Missionary Care for Creatives in Los Angeles; or for others

I wrote a post about cultural altruism hubs. That post, and this one, which is related, discuss a kind of organizational or "scenic" structure or structures that people could build. I don't feel like this is a thing I should pursue, so I'm not looking to try to build those structures myself. But I think the ideas are worth writing up. Maybe someone else will find them useful.

I often write to a secular audience, or to no audience / to myself. But in this case, I write more to a Christian audience.

Creative people are especially susceptible to spiritual attack. Culture war brings out Satan. Some cultural-spiritual warfare is fought by "foot soldiers" (through interpersonal contact). Others through "air support". Airplanes are sophisticated machines. Books, movies, etc. are machines made out of thoughts and images. Culture "flies in the air". So producing cultural artifacts puts new "airplanes" or "drones" in the sky. These artifacts fight each other and fight people on the ground. With good air support, ground troops can have an easier time. So (I think) with good cultural artifacts, interpersonal evangelism and discipleship can go better.

Los Angeles is a center of the movie and music industries, which manufacture cultural artifacts (that part of the "air war"). Those industries are not always kind to the people who try to work in them. Many people have dreams of success in them, but only a few can succeed. There are stories of exploitation in those industries. This can affect everyone who tries to "make it". The overall culture of these industries seems to largely be non-Christian. Christians trying to work in those industries may experience as much exploitation and as many broken dreams of success as non-Christians. They may also experience culture shock and spiritual attack (for instance, being invited to hedonistic parties (something that I would guess happens), or being acculturated to the dominant secular culture to the point of compromising their faith). They may also experience hostility, due to their beliefs.

Are Christian creatives in Los Angeles missionaries? Arguably yes. So they can be supported and cared for like any other kind of missionary. (I recommend reading Serving as Senders Today and The Reentry Team, both by Neal Pirolo, to understand what I have in mind by "support" and "care". Briefly, churches or other sending teams can provide moral support, prayer support, send and receive messages about what's going on in the field, maybe money or logistical support, and help in missionaries transitioning in and out of service.)

Creative missionaries could care for fellow creatives and engage in evangelism and discipleship like any other kind of missionary. But they also "translate the Bible into the native language" of their fellow creatives, by being creative themselves, and/or into the language of the US in general, or even of other parts of the world, where LA culture industries reach.

I feel like if I were a suspicious secular person (perhaps an ex-Christian), an incorporated missionary agency sending financially supported creative missionaries into LA would be disturbing and lead to bad press (if evangelical Christians think that there is an oppressive, militant "other" in the cultural world, so do secular people -- everyone is "David" seeing "Goliath" in each other). Creative people tend to have their own ideas and some might not want to work with a missionary agency themselves. (It's good for creative people to be independent-minded in order to see what other people don't see.) Financially supported missionaries might be harder to relate to by struggling actors, writers, musicians, directors, etc. that they may be trying to reach.

So I think maybe the best way to implement creative missions is to set up structures to care for and support the creative Christians who find themselves in Los Angeles, as though they have sent themselves already, but maybe without enough support.

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Implementation:

I don't know anything about what might already be going on in this area. I can imagine that something like this is already going on.

I think churches in Los Angeles are already doing some of this support and care work. What they might not have is the sense that their creatives are missionaries dealing with spiritual warfare, culture shock, etc., and not know as much as they could of how to be good "senders" and "carers". Perhaps what is needed is to equip those churches.

Also, creatives might not have the sense that they are missionaries on a mission field. They might benefit from additional teaching and encouragement in having a really Christian worldview and practice in their art and life.

Other ideas:
1. Establishing refuge places in Southern California so that people can (affordably) get out of LA to take a break from it.
2. Connecting churches that have creatives to creatives in LA. (Not every church is a good place for a creative person to be.)

Southern California (plus northern Baja California) could be seen as having two areas of strategic significance for cultural people: Tijuana which is a gateway to Latin America and/or to understanding the non-American, non-"developed" world; and the cultural artifact manufacturing center of Los Angeles. In between is San Diego, a quieter place (maybe the military in San Diego is of cultural strategic significance?).

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Caveats:

I have not spent a lot of time in LA. I was involved in a low-budget film production that got actors from LA and have seen the incentives for exploitation and selling yourself in filmmaking. I can sense a certain amount of felt unhappiness and spiritual darkness from Los Angeles filmmaking (Hollywood and I guess "aspiring Hollywood" or indie film productions). I don't have direct experience with the music industry in LA.

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Postscript:

What about film directors? I mentioned them above. They are employers, people in positions of power. But they are at the mercy of their funding sources. Directors have to cobble together funding and employees from various sources, and then work intensely during production, with long pre-production and post-production times. Once finished, they sell their product on the market and hope for critical and financial success, which is uncertain. A lot of money rides on what they do. If they lose too much money, maybe they can't work again. It sounds like a risky, stressful, "disestablished" line of work.

This sounds like perhaps a more intense (or not) version of what entrepreneurs in general go through.

A film director could do the wrong thing because they are under some kind of pressure. Perhaps it is true of any kind of entrepreneur. Or business executive. How much wrongdoing comes from powerful people who are (subjectively or objectively) in insecure positions? Perhaps it would be good to come up with care and support for them.

Maybe if a person doesn't have money, that's their hard limit, and only with additional funding would they be able to do the right thing. (Maybe there could be funding to help them do the right thing?) With better support (prayer, moral, logistic, communication) and the expectation that they can get care if they fail, they might have more courage to do the right thing in marginal cases where they may not really be risking their success, (where perhaps it is some kind of delusion of danger or sin that puts its thumb on the scale of their perception of risk), or even in self-sacrificial cases where they have to sacrifice their success (their business venture/film? / career?) to do the right thing.

(Funding to help do the right thing: a director could develop a relationship with a funding agency that would commit to providing at least a significant part of the director's funding for each of their films, conditional on them doing the right thing and not necessarily on them being commercially successful. In other words, provide grace, or slack, so that directors can fail commercially if they do the right thing on set or in their other operations.)

(Conservative talk radio, to me, sounds like the voice of people who are suspicious and hardworking -- maybe small business owners who could easily go out of business and who have to deal with other insecure people who might cut corners or make untrustworthy deals to survive. Can there be care and support for them?)

Likewise, people in the spiritually dark worlds of the elites. Do Washington, DC churches adequately care for politicians and staffers who fight a culture war of their own? Political theater is part of the "air war" that movies are also involved in. Political decisions and governmental implementations of them have cultural consequences.

(Silicon Valley sounds like a place with its darkness and its own, different culture. What about it?)

People with bad reputations (criminals, prison guards, and police, for instance) may need care and support. It requires discernment how to support someone who has directed their life toward wrongdoing.

Like with creative missionaries in LA, I don't know anything about what might already be going on with care / support for people in these areas.

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The church I grew up in had a sign over the door as you went out, that said "You are now entering the mission field". Probably everyone could see themselves as a missionary, and everyone experiences occupational hazards as they interface with the world. And so everyone could be sent and cared for -- by other people who also could be sent and cared for. Do churches send and care for their own pastors? (Maybe pastors should have some support from outside their own congregations.)

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Everything is powerful, culturally. Everything sends a message. The way you do business as a small business owner affects the overall culture, the sense of how things are and how people act. Similarly with the products a business owner releases on the market. Each one is a movie or book, conditioning people's minds. The caring professions are culturally powerful.

This raises the question: if everyone has cultural power, if each person can say something that has a significant effect on someone (at least on him- or herself), what should you say? Are you the missionary for God and the truth, or for an off-flavor of God and a somewhat misleading truth? You have to seek to know what is true, so that you can correct what is wrong.

This process of self-correction has to go on on a societal level. Society (people within it) must speak against what is believed by society (other people within it). What does it take to oppose a consensus or effective consensus? What if the consensus involves the caring structures that you can find? Who will care for you when you burn out? Will the price of getting care be that you have to stop pointing out what's wrong?

So as much as care and support sound like a good thing, for at least some people, those who would point out what is least popular, it may be good to develop independence from human support and care. A wise society concerned with protecting itself from its own blind spots might try to develop the strength behind that independence in people, and not only promote care and support for people. For a believer in God, deriving strength from God, rather than from people, is a way to be strong enough to say what's unpopular.

It's possible for Christian (church-based) culture to somewhat discourage the individual from seeing things from their own perspective, and instead tries to enmesh them in a social organism. An individual church, and many individual people, will fare better if they are simply in-some-sense-"properly" interrelated socially. But Christianity as a whole suffers if it becomes blind due to its success in orienting individuals toward the points of view of their nearby congregations, which all can potentially be misguided.

MSLN and Evangelicalism

I am thinking of posting links to this post on outside sites. If you have come from one of those links, this post is about the New Wine System (a system of Biblical doctrines) developed/discovered by Philip Brown. I last read the comprehensive book on the subject that he wrote, New Wine for the End Times, about 10 years ago (when I was 25) and though it seemed to be convincing to me at the time, I haven't been able to reassess it from my more critical, older-self perspective. I will suggest that it is probably at least as Biblical as Reformed, Lutheran, Catholic, etc. doctrinal systems, possibly more so. In other words, it has at least as good a claim as any of those to being what was originally meant by the Biblical writers (or by God in his role as author of the Bible), possibly more so.

Being more philosophical than scholarly, I believe in the New Wine System more through reasoning, this taking up much of my efforts as a writer. My project called "MSLN" attempts to prove the existence of God (one whose nature requires/implies the New Wine System), is more complicated, more of a work in progress. However, I have also written up a simpler argument for the New Wine System which presupposes that the reader believes in God (a certain kind of God that many Christians and possibly some non-Christians would accept as the one they believe in), in an 8 page booklet called Simple New Wine System.

I'm not sure how Philip Brown would summarize the New Wine System (I mention that as some degree of deference to him since the label "New Wine System" originates with him.) I will summarize it as I understand it as being the following two ideas: 1) we must become completely holy (repent 100%, come to have God's values and heart 100%, love God with 100% of our beings, overcome our sinful habits in partnership with God 100%, perform any positive acts that God requires, maybe other things like that) in order to enter heaven (or else we must be destroyed in hell (annihilationism)), 2) there is a realistic amount of time for us to complete our part of this process, in the Millennium/Resurrection.

To some extent this post may be unwelcoming in the sense that I don't discuss it in terms that would make the most sense to someone unfamiliar with my writing. I think that writers try to be trust-producing (so that they have an audience), but sometimes that outstrips their trustworthiness. Someday maybe I will be so confident in the trustworthiness of what I say that I will present what I say in a more popular way. I think I'm moving in that direction, even with this post.

I'm trying not to get into the Bible or Christianity too much at this point in my writing life. However, MSL, the natural theology I do want to talk about, shares many structural similarities with Christianity (and with legitimism (the "L" in "MSL") could be seen as a proto-Christianity or minimalist Christianity).

So this post is trying to talk about "evangelicalism", which is a phenomenon in MSL, but also a phenomenon in Biblical Christianity. So talking about "evangelicalism" is something that serves the purpose of understanding MSL, but also shows how New Wine Christianity might "reform" or "restore" existing Biblical Christianity, perhaps solving some practical problems the church faces, and thus helps me explain the appeal of MSLN to some Christians.

"Evangelicalism", here, is not about cultural affiliation with "Evangelicals", but rather is a basic attitude, which could be something like this:

1. People are at risk for something other than loss of secular life. (Usually, for loss of eternal life.)
2. The way to deal with that risk involves that we care about others' well-being and act on that.
3. There are consequences to our inaction (or misguided action) with respect to #1. (People being lost from eternal life, usually.)
4. We should care about those consequences and feel and act accordingly.

Does MSL commit me to evangelicalism?

Does MSL commit me to evangelicalism? I think so. One interpretation of MSL would imply that if people don't do their part in "anti-tempting" people so that they turn toward God, God can do it in the Millennium. Therefore, under that interpretation, people would not have to care for other people's salvation. I suppose that's possible. But another possibility is that tragedy is possible. God is not so much in control that he can make up for all our deficiencies. This may sound impious, lacking in regard for God. A God who is great should be powerful, right? Who are we to not think God is great? So we must think he is powerful.

But what is the truth? Not everything that happens in this life seems like it comes from God. Maybe it's as simple as, it's not something God wants. (Atheists can provide strong examples of horror and suffering. Jews have had to struggle with the Holocaust as a religious fact, and it should concern us just as it does them.) But if God doesn't want it, then it's possible for things to happen that go against God's plan. My belief is that God always has a plan for everyone's life. But people's choices (whether their own, or other people's) send their lives down different tracks, so that God's first-choice plan ("plan A") gets replaced with his second-place plan ("plan B") or eventually further down the alphabet. And some of those plans that are far from plan A have to involve horror, lies, and suffering, and temptations to despair, delusion, and rejection of God.

What force compels God to allow our lives to become gratuitously bad? God is a holy God, so he can't will us to sin. He is unable to tempt us. But temptations help produce holiness (part of being like God is to turn against sin, ourselves -- so sin has to be presented as a positive thing for us to really strongly do that). Who will tempt us except evil beings? These evil beings then can refuse to work for God in their roles as tempters unless they get concessions, concessions such as a world that contains gratuitous evil. One of these evils might be that God is contractually not allowed to do all of the work he would otherwise do himself (more competently than we would), so we have to do some of it ourselves. Of course, it's good for us to do some of the work, for our own sakes. We anti-tempt ourselves when we care for other people. But there are times when we are not competent in doing our job (or not willing to do it), and there are consequences to that, which fall outside God's desires (and thus are tragic).

While it's always possible that God and Satan negotiate a world where God can do all the anti-tempting necessary, so that if someone rejects him it's 100% their decision, I don't know of any reason from MSL that would make me say I could assume that was the case. So there is uncertainty.

According to this post, God must do everything he can do to save us. Any lack of salvation is due to us, and he must provide us the ideal environment to be saved. So how could God fail to make up for our deficiencies in anti-tempting?

God cares about the salvation of his creatures. In order to have his heart, we must do the same. In order to be saved, we must have his heart. So we must care about the salvation of his creatures to be saved. The best way to do this is through practice.

It may also be the case that the most effective way for us to take this practice seriously is for us to be responsible in some way for others' salvation, in a way that does not get made up by God. After all, nobody makes up for what God does, so God's heart has to face that level of responsibility.

There's a trade-off between the benefit to the worker (who needs to have a reason to take the work seriously) and a risk to the one helped (or who should have been helped, if the worker doesn't do their job). God balances these two, and the result is that to some extent we are responsible for the eternal well-being of other people.

This makes sense to me, and I'm at least provisionally inclined to believe that it simply is the case. But if I want to doubt it, I think I still have to see it as a live possibility.

What is the best way to handle uncertainty? I can think of two natural intuitions. One is to say something like "agnosticism about the existence of God should lead to practical atheism" -- if you can't know about something, assume it doesn't matter. I think this is a fairly common one in culture. But, for people into risk management (some businesses, government, the military, effective altruism), certain uncertain outcomes are worth preparing for or trying to prevent. Practically speaking, if you have a solid-enough idea that God might exist, and of what that would entail, you should act as though God exists (in keeping with how likely you think God might exist), even if you are agnostic.

So which approach should we take, with respect to the possibility that people are needed to produce the best outcome with respect to the salvation of other people? If people aren't needed, and we try anyway, and we do a good job, then there are no downsides. And, if people aren't needed and we try, and do a bad job, whatever mistakes we make will be offset by good decisions God makes in anti-tempting them. (At least, in terms of whether people reach heaven, our mistakes will cause no lasting harm.)

But consider the case where people are needed. If we don't try (or don't do a good job), then there could be tragic consequences.

So I think the natural choice for a believer of MSL is to value evangelicalism. I would say "the natural choice is to live it", and I think most should, but perhaps some could lack competence or good-heartedness to the extent that they might feel it wisest to do nothing evangelical. But, if so they would be doing so for an evangelical cause (by getting out of the way).

What if we are uncertain whether MSL is true or not? To the extent that we think it might not be true, we should consider other goods besides eternal life. But to the extent that we think it probably is true, we should be evangelicals.

What kind of evangelicalism would MSL produce?

Michael Spencer's "Wretched Urgency" talks about evangelical (in the sense I use) church culture that is sort of "crazy". (It's a fleshed-out example from someone who saw that world better than I have.) I would use the term "dishonest" (people forcing themselves to care about things they don't naturally care about). Also, people who are focused heavily on conversions and not the moral life.

Isn't the moral truth that we should save people from hell, and go about it by converting them? But why does that go against what the New Testament seems to exemplify? Spencer makes the point that there isn't much about preaching to the lost in the New Testament. It happens, but the emphasis is more on morality.

The MSLN answer is: if you don't focus on morality, you could be one of the lost. The person you have the greatest chance of reaching to prevent eternal loss is yourself. We know ourselves the best of anyone (although we can sometimes be self-deceived or misguided), and we have the advantage of being able to just obey ourselves when we tell ourselves to repent, with an act of unilateral will. In some sense we can will that other people repent, but also, we are powerless. A mistake that evangelicalism can make is to try to push people to the point of repenting, using pressure and manipulation. MSL and New Wine evangelicals should not do that, and it doesn't make as much sense for them to do so, unlike in some non-New Wine Christianity where it does more so.

In MSLN, while the need and call for holiness is absolute, the time period in which people can pursue holiness is greatly expanded over what we get in secular time. So it doesn't make as much sense to be "wretchedly" urgent. You can dilute your urgency, not to the point that there is none, but you aren't forced into "wretchedness" by the fact of the brevity of secular life -- instead of saying "if this person doesn't change before the end of this life, they will go to hell" you say "if this person doesn't change before the end of this life, that's not the best sign but it's not certain they will go to hell". Because your urgency is diluted, you don't have to drive yourselves and other people as hard in response.

I grew up in a church that in my memory was "practically non-evangelical". This is a term I made up -- "practical non-evangelicalism" (PNE) parallel to "practical atheism". A nominal Christian may really be atheistic in how they prefer, act, and trust ("practically atheistic"), and a nominal evangelical may be non-evangelical in how they prefer, act, and trust. PNE can happen when you have all the doctrinal ingredients necessary to be evangelical, but you just don't derive evangelicalism from them. You might do this by technically still believing in hell and lostness, but just never preaching about it. Maybe the older half of the congregation has memories of the "wretched days", so the Spencer-like preachers emphasize all the things Spencer does (including spiritual maturity, and feeling OK instead of guilty all the time), and the younger half of the congregation, having only heard Spencer-like preachers and not the culture Spencer-like preachers are responding to, again, may have some technical sense that hell exists (it's mentioned in the Bible, after all), but has no real concept that that's a real thing, no concept that people have eternal as opposed to secular well-being, and thus do not care about their own or other people's eternal well-being. It has seemed to me that this sets up two problems: 1) we love people less because less is at stake, 2) we make secular well-being our real concern, and then as soon as the secular world cares for this well-being better than religious people do, religion will have no purpose and die out. #2 matters if there's some reason why God is supposed to matter to us, and we come to know God through people having concern for people (concern in the name of God / religion).

Typically, I like to solve as much of my problems as I can with principles, and avoid laws and practical wisdom. If you can found your thought structure on good basic truths, then everything should follow well. Get your basic truths right, if you possibly can, to save you work in the law-writing and practical wisdom phases. I think it's hard to avoid laws and the need for practical wisdom, though. But with better principles, I think MSLN should do a better job than traditional evangelicalism.

However, traditional evangelicalism isn't totally a failure from an MSL/New Wine perspective. That is, from my natural-theological point of view, it does some good, and probably more good than bad, and even from Spencer's Biblical point of view, it was successful in conveying at least some concern for morality and it did transmit the Bible which he uses to correct "wretched evangelicalism". The messed-up, simplistic version of something might be popular and powerful, at least for a time. I don't think it makes sense to ignore the special genius of "wretched evangelicalism", which is that, though "wretchedly urgent", it actually was urgent. That's not something to dismiss lightly, and it is not good to substitute "wretched urgency" with a "wretched apathy".

What we want is excellence. How do we achieve that? An athlete has to train hard, and even risk injury, in order to be excellent. But, they have to have good technique in order to be excellent. I think that traditional evangelicalism lends itself to bad technique. But being too concerned with health leads to lack of effort. I think MSLN brings better technique in that morality (holiness, spiritual maturity) is part of the goal. You can singlemindedly pursue the goal of salvation of the lost and still attend to morality. That takes care of one of the failure modes of traditional evangelicalism, that "consequentialism" (evangelicalism) "tempts us to sacrifice deontology/virtue ethics" (tempts us to sin, fail to be good, fail to expect goodness from others).

It's possible to associate "spiritual maturity" with healthy living (with secular well-being), such that healthiness (especially mental health) is an inherent part of spiritual maturity. I think it is more dangerous to overemphasize health than to overemphasize effort (because if health is your idol you might not get punished for it like you probably will with effort). But health is a valid concern, and does play into the longevity of a religious movement (if everyone burns out, the movement loses ability to expend effort in the long run). I don't know if I've written about this on this blog, but my belief is that legitimism implies that, since the good is the best thing, we should put the good first, and be willing to sacrifice everything to the good. (Legitimacy is the good, God is the good, and both MSL's "Father" and "Son" persons of Legitimacy (the good) risk their existences in order to conform to Legitimacy. God is self-obedient.) This implies that willingness to pursue "the cross" (risking yourself for the sake of the good) is essential to salvation. We can't let health get in the way of that, and MSLN calls for the cross more clearly than non-New Wine Christianity. But, you pursue the cross attempting not to destroy yourself but to be effective, and effectiveness calls for a concern for health. I don't think MSLN clears up this on the level of principle, occasioning law and/or practical wisdom to make sense of this. (Maybe Jesus' example of only dying on one cross and avoiding all the others is helpful.) (Also "Give to health what is health's and to God what is God's" as in this story)

What MSLN does do is say that if you're pushing too hard, in your pursuit of working for your salvation or others' salvation, and you are starting to burn out, you can say "Well, there's time in the Millennium, so I don't have to make this effect happen now, so I can take a break". But if you're becoming too apathetic, you can say "Wait, there's something real at stake, I need to go to work. Who can say if my work won't help someone escape hell?" MSLN's ideas about how reality is set up allow us to move away from either extreme position of "there is no work to be done for God, only to attend to secular well-being, if that" and "the work for God is so urgent that we need to pursue it dishonestly, insanely, etc.". MSLN is in the middle, motivating work for God without too often leading to "wretched urgency".

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Perhaps, to sum up so far, the problem with evangelicalisms are that they can be unhealthy, dishonest, immoral, "wretched", and thus be counterproductive.

A traditional evangelical could keep their "heaven or hell when you die" perspective and say "while it looks as though there is an intense, burning urgency to help people find God, what actually works to achieve that is to not think about that or in those terms, otherwise you become unhealthy, dishonest, immoral, 'wretched', etc.". In other words, things are "not what they say on the tin". You might naively think that you should care about other people and feel the feelings, think the thoughts, etc., that go along with their objective state, and then act on those feelings/thoughts. But actually, you shouldn't care about other people, nor feel those feelings, think those thoughts. Actually, to "really" care about other people is like not caring. Caring is "not what it says on the tin".

When I admired traditional evangelicalism's possession of urgency earlier (even if it might be "wretched"), part of what I thought was good was the way that urgency gets us to actually do things. The doing of things follows from objective reality. Just to see someone as lost gives you a power and direction to do something. Their lostness is a moral truth. How will you respond to that truth? If you don't respond to moral truth, what kind of person are you? Probably someone lacking in moral sensitivity -- having a heart unlike God's.

Perhaps in some grim world the best we can do is live the paradox. Maybe the paradox lurks in non-New Wine evangelicalism (at least all the non-"wretched" varieties), and the best we can do is be paradoxical.

With MSLN, you don't need to distance yourself from the objective fact of someone else's lostness in order to relate to it in a healthy, honest, moral, non-"wretched" way. So then the "MSLian" or New Wine Christian can better maintain their connection to the fact of lostness. They can trust the category of "objective truth" more. They can derive strength from the truth in a way that a paradox-minded person can't. They can be more passionate, and thus will probably be more fruitful than they would have been as "paradoxical traditional evangelicals" or "practical non-evangelicals".

This assumes that MSLN (a set of ideas) is well-implemented by the people who adopt it. And like anything, it might not be well-implemented if its adherents do a bad-enough job. But MSLN itself isn't starting them off at as much of a disadvantage as the other views do.

Can MSL evangelicalism be trusted by traditional evangelicals?

This post is written at least in part so that non-New Wine evangelicals might consider New Wine evangelicalism. One question such people might have is "We think that what matters is that people make a decision for Jesus -- that they are converted. Could the New Wine System be a scam that gets us to no longer emphasize that thing, which we have always thought mattered? What if we mistakenly believe the New Wine System, although it is false, and fail to do work we should have done, and people go to hell who otherwise would not have?"

I do think that being concerned about intellectual scams is valid, and that a change in the beliefs that affect what you consider highest is one to make carefully and aware of the risk. A New Wine person like myself, considering traditional evangelicalism's arguments if they were presented to me, might feel like they are a scam, to get me to give up my concern over holiness's role in salvation. Traditional evangelicalism at its worst produces shallow believers who think they are 100% OK in the eyes of God (effectively -- they know "they are sinners" but don't think being a sinner is really a bad thing since they are guaranteed to go to heaven). In this regime of moral shallowness, people can harden on little sins that they like, and in some areas become deaf to the voice of Jesus. So traditional evangelicalism, when it succeeds at what it thinks is sufficient to save people, could bias some people toward choosing hell, if in fact New Wine evangelicalism is correct. Both evangelicalisms are potential scams, depending on your perspective.

How can you choose between two potential scams? (Especially when, in this area, all the alternatives are potential scams, things that if you adopt them might cause you to take focus off of what really matters.)

How much are New Wine and traditional evangelicalism in tension, practically speaking? Maybe in practice they achieve the same ends, more or less.

Conversion matters to a New Wine person because it enables people to point themselves in a better direction with respect to God. It's part of holiness as I understand it. Can you reach God without a conscious trusting relationship to him? No. Likewise traditional evangelicals (despite "wretchedness") still teach holiness.

It's true that MSL doesn't require a person to trust in Jesus by that name. In some languages, Jesus is known as "Yeshua" or "Isa", not "Jesus", so it's not the string of letters that is essential to the name of Jesus, but rather some minimal set of traits in the person associated with that name, that makes the name really the name of Jesus. MSL does require trust in Legitimacy/the good/God in multiple persons, does require that that God take on the form of a limited personal being such as we are and die, and I think (although I'd have to check), most of what Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount (one exception being his call to keep the Law) are implied by MSL. I think if you want to implement the idea of a good God, and a good God in human form, according to MSL's view of God and goodness, you might well recreate many or most of the sets of traits of Jesus, when looking at the person of Legitimacy who takes on limited form, such that it makes sense to give that person the name of Jesus. However, not having spelled out all of the essential traits of Jesus, nor of all the implications of MSL, I can't say that MSL preaches Jesus, exactly. If it doesn't, it gets people relatively close to trust in Jesus, but that might not be close enough for the comfort of some traditional evangelicals.

(If the name "Jesus" or something etymologically similar is one of the minimal essential traits that identify Jesus, then MSLians could easily use that name to refer to the person of Legitimacy that resembles the Biblical Jesus. I've used "the Son" before in MSL contexts, which might also be adequate. I suppose this is only a fair thing to do if we can identify the other minimal essential traits of the Biblical Jesus as well as the full MSL conception of its "Son", and the two line up sufficiently that they refer to the same being.)

However, New Wine Christianity (as opposed to the MSL natural theology) holds Jesus as high as any other kind of Christianity. Evangelical Christians do not need to convert to MSL, but rather to New Wine Christianity, if they find the ideas held in common between MSL and the New Wine System convincing.

Yet they still might be concerned about the existence of MSL. Could MSL be leading people astray, to 99% of what it takes to be saved (having an understanding of the limited person of God that almost amounts to the Jesus that is the way, truth, and life), but stop them before going 100% (really believing in Jesus)? From one perspective, we could say "well, among all the not-100% versions of the truth that are out there, this one is better than most". But I'm sensitive to concerns about coming up with something that is 99% right and therefore highly trust-producing but which is fatal by not going the full distance. I think (I hope I've said this before and say it later by way of emphasis) that MSL naturally calls us to say "we don't know everything that we might need to know about God and we're listening to hear the answer". An MSLian certainly should listen to a traditional evangelical talk about Jesus, and I think naturally would welcome hearing about their ideas and considering adopting them. Why not become a Christian, at least in some minimal sense? Hopefully that (if put into practice as much as it should be) would reduce the danger of MSLians not hearing the truth about Jesus that traditional evangelicals possess. I don't think the world (in this life, at least) is ever completely safe, nor is any state of affairs not at all apt for concern. The traditional evangelical must consider the danger that they are wrong and MSL is right, just as the MSLian should consider the danger that they are wrong and traditional evangelicalism is right.

What if the New Wine System causes us to not be as concerned with converting non-believers, given that they can be converted in the next life (according to the New Wine System), and we miss opportunities to convert them in this life which is all we get for this task (according to traditional evangelicalism)? This is a fair concern, and I can see a real risk here. One way to resolve the tension is epistemic. If the truth says the danger is "here" and not "there", then that settles what to do. (Though I'm trying to talk about risk management in this section, ultimately you should believe what's true rather than focusing on trying to be safe.) I think the New Wine System is favored by the truth, but the reader should make up their own mind.

It may be the case that the New Wine System is more effective at producing conversions than traditional evangelicalism. Traditional evangelical conversionism is something I would expect to produce a strong feeling at one point in life which may or may not lead to a lifelong commitment. It's a good way to increase a church's size in the short run. But what kind of people become leaders in a church?

What if churches were full of people who were leaders, who were examples of people living like there's something other than human flourishing that matters or in some other way were deeply and genuinely living like God exists, and who were deeply and genuinely concerned about their neighbors' spiritual lives (that they aim toward the person of God consciously, and that they come into tune with God morally even if they sometimes do that unconscious of the person of God). The New Wine System might be expected to increase congregants' seriousness as Christians at the same time as it decreased (but not to zero) their emphasis on having to convert people in this life. Possibly more people would become the kind of people who could convert others, by increasing their own trustworthiness through the pursuit of holiness, and by taking their faith seriously enough to love and reach out to the people who don't have it, even if their individual urgency to convert decreased. It could be the case that the New Wine System would perform well from a conversionist point of view (although that remains to be seen).

Another perspective is that the church universal is an ecosystem. Traditional evangelicals are effective at conversionism, but they sometimes are "wretched". People who are converted by traditional evangelicalism but don't do well in traditional evangelical churches leave -- perhaps they leave Christianity entirely. Or perhaps they go to a PNE, liberal/mainline, progressive, Catholic, or Orthodox church (maybe even fundamentalism would sound better than traditional evangelicalism to some). Each of these variants of Christianity provide homes that people might like to stay in -- they are not all in line with the truth (they couldn't all be since they differ from each other doctrinally), but they serve a purpose.

The existence of New Wine doctrine allows PNE, and possibly also liberal/mainline and progressive Christianity to move in a more evangelical direction -- and thus as a byproduct produce more conversions. The New Wine System is more congruent with PNE (and maybe some liberal/mainline and progressive) Christian cultures, would be more fitting for the kind of people attending there.

From this, a committed traditional evangelical might look on the New Wine System as being among a number of doctrines that are not completely valid, but not the worst of them. And possibly also as a less-risky thing to consider believing and recommending to others.

Some editing issues explain the redundancy of the following paragraph:

That goes for New Wine Christianity. But MSL might sound risky, still, if it does not insist on the name of Jesus. I think that the exact same belief can move one person closer to the truth, and another person further. It's possible for MSL to move people from atheism and non-Christian spirituality toward theism, and while MSL does not force people to accept the Bible logically, it does recommend the Bible to some extent, I think. (I haven't done all the thinking that I feel I should on this subject, but on the surface, because MSL sounds like a proto-Christianity or minimalist Christianity, it makes Christian scriptures seem like they might be from God. And, as I said before, an MSLian should have the sense that they may not know enough about God.) Depending on how things turn out, this could lead non-Christians to become Christians who otherwise wouldn't have, although the risk remains that some people would think that the name of Jesus wasn't necessary for salvation, given that an intermediate step in becoming a Christian did not insist on that.

Maybe practically speaking, we should seek to prefer, act, and trust according to both MSL and traditional evangelicalism (should both aim for complete holiness and seek to convert and be converted). If those were the only two versions of the purported truth out there, I think it would be easy for me to try to satisfy both personally, and emphasize both in my behavior to other people. I feel like MSL "has nothing against" conversion, and traditional evangelicalism "has nothing against" holiness. I personally find MSL and the Bible the only options I'm interested in obeying, and so that doesn't seem like a huge leap to me, and perhaps the reader is in the same situation. Then, neither belief system is practically speaking risky from the other's perspective.

But, if I'm trying to be openminded, I consider the possibility of views like Islam, or "Christianity+" religions like Roman Catholicism and Mormonism. Do I have to satisfy Muslim doctrine? I think MSL rules out Islam's insistence on its version of the oneness of God (this is not my official opinion, but seems like a safe guess about the Islam I've heard of). I can't satisfy both Islam and Christianity at the same time. But could I satisfy Catholic or Mormon Christianity along with the Christianity of the 66 book canon I grew up with? I don't know. What if there was some little sect of Christianity, 200 members strong, in some obscure part of the world, that taught that salvation requires a certain kind of faith in God, the real faith that died out in the first century, a specific kind of faith that they know about, and this is the only way to avoid hell? So I have to have their kind of faith? What if it conflicts with MSL and traditional evangelical faith? Can I know that such a sect does not exist and that they are not right? Sure, they are small and thus I might claim are insignificant, but the church was small in the first century.

Is it easy to know the truth, and know that you know the truth, sufficient to prefer, act, and trust so that you are saved? Maybe not. If not, and God exists, and God loves you, and God wants to achieve what satisfies his desires, wouldn't he provide you a way to come to know whatever truth is needed for salvation, whether in this life or a later one? This is essentially an argument against traditional evangelicalism and for something like MSL. This doesn't mean that it doesn't matter what we believe in this life, but that the significance of, what kind of beliefs we believe in this life, is diluted by the provision of God for an afterlife where hopefully the epistemic environment for our trusting of God is more favorable. (If it's useful in saving us, I think we will be given clarity someday.)

Are traditional evangelicals more afraid of hell than they believe that God exists, loves us, and wants to achieve what satisfies his desires? If so, then it makes sense to be suspicious of MSL and the New Wine System. Otherwise, no.

What about "dark evangelicalism"?

This section is somewhat of a footnote or note to myself, not as well-thought-out, and weirder.

Someone could object that maybe God is not ultimately in control enough of the process of salvation, such that he can't guarantee a clearing-up of salvation doctrine later. This does not sound like traditional evangelicalism, whose God is simply omnipotent. But one could imagine a dark evangelicalism, where people need to hear about God in this life to be saved, and God is powerless to give them a second chance.

God really loves, and God doesn't want any of us to be lost. He doesn't create any of us to go to hell. God would not create us if he knew that there was a chance any of us were bound for hell at the time of creation, which would be the case if he didn't provide a way for us to be saved (like an afterlife where we could hear the truth adequately). We might end up going to hell, through the mishaps of life and our turning away from him, but to not provide something like the Millennium would be an unforced error on his part.

So now the "dark evangelical" has to claim that God is not fully or sufficiently loving. But this contradicts the Bible. The Bible says (1 John 4:8) that "God is love". If God was not fully loving, love itself would not be fully loving. Or, if "God is love" is a figure of speech for "God is loving", the love that we have comes from God (1 John 4:7), so we can't exceed God in being loving. And I would assume we can't exceed God in practical wisdom. (Although maybe a "dark evangelical" would contest that? I think creating the world would require a lot more practical wisdom than living one human life.) So if a human can figure out that it doesn't make sense to make an unforced error that prevents people from going to heaven, and doesn't do it out of love, God would also be able to figure that out, and wouldn't do it. So the Bible does not give support to the idea that God is insufficiently loving to avoid "dark evangelicalism".

A traditional evangelical (we will say) believes in "sola scriptura" and so would reject the dark position for being unbiblical. But an "MSLian" might take the dark evangelical position seriously. Is there evidence for dark evangelicalism?

Possibly some can be found in MSLN itself, at least in the first two arguments (the Metaphysical Organism (M) and simantism) (S). The idea that God has to be fully loving is developed in legitimism (L), where love is a form of value, everything that exists is at least temporarily legitimate, Legitimacy has to value what is deserving, everything that is legitimate is deserving, and so everything that is not illegitimate (something like "sinful") is something that Legitimacy must value/love/will-to-exist-forever. But if a student of MSLN does not accept L but only M or MS (S implies M), would they have any reason to think that God is loving, sufficient that he would have to be competent in choosing whether to create us?

The Metaphysical Organism, and by extension the Speaker, is a being of perfect empathy. They feel exactly what we feel. While I don't know how to measure how much unbearable pain there is in our world, I think there is a lot of it, probably unrelenting for thousands (or perhaps millions?) of years. The Metaphysical Organism/Speaker would likely understand this long duration, unrelentingness -- perhaps understand after a few weeks of the load of pain, and then think "is it worth going on?" If they decided to, it would be an action of love, tested over the years by the constant or near-constant barrage of qualia of unbearability. They would show their value for creation by the pain they were willing to bear for us. So the pain and tragedy of creation gives us a reason to think they love us enough to not create if things were going to be really hopeless.

Under M or MS, why would the MO/Speaker need us to accept Jesus as our savior? I don't know of a reason off the top of my head. Why would they require any particular thing for salvation? I can understand them not being able to keep us around if we insist on doing unbearable things or being unbearable to them. But otherwise, why would we have to do any particular thing, like make a decision for Jesus? In MSL, it makes some sense because part of being legitimate is to trust/follow Legitimacy and if Jesus is who he says he is, he is part of Legitimacy. Accepting someone like Jesus is part of MSL. But it's not as clearly a part of M or MS.

A reason why the Speaker could be known to love us is because he created the simantic word of "love", and so understands it deeply himself. Thus, if we can apprehend it and participate in it, we know what he knows. If we know that love is greater than its competitors, he knows that, and will see love as we do, so that he will only create if there is a chance for each of us to be saved. (He know sadism (for instance) as well, but perhaps if you understand love and sadism perfectly, you will always automatically choose love as the best, and sadism as not measuring up.)

--

People think they have experiences of God. Probably they do sometimes, if it's sufficiently possible that God exists. Is God loving? I think for most people (maybe even in different religions?) he is. God is supposed to be trustworthy, and somehow he tells us he is. Not everyone experiences him this way necessarily, but I would guess it's the majority view and maybe that should count for some kind of evidence.

Maybe we could view religious experience as experience with spirits (some of whom claim to be God, or working for God), as opposed to with God. If the spirits are trustworthy (we know from relating to them), maybe if they tell us that God is loving, we should believe them?

--

If something claims our practical attention (our trust and/or obedience), if the credence we can give it is below a certain amount, it's as likely as so many other conflicting things that it's not worth worrying about. Can dark evangelicalism rise above that threshold? It's an open question. Can it be deemed likely enough, and also recommend a clear-enough course of action, that we can trust and/or obey it?

Blog Chapter 4 Summary and Bibliography

Looking at my blog posts, I realized that they naturally came in different periods or phases. The 2019 posts were one, then there were those from 2020 - 2021, and then those from 2021 - 2022. In spring of 2022, I decided to deliberately create a phase, which I called a "blog chapter", this being the fourth one.

I think the previous three were things that arose spontaneously and in response to my own needs, while this fourth one was premeditated and a bit artificial. Somewhat like doing a year of school.

This chapter has been about the "exilic-familial", among other things. I explored themes of nation, culture, family, childhood, and education. These topics connect to a vision that I had before officially starting the blog chapter (or, I was hypomanic and wrote something), about "cultural altruism", a path for those trying to do good through culture or in cultural areas, articulating with art, religion, humanities, politics, and effective altruism and especially its "Long Reflection" idea. When we try to govern the world, we are, and should be, informed by nation, culture, family, childhood, and education.

Two specific cultures were themes, Jewish (especially as I best know it, from the Old Testament), and Indonesian. Jewish culture is a family of holiness, and also has a history of enduring exile. I saw in Judaism (at least in the Old Testament itself) a kind of honesty coming out of having lost, and the idea of not winning and that being a route to peace and holiness. I saw in it families broken and reconciling.

Indonesian culture is (to me) about syncretism and unity-in-diversity, as well as a connection to Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Indonesia is a nation that attempts to pull together diverse groups, and which has a history of mixing religions. (I didn't really explore these themes in depth, but only discussed Indonesia a little.)

The war in Ukraine and the polarization of US politics are in the background.

This chapter, written in about seven months if you include the cultural altruism writings drafted in March and April, surprisingly (to me) is in the same order of magnitude of number of words as the three preceding chapters combined, about 20% less. I keep feeling like I do the math wrong when I count (maybe somehow I do), but I think it's right. I didn't feel like I was working any harder when I wrote. Perhaps I was under the influence of hypomania? I clearly had it in late March, but maybe it continued in a non-obvious, attenuated form throughout the seven months.

I've felt different ways over the last few weeks. Sometimes depleted, sometimes not. I've thought about quitting or drastically cutting back on writing, and also going on full bore. I think what has been particularly hard has been working to finish this after I had already moved on from being into this blog chapter. I could use much of myself as usual to work, but not all of me.

--

These are the books reviewed in this blog chapter. Links are to my reviews:

Holy Resilience, by David M. Carr, hardback (1st ed.?) ISBN 978-0-300-20456-8

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bantam Classic paperback, ISBN 0-553-21277-X

In the Shadow of the Banyan, by Vaddey Ratner, 1st hardback ed., ISBN 978-1-4516-5770-8

Between Man and Man, by Martin Buber, tr. Ronald Gregor Smith, Macmillan Paperbacks Edition, 1965, no ISBN

Creative Destruction, by Tyler Cowen, paperback, ISBN 0-691-11783-7

The Meaning of Marriage, by Timothy Keller (with Kathy Keller), hardback (1st ed.?), ISBN 978-0-525-95247-3

Along the Way, ed. Ron Bruner and Dana Kennamer Pemberton, paperback (1st ed.?), ISBN 978-0-891-12460-3

On the Genealogy of Morality, by Friedrich Nietzsche, tr. Carol Diethe, Cambridge edition, paperback (Revised Student ed.), ISBN 978-0-521-69163-5

Teaching Children to Care, by Ruth Sidney Charney, paperback (1st ed.?), ISBN 0-9618636-1-7

Book Review: Teaching Children to Care, by Ruth Sidney Charney

See also the preview for this review.

Teaching Children to Care, by Ruth Sidney Charney, is a book I would recommend to some people. I think for what it is it is a good book, but where it fails to be, or where some other book fails to make up for it, there is a serious problem. I could recommend it to anyone who works with children (like parents or teachers). It may have some practical value to them. Also, the spirit of it is good and sometimes a teacher communicates more of what is value through their spirit even than the good advice they give. (Another book that is like that is The Reentry Team by Neal Pirolo.)

--

Teaching Children to Care notes

I read this book through without taking notes. That may not have been the best idea, since now I am tempted to simply say my impressions without giving references, and I don't feel like reading through the book carefully, and feel like simply quitting [rather than re-reading].

I am feeling tired of writing at this point, like I'm losing interest in the subject matter. What will happen next? Will I "love Big Brother"? There was someone in my life who steadily and systematically undermined my devotion to my beliefs and my writing. They used skillful means in an all-out attempt to gain my trust and reshape me according to their will. Their expectation was that I would quit one day (then, perhaps, I would have to validate their point of view). They had a choice, to join me in my path of life, or to try to shut me down. Because they tried to shut me down, they broke me. I can imagine them reading this, and them feeling all kinds of emotions, but their iron certainty that I will give up my writing someday does not go away. It is their expectation, and, I am fairly certain, their deep personal preference.

If my writing is correct, then they are an instrument of Satan. This may sound crazy or harsh, but it's the logical truth.

[I wrote that some days ago in a state of turmoil, but I affirm it now in a state of peace.]

So what can I do? If I can't write, how can I be true to my beliefs? No one seems to want to share them with me. By writing, I enter a world where at least I believe what I believe. The text I write and I enter a relationship and share the beliefs that we create, and the beliefs that previous texts created with me as I wrote them.

But now, if I quit writing, how can I stay true to my beliefs? I will lose that last community. But then will I have to share some kind of community? All the communities that exist are not New Wine communities. If I really share "community" (being "one-with-together" with others?), how can I possibly hold divergent beliefs from those I am "in community with"? So I will (at least seemingly) inevitably come to agree with and approve of everyone else around me. I will have no choice but to see things as my community sees things, to participate. My choices of communities are all based in lies, and they all spit in the face of God, whether through hostility to God or through fake love of God. But I must be brought to be a social person, responsive to my community, brought into tune with it.

[Similarly, although I wrote this in a state of turmoil, I think it is still factually correct when I am at peace. I still see the danger, and the lies, rejection of God, hostility, and fakeness.]

I have written that people should come into tune with God, but who and what is God? Is "God" the loving creator of the universe, who holds us to the highest standards, a person who loves and dies for us? Or is "God" community, the set of all people around us? Between the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (or the Speaker and Legitimacy), and community, which is more omnipotent? Who do I fear more? God seems to be shackled by community, or by the way that community's members collectively construct how they will trust -- what the definition of "crazy" is, what images of God are socially acceptable to believe in, how hard to try to know the truth.

Defining morality as prosociality simply sets up the community as God. But if there is a real God, a person who loves us more than community can, who is the truth, then prosociality is a dangerous thing, a seductive lie.

So these are the stakes with which a person should approach a book like Teaching Children to Care, which is a book about getting children to behave, to like each other, and so on, apart from any mention of God. If Ruth Sidney Charney, the author, believes in God, she can't show it in a public school classroom. Instead, she has to deal with the behavioral issues right in front of her, or the classroom will not be a place of learning and work. So she instills in her students a responsiveness to each other and to her, and teaches them the Golden Rule -- do to other people what you would have them do to you. No mention has been made, or can be made, of Jesus, who spoke that rule. She mentions how morality is bigger than us, not something we create -- is she talking about God when she says "morality"? Or is morality really just "I want to please my teacher because I'm a child and it's a human instinct, and whatever she says, I want to do"? The teacher creates morality but doesn't teach children to love God. She doesn't explain where morality comes from, because, perhaps, if she tried, it would undermine morality. She speaks with implications rather than straight out, asks leading questions rather than baldly stating, so that children internalize what she says, and so that they can't fight back. They don't have the mental development to construct alternate systems of their own, but perhaps they could see through hers intuitively, or have the kind of powerful skepticism of those who don't understand a set of explanations, if she offered explicit explanations. But she doesn't. Implications are more psychologically effective, and she's convinced that the ends justify the means.

So children are indoctrinated to be deeply moral (or that is the attempt), and yet to find God peripheral or nonexistent. Morality, which I think is difficult to ground in anything other than God, is simply not grounded and becomes a free-floating force in people's mind. Not to be thought about explicitly -- if we did so we would either become nihilists or truly committed to morality (and thus out of tune with society). But instead this unspeakable force. I wonder if secular people who are moral realists are convinced that morality must be "out there" simply by the psychological force of having been taught to be moral when they were young, apart from rationality. And perhaps morality is, practically speaking, not seen as something that needs rational grounding, because it has been ingrained in us so much. This kind of moral education may explain both moral realism and moral anti-realism among secular people.

This may make it sound like I didn't like Charney, but I think she makes, or made, the kind of teacher I would have liked. She is a passionate teacher. I can recommend her book as a way to understand passion, something I think is essential. While her emphasis on passion could lead someone to God, her emphasis on prosocial, arational morality threatens to lead people away from God. So she is a mixed phenomenon.

Part of how I am feeling now comes from bipolar disorder, I can tell. No matter what I have going on my life, when I feel low, I feel low. This is the content of my low thinking, given what I have lived so far. When I am not blinded by the depression, I can understand fully how it is that I can keep going. But for now, I can rest a bit, knowing that I have written some of my thoughts on the book I read. I think, maybe, I won't read it again to look for the supporting quotes to what I said above. But I can recommend reading the book, for its passion, if you want to check my work.

--

One additional thing I remember thinking as I read was about how, given how beautiful and effective Charney's methods sound, why could they not be used on the elites of the world, so that, perhaps, they could bring the countries of the world in harmony with each other? I thought, maybe because the way she talks to children is something that wouldn't work on adults. It's too artificial, too skillful. Adults want the skillfulness of a poker player, to affirm their adulthood, but not the skillfulness of a professional mom.

It made me wonder, how do we make this strange creature called adult? What is this being? No child is really bad, we say, but some children grow up to become bad adults. A child can hardly set himself or herself up against his or her family. But the leader of a nation can. They can shape themselves into their own being, and shut down every human feeling, can listen to other people speak and know that they will never agree with them, and go on with their agenda. They can decide who they want to be and then be it, taking the responsibility for it, suffering for it, and still continuing to choose it, despite what other people think. Children try to say "no", but adults sometimes can actually succeed in saying "no".

--

(later)

One thing Charney talks about is how she isn't trying to punish children, simply have them see the consequences to their actions.

What if adults were shown the consequences of their actions? So often, the natural consequences of people's actions fall due not in their own lives, but in others. What if some teacher could help adults see the effects of what they do?

Adults think that being shown the moral way, having someone say "you should know better" is a thing of youth. Now that they are older, they are past that. Adults can no longer do wrong.

Now, there are certain things that an adult can do wrong. Everyone knows what those things are. We all agree on that. But the things that we don't all agree are wrong, are not to be enforced, and not even to be called wrong, so we don't have to think of them as wrong, so, in our heads, they are not wrong.

Adulthood as a collective can't be taught. It knows. A reshaping of adult values by being shown the consequences of adult behavior can't be done, it seems. So maybe the moral thing to do is to fit into the constructed adult reality, be good at being one of the tribe of adults?

But, the consequences don't go away... how will we take into account the real effects of what we do (and don't do) if we don't listen to the truth?

--

I wouldn't mind my life so much if it weren't for the bipolar disorder. Writing isn't so bad, and when I'm euthymic, I feel fine. I can hear some imaginary (or real) readers being solicitous for me when hearing about my bipolar disorder. They seem to (or really do) care about me so much and wish that I would take care of myself. But if they care about a person's well-being, I have a great opportunity for them. They can save up $5,000, donate to Against Malaria Foundation, and thereby save someone in the developing world from a painful death from malaria, which would have orphaned their children and widowed their spouse, and diminished their extended family and weakened the national economy. (It's even worth donating $50.) Or, this imaginary or real person who is moved by my bipolar disorder is a Christian and thinks that the second death is worse than the first (which, basically I agree with, although I do give money to global development), they can give a much smaller amount of money -- apparently, $1 -- to Doulos Partners and that should cause [or allow] one person to start to become a disciple of Jesus. Do you think that these charities might not be the best ones to donate to? You can look for better ones. You could even just give money directly to people who are worse off than you, if you can't find any trustworthy charities.

If you have time but not money, you can think of some way to use your time to help people. If nothing else, you can seek to make one new friend, and be a good friend to them.

But you may not have any time or money to spare. Some people don't. Then at least adopt the identity of a "person who cares", who would donate your time and money if you could, so that when someone enters your life who is more deeply involved in caring, you can offer them the welcome of your validation of what they are into, instead of passive-aggressive or blatant hostility, or indifference.

--

The title of the book I read is Teaching Children to Care. To me, I thought of "caring" as "feeling and acting strongly", more as "exerting effort to do good, work on a good-making project". But the book mostly emphasizes "seeing other people as people" and the Golden Rule. A way to reconcile these two meanings is to think of God, who is personally blessed by large-scale altruistic efforts, in the way that if you share your lunch with someone, they are personally blessed by your personal thoughtfulness and the consequence of their hunger being alleviated.

--

One thing that makes adults resistant to new morality is that they have reached the developmental stage where they are their own person and they have their own boundaries, and they are secure in themselves. Or, that they have not reached that stage yet, and are vulnerable to being hacked by other people (or demons) and thus are resistant to attempts to change them. A secure person is not threatened by morality and so does not change, while an insecure person is threatened and so shuts it down.

Somehow it is possible for a secure person to take into account morality -- maybe through a discipline of fearing being trapped by your own security. Both a secure and an insecure person can find their rest in caring, in the interrelationship of all things to each other and to them, as opposed to, in the secure person's case, their own stability and boundaries. Presumably the insecure person, on some deep level, has no place to rest.

--

[Response:]

I thought I should go into more detail about moral realism.

[Secular moral realists may have a strong intuition that morality is "out there" and this intuition is the basis of their sense that morality is real, despite whatever difficulties in grounding it rationally (or lack of having tried to do so). They would deny the intuition that people have that God exists as being valid, but they do trust and honor the intuition that morality exists.]

[Secular moral anti-realists may have no qualms, and little difficulty, in "being good people". "You know, C. denies that morality even exists. But he's a good guy." They can, in unreflective moments, feel that morality is real. They can even get mad at injustice. They can devote their lives to doing good. But then they go back to the study of their minds (like Hume's study where he can be skeptical) and say "but none of it's real!".]

[Morality is an area where we seem to have agreed to be irrational, to not try to connect all the dots or demand that all the dots be connected, even beyond the background level of irrationality that attends most human endeavors. ("This thing makes you change what you do. You spend hours and hours, thousands of dollars to comply with this thing. It's not just how you feel -- it's something you have to obey. You just know that you have to obey it, no person or other visible force or situation makes you obey it. And you can't explain what it is, how it fits into the rest of reality -- or, you even say it's an illusion?") And, perhaps that acceptance of irrationality is because we have had morality ingrained in us in a subtextual way, or the instinctualness of morality is encouraged, but not accompanied by reason, when we attend secular public schools (or even religious ones that don't make God real to students sufficiently), or have parents who are helpless in explaining a rational grounding to moral realism to us when we are young.]

[Maybe we can at least explain where moral instincts come from -- evolution? (Why should we trust how we have evolved? Evolution helped us to survive in early environments?) Or we can say that they are heuristics for survival. (Why should we survive?) But then, if we are the "1%", why redistribute wealth? The 1% could probably maximize its survival best by not redistributing wealth. Or, a related question: does promoting animal welfare really lead to human survival? Often it is orthogonal to human survival. I think morality could come from evolution but does not necessarily serve the purpose of human survival. Maybe some people have genes that make them ethically oriented? Then why not shut them off? Does morality really have value? To answer that question, I think we need a moral realism.]

[Maybe morality is just maximization of value, by definition of "morality" and "value". Then, can we explain that voice that says, for each valuable thing X, "X is valuable"? Or is that also irrational, just a random "monkey on your back"?]

[I don't think I'm being fair to secular moral realists. I should at least explain why I think moral realism is hard to ground in anything other than God. Secular moral realists may be able to come up with a satisfying account of how moral realism is grounded.]

[How would they do that? Do we start with "these are our moral intuitions, now we have to find some metaphysical belief that lets us keep them"? But what if there's something wrong with our moral intuitions? One of the main points of having a grounding for moral realism is to know what particular things are moral, now that we know where morality comes from. I am generally relatively more of a thinker and writer than a reader. So I tend to work with first principles (or personal experience). But I did read The Feeling of Value by Sharon Hewitt Rawlette and remember that I had mixed feelings about it. I thought that it probably was successful in showing that some kind of experiential states can be known to be bad, just because they feel like badness, and some can be known to be good, just because they feel like goodness. I'm not sure I would be so charitable now. At least, without going back and looking to see the details there, I think "why should our perceptions of good and bad be transcendentally valid?".]

[A moral realism needs to be usefully thick, if we are going to guide our lives by it. You can always posit something like the (unfortunately named) "morons", "moral particles", and I can say, "fine, now we know where morality comes from, some kind of ontologically real substance of morality". Now what? We need to know something about these moral particles in order to know what is actually moral to do and be.]

[I don't know if there are any better secular moral realisms than Rawlette's, but at least hers is usefully thick. Hedonism (what she advocates for) is a somewhat useful guide to life. (Maybe that is what is so seductive and dangerous about it, that it's easily agreed-on for "practical purposes" while not really being in tune with reality.)]

[My approach to moral realism, as of now, is to say, "An ontologically real substance of morality exists. Everything that, practically speaking, exists, is conscious. (Only consciousness can interact with consciousness.) This means that the ontologically real substance of morality is conscious. Morality is about a standard which applies. For something to exist, it must ought to exist. It must live up to that standard. That things exist proves that morality exists and is being satisfied. The way that conscious beings metaphysically contact other beings is for their consciousnesses to overlap, for them to experience exactly the same experience. Morality metaphysically contacts everything that exists in order to validate it so that it can exist. So morality experiences exactly what we do, and finds the 'qualia of goodness or ought-to-be-ness' ('pleasure') good, at least on a first-order level, and similarly with the 'qualia of badness or ought-not-to-be-ness' ('pain'). This validates a lot of Rawlette's account.]

["But we know a few things more about morality. For instance, morality has to be self-consistent. Like us, it has to put morality first. So it has to put itself first. But it has to put itself first as an other, as a law it submits to. Thinking of morality as having two aspects, the enforcer of the standard and the standard itself, allows us to see that morality has to be willing to put aside everything, including its own existence, for the sake of its standard. If it ceases to be willing to do that, it is not self-consistent and it ceases to be valid, destroying everything by being invalid (no longer moral, and thus unable to validate anything).]

["Part of morality's self-consistency is that it must have the same values as itself. Everything that exists has value, it ought to be, either temporarily or permanently. (What is bad must someday cease to exist.) Morality must be on the side of value, and must value everything that is of value for what it is. Morality values persons in that they are persons, this personal valuing being called love. Morality must love in order to be self-consistent and thus valid. It loves that humans are in tune with it so that they can exist permanently. To love a person fully involves understanding the person's being fully, and that full understanding can only come from kinship. So morality is a person (a person who is also kin to animals).]

["Everything is the expression of a will, either that of morality, or of a free-willed being whose will is willed by morality. To be is to will. So impersonal beings are parts of personal beings and don't have independent reality. They are valued as parts of personal beings, and with those beings morality has kinship, not with their parts taken separately.]

["Morality has to be willing to bear the burden of what it imposes on others. If it's worth it for a human to pay a certain cost for morality's sake, it's worth it for morality to pay it as well, if possible. Morality already experiences every burden that is part of our experienced lives, by being conscious of what we are conscious of, but there is a further burden that each of us experiences, which is to experience only our own lives and deaths, without the comfort of knowing the bigger picture. How can morality bear that burden? Morality is composed of multiple persons, one of whom experiences everything, another, who does not and can live a finite life (the first maintains the moral universe through his/her validation of everything during the time the second lives a finite life)."]

[As you might have guessed already, "morality" in the above could be considered "God".]

[If we accept the above (or perhaps a better-argued version of it...), we have a concept of morality that largely supersedes hedonism. It incorporates hedonism and its recommendations, at least insofar as it validates the first-order goodness/badness of pleasure/pain (if pleasure has baked into it the perception that it ought to be, and pain, the perception that it ought not to be), as well as answering why it is that care for hedonic states is transcendentally valid. Further, we are recommended to be willing to give up everything for what is right, and thus to risk ourselves for that when it is called for. And we are to bear the burdens of those we rule over, as much as we can. It might be possible be able to come up with other ways to thicken the very concept of moral legitimacy, so that we know more about what morality must be, and thus what we must do or be in order to be moral. This thickness is a useful guide. And, if we think that this person or persons who are morality exist, they may have acted in history, and we may try to find evidence of where they might have spoken, allowing us to thicken our concept even further, although with less certainty.]

[To defend my earlier statement, I think that it's hard for me to imagine a successful secular / atheistic moral realism, because what I see as the way to ground moral realism involves the existence of God, and the (perhaps unrepresentatively few) secular moral realisms I've seen are not satisfying to me intellectually. Maybe if I want to strengthen what I say further, putting it briefly, I would say that if morality exists, it must love fully, and that kind of love is something that persons do. So then, morality is a person, and the word for a person like that is "God".]

--

22 September 2023:

When I wrote this post I thought that bipolar disorder was my big problem. However, now that I am more over the ways people have traumatized me and programmed me with the ways they wanted me to think, I see that those are a much bigger deal than my bipolar disorder. My bipolar symptoms, without those traumatized and programmed thoughts, are fairly mild.

Book Review: Between Man and Man by Martin Buber

See also the preview for this review.

I wrote the notes for this review quite a while ago, but didn't write the review right after reading the book. This may have been somewhat of a mistake, as I now am not connected to the material and can't add much beyond the notes. But luckily my notes have somewhat of a conclusion to them, and so maybe it is somewhat as though I have written the review already.

--

[Notes:]

Thoughts after reading Maurice Friedman's introduction:

Friedman (p. xiv) says

Not every relation between persons is an I-Thou one, nor is every relation with an animal or thing an I-It. The difference, rather, is in the relationship itself. I-Thou is a relationship of openness, directness, mutuality, and presence. It may be between man and man, but it may also take place with a tree, a cat, a fragment of mica, a work of art -- and through all these with God, the "eternal Thou" in whom the parallel lines of relation meet.

This makes "I-Thou" sound understandable to me. I don't remember it being that clear when I read I and Thou, but maybe it was there all along. If I take it as a fairly faithful representation of I and Thou, I would say that I experience I-Thou relating fairly commonly and that it is not an exceptional state. Except, when it comes to people. I find that I tend to see people in terms of how I am afraid of them or how I could use them, or how I desire them, or in some way or another I have an automatic agenda with respect to them. But I don't have this kind of agenda toward plants or inanimate objects, and I don't think I usually have this toward animals.

I find even when opening the door to leave a room, that I approach it with openness, directness, mutuality, and presence. (I don't see it as I-It even when I'm using it instrumentally.) I think, because I see it as the unmediated speech of God and so simply part of my relationship with God, like any other speech between him and me, and toward God I have (maybe Buber would say, I must have) a relationship of openness, directness, mutuality, and presence. The world is just God's speech -- except, where some being who is other than God is asserting themselves in such a way that God fades to the background and I must relate to them instead of God. Then all the agenda-thinking comes in.

Simantic words are the beings which God speaks, but I suppose to be more accurate, there is a component of what comes from people which those people speak as well, although a lot of what comes into my experience body from them is not 100% of their willing. When I see the simantic word of a person, it is loaded, like a loaded term that a person handles carefully to avoid controversy. But God, plants, (all or almost all) animals, bricks, asphalt, the sun, etc. are unloaded simantic words. All words have connotations, but some of them have such connotations that they are loaded.

(One inanimate object that I do find loaded is my laptop. Maybe because so much human speech comes through it, and so much of my own speech goes out through it, so it has become "humanized" to me.)

I think most people are naturally addicted to people and warp themselves and their view of reality to fit what some group "wants" them to believe. Our people-addiction causes us to have agendas for the people around us. Or agendas of getting away from them as fear-objects. We are so addicted to them that we fear them, even beyond whatever objective risk they may pose us with physical weapons. And thus if they rule us we are unable to see them as people. Prosociality makes it so you have to love the people around you, but since you don't choose to love them, it's not really you who loves them. So we are urged to love people, but that urge to love, if external, or internalized, is an obsessing, controlling force, an externalized or internal addiction, and it prevents us from really loving people.

This amounts to a bitter critique of (a) humanism. Can I offer anything better than that humanism? One thing I can offer is to say that being alone is fine. You're not going to die. You have to be weaned from your human addiction first, though, or else it might not work out. It helps to seek to love God, and to come to see the phenomenal world as spoken by him. When you live in a default state of "I-thou" connection with God, then you can be alone as much as you want.

The alternative to prosocial humanism isn't "ego" or insanity in a world where you are the only one who exists, but rather to become in tune with God on the level of phenomenal presence, where every experience is a message from God. You can be fed as much from God alone as from other people. Then, you don't have to be addicted to them.

There is some danger that if you are not addicted to people, they can't be used as tools to force you to grow up. Maybe people-addiction is a necessary slavery to help you grow closer to God? But it seems that there should be a more Millennial way to learn, and that God prefers to teach us things that way, because he dislikes the brutality of our lives as much as we do, and more so. Why can't God just guide us gently to learn directly from him? Why use people as bludgeons and acids on us? Maybe the problem is in us, to make us need people. But otherwise, I think that a person by themselves (with God), with perhaps some kind of food for thought, or perhaps either internalized or written-down Scripture, could learn the lessons of holiness, without other people being involved. Maybe when there is something "rough and uncomprehending" in us, like a sheep, we need to be treated like an animal. But we are sons and daughters of God, and we don't have to be animals (or children) all our lives -- instead, always children of God, but adult children instead. Perhaps some people need other people to help them overcome their sins. But it's better not to to take the rough and random path of a sheep, and instead to walk on the trail or road.

I do think it's possible that people need people because for some reason God is prevented from talking to us gently and directly, by some kind of negotiation with Satan. But then, like any other slavery, that's something to be escaped when possible, and considered lamentable when not possible.

--

Sidebar: Thinking about addiction. I see a moderate Internet addiction in me. Trying ways to control that. Social media is addictive because we're addicted to people and information. I have to use social media (more or less) for practical purposes. But it's bad.

I grew up without a TV in the house. Someone I knew had a TV growing up but could only watch -- one hour a day? One hour a week? I don't remember exactly. Maybe I could try something like that with social media.

People who quit nicotine do other things to sort of exercise the habit. Looking at Indonesian Wikipedia is still a grabbing for information. But it feels less "loaded" or "Doritos-y" because the language isn't worn in to my mind, and the random pages I see talk about things that I'm not normally into sometimes.

--

Now I've read up to the end of the first part, "Dialogue". I had thoughts after the first section within the part, but forgot them before I had the chance to write them down, and my mind was not deeply impressed by them, I guess. I do remember thinking that Buber's basic philosophy articulates fairly well with simantism, could be a module added on to MSLN. I just read the second two sections, and didn't have as many thoughts. I think maybe sometime in the future I'll come back to the first section and see what I think -- maybe recover some of those thoughts I had -- but for now I'll move on.

Overall, it seems like Buber is preaching to the choir to people nowadays. I think to actually practice "dialogue" is not always done. But he sounds like a fairly mainstream humanist to my ears, though he expresses himself in a non-mainstream, philosophical way.

I like Buber more as a portal into the concept of wordless dialogue, and thus into relating to God, as part of epistemic and ethical theism. Also, it's interesting to think about how Buber's concepts of dialogue and being whole-souled would apply to nations. Can two nations experience an analogue of Buberian dialogue? Could a nation be whole-souled? It would have to be, I think, to be engage in what could be called Buberian international dialogue.

But, interpersonal relationships are important, and maybe it's good to hear his sermon again. (As though maybe a message starts off fresh / alien and fully confrontational and communicative, and then that exact message when it has become standard, assimilated, uncontroversial / familiar, is spoken to a "choir" ("preaching to the choir"), becomes a sermon.)

--

up to p. 54 (The Question to the Single One, The Single One and his Thou)

Buber has been talking about how Kierkegaard seemed to think you should only address God as Thou (make God first relationally? Or even significant at all above a certain threshold?). Kierkegaard chooses renunciation (of Regine Olsen) so that he can love God.

On p. 54, Buber asks:
--Who is there who confesses the God whom Kierkegaard and I confess, who could suppose in decisive insight that God wants Thou to be truly said only to him, and to all others only an unessential and fundamentally invalid word -- that God demands of us to choose between him and his creation?--

Does Buber need God to be such that he does not demand of us to choose between him and his creation? I don't know if this is maybe a difference between a Jewish and Christian approach to things. Buber was certainly well-read in Christianity and allowed himself to be influenced by non-Jewish thoughts, so maybe a Christian approach to things via the cross would not be foreign to him after all. But maybe it would. And Kierkegaard, from my perspective not fully knowing his work but having some familiarity with it and his life story, seems particularly valuable as an example of someone living out the cross. When the Romans come to burn the early Christians, the early Christians have a choice: God, or life? This choice could be seen as: God, or creation?, in that life is created by God and full of his creations. What kind of Christian can choose life over a death for God without shuddering at the betrayal? So for a Christian (or an aspiring Christian, perhaps) like Kierkegaard, it is a bit frightening to think of choosing creation over God. Even a Jew wouldn't want to make creation an idol. Maybe Buber would answer (as I think he does, in a way) that loving creation and loving God are inseparable. As though it is only possible to love God through creation.

I know from personal experience that it is possible to love God apart from love of creation. Maybe Buber had never experienced that. Maybe Kierkegaard had, and maybe had to "renounce" Regine (as if she were his prize) in order to learn it.

If you have to have creation, or you have to have renunciation, either of them seem like things that could turn out to be spiritually dangerous to you, keep you from fully loving God. It depends on the person as to which is more dangerous than the other.

I don't think that creation is something to not love at all. I think it should be loved like you love yourself, sort of in the background or as instrumental to your journey toward God. To help someone else on their journey is worth doing. But basically, I think everything should be oriented toward God. There should be an intimacy that each person has with God and not with anyone else.

I don't know about saying "an unessential and fundamentally invalid word" -- I wouldn't say that second place is that bad a prize for each person to take, while God takes first place. I tend to think that good love of people is a mixture of high-quality love, pristine like water from a mountain spring, and equally high-quality, pristine and clear, indifference. For me, I and the people around me, are bit players in my life story, as I would like to be in theirs, who do not need complex characterization, do not have to have our natures disclosed to the point of inciting intense will.

However, I understand that this is my perspective, and goes along with my more-monastic / celibate life experiences and preferences. Maybe I'm not as solitary as Kierkegaard? So I'm somewhere between Buber and Kierkegaard? But I think I lean more toward Kierkegaard in this.

I would guess that Buber, Kierkegaard, and I are/were all introverts. But, perhaps Buber was not as much an introvert as I am -- maybe Kierkegaard takes the prize of "most introverted", although when he was younger, he went out a lot. I don't want to "legislate" from the perspective of my own personal preferences. Maybe it's best for the "Buberians" to see the world in a more Buber-like way, and for the "Kierkegaardians" to see the world in a more Kierkegaard-like way. I would still want to emphasize that despite personal temperament and life situations, making creation (or specific creations) into an idol is a real spiritual danger, one which even a "Buberian" should be careful to avoid. It's possible that I'm misinterpreting Buber, but I feel like he might be insisting that we can't renounce creation, and that feels dangerously close to saying we have to have it, and thus need it to be saved. I think that as long as a person loves God and is willing to go all the way to fully loving God, God is all they need.

But now I think about it, and I think maybe I could agree with Buber's emphasis on creation if we assume that human beings only become more holy through some kind of communication from God, and that the only way to communicate is through simantic words, each of which is a union of noetic relations and phenomenal content, which is about as much "created; a creation" as anything can be. Some kind of creation is necessary as a tool for God to communicate with us, and after all, both we and God are made out of simantic words. So maybe I don't see as strict a division between God and creation.

However, I think the blurring of God and creation is valid only on one level of reality (maybe that of "immaterialism"), while the difference, in a easygoing way, is seen on another (that of "simantism"), while the difference is seen in a sharper and starker way on yet another (that of "legitimism"). In other words, we all might be part of the same pages and have the same ink on us, us and God being one book. But the ink communicates words and characters doing things, and these have a distinct reality as they relate to each other. And then some words and characters refer to beings which are foundational to the whole book and who are in some sense higher (or truer) than all others. And within the story, the difference between the different characters is there.

--

p. 62 (The Question to the Single One, The Single One and the Body Politic)

Buber says something like "marriage and being part of the body politic are ways that you are forced to confront others as others". Is this a good thing? How good is it, if it is good? Is it a necessary thing? If necessary, is it a praiseworthy thing or a necessary evil, or more or less neutral, or mixed?

I think if the greatest spiritual danger is egoism, then all manner of being bound to people and forced to deal with them so that you see other people as other is maybe necessary. And I think egoism can get in the way of people loving God. In other words, if you're stuck in yourself, then you can't seek God. Maybe you can be broken out of yourself by being forced to confront people deeply. Will you then go to seek God? Some people will, some people won't. I think the greatest spiritual danger is to not love God with all of your being. So making "marriage and dealing with the body politic" a big deal is potentially misleading by emphasizing an instrumental means to loving God as an end in itself. I'm not sure that Buber makes this mistake, exactly, but I feel like his text emphasizes the humanist angle to this question, which I think does push on "you need to confront other people to see them as others through marriage or the body politic in order to be saved".

Marriage has its challenges, but so does celibacy. I would read the challenges of marriage not as essentially being most valuable as ways of teaching you to see the other as other and thus to get out of egoism, but to be sources of disestablishedness, which enable us to seek God. Celibacy can be a source of disestablishedness as well.

Marriage brings with it a kind of unfreedom -- either your spouse restrains you from being yourself, or along with your spouse you are incentivized to remain whatever self you've negotiated yourselves to become together. Maybe you can change, together, or become an ideal together, but there's an obvious danger to "regressing to the mean" if you can't intentionally coordinate your spiritual movements. The mean says "do what's default in your culture" and if the two of you can't both pick the same non-default to go down, you won't support each other, or even might undermine each other, but you will tend to continue to support the default in each other.

Celibacy brings with it a kind of poverty. Speaking generally, a celibate person is free, but poor, while a married person is wealthy, but unfree. Poverty causes the celibate person to seek God, while unfreedom causes the married person to seek God. There is trouble in the celibate's life as well as in the married person's life, and that trouble can disestablish, leading to the opportunity to be close to God.

I'll guess, maybe following Buber, that one can draw an analogy between participation in the body politic and marriage, that it has similar attractions, troubles, upsides, and downsides.

p. 62
--But to this we are led by marriage, if it is real, with a power for which there is scarcely a substitute, by its steady experiencing of the life-substance of the other as other, and still more by its crises and the overcoming of them which rises out of the organic depths, whenever the monster of otherness, which blew on us with its icy demon's breath and now is redeemed by our risen affirmation of the other, which knows and destroys all negation, is transformed into the mighty angel of union of which we dreamed in our mother's womb.--

--

pp. 62 - 65 (still in the The Single One and the Body Politic section)

Buber goes on to say something like that the body politic consists both of the "near-neighbor" (my term) or "private sphere" (Buber's term) connections, at such a small scale that you can really feel how you are a part of it and also relate to all the members as individual people; and also the "public sphere" (Buber's term), where you can't grasp the individuality or concreteness of each person.

One of them lends itself to being "the crowd" that Kierkegaard doesn't like (the public sphere), but the other doesn't (the private sphere). Buber says "the crowd" happens when people are caught up in a mass moment, like with some protests, or when public opinion invalidates private opinion, where people give up their own thinking to fit in. Buber does see the danger in this, but thinks that the body politic goes beyond this "crowd".

I don't know what Kierkegaard meant by "the crowd is untruth", but a possible way that "crowd" can be "untruth" (or at least "untrustworthy in a way related to knowing and believing") is when you outsource your responsibility to know the truth and to relate to God, yourself, to the people around you. You go to church and the church worships God, but you don't. Or you only do with part of your being and sort of "go along with the ride" of the church. Or you are part of a small group of friends, and you find yourself filled by your conviviality and your particularness, but that filling keeps you from really hungering for God and/or the truth. It isn't exactly fair to call the "near-neighbors" of Buber's private sphere a "crowd", but I can see how Kierkegaard's "Single One" should still be concerned about Buber's private sphere with all its belonging and concreteness, with its temptation to keep the Single One from really directly facing and seeking God and the truth.

--

I don't want to make it sound like singleness, celibacy, poverty, etc. are completely safe, in contrast to conviviality, marriage, and wealth. I do think that the latter three are more appealing and therefore tempting than the former three. But, single, celibate, poor people should be aware that in their isolation and poverty, they are likely to do things that are desperate, or be tempted to doing those things. Hunger taken generally is good because one of the hungers is the hunger for God and truth. But there are specific hungers which are bad, or even not worth feeling.

It is always possible to favor singleness, celibacy, and poverty over God, and to not obey God's specific desires for how we are supposed to work for him, because of those biases. I think that it's tempting to think that when life seems to make sense, it reflects God's will. I think there's something to that heuristic that when life draws you toward something that is on some level positive, it's God's will for you, but it may not be the basically positive thing that God really wants for you. You may find yourself drawn toward a providentially-ordained-looking job, for instance, and think that it was God who ordained it through all the events of timing, and "opened doors", through which it came. And, given your heart and your previous life choices, it probably was God saying, this is my plan for you, accept it. But if you had a more faithful heart or made better decisions in the past, you might have been given something else, which God would have liked better. God makes life choices make sense to us, often, by blessing us, because that's how we trust him and how our motivations flow. We conceive of blessing, more automatically, through the lens of conviviality, marriage, and wealth. So we are probably biased, more often, to think that conviviality, marriage, and wealth go along with doing God's will, when that may not be the case.

Still, it could be the case that God wants a celibate person to marry in order to work for God better, as much as it could be the case that God wants a person seeking marriage to choose to be celibate instead, in order to work for God better.

--

Finished The Question to the Single One.

I have to say that I have only been reading in a somewhat superficial way. Something about Buber's writing style defeats my attempts to read it. When I look carefully, it seems like he uses understandable words with understandable grammar, but somehow I have a hard time connecting with his sentences. Maybe in some cases he's writing about realities which I have not seen? I suspect that my own writing is in some way not fully readable to everyone.

--

Read Education.

Similarly hard to connect with Buber's sentences here. I did find it somewhat helpful to read the writing under my breath.

Had some good ideas, and may be worth reading if you're interested in education. The part that stood out to me most was this (p. 98; the eighth "conglomeration of paragraphs":)

--The relation in education is one of pure dialogue.

--I have referred to the child, lying with half-closed eyes waiting for his mother to speak to him. But many children do not need to wait, for they know that they are unceasingly addressed in a dialogue which never breaks off. In face of the lonely night which threatens to invade, they lie preserved and guarded, invulnerable, clad in the silver mail of trust.

--Trust, trust in the world, because this human being exists -- that is the most inward achievement of the relation in education. Because this human being exists, meaninglessness, however hard pressed you are by it, cannot be the real truth. Because the human being exists, in the darkness the light lies hidden, in fear salvation, and in the callousness of one's fellow-men the great Love.--

To me it seems that this means something like "a teacher, though supposedly they are teaching a subject, is really becoming a sort of figure in the inner landscape of a child, enabling the child to trust". The child is able to have "security trusting" (Joseph Godfrey's term from Trust of People, Words, and God), trust in the universe as a whole, because a human steps in to perform a certain role, by being a certain person who happens to be put in the child's life in order to teach a subject.

When a student learns, they are the ones who teach themselves, and the teacher can only help so far. So the student must trust enough to take the chance of being wrong, or of stepping out into "darkness" (all the confusing and unknown things which make up the world before we learn) to make it into "light" (clarity and knowledge). To existentially trust, overall, enables self-trust, and trust of the educational process, so that oneself and one's task of learning can be connected with.

The image of a "dialogue that never breaks off" is how I experience my relationship with God. In a way it does have interruptions, like how the mother isn't constantly with the child (I would suppose) in Buber's image. But it also doesn't. I don't think this dialogue is something I can completely take for granted, but I do think that in reality it has been going on my whole life, at some level or other, whether I realized it or not. I can't take for granted that I will always be open to God or be on the path to being open to God. But God is always open to me, unless and until I completely reject him.

I think it's appealing to think of the child relating to the mother (and thus each person relating to God) according to a purely wordless dialogue. Buber is particularly valuable as someone who points out that wordless dialogue happens. But mothers are persons and not just "eternal Thous", and as persons, they may say something (with words), that a child needs to hear, understand, and perhaps obey. Similarly with God. We need to trust God in how he supports us, in some ways wordlessly, and also to trust his words which tell us what he values, what he commands, and who he is.

It is safe to assume that if you completely trust God and follow him, you will be safe in the end. But part of trusting God involves going out to look for the words which he has already spoken, and learning the principles with which we can identify those words when they are present all around us. So we have to take action, and often initiative, in trusting God. Also, trusting God is something we have to consciously renew at some points, and there is danger there.

--

Read The Education of Character.

This is the most clearly-written part (at least to me). I think for many people it would be the best thing to read first of this book. If they like it, they could read the preceding parts which reinforce it, and if they want further reinforcement, they could read I and Thou.

I can see applications to cultural altruism. It occurs to me that one way to try to solve the problem of determining the best values is to see what kind of people we have to be to really teach values. The values of good teachers are the right ones for everyone to have. Buber's text might support "being whole-souled", or maybe a little further from his wording and maybe not 100% the same concept, but one which goes along with it "not being fake" / "being real". I don't know that a "morality of good teaching" determines enough, but it seems like it is a good thing to make sure is in your axiology.

Politics is culture war, but what if it were conceived of as education? Could political people become educators?

--

Reflecting a bit before going on in the book...

One danger of being into Buber's philosophy is that if you are really into the concrete personal being in front of you, then you will reshape your mind somewhat to only be attuned to concrete personal beings in front of you, and you may neglect distant or future people, or God.

I don't know if this is fair to apply to Buber himself, but I get the feeling when I read his philosophy that it would appeal to and encourage people who tend to think that to love God reduces to loving people. Certainly, when you love people in a concrete, personal, instinctual way, that love is much heavier and real-seeming than the love you might try to have for God. But is that compelling feeling trustworthy? The compelling feeling a young man has that he will marry "Alice" is also what he will later feel for "Brenda", "Calypso", "Diana", and "Elysia". And he won't marry any of them and in many cases, it never would have been a good idea if he had. Or the compelling feeling of shame and failure someone may feel may seem persuasive and true, but they shouldn't kill themselves. The feeling that you are going to marry someone someday is beautiful, and the feeling that you are shameful and a failure is (brutally) real, and weighty. Is it the case that if you feel a compelling feeling for the concrete person in front of you that is beautiful and real, you have found the truth? Or is it still possible for that to be misleading in some way? Could it be that loving people is a subset of love, and that you need to love God as well? Or do we simply know, in a wordless way, that concrete personal love is the highest, when we feel it, and because we know it wordlessly, no words can speak against it?

Maybe practically speaking it's easy to deal with this dilemma by pointing out that for people to have true well-being, they need to love God, and they need to love as God loves. For us, this means that we must both love in the concrete personal way, and love the distant and future beings, because God loves in a concrete personal way, and God also loves all beings, including those distant to us, and future beings. I'm not sure Buber would object to this, but I think the emphasis of his writing could appeal to or motivate people who don't see things this way.

A related danger is that because of Buber's emphasis on the concrete personal, and finding God in ordinary lived life, one might think that this life is all that matters, and the first death is all that matters. I think human instincts say very clearly that the first death matters. Caring about the second death is physically more difficult, but (I think) if you think, you will see that the second death matters, and matters far more than the first death. It can be difficult to reconcile the compelling instinctual moment with its heavy, loud speech with the quiet voice that you have to work to obey. Going with your instincts feels more natural and even humble, more honest. Using those three feelings as criteria can help you avoid bad thinking sometimes. But if your instincts are out of touch with reality, the naturalness, humility, and honesty you feel can be misleading.

--

Caring about the second death is something that (some) teachers do. Do healers do it? Buber seems like he would appeal to the helping professions, to teachers and social workers, but also doctors and especially therapists and psychiatrists. It seems that the whole mindset of a healer (which Buber's philosophy fits into well) is a powerful one, but if it's focused primarily or exclusively on the first death, it is a dangerously misleading one.

One might say that healing precedes teaching. If you have a terrible stomachache, you probably can't learn most lessons. I can see that, but I suspect that the process of healing can involve some hidden tradeoff, the signing of some hidden contract.

One hidden contract can be that you "have to" adopt the identity of a sick person. You have to say "I am a sick person in need of help." You have to make the inner part of you, your "I", or even "I"-saying, sick, and then (ideally), you can get healing of all the flesh and clothes around that inner part. Are you ever allowed to say "Okay, I'm not a sick person in need of help anymore, I'm out of here."? Some healers (and parts of "health culture") let you do it. But others don't want you to.

Is this a problem? If you adopt the identity of "I am a sick person in need of help", it does things to you. You are fearful, guilty, needy and thus unhappy, and you don't trust yourself. You adopt the identity of a small person, and not a large person. This mentality keeps you from fighting evil most effectively. All you can do is heal and need, you can't be a soldier. It inhibits vision. It may pave the way to giving in to some temptations. You may feel a need to control or infect people who are healthy in the way that you are not, because you think that it's morally wrong for people to think they are healthy, even if by making them think they are unhealthy, they become unhealthy.

I would say that I'm okay with valuing healing if it produces that innermost healing, but even being healthy in that way doesn't necessarily make you a good person. But what if healing could actually end up causing people to be holy?

The trick is that healing is something that can be done to someone, and can be passively received. If you have an abscess, you could be in a coma and someone could remove it, and you could benefit from that operation, without even consenting to it. But the critical element of morality, of coming into tune with God, is that it is something you do yourself. To turn toward God is an action you must take. Nobody can make you take that action, or engineer that action in you. You must consciously do it yourself. So the healing of the innermost person may be helpful because when that part is healed, it is easier (I think) to say "I can do things", among those things, to repent. But, of course, this kind of healing only leads people to the water, and they can choose not to drink. Maybe teaching leads them closer to the water, and should be provided, but they still can choose not to drink.

--

Thinking about Buber overall, makes me think about the Kantian idea that one should treat people as ends and not as means. I feel like I exist as means and not as an end, and I naturally see the people around me as means. We are all background characters in each other's stories, and the real story is how each of us seeks God. I exist as means to the end of other people being means. I am means toward the interests of Legitimacy. I will always be means for that and I will never be done with that. Legitimacy is what is most valuable, and so I will always be an instrument toward it/him/them. Legitimacy is a person and a community of persons. The "head of state" and "head of government" of Legitimacy is God. We will always be means toward the (ongoing) end of what is really right, and what is really right is a person.

I'm not sure what Buber would make of that last paragraph. I haven't read I and Thou in a long time, so there are probably details to what Buber says there -- possibly details in the first part of Between Man and Man that I missed or have already forgotten -- which close off some degrees of freedom in what I can say about Buber with respect to this question, but I can say a few provisional things now. Buber has "I-Thou" relations and "I-It", as though we relate to people as ends in themselves without agendas, or as parts of our agendas. But I perhaps want to say that there is some kind of relationship whereby another person is part of God's agenda, and I am part of God's agenda. If "God's agenda" is really just my agenda, then I think effectively that's an I-It relationship. But if "God's agenda" is something that is out of my control, then maybe it's closer to an I-Thou relationship. But that other person does not exist in a freestanding way, and neither do I. This way, there is always a purpose to people, always an ethical orientation, and people never exist in their own rights, but are inherently oriented toward God. Does God relate to people in an I-Thou way if they must be oriented toward his agenda? The idea of Legitimacy says that God and God's agenda are one thing. So an agenda can relate personally to people, at least, God can. But I think God's relationships with us would be either a mix of I-Thou and I-It, or something else orthogonal to those categories.

--

Finished reading Part 5: What is Man?, Section One: The Progress of the Question.

I guess my main response is to think about the ideas of cosmos, infinity, and the asking of the question "what is man?". Buber sees a pattern where people find a way to fit man into the cosmos, giving them security, and then they don't deeply ask the question "what is man?". Some people, though, see infinity and man has no place in the cosmos, or stands out, or is alone in some way and is forced to see himself in a strange or alien way, asking "what is man?".

The MSLN response, I could say, is that the cosmos is just God and you, and peripherally the other people connected to God. The cosmos is also what God speaks to you. So there is a two-fold cosmos. In the base reality, you, God, and each other person, all is finite. But God can speak the simantic word of infinity to you. And you and he will experience it to the full. God feels the depth that you feel when you ask "who am I?" or "what is man?", though he knows more about you or about humans, all that there is to know. He is as bewildered as you are, and perhaps he wonders sometimes "who am I?" or "what is God?", even if he knows all the facts that can be known about himself, and understands how those facts work together. He may not be ignorant about himself the way that we usually are, but still find his own existence to be a thing of wonder, that is even heartbreaking.

--

Thinking back to the "Kierkegaard / Buber debate". I take "Kierkegaard" to be a representative of "sometimes you need to renounce the people you love in order to love God" and "Buber" to be a representative of "you never need to renounce the people you love in order to love God because to love them is to love God". Both these positions seem necessary, correct, compelling, and wrong.

I think it is important to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength. I think I have a capacity to love God through loving people, and a capacity for loving God exclusively, with no other people admitted to that part of my life. In order to love God with all of my heart, soul, mind, and strength, I have to offer what is exclusive to God through an exclusive relationship, and offer what is communal to God through a more typically Buberian relationship in which others are admitted. It's a bad idea for "Buber" to miss out on the essential message of "Kierkegaard", and vice versa. Kierkegaard might have been right about Regine Olsen (or her life reality) occupying a part of him that only should have been given to God, requiring him to renounce her. Buber might be right that sometimes renunciation is not what God wants us to do, and that relating to people may not keep God out of our lives.

It is also important to love God with all of your being and love your neighbor as yourself. The theistic has to take precedence over the human. Relating to people in such a way that you relate to God is somewhat dangerous, if it really turns out to be a case of loving your neighbor, that pays lip service to theism, or even a case where you really do love God through loving your neighbor, but the way in which you love God is not you loving God with all of your being -- rather, maybe, you don't love with all of your being, or you love your neighbor with all of your being, or you love the totality of humans with all of your being, or even somehow you love yourself with all of your being.

The road of renunciation and theism is hard and unpopular, and "Buber" takes the path that is healthier and more sane. So "Buber"'s is the way that will become more popular, typically, and thus in the long run "Buber" is more dangerous than "Kierkegaard", if there is some way in which "Buber" "binds to the receptor" of the part of us that needs what "Kierkegaard" uniquely offers.

--

Finished reading Part 5, Section Two: Modern Attempts.

This is the end of the book, except for the Afterword. At this point I would say that my response to the book is, I would change the emphasis of it from "between man and man" to "between person and person" or "between personal being and personal being", so that this "between" thing can be satisfied between a human and God, and not just between a human and a human.

I think the book overall can be good to read, for those interested in personhood, the question of "what is a person?", and the relationship between personal beings. I agree with Buber that individualism (a true individualism that excludes God) and collectivism both sound like bad tendencies and Buber's "between" sounds better. I think Buber is kind of saying what is now "received wisdom" (like what Scott Alexander pointed out about Hobbes seeming obvious in retrospect). We all know that we should relate one on one in rich ways so that we see each other's humanity. So it's not an exciting message, it seems, in this current moment as far as I can see online. David Brooks is into Buber, that's true. But I don't see a lot of people on Twitter talking about Buber, unlike the Gen Z(/Millennial?) Simone Weil trend. Someone I once knew pointed out that the problem with Buber is that only nice people read him. I don't know how true that is, but it sounds plausible. Part of me wants to point out that nice people probably feel strengthened when they read Buber, and producing cultural artifacts that pretty much just strengthen nice people is a good thing. But part of me sees my interlocutor's point, which is that you have to change the minds of "bad guys" or "sensible guys" more than saying the same old thing to "nice guys". I feel like Buber doesn't get "nice guys" to change the world, at least, I don't feel him motivating me very much, assuming I'm a "nice guy".

Perhaps one of the defects of Buber's teaching is that he favors agendalessness. You can do a lot of good in an agendaless way, but some good (probably) can't be done in an agendaless way. So, maybe a good adjunct to Buber's teaching of promoting one on one, small group dialogue, is for agenda-based people to figure out ways to engineer those experiences. My guess is that there are a decent number of churches that think about things like this, whether they are aware of Buber or not. I don't know if secular groups think this way, but I would bet at least one school and at least one business has tried to incorporate these ways of thinking. Possibly even the military, as ironic as that might sound (building esprit de corps is important, even if your combat unit is being trained to kill people, which, it's hard to avoid thinking in some way is a denial of their humanity).

This points out how agendas consume agendaless people. The agendaless thing to do is to love your family and support them. Then, they will go off and work for a collectivity, like a multinational corporation, which will perhaps cheat people, exploit the environment, dodge taxes, develop technology that moves us closer to being able to destroy civilization -- and then whatever taxes are paid by your family will go to the other big collectivity, the government, which pays for wasteful and yet all-too-effective wars. I don't think Buber was naive enough to think that you can avoid all agendas and all agenda-ed thinking. But, it might be tempting, if anyone got really excited about this book, for them to ignore the bigger picture (perhaps even pointed to within the book in passing) of how we have to use "I-It" thinking, or use tough-minded mental software like desert watchfulness, or warlike determination, or doing math, or something in that vein, as opposed to the beautiful and timeless-feeling meetings that happen between... humans and humans... when they get into their own dimension, as Buber puts it in the very last chapter of this section ("Prospectus"). People read books, and reality, for their emphasis, sometimes, as opposed to their details.

Having said all those caveats, I do think that as relatively unexciting as Buber's main teaching might be to some people, to enter that timeless-feeling, present place is a good thing to learn, and I've certainly gotten a lot out of Buber's wordless dialogue, especially as explicated in the dream at the very beginning of the book. Maybe Buber's teaching (like some others out there) is a good song to practice until its second nature, as an etude even if not as the most exciting four-chord anthem.

Now, having appeared to have given a conclusion to these notes, I should read Buber's Afterword...

--

Finished reading the Afterword. I don't have anything to add here.