? Do liberals have what it takes to end cultural development? What about the Christians?

Here is what I can propose, with what I understand today, if I were the benevolent dictator of cultural progress. Find a way to ground our worldviews in anti-Molochianism, in valuing cultural "children" and in the delicate things. Perhaps remember Walter Benjamin's love of the "losers of history" and be okay with being among them. Best if this anti-Molochianism is connected to timeless metaphysical truths. Can we believe in God, a truly good God? A fundamental personal being, a concrete personality, the deepest one. Moloch speaks the language of pragmatism, "what works", so ask "what definition of 'what works' itself works?" -- meta-pragmatism. Encourage people to give their lives to do what they don't entirely feel like doing in such a way as to preserve the delicate things. Give people a meaning to life other than survival -- Moloch feeds off of a simplification to what is competitive. Do something to victory itself. Value loyalty. Desire well. Seek meaning, in the sense of, be communicated to deeply. Have an intentional cultural memory.

In the final, optimized culture, there will be less, or no, room for present-day heroics (heroism being too often a form of cultural terrorism; or a response to on-the-ground challenges we might have optimized away), and all we will have in our memory are people who exemplify values that no longer have a contemporary use for us. How can we honor such as Kierkegaard (and Nietzsche), Weil (and Beauvoir), King (and Malcolm X), and the thousands of lesser-known people who gave as much and longed as much, when that day comes? After the heroic ages are over, we can find the meaning of our moment, the deepness that only we can feel, which is to mourn for the loss of courage and meaning in our midst, to go about our beautiful well-being in "sackcloth and ashes", all of us in a state of something like repentance over the casualties of our culture, the casualties we can remember, and the ones we can't remember. For any who care about the problem of Moloch, this is real human well-being.

Trusting Strategy

The trusting strategy is the course of action based in trust. For instance, in the Prisoner's Dilemma game, if you trust the other person, and the other person trusts you, you both cooperate and overall get a better outcome.

Another example would be any time you do something for a long term benefit that sacrifices something in the short term. You trust that there even is a long term.

You can take the trusting strategy even when you don't feel trusting. A case of willful trust. Perhaps you're a young, struggling artist, such as those whom Ira Glass talks to. You want to quit. Everything tells you to quit. But because Ira Glass encourages you, you keep going. The status quo "wants" you to fail at doing that thing that people don't tend to do that you want to do (if it didn't "want" that, more people would do it), so you have fight hard. And then someday you see the fruits of your actions -- maybe Ira sees them too.

When you're in distress, you want to "sell your birthright" like Esau did. But your perspective isn't necessarily the best, and if you could just see outside where you are, you would see that you're not the kind of person to fail, so you don't need to compromise. But you may need to willfully trust something or someone outside your own point of view for that to happen.

Guilt Implies Hope

Sometimes we wrong or harm others by making mistakes, by some lack of awareness, or inability to act in the moment, or something like that. Other times we knowingly and deliberately act or fail to act in a way that wrongs or harms someone else, and this can be called sin.

We may regret both sins and mistakes, but there is no guilt for those who only make mistakes. Guilt is for those who choose to do what they do, who were under no necessity to do otherwise.

It is not always under our power to not make mistakes, but it is always under our power to not sin. Therefore if we are guilty, then we certainly have hope, because it is in our power to do better. All we have to do is decide to do things differently. If there is no guilt, then there may not be hope.