A Meaning of "Human Freedom"

It's possible to ask what human freedom is.

Here's an answer:

To be free is to be yourself. Who you are is up to you to choose. What you choose is valid.

If you want to maximize your own freedom, then you want to be free for as long as possible. You don't want to die the second death. So, the way to maximize your freedom is to become fully in tune with God so that you don't have to die the second death. Otherwise, to maximize your freedom is to do/be whatever your heart tells you and whatever you set your heart to be.

Who do you love? / Who do you fear?

Sometimes I ask of myself "Who do you love?" when I am drawn toward something or someone other than God. Who am I putting first in my intentions and emotions? Who am I most committed to?

Sometimes I ask of myself "Who do you fear?" when I am afraid of some reality other than God. A reality might limit me, but I choose if the idea of a reality limits me, more than the reality itself does. What I fear is what I consider real. What I fear most is what I consider most real. So, who do I fear?

Running Software; Insecurity and Evil

"You" can selflessly choose to become a "you" who selfishly desires the good. It's as though you choose to run software. You enter into the software with all of who you are, but ultimately it's something you chose to run, and maybe there are times where you become distant from that software and can face the choice once more, and unchoose it, or affirm it, consciously.

Sometimes we see people (or nations) doing evil. Why do they do that? Are they evil? (Aggressive, powerhungry, greedy, hateful.) Or is it because they are acting out of self-defense? (Out of fear, insecurity, weakness, desperation.) Sometimes an observer of them can make a case both ways.

Maybe what is going on is that the evil reality of them, who they really are, is choosing to install the insecure software, to justify its evil. Or maybe they aren't really evil, but their fears install the software of being evil. For instance, choosing to install the software of dehumanizing your opponents to allow you to do what you have to do to survive. Once your opponents are dehumanized, then it is natural to be evil to them. Or maybe they are simultaneously significantly evil and significantly insecure.

People can have significant evil in them and also significant non-evil (good, or amoral self-interest). But even purely evil people have to mind their own self-preservation. So they might act even more evil than they would just out of their own inherent evil, if you threaten their survival.

What's the right strategy with people like this? Are the people who seem evil to us often the people that we really understand? So, given cases in which we lack understanding, we bet -- either that our opponent is so evil that they will try to take over if given a chance, and we must "do what it takes to stop them", including threaten their self-preservation; or that they are not so evil and will content themselves with self-preservation if we leave them alone. Do we know what we're doing? We may think we do.

Perhaps this consideration of "software", insecurity, and evil is more often more usefully applied to ourselves, because of all people we know ourselves best. How often do we install "software" that justifies, motivates, or makes more feasible some kind of hostility (perhaps software of a kind of morality) primarily or significantly to serve our own self-preservation? How often do we emphasize our neediness (run a supercharged self-preservation program) because we want to be greedy? How often do we install software for reasons other than the truth of what the software states or is based on?

Alien View of Two Cities

Cities tend to be alike insofar as they are places to meet future spouses, raise families, go to school, work at a job, grow old, get born. Your whole life story can play out in a city, and there is a way in which your human life can sort of be lived the same no matter what city you live in. In Delhi or Lima (each under a cloud of smog), people meet future spouses, raise families, go to school, work at jobs, grow old, and get born. I went to Lima for a few days, when I was 17, and was impressed by the smog. But if I had stayed five years, while that would have been bad for my respiratory health, I might have gotten more involved in friends or perhaps a girlfriend, or a church, or something like that. The smog would have been a background condition, one which I noticed here and there, maybe every day, maybe not. But I would have been living my life, the important, (near?-)universally human parts of life, of developing as a person, caring about things which were emotionally weighty to me (God, art, science, etc.) and participating in other people's lives. I would have shifted back and forth from theism to atheism to agnosticism in my fiducial depths, and experienced whatever other essential features of the human condition. But the smog wouldn't have been worth mentioning.

The alien view of a city is to see the smog and not the people raising their families (and going to school, growing old, etc.), which is the familiar view of a city. Both the alien view and the familiar view are right, and both are wrong.

Except for time I spent in Davis, CA, going to college, I have lived my whole life in San Diego. I'm not particularly interested in travel, and tend to feel the monk's feeling of wanting to stay in my cell. When I'm feeling very local, I see nearby me only a few places, which comprise my whole world that I can see. It's as though San Diego is my house, and I'm looking out the window. My whole world is Southern California, plus a view into Mexico. The Imperial Valley to the east is a desert farming community, and Tijuana to the south is in another country, reputed to be dangerous. I don't go to those places very often. To the west is the Pacific Ocean, which is a watery desert. To the north is Los Angeles, which of all these neighboring places I have the strongest impression.

As an outsider, my view of Los Angeles is that it is a place of spiritual darkness. There is greater stress and hostility there than in San Diego. Los Angeles seems to have been shaped by the movie industry, which sells beauty, but it's an ugly place. The Hollywood neighborhood is not a vision of beauty. But the sun shines "all year long" (not literally true, but something like it). A constant 72 degrees Fahrenheit may sound idyllic (it's the temperature you set your thermostat to), but that 72 degree sun gnawing at your skin, day after day, becomes a horror. You find yourself irritable under its gaze. (We have spells of this in San Diego as well.) That irritating pleasantness can even have an obscene component, the obscenity of people being fed things engineered to please them. Hollywood actresses are selected for for appearing beautiful to American men, but I have come to feel like I'm looking at a Doritos chip, a snack chip for the eyes rather than for the mouth, which has a dark energy to it, something to make me high, addictive and bedazzling. Films themselves are like Doritos chips, though they are all superficially beautiful. There is an obscenity to their beauty, which I see as an alien to them. Los Angeles is a place of desperation (aspiring actors and musicians), of broken dreams, of exploitation. While not all of LA is in the movie or music industries, I would guess that this spills over into the city at large.

When I go to LA, I often come in on the train. As it approaches Union Station, where I get off, I see the same thing every time, a kind of industrial landscape, with the Los Angeles River running through it, channelized with nothing natural about it, graffitied, sometimes with trash and the belongings of homeless people. In San Diego, there's nothing exactly like it. The Skid Row equivalent in San Diego as I've experienced it is smaller, and I have felt uncomfortable but comfortable enough walking through it, but an Angeleno friend had me canceling my Greyhound tickets so I wouldn't have to go to Los Angeles' Skid Row, where the LA Greyhound station is located. There is a hostility in Los Angeles, and an aggressiveness, both in the way people drive, and in the things people say. My Angeleno friend once said "Welcome to LA" after a homeless person went off in a train station in a way I don't think I've ever heard in San Diego. Being homeless is stressful, but perhaps more stressful in Los Angeles.

I visited a therapist in San Diego one time at a particularly dark time of my life. He said good things about Portland, but his opinion was that Los Angeles was a spiritually dark place. I don't want to be unfair to spiritualities which are not Christian, but I will note that goth and occult spiritualities and aesthetics are relatively strong in Los Angeles, and while they could be defended by some as not being really bad for you, their imagery tends to be dark and often weird, a participation in horror. David Bowie went through his worst years in Los Angeles crawling deeper into cocaine and occultism, enabled by false friends and money.

Hollywood (and Los Angeles, to the extent that Los Angeles is a support organ for it) sells America, and the world, fake beauty, so no wonder Los Angeles itself has arguably the pleasantest weather in America (shared with San Diego), but is actually an ugly, dark place. But to be fair to Los Angeles, though I am familiar with San Diego in ways that I am not with Los Angeles, I can see San Diego, as well, as an alien. San Diego, often enough, is a place of genuine beauty, not fake beauty. San Diego is the good life, a genuinely nice experience. It shares some of Los Angeles' dark side (we have that gnawingly pleasant weather, and some of the traffic) and San Diego had (and has?) a relatively strong goth scene. But San Diego is a sleepy place, a kind of "last man" place. San Diego is more spiritually dangerous than Los Angeles, because in Los Angeles, you know something is wrong. But in San Diego, you feel like everything is right. The word "hedonism" sounds to some like cocaine and strippers on Sunset Strip -- a Los Angeles phenomenon -- but to me it sounds like a beautiful sunset at La Jolla Shores, or Coronado, or whatever other San Diego beach, that feeling of the "pacific" ocean calming you, quieting away the deeply personal side of you, drugging you with genuine psychological health. How can you really learn to love in San Diego, when it is at its "finest"? You have a better chance in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is known for the film and music industries, and its container ports. San Diego is known for the military, and for craft beer and burritos and going to the beach. The World Famous San Diego Zoo is here as well.

The vulgar hedonism of Hollywood rock stars in the 1980s is probably too easily grown past. Also, the version of hedonism envisioned by transhumanists (for instance, discussed somewhat in X-Risk), while exciting and motivating to them, may seem sort of ridiculous and unnecessary to the average person. But San Diego, instead of radical hedonism represented by rock stars or transhumanists, represents normal hedonism, for normal people. If you want really good, human compatible experience, come to San Diego. Watch a sunset. Eat food from a taco shop. Drink a craft beer. Go surfing. Maybe stay home and watch a movie. Go check out a farmer's market on the weekend. Forget God. Lose your passion. Let go. Turn off the part of you that cares about anything outside of your lifestyle of normal humanity.

San Diego is the hedonism that normal people would choose, and already do choose, long before any advanced technology makes an Experience Machine possible. It may be the exact experience that people choose once they've tried all the "adventure programs of youth" that you can run on the Experience Machine. At the end -- our vision of heaven, I guess, will be San Diego, or culturally varied versions of it.

One San Diegan I knew lived in Germany for school, but came back to visit his parents in a neighborhood close to mine. He said that when he visited San Diego, he felt sadness. That was his alien view. I can connect with that -- the sadness of a beautiful sunset, all the people beautifully bedding down for one last night, as the dark settles in and they cease to exist.

San Diego says "look at things from the familiar view". Los Angeles says "look at things from the alien view". I feel like I would have a much easier time discussing the content of this post in Los Angeles-as-Los Angeles. I feel it very difficult to talk about it in San Diego-as-San Diego. In Los Angeles, we can have the possibility of really being aware of weird things, like that if we give $5,000 to a charity, it could save someone's life, a totally meaningless and abstract behavior from the point of view of an ordinary human's life. But that weird sacrifice, from our perspective, is like a gift from heaven for the person who benefits, who gets to live 35 more years (up to life expectancy, at least). In Los Angeles, we can be aware that the familiar view, normality, human nature, themselves are horrors, which prevent people from giving to anyone outside their own familiar lives. In Los Angeles we may long for something other than "this", and perhaps even occasionally cry out to God. But San Diego is self-sufficient. I don't want to be too kind to Los Angeles -- I don't know that Los Angeles leads people to love God. But at least in a sense it is unstable. San Diego is more hedonically stable, is a lower-energy point of cultural development. You can become aware of God if you can see outside the totality of the experience-as-experience. You can become aware of persons as persons, as more than just experiences, if there is some outside to the hedonic moment. A perfect San Diego could exclude you from loving God as a person, as a real being, and you would have no way to motivate yourself to leave that perspective. It would be a perfect sunset at the end of a 10/10 day.

The truth is found in totality. So while I have presented the alien views of the two cities, to be accurate, one should remember their familiar views. Every person is an alien to us and family to us, and every collection of people is alien and familiar. Most aliens have some element of horror to them, and so do most people, though there are some aliens who are like cities of God.

Both Teeth-gritting and Natural Love

Humans are motivated to get what they want, because they want it. Sometimes we can be motivated to do things because of some sort of external force. Perhaps some definition of virtue is "doing what you don't feel like doing". It is virtuous to be self-sacrificing in that way. Allowing an external force to rule over you, or willfully offering yourself to that external force, is virtuous, perhaps the height of virtue. Perhaps as though the real enemy is Self and not any other evil.

The problem with that view is that we may never learn to really want what is good. We tend to value what we desire, and when we value, we love. We have to come to love the good completely someday, and if we have a capacity for "teeth-gritting" love and for "natural" love, we are not fully loving the good if we don't love it naturally. Also, we are more likely to be effective in pursuing the good if both the teeth-gritting and natural sides are working together. To the extent that effectiveness matters in pursuing the good, it is better for us to prefer to have both teeth-gritting and natural love.

So, I do what is good because it is what I want. This is my selfish desire. (There's a sense in which it isn't selfish, if I chose to naturally want to do what is good because it was the right thing to do.)

Book Review: Holy Resilience by David M. Carr

I read Holy Resilience and my method for writing this review of it is to copy the preview of it and reply to it, like to a long email.

My "replies" are set off with --

--

In 2018, I wrote a book called Patience. It's a sort of strange book, most of which I can't remember right now. I've tried to re-read my old books in the last few years, but I haven't gotten around to reading that one. But I am aware of one part of it that opened up a big new area in my thinking.

Someone I knew back in the middle of the 2010s was a secular Jew around my age who was a history student. He pointed me to a book by Yosef Yerushalmi called Zakhor which claimed that "history was the faith of fallen Jews". What impressed me was a claim that Yerushalmi was using as background for his argument, which is I would guess not original to him, that the Hebrew Bible was the "cultural memory" of the Jews, and not history.

It struck me that the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament was something "remembered from" a position. Even as a non-scholar, it really looked to me like a lot of the Old Testament was written down in captivity. That's when the history books (1 Samuel through 2 Kings / 2 Chronicles) leave off. My naive theory is that a lot of the content of the Old Testament was oral tradition, and the editors or canonizers of the Old Testament chose which oral tradition to preserve and trust. The Old Testament could be historically accurate, but it's more like the past of the people in captivity, which makes them who they are, and only secondarily history in a secular sense (what literally happened in time). I don't think this takes away from the possibility that they are inspired. Maybe God wanted his people to remember their past a certain way. Maybe the events of the Old Testament literally happened in a kind of spiritual world, which is somehow in parallel with our own and which we have lived and will live again in our own secular way.

I thought that the Jews ended up being admirable because they were losers when they wrote down the Old Testament. They were losers who survived.

--Carr's book basically doesn't support my theory. Yes, they were losers who survived, but he tends to make it sound like they didn't choose to remember things the way they did from a sense of loss, of having nothing more to lose, but rather, they chose to remember things the way they did to help them survive emotionally. But, one of the ways of emotional survival was to make sense of things through self-blame -- there was a reason for what they went through, which was their own sins. This is a known trauma mechanism. That caused them to see the negative in their own past, which then got somewhere into their identity.--

--A Jew steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures would probably have the sense that the people of Israel were "mixed" people: chosen, but sometimes morally exemplary and sometimes the opposite of morally exemplary, who fell short of a holy God. There is a sense of being aware of spiritual danger in that stance and also a version of humility. I guess my perspective now is that the initial psychological mechanism was (or could have been) some kind of self-blame, and that may have come up over the years when things went really bad for the Jews, but that there is a "mellowing" effect that time and tradition has on a text which gives the text a life of its own. (Like cooking raw ingredients until they make a soup.) And once it "mellowed" (or "ripened" or "aged") the text was able to speak as though it had been edited, composed, and/or canonized, by people who "had nothing left to lose" and "just wanted to speak the truth".--

--Maybe the distinction between "having nothing left to lose and speaking the truth" and "self-blaming" is that "self-blaming" could be a semi-conscious or unconscious way to take control of a situation and to save yourself, but "having nothing left to lose", I could say by definition, is about letting go of control of a situation and not trying to save yourself.--

--However, one thing which I didn't determine in the one reading I did of the book, is exactly how epistemically trustworthy Carr is. I'm not sure that there couldn't be other valid stories about the origin of the Bible, and, supposing I could list them all, I don't know how much credence I would apportion to Carr's views. I often wished he would qualify some of his statements in keeping with the conjectural nature of what he was saying, and also, I would have liked to have seen quantified credences for those statements. I would have had a better sense that there was something possibly more to believe than what Carr was defending if I saw that, and I suspect that Carr does not believe that his view is conclusively certain and thus does believe that there is a wider epistemic world, and so it would be a way to have his text reflect his actual worldview to indicate its insufficiency. I would have also liked to have seen more endnotes or discussion in the text proving some of his cases, or referring to other sources that did.--

--But, I'm not extremely interested in history, but rather in philosophy and present and future religion. So, I am glad to face the distinction between "self-blame" and "having nothing left to lose" occasioned by his book ("philosophy") and then I continue to think that God may use "having nothing left to lose"-based "loser thinking" in the present and future of religion, given that good "loser thinking" can be good for people and society. I think that Scripture is validated not by the process of composition, but by how it speaks to people once it has taken its form, mellowed culturally, entered the world of ahistorical or extramundanely historical truth (as opposed to, say, random things people were saying about recent events) and become established and trusted by communities and individuals.--

At the time, and still to this day, I don't feel a strong sense of identification with a people group. Some people are very nationalistic -- some in ways that seem good, others in ways that seem bad (like the Nazis). Nationalism is a great way to start wars; motivate genocide and ethnic cleansing; suppress, shame, or dehumanize people; or waste time getting and feeling angry. Nationalism (as I used it in my book) doesn't have to just be about nation-states, but could operate at different levels -- it operates at the level of the individual with his or her own personal nation, as well as in the family or friend group, and in the church or workplace, and in various identities (races, sexes/genders, and sexual orientations as identities rather than as accidental physical facts, political or religious affiliations, fandoms), all of them nationalisms. The love that we have for ourselves and others is often (or usually?) nationalism. So every affiliation that draws persons into distinct people groups (one meaning of "political"), we could call nationalism. So that "nationalism" (which can include nation-state level nationalism) can make people brothers and sisters of each other, emotionally bonded, can give them spiritual nourishment, can give them a sense of being a person, can motivate whatever it is that causes people to help each other.

I don't think that that "good nationalism" is a good god, in fact, I think it is a tempting idol. But, "bad nationalism" is an obviously bad god that can also be an idol. And good nationalism, like all really good temptations, is a good thing in itself. Perhaps we need good nationalism (of a sort that is really good and non-tempting) so that bad nationalism or bad anationalism doesn't cause us to get desperate for good-nationalism-of-whatever-sort, leading us to idolize good nationalism.

So there are two questions: can we split good nationalism from bad nationalism, and how? And, can we make nationalism an inherently God-worshiping thing instead of a very good thing which turns us away from God? I don't know the answer to the second question right off the top of my head right now, but I have a suggestion for the first, based in the sort of notable moment of insight or inspiration I had when I wrote Patience.

Being ignorant of most of Jewish history, I saw the Jews as being the people group who wrote and remembered the Old Testament. So what kind of people wrote and remembered the Old Testament? Losers. So I thought, if I'm going to be part of a people group, part of a chain of cultural memory, if I'm going to adopt an identity as a person who belongs to other people based on their collective self-concept and "past", and in this way become a "thick" person who connected with people, what group should I choose? The Jews (the people who wrote and remembered the Old Testament) have claim to being the people of God's word. They certainly have a "past" (the Old Testament itself), which I could adopt. But, notably, they are also the losers of history, dispossessed, looking back on how they messed up, how they fell away from God, how they mistreated each other. I thought that if I intentionally identified with this, even strongly, I would not fall into the temptations of bad nationalism.

At that point I thought that if I was ever going to join a people group, for real, on the level of "rootedness", it should be to the Jews who wrote down and remembered the Old Testament, or people who could be considered sufficiently like them, although not necessarily to the Jews in general.

Recently, I heard on this episode of the Israel Bible Podcast an introduction to David M. Carr's Holy Resilience which claims that the Bible (both Old and New Testament) came out of response to trauma, and that that origin enables it to speak to people in difficult times. This is why it has staying power over time, where more triumphalistic texts have failed. (At least, that's what I remember from the episode -- I may have misinterpreted or misremembered it.) If that is Carr's argument, it's akin to what I believe, but also maybe strangely askew to it. It sounds like maybe Carr will have the people of the Bible be winners after all, the winners who use non-triumphalism about their failed "battles" to help them win the longer-term "war" of survival. Survival is good, and "pays the rent" for the truth, but survival itself isn't the point -- it's a very good thing and therefore a very compelling temptation to idolatry.

I expect Carr to have interesting arguments, some of which may support my own point of view. I'm also perhaps expecting that he could say things which flesh out his point of view in a way that makes my own less attractive to me. (Sometimes seeing your reflection in a mirror does that.) So, I've bought a copy of the book, and intend to start reading it soon.

(I read the preface and it somewhat makes me think that Carr will not be in favor of triumphalism, but will also not be arguing for exactly what I would argue for.)

--Overall, I think Carr's point of view was of humanism, survival in a secular ("first-deathly") way, self-care, healing. My point of view is more of ... not anti-humanism, but a humanism which must depend on loyalty to God, survival in a supernatural way (avoiding the "second death"), being true and moral. So his point of view is all about how trauma makes people not triumphalistic and then they go on to be successful in the world. Assyria, Babylon, and Rome (who had triumphalistic narratives) are gone and largely forgotten (Rome less so, but still relatively forgotten), but Judaism and Christianity have survived to this day, much longer, and Carr thinks it's because of their ability to get through tough times with adaptations caused by trauma's mark on their text. Ironically, he does point out that Christians ended up persecuting Jews once Christians became dominant. But Christians got some of their cultural power, allowing them to be strong enough to persecute, from their ability to die without shame by calling Jesus' death on the cross good (by having that response to the trauma of seeing their leader killed). So the Christians ended up using the power of trauma for basically evil ends. So is trauma that yields power a good thing? It's only as good (in effect) as the use of the power.--

--But I would like to be in favor of trauma which produces holiness and truth, or perhaps instead of trauma (which we might define as being something that produces "kneejerk" reactions (for instance, of self-blame)), that adverse effects, exilic conditions, breakdowns of groups or individuals, or whatever other stresses occur should cause us to "lose" rather than develop the complexes of textbook traumatization. Maybe the kinds of things that break us generally do traumatize us and it's only as we heal and look back at the mellowed trauma that we can see a glimpse of loserhood and go on to choose to enter into that identity.--

--Or, we can willingly leave our "throne room next to God in heaven where we are victors and live comfortable lives" and instead identify, without being forced to, with the losers of history. That we prefer or inhabit a "throne room" does not mean we are not insecure, nor that we do not suffer and struggle. But we are still trying to hold onto victory as a value and onto our own victorious status, such as it is, as though it will save us.--

--(Lives of suffering and struggle can still be comfortable on some levels.)--

--One thing I should mention by way of warning is that I don't know if "loserhood" as I describe it is something that works in real life -- I feel like it is somewhat "untested" and I don't feel the strongest intuitive and emotional connection with it, it doesn't feel completely comfortable. It may work. It does feel right in cases of zero-sum or "insufficiently positive-sum" competition.--

Playing at the Role of Being Human

The spirits of grieving and of romantic love are characteristically human and lean atheist. Grief claims that there is no way to bring people back from the dead, and romantic love claims that your "exceedingly great reward" is a human being and not God -- two dimensions of atheism.

There is a sense in which such feelings, as real as they are, are spiritually risky, and can set themselves up as more real than God, who is actually the most real. And yet, if we do not feel them, how can we be human? If we are not human, then ... certainly we are not trusted by humans as much, for being alien to them, and maybe one could say that there's something inherently wrong with being a human who is not maximally human, or who is alien to humanness.

Jesus wept, even though he didn't have to. He knew better, but he didn't at the same time. Perhaps for us, we can inhabit the stage play of being human, and inhabit our roles in it, but still know that we have a reality outside it.

Gifts for Difficult Times

Solomon was faced with the task of ruling Israel, a populous country. He prayed to God to give him wisdom and knowledge to help him be king.

Solomon was already wise, to recognize the difficulty of what he was facing.

I think a good exercise is to ask yourself if you are doing something difficult, or have something difficult in your future. Then, you can see what kind of gift to ask for from God.

Praying to Begin to Care for the Non-Default

Sometimes I pray for God to help me keep caring about what is non-default (distant people, future people, people's spiritual state -- like whether they fully make it to him, caring about him himself). To care about what is default is what you do when you don't care about anything, in a state of deadenedness or exhaution. But to care about the non-default requires that you have "fight" in you, to push against the default mindset. That fight tends to be or always is intentional and conscious, a moment of decision.

This tends to prove successful for me, as though caring about the non-default is something that God wants me to do and will help me with.

It's been some time since I first encountered the question of the well-being of the non-default. In some cases, I remember the mechanism of the "inciting message" being all it took to open me up to those concerns. In other cases, I can't clearly remember how I came to adopt those values -- maybe I'm only gradually adopting some of them, but I have already begun.

I can guess that maybe someone who was approaching a potential initial valuing of the non-default could pray to God to help them to value it, in parallel to how I pray to continue to value.

Book Review Preview: Holy Resilience by David M. Carr

See also the review for Holy Resilience.

In 2018, I wrote a book called Patience. It's a sort of strange book, most of which I can't remember right now. I've tried to re-read my old books in the last few years, but I haven't gotten around to reading that one. But I am aware of one part of it that opened up a big new area in my thinking.

Someone I knew back in the middle of the 2010s was a secular Jew around my age who was a history student. He pointed me to a book by Yosef Yerushalmi called Zakhor which claimed that "history was the faith of fallen Jews". What impressed me was a claim that Yerushalmi was using as background for his argument, which is I would guess not original to him, that the Hebrew Bible was the "cultural memory" of the Jews, and not history.

It struck me that the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament was something "remembered from" a position. Even as a non-scholar, it really looked to me like a lot of the Old Testament was written down in captivity. That's when the history books (1 Samuel through 2 Kings / 2 Chronicles) leave off. My naive theory is that a lot of the content of the Old Testament was oral tradition, and the editors or canonizers of the Old Testament chose which oral tradition to preserve and trust. The Old Testament could be historically accurate, but it's more like the past of the people in captivity, which makes them who they are, and only secondarily history in a secular sense (what literally happened in time). I don't think this takes away from the possibility that they are inspired. Maybe God wanted his people to remember their past a certain way. Maybe the events of the Old Testament literally happened in a kind of spiritual world, which is somehow in parallel with our own and which we have lived and will live again in our own secular way.

I thought that the Jews ended up being admirable because they were losers when they wrote down the Old Testament. They were losers who survived.

At the time, and still to this day, I don't feel a strong sense of identification with a people group. Some people are very nationalistic -- some in ways that seem good, others in ways that seem bad (like the Nazis). Nationalism is a great way to start wars; motivate genocide and ethnic cleansing; suppress, shame, or dehumanize people; or waste time getting and feeling angry. Nationalism (as I used it in my book) doesn't have to just be about nation-states, but could operate at different levels -- it operates at the level of the individual with his or her own personal nation, as well as in the family or friend group, and in the church or workplace, and in various identities (races, sexes/genders, and sexual orientations as identities rather than as accidental physical facts, political or religious affiliations, fandoms), all of them nationalisms. The love that we have for ourselves and others is often (or usually?) nationalism. So every affiliation that draws persons into distinct people groups (one meaning of "political"), we could call nationalism. So that "nationalism" (which can include nation-state level nationalism) can make people brothers and sisters of each other, emotionally bonded, can give them spiritual nourishment, can give them a sense of being a person, can motivate whatever it is that causes people to help each other.

I don't think that that "good nationalism" is a good god, in fact, I think it is a tempting idol. But, "bad nationalism" is an obviously bad god that can also be an idol. And good nationalism, like all really good temptations, is a good thing in itself. Perhaps we need good nationalism (of a sort that is really good and non-tempting) so that bad nationalism or bad anationalism doesn't cause us to get desperate for good-nationalism-of-whatever-sort, leading us to idolize good nationalism.

So there are two questions: can we split good nationalism from bad nationalism, and how? And, can we make nationalism an inherently God-worshiping thing instead of a very good thing which turns us away from God? I don't know the answer to the second question right off the top of my head right now, but I have a suggestion for the first, based in the sort of notable moment of insight or inspiration I had when I wrote Patience.

Being ignorant of most of Jewish history, I saw the Jews as being the people group who wrote and remembered the Old Testament. So what kind of people wrote and remembered the Old Testament? Losers. So I thought, if I'm going to be part of a people group, part of a chain of cultural memory, if I'm going to adopt an identity as a person who belongs to other people based on their collective self-concept and "past", and in this way become a "thick" person who connected with people, what group should I choose? The Jews (the people who wrote and remembered the Old Testament) have claim to being the people of God's word. They certainly have a "past" (the Old Testament itself), which I could adopt. But, notably, they are also the losers of history, dispossessed, looking back on how they messed up, how they fell away from God, how they mistreated each other. I thought that if I intentionally identified with this, even strongly, I would not fall into the temptations of bad nationalism.

At that point I thought that if I was ever going to join a people group, for real, on the level of "rootedness", it should be to the Jews who wrote down and remembered the Old Testament, or people who could be considered sufficiently like them, although not necessarily to the Jews in general.

Recently, I heard on this episode of the Israel Bible Podcast an introduction to David M. Carr's Holy Resilience which claims that the Bible (both Old and New Testament) came out of response to trauma, and that that origin enables it to speak to people in difficult times. This is why it has staying power over time, where more triumphalistic texts have failed. (At least, that's what I remember from the episode -- I may have misinterpreted or misremembered it.) If that is Carr's argument, it's akin to what I believe, but also maybe strangely askew to it. It sounds like maybe Carr will have the people of the Bible be winners after all, the winners who use non-triumphalism about their failed "battles" to help them win the longer-term "war" of survival. Survival is good, and "pays the rent" for the truth, but survival itself isn't the point -- it's a very good thing and therefore a very compelling temptation to idolatry.

I expect Carr to have interesting arguments, some of which may support my own point of view. I'm also perhaps expecting that he could say things which flesh out his point of view in a way that makes my own less attractive to me. (Sometimes seeing your reflection in a mirror does that.) So, I've bought a copy of the book, and intend to start reading it soon.

(I read the preface and it somewhat makes me think that Carr will not be in favor of triumphalism, but will also not be arguing for exactly what I would argue for.)

Okay for Today

O Lord, someday I may cease loving you. Who can say what will come? But for today I will love you.

O Lord, someday I may cease breathing in. Who can say what will come? But for today I will love you.

Anxiety's object never comes to pass, only joy's or sorrow's. Your life only exists in the moment, and you contain your past in the present. You are not in hell right now.

According to MSLN, you can't know that you are permanently safe until you have completely decided to follow God, something which most people haven't done yet, and won't do for a very long time. And it is not safe for you to say that you have done this, certainly to say it to others and perhaps to think it to yourself, until you are actually in God's rest. But you can know, for today, that you have not ceased loving God, and that for today, you have not made yourself a permanent enemy of him.

Assurance that is in line with the truth can be real, but only provisional, until you are fully spiritually mature.

Loving Good Like God Loves Good

If you hate doing the good and force yourself to do it, there's something virtuous about that. But in the end, you need to love the good like God loves the good, with all of your being.

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There's something easy about motivating yourself to do things you love, even if they are difficult.

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When overcome with depression or any other temptation, your feelings, or lack of feelings, don't necessarily reflect who you are.

What Does Caring Look Like for Me?

I knew specific "broken-brained" people and who or what they were. When my brain is "broken", I can be them, and it feels good and natural.

Maybe caring looks like that for them. But what does caring look like for me? Not that, not really.

Going too hard on myself, or going too easy on myself, doing something that someone else is already doing, or can do better. But I am most useful to God when I ask "what does caring look like for me?" and come up with my best answer, which is plausibly correct.

It's important to care. Caring is how you value, and valuing is love. Value is how things are valuable, and thus it is important to care. Caring is who you are, and the way it affects what you are and how you act and trust.

What you are is clothing for who you are. The flesh of your mind and what it does are clothes that you wear. It's better to be the right small person than the wrong large person, and the right large person than the wrong small person.