Book Recommendation

I am about halfway through the new book by the good bishop, aka. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Ostensibly it is about the remainder of life after conversion, and particularly the importance of character. I’m finding it really stimulating and helpful. The book is trying to fry several fish at once, which at times makes it seem a little unfocused, but its main thoughts emerge clearly enough. The main point could be put like this (apologies to the author for my sloppy summary):

Humans have been created with a job to do. The Ancient Greeks like Plato and Aristotle knew this, and this is why they talked about virtue so much. Virtue is just a rough-and-ready translation of the Greek word arête which also means something like ‘excellence’, or ‘success’. The Greeks answered these questions falsely, but they were onto something with making virtue an important ethical category. To answer the question, ‘What is it to live a virtuous life?’ or ‘What is an excellent human life?’ or ‘What is a life of success?’ we need to have an answer to question of the ends of humanity. What is the purpose of humanity? What is its role in creation? What did God create and redeem humans to do? Answering these questions Christianly, must involve telling the story of the creator God, his relationship with Israel, and the job the disciples took upon themselves after the resurrection.

The book’s answers to these questions have been a little inspiring. At once they have tried to be more descriptive than ’give glory to God’, and more motivating then ‘don’t sin’. Here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite.

Worship and stewardship, generating justice and beauty: these are the primary vocations of God’s redeemed people. And the habits of the heart, mind, and life to which we are called are designed to form us, gradually and bit by bit, into people who can, with the hard-won “second nature” that we call virtue, freely and gladly take forward these tasks.

- N. T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters (2010), p. 83

Like his previous Surprised by Hope (2007), this is a really accessible book that is aimed at the popular level. It does a great job of retelling the whole biblical narrative, and presenting an account of how disparate parts of the bible fit together into the one story. Along the way it reclaims some important spiritual terrain of everyday life that evangelicals of the past few decades have been in danger of abandoning – including the importance and role of aesthetics, justice and work.

Heartily recommended!

p.s. I have a North American copy of the book, published by Harper Collins. In the past, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named has published his popular level books with different publishers in North America and the rest of the world, and sometimes with entirely different titles. So if you’re hunting for this book in Australia, it may have a different name and cover. All part of his cunning ‘shock and awe’ infiltration tactics designed to distract us I suppose!

Un-Motivational Ethics

Like any thinking, ethical thinking is under a standing obligation to reflect about and criticize the standards by which, at any time, it takes itself to be governed.

John McDowell, Mind and World (1994), p. 81

This is a great illustration of a stance in philosophy that both excites and disappoints me. One the one hand, I think it is incredibly exciting to be in the business of thinking critically about not only the activities, goals and emotions that we fill up our public and private lives with; and to think about the reasons why we think that those activities, goals and emotions are excellent ones to fix on. But it is a great shame how thoughtful people (like philosophers and theologians) can often frame this task in a completely unmotivating way. The above quote leaves me feeling like there is a huge gap between being a reflective person, and living as an ethical person. The above quote makes it easy to assume that all of ethics can be captured in the process of reflecting and criticizing, leaving the actual hard work of living to one side.

…But the Faith That Justifies is Never Alone

We shall not learn how to save our souls by talking about the formation of virtuous characters. Nevertheless, such talk may teach us better than anything else what it is for a soul to be lost or saved, and so teach us to care about it for ourselves and others.

- Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order (1986), p. 224

Oliver O’Donovan: In Praise of Relativism?

The New Testament can and should exercise authority over our moral thought at both general and specific levels. Yet there remains a work of moral judgment that is properly relative to agents and situations, and this is what shapes the priorities that prevail in given periods. That is why it is more difficult for us to sympathize with the moral attitudes of earlier Christian generations than it is to share their doctrinal convictions; for with our contemporaries we share a common world with its urgent questions and moral challenges. The logic of human historicity is that living in a given age means having a distinct set of practical questions to answer, neither wholly unlike those faced in other generations nor mere repetitions of them…If we ask why there should be historical differences, the answer is simple: the priorities we hold are the result of shared judgments about the demands of the age in which we live and act.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion (2008), p. 45

Christians are often scared of the word ‘relativism’. Christians are also sometimes ashamed of the proverbial skeletons in their historical closet – Christians from bygone eras who did, what seems to our lights, awful and irrational things. This quote from Oliver O’Donovan throws light on both these attitudes. He surprisingly seems to suggest that there is a sense in which Christians are relativist, and he seems to caution against referring unproblematically to Christian history to shed light on contemporary questions.

Thoughts?

What I Don’t Love About Rorty

 

Brandom’s favorite philosopher is Hegel, and in this area the most salient difference between Kant and Hegel is that Hegel does not think philosophy can rise above the social practices of its time and judge their desirability by reference to something that is not itself an alternative social practice. For Hegel as for Brandom, there are no norms which are not the norms of some social practice. So when asked “are these desirable norms?” or “is this a good social practice?” all either can do is ask “by reference to what encompassing social practice are we supposed to judge desirability?” or, more usefully, “by comparison to the norms of what alternative social practice?”…Cultural politics can create a society that will find inter-racial marriages repulsive, and cultural politics of a different sort can create one that finds such marriage unobjectionable.

– Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers IV (2007), p. 23, 13-14

The above quote is, to my mind, an excellent example of what Christians believe is the poverty of relativism.

Taking Rorty’s example, Christians believe that there is a difference between the society that treats inter-racial marriage as repulsive,  and the society that treats it as unobjectionable, and perhaps beautiful. Furthermore, Christians think that such norms, such recommendations, can be argued for in a more forceful way than saying: ‘this is what works for us.’ To be fair, Rorty’s works are filled with intelligent, fascinating and persuasive replies to just this objection.

But when I ask myself which picture I am more drawn to, which picture I hope more and more people are drawn to, and which picture describes a world I would want to live in, Rorty’s picture begins to look actually repulsive.

The issue of morality and cultural difference is a complex and fragile one; it raises questions and anxieties that aren’t easily answered and relieved through deploying a simple theory. But I find Rorty’s answer of giving up on objectivity and universalizability really disheartening.

Ethics: Description or Judgment?

“Ethics” is not the name of a descriptive science, like “chemistry” or “sociology”. There is no slice of reality in which it specializes. Ethics is the explication of the logic of practical reason that directs our conduct, individual and collective. It terminates not in a descriptive judgment about how the world lies, or a slice of the world, but in a practical judgment on how we shall conduct ourselves.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion (2008), pp. 37-38.

This remark from O’Donovan cuts straight to the heart of a latent fogginess in my own thinking. Is ethics primarily a task of description or of judgment? That is, when we make ethical claims – when we say that ‘hate is wrong’ and ‘generosity is good’ – are we first and foremost recommending a certain course of action, or are we describing the way the world is? As a Christian, I often think it is the later: there are objective moral realities and God has given us insight into them through the gospel of Jesus Christ. So when we make moral claims we are describing the world truthfully as we know it be thanks to God’s revelation, and we are also, indirectly, describing what God is like.

O’Donovan clearly recommends the other option, that ethics ought to be a task of judgment, but for me this raises a host of other questions, not least, is this judgment then independent of any descriptive account we give of the world – a descriptive story which can either include reference to God or not? 

What do you think?

Aquinas the Pragmatist?

It is worth pausing to make comparison with a similar moral antinomy, much discussed in the Scholastic period: Is it right to obey a mistaken conscience? On the one hand, obeying one’s conscious is, apparently by definition, something it is always right to do. On the other hand, a mistaken conscience is, again by definition, a conscience that instructs you to do the wrong thing. So doing what a mistaken conscience tells you is to do right and wrong at the same time. There is a lesson to be learned from the deft way Aquinas, confronting this paradox of “perplexity”, thrusts it aside. “One can withdraw from the error”, he tells us (Summa Theologiae II. 1.19 ad 3). Commentators have expressed bewilderment at this, for it is, of course, not an answer to the question, but an evasion. It does not tell us what to do when our conscience is mistaken; it tells us  not to have a mistaken conscience. Is Aquinas merely saying, “If that was where I wanted to go, I wouldn’t start from here” – always a bad answer to practical questions, since “here” is where all practical questions start from? No: he means that there is something that the framing of the question has left out of account; the alternative is wrongly posed. It beguiles us into imagining a helpless innocent pathetically trapped between the devil of dutiful wrongdoing and the deep blue sea of guilt-ridden right-doing. Moral reality is simply not like that.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion (2008), p.31

In this passage, profound Christian ethicist and theologian Oliver O’Donovan points out a little lesson in philosophy, which I always thought was given voice by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Pragmatists like John Dewey and William James. O’Donovan surprisingly points out that the same move can be seen in the work of the medieval theologian Aquinas (ca. 1225-1275). Perhaps proof that there is, after all, nothing new under the sun.

The lesson is: rejecting the question. A philosophical stance towards questions, or a least a philosophical stance informed by Wittgenstein, Pragmatism (and Aquinas!) holds that not every question is a good question. Questions can be loaded and so naturally push you towards one answer; questions can set up false dichotomy’s and distinctions and so obscure other relevant options or ideas; questions can be motivated not by the neutral task of pure inquiry but by mysterious and complex psychological and political reasons.

The difference between O’Donovan’s point as sourced via Aquinas, and this idea of scrutinizing questions (and indeed the very act of asking questions), is that Christians believe that there is an objective, concrete reality which can be obscured and manipulated by bad questions. O’Donovan concludes, ‘Moral reality is simply not like that’, a phrase Wittgenstein and the Pragmatists wouldn’t want to be caught saying. However I think this moral (and probably metaphysical) realism provides a greater incentive to reject bad questions, since they genuinely can hide features of an independent reality, they genuinely can fail to latch onto the way things are.

Wittgenstein was interested in what about the human psychology motivates people to ask philosophical questions, Pragmatists were worried about how allegedly neutral questions could be political and ethical questions in a Groucho Marx disguise. O’Donovan and Aquinas are concerned that certain questions simply fail to carve out reality at the joints, to capture the richness and complexity of reality.

Red Skies and Gnawing Questions

Was it just me, or did anyone else notice that the tongue-in-cheek references to ‘Armageddon’ and ‘The End of the World’ in Sydney on 23rd of September didn’t quite have their tongues completely in their cheeks?

As the dust storm swept through our city, a bunch of my friends, and a bunch of stuff I read and heard that day through the press, jokingly referred to Christian ideas of a final judgment, and then less jokingly remarked that climate change is rather serious, and we need to do better for our country and our children.

To my ears, this sounded like a secularization of the Christian idea of judgment. People are aware that their actions can have terrible consequences, people are aware that indulgent, selfish and reckless living can have terrible consequences on our world and our future, and people seem to believe that there may be a day when this becomes overwhelmingly obvious and perhaps even terrible – the sky will turn red, the seas will rise.

I’m not trying to make any kind of remark on climate change or environmental issues, but just pointing out how hard it is for people to really shake off the idea that there will be a day when their actions will have consequences and when they will be asked to give an account for what they did. Even a primarily secular community like the City of Sydney still has, from time to time, a moment when this thought in allowed to creep in.

Even if we ‘throw off’ ideas about a God and universal ethics, about a quaint Jew who supposedly rose from the dead and spoke a message of warning, it seems to be hard to avoid the gnawing question – ‘Will things one day fall apart for us because of the kind of lives we led?’, ‘Will it one day turn out that we were the cause of the centre not holding?‘

On Money and Privacy

We are fascinated with privacy. Gossip magazines, stories about dual identities and secret affairs, and TV shows like Lie to Me and Big Brother disclose this fascination of ours pretty obviously. There is something alluring about the possibility of a secret identity, a secret relationship, secret passions, a secret past. At the same time there is something comforting, warm and even liberating about a secret place, a secret hobby, a secret dream, a secret song, a secret ability –  a secret thought-life which is not open for others to critique, question, probe or trample all over.

But is this a good thing? I realise this is a pretty broad question to throw up – is privacy in all instances and at all times an excellent or a harmful thing? – but it’s an important question. What reactions do you immediately have to it?

A friend has recently introduced me to the prose of Joan Didion. She is a brilliant writer, penning some real insights about human nature and American life. Writing in the 1960s, she has this to say about America’s fascination with millionaire Howard Hughes:

Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the west, trailing a legend of desperation and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favourite people and our favourite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted…That we have made a hero out of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake, but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.

Of course we do not admit that…There has always been divergence between our officials and our unofficial heroes. Hughes is the last private man, the hero we no longer admit.

-          Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1967), p. 71-72

In this excerpt Didion suggests that the reason Americans made a hero out of Hughes was because he was a symbol of complete freedom. Legends circulated that he would buy up entire hotels for just him to use, that he would buy movie stars to only work in his movies, that he would pay a barber large amounts of money to be standing-by 24/7 in case he ever wanted a haircut. His money and his power were the means to mobility and privacy. This is both an interesting suggestion about why money and power (often thought to be materialistic ends in themselves) are so valued, and also a dark suggestion about what desires may actually drive human beings.  A suggestion that there is something destructive embedded within the American dream.

There is a delicious irony to Didion’s suggestion. America secretly admired a man who has complete privacy, because it would not be publicly polite to admit that you actually value and desire privacy above all things. America secretly admired the man who had the means to live completely secretly.

Perhaps contemporary fascination with promiscuous NRL players, outspoken radio personalities, adulterous politicians, and idle hedonists like Paris Hilton, is generated from that same place as America’s fascination with Hughes.

Christianity has bad news for those who would chase all their life after ‘personal freedom, mobility, privacy’ as the greatest good in life. And it has a word of warning to those of us who love our privacy a little too much:

The sins of some men are conspicuous, going before them to judgment, but the sins of others appear later.  (1 Timothy 5.24)

…Either way, they appear. Privacy is in fact, a myth. Don’t romanticize it, let alone secretly chase after more and more of it.

Radiohead on Hiding From Your Choices

When I’m at the pearly gates
This’ll be on my videotape
My videotape
My videotape

Mephistopheles is just beneath
And he’s reaching up to grab me

This is one for the good days
And I have it all here in
Red, blue, green
Red, blue, green

You are my centre when I spin away
Out of control on videotape
On videotape
On videotape
On videotape

This is my way of saying goodbye
Because I can’t do it fact to face
So I’m talking to you before
No matter what happens now
I won’t be afraid
Because I know
Today has been the most perfect day I have ever seen

– Radiohead, ‘Videotape’ from In Rainbows

I am a Radiohead fan.

But this lyric really bothers me. At once Thom Yorke is convinced that the choices he makes in his life have important consequences – and he seems convinced that particular choices are going to have bad consequences. But he hides from these choices by telling himself that ‘today has been the most perfect day’. However things work out in the end, he’ll always have this one perfect day to hold onto and justify his choices. He’s sure that one day ‘Mephistopheles’ is going to require something quite serious of him, but stops himself from being bothered by this right now by remembering how ‘perfect’ the moment in question was.

I usually admire Thom Yorke’s lyrics for the way he can latch onto the absurdity of pride, the pain of isolation and the desire for something permanent and good; but in this song I think he cops out and glorifies a simple ‘live for the moment’-type mantra, and the tinge of melancholy and curiosity which accompany this song seem token – more a result of habit then genuine reflection.

What say you?