(Grateful?) Cognitive Minorities

I count it a good Sunday morning at church when I leave the building empowered with good ideas for living well. Among other things, I think, the Sunday morning service ought to provide people with tools for interpreting their experience (at an individual or collective level) through the lens of the biblical narrative. Church ought to be a place where people can go to have both the world, and their beliefs about it (religious or otherwise) rendered in intelligible terms, and in a manner that both challenges and encourages the way in which they participate in it. No small task, to be sure, but this morning’s service managed to accomplish all of these things, benefiting greatly from a little “outside help.”

Today we were joined by two Mennonite Brethren leaders from Québec, Éric Wingender of École de théologie évangélique de Montréal and Charles Martin, the moderator of the Québec MB Conference. Together, they provided us with a window into the religious culture of Québec , as well as a timely challenge regarding the nature of the church’s influence in the broader culture. The province of Québec, much like the Greater Vancouver area, is an overwhelmingly secular environment - one in which a public profession of Christianity is likely to be met either by bemused apathy or open hostility. Québec’s situation differs from other parts of Canada due to the historical influence of the Catholic Church - an influence which, according to Martin and Wingender, is widely perceived to be a negative one. The Quiet Revolution in the 1960’s - a period of accelerated secularization in Québec culture - figures prominently in the collective cultural mindset. Christianity is perceived largely as a thing of the past, a relic from a period of Québec’s history that is best forgotten.

So how is one who continues to believe that Jesus Christ really does represent the clue to history to respond in a cultural context such as this? Peter Berger used the term “cognitive minority” to describe those in the modern West who believe in the supernatural despite powerful social and psychological pressures toward secularization, and while Wingender did not use this term, Christians in Canada - whether in Montréal or Vancouver - will likely resonate with Berger’s explanation of it:

Whatever the situation may have been in the past, today the supernatural as a meaningful reality is absent or remote from the horizons of everyday life of large numbers, very probably of the majority, or people in modern societies, who seem to manage to get along without it quite well. This means that those to whom the supernatural is still, or again, a meaningful reality find themselves in the status of a minority, more precisely, a cognitive minority… By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society.

In a context where the absence of belief in God is assumed, confidently self-identifying as “religious” isn’t always easy. Yet the fact that Christians no longer enjoy the status of “cognitive majority” is not necessarily something to be bemoaned. The message of Martin and Wingender in today’s service was that the overwhelmingly secular context in which many Canadians find themselves might just give us the chance to take a fresh look at how the nature of the gospel message ought to affect how Christians engage with the broader culture.

Both men strongly advocated a re-imagining of Christian influence within culture, moving away from the top-down approach those in Québec are so familiar with, and toward a “bottom-up” mentality, where Christians exercise influence through love of neighbour, compassion, building community, and seeking not only to present Christianity as a plausible “cognitive option,” but to demonstrate its truth in everyday life. On this view, the main issue is not “how do we take back what we’ve lost?” (especially when what we “had” might have been acquired illegitimately or immorally in the first place), but “what unique opportunities to reflect God’s redemptive gospel are made possible by our position as ‘cognitive minorities?’”

The text Wingender preached from this morning was Matthew 8:18-27. In these verses, Jesus displays two apparently contradictory ways in which God has worked and continues to work in the world. In 8:18-22 Jesus responds to a teacher of the law’s declaration to follow Jesus wherever he goes with an enigmatic description of the nomadic and uncertain nature of his ministry on earth. Wingender interpreted the “foxes have holes” statement as an expression of God’s peculiar and less-than-obvious way of working in the world. God “hides” himself from us in that he comes to us in unexpected ways that we find confusing and unsettling. Then, in the calming of the sea in 8:23-27, Jesus displays his power over nature, working in ways we are more accustomed to expect from a deity. This, Wingender referred to as God’s “revelatory” nature. Thus, God simultaneously hides and reveals himself from us. And the appropriate human response to God’s paradoxical manner of working in the world is trust.

So what does this have to do with how Christians, as “cognitive minorities” ought to think about and respond to culture? Simply put, God’s way of working in the world will sometimes seem strange to us. The loss of cultural influence by a once-dominant Christianity may not seem like a good thing - it may even seem to be something that God might have some interest in preventing. It certainly doesn’t seem like the most obvious way to “make disciples of all nations” (Mat 28:19).

But perhaps here in Canada we are entering or in the midst of a season of “hiddenness” as opposed to “revelation” with respect to how institutional Christianity relates to the broader culture. Perhaps the church’s mode of being in the world at times reflects the God they are called to image, operating in different ways - now advancing, now receding from view - in different historical contexts. For roughly 1500 years, God’s name was proclaimed or “revealed” by a culturally dominant church, which had both positive and negative consequences. Now, with the rapid secularization of the West, maybe the time has come for the “hidden” face of God to be proclaimed by a church who is humble, penitent, open to dialogue, and committed to loving our neighbours as ourselves.

I’m probably guilty of any number of exegetical errors in the preceding, but I am, at any rate, grateful for the message communicated by my French-Canadian brothers this morning. Both seemed deeply committed both to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and to embracing the challenge of representing him to a culture that seems, on the surface to have had enough of God. I’m grateful for their reminder that wherever we find ourselves - Québec, Vancouver, or anywhere in between - we must realize that God does not work according to the straightforward linear models of “progress” by which we evaluate “success.” He reveals. He hides. And we trust.

 

Morality: Divine Spark or Evolutionary Trick?

A good deal of my reading this week has been on human moral intuitions and the role they are playing in the jeremiads against God and religion served up by the “new atheists.” I’ve read enough over the years to be roughly familiar with the typical evolutionary story told about the origins of morality: morality has evolved because it enhanced our evolutionary fitness. Whether the story told is one of group selection, preserving social cohesion, or reciprocal altruism, at the end of the day, the scientists tell us, we are moral creatures because this is the best way to get our genes into the next generation. The story is familiar enough, but many, including yours truly, find it to be an incomplete and unsatisfactory tale on its own. Consequently I was interested to see if the well-known evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker had any light to shed on the matter in his article in today’s New York Times.

One of the more interesting sections of the article is where Pinker, relying on the research of anthropologists Richard Shweder and Alan Fiske, identifies five broad moral themes which appear to be virtually universal:

• The idea that it is bad to harm others and good to help them
• A sense of fairness: that one should reciprocate favors, reward benefactors and punish cheaters
• The value of loyalty to a group, sharing and solidarity among its members and conformity to its norms
• The belief that it is right to defer to legitimate authorities and to respect people with high status
• The exaltation of purity, cleanliness and sanctity and the corresponding loathing of defilement, contamination and carnality

According to Pinker, these five themes represent the universal raw moral material upon which socio-cultural factors operate, which accounts for the moral diversity we see cross-culturally. Some cultures will elevate the importance of purity at the expense of fairness or the injunction not to harm, others will accord more respect to authority than they will to group loyalty. The moral universals remain firmly in the picture, but they are emphasized to varying degrees depending upon the cultural context.

This makes sense, and seems to be a compelling affirmation of, for example, C.S. Lewis’s concept of “The Tao” - a universal moral law that admits of development from within, and can be modified over time and in different cultural contexts, but whose fundamental nature we are no more free to change than we are to “imagine a new primary colour” or create “a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.” Far from advocating a form of ethical relativism based primary on utility, Pinker seems to recommend a (heavily) qualified version of moral realism which is interesting, coming from a hard-boiled scientist such as himself.

But is it consistent? Later in the article Pinker attempts to find a way out of the familiar problem posed by all purely naturalistic accounts of the origins of morality. If, at rock bottom, what we consider to be objective morality is simply the result of an amoral process whose sole “goal” is the survival of this or that organism’s genetic material, how can we claim that morality is in any sense “objective?” Perhaps more worryingly, what is to prevent our abandonment of what we naively thought was “objective morality” now that we know it is just our genes tricking us about what is, inherently, nothing more than a survival technique? Pinker explains the problem well:

The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to debunk them. Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested — to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes. The explanation of how different cultures appeal to different spheres could lead to a spineless relativism, in which we would never have grounds to criticize the practice of another culture, no matter how barbaric, because “we have our kind of morality and they have theirs.” And the whole enterprise seems to be dragging us to an amoral nihilism, in which morality itself would be demoted from a transcendent principle to a figment of our neural circuitry.

Of course Pinker doesn’t believe any of this, and he has his reasons for this. First, he claims, we need to be careful about “anthropomorphizing” our discussion of evolutionary science. Just because genes seek to get themselves replicated doesn’t mean that the organisms of which they are a part are behaving “selfishly.” Genes do not have motives after all, and the only reason we describe them in terms of agency is because this is how we understand it best. According to Pinker, “‘Selfish’ genes are perfectly compatible with selfless organisms, because a gene’s metaphorical goal of selfishly replicating itself can be implemented by wiring up the brain of the organism to do unselfish things, like being nice to relatives or doing good deeds for needy strangers.” No matter what’s going on beneath the surface, he seems to be saying, human beings really are behaving morally when they do these kinds of things.

In addition, Pinker appeals to Robert Trivers to show how the evolutionary strategy of reciprocal altruism - you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours - can produce genuinely selfless creatures by continually raising the stakes, rewarding those who do the best job of appearing to be generous in a kind of benevolence arms race:

The most effective way to seem generous and fair, under harsh scrutiny, is to be generous and fair. In the long run, then, reputation can be secured only by commitment. At least some agents evolve to be genuinely high-minded and self-sacrificing — they are moral not because of what it brings them but because that’s the kind of people they are.

But what has caused them to be “the kind of people they are?” And once this cause is understood, what justification do they have for continuing to act in this way? At the end of the day, Pinker’s argument here seems to amount to little more than saying that evolution has done a really, really, really, really good job in tricking us into being moral. It’s done such a good job that human beings have reached a point where not only do we (mistakenly) believe that objective morality exists and that we have an obligation to behave according to its dictates , but we also have an apparent need to attach objective value to the results of this entire process.

When we push this view to its logical conclusions, however, the whole thing - the behaviour that counts as moral and our curious ability/requirement to label it as such and attribute to it objective value - is nothing more than an elaborate survival strategy. No matter how desperately scientists like Pinker, who seem unwilling to admit that morality might have some kind of a divine cause, might want science to yield the picture of a genuinely moral being who behaves morally for its own sake, rather than for the benefits it can secure, it simply doesn’t work.

The big picture is still of an essentially amoral world which, through an impersonal, mechanistic, and thoroughly amoral (if not immoral - think of Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw”) process has managed to produce a creature who thinks and acts in terms of values and morals, and who believes these to make demands upon him which go beyond the kind of selfish behaviour that would seem sensible on a naturalistic picture of the world. The lengths to which we we will go to avoid the distasteful ethical conclusions of the process which has led to our arrival on the scene provides, in my opinion, a powerful testimony to the universality, inviolability, and beauty of our strongest moral intuitions.

 

The Altruists Paradox

A few days ago, I came across this piece on the nature of altruism from John Tierney in the New York Times. Apparently brain scans conducted at the University of Oregon found that “pleasure areas” of the brain are activated in experiments where participants performed a charitable act, thus demonstrating that there is a biological basis for altruism. Typically results such as this are thought to bolster arguments against theistic belief - if some human behaviour can be shown to produce pleasure its origins must clearly be explained without remainder by evolutionary biology.

So what is the proper relationship between pleasure and altruism. Must altruism be painful in order to be designated as such? Often times those slugging it out in the religion vs. science trenches cling to the existence of altruism as providing strong evidence for the claims of some form of theism. If science can’t explain why we would act in ways that seem, on the surface, to have no survival value, then surely it must be down to God (the “God-of-the-gaps” approach). Extraordinary effort on both sides of the debate is devoted to proving that altruism either a) has exclusively religious origins and thus refutes scientific materialism, or b) can be shown to have survival value and thus renders God superfluous.

This approach seems wrong-headed to me. From a theological perspective it seems perfectly reasonable that doing good should feel good and that this ought to be reflected in analysis of our brain-states. If we believe that God has made us in his image and created us to do good works (Eph. 2:10), then we ought to expect the results of the experiments at the University of Oregon. There will, obviously, be times when doing the right thing is difficult, but I see no reason why we shouldn’t take pleasure in conquering our selfish tendencies, helping those in need, promoting shalom even at personal cost

(Of course it’s highly debatable how much “personal cost” was involved in the experiment conducted; participants exhibited pleasure when charities “received” money, but there is no indication that the money came from the participants themselves. From my perspective, there remains a substantial gap between noticing a certain set of neurons firing in someone’s brain when they observe good being done and some of the truly extraordinary examples of self-sacrifice motivated by religion.).

At the same time, the fact that something can be shown to have some benefit for the propagation of the species does not thereby eliminate the possibility of God as its source. It’s not as though our choices are between altruism providing absolutely no survival benefit and being such a peculiar and unnecessary thing that it could only come from God (as if God’s interests lie exclusively in things that have no survival value!), or altruism being reduced to nothing but a selfish interest in survival thus ruling God out of the equation entirely. This is a false, and unhelpful, dichotomy, but one which pops up now and then in discussions of this sort.

At the end of the day, if we start defining altruism as something which ought to make us miserable - as some kind of a grim exercising of our Kantian duty, which ought to exhibit no evidence of pleasure - then we’re not really talking about anything like a biblical view of love-of-neighbour anyway. We do good because we were created by God to love good and to find fulfillment and meaning in participating in his plan for the world. I see no reason why a close look at our brains ought not to reflect this.

 

To What End, Ethics? (II)

A few final thoughts about The Ethical Imagination…

Somerville concludes her reflections upon how and why we must find a well-grounded basis for a shared ethic with a plea for a return to “past virtues for a future world.” Our humanness ought to be held in trust for future generations - in other words, we have an obligation not to radically alter, through our various technologies, the essence of what it is to be human. Trust, courage, compassion, generosity, hope - these are all thought to be vital components of thinking and acting ethically in a context where human beings possess unprecedented capabilities to alter what it means to be human.

Throughout this book I found myself agreeing with Somerville’s ethical conclusions, but disagreeing with the means by which she arrives at them. I remain unconvinced that “the natural” can bear the ethical weight that Somerville wants (needs?) it to. It remains unclear to me how appealing to what is natural can legitimate any argument for the promotion of the virtues she wishes to emphasize.

The following quote, near the end of the book, has been bouncing around in my head for the last couple of days:

Ethics is fundamentally about not “messing it up” - not only for ourselves, but especially for future generations. I believe our primary obligation is not only to leave future generations with as many options - natural, material, ethical, spiritual - as we have, but, even more important, to leave them with nothing less than ourselves - the miraculous outcome of 850 million years of evolution that, it is to be hoped, will also result in their children and their children’s children in the generations to come.

Is this truly all we can say about ethics? That it is fundamentally about not “messing it up?” To preserve a certain biological minimum base for future generations? Perhaps. It could be that in a pluralistic society, characterized by so many competing voices, we ought to simply affirm what we can, at rock bottom, agree upon and try to build upon this foundation. To be fair, Somerville’s aims do seem to be primarily pragmatic rather than theoretical. It may be that Somerville has identified a useful (although theoretically inadequate) place from which to launch ethical discourse in a political climate as complex as ours.

Still, I can’t help but contrast this book with some of the themes discussed in one of my courses this past semester. In a discussion of theological anthropology for a Systematic Theology course, John Stackhouse described the human beings who bear God’s image as “deputized gardeners.” Our role is (and always was) to seek maximal flourishing in all areas of creation, not just the preservation of a biological category. Undoubtedly, seeking to protect the category of “human being” will be a part of the “deputized gardener’s” role, but it will go beyond that. Ethics will be about more than “not messing up” (although that will obviously be included) but trying to creatively enhance and improve upon the world that God created (Genesis 1-2 do not say that the world was created “perfect,” but “good”). Flourishing, not bare preservation, was what God intended his image-bearers to pursue.

From my perspective, the Christian who adopts anything like this “deputized gardener” vision of what it means to be human and to act ethically can happily affirm Somerville’s conclusions, and even, to a limited extent, her motivations and methods. In our present context, it is simply naive to think that everyone will agree upon the Christian’s starting point for ethics. A “lowest common denominator” approach may be the most useful to get stuff done with so many competing visions of what it means to be human and to act ethically.

 

The Limits of “the Natural”

More on The Ethical Imagination…

Somerville exhibits a virtual reverence for “the natural” in her quest to argue for the “secular sacred” as a potential universal grounding for ethics. In situations of ethical ambiguity, our default position should always be to “the natural.” Let me give you an example.

The last chapter has been about new reproductive technologies (NRT’s). Somerville argues (refreshingly!) that individual human rights ought not to be the primary factor in determining how or if NRT’s are used; rather, the rights of children to know their genetic origins, to come into a “normal” situation, ought to be decisive. It is apparently now possible, for example, to create an embryo with the genetic heritage of two women or two men “by making a sperm or ovum from one of the adult’s stem cells and using a natural gamete [a specialized germ cell that fuses with another gamete during fertilization] from the other person; or by making an ‘ovum’ from an enucleated egg fused with a sperm and fertilizing it with another egg.” Reprogenetic technology has also, apparently, made it possible to use the gametes of aborted fetuses to produce babies, raising the almost incomprehensible possibility of children being born whose biological “parents” were never alive!

My understanding of the mechanics of NRT’s is pretty foggy (a gross understatement, if ever there was one), but suffice it to say that all sorts of truly shocking permutations and combinations are either already available, or on the not-too-distant horizon for those who cannot or do not wish to have children in the normal manner. And the existence of these technologies raises all sorts of ethical questions regarding what kind of biological heritage is “owed” to future children.

Somerville is, encouragingly, strongly opposed to the use of these technologies. But her reasons for opposing it are, in my opinion, inadequate. Earlier I mentioned that her concept of the “secular sacred” relies upon a “presumption in favour of the natural.” Somerville believes that human beings have intrinsic value, and that this value is grounded in natural reality (there are many questions that could be raised at this point, but I’m going to leave them alone for now). With respect to the use of NRT’s, every child’s right to have two adult biological parents, to not have their genetic material technologically manipulated must be preserved solely based on the intrinsic value of “the natural.”

I had suspicions about whether or not “the natural” was a concept capable of bearing the ethical weight that Somerville wants to place on it early on, and my suspicions were confirmed in this chapter. While I am in agreement with virtually everything she says about the ethics of NRT’s, I do not think that appealing to “the natural” is good enough - in fact, it leads her to make some statements that I find problematic, for logical, theological, and personal reasons:

Knowing who our biological relatives are and relating to them is central to how we form our human identity, relate to others and the world, and find meaning in life. Children - and their descendants - who don’t know their genetic origins cannot sense themselves as embedded in a web of people, past, present and future through whom they can trace the thread of life’s passage down the generations to them.

As an adoptive parent, I find this to be a deeply troubling passage. By placing so many of her ethical “eggs” in the basket of “the natural,” Somerville seems to be almost required to advocate a form of biological determinism with respect to human identity. I suspect that if people were to truly believe that biology is as central to personal identity as she seems to be claiming here, adoption would virtually never take place. Who would take on the task of providing children with a new, and hopefully healthier, “web of people” through whom they could “trace the thread of life’s passage” if “the natural” was as ultimate as Somerville claims here? Biology is important, certainly, but from my perspective, one of the most compelling elements of the adoption process is precisely that biology does not define our human identity. “The natural” is not an unqualified good; it, too, can and must be redeemed.

As one who has an awful lot personally invested in Somerville being wrong about this, I find Somerville’s loading up on “the natural” in her ethics to be worrisome. As an aspiring theologian I see in it an excellent example of what happens when you seek the ultimate justification for ethical foundations in the created order rather than the Creator. In my earlier musings I suggested that Somerville seems to simply be advocating a profoundly religious worldview without the language of religion or the appeal to God. But while calling nature “sacred” may be necessary or convenient in providing the justification for a particular ethical system, examples like the one cited above demonstrate, I think, that “the natural” cannot serve as a substitute for God.

 

The Elephant in the Room

More on Margaret Somerville’s The Ethical Imagination…

For those who remember, Somerville’s project is to argue for a shared ethic based on what she terms “the secular sacred” (a term that I continue to have reservations about). I read her take on “truth” a couple of days ago and while my initial reaction was somewhat negative, I now find myself wondering if there may be some pragmatic merit in what she says.

Perhaps not surprisingly for someone arguing for an ethical system that can be universally embraced, Somerville seems to just put forth a version of truth similar to religious pluralism:

I start by imagining that which we are looking at in order to discover the truth about it - whether it’s a person, an object, an idea, a theory, a principle, a belief. I then imagine it in the centre of a big circle, and imagine all the people who are looking at it standing around the circumference of that circle, each holding a light. The lights are of different kinds and have different-coloured lenses, and a few of them fail to work (their batteries are dead) or they show a distorted image (what they show is not true). Some of the lights were invented recently and show us truths we didn’t know before; others are old and show us truths we still need. The different-coloured and different kinds of light reveal different aspects of the entity we are looking at. These aspects are not all the same, but they are all aspects of its truth.

Initially, I thought that this view of truth was extraordinarily unhelpful and not entirely honest. And as a theory of truth I still do. Lesslie Newbigin has a brilliant take on religious pluralism which demonstrates the arrogance of the kind of claim Somerville seems to be making. According to religious pluralists (John Hick, for example) each religious tradition is analogous to a blind-folded man being asked to describe an elephant. Each will describe the part of the elephant that he came into contact with, but none will define the elephant as a whole. The elephant, of course, is ultimate truth, and each blind man’s partial and inadequate description of it represents one of the various religious traditions.

Newbigin points out the obvious flaw in this argument: someone must have the ability to see the “whole elephant” in order for it to work. Someone (in this case, the religious pluralist) claims to see “the full truth to which all the world’s religions are only groping after.” The claim that different religions or, in Somerville’s case, different perspectives on truth are partial approximations of the greater whole is itself a partial, limited, human understanding of truth. It is just one more blind man claiming to describe the entire elephant based on his own understanding of it.

So Newbigin’s argument was whirring around in my head as I read Somerville’s quote above. However it turns out that all Somerville may be arguing for is a healthy, pragmatic appreciation of our epistemological limitations. A few paragraphs earlier she says that

[o]nce we accept the unavoidable presence of uncertainty, our understanding of truth and consensus in ethics shifts… [T]he kind of ethical truths we look for, those on which we can agree, are forms of “temporal truth” - always open to challenge, of course, and to change. Some of us would see any such change as a change in the truth; others would see it as a clarification or correction of our previously inadequate or mistaken articulation of truth. In other words, the concept of temporal truth in no way denies that there can be Eternal Truth. Rather, if we believe in Eternal Truth, we hope that what we see as temporal truths are partial manifestations of it.

To put it another way, Somerville seems to be saying that there might well be a real elephant, but none of us know what it looks like and from the perspective of one seeking to discover the grounds for a shared ethic, we’re better off just assuming or “hoping” that our views of the elephant are accurate partial representations of it. In other words, her adoption of a pluralistic version of truth is provisional and pragmatic. She feels it is necessary to “get stuff done” ethically in a pluralistic environment.

I still have my reservations - I obviously think there is a lot more that can be said about truth (I think that some views objectively describe the elephant better than others), I think in some ways her view requires more faith than any religion, and it certainly requires a higher principle (unstated, so far) by which to evaluate which “lights” contribute positively to the mix and which just distort and destroy - but adopting a view such as Somerville’s may be about the best we can hope for in our current political context. At the very least it’s humble about what we can actually know for certain and, from my perspective, it seems like the sort of vision that a Christian could imagine positively contributing to in his/her obedience to God and promotion of shalom.