convictions and endeavors

“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”  Google that and get over 200,000 results.  It is attributed to Friedrich Nietzche, “The Antichrist.” 

Since lies are falsifications of observations, conclusions or convictions, we might expect them to be ephemeral and not a long-term threat to truth.  Nonetheless, where only one person has convictions, that person’s lies will prevail upon the other people.  Nietzche almost says as much: “Active, successful natures act, not according to the dictum ‘know thyself,’ but as if there hovered before them the commandment: will a self and thou shalt become a self.”  This is from “Assorted Opinions and Maxims.”

Some credit Hitler with the notion that ceaseless repetition of a lie will make people believe it.  Also, some credit Nietzche with making the success of Hitler possible, such as by setting apart a class of Übermenschen who alone can rise above all moral distinctions, religious and social.  I will leave that to those who know in detail what he wrote and what people of the ‘20s and ‘30s said about it. 

But people with no convictions are vulnerable.  Bankruptcy hurts; hunger hurts; knives and bullets hurt.  Hurt produces conviction of a sort:  that the most important thing is to stop the hurting.  The illusory pleasure produced by cocaine also produces conviction of a sort:  that the most important thing is to sustain the pleasure with another fix, whatever that might cost.  Between these extremes, most of us experience ordinary stresses, and most of us have convictions sufficient to anchor us against being pushed out to sea by those stresses. 

If indeed Nietzche made conviction of what has long been deemed good and right seem disreputable to a generation of Germans, then he (and those who might have rebutted his position but remained silent) did a great disservice.  Would Nietzche say he gave fair warning he might write lies of which no one should have become convicted?  “I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful -- of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man. I am dynamite.”  “Ecce Homo”

On first take, Nietzche was a self-absorbed fool rather than a caring, living human being as he forsaw the consequences of what he wrote and published it anyway.  That, however, repudiates the marketplace of ideas – something dear to both democracy and science.  Nietzche himself did not respect this marketplace.  “This is the sort of modernity that made us ill – we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay.  This tolerance and largeness of heart that forgives everything because it understands everything is to us like a warm, dusty, rainy wind out of Africa.  Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such south-winds (’The Antichrist’).” If the world had been as Nietzche claimed to want it, Nietzche would have been writing from prison. 

Professionally, Nietzche was a philologist.  That meant he was committed to words themselves, saying nothing about his hopes to accomplish something through them.  It is a likely source of the power of his words to jump from the page, stirring up thought –and trouble.

Before expecting self-censorship, we must consider the consequences of not putting into the forum an idea that has occurred to one and might occur to others also.  Maybe it is not coincidence that Nietzche’s writngs appeared at a time and place where religious influence was rapidly declining.  We don’t know his forebears did not think likewise and censor themselves.  Likely this is what Nietzche meant as he wrote in the preface to “The Anichrist”, “Some men are born posthumously” and, “A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard.”  Had the power of private will to overcome reason in miserable circumstances been adequately vetted a century earlier, most educated people would have thought enough about it by 1923 to have looked at the misery around them, recognized their vulnerability, and promptly denounced the Beer Hall Putsch as a false remedy. 

To be fair, this generation of Germans incurred misery unprecedented in the industrtialized world because defeat and the demand for reparations was followed by worldwide depression.  The southern United States also suffered defeat and neglect, and like the Germans reacted with bigotry, but it was less industrialized, and its neighbor enjoyed unprecedented prosperity and progress.  To active natures, Germany’s stress was unbearable.  They could not simply plant vegetables and wait it out.  But just as most chose not kill themselves individually, they could have chosen not to send their nation to hell.   

What is the ethical status of one who writes things that make the miserable kill but make the rest of us think?  Does it depend on whether the miserable are part of the audience?  If they are not part of the audience during the writer’s lifetime, does it matter that they join it later?  How does this provocateur share responsibility with the authors of the misery, with the exploiters of the misery, and with those of us who might have helped relieve the misery but did not?  I submit the provocateur who reasons clearly and does not advocate violence has nothing to feel guilty about. 

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Most of our lives contain more than one field of endeavor, and each field contains one or more sets of shared convictions.  Let me list some.  I think the order of this list is significant, and the last loops around to the first. 

SCIENCE                      • Occam’s Razor

ART                               • beauty is in the eye of the beholder

                                       • consistent production of beauty is a personal excellence
that overcomes all other judgments of the person

RELIGION                    • the Ten Commandments

                                       • the Apostles Creed

                                       • the Five Pillars of Islam

                                       • the balance of Yin and Yang

FAMILY LIFE              • blood is thicker than water; there is something more private      than the community and more permanent than death

                                       • marriage is forever, or is not, depending on religion and law

LAW                              • equal protection (within each class of people, or for everyone)

                                       • precedent

                                       • authority, either coercive or political, to make rules

POLITICS                     • both coercion and law come from people

                                       • convictions are whatever has been agreed to

COERCION                  • might makes right; winning is everything

                                       • might comes from obedience

                                       there is no profit except by taking something away from someone

SPORT                          • winning is everything (until the game is over)

                                       • losing is motivation to win next time

BUSINESS                    • anything good yields a profit

                                       • any desired good can be bought

As you see, the relationship among the convictions is different in each field. 

Science has only its one article of faith:  that where two or more explanations are equally in keeping with what is observed, the simpler explanation is to be preferred.  This leanness of conviction leaves everything else open for reason.  There is great controversy about where reason leads, but controversy gives way to agreement following additional observations.  Truth trumps conviction. 

The first endeavor to be desegregated in America was music:  personal excellence was known by its artistic product in a free society.  But the Nazis identified forward-looking art as degenerate because it contained convictions other than the Fuehrer’s. 

Religion is nothing without the separate religions, each holding certain articles of faith essential and ignoring or rejecting other articles of faith.  With difficulty people of different religions occupy the same country, but one person rarely holds two different religious affiliations sincerely at the same time.  Each religion somehow provides its believers with a sense of duty independent from any of the other endeavors.  Each religion also somehow provides for its own preservation.  So the measure of religious truth might be the long-term survival of the community of believers.  The philosophy of Nietzche is the antithesis, for the convictions represented by a religion’s articles of  faith are not enemies of the truth that is survival, but are its essence.  

Participation in family life is mandatory at birth and voluntary (or occasionally unavailable) in adulthood, with an unstable adolescent stage in between.  Its competition is amply explored through the Arts of novella, opera and soap opera. 

Different countries hold slightly different codes of law, and these do not peacefully overlap.  Variety is entirely geographical (see the House of Factions blog to come).  Law is the one field in which participation is mandatory throughout life, based on where one is rather than on choice. 

Where Law provides for free enterprise only, business is almost mandatory, since one must eat.  The few places where ample food grows everywhere on wild trees have a remarkable tolerance for chaos.  Cold, inhospitable regions tend to be peaceful unless disturbed by an outside force like the Bolsheviks.  Where Law forbids enterprise, coercion substitutes for money.  People perform up to a minimum, not from a minimum upward into a limitless bounty. 

Family life, Law, Coercion, Business and most of Sport are competitive.  All of the fields are cooperative, Law least so. Science is the most unified of the fields, with Sport a close second.  Think of the relationship between the United States and Russia:  contact in Science and Sport continued even during the Cold War, systems of religion and business were at odds, and lack of agreement on law is an impediment to business even today. 

Art and Sport are the most impractical, the most voluntary fields of endeavor.  There are schools of art, each with its own standards of excellence.  Judged sports are a combination of Art and Sport.  Competitive sports have rule-books that look very much like codes of law.  Whoever has played football knows how to be absolutely convicted of the opponent’s evil nature from the moment the ball is hiked until the whistle blows–and knows how to make that hatred vanish in a split-second.  Non-competitive sports are combinations with Art, Religion, Family life and/or Science.  No wonder one turns to Yoga for self-unification. 

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The convictions Nietzche was writing about are primarily individual.  Groups share convictions, sometimes complex sets of convictions from all the fields of endeavor.  They don’t always fit; for example, medieval religious convictions trespassed upon Science, Art, Business, Politics and Law. 

Determination by religious fiat that life begins at conception still does so.  (see [the Roman Catholic] Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin, Introduction, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19870222_respect-for-human-life_en.html?GRAB_ID=152%5C&EXTRA_ARG=%5C&HOST_ID=42%5C&PAGE_ID=11941888.  “The terms ‘zygote’, ‘pre-embryo’, ‘embryo’ and ‘foetus’ can indicate in the vocabulary of biology successive stages of the development of a human being. The present Instruction makes free use of these terms, attributing to them an identical ethical relevance, in order to designate the result (whether visible or not) of human generation, from the first moment of its existence until birth. The reason for this usage is clarified by the text (cf I, 1).”  The referenced passage seems to be, “These techniques can enable man to ‘take in hand his own destiny’, but they also expose him ‘to the temptation to go beyond the limits of a reasonable dominion over nature’.(1)”

So far as science is concerned, it might be simplest to say life is continuous.  The theory of sociobiology, in particular, gives more weight to the genes than to the individuals who carry them in various combinations, and the genes change very little from generation to generation.  The church’s trespass applies more to politics and law.  Certainly churches have the right to political expression, but when a church challenges the right of its members to political expression on this or any matter it is challenging democracy itself.  The extent to which democracy should tolerate opposition to its own existence is being litigated in a different context, that of terrorism.  The right of churches to express views and excommunicate members is not under challenge, but the propriety of their attempt to control political behavior is. 

Science yields truth and wonders to be applied as technology by Business to make Family life easier.  But to let Science supplant Religion or any of the other endeavors is a fatal oversimplification, for it separates abstract truth (which is just a verbal and mathematical model of what some of us believe God has created) from the realities of life as that wonderful animal that some of us believe (quite vaguely and non-rationally, yet faithfully) has been created in God’s image.  Scientific truth never says SHOULD, but only IS or DID with a specified level of confidence.  So it says nothing about why or how life should continue.  It left a vacuum for Nietzche to glorify or to fill in his own name.  Nietzche might have been happy with that, but I am not. 

Some of the quotations from Nietzche appear in http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/nietzschequotes.html .

Others are from “The Antichrist,” relying largely on

the H. L. Mencken translation. 

herem

Herem is the Middle Eastern concept that certain things, places and people shall be dedicated to destruction as required by the Almighty.  They may not be judged, salvaged, or converted by man but must be destroyed without question.  A Biblical example is the destruction of the people, goods and buildings of the city of Jericho by the army of Joshua.  

In late July, 2010, an unarmed civilian medical party of ten was killed on a trail in Afghanistan, and the Taliban claimed they did it because these people were trying to convert Afghans to Christ.  Although their actions were unimaginably kind and generous, their perceived religious error required their deaths.  

This is what herem looks like from the other side.  As people of the Book, we do not doubt the goodness of what the Lord did at Jericho to give his chosen people a place to live and develop their faith in purity.  But there came a time when purity had to give way to tolerance, because the peoples of the earth were growing and colliding.  Ending herem was a top priority, for which the Father sacrificed his only Son.  

I believe ending herem began as Jesus told the parable of the good Samaritan.  The hero of the parable was doctrinally impure but defined 'neighbor' through his actions.  Since that time, faith has not been an excuse for butchery.  Nonetheless, John foresaw in Revelation a violent end for our earthly times.  

God, creation and language

Dr. J. Craig Venter , who was being interviewed on 60 Minutes, had written a genetic code for a new kind of bacterium, created corresponding DNA, and demonstrated that the bacterium could live and reproduce.  The interviewer asked, "Do you believe in God?"  "No," he said.  "I believe the Universe is far more wonderful than just assuming it was made by some Higher Power."  

But did he not contradict himself?  The latter statement seems the clearest way of saying that he does indeed believe in God.  It is reminiscent of the refusal of strongly-believing early Jews to speak the name of God.  

When we say, "I believe in One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord..," do we unthinkingly place limits on God according to our human experience?  

"Almighty" invites use of the equivalent, "Higher Power," because it makes reference to might.  This word reflects our human insecurity, our pre-occupation with hierarchies and bullies of all sorts.  It comes out of life's fray and has little to do with the creation that went before.  

"Son" implies close resemblance.  The apostles saw before them a Man, and Thomas explored the distinctions among seeing, touching and believing.  The ways Jesus transcended being a man are to the the point, being wonderful in ways we cannot understand.  We say "Son" for lack of a better word to describe Jesus' closeness to God, His identity with God for our Christian purposes.  We struggle with its implication of gender while realizing that gender is just one attribute of life while life is just one attribute of creation.  

"Lord" again references hierarchy, specifically feudal hierarchy, which was a somewhat civilized version of the kinds of relationships we see in street gangs.  It rightly calls for our fealty and obedience.  But this word, too, is anthropomorphic.  Man was created in God's image, but, just as we cannot make a statue from a drawing without making some assumptions, we cannot rightly imagine God in man's image.  

As Venter's laboratory did something previously done only by God, we are tempted to think (without evidence) that God did it in a similar way.  Perhaps man (including woman) has been taking on more attributes in the image of God.  Has our imagining of God kept pace?  

I am a Presbyterian.  This is my mother's family's traditional affiliation; it is mine because it is both faith-filled and reasoning.  The truths of the Apostles Creed are, for me, true by my choice to concur with the religious truths contained in the Bible and thus true by definition.  My search for religious truth does not interfere with my search for scientific truth.  There is only one scientific truth that is true in the same way that the religious truths are true; that is Occam's Razor.  

If Christian experience were based on language alone, I would not be a Christian. Music brought me to Christ as language could not do.  How many additional modes of communication shall we need to imagine God with a richness befitting the complex lives we now live, a richness that will reach our neighbors whom mere words and music cannot reach?