Mutuality

 

Reflections on a Trip to Mexico

            I spent eight days on a service trip to Door of Faith Orphanage in Mexico over spring break.  In just three days since returning, I’ve been asked repeatedly about my experience.  If for no other reason than to respond to friends’ questions, I need to think about it.

            Superficially, not much happened.  It took a day and a half to drive to La Mision and equally long to return.  Our service to the orphanage consisted mostly in cleaning kitchens, trash removal, painting rooms in the older boys’ dorm, and small repairs.  In the afternoons, some of our group (children and young adults) played soccer or basketball with children from Door of Faith.  One afternoon I gave chess lessons to Humberto, an eight-year-old boy who knew how the pieces move but little more.  Next year I plan to take a chess set with me, to invite kids to play each day of the visit.

            On a deeper level, I learned about mutuality.  That is, I learned a little, not everything.  I suspect I have much more to learn.

            When American Christians go to foreign countries on short term mission trips, they face not-so-subtle temptations to think of themselves as superior in some way to the people they serve.  It’s easy to think we know the right way to do things (build buildings, pave roads, fix plumbing, etc.); in some cases, we actually do know how.  Feelings of spiritual superiority can infect us as well.  In our minds, they are victims of poverty (often they are poor), ignorance (the children attend school every day), and lack of proper planning.  We think: they should listen to us.  They should do it the way we do it.

            But teaching and learning is a two-way street.  We have much to learn about how things work in Mexico.  (I’m sure the same is true of other countries.)  Our team’s leader, John Laney, lent me a book written, in part, by one of the directors of Door of Faith, Reciprocal Missions.  The title captures much of the thrust of the book.  The spiritual benefit of short-term mission experiences flow both ways.  We serve and are served.  We teach and we learn. 

            Back at GFU this week, my honors students discussed Whose Religion is Christianity, by Lamin Sanneh and The Next Christendom, by Philip Jenkins.  These authors confront their readers with facts on the ground that upset the expectations of many people.  The Christian movement grew rapidly in the second half of the 20^th century, and it grow not through the imposition of European structures (the colonial era died in the early 20^th century) but through indigenous discovery of the gospel.  (Sanneh identifies translation of the Bible into local vernacular languages as a crucial factor.)  In the 21^st century, world Christianity is not mostly white or European or North American or rich.  Most Christians are brown or black and poor.

            Our mission trip to La Mision exposed me, for just a week, to the majority church.  Of course, one instance of Christian ministry in just one country gives only a tiny window into the world church.  But it’s better than ignorance.

            Sanneh argues that we must be open to the possibility that God is doing something in the world.  We should not try to explain away the explosive growth of the majority church with the tools of 19^th century sociology and philosophy (according to which the global church resulted from colonial impositions and will fade away through the power of modernism).  The majority church is not the “global” church (European churches multiplied everywhere) but a truly “world” church, rising as people encounter God revealed in Jesus.

           

Policies, Prayers, and the President

 

Praying for the President

 

            In 2016, I quit the Republican Party because it nominated Donald Trump for president, and I’ve never voted for him.  I make this first point to establish my “never Trump” bona fides.  I thought then, and think now, that Donald Trump is morally unfit for the office.  Nevertheless, now that he is president, it is my duty as a follower of Jesus to pray for Mr. Trump.  How do I do that?

            It’s possible, of course, to offer “generic” prayers for political leaders.  I can ask God to give some office holder—mayor, congressperson, governor, president, etc.—wisdom and courage to seek justice and shalom.  I can ask that the eyes of the powerful and rich be opened to the needs of the weak and poor.  And so on.

            But what about specific policies pursued by a political leader?  How should I pray for a legislator who wants to make “death with dignity” easier?  (I recently learned of an effort in Oregon to greatly weaken legal safeguards around assisted suicide, which would increase deaths from depression and, I think, move Oregon significantly closer to involuntary euthanasia.)  Do I pray for God’s guidance and blessing for the leader while also praying that her policy be defeated?  It seems I should.

            I pray, then, for God to guide President Trump into the ways of justice and shalom.  I rejoice that Mr. Trump has publicly said he aims to broker peace in places of conflict, including Gaza and Ukraine.  Naturally, I pray that God give the president success in peacemaking.

            But how does Mr. Trump aim to resolve these conflicts?  In the Gaza case, he publicly proposed that the Gazans (about 2 million people) move to Egypt and/or Jordan, so that the US could take possession of Gaza and turn it into a Rivera-like resort.  Regarding Ukraine, he invited Zelenskyy to the White House, where he berated and insulted him on live television.  Before and after the infamous meeting, Trump adopted Putin-like language about the conflict, calling Zelenskyy a dictator and assigning responsibility for the war to Ukraine.  Apparently, Trump thinks it’s their fault the Russians invaded.

            If Trump had offered to move 2 million Gazans to the US (we have lots of land in Nevada and Utah that looks superficially like Gaza) so the US could develop an Eastern Mediterranean resort, then we might have taken his proposal seriously.  Two million immigrants would be a much smaller proportional burden on us than on Egypt and Jordan.  But Trump doesn’t want immigrants to the US if they might be a burden.  Trump’s Gaza proposal strikes me as fantasy thinking.

            The Ukraine case may be even worse.  The news services today report that Russian government spokespersons have happily endorsed Trump’s rejection of Zelenskyy.  It seems to them, and more and more it seems to me, that Trump has simply adopted the Russian analysis of the Ukraine conflict.  To wit: Ukraine is not a real country; historically, it was and should be a part of greater Russia; therefore, any move by NATO to include Ukraine or support its continued independence amounts to an attack on Russia.  The real cause of the war was Ukrainian refusal to submit to Russian rule.  Thus, the way to peace is for Ukraine to sell minerals to the US and trust that Russia will abide by a ceasefire.  (Trump’s friend Putin would not interfere with US economic interests in Ukraine—right?)

            As a follower of Jesus, I must pray for peace between Israel and Gaza and between Russia and Ukraine.  I must pray for Donald Trump.  Should I pray that God give success to Trump’s policies that seem hopelessly inadequate to the task?  Should I pray that foolish policies be defeated?  (The policies seem foolish to me, but perhaps I am wrong.)  Should I pray that Trump’s thinking change, that he and his advisors find new policies to pursue?

           

Some Amost-Platonic Reflections

 

Beauty in Community

 

            Sarah and I attended a concert by the Oregon Symphony last night.  It’s an annual event in Newberg, made possible by a foundation grant from A-DEC (Austin Dental Equipment Company, one of the biggest employers in Newberg), Ken and Joan Austin.  The concert came at the end of a long day; I was tired and prone to distraction.  Gradually, though, the music concentrated my mind.

            Music displays beauty.  That’s an interesting fact, since we also find beauty in what seem to be very different modes.  Nature gives us visual beauty in trees, flowers, a star-strewn sky, and many other images.  We see other examples of visual beauty in paintings and photographs and yet another in human bodies.  And there are abstract beauties: a mathematical proof, a move in chess (a move that, more than merely solving the problem, solves the problem elegantly), a scientific hypothesis, or a philosophical vision.  Somehow in all these ways—and others—we find beauty.

            According to Diotima, the wise woman who explained eros to Socrates (in Plato’s Symposium), we start our exploration of beauty by noticing individual beauties, the beauty of bodies.  We become aware that all the particular beauties share in the form of beauty, and then we recognize Beauty in abstract things like laws and institutions.  If we climb higher on the ladder of love, we realize we desire not just this or that beautiful thing but Beauty itself, the form of the Beautiful.  Then, in good Platonic style, we move to love of the highest form, the Good.

            There’s another feature of a live concert.  I suppose—though I am not well-enough trained to have noticed—that the sounds I heard last night were not perfect.  That is, the musicians, move than sixty of them, did not play the notes exactly as written by Rachmaninoff.  It’s easy to imagine one of them chastising himself for an error in timing, tone, or volume.  We might imagine an edited recording, in which a technically brilliant and musically adept team of recording experts “fix” all the errors.  And it’s easy for us to imagine a supercomputer programmed to translate Rachmaninoff’s score into an error-free rendition of the piece.

            As a matter of fact, much of the music we hear on television, radio, and through our iphones partakes of this “manufactured” quality.  It’s music as background.  We hardly notice.  (The advertisers and algorithms pay attention to it, even if we don’t.)  Is it beautiful?

            Listening to the Symphony I became intensely aware: this is a live performance.  All those people, more than sixty of them, are collaborating to produce this experience of beauty for me.  That is, for us, all of us here in the auditorium.  The performers practiced, of course; in combination, in total, for hundreds of hours on this piece of music.  And before that, they trained themselves for thousands of hours (each of them) to attain a symphony level of excellence.

            As I listen, all that preparation is past.  Right now, here, they are collectively giving me/us this experience of beauty.  Consider how amazing this gift is.  In the listening I enter beauty.  According to Plato, I enter Beauty itself and through it into the Good, if only temporarily.

            (Do we experience Beauty and the Good via manufactured music?  Plato didn’t have to defend his philosophy in an age of computers or synthesizers.  What would he have said?)

            Much of this meditation would apply equally to a solo performer.  The musical soloist also gives the listener an open door to Beauty.  The Symphony is a collaboration, a community, which adds another layer to the beauty of the music.  As I listened, I could watch the players as they concentrated on the score before them (while also watching the conductor’s movements) and translated the musical notation into sounds.  Visual details added to the sense of collaborative beauty.

            When walking my dog, I am often grateful for visual beauties in the world I see.  Today I am grateful for the aural beauty of the symphony.

           

 

Reflections on Dependency

 

Philosophical Bits #5:

Vulnerability and Rationality

            Alasdair MacIntyre influenced late 20^th century analytic philosophy, especially moral philosophy, with three notable books: first, After Virtue; second, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and finally, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry.  He was a leading voice in what is often called the revival of virtue theory.  MacIntyre’s historically informed analysis of moral philosophy in the modern period—his persuasive argument that what he called “the enlightenment project” could not succeed—greatly shaped my thinking and lecturing from the time I first read his books in the 1990s.

            In 2004 I read another book by MacIntyre: Dependent Rational Animals.  I’ve been thinking about themes and implications of that book for twenty years.  MacIntyre invited philosophers to take seriously our nature as human beings.

            We are all born dependent.  Every human baby must receive care and nurture from adult human beings to live.  Near the end of life, many or most of us will need nursing care from others.  Between birth and death, we are never more than an accident or injury from needing emergency care from others.  All this just to maintain bare physical life. 

Our psychological well-being depends on receiving touch and attention from adults.  We need other people to teach us how to dress ourselves, how to speak, and how to interact with family members, strangers, and persons of authority.  We need other people to teach us how to read, to use tools and machines, and to calculate.  Every vision of the good life for human beings requires other people to provide the individual with materials, ideas, skills, and training.  Notice that even in fantasies like Robinson Crusoe and Castaway the isolated person takes with him, in his mind and memory, the benefits of his upbringing.  As social creatures we are dependent creatures.  If an isolated person can maintain his life, it is only because he holds within himself gifts of learning and training for which he was dependent on others.

Philosophers, even more than other people, ought to recognize our indebtedness and dependence on other people.  I did not invent logic, or the clever systems of symbols philosophers use to analyze arguments.  (In logic alone, consider concepts such as proposition, negation, implication, contraries, contradictories, validity, etc.)  I did not investigate the history of thought, nor did I create the thousands of arguments and counter arguments by which philosophers provoke one another to pursue truth, beauty, and the good.  Philosophy begins in wonder, said Plato, but wonder alone brings one only to the edge of the ocean of thought; swimming in that ocean is made possible only by engaging with the thinking of others.  If philosophers today are able to advance our discipline or create any genuine wisdom, we do so as minds shaped by the conceptual gifts of others.

Dependency implies and creates vulnerability.  We need other people, but other people have the power to threaten the good lives we want to live.  Sometimes threats are near and obvious, as when others steal our possessions, assault us physically, or kill our loved ones.   Other times the treat can be large scale, as when an authoritarian government stifles inquiry by enshrining some theological or ideological doctrine as “the truth” and compelling everyone to assent to it.  At still other times, the threat comes not from criminals or a government, but from the latest social or philosophical fad.  Group think can happen on a large scale.

Thus, even a little reflection on our dependent and vulnerable nature introduces questions of political philosophy.  How can a society encourage adults to care for children?  How can a polis discourage theft, fraud, violence, and threats of violence?  How can society encourage open discussion and criticism of even popular ideas?  How can a polis discourage such acts between citizens without endorsing/establishing some comprehensive account of the good life for human beings?  Note: this last question owes its form to John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice.

Rawls says we can understand our pursuit of justice—the first virtue of political philosophy—through social contract analysis.  We do not have to agree on some comprehensive theory of the good life (Jewish, Muslim, atheist, Platonic, Marxist, Christian, etc.) in order to agree on basic rules of justice.  Instead of a complete vision of the good life, we adopt those rules that everybody (from behind the “veil of ignorance”) would agree to for his or her mutual benefit.  Rawls endorses religious freedom and a liberal political order: limited government, rule of law, and civil rights.

Will Rawls’ vision of a just society work?  Maybe.  In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? MacIntyre introduces the concept of competing traditions of rationality.  It is not enough to say that such and such a theory or argument is “rational,” because different traditions of rationality will endorse competing definitions of the terms, problems and decision procedures that make up rationality.  But, MacIntyre says, this does not mean we are left with epistemic relativism.  Every tradition of rationality has its own internal problems.  (A tradition with no problem, a tradition that has an answer for every question, is a dead tradition.)  If, in the competition between two traditions, one can show that it has the resources to solve the problems of the other tradition—as understood by that other tradition—it thereby demonstrates its superiority to the second tradition.  In philosophy of science courses, I have pointed out the parallel between MacIntyre’s argument and Thomas Kuhn’s argument in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  MacIntyre’s rationality of traditions parallels the rationality of a scientific revolution.

How can/should we persuade each other in social and political debates?  Is it possible to rationally persuade?  Yes.

First, we must identify and describe the problem in a way that our interlocutor endorses.  The other side needs to know that you understand the problem the way they do.  Second, we must show that our “solution” (including the reasons we give and the implications we draw from them) will solve the problem as understood by the other side.  The basic invitation is this: If we look at it this way, we can solve the problem; let’s do it together.