"To get through this pandemic we have to bridge the empathy gap. We know the coming months will be deeply trying, but they could be disastrous if we don’t find a way to start caring about other people." (NY Times Opinion column, Charlie Warzel)
This is profound and true and, in the context of any number of divisions in the world, incredibly difficult. But not impossible. I guess I was always one of the radicals at school, coming from a predominantly working class town, built on coal and industry, with strong traditions of solidarity. But I was always struck by things the Catholic brothers taught me, about 'others,' people who may fall outside of our immediate loyalties, people we disagree with, people who may oppose us and offend us, whose politics is not ours. The same lesson applies to those others, too, I was told. There is a greater loyalty, a greater justice, one that unifies us all, to which we are all accountable, to which we should seek to conform our will and actions. I see some reprehensible views expressed by people, and a sheer and utter stupidity and selfishness on their part that it is so incredibly difficult to empathize with them. It is easier to be angry and contemptuous. You will find loving others as you love yourself - and forgiving them - as the toughest thing of all. So we were all told at school. We absorbed the lesson in silence, which means many of us may well have been paying attention. It's not been difficult to see how current and long-standing divisions would turn nasty and violent. In my last week in America in April 2019 I made a big statement on this, my last day of attending the little village church. So I shall post the link below. But write up the words here, drawing on the added comments. There's no way I conceal division and suppress conflict in order to preserve the civil peace - that approach is ideological and defaults to an iniquitous status quo that stands in need of changing. But I always see change as a healing, a reconnection overcoming disconnection, a reconciliation without retribution. I try hard not to deify and demonize in the context of conflict and division - such a thing will theologize politics and turn Earth into a Hell. Try to see God in the face of the other, even and especially when that other seems about as far away from justice as you could imagine. It's tough, it really is. The older I get, the more impressed I am by the fragility of people - and the fragility of the good - the brokenness, the wounds and the cries of pain, often ill-directed, but real all the same, and the need for the healing, reconciliation without revenge and retribution. And the need for an emotional intelligence, to go with a social intelligence.
I'll quote the words from my post from over a year ago now.
The Power of Humility - uniting around 'something' instead of fighting over 'nothing.'
I affirm the power of humility. I write frequently of reclaiming power. It is less power that corrupts but the lack of power. But the restitution of power - which is just - needs to be tempered by the humility of the Love that is expressed through sacrifice and service to others, lest it merely degenerate into prideful self-worship and idolatry.
The world we live in, the political world, is a world of division between people, interests, and perspectives. Politics is about mediating those divisions, but the possibility of such mediation is dependent upon a common ethic, a sharing of common ground or common language. Unless this division is set within a wider ethic then we are a house divided and will fall. Instead of unity, each side will take to the trenches and state their positions against each other, persuading no-one but their own side. Instead of a mutual learning, society will drown in a mutual indifference or tear itself apart in a mutual antagonism. .
This past century or more, human beings have thought they could take morality into their own hands and go it alone as authors of their own destiny. What we have found is that, as a result, we are indeed alone, with nothing, the masters of nowhere. The danger is that, removed from the source and the end that we share in common, that is precisely where we will end up, alone and against each other through devotion to particular interests and loyalties. The masters of nowhere. Human beings live within social relations that are unequal and divided. There is no unity of purpose within those relations, there is no commitment or devotion to common ends. Because we exist on divided ground. On our own, we are divided against one another. Politics ceases to be able to perform its mediating function. Absorbed in the fight over the terms by which that barren landscape shall be possessed, we risk losing everything in order to gain nothing. There is no world to win, there is a world to be appreciated in common. Shared.
This is not an anti-politics, the assertion of an abstract unity that puts politics - and people - on ice in face of a common, abstract, standard. On the contrary, politics is dissensus and disagreement. But unless we set division in a wider context then we are divided to fall. My fear is that we are going to fracture, we are going to turn against each another. And become entrenched in those divisions. Without mediation, violence and force is the only way. But it isn't a way out.
Marx wrote of a “world still to win.” That view presumes a world worthy of winning, and such a world is beyond human self-creation, beyond possession, and beyond the controversies over the terms of that possession. I affirm transcendent standards of truth and justice vs conventionalism and constructivism. At risk of committing a logical fallacy, either there are transcendent standards with respect to truth and morality, or there are not. If there are not - and this seems to be the dominant view 'after virtue' - then sooner or later you have to submit to power, to the fact that truth and justice are mere functions of power, choosing your sides in the endless, pointless, nexus of power/resistance. You can see Foucault here and call it liberatory. I see only Hobbes' 'war of all against all.' It may seem to be liberatory to be fighting on whatever side in this power/resistance you choose - it is all your choice - but the ultimate emptiness and arbitrariness of the fight will sooner or later become apparent. "Where there is nothing," wrote Max Weber in Politics as a Vocation, "both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights."
"Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph exactly now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but also the proletarian has lost his rights. When this night shall have slowly receded, who of those for whom spring apparently has bloomed so luxuriously will be alive? And what will have become of all of you by then? Will you be bitter or baunistic?"
It doesn't matter which side wins in such a political world. Where there is nothing, we have all lost our rights: this social struggle is just a sophist power struggle where might is right and justice is the interests of the strongest.
That's the very opposite of Jesus' example and message.
In a world that is riven by conflict, hatred, and animosity, we have a mission to be the living agents of the Love that bridges all divides, heals all broken relationships, and releases the joy implanted within the hearts of each and all.
So I offer this prayer that throughout the troubled times that are sure to come in this political world we live, and which threaten to divide us against each other, that we cleave to the Love of a God that enfolds, nourishes, moves and redeems all.
Because without that, we have nothing and we are nothing.
That is the “something” that is the true ground of our being, the “something” that we need to recover and hold on to as against Weber's “nothing,” the world as objectively meaningful and valuable as against objectively meaningless and valueless.
That is the rebuilding that the world desperately needs today. Should we start from that premise, this world would be a better place than it is today.
Offering some explanation of my own position. I have met too many whose political ideals and causes I share, yet who are bereft of hope and mired in despair to budge on this. I have no proof and no evidence to support my claims on God, no more than those without God have in support of their own claims.
We live in uncertainty. That is what faith is all about. Reason as far as reason will go, but reason does not go anything like far enough when it comes to a rich and meaningful life. Love takes up where knowledge leaves off, wrote St Thomas Aquinas.
Neither side of this “debate” can refute the other. We are talking incommensurate logics. So the question, for me, boils down to which side can make the most of human life in all its richness, its quest for meaning, its longing and desire, its suffering and frustration. I've met too many mired in misanthropic despair and negation of all hope for want of empirical evidence and logical proof to be swayed away from the search for God and God's love. I can't prove the truth of this, I can't say at any point that I have the truth. But that truth-seeking is so eminently nourishing that I am willing to offer it as proof of the existence of a transcendent source of nourishment, some anarchic excess that subverts and transforms the empire of facts to redeem all things.
I cleave to this through the thin, because I know by experience it brings me to the thick.
The demand for proof and evidence for God is a double-edged sword. Scientific and technological advance has given the illusion that we may have certainty on the deepest of question. Knowledge and know-how concern explanation and ability to manipulate matter and even people. It is not the same thing as understanding. Once we move into questions of meaning and significance, the remit of such power ends. Philosophical reasoning, when hooked on misplaced presumptions of certainty, undercuts itself. People are crying out for hope and meaning, for belonging and healing. Too many, discarding faith for any number of reasons, many of which are understandable, in that people have been damaged by dogmatism and false certainties revealed too easily to be falsehoods without support. But philosophical critique can be acidic, dissolving all supports, leaving human beings alone in a world that is objectively valueless and meaningless. I have reflected on this for years and years and will take that leap of faith, that heart leap, into the view that there is a good God that has created a good world, a world that is objectively good, enjoining us to act accordingly, conforming ourselves to, and confirming, that goodness within and without.
In the end, this issue boils down to the question of which view is capable of offering the more plausible account of human nature and human life. (I should hasten to add that that pragmatic test is not the basis of my view, resting truth on ‘what works’ or is ‘the most plausible,’ which is conventional and customary. I affirm transcendent standards of truth and morality within a metaphysical framework, the condition of truth-seeking, its inspiration and point).
There is a distinction between natural law, nature seen through the eyes of a moral reason common to us all, and a quasi-scientific ethical naturalism. The former encompasses more than physical explanation with respect to natural functions and refers to the correct understanding of desire, the quest for meaning, the cosmic longing for healing, wholeness, and belonging. It encompasses to family, society, polity and all forms of human bonding. In this respect, the issue pits the natural-law and virtue ethicist – myself - against the expressivist or emotivist, all those positions which dissolve ethics into mere value judgments, irreducible subjective choice, opinion, and preference. You can line the combatants up either side of this divide: those who affirm transcendent standards and norms as against the conventionalists who assert that truth and meaning are human projections in time and place: Plato and Aristotle and their successors (St Augustine and St Thomas and various other Saints, Pascal, Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, myself) against Hobbes and Hume and their very many successors in the modern world. The Hobbes-Hume position has held sway for some time, but that hold is weak and weakening, succeeding more by negation on the basis of a positivist science that is untenable. Philosophical reason and science cannot settle this question, only cut the foundations from under the position which cleaves to purpose, meaning and goodness in the universe. It's a pointless victory, if victory it is. For nothing has been won, since nothing can be won. All that has been achieved is the destruction of the cosmic hope and longing that inspires human beings to carry on living and loving when the facts of life seemingly contradict our highest goods and deepest truths. Neither side can refute the other side clearly and directly with the tools of philosophical reason. The only way to decide is which side of this divide provides the most satisfying account of the richness of human life as it is experienced in the real.
I answer plainly: The natural-law and virtue ethicist tradition and those praxis philosophers who embodied the ideal in the real as it unfolds in history – transcendent truths unfolding in the historical process. We need to call back the transcendent standards which buttresses all things; we need to call back the soul. The Greater Love that enfolds, nourishes and carries all, the Love 'that seeketh not its own.'
One of the books that really swayed me on this when I was still an atheist philosopher was Jonathan Sacks' The Great Partnership. He writes:
'The search for God is the search for meaning. The discovery of God is the discovery of meaning. And that is no small thing, for we are meaning-seeking animals. It is what makes us unique. To be human is to ask the question, 'Why?'
Scientists of a certain type seem to take perverse pleasure in declaring that life is in fact meaningless. Here, for example, is Jacques Monod:
“Man must at last wake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realise that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world, a world that is deaf to his music, and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings or his crimes.”
Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, New York, Vintage, 1972., p. 160
And, more bluntly, Steven Weinberg:
“It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more or less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning... It is very hard to realise that this is all just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe ... It is even harder to realise that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.”
Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, New York, Basic, 1977, pp. 154-5
That’s the ‘nothing’ Weber wrote of, rendering struggles pointless. It is Nietzsche’s ‘death of God,’ and the collapse of an overarching and authoritative framework on truth and morality. (It is well known that Nietzsche said goodbye to religion and ethics, it is less well known that he said goodbye to notions of scientific truth and objective reality, for the same reasons. I affirm – science needs metaphysics in order to justify the search for truth and establish respect for truth).
If the world is indeed meaningless and pointless, then nothing is more meaningless and pointless than the philosophy that says it is so. Sacks writes that as a mood, most of us have experienced times when that is how the world seems. In the midst of crisis or bereavement, the fabric of meaning is torn apart and we feel strangers in an alien world. Yet a mood is not a truth; a feeling is not a fact. As a general statement of the condition of the universe, there is nothing whatsoever to justify Monod's or Weinberg's conclusions. To grasp this, he rewrites Bertrand Russell’s statement in A Free Man's Worship:
“That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's salvation henceforth be safely built.”
Bertrand Russell, A Free Man's Worship, in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, London, Routledge Classics, 2009, p. 39
C'est magnifique, writes Jonathan Sacks. One can scarce forbear to cheer. But one can produce almost exactly the same peroration in praise of faith:
“That man, despite being the product of seemingly blind causes, is not blind; that being in the image of God he is more than an accidental collocation of atoms; that being free, he can rise above his fears, and, with the help of God, create oases of justice and compassion in the wilderness of space and time; that though his life is short he can achieve immortality by his fire and heroism, his intensity of thought and feeling; that humanity too, though it may one day cease to be, can create before night falls a noonday brightness of the human spirit, trusting that, though none of our kind will be here to remember, yet in the mind of God, none of our achievements is forgotten - all these things, if not beyond dispute, have proven themselves time and again in history. We are made great by our faith, small by our lack of it. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding hope, can the soul's salvation be safely built.”
I never understood why it should be considered more courageous to despair than to hope. Freud said that religious faith was the comforting illusion that there is a father figure. A religious believer might say that atheism is the comforting illusion that there is no father figure, so that we can do what we like and can get away with: an adolescent's dream. Why should one be considered escapist and not the other? Why should God's call to responsibility be considered an easy option? Why should the belief, held by some on the basis of scientific determinism, that we have no free will and therefore no moral responsibility, not be considered the greatest escapism of them all? There is absolutely nothing in science - not in cosmology or evolutionary biology or neuroscience - to suggest that the universe is bereft of meaning, nor could there be, since the search for meaning has nothing to do with science and everything to do with religion.'
Can we prove life has a meaning? Clearly not.
Almost none of the things for which people live can be proved. Consider trust. Consider love.
I have been writing at length on this in my forthcoming Dante book. For now, another poet, Tennyson, suffices to make the point. In "The Ancient Sage" he writes:
Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,
Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,
Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no
Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay my son,
Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in converse with thyself,
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!
She reels not in the storm of warring words,
She brightens at the clash of ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’
She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst,
She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,
She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,
She hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wail’d ‘Mirage’!
Here, I agree with St Thomas Aquinas in holding that 'the slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.'
In fine, we take justice back to source rather than subordinate it to political ideology. We establish the true relations. Participating in social justice is a Christian tradition inspired by Jesus.
I've been getting angry with people on social media lately. These are angry times, and there are a lot of words flying, a lot of views being expressed in haste. One great great philosopher and social ecologist whose work I love, and with whom I have the honour of being in contact with on social media pages, - John Clark - put a "laugh" against a post I did on Pope Francis' call for ecological conversion. I love Pope Francis' message here, having brought it to my own church back in 2006 - Rainbow Rising
I hit the roof, sending him a terrible message. When attacked, I can fight hard. I found that he had simply clicked the wrong button by mistake and had meant to give the post a 'like.' I have sent him a fulsome apology and, hopefully, have learned an old lesson. Pause and reflect. Take on only important fights. Even if someone is being abusive and contemptuous, it is still better to respond in love and lead by example. Responding in kind in a context of anger and hatred unleashes a destructive cycle of reprisal and counter-reprisal that makes a wasteland. Look for understanding. Even if someone is being abusive and contemptuous, it is still better to respond in love and lead by example. People are crying out for compassionate community, and it is for those who know this to be healers and light the path and invite people to follow. I've been apologizing to a few people lately. Oddly, I have been writing on the unforgiving nature of the times, on people who think their (seemingly) superior knowledge leaves them unstained by the sins of the past, blinding them to their own flaws, losing redemptive hope for each and all. I've been asking - and receiving - forgiveness these past few weeks. I have been on a short fuse.
I'm a member of the Asperger’s group on here. (The fact that I have been told I will have to wait at least a year for my referral to even begin has come as a blow, not least because I suspect I am an extreme case and in need of diagnosis). A few days ago the question was asked:
“Why do you think that so many Asperger’s prefer spending lots of time alone?”
The answers from AS folk came thick and fast:
“I'd say it's because I'm quite empathetic and most of what I pick up seems to be anger and hate, I don't do well in that environment."
That certainly applies to me, and it is easy to get drawn into it. The answers continued:
“Because people who won't judge you are really hard to find."
I loathe the punitive and the judgmental, not least when shorn of mercy, forgiveness, and promises of redemption.
“I pick up negative energy I see through the fakeness as well."
“I think it's the lack of positive social interaction."
"We either feel out of place or are misunderstood."
"It seems most of us are introverts and that also makes social settings taxing."
"I see a lot of people in these groups actually longing for friends and connection, but aren't able to achieve it."
I have a feeling that applies to people as such, AS and NT. These are taxing times that test - and often break - us all. I'm not very resilient to negative energy in the context of anger and hate, though, and a relentless diet of it tips me over the edge.
There's a better way. 'The infinite way,' as Dante put it.