It’s a new year, so I’m thinking about new things. Next school year, I’ll be teaching the same slate of core class: “Philosophy of Human Flourishing”; “Religion in Global Context”; “Introduction to the Bible”. While I enjoy teaching all three of these, I’d like to someday, possibly teach courses on the following topics, because I’m curious about them:
1. “History and Philosophy of Games”
This may be a 1.a and a 1.b option, maybe even a 1.c depending on what would draw the most interest from students (presuming that there would be any). 1.a would be “History and Philosophy of Games” but if that’s too broad, 1.b would be “History and Philosophy of Sports”. If 1.a was doable, I’d open with Unit 1, “What Is a Game?” I’d consult the thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Bernard Suits (The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia), Jane McGonigal (Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World), and the philosopher who I’m currently reading: C. Thi Nguyen (Games: Agency as Art). Unit 2 would likely focus on, for lack of a better word, physical games ranging from baseball to Uno, or “sport” if the former idea is too broad. Unit 3 would likely focus on video games. Each unit would begin with a history of those types of games. I’m not sure what other lessons I’d add yet, though I imagine.
If this is too much to stuff into one class, then my 1.b option would just be, as mention, “History and Philosophy of Sports” and my 1.c option would be “History and Philosophy of Video Games”. Both of these topics would be much easier to plan for separately. Paradoxically, I don’t play video games all that much, but they were a massive part of my childhood, so I find them interesting still. I watch a ton of sports, but don’t play much. I think the history and philosophy of sports would be easier to create, as I’m more familiar, but I imagine, if somehow I could incorporate some video game play time into the class, the history and philosophy of video games would be a lot more fun to create/teach.
2. “Philosophy for Becoming an Adult”or “Philosophy for Adulthood”
I imagine this being an elective for seniors. Unit 1 would focus on meaning-generation. I could see myself teaching lessons on what major philosophical and religious traditions have presented as the meaning of human life. (For the religious traditions, I could use Stephen Prothero’s four key components of religions (problem, solution, technique, and exemplars) which might map onto schools like Stoicism, Epicureanism, Confucianism, etc.
Then, Unit 2 would focus on relationships. Maybe something related to Confucius’ ranking of relationships and teachings about filial piety combined with something on friendship (maybe consulting Robin Dunbar’s Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships) and maybe something—if I’m brave—on romantic relationships, though I’d be super cautious about this, and may want to choose some novel angle. Unit 3 would focus on work and career, maybe built around Matthew Hammerton’s “What Is Wrong with Workism?” Hammerton mentions Aristotelean “perfectionism,” which would be worth a lesson in itself. I think a discussion of AI’s relationship to work and whether we want a “post-work future” would be a great fit here.
An introduction to ethic could be a lot of fun too.
I’ve been reading through John Stuart Mill‘s On Liberty over the past couple of weeks. It’s a short work, less than a couple hundred pages, but dense enough to read slowly. For those unfamiliar with Mill, he’s seen as a “father of liberalism”. Liberalism has many branches now but I would say that what holds them together is an emphasis on the right of the individual to believe and live the “good life” as they see fit as long as it doesn’t violate “the harm principle,” meaning as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Obviously, that’s easier said than done but I think most “western” societies have tried to abide by this principle.
Mill lived from 1806-1873 in Victorian England. While his ideas may be the water in which we swim now, or so argues the philosopher Alexander Lefebvre in his excellent Liberalism As a Way of Life (a book that I finished reading and need to say something about here soon), his ideas regarding individual freedom were radical for the time. This isn’t too difficult for me to understand if I consider the plight of LGBTQIA+ Americans in my own lifetime and slightly before. Harvey Milk was killed a mere four years before I was born. Even in “liberal” California where I was raised, I heard plenty of voices desiring to push queer people “back into the closet” because their “way of life” was something, in the view of many of the adults in my life, a private matter, at best. I heard many preachers refer to nearby San Francisco as “Sodom,” citing the common misconception that the city of Sodom from the biblical Book of Genesis was destroyed by the Bible’s God because of homosexuality. On the other hand, I’ve seen society because far more tolerant, at least, and accepting, at best, of our LGBTQIA+ friends (mostly the LG part; there’s a lot of work to be done after that still). And this “progress” as many of us would call it has little to do with the generosity and gracefulness of Christians. Instead, it has to do with the continued impact of people like Mill whose “live and let live” philosophy continues to influence us, even as forces of illiberalism threaten it, like, for example, the Christian Nationalist movement.
Rejecting Christian Nationalism For Mill, ideologies like Christian Nationalism, which argue that the United States is a “nation by Christians for Christians to practice Christianity,” and that everything from our “moral” laws to immigration policies should reflect that, are in error. They’re in error for two reasons: (1) history and (2) epistemology. With regard to history, Mill argues that Christians, and others, have made mistake after mistake when they tried to use the power of the state to force others to live as they wished, and that this history should be a warning to us that we could do the same if we veer away from being liberal. With regard to epistemology, Mill points to the frailty of human knowledge, how we are limited to our own time and place and how those limitations keep us from the “god’s-eye view” that we assume when they forget that we’re not infallible by forcing everything from our metaphysics to our morality upon others, especially if their metaphysics and morality, when practiced, doesn’t impact us directly. Let me unpack this with some exegesis of On Liberty (from the edition published by Arcturus Press for page number references).
Answering the Questions for Ourselves Mill begins by acknowledging that one may be convinced on the truthfulness of their understanding of Christianity. He doesn’t want to attack that when we warns us about the problem of our own fallibility, at least not directly. Instead, he begins with the principle that as convinced as we might be, we can’t force that conviction upon others. He writes, “…it is not the feeling of sure doctrine (be it what it may) which I call the assumption of infallibility. It is the undertaking to decide the question for others, without allowing them to hear what can be said on the contrary side.” (p. 36) For those Christians who care about our foundational sources in the New Testament, it is clear from the Gospels, the Book of Acts, the epistles of St. Paul, etc., that the earliest Christians felt the need to persuade people of their Gospel. They didn’t have the power of the Roman state to help them, so this was necessary, but also it says something about the very nature of Christian proclamation: ultimately, reception of the Gospel must be voluntary, even for those that inherit the faith from previous generations.
Killing Socrates and Jesus As a warning, Mill reminds his audience of the great mistake of the Athenians who voted to execute the great father of western philosophy, Socrates, and how in retrospect that proved short-sighted and foolish. But not to stop there: if the death of Socrates was an injustice, “the event which took place on Calvary rather more than eighteen hundred years ago” (p. 37) should stop Christians in their tracks when they try to use the power of the state. It was the power of the Roman state that was used to wrongly execute Jesus himself! How then can Christians make the same mistake?!
Similarly, Christians should ponder the origins of their religion, and how the Romans mistreated (at best) and persecuted (at worst) Christians, only for Christianity to eventually emerge as the religion of the empire. If Christianity was true, and it was going to be true for your average Roman, what foolishness to persecute it! But persecute they did and persecute they continued to do, even after becoming Christian, just against Christians that were perceived as “unorthodox” or “heretical”. Seemingly, Christians didn’t learn from the early rejection and persecution the concept of tolerance. Once the oppressed was in power, they became the oppressor, and Mill wants to warn against the impulse to do this. As Mill writes “Orthodox Christians who are tempted to think that those who stoned to death the first martyrs must have been worse men than they themselves are, ought to remember that one of those persecutors was Saint Paul.” (p. 38) If St. Paul could be in error, so can you!
Now, the example of early Christian persecution may lead some to think that persecution is justified. In other words, they may conclude that persecute we must because if something is true, it will rise to the challenge, just like Christianity did. Mill rejects this (“the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplace,” p. 41). If for no other reason, that such a mindset deprives a generation, or many generations, of the benefits of that truth. Mill observes, “The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when as opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of it reappearances falls on a time when from favorable circumstances it escapes persecutions until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.” (p. 42) This is wonderful, but bad for the many generations who lost out on the truth that was buried by the arrogance of the times.
The Impotence of Intolerance What does our intolerance accomplish? Not much. Mill uses the example of the atheist who is willing to face the public consequences of their atheism in Victorian England. Are they not the most honest hearted people? They must believe their atheism truly? What about the atheist who poses as a believer to avoid penalty? What does this create? Churches with atheists who don’t want to be there, i.e., Christians who are pretending! “Under pretense that atheists must be liars, it admits the testimony of all atheists who are willing to lie, and rejects only those who brave the obloquy of publicly confessing a detested creed rather than affirm a falsehood.” (p. 43) To do this is to cultivate vice among the people and suppress virtues like truth-telling, all in the name of preserving “Christianity” among the people.
What does our intolerance accomplish? It doesn’t remove the “heretics,” according to Mill. Instead, it suppresses the greater minds of a generation. If people’s very livelihoods are at risk, they won’t pursue the truth (p. 45). If they don’t pursue the truth, that generation loses out on their insights (p. 46):
“A state of things in which a large portion of the most active and inquiring intellects find it advisable to keep the genuine principles and grounds of their convictions within their own breasts, and attempt, in what they address to the public, to fit as much as they can of their own conclusions into the premises which they have internally renounced, cannot send forth the open, fearless characters, and logical, consistent intellects who once adorned the thinking world. The sort of men who can be looked for under it, are either mere conformers to commonplace, or time-servers for truth those arguments on all great subjects are meant for their hearers, and are not those which have convinced themselves”
The Universal, Ugly Side Effects of Intolerance And it’s the fear of being wrong that hurts us all. Because an environment open to free thinking may create heretics, yes, but it will create much more good: “Truth gains more even by the errors of the one who, with due study and preparation, thinking for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.” (p. 47) When a society suppresses free thinking, it hinders creativity-within-orthodoxy, making orthodoxy dull and lifeless. Mill writes, “The greatest harm is done is to those who are not heretics, and whose mental development is cramped, and their reason cowed, by fear of heresy. Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it should land them in something which would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral?” (p. 47)
Steel Man In Mills’ view, “orthodoxy” should be able to hold its own in the court of public opinion. Religious dogma proves itself weak when it must be forced upon others, as if suddenly people pretending to believe something out of fear makes it true! Mill argues, “Whatever people believe, they ought to be able to defend against at least the common objections.” (p. 49) (On a side note, I don’t think this is meant to encourage the “I did my own research” culture of the Internet. Remember, he qualified that research must be done by “one who, with due study and preparation” is “thinking for himself” with a strong emphasis on that “due study and preparation”. If I want to talk about climate, or astronomy, or geology, or vaccines, etc., “due study and preparation” may take years!) For Mill, one shows that they have a strong view not because they can articulate it, but when they can articulate it and its opposing view. When you can steel man your opponent’s argument, but still find it weak, then you know you have some solid ground upon which to make your stand. And you can’t debunk a view you don’t like by citing opponents of the view. One “must be able to hear them from person who actually believe them” (p. 51). Now, maybe the average person doesn’t have the time to do all this “research”. So be it. But those who shape public thought and policy must! “If not the public, at least the philosophers and theologians who are to resolve the difficulties, must make themselves familiar with those difficulties in their most puzzling form; and this cannot be accomplished unless they are freely stated, and placed in the most advantageous light which they admit of.” (p. 52)
Dead Beliefs Mill notes that many “teachers of all creeds” often can be heard “lamenting the difficulty of keeping up in the mind of believers a lively apprehension of the truth which they nominally recognize” (p. 54). But he says, “No such difficulty is complained of while the creed is still fighting for its existence” (p. 54) In other words, if you want people to remain committed to a belief, you shouldn’t want it to be commonplace. You must want people to be confronted by it! Mill comments, “To what an extent doctrines intrinsically fitted to make the deepest impressions upon the mind may remain in it as dead beliefs, without being ever realized in the imagination, the feelings, or the understandings, is exemplified by the manner in which the majority of believers hold the doctrines of Christianity.” (p. 55) For Mill, the teachings of the New Testament “are considered sacred, and accepted as laws, by all professing Christians,” but they’re rarely practiced in actuality, because they’ve become so common place. People take comfort in merely affirming these doctrines, but they’re rarely confronted by them. How can this be? “The standard to which he does refer it, is the custom of his nation, his class, or his religious profession. He has thus, on the one hand, a collection of ethical maxims, which be believes to have been vouchsafed to him by infallible wisdom as rules for his government; and own the other, a set of every-day judgments and practices, which go a certain length with some of those maxims, not so great a length with others, stand in direct opposition to some, and are, on the whole, a compromise between the Christian creed and interests and suggestions of worldly life.” (p. 55) In short, Christians interpret something like say the “Sermon on the Mount” through the lens of their culture, denominational teachings, etc., seeing them as morals that they affirm because those morals have been interpreted for them and to them in such a way that they feel like they’re in the right.
Once this has happened, whatever power such teachings had to confront said Christians has been removed, and now this sense of “rightness” can be weaponized. “But in the sense that living belief which regulates conduct, they believe these doctrines just up to the point to which it is usual to act upon them. The doctrines in their integrity are serviceable to pelt adversaries with; and it is understood that they are to be put forward (when possible) as the reasons for whatever people do that they think laudable.” (p. 56) Anyone who has been around Christianity for any length of time knows this is true if they’re honest. And speaking personally, I know it to be true of myself. When I read the Sermon on the Mount without trying to justify myself, I often come away thinking “how can I live up to this?” Christ’s teachings will do that. One can weaponize Christ’s teachings only if they’ve found a way to interpret them so that they, suspiciously, always align with the morals and values of the reader! Mill knew this and tried to spotlight it for his readers.
Now, Mill thinks it’s actually a good thing if we’re a bit syncretistic. That may be a topic for another post. So, Mill isn’t trying to shame Christians for building their morality from multiple points of view. All he wants is for us to admit that this is what we’re doing, and he wants Christians who act as if they’re the ones who alone understand the New Testament and its teachings rightly to pause and be a little more introspective.
Mill’s Liberalism When I say that Mill thinks Christians should be liberal, I don’t mean, necessarily, that they hold to a “liberal” theology, like say one that reinterprets the creeds, or that they embrace the individualism of libertarianism, or that they embrace the policies of neoliberalism, etc. I mean, specifically, that we take into consideration our own fallibility, especially around matters regarding religion, or philosophies of how we should live, and that we recognize from history how often the most confident were the most in error. This demands humility. It requires a little of “live and let live,” especially if we can’t show how someone else’s actions, beliefs, associations, mythologies, etc., hurt other people (and by “hurt” we mean actual harm, not just discomfort or a feeling of disagreeableness). Christians should take from their own scriptures the scenes where people crucified Christ wrongly, and how St. Paul boldly persecuted, and how the Roman Empire suppressed, as a reminder of how easy it can be to be confidently wrong. If Christians abide by the principles Mill sets forth, they won’t have microwaved answers on what politicians or policies to support in modern democratic life, for example, and at best they’ll have one driving principle for dogmatism: avoid harming others. If Christians took these ideas into consideration, I think we’d see a far healthier Christianity, at least in the part of the world where I live.
It may do the philosopher Simon Critchley an injustice to take these two paragraphs out of the context of his book, Mysticism, when they’re somewhat unfathomable without the context of chapter 2 (“Seven Adverbs that God Loveth”), but I have to post these words somewhere for future reference! Critchley writes (p. 87)):
I am curious about the meaningfulness of asceticism today. The forms of ascetic practice in which people engage are legion: hot yoga, ceaseless meditations, extreme fasting, various forms of detox, excessive exercise, and compulsive devotion to routine, which was particularly acute during the COVID-19 pandemic. Or asceticism becomes pathologized, as with anorexia, bulimia, and other ‘disorders.’
We are strongly drawn by the desire for asceticism, it seems to me. We are fascinated by the extremity of mystical practice—think of the wildly self-destructive antics of female medieval mystics like Christina the Astonishing described earlier, the self-mortification of monks, stylites, anchorites, and the bands of itinerant flagellants in the early Middle Ages. But we find such behavior and its metaphysical demands too rigorous and weighty for our softer secular souls. For us, the purgation of sin has become a juice detox, the flagellation has become our relation to a bad selfie posted on social media.
Why did these two paragraphs grab my attention. I pondered that for a moment and I think it’s because it says something similar to the entire book by Carolyn Chen, Work, Pray, Code: When Work Becomes Religion in the Silicon Valley. She shows how religious we humans are…even when we’re super irreligious. We need patterns and rhythms. Religion used to provide that to most of us. As we become more secular, the desire for order and meaning doesn’t go away, we just plant it elsewhere. Harvey Cox made many similar observations in The Market as God. Even the great atheistic philosopher, Daniel Dennett, toward the end of the documentary I, Pastafari, says something about how secularism shouldn’t go back to the superstitions of religion but sure needs to discover all of the social benefits that those religions offered before it’s too late. I guess what I’m saying is that as annoying as statements like, “you may not be religious but you have a religion” or “we all worship something” may feel to those who have left organized religion, the fact is that they contain a truth. We humans can’t dump the things that made us human over all this long millennia of our evolution. At best, we can reword and reinterpret them. I think Critchley captures this with relation to the mystical impulse.
As a long time listener of the podcast Very Bad Wizards, I purchased Tamler Sommers’ book Why Honor Matterswith a positive disposition toward the author but a negative one toward the focus of the book: honor and honor cultures. My moral/ethical leanings are shaped by a “dignity framework,” whether that be because of my upbringing as a Christian and the explorations in Christian theology that have indoctrinated me, or (and?) because of my attempt to develop a rational basis for my moral and ethical beliefs that don’t appeal to divine revelation (often a secular derivative of Christian morality, if I’m honest). Right or wrong, Christian morality is presented as emerging from the example of a man, Jesus, who appealed to dignity (by way of the imago dei) in the honor/shame culture of the Roman Empire, with obvious favoritism toward the former. Jesus suffered because of an honor culture (i.e. his Passion) but the Kingdom of God that he preached imagined the world as a dignity utopia. This paradigm makes honor cultures look archaic and unevolved.
Sommers’ book doesn’t abandon the value of dignity-based morality but instead sheds light on the strengths of honor-based morality that we have lost in societies that have abandoned an honor-shame structure. He doesn’t ignore that weaknesses of honor culture—for example, honor killings, cyclical revenge, and such. He builds a steel man for the values of honor culture that I found at time convincing and at other times at least worth pondering further. And this book knocked me off my high horse by putting a spotlight on where dignity culture has failed (e.g. the American justice system and our world’s largest prison population).
I was attracted to the book for a negative reason: I’ve begun to think, contrary to some, that we’re not a society that needs less shame but one that may need more of it. I don’t mean old school, religious, Puritan-style shame. But I do think that social media has revealed a side of us in “Western” culture that’s gotten very ugly. It’s individualism taken to its most absurd extreme. We do what we want and we don’t care who it impacts, as long as we enjoy it. I think there should be some shame in that. The flip side of this is that there needs to be more people who want to live honorable lives: who care about their name, their reputation, and that of those closest to them. (For example, I want the name “LePort” to mean something that it definitely hasn’t mean in previous generations, and I want it to be a good name that my son can proudly own.) If you’re generally interested in a philosopher making a defense of the strengths of honor-based morality, or if you’ve had a concern similar to my own, then I highly recommend this book. It’s well-written and its case is argued as about as good as anyone can argue for honor-based morality in our current context.
A year or so ago, I heard a talk on authenticity. The speaker told the audience that they knew that they had acted in ways that were disappointing to the community, that they had caused unnecessary trouble, and that they had hurt and offended people but that ultimately, they would do it all over again because they were being authentic to themselves. Some of the people in attendance applauded this speech, affirming this definition of authenticity: being true to who one is. I was appalled by it.
For one, I reject the idea that there’s an essential “I” to be “discovered”. This is why I find personality tests to be meaningless. I don’t agree with the presentation of selfhood that suggests that we’re a fixed self that we need to discover/understand to be happy. While there is much about ourselves that remains consistent over time, there’s also much that remains in constant flux, and we choose (however strong or weak you want to define that word) who we want to become. We don’t discover who we are already. I’ve been influenced by Buddhist and Existentialist accounts of personhood to the point where such ideas about the self—that we are who we are and the best that we can do is discover it and better understand it—seem insensible to me (see “Buddhism, Existentialism, and the Enneagram”).
I find what that speaker called “authenticity” to be contrary to authenticity; I find what that speaker called “authenticity” to be what Existentialists call “Bad Faith”. In her book, How To Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment, Skye C. Cleary defines “Bad Faith” this way (p. 253):
“Self-deception which involves denying our own or others’ freedom. We are in bad faith when we avoid the truth of our life and situation, when we deny we have choices, or when we reject responsibility for our actions.”
The speech that I heard fits the definition of “Bad Faith” ala Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The speaker denied their freedom to reflect and change. They chose to “avoid the truth of” their “life and situation”.
So, what then would I say is “Authenticity”. I return to Cleary (pp. x-xi):
“To become authentic means to create our own essence. It’s the creation that is vital here. We don’t discover ourselves, we make ourselves. Authenticity is a way of expressing our freedom: to realize and accept that we are free; to be lucid about what we can and can’t choose about ourselves, our situation, and others; and to use our freedom as a tool to shape ourselves. Our selves are not the product of a chain of impersonal causes and effects. Creating ourselves is an art form—the act of intentionally choosing who we become.”
Existentialist thinkers say “existence precedes essence”. We exist but we’re not defined yet. We’re born with certain characteristics, yes, and Existentialist call this our “facticity”. But what makes us different from say a rock or a cactus, is that our “facticity” doesn’t completely define us. We can experience “transcendence” as humans where rise above our facticity to give ourselves greater meaning, or to create our “essence”. This “creation” is what makes us authentic.
This is contrary to the talk I heard, or personality tests that help us “discover who we are”. For Existentialist, there’s no permanent “I” to be “true to”; there’s an “I” that continues to create itself. So, when this speaker said they recognized all the wrong they had done but then chose to double-down on it rather than confessing the wrong and declaring a desire to do better, they weren’t being authentic at all; they were acting in Bad Faith thereby creating “bad authenticity” or “authenticity” as it’s understood in the crudest and laziest way possible. If we reject our responsibility for ourselves in the name of letting our “true self” shine, then we’re being inauthentic because we’re denying that we’re making a decision to remain who we’ve been in spite of our awareness of ourselves and how that awareness demands that we change for our sake and the sake of others. We’re being inauthentic in that we’re (in the words of St. Paul) thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought to think, not recognizing that as humans we’re categorically no better than other humans even as we convince ourselves that we are and that we have the right to act in ways that we would never accept from others if they acted that way toward us.
This week, I read Jean-Paul Sartre’s lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism”. I was struck by one line in particular. It reminded me of the Kantian Categorical Imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” But Sartre’s version is framed existentially. He says (quoting from Macomber’s translation, p. 24), “…in creating the man each of us wills ourselves to be, there is not a single one of our actions that does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be.”
If I understand existentialism, it doesn’t offer forth a strict, structured ethical system by which all must abide. But there is an ethic based in our freedom as humans and our responsibility for our actions. Sartre says that once we’re “cast into this world” against our choice—because we have no choice when it comes to our being born—we are “responsible for everything” we do (p. 29). We can’t blame our actions on others. We do them. Presumably, we do them with a sense of justification. We do them thinking they’re right to do. Sartre is convinced that no one acts thinking that their action is evil. “We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for any of us unless it is good for all.” This isn’t quite Kantian. We’re not making a choice with the Categorical Imperative in mind, explicitly. But we may be abiding by it implicitly. Because we think that if we can do it, humans should be able to do it. And if humans should be able to do it, then in essence, our actions tell everyone around us, whether or not we place them within a concrete ethical framework, that this is what we think is good and right. And whether we would want others to do what we’ve done is secondary to the fact that once we’ve done it, we suggest that humans can and should be able to do it, and if humans can and should be able to do as we’ve done, then this is what we deem acceptable for humans, as a whole. Even if we’re narcissistic enough to say that we alone should be able to act in a certain way, the reality is that we’re a human among humans, so the louder claim of our actions is “this is how humans should act”. We wouldn’t act as we do if we didn’t believe this.
I mentioned the philosopher Simone Weil a few posts ago (see “Simone Weil’s rootedness”), and her book, The Need for Roots. In that post, I mentioned my desire to meditate on her “vital needs of the human soul”. This post will be the first in a series where I’ll summarize what she says about each one and then share my own meditation on it. For Weil, these vital needs can be understood this way: (1) they are an attempt to answer this question: “what needs related to the life of the soul corresponds to the body’s need for food, sleep, and warmth”; (2) and they “must never be confused with desires, whims, fantasies or vices” (p. 8, Schwartz translation). While this may sound theological in nature, and for Weil it seems like there’s no line between theological and philosophical thinking, let me say that if the word “soul” is distracting, try to think of psychological well-being. Also, I don’t think one needs to assume the a soul/body or mind/body dualism to find value in this list. It’s common to speak of physical and psychological needs as distinct even if we believe that the mind/soul/psyche is material.
The list of vital needs First, let me share the list that Weil created. It’s fifteen items long, so this series may take some time:
Order
Freedom
Obedience
Initiative & Responsibility
Equality
Hierarchy
Honor
Punishment
Freedom of Opinion/Association
Security
Risk
Private Property
Shared Property (“participation in collective goods”)
Rootedness
The Need for Truth
The reason that I want to (1) summarize and then (2) reflect/meditate upon each is that I’m not sure if I agree with this list as a whole. As I re-read each one, it’ll give me a chance to critically evaluate what Weil wrote. If there’s space, I want to end my class “Philosophy for Human Flourishing” with a lesson on this list, so this gives me a chance to really evaluate it. Let’s begin with “Order”.
Summarizing Weil’s comments on “Order” Weil calls the need for “Order” “the main need of the soul” that is “the one closest to its eternal destiny” (p. 8). What does she mean by “Order”? Her definition is as follows: “a web of social relations such that no one is forced to violate strict obligations in order to fulfill other obligations” (pp. 8-9). For context, Weil begins the book (p. 1), “The concept of obligations takes precedence over that of rights, which are subordinate and relative to it. A right is not effective on its own, but solely in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds.” In other words, I can demand people recognize my rights all day, but if they feel no obligation to me then there’s nothing to the language of rights; and if I don’t feel obligated to others, then I won’t recognize their rights. As she said, “…a right that is not recognized by anyone amounts to very little.” Also (p. 1), “He in turn has rights when he is considered from the point of view of others who recognize obligations towards him”.
With a shift in our attention from rights to obligations, “Obligations are only binding on human beings” and “Identical obligations bind all human beings” (p. 2). Our identical obligations to other human beings means, “There is an obligation towards every human being through the mere fact that they are a human being” (p. 2). Her foundation for these claims is definitely theological in nature. She says that the obligations are not based on “de facto situations, or on legal precedent, or on customs, social structure or relations of force, or on the legacy of the past, or the supposed direction of history…This obligation is not based on any convention” (pp. 4-5). Instead, “This obligation is eternal.” Why? “It echoes the eternal destiny of all human beings.” Since, theologically speaking, the human is eternal, so our obligation to these other eternal being with which we surround ourselves. “This obligation is unconditional.”
When Weil describes our obligations to every other human, they include “not to let them suffer from hunger”; “shelter, clothing, warmth, hygiene and care for the sick”; and those things that are “not physical” but part of the “moral life” (p. 6). With this in mind, we see that “Order” means that making sure that people can fulfill their varying obligations to others. Weil mourns, writing “Nowadays, there is a very high degree or disorder and incompatibility between obligations.” But she’s not confident that this order is possible. She writes (p. 9), “Unfortunately, there is no method for reducing the incompatibility. It is not even certain that the idea of an order in which all obligations are compatibility is not a fantasy.”
She takes hope is the widely diverse universe working in a synchronized way, and “truly beautiful works of art” doing the same. But it seems to me that this is the best she can offer: a hope. She writes (p. 9):
Lastly, our awareness of our various obligations always stems from a desire for good that is unique, fixed and identical to itself for each man, from the cradle to the grave. This desire perpetually stirring inside us prevents us from ever resigning ourselves to situations where the obligations are incompatible. Either we resort to lying in order to forget they exist, or we struggle blindly to extricate ourselves from them.
If I’m reading her correctly, Weil is saying that we desire a world in which our obligations are not in conflict. This is a need of ours, even the central one. But it’s also one that may be “a fantasy”. We want a morally structured society. I presume that this implies that a morally dysfunctional society leaves us unable to experience this order that we crave
Reflecting on Weil’s comments on “Order” Every philosophical thought experiment from the trolly-problem on is a reminder that we live in a morally tense universe. As I wrote in my last post, “Effective Altruism and moral intuition”, there are moral systems that make a lot of sense but then when pressed, feel immoral at points. This is true of a lying deontologist and a hard-line utilitarian. But the desire that we have for such a framework is real, and if I’m understanding Weil, then maybe the constant striving for such “Order” is the best we can achieve.
Our pursuit of “Order” and our desire to create it for others is why every moral treatise and moral system has come into existence. We argue for our preferred morality in hopes of finding the morality that will work for all of us. This hasn’t happened yet but again, I think the goal is noble and what’s the alternative. Even if we concede some form of moral relativism, that’s a system, that’s a structure that we land upon in order to find “Order”.
Let me be brief (-ish) with this blog post. I’m preparing lessons for my new class, “Philosophy for Human Flourishing”. One of them will ask students to imagine themselves as a CEO of a pharmaceutical company that has the opportunity to make their company more efficient by implementing AI technology that promises to create more life-saving medicine quicker for cheaper. But this means laying off many of their employees. What should they do? I’ll break the class down into four groups, all responsible for making an argument from one of these four ethical paradigms: Aristotelean Virtue Ethics; Deontology; Utilitarianism; and Effective Altruism.
In preparation, I’ve been entertaining the arguments of the Effective Altruists and I find myself conflicted. (If Effective Altruism is new to you, here’s an introduction: Effective Altruism.org.) In short, Effective Altruism seems to universalize morality. It aims to be objective and rational, making moral decisions based on data. For example, many Effective Altruists, argue that while you could spend $1,000 on say a charity for researching glaucoma or for providing underprivileged students with sports equipment, you’re better off using that money for malaria nets, or vitamins, or vaccines, because charities that focus on these things save more lives. So, your charity is more effective. And following Peter Singer’s classical “Drowning Child Thought Experiment”, they argue that distance—geographic, in the original version, but even through time in some more recent versions—shouldn’t prevent you from saving a life. In other words, shared nationality doesn’t make someone more deserving. If you can save one American life with $1,000, but thirty in some country across the world, then you save the thirty. (This feels a little like the trolly problem.) There’s no denying that this is more “effective”. And it’s difficult to make the argument that something like shared nationality makes a life worth saving. This may be because I’m influenced by teachings like the Parable of the Good Samaritan, or because I fear the slippery slope of where such ideologies can lead, as various nationalist ideologies have shown us in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries!
On the other hand, something feels off about Effective Altruism. Morality that lacks relationally feels…immoral. It seems weird to say no to the homeless person standing right in front of you, looking them in the eye while denying them help, because that money will go further if sent to someone on the other side of the world. Ethnocentrism, nationalism, and such ideologies are dangerous, but does that mean that there’s no place for preferring “closeness”, for lack of a better word. I won’t lie: I’d save my son before saving hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of kids on the other side of the world. In fact, in some sense, by raising a young American, and knowing the cost it’ll take to do so, I’ve already chosen to spend money and resources on his one life that theoretically could’ve saved many, many lives elsewhere. And I feel like this is the right thing to do; I feel like my obligation to my son is greater, by far, than my obligation to people elsewhere. Am I hypocritical for this? It’s something that I’m pondering.
Yesterday, I filled a box halfway with books that I’ll be taking to Half Price Books this morning. Now, I’m a fan of Umberto Eco’s concept of the “antilibrary” where the unread books on our shelves remind us of all the knowledge that we don’t have and won’t acquire in this lifetime. If I could, I’d fill my house with books, read and unread. It would look like a library. It would elate and humble me. But I’m not the only person in my household who makes decisions about home decor, so there are limits to where books can be stored. This means that I needed to clear some space for the many new books that I’ve bought that have been stacking up on my desk—mostly philosophy books in preparation for a new class that I’m teaching next school year. Hence, the half-filled box that I’ll be taking to Half Price Books.
I chose mostly biblical studies and theology books. I didn’t touch my philosophy section. I didn’t touch my religious studies or American religion sections. I decided that only so many books on the Bible were needed, so that’s what I’m selling today. This decision reflects a change in my interest and even personhood over the past few years. I’ve struggled to teach students about the Bible in a way that confounds me. When I’ve taught courses on comparative religion, American religion, or even local religion (ala my summer offering “Religion in San Antonio”), it’s been easy to retain student interest and investment. And honestly, when I teach the Hebrew Bible, other than a lot of whining about “all the reading” (you signed up for a course on the Bible, kids!), it goes well. But every spring, the combination of the year drawing nearer and nearer to the end, along with self-understood “familiarity” (which is hardly any familiarity at all) that breeds contempt, and the fear of using critical thinking skills to evaluate something so sacrosanct as the Christian New Testament, I find myself struggling constantly with resistance to learning. Most of my educational training has been around the Bible, especially the New Testament. I’ve written ThM and doctoral theses on its content. I’ve presented papers at conferences about it. But nearly a decade of teaching it to adolescents has sucked the joy out of it. I enjoy teaching high school…just not the New Testament. And this has led me to lose interest in the very content matter that was at the heart of an undergraduate, two graduate, and one doctoral degree.
Is there another context where I could find myself enjoying the teaching and discussion of the Gospels or the Epistles of Paul again? Sure. I imagine an adult education class at a church, if I had the time or will power. But my experience in my context has so zapped me of interest in that material that I lobbied to reduce our two semesters of biblical studies to a single semester offering titled “Introduction to the Bible” which seems far more manageable for my students and me. I mean, to be fair, if students are going to learn about religion in high school—a privilege that many high school students don’t have or have only in contexts of indoctrination—I find it strange that they would spend all their time on the holy book(s) of Judaism and Christianity without even learning about Judaism and Christianity let alone all of the other religious traditions that are out there. Most of them aren’t going to seminary someday. If they stay Christian, as many of them are, they’ll hear the Bible through the comforting filter of sermons, which seems to be their preferred method of engagement anyway. (Sorry if this sounds bitter!)
This has led me to rethink other aspects of my personality and how I’m using my time. For example, do I want to remain a member of the Society of Biblical Literature? My son’s birthday will be every November, just a few days before Thanksgiving Break when the Society of Biblical Literature and American Academy of Religion meet. Do I want to spend my time at those conferences anymore? I’m not sure. I don’t want to hear papers on some micro-exegetical evaluation of a portion of the Gospel of Mark, that’s for sure. So, is membership and conference attendance a waste of precious time and money? It’s beginning to seem like it.
I’ve been through these transitions before. So far, they’ve always turned out well but they’ve left me with a pedigree that doesn’t match who I’ve become. Let me explain. In high school, no one considered me college material. At best, I would go to the local community college for some skills but I think that most presumed that I would enter the workforce when I graduated. The summer before my junior year, I became curious about the Pentecostal tradition that my mother was raising me in, and by default, I became curious about how to read the Bible “the right way”. The positive side to this is that I turned around as a student and graduated from high school, which was in doubt at times, and then went to a denominationally affiliated college because I thought I was going to become a minister in those Pentecostal circles. By my junior year, I knew this wasn’t going to be the case. I didn’t believe any of their core teachings anymore, so I bid my time until I graduated, looking for a new place to belong.
The negative side of this is that my undergraduate degree is from a truly terrible school. I will never step foot on that campus again. But my options weren’t Stanford or Cal Berkeley as I neared graduation. My options were workforce/community college or this denominational school and the denomination school did give me the skills needed to get into graduate school. So, I went to Western Seminary, which is loosely affiliated with Baptist churches but mostly brands itself as conservative, “big tent” Evangelical (compared with say the more “liberal” “big tent” of a Fuller Theological Seminary). I earned a MA and then a ThM (Master of Theology) from there. As I began my studies for my PhD, through the University of Bristol but facilitated by the Anglican school Trinity College Bristol, I began to experience a from of deja vu. Just as I had known that I wasn’t going to be able to stay in the Pentecostal circles that had raised and educated me, because I could no longer identify with them, so my time in Evangelicalism was drawing to an end.
The end of my doctoral studies were traumatic. As I neared the completion of my thesis (what they call a dissertation in the UK), a series of things went wrong and I began the job that I’m still working today, which was great because I had a teaching job, but made it extremely difficult to finish off my thesis. For this reason, my viva was a bloodbath. I had to spend the next several months making corrections to my thesis in order to graduate and in order to not fail my doctoral program. I pulled it off but something had changed forever. As much as I’ve tried over the years to regain some sense of myself as a biblical scholar, the confidence was gone. I hated my thesis, so I never could find the will to edit it further to try for publication. It sits as a PDF on my computer and as a lost book somewhere in the library of the University of Bristol. (By the way, the external evaluator who bludgeoned me to death during my viva: his books, which I’ve kept on my shelves all these years, are in the box that I’m taking to sell this morning!)
All of this has me thinking about one of my favorite concepts from Buddhism: anatman/anatta. It’s a complicated theory, but as Daniel Weltman summarizes it: “there is no persisting self—nothing about us that remains the same at all times.” (I recommend his explainer, “The Buddhist Theory of No-Self”, for those who want to know more.) While I don’t know that I’m on board fully with the idea of no-self or no consistent self, it makes a lot of sense experientially. Is the Brian LePort that thought he was going to be a Pentecostal minister the same as the Brian LePort who thought he was going to be an Evangelical biblical scholar who became a high school religious studies teacher in an Episcopal school? Yes but also in many ways, absolutely not. Those versions of me were necessary for the current version of me to exist, for sure. If I wasn’t under the delusion at age 18 that I was going to be a Pentecostal preacher, I wouldn’t have the job that I enjoy now at age 42. But also, the decision of the 18 year old to go to a school that trains ministers in a highly sectarian denomination forever limited to future options of the person that I’ve become and am becoming. It’s still on my CV and I’m sure that along with schooling from conservative Evangelicals, it’s caused people to write me off as a candidate for many jobs. I got extremely lucky that when I applied for my current job a decade ago, that chaplain who was heading the search has himself spent time in Pentecostal and Evangelical circles, so he was curious about me. I fear that a born-and-bred Episcopalian who’ve never given me a chance!
On the other hand, there seems to be hardly anything left of that kid that thought he was going to be a Pentecostal minister. If I could warp time and meet him, we’d likely agree that there’s no connection between the two of us. We’d have a hard time imagining that we’re the same person in any meaningful sense.
I’ve written mostly about the changes that came from transitions in and out of religious traditions and academic settings but there’s no doubt that other major events forever altered me into someone new, ranging from my marriage at age 27, to moving away from California and eventually living in Texas, to the birth of my son last November, to a major health scare that I experienced just this January. These types of events feel like when the butterfly comes out of the cocoon. There’s continuation but the discontinuation is what’s radical.
Am I a philosopher now? No. I’m self-trained. I’ll always have a more developed skill set for biblical studies than for philosophy but the biblical studies books are going to the store to make room for more philosophy because who I want to be now is someone who thinks philosophically. I’m not as invested in the project of creating human knowledge around/about the Bible as I used to be. It’s a noble endeavor, as all humanities work is, but it’s not my endeavor anymore. And while I’ll continue to teach a class on the Bible for the foreseeable future, it’s not my area of interest anymore, so I hope my philosophy class is a success! Who knows who I’ll be or how I’ll feel in a year from now. I’m sure there will be far more continuation than discontinuation. I’m a relatively stable and static person. But sometimes you need to make room for a new version of yourself by getting rid of that which is old. So, if anyone is looking for a good deal on some biblical studies books, go to Half Priced Books over off Bandera Road here in San Antonio. You’ll find some of my stuff there.
The philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943) is a fascinating character. (If you’re interested in hearing more, BBC Radio 4’s “In Our Time” did an episode on her: “Simone Weil”. So did Vox Media’s Sean Illing for his show “The Gray Area”: “Simone Weil’s radical philosophy”. I’m sure there are many more episodes out there not to mention articles!) Her book, The Need for Roots, is one that I’ve been reading through slowly. At some point, I want to write a few posts on what Weil considers to be the “vital needs of the human soul”. They’re sort of like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but for our psycho-spiritual condition. But here I’m meditating on just one—the one that inspired the title of the book: our need for rootedness.
Simone Weil
I’ve been thinking about rootedness for about fifteen years without always having a word for it. This is because fifteen years ago, I left my home in Northern California. I planned to return as soon as I could. First, I went to Portland, Oregon, which was delightful in many ways. I think I could’ve settled there though the constant drizzle that helps make Portland so beautiful can also be quite depressing. When my wife and I had been there three years, we prepared to move back to California but the opportunity that I thought would take me back home disappeared, and we had mentally and emotionally committed to leaving Oregon, so we made the fateful decision to go to where my wife was born and raised: San Antonio, TX.
I felt out of place from day 1. I’ve been here twelve years now, and I’ll admit, I continue to feel out of place. I feel like a visitor. And while I don’t want to speak for my wife here, just so the rest of what I have to say doesn’t sound too whiney, I know she feels about Northern California just as I do. But I must say that hardly a day passes where my mind doesn’t flash an image of Napa, or Sonoma, or Marin, or somewhere along the coast of the Pacific Ocean, or San Francisco. I spent my first twenty-seven years there and while I know I had to venture out, sometimes I wonder if it was the right thing to do, especially as it seems more and more unlikely that I’ll have an opportunity to return.
For some readers, I know this sounds like it reeks of privilege, as I complain about not being in the hoity-toity Napa Valley of my youth. I’ll concede that. But it doesn’t make the feeling go away. When you see yourself as a plant who has been pulled from the soil in which you grew, only to be replanted where you feel like nothing is familiar, it doesn’t matter where the original soil is. And I think Weil gives me philosophical justification for this feeling.
This is what she wrote about rootedness (p. 33):
Rootedness is perhaps the most important and least known human spiritual need. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being is rooted through their real, active or natural participation in the life of a collectivity that keeps alive treasures of the past and has aspirations for the future. The participation is natural in that it stems automatically from place, birth, occupation and those around them. Every humans being needs to have multiple roots to derive all their moral, intellectual and spiritual life from the environment to which they naturally belong.”
For Weil, to belong to a people in a place is a good thing because you share with those people a commitment to that place, to keeping “alive treasures of the past and…aspirations for the future.” I admit, I’m more concerned with what happens in Northern California, whether it be politically, ecologically, etc., than I am South Texas. I’m invested in that place thriving whereas the place that I live feels distant. Yes, I work here. I vote here. But every time I see a billboard that says, “Don’t California My Texas!”, I know I don’t belong here. Whenever I see the legislative priorities of Texas politicians, I know that I have little place in keeping alive such treasures. I’m a long time visitor.
Weil says that this rootedness is “natural”. I feel this. When I get off the plane at San Francisco International Airport, the sun hits differently, the world feels and smells better. Again, it’s like a root returned to native soil: it feels right.
Now, in a sense, my workplace was become a place of rootedness. In fact, it’s the only reason I’m in Texas. I know that as much as work should not bear too much of our life’s meaningfulness, that if I worked a job that I did find meaningless, even in California, it would impact my emotional wellbeing. So, because I find value in my job, I haven’t been willing to risk that to go home. Whether or not this is reasonable, it’s why in twelve years from now I might be in Texas still, continuing to feel out of place but oddly fulfilled where it really matters.
Though, of course, I doubt myself when I think of what “really matters”. Now that I’m a father, I have this strong desire to offer my son what was offered to me. I’m not necessarily saying what my nuclear family had to offer me. That’s a complicated story. But what my rootedness had to offer me: drives through the vineyards of the Napa Valley, summer trips to Stinson Beach, the majesty of wandering through San Francisco, a game at Oracle Park, but also the culture and values of everything Northern California, save Silicon Valley which I despise. These things are me. I’m an extension of that environment. Will the day come when I say to myself, “Those realities matter more than my 9-5!” Maybe. The tug is always there.
When someone is unrooted, whether traumatically or not, it changes everything. Weil claims, “Every military conquest results in uprootedness.” This isn’t just because a people may be removed from their home but because their home is irreversibly altered into something different. For Weil, every “milieu” of rootedness “should receive external influences not as an addition, but as a stimulus that makes its own life more intense.” In other words, “external influences” can “nourish” a people but it shouldn’t alter what it is that they share. Because of this, it doesn’t take a military invasion. As she says, “…money and economic domination can be such a powerful foreign influence that it results in the disease of uprootedness.” My mind goes to what Silicon Valley did to San Francisco. In many ways, it’s financed San Francisco into becoming one of the most amazing cities in the world; in other ways, the San Francisco that I knew even in the 2000s, and all that it stood for, seems to have mostly disappeared. The Napa Valley where I was raised is almost completely unaffordable for the working class. I guess this is what makes gentrification so disheartening for those who experience it.
The changes that Mammon has wrought on Northern California create a tension when I think of what I want to offer my son. In Texas, I can afford a home for him to grow up in. I can model for him fulfillment in a meaningful vocation. But Texas is, well, Texas. A man like Greg Abbott is Governor. Men like Ted Cruz and John Cornyn are our Senators. Our politicians demonize immigrants. They make the lives of women more and more restrictive to the point where we’re one of the “top 5 worst states” for women. It’s not a safe state for the LGBTQIA+ community. I have no pride in Texas. There are good people here. There are good Texans. I hope they reshape the state into their image but it’s hard to feel committed to this cause because I don’t feel like I’m part of it nor can I ever really be. I’m just one of those dangerous people who might “California” their Texas.
Again, as I said, I might be here in twelve years, working the same job, feeling the same feelings. But Weil is right that having a sense of rootedness is a serious spiritual (however we may use that word) matter. I hope if I stay, it offers my son more opportunities so that I can justify the decision. I hope that I’m not being selfish in needing to work a job that I find meaningful. We humans are complex. Adulthood is just a series is decisions where we can’t know if we’re making the right one. This weighs on me. Will I regret sidelining the spiritual nourishment of rootedness, if I don’t prioritize it?
The blog of Brian LePort 