I have been formulating my personal philosophy as a journey. The first chapter was on "Unexamined Assumptions." Here is that chapter in 2 Parts: part 1 and part 2. Chapter 2 continues the journey into ethics.
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1. Philosophy is about ultimate things and the answers to ultimate questions. It stands alongside all other fields of inquiry and asks, "What is the scientist really doing?" "What is the historian really doing?" Or the artist or the psychologist.
Or the minister and priest. This latter "meta" inquiry is of course very sensitive. [1] Should anyone be allowed to ask questions about God? Or does asking questions about God put us in a seat of authority we shouldn't have as mere humans?
The Bible allows questions. We hear them in the prophets. "How long, oh Lord?" (Hab. 1:2). The psalmists ask this question repeatedly. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus cries out from the cross, quoting Psalm 22:1. "Why do the nations rage?" (Ps. 2:1
You can ask questions with different attitudes, though. You can ask questions truly seeking answers. You can ask questions in pursuit of faith. And you can ask questions in pursuit of doubt. You can ask questions about God as if you are in the driver's seat. And you can ask questions about God because you just don't know.
I have already advocated the long-standing Christian approach known as "faith seeking understanding" (fides quaerens intellectam). We start with the faith we have and go from there. We do so as genuine seekers because we don't want to get it wrong.
The fact that we inevitably start off with assumptions that are wrong is no offense to God. It is in large part a consequence of the Fall. Seeking the truth is thus ideally a quest for God -- the real God rather than the one of our potentially false assumptions. God believes what is truly true. Our inevitable starting point is to have some beliefs that are not true. Thus, rightly done, philosophy is a quest for the thoughts of God amid the inevitable thoughts of man.
Not everyone of course is equally suited for this task. Some of us are gifted in the area of abstract thought. Others may be more easily led astray in the world of thought. I accept that it may be appropriate for some not to question but to trust those they respect. I would only urge that it be done with humility, as the quest must also be done.
Yet our quest will ultimately lead to humility for those who love the quest, love ideas, and are gifted at such "meta-thinking." If the quest ends in arrogance, we have not done it right. There are many of us who have not done it right.
2. I want to start our quest to move beyond binary thinking with ethics. I'm sure you have heard the word. Let's start with a working definition. Ethics is about what is right and wrong. As we will see, even that definition is unreflective, but it helps us get the ball rolling. It helps us start the journey.
Like all ultimate matters, the question of ethics is sensitive. Our sense of right and wrong is deeply ingrained on our psyche. It's something we generally don't question -- or at least there is a lot of pressure not to question our sense of right and wrong. By the time we reach adulthood, we likely have a host of "mores" or "customs" built in.
There is a machine of control in place to keep us in line, especially if we grow up in a particular religion. In many cultures, the instrument is honor and shame. Deep values are implanted in the heart of a child's mind so that they want to seek honor and avoid shame. In Western culture, we try to instill a desire to avoid guilt. We want that angel on their shoulder (Freud's superego) so that they will resist the devil on the other one (Freud's id).
In evangelical circles, we have Sunday Schools to instill these core values. We want to imprint our way of life into our children at a young age. "Train up a child in the way they should go" (Prov. 22:6). With good intentions, we are trying to "indoctrinate" them. And, I don't think it's crazy to say that the Bible often serves as a tool of control to keep us in line.
The ironic thing, of course, is that the Bible often raises questions about our cultural ethics. My seventh and eighth grade Sunday School class has been working through Joshua, Judges, and 1 Samuel. The young people ask many difficult ethical questions every week. Why was Jael considered good when she drives a tent peg through a man's head? Was Rahab right to lie? Did Jephthah really sacrifice his daughter?
3. I remember when I realized that the Bible doesn't outright condemn polygamy. Don't get me wrong. I think it is headed in that direction, and I fully affirm monogamous marriage as God's ideal. But this is one area where I had this moment of realization about my own unexamined assumptions about what the Bible means.
Jacob of course has two wives and two concubines. Not a word of condemnation is given. David was a man after God's own heart and yet had many wives. A key moment in my quest to know the Bible was when I realized that Deuteronomy 21:15-17 assumes that a man might have more than one wife. The passage says nothing about the man needing to get his life in order and only have one wife. It assumes that polygamy was a normal practice in Israel.
What about Genesis 2:24 -- a man becomes one flesh with his wife? I had always assumed this was one man and one woman. But a man becomes one flesh with every woman he has sex with (1 Cor. 6:16). He becomes one flesh with a prostitute, for example. (By the way, this is not the same as marriage. Paul would never say that such a man had to marry the prostitute.)
In short, a polygamous man in the Old Testament became one flesh with each of his wives. Imagine my surprise when it occurred to me that Boaz might already have had a wife or two when he married Ruth. Nothing in the story precludes that possibility. It may actually be more likely than not.
Mind blown! I had an unexamined assumption about what the text was saying -- an assumption that I think is right in terms of how we should live and what God's ideal is for us. But I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't see that I had hidden assumptions. My thinking was "unitary," using a term I coined in the first chapter.
4. What I'm getting at is that the Bible often isn't as entirely the source of what we say is right and wrong as we think. That doesn't mean our values are wrong. It may just mean that we are unreflective about the full basis for those values and where they come from.
When I taught New Testament, I had the students write a final paper in which they took a position on a contemporary issue based on the teaching of the New Testament. But I always warned them. It's best to pick an issue that the New Testament directly addresses. I made this warning because I often would get papers on abortion with lots of statistics and moral sentiments but not a single verse from the Bible.
It seems clear to me that our position on abortion is broadly based on the ethical principle that it is wrong to kill, but there is almost nothing in the Bible itself that directly addresses the topic. Almost every Scripture I have heard quoted involves unexamined assumptions that aren't clearly in the texts coupled with logical fallacies.
In other words, there is a significant amount of theological glue involved in this position of the highest importance to us. If you set out the logic of our position, there are premises that come from outside the text. That doesn't make our position wrong, but it does show that our position is actually as much or more theology and philosophy as Bible.
We are on a journey of unexamined assumptions because we want to know what God thinks. A key realization on that quest is that some of what we say is the Bible is actually our assumptions rather than the Bible itself. The Bible can become merely symbolic. It can become a white board of culture and a power tool to keep our group under control. It can become a bannerhead, a placard. But if we look inside, sometimes we may not hear what we want to hear if we truly listen.
5. There is a delightful story in the Histories of the Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote in the 400s BC. [2] In the story, king Darius asks two groups of individuals what their practices were in relation to their parents when they die. The Greeks respond that they burn their bodies on a funeral pyre (Star Wars style).
The other group, the Callatians, were horrified. They thought such practices were abhorrent. "What then do you do?" Darius asks. "Why we eat our dead parents of course."
At this point, Herodotus draws a conclusion. "Custom is king over all." In other words, he draws a relativist conclusion and what we now call "cultural relativism." In this view, right and wrong entirely depends on where you grew up.
Indeed, I was initially puzzled by the fact that the Greek word ethos and the Latin word mos -- from which we get the words ethics and morals -- initially meant "customs" or "habits." This made no sense to me initially because "everyone knows" that morality is about absolutes. It's about what is universally right and wrong everywhere in all times and places.
More on absolutes in a moment. Certainly most people in most cultures do not consider their values to be "cultural." They think they're just plain right.
In Western culture, Herodotus is sometimes called the "father of history" because he went beyond simply repeating his people's traditions or assuming the Greeks were always in the right. He pursued source material and tried to be more even-handed in his treatment of the evidence. He was not a historian in the modern sense, but he is often seen as a benchmark.
Indeed, the fact that he didn't privilege the Greeks led Plutarch to call him the "father of lies." Plutarch used his intellect to reinforce Greek cultural assumptions and values. In his own way, Herodotus began to use his intellect to ask the question of what is actually true -- which goes beyond the Greeks. The real truth is what God thinks, and God is bigger than any human tribe.
6. By the end of our journey, I hope to end with a justification of definite rights and wrongs. But because we start off with unexamined assumptions -- blind spots -- we can live with a little disequilbration for a moment. Inevitably, our views on right and wrong do have a lot to do with where we are born. And even as Christians, the morals we see in the biblical texts are deeply influenced by our culture.
In philosophy, I often shared a list of fascinating differences between different cultures. I've mentioned the polygamy of many cultures and the fact that the Callatians ate their dead parents. Obviously, there have been cannabalistic cultures that eat their enemies as well. [3] In certain Inuit cultures, the elderly might self-sacrifice (or be left behind to starve) because of the scarcity of resources... without it being considered wrong.
The ancient Spartans encouraged their young people to learn how to steal as a valuable skill. Some Greeks valued quasi-sexual relationships between male mentors and the young men they mentored. In ancient Egypt, a man's family (including pets) were often buried alive with the dead husband.
Even into modern times, the practice of suttee in India burned the live widow of a dead husband on the same funeral pyre as him. Female circumcision continues in Africa to this day. In Japan up until recent times, the honorable thing for a woman to do even if she were merely accused of infidelity was to commit suicide. [4]
7. If we start off without even knowing that other cultures have different values (unitary thinking), we are typically repulsed when we encounter these practices of other cultures -- just as they are repulsed by our practices. The Callatians are repulsed by the Greeks, and the Greeks are repulsed by the Callatians. As I mentioned, we will try soon enough to ground ethics on something broader than culture.
But our initial reaction is often binary thinking. My culture's right. Yours is wrong. We bring in the Bible often without reading it. "The Bible tells me so." A whole mechanism of rhetoric developed in evangelical circles in the mid-twentieth century to combat relativism.
The other extreme is moral nihilism, a complete rejection of right and wrong to begin with. As we will see, this is actually something different from relativism. Relativism actually does believe in right and wrong -- it just believes it's relative.
Moral nihilism rejects the existence of right and wrong altogether. Think Nietzsche. Think Diogenes, the ancient founder of the Cynics. He pooped and had sex in public to argue that the rules against such things were just made up by society. We will dive into such territory later in the book. For now, we are looking at the movement from unitary to binary thinking.
[1] The word meta in Greek means "after." In this context, we might say it means "alongside of." A "meta" discipline stands alongside that discipline and asks what it is doing, what its assumptions are. Philosophy itself has internal "meta" disciplines. It has "meta" physics and epistemology, which are the meta-disciplines to the meta-disciplines.
We can never escape this loop. Ultimately, all thinking rests on fundamental assumptions that cannot be escaped.
[2] This story is found in Herodotus, Histories 3.38.
[3] The Callatians weren't cannibals, by the way. I wonder if they thought this practice actually preserved their parents' heritage within them.
[4] You can see how much energy human cultures exert trying to control women. This speaks to their great potential power in society. Societies develop rules to control it. Part of the cultural dynamics in America in the moment is to try to put the genie of the empowered woman back into the bottle.
1 comment:
Interesting! Thanks!
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