The hereafter and the here and now

A week ago, I got into an argument as I began my Monday night bartending shift. (There are disadvantages to being disagreeable and having spent a lot of time thinking philosophically, when it comes to working in a service job.) A friend of a coworker was surprised to learn that I taught philosophy and so began to regale me with stories of the philosophy classes she took in college. In particular she wanted to tell me about her philosophy of religion class and how she couldn't understand why they even taught such a class, since it was all just belief anyway.

I went through my normal spiel about how even beliefs, even unprovable and irrefutable beliefs in the realm of religion can be more or less rational. I told her how, for instance, the positing of a material God does less explanatory work than the positing of an immaterial God, if for instance you find the existence of the material world in need of explanation. Positing another member of the material set does nothing to explain the existence of the set. I left aside the problem of using more being to explain why there were beings in the first place.

Then our conversation turned to the overall value of religion. She argued that we need religion to give us morality. I countered that there were religions that had pretty bad moralities, for instance those intent on reestablishing the Caliphate. She replied that those were the bad ones. And then I asked how she knew. Of course because they are immoral. But since this just means that you have an independent grasp of morality from which to evaluate religions, I said, you don't need the religion for morality in the first place.

She moved to the role of religion in providing peace of mind and hope in the hereafter. Being disagreeable, I said I thought that having peace of mind was overrated--for instance, having peace of mind, while the poor are walking through dead bodies in New Orleans is not a good thing; one ought to be outraged, not happy--and I'm suspicious of too much concern with the hereafter. I love and miss my dead relatives and friends and part of me wants to rejoin them, but focussing on this goal to the exclusion of doing something about the situation of those still on the earth has always seemed one of the great failings of certain kinds of religion--the kind evidenced by those "I'm not perfect, just forgiven" or "Saved" bumperstickers and their ilk.

Now, I have my own religious side, as well, and I do sort of hope for something in the afterlife, but it isn't something I worry too much about. I can't live this life as if it were a practice for something else (presumably something very different). This is the game, here and now. And, if it turns out that my performance or luck or grace or whatever gets me into the playoffs, so be it.

Intelligent design and its discontents

Out of either intellectual dishonesty or sheer lack of acumen--it is not my place to judge which it is--the President has joined the call of the fundamentalist part of his base and Senator Frist for the teaching of intelligent design in the nation's public schools. His, surely disingenuous, rationale for this policy is the need to expose students to varying points of view. Quite apart from the question of whether it is wise or possible to introduce varying viewpoints to elementary student--isn't there a reason why we teach young students as if Newtonian physics were everywhere correct and only later introduce the problems that led to relativity and quantum theory?--it is clear that almost no one in favor of the teaching of intelligent design really wants an intellectual free-for-all on human origins.

No one is proposing that we also talk about various demiurge theories in which the designer is intelligent but flawed, or religious traditions in which there are various factions at play--and opposition--in the creation of humanity and the rest of the "created order". No one thinks we should introduce the Finnish stories of the mother goddess who through a virgin birth and a mysterious egg leads to the creation of the world. Nor are people jonesing for the teaching of the masturbatory creation stories in Japanese and Egyptian mythology. And, absolutely no one in favor of opening up the "debate" thinks that, alongside intelligent design and creationism and evolution we should also introduce students to the well-reasoned arguments of Hume and, much later, Stephen Jay Gould exposing why, if we take there to be a Creator, we must think Him to have been pretty bad at design. There just can be no doubt that the reason for introducing intelligent design is religiously motivated.

I am in favor of teaching something like intelligent design, but not in a science class. Because, after all, it just cannot be thought of as a scientific theory.

It doesn't make predictions. Thought experiment: Does evolutionary theory or intelligent design do a better job of telling us how viruses will change? Evolutionary theory gives us a mechanism according to which they will change. Intelligent design tells us that God will change them according to His inscrutable plan--presumably His inscrutable plan involves killing more people, but never mind that. So it's useless as a predictive scientific theory.

It does absolutely nothing to explain phenomenon. Question: Why do humans have the same spinal structure as quadrupeds? Intelligent design doesn't tell us why, other than that was the way in which God chose to do it, meaning that bipedal humans would suffer back pain after their early adulthood, having given them a spine ill-suited for upright support. (Perhaps God was a friend of chiropractors.) Evolutionary theory explains this through tying our current structure with the structure of beings that came before modern humans and from which modern humans evolved.

It cannot be supported nor falsified by observation. What would the observation be that showed that God planned our present form? It's impossible to say. It's not a bit of science, it's a leap of faith. Or better yet, it is a meta-theory. It doesn't say anything about the way in which beings arose on this earth. It isn't even inconsistent with evolution. For instance, one could believe consistently that God intelligently designed life via evolution.

So, whatever this theory amounts to, it isn't science. And it doesn't belong in a science class. Where then does it belong? In the humanities and what was called social studies when I was a lad in elementary school. Intelligent design is a theory about meaning and ultimate causes and reasons for living. As such it belongs in the same classes in which children read Great Expectations and learn about the caste system in India and about the religious tradition of the West. And it belongs there together with secular, humanistic and downright atheistic theories about meaning and ultimate causes and reasons. But never in the science classroom.

A Working Vacation?

Today, President Bush has announced that he will cut short his four-week vacation to return to Washington to personally oversee the relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Now, of course, I realize that the return to Washington is a symbolic move--and it amounts to little actual shortening of his vacation, as he was due to return in two days anyway. But, the claim that he needs to be in Washington in order to oversee federal efforts belies the claims of the Administration and its supporters that there is no danger in the President--the most-vacationing-president ever!--taking long breaks from his reportedly not-too-stringent work routine in DC. (Not to be confused with his very stringent work-out routines.) The President and his supporters have claimed that the President's presence in Crawford, his long bike-rides, his time spent clearing brush, etc., are insignificant, since of course he can lead the nation and the War on Terror no matter where he is. But, if this is the case, why oh why must he return to DC to lead hurricane cleanup efforts? Must he be in the offices of FEMA? Is his role in disaster relief more central than his role in defense or war or the economy or any of the other executive functions? Or is it just the case that when the President is in Crawford, there is no one in charge of the federal government (or at least not President Bush)? Either being in Washington is essential or it isn't but it can't be both.

The Culture of Eternal Glory

In many of the recent discussions of terrorism and suicide-bombings, talking heads, pundits and politicians have made a good deal of the "culture of death". Militant Islam, in particular, has been identified as a culture of death or sometimes even a death cult.

While this nomenclature might have some rhetorical force, it is both misleading and ultimately misguided in an understanding of what it is exactly that motivates people to sacrifice themselves in actions that take large numbers of other lives to forward what they take to be divinely mandated goals. Of course there have been genuine death cults and cultures of death. One thinks of the Thugee and their often murderous worship of Kali--while not exactly as Steven Spielberg portrayed them in the Temple of Doom, it isn't too far-fetched to characterize them as a cult of death--or the human sacrifices of the Aztecs.

Suicide bombers are a different kind of beast, though. They aren't infatuated with death, they don't worship it, they don't even respect it all that much. Indeed that is the problem. They aren't a cult of death, they are a cult of a particular kind of life beyond death. Theirs is an eschatological motivation. Because they don't take death to be final or even that important--there is, after all, a virgin-filled Paradise awaiting them (unless textual criticism is right in saying it's merely grape-filled)--they have a diminished respect for their own mortality and for the mortality of those who fall in their plans.

In this way, they have more in common ideologically with millennialists and those Christians who take the entire Gospel to be somehow a footnote to the book of Revelation. Witness the great popularity among evangelicals and even some Catholics--although it goes against the considered teachings of Catholicism--of the Left Behind series of books. It is this concern with the great battle to come and the eternal glory awaiting those who take the right side, whether it be against those who oppose Islam, against the Antichrist, against those who forestall the rebuilding of the Temple or against those who do not give Rama his proper worship, that motivates murders in the name of religious extremism and that unites in mindset so many of today's fundamentalists, who might better be termed eschatologists.

This term has the rhetorical punch of resembling "scatological" and, moreover, correctly identifies their motivation in an overweening concern with last things, with final battles and with eternal glory as opposed to earthly co-existence and life. This is the very sort of religion that is most dangerous to world peace and to any vision of a secular society. But it isn't a death cult; it would be better if it had a little more respect for the finality of the grave.

Civic duties and the Republic

I spent most of this past Monday in the jury "lounge" of the Hall of Justice, San Diego's court complex. Quite apart from expecting the Super Friends to arrive at any moment and reflecting on the absurdity of calling any room as uncomfortable as a third-world bus station waiting room a lounge, I gained a little out of the experience.

As it turns out, I wasn't selected for a jury. But this wasn't because of my contrary nature, my argumentativeness, my training in making the weaker argument the better, my belief that the reasonableness of a doubt is both context- and subject-sensitive or even my friendship of one of the County's prosecuting attorneys. After six-and-a-half hours, Jury Services' computer had not selected my name to be sent to a courtroom and the courts' jury needs for the week had already been met.

But, in that period of several hours, after the intelligence-insulting orientation--an hour to explain what could have been read and comprehended in 5 minutes--I was thrown together with a group of people unlike those with whom I normally mix. I was between a middle-aged elementary school teacher, native to California and active in her church and a retiree who's guiding passion is the rational expansion or replacement of San Diego's Lindbergh field.

Now, fortunately or not, neither these two, nor the majority of the several hundred people in the jury lounge that day were much like the sort of people with whom I normally mix. My communities are either gay or academic for the most part. In other words, like many Americans I live in something of a self-selected ghetto. This is no different than living in an ethnic neighborhood or a homogeneous suburb or a small town. It has its advantages. At the same time, it means that I don't spend much time with people outside these self-selected community: I don't understand where they are coming from and most of them probably can't understand why I might have the opinions I do (God knows that most people I know can't figure me out).

Besides helping to guarantee the right to a jury by one's peers, civic duties and responsibilities have another advantage. Like one of the traditional justifications for public schooling, obligatory civic responsibilities force us to spend time with one another, to get some greater feeling for the larger, more inclusive public.

Now, clearly this doesn't mean that we are going to build some kind of strong community. I'm not likely to be spending time with the woman I talked to most of the time I was on jury duty. She seemed as troubled by my being Catholic as she was by the feeling she was getting that I might be gay. I'm pretty sure that if we got to know one another, we wouldn't like each other. Communities are built on closer connections and are necessarily smaller and more emotionally-charged things. But civic responsibilities might create a sense of a (loosely) united public. And such a sense of belonging to a public is necessary for the survival of anything like a republic.

A republic is, literally, a public thing, i.e., a thing that we all share and have an interest in. If we are to keep from becoming just a fractured set of irreconcilable communities, perhaps we all ought to pay more attention to our civic responsibilities.

Meth, morality and the limits of (the gay) community

The gay community--and especially the gay male community--is in the midst of a profoundly adolescent moment. Like an adolescent who has protested against his parents' rules until he is finally free of them, we find that being free of some of society's rules doesn't or shouldn't mean that we don't impose some rules on ourselves. In fact, what we are seeing in the twin crises of meth addiction and barebacking in the gay community is the necessity of rules or normativity or morality or whatever you want to call it, in any mature community.

What we are seeing--and I am going to focus on the responses and counter-responses to the widespread use and abuse (I'm not sure that there's any difference in this case) of methamphetamine among gay men--is a community that has largely been defined in terms of throwing off other conceptions of morality trying to set some rules for acceptable behavior. This, of course, sets up a tension.

The way this tension plays out is evident in the responses those who use meth--or defend its use, since these may not be identical groups--make to those members of the community who point out the ways that meth is destroying individual lives, activities like parties and dancing and the community at large. The standard response from the meth-defender is to claim that his opponent is being moralistic, is taking the same part as those who say homosexuality itself is immoral, that it's simply a matter of choosing the way in which one wants to live one's life, etc.

This is instructive, I think. I should note, for clarity, that I am no friend of meth; I've watched people I care about throw their lives away, seroconvert and slowly (and quickly) die because of its effects, and I've watched parties that I once enjoyed because of their spirit of camaraderie and love turn into aggressive hunts for aggressive meth-fueled unsafe sex. But, I am stung by the accusation that this opposition of mine is necessarily moralistic or of a kind with statements by the American Family Association or Pat Robertson about the morality of homosexuality.

I am stung because this accusation relies on a deep confusion; one between moralism imposed from outside and the adoption of a morality within a community. The gay community, of course, is largely defined in terms of its opposition to the moral pronouncements--at least some of them--of the larger society. Society as a whole has generally thought that sex belonged within marriages or at least between people of opposite sex. Gays (and lesbians) have defined a community in which this rule is profoundly rejected. This is throwing off the moralism of the larger community--and is parallel to an adolescent rejecting the beliefs of his parent.

But, the fact that the community has at its center a rejection of a particular conception of morality is not a justification for thinking that no other conception of morality should take its place within the community. Just as an adolescent who has rejected his parents' belief structure still must replace it with some other set of organizing principles around which to structure his life, the community must decide what rules we are willing or need to apply within our own community.

This process of defining and deciding on rules differs from the moralistic approach of those outside the community, because it relies on debate and discussion and the experiences of those within the community. It differs most strongly in that it is borne from a sense of concern for those within the community--Robertson doesn't care about the gay community in any sense, while my worries about the effects of barebacking and meth-addiction are motivated by just such a community concern (as well as the concern that if we cannot regulate ourselves, we open ourselves to ever more moralistic attack). In this sense it is not moralistic, even if it is moral in some sense.

Rejecting the morality of the wider community as a community is not tantamount to releasing ourselves from all moral consideration. Communities are always and everywhere defined by rules of acceptable and unacceptable behavior--even when these rules are in flux or under debate (consider debates about the value of marriage vs. differently structured relationships in our community). We all, to some degree, realize that within our community there are specific rules. For instance, we don't accept relationships between adults and children, we don't accept non-consensual relationships. In both of these cases, we are concerned about harm, precisely what drives considerations about meth and barebacking.

Rejecting traditional morality is not equivalent to an acceptance of absolutely anything goes. If, as some would say, we really must refrain from any moral considerations in the gay community, lest we be just like those who would condemn us, then there can be no gay community; instead there is just a collection of people with (some of) the same sexual proclivities.

If that is the case, then I think that a great opportunity will have been lost. For one thing the gay and lesbian community has to offer is a different set of ways of organizing a community and caring for its members.

Death, the Pope and evil

The death of John Paul II left me saddened. I am a Catholic--it was preparation for the seminary that led me to philosophy and even now there are days when I wonder whether I shouldn't have entered the monastery--so there was the loss of the head of Catholicism. I was only five years old when Karol Wojtyla was elected pope and became John Paul II, so there was the loss of a figure who, in some sense, defined my childhood and young adulthood and whatever it is that I am in right now (pre-middle-age, mid-adulthood?). He was only two years older than my grandfather and died on what would have been grandfather's 82d birthday; his death made me revisit my grandfather's death, so there was a sort of contact grief in his death. His last years were tortured; demonstrated a noble, dignified suffering, a suffering that wasn't hidden, that witnessed to the heights of human possibility even within the limits imposed by a dying body. Seeing his battle end brought out a happiness mixed with sadness.

But at the same time, I am among those that the pope, particularly in his last years, saw as the vanguard of a new, horrible evil, opposed to Christ and Christianity and the very foundations of civilization. As a gay man, I am hardly among those that the pope would have thought an ally.

Now, of course, there is a certain skewed vision of the papacy filtered through the American media and mindset. What is rarely discussed is the emphasis the pope put on the inadequacies and evils of capitalist societies--while the pope was praised here for his opposition to communism, little is ever made of his vehement condemnations of capitalism. He was an enemy of materialism in all its forms; materialism is, he thought, necessarily opposed to spirituality and humanism. Since capitalism is materialistic, it, too, is inconsistent with authentic Christianity, he thought.

In other words, there were many aspects of his social thought that would have made us natural allies, that would have made him allies with a lot of gays and lesbians, in fact. But, instead he saw us as part of a vast evil movement undermining the very society and community onto which he put so much emphasis.

There are different ways to respond to this. One could just dismiss the pope and the Catholic Church as irrelevant to the modern world. While this might be tempting for a lot of people, particularly those with a secular bent, it ignores the fact that Catholicism is the largest denomination within Christianity, that there are a lot of Catholics out there and, if nothing else, gays and lesbians need to work out a modus vivendi with them. (And, as recently happened here in San Diego, when the bishop initially forbade the funeral of a prominent nightclub owner, the Church can even be made to see the errors of its ways.) Ignoring Catholicism and its response to homosexuality is as dangerous as ignoring the continually growing tide of fundamentalisms of all flavors.

One could simply write the deceased pope as an old man out of tune with the direction of the contemporary and future world. There is also something tempting in this option. Personally, I was able to excuse a lot of the pope's disdain of gays and lesbians by thinking about other people I know of his age. If my grandfather were still alive--and assuming he didn't know about me--what would he have been like? Well, he, too, probably wouldn't have had a lot to say in favor of gay marriage or gay adoption. I'd like to think I'm wrong about this, but he grew up in a different world and, without personal and direct and positive experience of gays, he wouldn't have been swayed to our cause (whatever our cause may be). More on this very point below. However, writing the pope off as just an old man out of step with the world is itself very myopic. It simply is not the case that most of the world sees sexual liberation and the celebration of divergent sexual orientations as ideal. If anything, social liberals in the European and American mode are out of step with the rest of the world. So, while this option might be tempting, it will lot serve our interests for long.

Instead, the right tack to take seems to be to engage Catholicism (and Islam and other religious traditions). But engaging a group doesn't mean (just) protesting their gatherings or meetings or establishments. It means to enter into dialogue with them, try to understand the background for their beliefs and ideas and judgments and present ourselves in a way that is understandable to them--being understandable is not the same as being acceptable. I can understand things I can't accept, but it's hard to imagine how I could accept something I couldn't understand. Engaging also means considering in what ways another's perception of one reflects shortcomings. Now, of course, ideally the Catholic Church and the next pope would want to engage in these ways with gays and lesbians. Rome moves slowly, though. Still, this doesn't mean that gays and lesbians shouldn't engage with Catholics and other religious believers on the ground.