Living Life as Heroes and Saints in tomorrow’s Democracy

  GEORGE TEMPLETON: COMMENTARY  

By George Templeton

Gazette Columnist

“First everything is quiet, a breath of air from lips and tongue.  Then the sound makes the world wild.  One, two three more, we can do more, much more.  Let’s do more, much more.  Let’s say more.  We are more.”  Ane Brun

There is hope.  We have elected an educator for Superintendent.  The public does not want to privatize education.  We have a moderate Democratic senator.  More women and racial minorities have joined the “Good Old Boys” league.  Now we have to focus on civics, critical thinking, and understanding that knowledge shapes reality.  We should elect those who educate us, supplying all the evidence so we can make informed decisions.  We should deny the con artists who try to manipulate us to achieve their personal ends.  We should see that the really important challenges are more than “us” versus “them” and that for me to “win” you do not have to “lose”.

Power and Persuasion  

Empathy and persuasion are soft power’s peaceful mechanism.  Is it really true that nice guys finish last?  Let the best man win!  But competition between groups leads to distrust.  Life is about striving, but when it is predominantly competitive, it becomes brutal.

Today’s global problems are complex.  Their solutions require interdisciplinary knowledge, but that is less important than power in the eyes of those who value independence and authority.  Military and economic warfare are the tools of hard power in a world that is a “dangerous place”.  Only it can defeat the four horsemen of the apocalypse.  The phrase, “balance of power”, recognizes the instability in arms races.  Was mutual assured destruction (MAD) worth the risk?  History shows that politics based on individuality leads to war.  Force turns people into things.  The only thing that stops its expansion is a superior counter force.  We tolerate crimes against humanity, genocide and war, though they destroy human meaning and value.  Do righteous ends justify violent means? 

An Unusual Cult

We have to choose between the personality cult so evident at Trump rallies and the creative possibility that lies outside.  The self-sacrificing statesman may not live to see the Promised Land, but his covenant goes on.  Life finds a way.  When you travel the world you experience many answers to life’s questions.  But they are not independent.  We are social beings.  We must “live” life’s questions.  If we are lucky, we will find our meaning by the time we reach our end.

A Divided Society

“Do you believe in a personal God?”  People who want a society that agrees with their personal faith ask this question.  The Christian leader, Jerry Falwell Jr. tweeted that the US needs street fighters like Trump at every level of government to destroy liberals.  His Liberty University collaborated on a two million dollar film, The Trump Prophecy, now showing in theaters that feature prayer instead of popcorn before the show starts.  There can be no ambiguity or contradiction in what “God said”.  Eternity in paradise is sufficient reward.

Professor Francis Ambrosio’s course, Philosophy, Religion, and the Meaning of Life takes on special significance in the light of today’s polarization.  He cautions us that history teaches us “to be on the lookout for wisdom’s impostors:  dogmatic fundamentalism, unyielding totalitarian absolutism of every kind on the one hand; ever shifting, elusive relativism and corrosive skepticism on the other, offering no solid ground on which to take a stand.”  To learn from history and the wisdom of our forefathers we must “make ourselves at home in the no man’s land between the false security of certainty and a casual promiscuity of indifference”.

Hero or Saint?

There are two fundamentally different paradigms for understanding the meaning of life.  The first is heroic, based on honor, admiration, respect, and performance.  Heroes do not sacrifice their own lives. They answer a solitary call, win against overpowering force, and aid their community.   The second is saintly, based on unconditional trust, love, gratitude, and humility.  The saint has a personal relationship.  He forgives his enemies.  Saints need not be Catholic.  The roles of hero and saint are difficult to inhabit simultaneously.  Dustin Hoffman’s 1992 movie, Hero, depicts this tension in a humorous way.  Citizen heroes trace their heritage to Plato’s Republic.  The secular saint can be found in the writing of Dostoevsky.  Is our president a hero or a saint?

Will we be heroes or saints?  We are endowed by our Creator with life and liberty.  Other countries admire our generosity and gratitude.  We are not envious of them.  We are not entitled to our privileged status.   We do not fear that others are unfair to us.  The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius explained this.  “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”

Living Mysteriously

Life is a mystery, but is it absurd?  It seems silly to think we can coerce people into loving us when the bombs that kill them carry our signature.  There are reasons to worry about the future of our children.  Have we done all we could do?  A loss of meaning lies in the fundamental ambiguity of human consciousness.  It is there in mathematical axioms and the meaning we bring to numbers.  It is there because there could be black swans, in spite of the fact that we never have seen one.   We are like the prisoner who tries to dig himself out of jail using a stolen spoon.  Consciousness is the only tool we have.

The force of technology has fractured the world promoting the rise of individualism, first in the Protestant Reformation, then in the rise of nation states, and now in America First.  Science has not abandoned Newton’s mechanics in favor of Einstein and Bohr’s.  The old way worked for going to the moon.  The new paradigm has to encompass and explain the proven old way, not eliminate it. 

Searching for Meaning

All we have are relationships.  Yet explanations are powerful because they point toward learning.  Suppose we were condemned to life instead of death, to forever relive our shame, heartbreak, and regret in an unchanging infinite loop.  Knowing this, would you amend your life’s posture?  Perhaps you would say “yes” to life and be more serious about it.

Self-fulfillment is not selfish.  It has a historical, philosophic and religious moral core.  It has facts and faith.  Life interrogates us and the answer is us regardless of which we accept.  There is more in the question than in anyone’s answer.  Knowing that we do not know is the greatest wisdom.  The question gives us personhood and the end of the individual self.  We are entangled in the ground of the hero and saint.  We are free to choose, but can one freedom live with another?

When we openly live in the human question we are truly free.  It was different yesterday and will be different tomorrow.  Doubting is not allowed when there is only one way.  Knowledge refuses faith.  Understanding opposes curiosity.  Questions recognize uncertainty.  Gratefulness promotes respect.  Power is greater than moral strength.  We profess with our mouths and deny with our deeds.

Keeping Tradition Alive

My friend explained that he voted a straight Democratic ticket, as did his family, father, grandfather, and so on, back to the time of Andrew Jackson.  Since those days, the political parties have flipped, but many of the issues regarding the individual versus the collective remain.  They are about our country, not just personal feelings.  They are about policy, not friends.  If we have friends, there must be those who are not.  It is a small step to make them enemies. 

A giant tree started from a tiny seed.   Nature had a goal for that seed.  There was the soil, water, and sunshine that it needed to grow.  Do you suppose that our lives strive towards a quality that is largely independent of situations?  Is it possible that we are born liberal or conservative?  There is a season for everything, and a time for every purpose under heaven.  Shouldn’t we try to find and nurture our purpose?

Understanding Humanity

Is it nature or nurture?  Jonathan Haidt, an ethics professor in the Stern School of Business, explained in his book, The Righteous Mind, that liberals and conservatives have different moral instincts.  Conservatives have a broader more balanced moral pallet than liberals do.  Liberals are educated, industrialized, rich, and Democratic.  Conservatives must be ignorant, agrarian, poor, and Republican.  But this requires an arrangement of the facts.  Do we disagree in the depth of things or because of our gut feelings? 

Is it moral for a nomadic tribe to leave the old folks to die alone on the ice because they have become an intolerable burden to their family?  How about our elderly and their economic impact on our society?  Have they earned their keep?  Aren’t the difficult moral decisions individual choices between wrong and wrong?

Why is it not O.K. to have sex with a dead chicken?  Is it O.K. to defecate in a urinal?  If your dog dies, why not eat it?  Haidt claims that your answers reveal the seeds of your moral pallet.  For most people it is not rational.  It’s not in the Bible or Immanuel Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals.  Morality is an excuse for feelings.

People risk their lives to save a stranger.  Do they have a gene for that?  If so, where is it located and what is its code?  Biological evolution has explanatory power, but it remains a theory because it cannot be falsified or replicated.  Moreover, the scientific method, the undisputed reason for mankind’s progress, fails its own criteria.  The bond that unites us is more than genetics or statistics.  It is empathy, respect, and cooperation.

Mankind is a process.  He is a “function” of variables.  Understanding him depends critically on how they are selected.  They need to be authentic, measurable, quantifiable, and independent, while situated by circumstance in time and space.  This is easier said than done.  The philosopher Nelson Goodman struck at the heart of this when he presented the paradox of Grue Bleen.  We understand things by how we classify them, but that flips in time.

We often study groups by drawing a sample and conducting a statistical poll.  The focus is on the most probable value.  We interested in confirming our good performance, but the entire concept can be turned upside down to focus on what is deficient.  It will not be popular, though it might help more than hubris.

We can place bounds on uncertainty, but not eliminate it.  You might conclude that your product is bad when it is good (error type 1), or you could conclude that it is good when it is bad (error type 2).  These points are connected by a mathematical probability curve that requires you to design for which risk you most want to avoid.  It’s an abstract shell game engaged in by the buyer and seller.  Is it fair? 

Life’s not fair!

Reciprocity is fairness in a “win-win” business deal.  When people feel cheated they want more than justice.  They want revenge.  Does fairness play any role in the meaning of our lives?  Isn’t our quest to do the very best with the hand that has been dealt us, recognizing that we have limited power within and beyond ourselves?  Isn’t it enough that we are free to decide who and what we are, and how we will act within the existing constraints? 

It is paradoxical that morality both binds and blinds.  Women reason morally according to an “ethic of care”.  They understand that family members are interdependent.  This is the narrow minded ethic of liberalism.  Conservatives tend to think that the law is morality.  “America First” takes an independent view downplaying ties to others.   Business has a transactional morality.  Flag waving identifies a morality based on duty and service.  But television wraps the Cross in the American flag.  That’s more than duty.

Bad Guys

Why is there evil?  Jung explained that “…evil is the shadow side of good, forming an inseparable whole with it…  Good and evil do not derive from one another, but are always there together.”  We externalize evil instead of being wary of the pride and hypocrisy in ourselves.

Social chaos nurtures belief in the “end times”.  It gives current events special meaning.  The “other”, identified as the Antichrist, causes violence.  Pope John Paul II recovered from his “fatal” wound as only the Antichrist could do.  The mark on the head of Mikhail Gorbachev was proof.  The deviousness of Henry Kissinger branded him.  Ronald Wilson Reagan’s six character name is a satanic code.  President Obama was the Antichrist because the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr spoke to him more than the rapture, tribulation, and millennium.

The fall of the Word

We hear opinions and see perspectives, not the truth.  Social conflict, based on facts and constructive argument, is good, but what about lies, hatred and propaganda?  The more information we have, the less we trust it.  But then we demand more information to sort things out.  This feedback loop is driving us nuts.  The repetition of a simple idea creates false complexity.  Some of the most difficult problems known to man are perhaps unsolvable, but they have been stated simply.  Seeing is believing, because it came earlier in the evolution of the brain than written language.  How will we recognize fakes?

Researchers have created a Generative Adversarial Network, where a computer creates an original fake video and another tries to detect it.  The computers communicate with each other, working to get better at their assignments.  On their own, they rapidly learn how to digitally make fakes that cannot be detected.  Perhaps our saving grace will be found in the fact that tweets cannot replace the world’s great literary works.

Founding Fathers

Democracy, the most fragile form of government, relies on the appreciation and judgment of its citizens.   Were the Founding Fathers heroes or saints?  The question may not be answerable or even appropriate.  It is difficult to have faith without belief, but faith is not certainty.  It requires a component of skepticism.  If we believe in democracy and the American way, how do we act out our faith?  Remember, it is what life extracts from us, not what we get from life, that matters.