An Unrelated Sermon

This Sunday I did a sermon for my church*. The topic is not particularly related to this blog, and is something that my minister asked me to do a sermon on, I doubt I would have chosen the topic myself. However, it went pretty well, and my wife has posted the sermon on her personal blog, so if you are interested it is availible here. It's entitled "What Would Jesus Do: Liberal Christianity and the Theology of Prosperity." It doesn't really say anything about what Jesus would do, but is more a history of the "What Would Jesus Do" movement in Christianity, and how it relates to Andrew Carnegie, Christian Socialism, Televangelists and board games, with a few conclusions about fads and the tensions within Christian thought about social action.

*[technically it is the Terre Haute Unitarian Universalist Congregation, and isn't a church. Most UUs are Humanists, Atheists, Agnostics, Pagans, or a bit of several things like me; folk that don't fit elsewhere but still find some value in trying to be part of a religious community peopled mostly by folk that disagree with you on the basics. Only 10-15% of UUs consider themselves Christian, so the term "church" can be misleading, but we routinely call it church anyway, and the term church captures it about as well as any term can deal with the wonderful weirdness that is contemporary Unitarian-Universalism.]

Philosophy and Collapse

The questions of what exactly philosophy is and what it is for, are old central questions in philosophy, (working on them is called “metaphilosophy”), and there are a lot of quite different answers. Here is the handout I give my students. The ancients thought philosophy was the love of wisdom, the literal roots of the word. Moderns often portrayed philosophy as some form of searching for truth. Kant thought that philosophy was about finding the limits of our reasoning ability. Marx thought it was about understanding the world so that we could change the world. Wittgenstein thought that philosophy was about clarifying the claims of other disciplines but that it can really make claims of its own.

Myself, I side with the ancients, that philosophy is the love of wisdom, but when talking to moderns, I often find Husserl’s picture helpful. Husserl says that philosophy has two fairly different aspects, one is aimed at contemplating timeless truths, searching for those things that are true in all times, what he calls “philosophy as an exact science.” Just as the laws of physics or geology care nothing for whether our society is flourishing with an expanding economy and hope for the future, or collapsing facing the end of growth economy with fear and despair for the future, so perhaps there are truths of logic, or metaphysics, or epistemology, or even ethics or aesthetics that care nothing for the particulars of the age. And indeed, it would be all too easy to confuse the prejudices of one’s own age with timeless truths, so when we are pursuing philosophy as an exact science, it is critical to try to find reasons for our beliefs that will not be exposed as merely the prejudice of our age when we poke at them hard. Many, including Husserl, have thought that philosophy-as-an-exact-science has made no or very little progress over the centuries, and have had various explanations for this curious supposed fact. The second aspect of philosophy in Husserl’s picture is what he calls “World-and-life Philosophy” and its job is to give us wise advice on how to live in our own particular time, place, and world. Here, it is critical to examine and understand the particulars of the age you live in, rather than abstracting away from them. Here, wisdom and advice are more central to the project than truth. Again, world-and-life philosophy seems to make little or no progress, but this is not surprising as its subject matter is always changing out from under it.

So as we are facing a collapse of some kind, a collapsing economy, but probably a broader societal collapse as well, philosophy has as usual its two main tasks, helping us seek for timeless truths, things that will not change despite the social and economic changes, and giving us advice on how to navigate the changes. And these projects are fairly distinct, but they are deeply interlinked. Navigating a changing world well probably requires understanding it deeply and insightfully (as well as luck and flexibility, and other virtues). But insight into the world of today usually requires seeing past to moment to the timeless truths that act as the skeleton of the age. So world-and-life philosophy brings us back to philosophy-as-an-exact science. But insight into the timeless truths usually involves understanding your own biases, and how you yourself have been shaped by your own times and society, and that requires insight into the particulars of your own age. So philosophy-as-an-exact science brings us back to world-and-life philosophy as well.

So what timeless truths are most salient for understanding our world’s situation right now? Well, a Christian and a Communist will give you quite different answers, and a devout Neoliberal economist will give you a third set of answers. But MY teachings are this. From metaphysics we learn that events rarely have a single cause, and that there is rarely a single best way of looking at things, rather different visions of the world have different strengths and weaknesses, and the world itself transcends them all. From epistemology, we learn that the world is too complex for anyone to really understand, that all strategies of human knowing have limitations. We make do with our imperfect models of reality, and divvy it up into many specialties and use division of labor in our epistemology as well as in our economy. But this relies on the ability to trust the honesty and competency of folk charged with keeping track of parts of the world that we are not ourselves specialists in. Any honest person, in dozens of specialities could see that exponential growth was going to hit resource limits eventually, whether in energy, population, habitats, atmospheric carbon, available freshwater, credit or something odder. Yet honesty itself is a resource that might be in short supply, and self-deception is a common problem for humans. From logic we learn that even when we try to communicate honestly what we have learned of the world to people of a different specialty or lifestyle, many problems can occur. At best, we summarize in ways that are helpful to our audience. Speaking claims that are formally true is usually impossible, for the same basic reasons that theories never reach reality, or that knowledge is never comprehensive. From ethics and value theory we learn that material wealth is not the end all and be all of happiness. Sometimes lack of wealth does cause misery, but other times more wealth is not going to solve the problems or make people happier. Nonetheless many people do seek more wealth (often as a stand in for social prestige or self-worth) and are often willing to compromise other values to do so. So we are often in the position of trying to make the best of a bad situation, and the ethics of acting as well as we can in a deeply f***ed up situation can be quite tricky, and quite different than the ethics of flourishing in good times, or of trying to prevent f***ed up situations from arising when they are still preventable. These are the themes that I will return to again and again in trying to explore my positions.

So what advice can world-and-life philosophy give? In flush times we seek every good we can, expanding in many directions; in contractions we seek to return to essentials, prioritizing goods as more or less pressing. What is most essential to your life and your happiness? Advice is not making the decisions for the advisee, it is seeking to augment the insight of the advisee, so that they can see more deeply into the situation than they could before. So how do I see the situation? We have reached the limits of exponential growth, and the ability of the global economy to create and sustain credit seems to be the most immediate limit. Perhaps the limits of water, carbon or oil will become increasingly salient soon. Like Sharon Astyk, I imagine that we will return to a level of ordinary human poverty, very much in line with prior historical ages, rather than some Mad Max world or zombie apocalypse or new dark age. Although wars, famines, and social unrest are certainly common elements in historical transitions. I predict that the US median income in real purchase parity power will drop to between 1/3rd and ½ of its 2005 value by the end of 2010 and remain under ½ of its 2005 value until at least 2020. This is going to change many aspects of our society, and certainly have global effects. I am optimistic that American life in 2025 will actually be better than in 2005 in a variety of ways, as America has suffered a number of problems related to having too much wealth, but the next 10-15 years are going to be extremely hard, and there will surely be plenty of injustice, death, and heartbreak along the way. I do not believe the government can be relied on to help us through this, but that preparations should be at the family and community level. Credit and money in a credit society act as a kind of artificial trust and these are breaking down, in large part because our society has become addicted to dishonesty, and lack of trustworthiness. As these breakdown, old fashioned trust, person to person bonds of obligation and trustworthiness, will become more important. I follow Stoneleigh in anticipating hard deflation in 2009 and 2010, with inflation setting in, in the US, sometime after that. You will lose much, your family will lose much. Some folk will lose everything. But many folk will lose much, but also keep much. What is most essential to your life and your happiness? What can you give up, and what must you fight to keep, knowing that no matter how hard you fight you probably can’t keep it all? That is a question that is at once intensely practical and intensely philosophical, and I can’t answer it for you, although I hope we’ll talk about it in dozens of different ways over the next months.

Beauty in Hard Times

Beauty is a wonderful thing, a thing of true value. Stocks look valuable at sometimes, and seem worthless in others. Posters of one’s favorite band seem valuable when you are a teen, and just cheesy latter in life. But beauty is of real and enduring value, in swell times and lean times. God forbid I should speak against beauty.

What I do want to say is that Beauty has a whole host of relatives that are worthy too. Beauty is a good thing, but not the only good thing.

The ancients and medievals in the West, valued beautiful art, but had plenty of other goals for art too. Grotesque art (like statues of rotting corpses) which nonetheless managed to convey religious truths like the ephemerality of this life, were considered art and valued. Horror stories, political art, and homely arts, all of these were valued as well even if what they produced wasn’t exactly beauty. But beauty proper had a place too, in the cathedrals, in the songs, in the decoration of clothes. It was part of how the wealthy showed off there wealth, how the young showed of their youth, and how the content showed off their contentment.

But this picture changed in the 1700s and 1800s. Beauty (and its very close relatives the sublime and the delightful) came to seem central to art, and to aesthetics, and aesthetics was cashed out as the science of beauty. A Baroque artist, a Rococo artist, and a Neo-Classical artist would have very different pictures of what beauty is, and what techniques best achieve it, but all three think that all real art is aimed primarily, even exclusively at creating beauty. And the philosophers of this time are very interest in how the philosophy of beauty related to the philosophy of moral value, and of economic value. To David Hume, Edmunde Burke, or Adam Smith, the question which of these paintings is genuinely better is philosophically very parallel to the questions which of the actions is genuinely morally superior, which of these assets is genuinely worth more, and which of these political systems is genuinely better. For the Scottish Enlightenment, the artist exploring beauty is in effect exploring morality, politics, and economics as well, even though that isn’t their real goal.

But by the end of the 1800s and the early 1900s you begin to see a rebellion against beauty by artists, and it continues during the twentieth century so that you see plenty of anti-beauty art in the 1990s and the 2000s. Arthur Rimbaud is the first person I know of to speak against beauty in public, at the beginning of his poem “A Season in Hell”

“Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.
One evening I took Beauty in my arms - and I thought her bitter - and I insulted her.
I steeled myself against justice.
I fled. O witches, O misery, O hate, my treasure was left in your care! …”

But the basic critique of beauty is found in many different arts and artists during this time, and it takes slightly different forms. Sometimes, the artist is pursuing some other goal besides beauty but thinks that they wind up hitting beauty as well, such as in Picasso’s Cubism; Picasso’s goal isn’t beauty, but he thinks his painting do succeed at being (oddly) beautiful incidentally. Sometimes, they are hoping to help people see beauty within a piece that looks ugly at first, but that they think is not genuinely ugly, as in Stravinsky’s ballet the Rites of Spring. But sometimes, the artist is actually opposed to beauty. The Dadaists thought that beauty was used by the powers that be to tranquilize the populous into accepting stupid policies like WWI. For them, undercutting beauty was part of undercutting the ruling regime. For Lichtenstein, obsession with beauty forced us to focus on the culture of the upper class, whereas art needed to wrestle with the culture of the whole society, thus must also struggle with pop culture. For Yoko Ono, beauty caused us to dwell on pleasant emotions, and situations where things were basically working, whereas art needed to confront life in both its pleasant and unpleasant forms. In a broken world, beauty is a balm, but it is in danger of being a lie or a distraction, and maybe the people need to be riled up rather than soothed. Many artists felt that art ought to confront the audience at least as much as it should cater to the tastes of the audience. So by the 20th century, beauty seemed like the coward's way out of refusing to look at the harsh realities of the world.

So do we need to be riled or soothed? Well, BOTH! Sometimes we need to be riled up and sometimes we need to be soothed, so I’m just not as willing to oppose beauty as a lot of 20th century thinkers were, but I’m also not as staunchly in favor of it as a lot of 18th and 19th century thinkers were. Further, I’m pretty impressed by Frank Sibley’s article “Aesthetic Concepts” from 1963. He argues that aesthetics is the study of human experience especially as it is colored by a particular kind of emotional experience such as when we experience beauty. But he argues that we have dozens and dozens of genuinely aesthetic concepts, like graceful, convoluted, or intriguing. According to Sibley, the vocabulary we use to talk about art falls into 3 basic categories, sensory talk that isn’t aesthetic yet (red, circular, polyphonal), aesthetic concepts (balanced, suggestive, harmonious), and overall judgment terms (good, lackluster, a classic).

So my position is that it makes sense to find ways to bring beauty into our lives, even in hard times, probably especially in hard times, but that beauty has a number of relatives that we should also try to bring into our lives during hard times.

There have been a lot of fights on exactly what beauty is, but a harmonious fit between parts, and a sense of delightfulness divorced from our immediate self-interest are classic elements. Winning a million dollars is delightful (at first), but our interests are directly involved. Watching a beautiful sunset is delightful too, even though it doesn’t really advance our interests in a direct way. Beauty is classically related to sexuality, youth and ephemerality as well. Sunsets are beautiful in large part because they don’t last. Beauty soothes us when things are hard. It makes it look as if things fit together, as if even the hard bits are just small parts of a larger more glorious design. One of my families’ favorite movies is O Brother Where Art Thou? which strives to convey the ways in which song and music weaved through the lives of common folk before the time of television and movies and Ipods. And here the music of beauty, solace and wistfulness dominates, not the music of anger, alienation, and reflection that I grew up with.

So beauty is a kind of delight but it is not the only variety of delight or even the only important one. When my kids get a new toy, they sometimes experience a delight that is not exactly beauty. It is a delight of fun, or hopefulness. Likewise when they learn a new skill that they can use, they experience a kind of delight twinged with pride and self-discovery. Delight is a close ally of curiousity, and so I will often find a book delightful even if it is not exactly beautiful. Beauty, as well as soothing, can give a lightness of spirit that we call delight, but delight is a broader concept than just beauty. And in hard times, delight is important too, not just soothing beauty. We need to keep our curiousity, our capacity for surprise and wonder. It is part of what allows us to retain openness to new and changing situations, it is part of what allows us to continue to adapt, and to enjoy adapting. In hard times, we need also a delight beyond mere beauty.

There is also a deeper kind of wonder, an experience tinged with awe, where we encounter what is far greater than ourselves. Traditionally, this close relative of beauty is called the sublime. In the sublime, we experience a glimpse of the transcendent, we are taken out of ourselves into a relation with things far vaster than ourselves. We stare through a telescope at the majesty of the Milky Way, and briefly experience our smallness. We look at an exquisite Greek vase from thousands of years ago and for a moment catch a glimpse of the brevity of our lives. The light filters through the trees of a forest, just so, and we are transported for a moment beyond time and space in the play of the dust motes in the beam of light. The sublime helps us to remember our place within the vastness, it helps our humility and our openness to wonder. It helps re-ground us in the essentials of our life. In hard times, we need splashes of the sublime, beyond just beauty.

And there are plenty more relatives of beauty that are important along side beauty. It makes sense to want a home to be familiar, comforting, ... well homey. Especially in hard times, some little corner of the world where one can be at home is a great luxury. The interesting helps to keep us engaged. The nostalgic helps us to remember our past. The graceful helps to lift us beyond mere necessity. The humorous, the cheerful, the silly, the festive, the cool, even the elegant are aesthetic goals worth seeking, if you can afford them, and usually you can afford at least some. And none of these aesthetic concepts is exactly the same thing as beauty. The angry, inspired, passionate, insightful, honest post-punk music I listened to as a youth, isn't really beautiful, but it is cool, and it is valuable, even aesthetically valuable. I do not think people should be cheerful all the time, or that one should be forced to live or work in a cheerful place. Enforced cheer is one of the more twisted aspects of our society. But we ought to have a place in our lives for cheerfulness on occasion. Cheerfulness isn't beauty or vice versa, but cheerful decor is sometimes appropriate, and I think that contemplating the differences helps us to see how lots of relatives of beauty all have a role in helping us to maintain a balanced and open perspective for confronting challenges.

Now I said that I don’t think a home should be beautiful, or at least not regularly beautiful. I think that a home should be homey, familiar, inviting and comfortable, and that is quite a different goal than beauty. But I do not mean that beauty should be missing, just that it should have a different place, or be an occasional visitor to the home, rather than the main aesthetic goal of a home.

But what of the ugly, the horrific, the terrifying, the repulsive, the tragic? Well, horror and tragedy in art usually thrive during economic downturns. People feel fear, and bitterness, and a whole host of foul emotions during hard times, and I think that is a good thing. Our world is not sweetness and light and people need to be able to face the dark as well as the bright aspects of our world. But pain is easier to bear when the pain makes sense than when it just seems meaningless. Childbirth involves intense pain, but women often find the pain far more manageable than other lesser pains precisely because they understand the point of it. Artistic explorations of the horrors and tragedies of our lives, can often help us to deal with them better precisely my making them more comprehensible. Some can find beauty even in horrors and tragedies (I’m quite good at that, and its one of the reasons I’m a goth), but even if you can’t experience them as beautiful, darker art, and darker aesthetic goals can still be valuable. But I wouldn’t want to live in a tragic house, or a horrific one, even if I want to read tragedies or horrors occasionally. Even ugliness itself is not always to be avoided. There are ugly truths, there are ugly tools. We must be willing to look on the ugly, even if we prefer the beautiful. I listen to beautiful music, like those haunting Depression era gospels, but I listen to ugly music too, like Einsturzende Neubauten. Without the beauty, it would be hard for me to find peace, without the ugliness, it would be hard to keep up the struggle, and I think both are important responses to our lives in hard times.

When life is a banquet where every wine flows it is possible to take beauty but find it bitter, and prefer as Rimbaud did camp and kitsch (it has been suggested that Rimbaud invented the idea of campiness). But after a season in hell, well … after that as Rimbaud says “All that is over. Today, I know how to celebrate beauty.”