Recently a guy at the Cato Institute explained why libertarians need Darwin. The essay ultimately concludes that it’s because Darwinism provides a basis for morality without God, which has been known to be a hot topic here on Musings & Searchings. But what really got me thinking was a five-year-old Wil Wilkinson essay he links called Capitalism and Human Nature.

Wilkinson admits in it that some aspects of human nature make it hard for capitalism to work. I could pick a few bones with some of his points, but I want to focus on the part about the shift from personal to impersonal transactions. In the old days, we knew most of the people we did business with. Nowadays, we have to somehow trust in all the strangers on whom we depend economically. And it is not really in human nature to trust strangers. “We live in two worlds, the face-to-face world of the tribe, family, school, and firm, and the impersonal, anonymous world of huge cities, hyper-specialization, and trans-world trade,” Wilkinson writes.

What to do about it? Wilkinson doesn’t really answer it directly, but his conclusion is suggestive: “Once we appreciate the improbability and fragility of our wealth and freedom, it becomes clear just how much respect and gratitude we owe to the belief systems, social institutions, and personal virtues that allowed for the emergence of our ‘wider civilization’ and that allow us to move between our two worlds without destroying or crushing either.”

This mention of gratitude reminds me of something I’ve been wondering ever since reading a bunch of articles on Ayn Rand, following the recent publication of a couple new biographies. I will admit my knowledge of her is all second-hand, so this may be wrong, but I get the impression that she feels society owes its creative achievers a lot more than they usually get, because their works are so beneficial. On the other hand, I also get the impression she thinks any Ubermensch worth his salt doesn’t do anything for anybody else, but strictly to self-actualize or something. So how much do you really owe someone who isn’t actually doing you a favor?

Wilkinson is right when he says, earlier in the essay, that reciprocity is pretty basic to human nature. But I suspect that equally basic is the importance of motive in reciprocity. Everyone knows that people can do you favors for selfish and even destructive reasons. Con men butter up wealthy women, drug dealers give discounts to get people hooked, politicians dole out pork to gain power, abusers play nice just long enough to keep you from leaving. People are rightly suspicious of such things. At the same time though, reciprocity isn’t altruism; anybody doing a favor in a reciprocal-type society would expect reward of some sort, so favors are always tinged with self-interest. I suppose reciprocity works best when self-interest and other-interest get into a happy muddle, so that people don’t think too hard about such things. That is more difficult when you’re dealing with strangers, which is perhaps why so many commercial transactions involve so much play-acting. Waiters act like you’re at their dinner party, saleswomen pretend to be your shopping buddy, and so on. Why do you and the grocery cashier thank each other after you’ve paid? Are you really grateful? Probably not, but it’s better to pretend you are.

But what Wilkinson is talking about here isn’t really gratitude towards persons, but towards “belief systems, social institutions and personal virtues.” It does seem to me that a common trait of materialists is the ability to feel grateful towards abstractions like that — toward science, toward nature, toward medicine, or what have you. It is, I think, harder for other people to feel that for something so inhuman and lacking any benevolent intent, which I suppose is one reason why gods are ever popular. The urge to thank something when good things happen is a common one, and is perhaps another sign of how deep reciprocity is in us. Yet it’s equally common for gratitude to fade when things become commonplace and taken for granted, and for it to disappear entirely when things go badly. The psalms of lament are nearly as numerous as the songs of praise, and the popularity of capitalism goes up and down with economic cycles. To expect more is asking for an awful lot of faith.

I think I didn’t make myself clear if I sounded like I said Eve was just defending a cool pose. I was trying to address the more abstract “Is sincerism an outsider position, ever?” question I brought up at the beginning. But fortunately I’m no longer a 12-year-old dork, and I realize that there’s more to cool than being alpha dog on the playground. (I loved Paris Is Burning too!)

Eve responds to my response to her manifesto against sincerism. We discussed this some off-blog, and as she said I think we agree about 75%. Toward the end of that discussion, I mentioned that I know what it feels like to be a misfit by being too sincere, and Eve said she couldn’t imagine that. So now that the subject’s come up again, I thought I’d elaborate.

When I was growing up, just about all of the traits the Eve says sincerism opposes — “irony, misdirection, self-protection, exaggeration, agent-provocateur behavior, unspoken understandings, WASPish complicity in one another’s secrets, and your mouth writing checks your ass can’t cash” — are also traits that might be called cool. As in, put on the persona, hide the vulnerabilities, play the game, get the jokes, nail the pop-culture references, pick things up without having to be told, do outrageous things, annoy the authorities, etc. For a kid who is not cool — like, say, me — this can all seem like an impenetrable puzzle. It requires a level of intuition, gamesmanship, and immersion in a culture that you might not even find especially interesting, except that to not know it can make you a target of ridicule.

This is part of what complicates “mainstream” and “fringe.” All these references and understandings and secrets are for a group, not a stranger or an isolate. If you’re by yourself in an unfamiliar culture, you appreciate it when people deal with you straight rather than expect you to know things you can’t know. Of course, it’s also impolite to demand that they translate everything without trying to pick up the language, so I take Eve’s point on that. I think my reaction may have come from associating this kind of behavior with a kind of border patrol.

Some personality types are probably more likely to feel like strangers in their own culture. When I wrote about sci-fi robots a while ago I mentioned that people with Asperger syndrome often identify with robot characters like Cmdr. Data because they, like robots, don’t pick up on the unspoken and irrational aspects of communication; they just take literally what you tell them. I suppose this underscores how genre fiction can tell things that realism can’t, although that doesn’t mean it opposes sincerism.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t admit that “cool” itself is something that started among fringe populations — the young and the black, mostly — and that teenage in-crowds exist under authorities at school and in other youth-oriented programs that are often run by sincerists. I am sure that is not true all over the country, but where I grew up, and probably where Eve did too, people attracted to working with young folks generally liked to think we can all get along if we just share our feelings. My mother, who trains teachers for a living, says getting student teachers to adopt the “mask of command” is often one of the hardest things to get student teachers to do. It goes against the grain of their personalities.

But even that needs contextualizing, I think. For one thing, it strikes me that all the examples of sincerism that Eve and I are coming up with are very female. Is this really a chick problem? I am reminded of a paper from my college sociology course (which I know I’ve mentioned here before) about the “feminization of love,” arguing that women tend to define love as sharing your feelings and secrets with others, while men define it more as doing things for others. The post-feminist struggle of women to be leaders while still being women (and not making the same mistakes as men) may lead them to adapt a more-feminine mode of relating to leadership.

The connection with feminism also points up the fact that this is really a post-’60s phenomenon. I may be wrong, but I doubt that if we were in the 1950s, Eve would be arguing that sincerism rules the country. The counterculture promoted some highly sincerist philosophies, such as romantic primitivism, nudism, and a psychotherapeutic model of relationships (which I suspect is why Eve felt an imperative to “press my fingers against other people’s bruises”, as she puts it).

Sexual liberation is also a very sincerist philosophy in its way, since it tries to put blunt communication in place of the semi-improvisational theater that courtship has normally been. I think this is what Eve was getting at when she called “safe words” essentially sincerist. But going by what my mother tells me about dating in the ’50s, this was a reaction against a form of ritual communication that was already going haywire. The thing about these shared cultural understandings is that you lose them with a sufficient cultural disruption. Courtship in the ’50s was already different from what it was a few decades earlier (you don’t see much dating in Victorian novels), and the ’60s changed the rules again. Nowadays, the safest advice is not to assume anything.

That’s why Eve’s objection to safe words, though I understand it, seems a bit backwards. Do we really want people tying each other up and flogging each other without some way to say “stop”? Do you want someone with a whip to be telling you that thinking you know your own feelings is a Heideggerian fetish? (Well, maybe some philosophy students would like that …) I think the problem here is with the situation, not the safeguard. It’s a situation of people engaging in a dangerous sex game and making things up as they go. As Lynn alluded to in her own post on this discussion, seeing sex as a game, but where nobody really agrees on the rules, leads some men to set of rules where there’s no real way for a woman to actually mean no. Standing against sincerism isn’t going to bring back a shared script.

A few other comments. Point 6a in Eve’s post, about aesthetics, has me pulled in two directions. Clothing in general is hard to defend on purely sincerist grounds; and since I am not a nudist, I’m not about to make an ethical critique of every fashion norm out there. Still, there’s something about Eve’s comment that sounds an awful lot like, “Well if it takes a little misogyny to make women dress right, then that’s what it takes!” In which case I am not on board. (Maybe at some point I should blog my conflicted reaction to the show What Not To Wear, which would probably explain this better.)

Also, I didn’t really mean to propose that journalism was inherently sincerist, so much as I was going off Eve’s example of “American newspapers’ claim to ‘objectivity.’” Although now that I look at it again, I think that was meant more as a metaphor. (Gee, I do sound like Cmdr. Data…)

Lee pointed me to this essay by a professor admitting to his ambivalent feelings about snapshot-taking. He pointed out that I had made some similar comments myself not too long ago.

It’s true that on my road trip, I was often surrounded by people taking pictures, while I didn’t even take a camera. Coincidentally, I also went to a monastery (more on that later, I hope), and felt the cameras to be almost profane in the context. But I started noticing my own oddness in that regard a long time earlier.

I was really surprised by the apparently pent-up demand for photography that got unleashed by the rise of cheap digital cameras. A couple years ago I went to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, which I had visited many times since moving to L.A., and yet I had never before seen so many cameras around. When I was growing up, of course, you couldn’t take pictures in an aquarium — it was too dark. But it had never even occurred to me to want to.

It was then that the picture craze first started to annoy me. People taking pictures in a crowded place are much more intrusive than people who are simply looking at things in a crowded place. They bob and weave to get a good angle, they pose their friends in front of things, and so on. And what of the fish? I remember being behind a woman for a while who moved from tank to tank, looking at them through her tiny LED screen but never seeming to look directly into the water.

On the other hand, I sometimes argue to myself that I shouldn’t be so annoyed. I do enjoy browsing through the photo albums that my mother put together of our lives, even though at the time I often felt her picture-taking as an unwelcome intrusion into some fun thing we were doing. And I also know that I rely on words to communicate, and a lot of people are more visual than verbal. I completely failed to understand the point of camera phones when they first came out, but I’ve come to see that images can be communicative acts, as well as simply mementos. If you’re seeking unmediated experience, the business of constantly framing things for photos isn’t really any worse than my continual habit if writing down experiences in my head (or on the blog). I guess it’s just tough for human beings to experience anything without thinking of how you’d tell it to someone else.

I also understand, having stood before scenes of awesome natural beauty, the desire to do something in response to it. I suppose for the mystically inclined there’s genuflection and praise, but for the more prosaic, there’s taking a snapshot. We take pictures of special things, after all, and maybe taking a photo is a way of saying to the mountain or the waterfall just how special they are.

I do wonder, though, if the sheer abundance of photography these days will take away from that specialness, and the craze will die down. For one thing, what do you do with all those pictures? Everyone who likes to take pictures seems to have a digital backlog that they haven’t had time to look at or sort through, which rather takes away from the idea that you take pictures to remember things. Maybe someday, the sign of a really special event will be that it’s unphotographed — an experience for only the lucky few who were there.

Lynn recently commented on a post arguing that doubt, despite becoming fashionable in some Christian circles, is still not a good thing. Marvin made a similar point about a month ago, leading to a debate and a post from a commenter defending doubt.

There’s a lot going on here — more than I can cover in one post. But one thing I always notice in these discussions is how they’re always haunted by certain American conservative Protestant ways of understanding doubt and faith. And that can lead to some miscommunication with the rest of us.

For one thing, as Telford pointed out to me years ago, doubt is taboo among many evangelicals. And there’s a crucial difference between a community regarding something as wrong, and actually treating it as taboo. Consider the way Alcoholics Anonymous looks at alcoholism, for instance. Alcohol abuse is clearly a bad thing to them, since they are devoted to eradicating it. But it is not taboo in AA culture, and quite deliberately so. Whereas taboos are defined largely by what people don’t talk about, AA is all about talking about alcoholism. And where taboos create shock waves when they are broken, AA expects backsliding from its members and deals with it through established systems.

I think that treating doubt as taboo, rather than simply bad, can sometimes make evangelicals insufferable, as Lynn points out. But even for those who have rejected the taboo, the fear of shame can remain the dominant association with doubt. I think that’s why many people react so defensively to criticisms of doubt: it sounds like an endorsement of the taboo. For that reason, I feel it’s incumbent on critics to not only explain what’s wrong with doubt, but to discuss methods of dealing with it.

This relates to the phenomenon that Marvin objects to, where ministers think that their main task, when confronting doubters, is to assure them that doubt is OK. That may need saying if the person’s main problem with doubt is fear of social opprobrium, but that may not be the case. Where I come from, if anything, the social pressure runs the other way: the desire for certitude is seen as a somewhat primitive emotion that needs to be overcome on the way to a more sophisticated, mature comfort with uncertainty. I think that is what Shane is objecting to: where communities of like-minded doubters gather, they can act like other like-minded groups and start thinking themselves superior to others. This is quite different from the lone, tormented doubter that many former evangelicals seem to have been at some point. So the appropriate attitude towards a doubter depends a lot on the situation.

The other odd thing I’ve noticed about how conservative Protestants view doubt is how it relates to works. David, commenting on Marvin’s blog, says doubt “shakes religion out of the realm of belief and into action.” A number of people at my former church told a similar story: they were raised with rigid beliefs, came to doubt them, and then, by some mysterious process, settled into a life of following Jesus through good works.

I call this “mysterious” because this relationship between doubt and action doesn’t seem to apply in any other realm. Take politics, for instance. Is a feminist who’s fervent in her beliefs more or less likely to be an activist than one who isn’t sure about it all? Would you think someone who left a comfortable job and family to sign up for the military is a firm believer in the war on terror, or a skeptic? Only in religion, it seems, are faith and action somehow embroiled in a zero-sum game.

I’m not sure what’s going on here, but this seems to reflect the old Reformation divide between faith and works, and perhaps also the idea of “once saved, always saved.” In other words, it is not so much the fervency of belief as the content of belief that inhibits action. And it seems that evangelicals, in particular, have a very specific idea of what constitutes “belief” in the religious sense: a set of propositions to which a person, at some point, chooses to assent, which then assures his salvation. Another kind of belief — one that is more intuitive, or emotional, or unchosen — isn’t considered a “belief” because it does not fit that template.

Again, though, this is a subcultural peculiarity. In my neighborhood, changing your career, giving away possessions, and getting arrested for Jesus (all of which PMCers I’ve known have done) are signs of strong belief. Whatever you call it, it sure as heck ain’t doubt. Yet I think that because it’s not “belief,” in the evangelical sense, it gets lumped in with doubt, thereby giving doubt unwarranted credit for inspiring good works.

I am saying this all as an outside observer, of course, so I could be getting things wrong. But if we’re going to talk about faith and doubt, we need to talk about what we’re talking about.

I am not — just to state this upfront — returning to blogging. I’ve been posting occasional comments on other blogs, but I think my sabbatical was the right choice and I’m not done with it yet. But the other day I stopped by Jesus Creed, and discovered that Scot McKnight is blogging his way through Telford’s new book on the Lord’s Prayer. So far, he’s blogged chapters one, two, three and four. As you can see, the first chapter is of special interest to me because yours truly is in it. Reading Scot’s post reminded me that, yes, I’m a character now in a book being read by Christians all round the country, which is really weird but kind of thrilling. (Other, shorter reviews are here and here.)

I haven’t read the whole book. Telford kindly sent me the first chapter so I could see what he wrote about me before publishing it, but thanks to the glacial pace of book publishing, that was more than three years ago. So I don’t remember it in great detail, but I do remember being surprised by a few things in it. I didn’t realize at the time how much my own questions fit into what he was already thinking. He always seemed so sunny and self-assured, that even though he said that Sept. 11 shook his faith (and wrote an article about it, though it seems not to be on his site any more), I didn’t really see it.

The other surprising thing was the conclusion. From Scot’s description you can’t really tell, but a major point of debate between us was the doctrine of eternal damnation. After a long theological discourse, Telford writes:

Does Camassia really think universalism would be more honoring to God and more appropriate to his loving character? Then let her pray for universal salvation. Let her do what Abraham did for wayward Sodom, what Moses did for the idolatrous Hebrews, what the King of Ninevah did for his clueless city, what the Canaanite woman did for unclean Gentiles, what Jesus did for his petty disciples, and what we do every day for those we love and even those we hate. Let her intercede before our heavenly Father and plead in the name of Christ and the power of the Spirit that no one would be lost. Maybe her secular eyes have seen something our religious ones have missed. Let her make her case — not to me, for it is not mine to grant, let alone teach — but to the One with the power to hear and grant such an audacious request. Who knows? Maybe she is right.

The thing is, while Telford said something vaguely like that once or twice, the rest of the time that we talked about the afterlife he spent insisting that there will be separation of the sheep and the goats on the last day, and explaining why this was just and right. I get the feeling that his own view of the subject inclines toward Wittgenstein’s: “If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with.” And this went on after he wrote the chapter. So suffice to say, I got a pretty mixed message about this.

Telford is a disciple of Newbigin, so he’s not inclined to call something a heresy unless it’s explicitly refuted in the creeds. And he’d rather have me be a universalist Christian than a non-Christian. So I took heart from his advice and pressed on, considering universalism, like pacifism or anti-Constantinianism or some such, to be a respectable minority position in Christian tradition.

I’m not a disciple of Newbigin, however, and one reason is that certain positions are ultimately irreconcilable. I mean, if you think about it, somebody’s going to be in for a big disappointment on Judgment Day. A universalist might end up going, “Gee, God really is as monstrous as people have been saying.” A Wittgensteinian might end up going, “Wow, I guess my life really didn’t have any meaning.” There’s something deeper going on here than a difference of hermeneutical opinion. The problems we have with God mirror the problems we have with each other.

C.S. Lewis believed that everyone has a sort of inborn moral compass, which he called Moral Law, and that Christianity is in the most perfect accord with Moral Law. If only it were that simple. We all use our own moral compass in choosing our religion, all right, especially when it comes to filling a plate from the chaotic buffet that is American Protestantism. But it’s clear enough that people’s compasses point them in wildly different directions sometimes, and so they end up with wildly different images of God. And so, arguments about God’s character can’t help but be about our own characters.

To tell the truth, one reason I haven’t gone back to blogging is that I’ve been having a hard time of it. My boyfriend and I broke up, my small group broke up, my grandfather died and my grandmother will probably follow soon, I’m back in therapy (which I thought, after fifteen years out, would never happen), and, more to the point at hand, my relationship with Telford has deteriorated to practically nothing. The blog just doesn’t seem like the place to share all this suckage.

Reading about the friendship I used to have with Telford really brought me back to … well I wouldn’t say “happier” times, but definitely more exciting times, more expansive and filled with possibilities. Intellectual debate, the kind where you push each other to think harder and better, is a pleasure in itself. But it also reminded me of the fact that the last time we spoke, which was eight or ten months ago, we were arguing about the same damn thing that we were four years earlier. In my last post I said I felt my blog was retreading the same ground over and over, and boy, that problem didn’t end when I stopped blogging. And when you’re stuck in a place like that, intellectual debate just turns into nasty quarrelling.

And under the quarrelling, I think in this case, lies a fear that the argument signals more than an earthly disagreement. Will we end up in the same place at the end of days? Will we want to? What is this deep difference that brings forth such divergent ideas of goodness? It’s unbearable to think that this separation may be permanent; but however much you talk to the Father, he’s not offering reassurances.

I’m heading up to northern California for the next week, and won’t have much computer time. I have changed the moderation protocol so that previously approved people can comment automatically, but it might not recognize you if you’re posting from a different IP address. See you later kids, don’t break anything!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!