The human cost of technological 'progress'

Facebook and Google have been centres of attention over the past week, not because of accomplishments but because of the insights provided as to how top-echelon enterprises fail in the moral or social spheres.

Under the headline “Facebook’s news blockade in Australia shows how tech giants are swallowing the web”, Jennifer Grygiel, Assistant Professor of Communications (Social Media) & Magazine, News and Digital Journalism, at Syracuse University, writes, “Just because advanced technology exists doesn’t mean it’s helpful in all situations or good.”

After the Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre of 51 Muslim worshippers in 2019, Grygiel was also able to identify where technology breakthroughs can have a devastating impact on society. The point of her article at that time is summed up in the headline, “Livestreamed massacre means it’s time to shut down Facebook Live”.

As to Google, it has been hauled over the coals since late last year for being more concerned over profit than the welfare of its staff and the true good of the public. The strife has been articulated by a Guardian journalist in this way:

“Google has recruited top scientists with promises of research freedom, but the limits are tested as researchers increasingly write about the negative effects of technology and offer unflattering perspectives on their employer’s products.”

Therefore, as a particular technology begins to hold sway in society it certainly is a fruitful exercise for the principal players to stand back and offer a transparent view for all to see and understand what kind of difficulties are arising. Those difficulties have to be taken seriously.

In a simple form, “multiple studies have found a strong link between heavy social media and an increased risk for depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm, and even suicidal thoughts. Social media may promote negative experiences such as: Inadequacy about your life or appearance.” This last point seems to be especially true for girls.

From a wider perspective, there is growing interest in the “’rules, norms and governance’ that should be applied to social media and technology companies”.

In the same way, the personnel working at developing technology, whether in the medical field or agriculture to name but two areas of concern, must have focused attention individually on the ethics of the direction they are taking. They must decide where the common good lies.

Taking such steps follows in the path of the 70 Manhattan Project scientists who signed nuclear pioneer Leo Szilard’s petition imploring President Truman not to use on Japan the atomic weapons they had developed. Unfortunately, Truman never got to see the petition before he made his decision to reject realistic alternatives and to kill in the order of 200,000 civilians.

With technology these days having an impact so widely and quickly, there's a clear case that all the smarts and beauty of technology do not negate the need to be alert as to the consequences of what can be done. There's conflict in working out where the boundaries of technological and scientific activity lie, but it is imperative that we accept that not everything that can be done should be done. 

After the populations if Hiroshima and Ngasaki were annihilated, Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project, told Truman, "I have blood on my hands". 

Reductionist scientists called out in public arena

Those we might call public intellectuals often seem alert to the over-reach of science. They point out cases where conclusions are extrapolated from data that cannot bear the weight. For example, James Wilson, a British writer and researcher, has this to say:

James Wilson

"Compared with the last crop of scientists who dominated the airwaves, [that is] the New Atheists – who kept picking philosophical fights they couldn’t win, and scolding the rest of us for being so stupid – the giants of Silicon Valley are not only awe-inspiringly brilliant, but appear refreshingly positive and optimistic." 

However, in speaking about Silicon Valley’s engineers, Wilson admits that “the vision of the future to which they are leading us terrifies me” (Read more here). He means the futurists are making the familiar mistake of viewing the person in terms of mechanical reflexes. 

On that point, Adam Gopnik, writing in the New Yorker, speaks out about how scientific reductionism cannot scale the heights of a person’s hopes or desires, for example. With a mocking tone, he writes:

The language of behaviourism and instinct can be applied to anything, after all: we’re not really falling in love; we’re just anticipating sexual pleasure leading to a prudent genetic mix.

The reductive mindset cheats the person of due recognition as being in possession of a range of capabilities that transcend the material.  That mindset is a disabling factor when it comes to recognizing reality, as examined in a previous post.  A final word:

We need to see the secular materialist epistemology [the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion] not as the ground of truth, but rather a “take” on truth. It is a powerful epistemology, one that can do great things, especially in science. But it is not and cannot be a complete way of knowing. We need to be careful not to let the cultural hegemony that secular materialism enjoys in our post-Christian culture gain the upper hand. Respect it for what it can tell us, but don’t give it more credit than it deserves. (Read more here)

                                     – Rod Dreher: journalist and author 

Dawkins, Pinker can't avoid critical peer review

 This blog has previously examined the ideas of both Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins because they have been among those with high status in the world of ideas in the last couple of decades. However, their thoughts are wide in reach but limited in value because both are in the thrall of a reductionist view of reality, blinkered by a science that stunts rather than expands our understanding of the world that people experience in fact.

But here I’m not going to deride their atheism, but to point out that in the world of ideas their views generally can be met with a great deal of skepticism. In fact, critics of equally high status can be scathing. One such instance is contained in the book Homo Deus (2018) by Yuval Noah Harari. He ridicules “Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and the other champions of the new scientific world views” for holding that each person has free will, and that “individual free choices provide life with meaning”. They are “delusional” in playing a “double-game” pitting the findings of the life sciences - we are merely "an assembly of biochemical algorithims" - against modern liberalism where an individual’s freedom to choose is the central concept. Harari continues:

After dedicating hundreds of erudite pages to deconstructing the self and the freedom of the will, they perform breathtaking intellectual somersaults [my emphasis] that miraculously land them back in the eighteenth century, as if all the amazing discoveries of evolutionary biology and brain science have absolutely no bearing on the ethical and political ideas of Locke, Rousseau and Jefferson.  [The writings of these three gave rise to the liberal tradition.] (p307)

Of course, Dawkins and Pinker are no strangers to criticism in the public arena.  Their speeches and writings always attract attention. However, Dawkins is unlikely to have been happy with the 2015 headline “Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation?”, in The Guardian to boot.

The point is that these “champions” are just as likely to be challenged over perceived gaps in logic as any other polemicist. Likewise, British academic John Gray was very direct in finding fault with Pinker’s handiwork: “Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war”, once again from The Guardian, which highlighted this:

A new orthodoxy, led by Pinker, holds that war and violence in the developed world are declining. The stats are misleading, argues Gray – and the idea of moral progress is wishful thinking and plain wrong

Harari’s own work will be examined in a later post. His own views on whether there is any source of “meaning” for each individual is so flawed that it is worth delving into.

Consciousness and the search for scientific humility

I like the humility of one cognitive scientist and philosopher about the state of knowledge as to how consciousness arises. His admission that despite all the attention the subject is getting there is much still to understand is at stark contrast with the declarations made by the likes of Steven Pinker or Sam Harris.

Professor David Chalmers

I’m referring to David Chalmers, University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University. He is also Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He has had a long interest in the philosophy of mind (especially consciousness) and the foundations of cognitive science, as well the philosophy of language, metaphysics and epistemology.

In a 2017 broadcast Chalmers said: “I see consciousness as one of the fundamental data of our existence, it's just a manifest fact where consciousness is possibly the most familiar thing in the world to most of us. At the same time, it's one of the things that is really the hardest to explain…" He went on:

This is for me what makes it such a fascinating problem I think for any scientist, for any philosopher, for anyone who is contemplating the human mind or the world, and I think we're at a very interesting point right now in 2017 where the field is becoming mature and there is a developed science and philosophy of consciousness, but still that moment you just step back and say, wow, this is really puzzling and something we are just beginning to come to grips with.

This willingness to be tentative in response to the complexity of that field of study can be compared to the pontificating seen in much that comes from the likes of Steven Pinker, Sam Harris or John R Searle, who in 1990 published The Mystery of Consciousness, but in 1997 berated Chalmers for his view that there was not enough evidence to decide that consciousness was completely a product of the brain. However, on this point Searle did offer a bifocal view of the issue. First he states, “Consciousness is above all a biological phenomenon, like digestion or photosynthesis. This is just a fact of nature that has to be respected by any philosophical account.” Then he takes a step back and qualifies the degree of certainty by concluding that work still needed to be done “in the project of understanding how the brain causes consciousness.”

Chalmers in 2017 was still looking for ways to bridge the gap between the brain’s processes and consciousness. He put the issue this way:

For me, there's any number of questions you can raise about consciousness but for me the big one has always been how can you explain it? Why does it exist and how can we give some kind of scientific theory of it. Absolutely it's got something to do with the brain. At least in humans you need a brain to be conscious, and activity in the brain is going to lead to consciousness. Change the activity in the brain and you will typically change the state of consciousness.

There's any number of correlations between the brain and consciousness, but nothing about that yet yields an explanation. So for me the hard problem of consciousness is how is it that all this physical processing in the brain should somehow give rise to conscious experience. Why doesn't it all go on in the dark without any consciousness? Why aren't we just giant robots or what philosophers sometimes call zombies, doing all this processing, behaving, walking, talking, but with the lights off inside, with nothing going on.

For me there is actually conscious experience here and I suspect very strongly that for all of you, you are undergoing something like the same thing. But how can we explain that fact, how can we give an account of that in terms of the physical processes of the brain?

Associate Professor Olivia Carter

In that broadcast Chalmers’ view of the uncertainty in the field was corroborated a fellow researcher into consciousness. Olivia Carter is Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and was executive director of the International Association of the Scientific Study of Consciousness. In explaining the state of play of the neuroscience of consciousness she said:

"So within the biology, if we say it's something about a brain, what is it about the human brain that allows consciousness? It's not inherent in the biological structure, it's something about the way this brain is working."

She described how certain types of neurons might be a factor. However, “… It's still unclear, absolutely unclear.” She goes on in a likewise tentative manner: “One big theory of consciousness is that basically… magically consciousness happens when…” Another telling aspect of where the science of consciousness is at comes with this statement:

It seems to be that the sorts of things, like visual perception and emotional processing, that these types of loops do exist and they seem to be important in working memory, whether or not you need working memory as a component of consciousness and such is not clear either.

Having discussed three areas of study, mainly to do with neurons and their behaviour, Carter says: “There's a lot of complex stuff happening in the brain. It seems to be coordinated, [and] one component of those things may or may not be the critical step to consciousness, or maybe it's the three things all together.”

Whether one is talking about consciousness, or the mind or the spiritual beliefs of most of humanity – Pinker had this to say in 2004: “the universal propensity toward religious belief is a genuine scientific puzzle” – what is needed is a little more accuracy on what the state of the scientific knowledge is and a little less of a readiness to marginalize those who see the facts about brain processes pointing to a compelling conclusion of a countercultural kind - that humans have capabilities that transcend the nature and nurture elements of their existence. 

Scientists' prejudices dismay Harvard astrophysicist

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb expresses dismay at the unwillingness of many fellow scientists to even look at his evidence for the existence of aliens in space. He told the UK newspaper The Observer that when he published papers presenting the reasons for his theory the science community showed little curiosity and in many cases mocked him at once for a stance that was considered outside the boundary of serious science. 

In Professor Loeb’s just published book Extraterrestrial, as The Observer’s account relates, he found that his theory...

“put me at odds with most of the scientific establishment”, even though, as a tenured Harvard professor on various academic boards, he worked at the core of it. […] Colleagues turned their noses up. Some thought it was ridiculous, others damaging to the community. Whenever he shared his theory, “Ninety-nine per cent of the time, I’d get this silence,” he says. On Twitter, one scientist described the hypothesis as insulting. Another said: “Next time there’s another unusual object, let’s not tell Avi!” – a petty swipe, Loeb’s theory reduced to a punchline. 

“That made me upset,” he says. “It’s like kindergarten. Let’s just talk about the science!” The reactions still bother him. “If someone comes to me and says, ‘For these scientific reasons, I have a scenario that makes much more sense than yours,’ then I’d rip that paper up and accept it,” he says. “But most of the people who attacked, they hadn’t even looked at my paper, or read the issues, or referred to the items we discussed.” 

Professor Loeb’s experience is of importance to everyone, inside and outside the field of direct scientific investigation. The consequences for us all as to any neglect of vigorous investigation into reality and truth could be severe, both materially and in understanding our human situation.

Professor Loeb

In some ways, Loeb sees the argument around ‘Oumuamua [an interstellar asteroid Loeb had been studying] as a proxy for a larger debate about the scientific process. Of his colleagues, he thinks: where are the progressive, exciting ideas? Where are the scientists making bold hypotheses without worrying they might damage their careers? He is convinced conservatism is ruining science, to the point where a hypothesis can now be dismissed outright just because it seems silly or outlandish or unfashionable, even when it is as theoretically plausible as any other theory available. Of ‘Oumuamua, he says: “The only reason I was courageous enough to come out was because people privately told me, ‘Yes, this object is something quite unusual.’ They say it privately because they’re afraid to make a public statement. But I’m not afraid. What should I be afraid of?”

Professor Loeb blames the antagonism on “conservatism”. But this is not a political or religious conservatism as in the American context, but the ingrained filter that affects a person over what is regarded in their society or community of what is “silly”, “outlandish” or “unfashionable”. “There is a taboo on the subject,” Professor Loeb says.

Once, Loeb went to a seminar on ‘Oumuamua at Harvard. As he left, he got chatting to an astronomer who’d spent his entire career studying objects in the solar system. “He tells me: ‘This object looks so weird, I wish it never existed,’” Loeb recalls, disapprovingly. To him the comment was scandalous. “As scientists we should accept, with pleasure, whatever nature gives us. Science is a dialogue with nature, it’s not a monologue. And what people don’t realise is, nature isn’t supposed to make us happy, or satisfied, or proud of ourselves. Nature is whatever it is.”

He goes on, “I find those instances when the data gives us some uneasiness, when the evidence doesn’t line up with what we expect, I feel these are the most exciting moments. Nature is telling you, ‘Your thinking on this is wrong.’ That’s what I’m here for, to learn something new. I’m not in it to feel good about myself, to get likes on Twitter, for the prizes. I’m in it to understand. So a colleague telling me, ‘I wish it never…’” He shakes his head. 

The filters or barriers to being open to what is socially acceptable, also slam into place because of the “cancel culture”, generated especially by society’s elite of academia, the media and corporate leaders, giving rise to real fear even in these same spheres. 

“You know, I’ve noticed a chilling effect on some people who have worked with me,” he says. “The moment there is backlash from the scientific community, they stop.” I ask why. “Because people at this stage – students and postdocs – they worry about their careers.” Loeb is convinced that, every now and then, a collaborator of his will be told that working with him could damage their hunt for a faculty position, as though it were an ugly blotch on an otherwise stellar CV. “I think that’s the part that is unhealthy here,” he says. “Science is supposed to be without prejudice, open to discussion. Not the bullying.”

All of this dogs Loeb. “My point is, how dare scientists shy away from this question, when they have the technology to address it, and when the public is extremely interested – while at the same time you have theoretical physicists talking about extra dimensions, string theory, about the multiverse? The multiverse is extremely popular in the mainstream. You ask yourself, how can that be part of the conservative mainstream” – but not the search for extraterrestrial life?

In his book, Loeb writes that throughout his career he has worked hard to approach problems with childlike wonder, often in defiance of conventional thinking. “If you speak to friends of mine, people from my childhood, they’ll tell you I haven’t changed much,” he says. “That’s on purpose. You might think of me as naive. But when people say, ‘As you get older, you need to abandon risk taking, become more rigid,’ I don’t accept that!”

Unfortunately, many, many people credit the world of science as being pure, untainted by prejudices, and fully devoted to discovering reality and the truth. From what we can see from Professor Loeb’s experience, scientists are bedevilled by the typical human weaknesses, as well as blindspots typical of their own profession. 

After centuries when the Western world’s top scientists were Christians,  it is sad that these days those who have experienced in their life the spiritual world in any of its many astounding forms are regarded as primitives left behind by the explosion of scientific findings in the last 100 years. But the mind view that is generated by scientism and an atheism that is so much more aggressive than healthy skepticism, is of that same type that gives rise to all that Professor Loeb has encountered. Science is not of benefit to us if it is not open to investigating all that is plausible.

 

Christians see no conflict between reason and faith

Deacon Burke-Sivers

To take one prominent example of how Christians have longed cherished their religion because it embodies truth, "Augustine consistently defends [faith-trust] in Christ, the Bible, and the church as rational. This faith is epistemically on a par with faith in other areas of human life such as family relations, geography, and history—where trust reveals itself as both rational and practically necessary." [1]

Accordingly, Christians posit that the beliefs of this religion can be defended rationally, unlike the case of other religions. However, because it is a human endeavour, there have been lapses in the church in acceptance of evidence about the world over the centuries.

I want to quickly illustrate how Christian scholars have attempted to use the faculty of reason to demonstrate that their act of faith as to core beliefs is not irrational. Here are how some proofs developed by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) can be applied in the modern context. Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers of Portland, Oregon, gave this talk in a video: A friend asked why Harold thought God exists...

So I took out my cellphone and put it on the table, and I asked him if my phone was moving. He said "No". So in order for my phone to move from a state of potential motion to actual motion a force had to be applied. I said, "Are there objects in the universe that are moving?" "Of course there are". I said that just like the phone there has to be a force that causes all objects to move. I said, "What is that force?" He said "The Big Bang". I said "OK, what caused the Big Bang?" He had no answer.

I then said, "Let's take the phone to the Amazon Basin and drop the phone on the jungle floor. A group of indigeneous people find it, pick it up. They have never seen or experienced anything like this technology before. Would they think this phone had created itself? Of course not. They would think that an alien, a god, or another human being had created it because things don't create themselves." I then asked him to tell me something that exists that created itself. He had no answer.

Finally I said, "When I bought my phone the battery was 100%, and as I [...] began to use it, the battery began to lose energy and move toward a state of equilibrium." I said, "[With] the universe there was a Big Bang and you would expect that after 13.7 billion years the universe would be losing energy, just like the battery on the phone. Instead, the universe continues to expand and there are billions and billions pieces of visible matter in the universe. How is it that universe is not losing energy after such a long period?" Again, he had no answer. 

I said, "Now you have to apply the [principle] of Occam's razor. [This] says that when you have a series of competing hypotheses, each with equally predictive outcomes, the one with the fewest assumptions is the one that is most likely to be correct." I said, "I gave you three assumptions and you could not give me an answer." 

The proofs for God as the first mover, the first cause and grand designer, another observer writes, are not a matter of "believing in the supernatural realm [as] some kind of philosophical ‘deus ex machina’– a God of the gaps – an answer for natural mysteries when we have no other answer. Instead the supernatural realm is a given within a philosophical view of the cosmos." 

The writer goes on: "It is the universal experience of the human race that the unseen realm is ‘there’. It’s part of reality. Deciding how it interacts with the visible realm and what it has to do with me and my destiny is where science ends and religion begins."

Though science may be able to identify "some sort of measurable pop and fizzle in the brain" accompanying an experience in an animal or human, "it is not the same thing as the experience any more than my increased heart rate when my beloved enters the room is that thing we call love".

[1]  Mark J. Boone, "Augustine and William James on the Rationality of Faith," The Heythrop Journal, Volume 61, Issue 4 "Special Issue: Apologetics", July 2020, pages 648-659

Miracles can be filtered out of our sense of reality

No way through - unless we avoid whatever is blocking our perspective

C.S. Lewis opens his book Miracles with the following words: "In all my life I have met only one person who claims to have seen a ghost. And the interesting thing about the story is that that person disbelieved in the immortal soul before she saw the ghost and still disbelieves after seeing it. She says that what she saw must have been an illusion or a trick of the nerves" [1]. 

That reaction might have arisen from an application of Occam's razor (see my previous post) but it also points to the fact that each of us form filters over time affecting our appreciation of truth and reality. This is part of our rational life that complicates decision-making. In this example, if the woman who saw the ghost had been open to all possibilities, she would have first taken the view that the extraordinary sighting seemed to indicate that there is a spiritual dimension to life, rather that assuming her brain had had a malfunction though it had been working correctly by normal measures before and after her experience.

I want to briefly explore this matter, excerpting from a blog I came across while researching my recent field of interest, the topic of truth and reality and Christian belief. The blog states:

This story [that Lewis relates] clearly illustrates how an individual’s Plausibility Structure (PS)* can affect belief formation concerning that which we believe to be reasonable or unreasonable, potentially true or surely false. A PS can simply be understood as a mental apparatus that operates as a filter to filter out beliefs that should not be considered as plausible.

Every belief that we entertain will first pass through our PS informing us of its possibility or likelihood and does not allow us to hold to beliefs that are inconsistent with the experiences or evidence that we are privy to. So, in the case of the woman in Lewis’s story, since she disbelieved in the existence of immortal souls (or, in other words, her PS did not allow for the existence of immortal souls), even after a seeming encounter with a ghost, she must find an alternative explanation (an explanation that fits in her PS) for what she experienced (i.e. an illusion or a trick).

...if [a person's] PS only allows for a naturalistic, materialistic reality, the supernatural will never be entertained as plausible. Regardless of the arguments that may be given for the existence of God, the possibility of miracles, and the reliability of Scripture, since [that person's] PS is closed off to supernatural explanations, these arguments will fall on deaf ears. In other words, [the person's] naturalistic framework limits his range of plausible explanations.

The church has enough self-awareness to be wary of filter that religious fervour creates, and so it has a body of regulations ensuring a thorough investigation into "the historical and scientific truth of the alleged miracles. Just as it is necessary for the legal checks to be complete, convergent and reliable, it is also necessary that their study be performed with serenity, objectivity and sure competence by highly specialised medical experts." 

The hope is that those imbued with solely a sense of the material world can open their hearts and minds - we are a mind-body phenomenon - to the spiritual/supernatural realm.

See also:

*Plausibility Structure [here] is not to be strictly identified with Peter Berger’s Plausibility Structure derived from his sociological theory of religion.

[1] C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 1.

Evidence of God from miracles - Scientists please note!

Melissa Villalobos

When Christians meet the ideas of those who take an atheistic view of our nature and existence, they are often struck by the ignorance shown about religion. Those who decide to stand against the experience and depth of knowledge most humans in history and even now in believing in "another order, which goes beyond the proper domain of the natural sciences" (see #284 especially) seem to do so based on  a view of human life blinkered by scientific findings that they extrapolate from with a kind of glee - All the better for "hedonistic utilitarianism"? (Peter Singer's term).

I accept that outside mainstream Christian churches  there is little understanding: a) that the search for truth does not necessarily pit science against religion or vice-versa because "Truth cannot contradict Truth"; and b) that a wholly literal interpretation of Genesis is not accepted generally within the universal church. 

However, healing from a disease or disorder is an example of the types of miracles Christians encounter, of course bolstering our belief in God's providence and in His loving response to our prayers. Steven Pinker, however, would have none of it, in no instance, based on the thought that any miraculous outcome must arise from the "laws of probability [or] the workings of cognition". 

To the point: Last year, John Henry Newman was a declared a saint, someone who the church could accept had been received into heaven as a "true and faithful servant" of God. Christians have had, from the earliest days, the practice of praying to saints to ask they intercede on our behalf before God. (Some Protestants reject this belief). The reason why the church could accept the status of Newman, apart from the witness of a godly life, was that it had judged that two miracles had occurred at his intercession. In this case, a man with a disabling spinal problem (Jack Sullivan), and a woman who was at risk of losing a baby (Melissa Villalobos) had their plea to Newman for help answered by the power of God. 

I link here to a video and a recording involving Villalobos and Sullivan, both Americans, where they relate their dire predicament and the outcome, which their doctors could not explain on the basis of the medical situation of each.

The link is here: Enjoy, and pass on to others who are still intriqued by the wonderful things that occur in the world around us. These are kind of the events that those who try to use science as a rationale for their atheism should give attention to.

President Biden and the Common Good

President Biden used his inauguration address to stress that he understood the "fear and trepidation" that many Americans felt in looking to the future. The centrepiece of his message to the nation comprised these words:

But the answer is not to turn inward, to retreat into competing factions, distrusting those who don’t look like you do, or worship the way you do, or don’t get their news from the same sources you do.

We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.

We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts.

If we show a little tolerance and humility.

If we’re willing to stand in the other person’s shoes just for a moment.

Because here is the thing about life: There is no accounting for what fate will deal you.

There are some days when we need a hand.

There are other days when we’re called on to lend one.

          That is how we must be with one another.

President Biden on Inauguration Day.

That ethos of sharing with those in need, of being a brother or sister to those in need, of regarding the community as one entity and not a collection of individuals, is the spirit of what has been termed "the common good".

The United States, and much of the Western world, which suffers severely from personal alienation in society, and dispossession arising from a reluctance to help social classes that are struggling to cope with the upheaval in jobs and trade, and the burdens of the virus pandemic, need to avoid sinking into the pit of "competing factions" by getting wise about the boon that application of  the common good offers policy and political behaviour.

The wisdom of the universal church, infused by the Holy Spirit and painfully gained from its own experience as a governing state from time to time, but especially as a father-mother-advocate living in community with those without influence and power, balances the importance of the individual person with the well-being of the community, so that there is mutually supportive relationship. 

I want to draw on the clear exposition of the main features of the common good presented in a key article in an American journal appearing to coincide with the Biden inauguration. The article states: 

The Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes well the church's teaching on the purpose of the government: "It is the role of the state to defend and promote the common good of civil society." Period. The government is not intended to prioritize "individual liberties" over communal flourishing, as so many right-leaning Americans wish, nor is the state intended by the church's teaching to be a hegemonic force for sectarian norms and partisan preferences.

According to the documents of the Second Vatican Council, which contains the most authoritative modern teaching on the subject: "It follows also that political authority, both in the community as such and in the representative bodies of the state, must always be exercised within the limits of the moral order and directed toward the common good — with a dynamic concept of that good — according to the juridical order legitimately established or due to be established" (Gaudium et Spes 1965).

What does the common good look like?

Drawing on the papal teaching from the preceding half century, the council explained that the common good is "the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment. Today [this] takes on an increasingly universal complexion and consequently involves rights and duties with respect to the whole human race. Every social group must take account of the needs and legitimate aspirations of other groups, and even of the general welfare of the entire human family" [Pacem in Terris 1963].

The catechism presents a digest of three key elements that combine to shape our understanding of the common good: respect for the human person, prioritization of collective social wellbeing and development, and the pursuit of peace.

The respect for the inherent dignity and value of the human person is not up for personal selection, choosing as one might which population, political party, class or race of people, gender or sexually oriented group one wishes to recognize. The church makes clear in Gaudium et Spes : "In our time a special obligation binds us to make ourselves the neighbor of every person without exception." 

The second element of the common good has to do with social well-being and development. The church teaches, in Gaudiem et Spes, that it is the government's responsibility in a healthy nation to make available to all people "everything necessary for leading a life truly human, such as food, clothing, and shelter; the right to choose a state of life freely and to found a family, the right to education, to employment, to a good reputation, to respect, to appropriate information, to activity in accord with the upright norm of one's own conscience, to protection of privacy and rightful freedom even in matters religious."

Despite conservative cries for "smaller government," which is a self-interested red herring disingenuously presented as "fiscal responsibility," the church makes clear that it is precisely the responsibility of governments to attend to these basic needs of its people. And if there is a population whose interests should supersede others, the church has made abundantly clear that it promotes the preferential option for the poor and marginalized, not the wealthy, comfortable or socially ascendant.

Pope Francis's 2020 encyclical letter, Fratelli Tutti (All Brothers), “further builds on the church's rich, if challenging, teaching on the role of government. Critiquing the rise of extremism, false populism and divisive rhetoric, Francis writes: "Political life no longer has to do with healthy debates about long-term plans to improve people's lives and to advance the common good, but only with slick marketing techniques primarily aimed at discrediting others. In this craven exchange of charges and counter-charges, debate degenerates into a permanent state of disagreement and confrontation."

Individualism, the ethos that has taken hold of society or is in the process of capturing the minds of the younger generation worldwide – also presents an obvious challenge to the wider community. The article quotes Pope Francis again from his encyclical on fraternity:

Individualism does not make us more free, more equal, more fraternal. The mere sum of individual interests is not capable of generating a better world for the whole human family. Nor can it save us from the many ills that are now increasingly globalized. Radical individualism is a virus that is extremely difficult to eliminate, for it is clever. It makes us believe that everything consists in giving free rein to our own ambitions, as if by pursuing ever-greater ambitions and creating safety nets we would somehow be serving the common good.

The common good, then, is achieved by addressing the needs of our neighbour. The outcome of peace in society is our reward, to use President Biden's words, if we "open our souls instead of hardening our hearts. If we show a little tolerance and humility. If we’re willing to stand in the other person’s shoes just for a moment." 

Further insights into the significance of the concept of the common good can be found on this blog here and here.

Let Christmas linger into the new year

 Christmas is an uplifting time of each year! Our focus is turned to a historical fact that has the meaning of love, faithfulness and self-sacrifice. There is a message in a person who has descended from a state of omniscience and omnipotence to become like all humans in an existence that is limited in most spheres of life.

Therefore, there is value in keeping before our eyes the important elements of the meaning of Christmas. This is what the early followers of Christ did, creating hymns and prayers, some of which have made their way down to us. I'm thinking of the hymns that Paul used in his letters, and there are the O Antiphons, advent prayers widely used in the church before the 8th Century. These prayers have given rise to chants and carols that have inspired the Christmas celebrations of people in subsequent centuries.

Below are slides that display how the heart of the early prayers have been incorporated into a Christmas carol that conveys delight at the gift that God has given us. At the end, are some links to videos I have been using to build my awareness of what Christmas means, and how that meaning has importance as I start this new year.

Christmas videos that have provided me with food for New Year prayer include these:

Traditional rendition of O Come O Come Emmanuel 

More forceful form of this prayer 

Then a beautiful insight into Mary's role as "God is born into the world of men" 

Finally, the lovely Wexford Carol -

"Good people all, this Christmas time,

  Consider well and bear in mind
  What our good God for us has done
  In sending His beloved Son"

Lyrics Source

Why evangelise? To free prisoners of the spirit!

The sharing of the Good News must go on. Here's why, according to Fr Frank Doyle S.J. in his commentary on Romans 6:12-18 in the Living Space website. He writes:

By Guiseppe Miro via Flickr

To have committed oneself to Christ totally must result in an inner transformation which steers us in the direction of goodness and love. To be in Christ is to be free, not freedom to sin but freedom not to sin. True freedom is the ability to choose the good; sin, as a choice of evil, can never be an expression of true freedom, it is an abuse of freedom.
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Paul develops the biblical ideas of ‘redemption’ and of liberation from death, and in order to bring out their implication makes frequent use of a metaphor that his contemporaries would find impressive: the slave redeemed and set free who can be a slave no longer but must serve his [or her] new master freely and faithfully. Christ has paid for our redemption with his life; and he has made us permanently free. The Christian must be careful not to let himself [or herself] be caught again by those who once owned him [or her], i.e. by sin; the Law, with its ritual observance; the principles of the world; and corruption.
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The word ‘obedience’ contains the root of the verb ‘to hear’. To turn a deaf ear to goodness and submit to evil leads to sin and death. To listen to the voice of goodness and submit to it is the way to life. We have a striking example in Jesus who, in obedience to his Father, offered up his whole body in life and in death for our liberation. Jesus “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming as human beings are… and he was humbler yet, even submitting to death, death on a cross” (Phil 2:7-8).
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“Once you were slaves of sin, but thank God you have given whole-hearted obedience to the pattern of teaching to which you were introduced; and so, being freed from serving sin, you took uprightness as your master.” To give ‘whole-hearted’ obedience implies willing submission and not an obedience that is forced, imposed or legalistic.
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Christians have changed masters. From being slaves to sin, they have become slaves to ‘righteousness’, to that inner goodness that results from opening oneself to the love of God that comes through ‘grace’.
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When we surrender to a life of sin, we are headed for death [of our spirit, our humanness]. When we surrender ourselves to God it leads to justice, to goodness. Paradoxically to become the slave of “justice”, or righteousness, is to become free. Freedom, as we said, is the ability to identify totally with the good. To use one’s freedom to sin is a contradiction. And that is what true freedom enables us to do – to choose the good and loving act at all times and in every situation.
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Although some may not see it that way, there is no one who enjoys more real freedom than the one who is totally committed to [Jesus and] the Way of Jesus. [This is] because it is the Way, it is the Vision of life, to which we are called by the deepest needs of our being.

Read it all at: https://livingspace.sacredspace.ie/o1294r/

God as a trinity of persons

What can one say that is meaningful about such an abstract concept as the Holy Trinity? It was the great St Thomas Aquinas who said that it was much easier to say what God was not than what he is. In other words, every positive statement made about God has to be immediately denied. If we say God is “good”, it is obviously true but our concept of “goodness”, however exalted, is so limited that God’s “goodness” cannot be remotely described by our concept of it. And so of every other attribute applied to God.

So when it comes to speaking of the meaning and inner relationship of three “Persons” in one God we are floundering in territory where ordinary human language is totally inadequate to express the reality. Our God can only be reached in the “cloud of unknowing”, as Julian of Norwich so beautifully expressed it. God is not any of the things we say he is. It is, as Fr Anthony de Mello used to put it, something like trying to explain the colour green to a person who has been totally blind since birth.

Provided we are aware of God’s basic unknowability by our limited minds, there are still many helpful things we can consider about our God and the inner relationships which are part of his being.

While it is of the utmost importance that we realise this, there are many statements we can make which will help in our relationships with God.

To go back to Thomas Aquinas again, one of his basic principles was that “Behaviour is determined by the nature of things” (agere sequitur esse). From the way things act we know something about what they are. We can thus distinguish the different natures of minerals and other non-living substances, plant life, bacterial and viral life, animal life, human life from the different ways in which each is able to function and react.

We normally will not confuse a cow and a horse, a bird or a bat, a shark or a whale, a gorilla or a human being. It is not simply their appearances that are different. We realise that each has certain capabilities and that those capabilities arise from the way they are essentially constituted in their inner being. We don’t expect animals to talk as humans do, except in TV cartoons. We don’t expect snails to run in the Derby or the Grand National. Or tortoises to outstrip hares, except in fables.

And, in our daily rubbing shoulders with other people, the only way we can know them is by what they reveal of themselves through their behaviour and interactions. We say they ARE kind, because they consistently behave in a way that is kind. Or they ARE cruel, again because of what is perceived as consistently cruel behaviour. “By their fruits you will know them,” said Jesus. “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, or a bad tree good fruit” — because agere sequitur esse.

At the same time, while we may feel we can know a lot about people from their behaviour (and do not hesitate to pass judgement!), we can by no means know everything. Every human being, indeed as science constantly discovers, every created thing is a mystery whose innermost reality is really impossible for us to penetrate totally. And that even applies to our own selves. We do not know ourselves totally. We are a mystery to ourselves — and, a fortiori, to others!

If this is true of created reality, we should not be surprised to face the same dilemma with the Creator. God, in his deepest being, is a mystery we cannot ever fathom. This is not just a “cop out”; it is a fact. Nevertheless on the basis of what God DOES we do get some very clear indications of what he IS. Agere sequitur esse applies to God also.

What the Christian Testament tells us

And it is in the Christian Testament especially that we get the first hints of there being more than way of understanding God, although the full theology of the Trinity was only developed later. What it means to have three Persons in one Being is something we do not even try to understand. But we can get some inkling if we confine ourselves to seeing what each of the persons DOES as a clue to what they ARE.

In Greek classical drama in the time of Jesus and earlier, the actors put on a mask to indicate the role they were playing (not unlike the elaborate painting of the face in Chinese opera for the same purpose ). The Greek word for this mask was prosopon, literally, ‘in front of the face’, and the Latin translation was persona (‘per-sona’, that through which the sound of the voice came).

So, speaking analogically, we can say that in our God there are three masks, three personae, three roles pointing to three separate sources of action. This is not an explanation. It is a groping effort to get some understanding. Those three roles are that of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Father

We see God as Father, a loving and compassionate Father. Not a daunting patriarchal figure but one that is easily approached and who can be addressed by the familiar and intimate term “Abba” (compare the English ‘Papa’ or ‘Ah-Ba’ in Chinese and other languages). He is the Creator and giver of all life. Everything good that can be discerned in the world around us comes from him and through him. In him, through him and with him all things exist.

He is the one who cares, the one who waits for the Prodigal to return and forgives completely and immediately. He is the Father of truth, the Father of love and compassion, the Father of justice. The whole of this beautiful world in which we lives is a testimony and, at the same time, only a faint indication of what he really is. If we really look at the world he has made (and not at the one we have unmade), our hearts can only be overcome with praise and thanks.

Son

We see God as Son, who in an extraordinary way came to live among us, and whom, in a paradox beyond all understanding, we humans killed.

In the Son as a human being, we can see, hear and touch God. We see something of the nature of our God as Jesus heals the sick, identifies with the weak and socialises with the sinful. We see him challenge the dehumanising values that form the fabric of most of our lives and, in the process, he is rejected by those he loves. Though he is God, he empties himself of all human dignity that he might open for us the way to true and unending life.

Spirit

We see God as Spirit, becoming, as it were, the soul of his people. All the good that we do, all our evangelising work, our hospitals, schools, works of social development and social welfare, our care of the sick, the weak, the oppressed and the outcast — all are the work of God’s Spirit working in and through us. Wherever there is love there is the Spirit of God at work.

Models for our life

And yet, being aware of all this, we still cannot say that we know our God. But there is enough here — if we pray and reflect on it — that is already overpowering in its significance.

We need to remember that we have been called to be and to grow into the image of God himself. In what has been revealed to us through Jesus and the Scriptures, we have more than enough to challenge us and to help us to approach closer to our God. Our ultimate goal, and it is the only goal for all living, is to achieve perfect union with him. We do that, above all, by loving as he loved, by loving unconditionally and continuing to love where no love, and even hate, is returned.

For this we need the creative power of the Father, the compassion of the Son, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. They are all available to anyone who opens their heart to receive.

Written for Trinity Sunday by the late Frank Doyle, an Irish Jesuit priest of the Chinese Province.His commentary on the daily Mass readings can be found at https://livingspace.sacredspace.ie/

Loneliness and the death of the family

Staggering statistics and heart-breaking analysis from Kay Hymowitz, an American scholar and author on culture and family life. She writes in the Spring 2019 issue of City Journal:

Americans are suffering from a bad case of loneliness.

Kay S. Hymowitz

The number of people in the United States living alone has gone through the studio-apartment roof. A study released by the insurance company Cigna last spring made headlines with its announcement: “Only around half of Americans say they have meaningful, daily face-to-face social interactions.” Loneliness, public-health experts tell us, is killing as many people as obesity and smoking. It’s not much comfort that Americans are not, well, alone in this. Germans are lonely, the bon vivant French are lonely, and even the Scandinavians—the happiest people in the world, according to the UN’s World Happiness Report—are lonely, too. British prime minister Theresa May recently appointed a “Minister of Loneliness.”

The hard evidence for a loneliness epidemic admittedly has some issues. How is loneliness different from depression? How much do living alone and loneliness overlap? Do social scientists know how to compare today’s misery with that in, say, the mid-twentieth century, a period that produced prominent books like The Lonely Crowd? Certainly, some voguish explanations for the crisis should raise skepticism: among the recent suspects are favorite villains like social media, technology, discrimination, genetic bad luck, and neoliberalism.

Still, the loneliness thesis taps into a widespread intuition of something true and real and grave. Foundering social trust, collapsing heartland communities, an opioid epidemic, and rising numbers of “deaths of despair” suggest a profound, collective discontent. It’s worth mapping out one major cause that is simultaneously so obvious and so uncomfortable that loneliness observers tend to mention it only in passing. I’m talking, of course, about family breakdown. At this point, the consequences of family volatility are an evergreen topic when it comes to children; this remains the subject of countless papers and conferences. Now, we should take account of how deeply the changes in family life of the past 50-odd years are intertwined with the flagging well-being of so many adults and communities.

Scholars sometimes refer to the domestic earthquake that first rumbled through wealthy countries like the U.S. in the mid-twentieth century as the Second Demographic Transition. (The first transition occurred around the time of the Industrial Revolution, as the high death and birth rates that had been humanity’s default condition since the Neanderthals declined dramatically, leading to rapid population growth.) Mostly associated with the Belgian demographer Ron Lesthaeghe, the SDT (the unfortunately evocative acronym) is a useful framework for understanding the dramatic rupture between the Ozzie and Harriet and Sex and the City eras.

The SDT began emerging in the West after World War II. As societies became richer and goods cheaper and more plentiful, people no longer had to rely on traditional families to afford basic needs like food and shelter. They could look up the Maslovian ladder toward “post-material” goods: self-fulfillment, exotic and erotic experiences, expressive work, education. Values changed to facilitate these goals. People in wealthy countries became more anti-authoritarian, more critical of traditional rules and roles, and more dedicated to individual expression and choice. With the help of the birth-control pill, “non-conventional household formation” (divorce, remarriage, cohabitation, and single parenthood) went from uncommon—for some, even shameful—to mundane. Lesthaeghe predicted that low fertility would also be part of the SDT package, as families grew less central. And low fertility, he suggested, would have thorny repercussions for nation-states: he was one of the first to guess that developed countries would turn to immigrants to restock their aging populations, as native-born young adults found more fulfilling things to do than clean up after babies or cook dinner for sullen adolescents.

The disruption of family life caused by the SDT in the U.S. has been rehearsed thousands of times, including by this writer, but the numbers still startle. In 1950, 20 percent of marriages ended in divorce; today, it’s approximately 40 percent. Four in ten American children are now born to unmarried mothers, up from about 5 percent in 1960. In 1970, 84 percent of U.S. children spent their entire childhoods living with both bio-parents. Today, only half can expect to do the same.

Read on for further light on the dis-ease afflicting citizens of much of the world,  who are choking on the fruit of several layers of self-deception within society that have their origins in changes in lifestyle, moral beliefs and life goals.

Kay S. Hymowitz is a City Journal contributing editor, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys.

Science limps as religion steps up - delusion vs. insight

Chris Arnade is an American freelance writer and photographer. Over several years he has explored the underbelly of the United States, having quit his job as one of Wall Street's elite in response to his disquiet over the growing divide within his homeland. He has just had his collection of essays and photographs published as Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America.

This divide is what prompted Arnade, who has a Ph.D in physics, to explore beyond his normal boundaries.Speaking of his former environment,  he states: "Our isolation from the bulk of the

Chris Arnade...surprised where faith flourished

country left us with a narrow view of the world. We valued what we could measure, and that meant material wealth. Things that couldn’t be measured—community, ­dignity, faith, happiness—were largely ignored because they were hard to see, especially from so far away."

With the insights earned through his meeting the 'strangers' even in his own New York, Arnade reflects on his past. While he was at college, he worked in a painting gang with Preacher Man and they had a difference of view over the Bible: "His intolerance simply didn’t fit my intolerance. My intolerance was credential-based." Arnade continues:

"When I look back now at Preacher Man and the others praying, I see people striving for dignity in a harsh world. I see mothers working minimum-wage jobs, trying to raise three children alone. I see a teenager fingering a small cross and a young woman abused by an addict father. I see Preacher Man living across the tracks in a beat-up shotgun shack, desperate to stay clean, desperate to make sense of a world that has given him little. Their faith may not be true, I tell myself, but it is useful."

Arnade writes: "During my years on Wall Street, I argued for policies based on data. I thought we should focus on things that could be quantified—like higher profits and greater economic growth. I measured success by how high the stock market was or whether we had maximized profits and minimized expenses, not by whether we had done the right thing.

"I was not alone. Most of us in the front row had decided that it was impossible to identify absolutes, that moral certainties were suspect, and that all that we could know or value was what science revealed to be quantifiable. Religion was an old, irrational thing that limited and repressed people—and often outright oppressed them." Therefore:

 "When I first went to the Bronx, I expected that the people there, those most affected by the coldness and ruthlessness of the world, would share my atheism. Instead, I found a strong belief in the supernatural, and a faith that manifested in many ways, mostly as a belief in the Bible.

"Everyone I met there who was living homeless or battling an addiction held a deep faith. Street walking is stunningly dangerous work, and everyone has stories of being cut, attacked, and threatened, or stories of others who were killed. Everyone has to deal with the danger. Few work without a mix of heroin, Xanax, or crack. None without faith. 'You know what kept me through all that? God. Whenever I got into the car, God got into the car with me.'

"There are dirty Bibles in crack houses, Qur’ans in abandoned buildings. There is a picture of the Last Supper that moves with a couple living on the streets. Rosaries, crucifixes, and religious icons are worn for protection and good luck. Pages of the Bible are torn out, folded up, and kept in pockets, to be pulled out and fingered nervously, or read over in times of stress, or held during prayers."

Of note is this fact: "Mixed with faith in God is a strong belief in the reality of evil. Crossing the bridge into Hunts Point, ­Takeesha [a prostitute friend] looks out the window of my van. 'This place is so bad and evil. It’s, like, so simple to walk across the bridge, but it’s like you can’t go across, you understand? This place is evil. It’s possessed. It’s evil. I been here a long time. There are bad spirits here. I have seen good people, I have seen people that have family, jobs, and they come here and they get dug in, and two weeks later they living in a cardboard box.' "

Arnade comes to this conclusion: "When you’re up against evil, whether the mysterious efforts of demons or the all-too-explainable effects of drugs, the world of science, education, and smart arguments doesn’t do much for you[...]. All that the front row offers to those living shattered lives in broken buildings is sterile institutions that chew them up and then spit them out."

A further insight is this: "For many back row Americans, the only places that regularly treat them like humans are churches. The churches are everywhere, small churches that have come in and taken over a space and light it up on Sundays and Wednesdays. They walk inside the church, and immediately they meet people who get them."

Although there are rules: "They say, 'Enter as you are,' letting forgiveness wash away a past that many want gone. You are welcome as long as you try. The churches understand the streets, understand everyone is a sinner and everyone fails. The rest of the world [...] doesn’t understand that. That cold, secular world of the well-intentioned is a distant and judgmental thing.

"The churches are also the way out of addiction, a way to end the cycle. The few success stories told on the streets are of relatives, friends, or spouses who found God, got with the discipline and order of a church, and moved away."

For me, the next section is a powerful statement of what I believe will take the post-Christian society many years to discover, making Arnade's new book (see below) all the more insightful and therefore of high value. The section is given in full:

"When I walked into the Bronx I was an atheist. It was something I was sure about. After years of traveling America, I wasn’t so sure. To my educated lifelong friends, I might have said I was agnostic, or still an atheist, but one who appreciated religion.

"To the believers I met I would say, 'I appreciate the power of faith,' or 'I understand the power of the Bible.' To the more direct and blunt questions, 'Yes I read the Bible now and then, but I wouldn’t call myself religious,' or, 'I have not been saved, but I do read the Bible.'

"None of it was a lie, but the more direct truth was that even after I had come to see how useful religion was, I still attended services as an outsider trying to understand why faith drew so many people to it. Why it seemed to comfort those who needed it the most. In the language of the church, I wasn’t yet saved. In the language of my friends, I was a scientist trying to understand religion.

"I could no longer ignore the value of faith, not as a scientist, not as a person who claimed to want to learn from others. Yet I still saw it as a utility—something popular because it worked. Still, after attending hundreds of different services I was beginning to realize there was more to it than that. My biases were limiting a deeper understanding: that perhaps religion was right, or at least as right as anything could be. Getting there required a level of intellectual humility that I was not sure I had.

"Like most in the front row, I am used to thinking we have all the answers. On Wall Street, there were few problems we couldn’t solve with enough smarts, energy, audacity, or money. We even managed to push death into the distance; with enough research and enough resources—eating right, doing the right things, going to the correct medical specialist—the inevitable could be delayed, and mortality could feel distant.

"With a great job and a great apartment in a great neighborhood, it is easy to feel we have nothing for which we need to be absolved. The fundamental fallibility of humans seems outdated, distant. It’s not hard to imagine that you have everything under control.

"On the streets, few can delude themselves into thinking they have it under control. You cannot ignore death there, and you cannot ignore human fallibility. It is easier to see that everyone is a sinner, everyone is fallible, and everyone is mortal. It is easier to see that there are things just too deep, too important, or too great for us to know. It is far easier to recognize that one must come to peace with the idea that we don’t and never will have this under control. It is far easier to see religion not just as useful, but as true."

This piece is an edited version of an excerpt from Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade, published on June 4, 2019, by Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House. Read the full excerpt at First Things.