Thoughts from Soren

Wishing and Hoping

            I met Mark Bernier at a philosophy conference.  Each of us read a paper about hope, so we naturally struck up conversation, and we agreed to trade copies of our most recent books.  I sent Mark my book, Why Faith is a Virtue, and he gave me his, The Task of Hope in Kierkegaard.

            Mark is a Kierkegaard scholar; I am not.  Parts of his book are given to arguing for his interpretations of Kierkegaard against other scholars.  Kierkegaard wrote many of his books under various pseudonyms, and in many cases the “authors” recount arguments made by fictional characters; it is an open question whether and to what degree the characters and pseudonyms speak for Kierkegaard himself.  It may be that Kierkegaard intended that his own views be hidden, that his real goal was to force readers to reflect for themselves.

            In any case, I’m not expert enough to adjudicate questions regarding the best interpretation of Kierkegaard.  My real interest in Mark’s book is not in technical scholarship but in the larger matter: hope.  Whether or not Mark’s interpretation of Kierkegaard best represents Kierkegaard’s actual thinking, does his reading of Kierkegaard offer insights into hope? 

            Consider the difference between a wish and a hope.  Both of these are what Bernier calls “pro-attitudes.”  That is, we desire the things we wish and hope for.  The difference between them is that we hope for things we think may happen, while wishing is not bound by possibility.  We can wish that past events had been different, but we cannot hope that past events were anything other than what they were.  Hope, as philosophers have often observed, implicitly contains an epistemic judgment that the thing hoped for is possible.

            Now, sometimes we hope for relatively unimportant things.  “I hope the Mariners win today’s game.”  “I hope we aren’t late for the wedding.”  “I hope the stock market goes up.”

            But some of our hopes are far more important.  They become central themes to our lives; they give meaning to our lives.  In Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne spends years planning and working to escape prison.  Kierkegaard asks readers to imagine a peasant boy who hopes to woo and marry a princess; the boy builds his whole life around this possibility.  Cortez burned his boats after arriving in Mexico; he hoped to conquer the Aztec empire, and he had no back-up plan.  We may call such hopes existentially crucial hopes.  (That’s not a term from Kierkegaard or Mark Bernier.  I made it up.  But it seems appropriate.)

            Existentially crucial hopes are not necessary ethical hopes.  Andy Dufresne’s hope to escape unjust punishment seems right, but Cortez’s hope to conquer the Aztecs was cruel and evil.  The embezzler’s hope that his crimes will gain him a life of ease and luxury is obviously immoral. 

            Hopes can be dashed.  I hope the Mariners will win tonight, and when they lose, I suffer.  Kierkegaard points out that this applies to existentially crucial hopes just as much as trivial hopes.  The peasant boy who has centered his life on his plan to woo the princess may one day realize that he will never succeed.  He is no longer a youth, the princess never noticed him; she has married a foreign noble, and she lives far away.  His hope is no longer a hope.  But, Kierkegaard says, it may remain a wish.  It is impossible that he will ever win the princess’s love, but he wishes that things had turned out otherwise.  In a sense, the peasant boy’s wish holds the remnants of his hope, and in those remnants the pain of his loss stays with him.

            Kierkegaard acknowledges that the boy may, as we say, “get over” his lost hope.  He may adopt other life plans.  It may be wise to do so, since by moving on he may lessen the pain of loss.  (I think that when a hope is existentially crucial, giving it up may be a crisis, akin to conversion.  In 1945, some Nazis committed suicide rather than live in a world without Hitler.   Their hope for a pure Aryan empire was gone.)

            Practically speaking, Kierkegaard says, it may be wise to surrender the wish.  But he advises against it.  The wish keeps the pain of lost hope alive.  If we use it rightly, the pain of lost hope will do us good.  Any hope that can be lost, thus transformed into a mere wish that things had gone differently, must be a hope directed at temporal things: escapes, marriages, empires, wealth, etc.  Therefore, a crushed hope may remind one—will remind one, if used rightly—that there is another kind of hope, a hope than cannot be crushed.

            True hope, which Kierkegaard calls “authentic hope,” is directed at “the eternal.”  By “the eternal” Kierkegaard means the God of Christianity, resurrection of the body, everlasting life, and enjoyment of God forever.  Mark Bernier, along with other philosophers, suggests that even if one does not identify the eternal in explicitly Christian terms, Kierkegaard’s advice may still be right.

            It’s interesting that Kierkegaard’s distinction between mundane hopes and authentic hope has a medieval parallel.  Thomas Aquinas distinguished between what he called the “natural passion” of hope and the “virtue” of hope.  Natural hopes aim at the goods of this world, while the virtue of hope, properly so called, aims at God and is infused in us by God.  As surprising as it might seem to us, it is possible that Kierkegaard never read Aquinas.  They may have come to remarkably similar notions of hope independently.

            Kierkegaard’s “authentic” hope and Aquinas’s “virtue” of hope direct us toward transcendent goods.  But this hope is hoped now.  The good that we long for is future, but the longing centers our lives in this world.  We build our lives around it, and it makes moral demands on us.

            The virtue of hope, “authentic” hope, cannot be an afterthought, a tag-on.  It must be, in the term I invented, existentially crucial.  Of course, this does not mean that many people today (and in Kierkegaard’s 19^th century Denmark) won’t treat eternal hope as trivial.  People live their lives, ostensibly committed to Christian dogma, while actually aiming at escapes, marriages, empires, and wealth.  They hope for these things—and heaven too, as an afterthought.  We should count it a blessing, Kierkegaard would say, that our mundane hopes are so often crushed and made into wishes, because the pain of our wishes may push us toward real hope.

Weird Hope

In That Day

In that day you will say,

“I will praise you, O LORD.

Although you were angry with me,

your anger has turned away

and you have comforted me…”

Isaiah 12:1

            The reader of this verse naturally asks, “What day? What is this ‘day’ the of which the prophet speaks?”  And: “Who is the ‘me’?  To whom is the prophecy addressed?”  The answers, as one would expect, are in the text proceeding, in chapter 11.  There, Isaiah prophesies of “a shoot from the stump of Jesse,” on whom the Spirit of God will rest.  The “shoot” or “Branch” will judge justly, slaying the wicked and delivering the poor.  The prophecy is aimed at a community, at Israel; the “me” is the whole nation.  But the promise is not for Israel only.  The whole creation will be redeemed:

The wolf will live with the lamb,

the leopard will lie down with the goat,

the calf and the lion and the yearling together;

and a little child will lead them…

They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain,

for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD

as waters cover the sea. 

In that day, the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples…

Isaiah 11: 6, 9,10

            The “shoot,” the “Branch,” and the “Root” of Jesse are taken by Jews as titles for the messiah to come, and by Christians as titles of Jesus.  The “Day,” then, is the eschatological day of salvation.

            In the biblical worldview, history is moving toward an end, the “Day of the Lord.”  History is not just a random sequence of events, not just one damn thing after another.  Nor is it an endless repetition of reincarnation or cosmic cycles.  The Bible teaches that God will intervene to bring about justice and shalom.  Therefore, hope has always been a crucial virtue for biblical people.  The Day of the Lord has not yet come, so it is a fundamental feature of our lives as believers that we hope for it.

            It is important to see that this forward-looking, hopeful stance toward God’s work in the future predates the New Testament doctrine of resurrection.  Christians are sometimes troubled by the lack of explicit Old Testament teaching about an afterlife.  They have been taught that the whole Bible is God’s book, so they expect Christian doctrine to appear everywhere.  And Christian preachers often feed this expectation by finding prophecies of the messiah all over the Old Testament—and by reading Christian doctrines, such as the doctrine of the resurrection, into Bible passages that say nothing of them.  The fact of the matter is that the Old Testament is ambiguous when it comes to the idea of a personal afterlife.  The notions of individual resurrection and a personal afterlife gained widespread popularity among Jews in the Hellenistic period, roughly 300 BC and after.  In Jesus’ day, resurrection was a matter of theological debate.  The Sadducees, stickers for the actual words of the Torah, denied resurrection.  The Pharisees believed in it.  Jesus, for all his conflict with Pharisees on other matters, sided with them emphatically.

            My point is not to question the doctrine of resurrection.  Jesus’ teaching settles the question for Christians.  The point is that hope was fundamental to Israel’s religion even before belief in resurrection.

            Christians, when thinking about hope, often start with resurrection.  It is entirely appropriate that we do so.  Jesus’ resurrection is at the heart of Christian preaching.  Without the hope of resurrection, Paul says, Christians deserve to be pitied.

            But Christian thinking about hope must not stop with resurrection.  We must be especially careful not to reduce hope to a purely individual matter.  Christianity is not just “Jesus and me, a love story.”  Hope was an integral part of the biblical mindset before belief in individual, personal afterlife.

            Israel hoped—and therefore Christians should hope—for “that day.”  Jesus preached repentance because the “kingdom of God” was near.  Jesus’ term, “kingdom of God” (or “kingdom of heaven”), was rooted in Old Testament promises of the Day.  In Jesus’ ministry the kingdom of God was actually breaking into the world.  When Jesus preached to Palestinian peasants, time was bending; the future Day was present now to those who believed.

            (By Jesus’ “ministry” I mean to include his teaching, his miracles, his deliberate gathering of disciples in anticipation of a death he openly predicted, his crucifixion, and his resurrection.  New Testament theologians often speak of his “ministry” in this inclusive way.)

            What do we hope for, when we hope for “that day”?  First, social justice: a lifting up of the poor and punishment for powerful and rich people who have oppressed them.  This theme echoes in Mary’s prophecy about her son (Luke 1:52-54) and in Jesus’ own preaching (Luke 3:16-21).  It almost goes without saying that the “day” will be a time of righteousness; as Paul says, the kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Spirit.

            Isaiah’s prophecy widens our perspective.  “That day” will bring an earth restored; or better, an earth renewed: “a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1).  Isaiah envisions predators living in harmony with erstwhile prey, and children playing with wild creatures.  Shalom between people will parallel shalom in the creation.

            A mind-boggling vision, to say the least!  Would a leopard be a leopard if it weren’t a carnivore?  Isn’t meat-eating essential to the form of leopard?  Isaiah’s prophecy presses on our imagination.  How could these things be? 

            For many people, it is just as difficult to conceive of human beings living in peace with each other.  Isn’t egocentricity essential to our being?  We maintain ourselves as selves by excluding the other.  A superficial “peace” can be made by military force, so long as the superior power holds the lesser powers down.  But can there be real shalom?

            I am stressing the “weirdness” of Isaiah’s prophecy to emphasize the thoroughgoing nature of biblical hope.  Biblical hope looks forward to “that Day.”  It is, to use Jonathan Lear’s term, a “radical” hope.  We hardly know how to express it.  We cling to it even in dark times, when the earth seems broken by pollution and society torn by hate.

           

Illustrating Different Kinds of Hope

Baseball Hopes

            Howard and I had a few minutes in the office.  He asked how I was doing, and I reminded him that I’ve been reading and thinking about hope.  Knowing of my interest in baseball, he laughingly suggested that Cub fans might be the epitome of hope.  So it’s time to write of baseball hopes.            

Right from the start, we need to admit that some people—otherwise sane, kind, faithful, good people—do not like baseball.  As inexplicable as that may be, it’s true.  I’ve heard non-baseball fans say, “Baseball is boring,” with apparent sincerity.  Non-fans do not agonize over the failures of their favorite them.  Non-fans think it strange that we fans spend significant parts of the summer agonizing over players who get hits 25% of the time while rejoicing enthusiastically over those who get hits 31% of the time.  Non-fans think that a 0-0 game lacks “excitement” (even it it’s the eighth inning!).  I do not offer an explanation for these facts; I merely acknowledge them. 

If you, dear reader, are not a baseball fan, you should probably just move on to a different essay.  This one won’t interest you.  On the other hand, you may be interested in philosophy and moral theory.  In particular, you may be interested in the virtue of hope.  But if you hate baseball… well, you’ve had fair warning.

In earlier essays, I divided hopes into three kinds: mundane, extreme, and radical.  Mundane hopes aim for ordinary goods of this world.  Extreme hopes aim at goods (of this world or of another) which seem very unlikely.  Radical hopes expect good things in the future, even when we don’t have thick concepts of what that good future would be.  Illustrative examples will help:

Mundane hopes: a woman hopes for a promotion at work, a student hopes for a good grade, a city councilor hopes for strong tax revenues and no budget-busting emergencies.  Extreme hopes: a injured man alone on a forest road hopes for help to come before he dies of exposure, a cancer patient hopes that the experimental drug will cure her, a lottery player acknowledges the extreme unlikelihood of winning the jackpot but hopes to win anyway.  Radical hope: Chief Plenty Coups leads the Crow people to hope for a good future, a future in which they will still be distinctively Crow, even though he recognizes that their way of life is irrevocably changed.  Some religious people have radical hope in regard to death, in that they acknowledge they have no concept of what an afterlife would be like, yet they hope that the universe, or karma, or God will cause a good future after death.

Now, how do these categories apply to baseball? 

First, we must acknowledge that hope is crucial to baseball.  In baseball, more often than not, hitters fail to hit.  Fielders make errors (which are duly recorded like demerits).  Pitchers give up runs; the higher the pitcher’s ERA, the worse he is.  The best teams lose at least a third of their games.  The season is so long that almost all players suffer injury; in many cases this means missing games on the disabled list.

Failure, injury and defeat: baseball players have to cultivate hope just to stay in the game.  But enough about them.  What about the fans?

Fans of some teams exemplify mundane hopes.  They hope their beloved Cardinals, Giants, Phillies, Red Sox, Royals, or White Sox will win World Series or, failing that, to at least make the playoffs.  In any particular year, the odds are against them, but these are reasonable hopes.  All these teams have won the World Series since 2005 (the Giants three times).  As of today, all these teams are doing fairly well, so their fans’ hopes for a 2016 championship are intact.  (Phillies fans are, of course, deluded.  Their players have over-performed stunningly.  The Phillies will come back to earth.  Any day now.)

Fans of other teams exemplify extreme hopes.  By this stage in the season, late May, the Angels, As, Padres, Rockies, Reds, Marlins, and Brewers have fallen far enough behind the leaders that their fans’ hopes are on life-support.  They hope that the latest rookie call-up will be like an experimental drug—a miracle cure.

Fans of the Braves and Twins aren’t hoping for miracles.  Their teams are so bad and so far behind the leaders that they have shifted the focus of their hopes.  Their hopes are radical hopes, that maybe the team has better young players down on the farm.  Or that the team will choose brilliantly in the free agent draft this June and bring in great new talent.  Or that the General Manager will somehow trade a relief pitcher to one of the contenders and receive a haul of young players in return.  Or that the team will get sold to a new ownership group, and they will hire a whole new front office.  Or…  Radical hope sometimes clings to a belief in a good future even when it doesn’t know what that good future would be like.

In 1969 the Seattle Pilots joined the American League.  They were terrible, but I was too young to realize this.  In mid-summer I still hoped they could win the division.  I nagged my father to promise we would go to a Pilots game if they made the playoffs.  How should that ancient naïve hope be categorized?  That next winter, the Pilots fled Seattle, to become the Milwaukee Brewers, and in 1982 the Brewers played in the World Series.  This did nothing to console Pilot fans.

What about the Cubs?  In the 108 years since they won the World Series, the Cubs have played in the post-season 16 times.  They lost nine times in the Series, the last time in 1945, and they lost seven times in the playoffs, the first time in 1984 and the last time in 2015.  Now, reaching the postseason 16 times in 108 years is not so bad; on average, once every seven years.  But losing all 16 times?  There is a special aroma to Cubs fans’ hope.  But the Cubs are really good this year.  They’re in first place.  Maybe…

Hope spring eternal for baseball fans, even for Mariner fans.  (The Mariners came into existence in 1977, partly as an inducement for the City of Seattle to drop its suit against the American League over the loss of the Pilots.  Maybe that is an example of radical hope coming true.)  My favorite team has never won the World Series, for good reason: it has never played in the World Series.  In the 40 years of Mariner existence, they have reached the postseason just four times.  (Once every ten years, so Cub fans have nothing to complain about.)  The Mariners are pretty good this year, and they leading their division.  Maybe…

There is one kind of baseball fan that totally escapes my categories.  Yankee fans do not hope.  They regard World Championships as a birthright.  They are surprised only when they do not win.

           

Trees and Hope

Planting a Tree

            I want to talk about planting a tree as a symbol of hope.  But first: there is a sense in which all human activity springs from hope.  Does that seem overstated?  A woman rises from bed, stumbles to the kitchen, and starts the coffee machine.  How could such a mundane action arise from hope?

I have often written that hope is a “syndrome,” typically composed of several aspects of a person’s soul.  But within that syndrome, two things are always true.  First, hope looks with desire.  Second, hope looks at possible things (neither certain nor impossible).  Putting the two together: hope combines appetite (we want the thing) and intellect (we judge it possible).  It can be argued that these features are present in all human activity.

All action aims at some good, or to avoid some evil, which means preserving good.  We would not choose the action if we did not desire the good or desire to avoid the evil.  We would not choose the action if we did not believe that our action would achieve the desired good (or at least increase the chances of achieving the desired good).  We simply do not act unless we hope that our action will move us toward some outcome we think good.

But what about that barely-awake woman fumbling with her coffee machine?  Does she exhibit hope?

I am not claiming that automatic physiological events are hopeful.  After the woman drinks her coffee, her stomach and intestines will process the beverage whether she wills it or not.  Caffeine will have its desired (or undesired) effect on her blood vessels.  Her kidneys will shunt off liquid to her bladder.   Her heart will beat quite independently of her conscious decisions (a bit quicker, perhaps, because of the caffeine).  And so on.  None of these normal bodily “activities” count as actions in my claim that all actions arise from hope.  Actions are what agents do voluntarily.

But the woman, as we imagine her, acts out of habit.  How can something as unthinking as turning on a coffee machine count as hopeful?  Well, habits generally grow out of freely chosen behaviors.  People do not use coffee machines automatically; they have to learn how.  (As a non-coffee drinker, I learned how to use the coffee machine to please my wife.  Clearly, a hopeful activity!)  When the woman began her habit of using the coffee machine, she did so with the expectation of getting some good.  She built her habit with hopeful actions.

            Now if the woman really has, by daily repetition, made her coffee machine rendezvous into something equivalent to the functioning of her kidneys, then we might say her morning ritual has lost its hopeful quality.  (We could imagine that she does it while still asleep.)  But this is only because it is no longer an “action” as I am using the word. 

            So: in a very broad sense, all actions are hopeful.  We choose because we hope.  When we despair we cease to act.

            What does this have to do with planting trees?

            Trees have a natural life span, in some species, much longer than we have.  To plant a tree is, in many cases, to aim at a good that will not be fully realized in one’s lifetime.  To plant a tree is to hope for a good that will be enjoyed by others.  (Of course, one may hope to enjoy the tree for oneself, but in many cases those who plant trees acknowledge that the lasting, greater benefit will accrue to others.)  Planting a tree, then, can be a symbol of a certain class of hopes, hopes that look beyond one’s lifetime, hopes that look forward to goods that others will enjoy. 

            Hopes differ according to the thing hoped for.  When we plant a tree, we hope (at least if we recognize the truth of trees) for an earthly good that reaches beyond death.  Planting trees symbolizes solidarity with coming generations whom we do not know.  To plant a tree can be a meaningful way to bless those who will come after.  It is a symbol of the good we hope for.

            That does not mean that every tree is planted virtuously.  In 1994 Karen and I took the boys on vacation to the redwoods of California.  We came back with two redwood seedlings, which we planted in our front yard.  A couple years later, Karen removed one tree, because the fast growing trees were already interfering with each other; we had planted them too close together.  The remaining redwood grew magnificently.  By 2007 it was over 50’ tall, towering over our house, and its roots threatened our foundation.  We had planted too close to the house.  And so, paying the arborist handsomely, we lost our tree.  The stump revealed a large split in the trunk of the tree; if not removed, the tree might have fallen in a storm and crushed our house.

Aristotle wrote that all the moral virtues must be gained by practice under the guidance of phronesis, practical wisdom.  The planting of our redwood tree may have been a symbol of hope, but it was not done wisely.

Whenever we act, we act in hope.  Sometimes we act out of generous hopes, and we hope that our actions will bless future people.  But we need to think about our hopes.  It is possible to misplace our hope or mismanage our hopes.  The redwood tree that no longer stands in front of our house is a symbol too.

           

              

On "Legend"

The Last Man Theme

            In 1954 Richard Matheson published a science fiction novel, I Am Legend, which introduced Robert Neville, a scientist who has survived the end of civilization.  Matheson’s story has been made into a movie three times: The Last Man on Earth (1964) with Vincent Price as the lead (but renamed Robert Morgan), The Omega Man (1971) with Charlton Heston as Neville, and I Am Legend (2007) with Will Smith.

            The root idea is that an infection has decimated the human race, killing the vast majority and turning almost all of the survivors into a horror.  In the novel and the first film the infected survivors are vampires, Matheson’s story giving a scientific twist to traditional vampire mythology.  In the 1971 version, the infected people are nocturnal albinos, and in 2007’s version they’re called “Darkseekers.”  In every iteration of the story the infected people avoid sunlight and attack uninfected people.  Robert Neville (Robert Morgan in the first movie) spends much of his time killing the infected people.  In the early versions this means driving stakes through their hearts (since they are vampires), but by the time we get to Will Smith’s Robert Neville he can kill them with explosions or gunfire.  Between battle scenes, Neville (Morgan), who is a scientist in every rendering of the story, seeks a scientific explanation of the infection.

            Zombie stories, recently popular in The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead, parallel the “Legend” story in their post-apocalyptic setting and the fighting between the infection-created monsters and uninfected humans.  But the Dead stories lack the “last man” aspect of Matheson’s novel and its film offspring.  And it is that aspect of the story I wish to explore.

            In the novel, Neville is literally the last man; in the end, he loses the fight against the vampires.  They capture him, and Neville comes to see that they fear and hate him much as he fears and hates them.   In the last scene, while awaiting his execution, Neville realizes that he will be remembered by the new vampire race as a mythological figure: “I am legend.”  In the Vincent Price 1964 version, there is no acceptance of the new dominant species.  “Morgan” dies cursing the vampires as “freaks”; he says that he is the last true man.

            In the 1971 Charlton Heston and 2007 Will Smith versions, “last man” takes on a new meaning.  Dr. Neville seeks not just to understand the infection, but also to find a cure, an injection that will protect the uninfected from death or becoming monsters—maybe even a cure for those already infected.  In the end, he finds it; a vaccine can be made, but only by using Dr. Neville’s blood.  The discovery comes too late for Neville: in Omega Man he dies, arms outstretched in a crucifix position, while handing a vial of his blood to a survivor, who presumably will use it to save the remaining humans.  In I Am Legend, Neville finally solves the problem just as the Darkseekers are breaking into his laboratory.  He gives the vial of blood to a woman and child who had joined him during the story and hides them in a coalbunker.  Then he detonates an explosive that kills the invading Darkseekers and himself.  Next day, under the protection of sunlight, the woman Anna takes Neville’s blood to a survivors’ camp where it will be used to stop the infection.

            The 1971 and 2007 editions of the story turn Matheson’s “last man” on its head.  Instead of accepting, however begrudgingly, the advent of the new race (as in the novel), or cursing its triumph (as in The Last Man on Earth), the Heston and Smith versions make Neville into a Christ figure, who dies to save the human race.  The symbolism is especially graphic in Omega Man, when Neville bleeds to death with arms outstretched.  I Am Legend doesn’t make the symbolism so overt; Will Smith’s Neville dies in an explosion rather than in a crucifix position, and the title doesn’t refer so obviously to Christian theology.  In both stories, however, it is clear that Neville’s sacrifice has saved the human race.  It’s not clear whether that salvation includes the already infected “monsters”; maybe the vaccine can reverse the disease, maybe only protect the uninfected.  Dr. Robert Neville doesn’t rise from the dead, but he saves humanity from death.

            What a strange mash-up of ideas!  Matheson’s story and the first movie give us the end of the human race, replaced by vampires.  Omega Man and I Am Legend give us a Christ figure, dying to save humanity.  But what a Christ!  In every version violence abounds.  Neville (Morgan) blasts away at the vampires/albinos/Darkseekers with a great variety of weapons and a great deal of gusto.  He fears them and hates them.  It’s as if Jesus were a 1^st century Zealot, killing Romans as fast as possible.

           (As I noted, in the novel, Neville comes at last to a kind of acceptance of the vampire triumph, an ending intended to increase the horror of the story.  In an alternate ending to I Am Legend, Neville makes peace with the attacking Darkseekers.  Now his blood can still save humanity, but Neville doesn’t have to die.  Is this peacemaking Neville a better Christ figure?)

            The great story is Christ’s story.  We can’t seem to get away from it.  Often, of course, we corrupt it.  We want Christ to save us, but we want him to do it our way, with lots of guns and explosions.  Sometimes we reconcile ourselves to the idea that Christ died for us; life from death gets us deep in our subconscious.  But we have a very hard time reconciling ourselves to the idea that we killed Christ.  We are the vampires, the Darkseekers.

MacIntyre, Nietzsche and Rorty

Locating Stories

            Alasdair MacIntyre’s book, After Virtue, has deeply affected my thinking—and my ambitions as a writer and philosopher—since I first read it in 1993.  After that first taste, naturally I read Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, and Dependent Rational Animals.  MacIntyre inspires and pleases, but not through style.  His sentences are often long, complex, and dense.  I sometimes warn students expressly to not write like MacIntyre.  No, MacIntyre is important for his ideas.  Here is a passage, from p. 216 in the 2^nd edition of After Virtue.

            A central thesis then begins to emerge: man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal.  He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth.  But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”

            MacIntyre here is expressly disagreeing with philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche or, more recently, Richard Rorty.  Nietzsche thought that we create ourselves through the expression of will.  Weak people, frightened by the moral vertigo of creating values, give themselves false consolation by accepting “slave morality,” the safe conformity of English utilitarian gentlemen.  (“Man does not seek happiness,” wrote Nietzsche.  “Only the Englishman does that.”  His scorn for careful philosophers such as Mill and Sidgwick sparkles.)

            Rorty takes a slightly different line.  We deceive ourselves, Rorty thought, if we succumb to the idea that our stories can be true.  Nietzsche apparently thought that his “will to power” doctrine was actually true.  We should be ironists, thought Rorty.  We ought to recognize that our deepest feelings and values are historical accidents.  If we had been born in another century or society, we contemporary liberals would have celebrated the torture of animals and the public execution of heretics.  We ought to regard ourselves as poets, says Rorty.  The poems we write are our lives.  We should not judge a poem or life as true, but as interesting.

            No reader of this blog will be surprised that I side with MacIntyre, not with Nietzsche or Rorty.  MacIntyre says that I can only write my story—that is, my life story, told through actions—if I can locate that story inside another(s).  Nietzsche and Rorty would be quick to respond that my siding with MacIntyre merely expresses my preferences, my own will-to-power or my own “poetry.”  They would assert such claims, but is there reason to believe them?

            MacIntyre gives an argument for his position.  It’s long and complex, so I will summarize.  1. The concept of “action” is unintelligible apart from background concepts.  2. One of the background concepts for “action” is the concept of narrative.  3. Therefore, I cannot understand the actions I make without understanding narrative.

            Perhaps the summary is too short to do much good.  Maybe an illustration, MacIntyre’s own illustration, will help.

            Imagine that someone points to a man and asks, “What is that man doing?”  Here are some possible replies: “He is digging with a shovel,” “He is planting turnips,” He is getting exercise,” “He is gardening,” “He is pleasing his wife,” and so on.

            (The “and so on” here is intriguing.  Logicians and philosophers of language have taught us that for any possible physical event there is an infinite number of possible descriptions.)

            Do you see MacIntyre’s point?  We do not know how to describe a human action without reference to intentions, beliefs, and narrative.  The man is not pleasing his wife unless he believes that she wants him to plant turnips.  Planting turnips in spring is a very different thing than “planting turnips” in dead of winter; the lack of a proper narrative makes certain descriptions of actions literally incredible.  What would you think of a story that began with the next sentence?  “The bachelor resigned while feeding his wife.”  Words like “bachelor,” “resigned,” and “wife” are essentially narrative concepts.  They bring story with them.

            The concepts of human action, intention, belief, and narrative form what I call a “concept nest.”  Each notion is defined in terms of the others.  Like a bird’s nest, the various ideas support one another.  Someone might worry that this creates a self-referential loop in the concept next, a vicious circle.  But the worry is unfounded.  We do in fact understand the various terms in a concept nest.  Each term helps us understand the others.  Gradually, by learning the connections between the concepts, we learn the whole.

            A few years ago, in a blog post in Story and Meaning, I confessed one of my intentions in writing fiction.  I want my stories to cohere, to make sense, in the light of the great story.  Stories give background to values.  My stories are full of good and evil: good people, bad people, and lots of people who struggle with virtue and vice.  I want my stories to be “good” stories in two ways.  I want them to be about good and evil.  And I want them to be good in the sense of enjoyable to read.  (The jury is very much still out on that.)

            We all author our own stories, our own lives.  However much I want to write good stories, I’m much more concerned that I write a good life story.  The way to do that, MacIntyre says, is to find the story in which mine is a part.  The great story of Christ backgrounds and overarches us all.

Another hope essay

Personal Hope

            My mother-in-law is dying.  Nearly ninety, she has congestive heart failure and diabetes.  Her kidneys aren’t working properly.  She cannot stand; she cannot sit up in bed without assistance.  The doctors have recommended hospice care and pain management; there is no medical intervention that can restore her to health.  Betty and her daughters, including my wife, must decide whether to accept the doctors’ advice.  They know that the hospice decision probably means Betty will die very soon (perhaps with less pain and psychological distress).  They also know that Betty will probably die very soon with or without hospice care.

            Betty’s situation—and that of her family—is not unusual.  Today, and every day, thousands of American families face the imminent death of a loved one.  Someday I will die.  Unless death comes suddenly by accident, criminal act, or natural disaster (the sort of thing that might garner a headline), the people who love me may have to make hard decisions about my care.  Like Betty’s daughters, they will decide while experiencing grief.

            What hope is there in the face of death?  Specifically, what hope is there for the person who is dying? 

            Death puts stop to our ordinary projects.  The “hope theory” and “hope therapy” promulgated by C.R. Snyder and his fellow psychologists are silent here.  I intend no criticism of hope theory/therapy; I simply point out that Snyder’s theory focuses on ordinary projects in this life.  There is no “pathway” around death; it puts a final block to all of one’s goals.

            Tough minded naturalism tells us to take heed of the finality of death.  There is no hope for those who die.  The best one can “hope” for is to come to the end of one’s days without regret.  Naturalism advises: live life as best you can now.  It hardly needs saying that naturalists do not agree on what living well now entails.  Epicureans and Stoics—and their philosophical descendants many centuries later—have opposing and plausible doctrines to preach.  But they agree that personal hope does not reach further than the grave.  An individual may hope that humanity or some portion of humanity might achieve some long term good, but she will never know if her hope is fulfilled or frustrated.

            Certain religious and philosophical worldviews offer a kind of hope to the dying person.  These views emphasize the solidarity of the human race.  The dying person may believe, on these views, that she is one aspect of universal consciousness; after death she will be free of individual consciousness.  On some accounts individual consciousness is an illusion anyway; we will be glad to abandon it.  The dying person can hope for unity with the universal spirit.  Of course, “universal spirit” will mean different things for different religions and different philosophers.

            The monotheistic religions offer a more robust hope for the individual.  The God of Abraham is a personal being (three persons according to Christianity) who knows each of us intimately.  These religions teach that by the power of God a person may live after her death in some form or fashion.

            (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam also agree that God is just.  What will God do with the wicked in an afterlife?  Who are the wicked?  How can a human being be justified before God?  There are at least a dozen significantly different doctrines relating to divine judgment.  I will ignore these questions and focus on the believer who hopes for an afterlife.  I will assume that the believer has met whatever qualifications there are for a good afterlife.)

            Betty is a Christian.  Christian hope centers on the idea of resurrection.  Every Easter we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, and we believe that Jesus will raise from the dead those who believe in him.  Betty can hope that some day she will have a new body.  The New Testament somewhat mysteriously calls this a “spiritual body.”  Paul uses a metaphor: just as the seed we sow in a field gives rise to a plant that seems very different from the seed, the body we “sow” in death gives rise to a body that will seem very different from the ones we are now.  “The dead shall be raised and we shall be changed.”

            There are at least three aspects to Christian hope.  First, Betty hopes for a life after death in which she will still be Betty.  That is, resurrection offers a personal hope, not an impersonal blending into the universal spirit.  Second, Betty hopes to be changed.  The resurrection body will not only be better than Betty’s worn-out body of the last few months; she hopes it will be better than her most active and healthy body (the body she had as a young mother, perhaps).  Third, Christians also hope that we will be changed; that is, we hope for a changed community, the kingdom of God.  Betty does not merely hope that the kingdom will come; she hopes to participate in it. 

In Romans 14, Paul says that the kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.  He meant his words as a description of how life should be in a Christian fellowship here and now.  Too often, we know, our churches are not exemplars of righteousness, peace, and joy.  In hoping for the resurrection, we hope to live in a perfected community under God’s rule.