Making Nobody Happy

Jesus didn’t die to fix something about the laws of his country, or the collective consciousness of his country or conventional attitudes. He didn’t die to adjust social mores or social stigmas or historical imbalances. He died to save individual souls. He died to bring the dead back to life. He died to free people from the individual burdens of their own sin.

Because that is where suffering lives, that is sickness lives, that is where power lives (for good or evil), that is where life springs forth, that is where goodness and beauty live. This shift toward the significance and primacy of the individual, in responsibility, in sovereignty, is terribly important. People live short, often insignificant, limited, little lives. And the world is vast. The world of human society is vast. Your part in it arises and passes in the blink of an eye. How can you claim that that is where any significance dwells, that the world of meaning begins and ends with the expression of your little life?

I think the answer is, you can’t. Unless you believe that some transcendent value has been placed upon individual human lives, that there is some preciousness to them, endowed in them by an ultimate purpose of which they are a beloved part. Unless they bear the image of something transcendently holy and significant. Unless something has made the smallest stories as sacred and eternal as the vastness of time and space.

Jesus did not come to empower anyone. Power is neither good nor evil, but is simply a measure of how strongly either nature can be expressed. Deliberately seeking of power, even for the good but most especially for yourself, has a corrosive effect on the human heart. The best causes have been corrupted and brought down by their desire to secure power for their noble ends. Power adds reach and force behind human action and human instinct. And the easiest instincts, those quickest to join you, are anger, fear, jealousy, resentment, and pride. Seeking and venereting an accelerant will favor those feelings that are quickest and most urgent and easy to sieze upon and rely upon.

Jesus came to serve. To give himself up. To draw close with others. To spend time with them and talk with them and eat with them and teach them. He was the most worthy to rule all, but chose instead to serve all. He did not consider it beneath him. There is something hidden there in his example. A warning that we may not have the right idea of what we need or how we should fix the world. That maybe it is ourselves that need fixing. That maybe power lives best inside service and love, in the hands of God, not in our hands.

It’s tricky figuring out what the message of Jesus means in our world today. Jesus taught us the pathology of our own worldly power and natures, and he also taught us the pathology of our righteousness. He showed us how our best efforts to serve the good could be all for nothing and even make the problem worse. So what is the pathology of the world today? What is its sickness? And what does it mean to seek Jesus as its cure?

These days, media has changed a lot. For one thing, the news cycle is continuous. For another, it’s remarkably granular. Things that would never have gotten into the news at all, much less outside the local news, can be pulled from every corner of the country and fed into the attention machine, thanks to smart phones as both gathering and delivery systems. It’s like having the entire country under surveillance. And anything bad that comes up anywhere we can feed to the hungry populace.

Another effect of the changing media is that a lot of reporting and editorializing is done by non-professionals. The anonymity of the internet and the speed of the news cycle means you’re usually just getting a “hot take” that was done from a distance, and no one suffers any consequences if their facts weren’t quite accurate (which is often the least of its problems). You get armchair journalism that doesn’t cost anyone anything. You read a bit about something and shoot off your mouth a bit and move on to the next thing elevated to your attention. And the environment favors those who can churn out the most provocative ve content the fastest, so shallow provacteurs of all stripes are the primary beneficiaries and gain platforms they might otherwise have never had in previous years.

The culture of safetyism arose during the formative years of the media transformation. Before the age of smartphones. It changed and transformed over time into a new kind of phenomenon, or maybe not a new phenomenon but one with a remarkable new level of reach and influence. The ability of every person to carry a constant stream of emotional/moral narratives around with them allowed the existence of people to be defined by them (and by people and events at a much greater remove from them than ever before) in a much larger proportion to their daily life and their experience than was ever possible. You can live your mental life inside the structure of the new media. You can do the majority of your significant information gathering, thinking, discussing, reacting, and responding all within the confines of the digital world (or a part of the real world that has been heavily conditioned and informed by it).

That’s a new thing. That’s a change to the structure of how people learn and think and reason and react and evaluate all kinds of things about the world. It’s an entirely different rulebook and ecosystem. And we look at our world and wonder what’s happened to it, what has changed, how things got to be the way they are. And the answer is so plainly right in front of our eyes. It’s just something we did to ourselves. Maybe almost inevitably, considering what people are like and considering how the changes in technology and media have changed the way our innate architecture operates. People stare at the world through their phones and are so stimulated and aroused to anger and fear and concern and outrage. And they wonder how the world got so bad so fast and why they seem to be helpless to do anything about it, despite the amount of emotion they spend against it.

And they never seem to consider that the mechanism, the entire ecosystem, may actually be part of the problem. That at least part of the source of so much misery may actually be the very system by which they become aware and seek to confront it. That just by participating they’re actually driving things deeper and deeper into the problem.

The problem with the internet and social media especially is that it favors a particular category of information. Moral/emotional content. Not just one or the other, but both. Research shows that sharability correlates with moral/emotional content. And a quick list of the most viral words you can use reveals that almost all of them are centered around expressing or provoking concern, outrage, fear, anger, contempt, and disgust. As Yoda said, they’re not stronger, but they are quicker, easier, more seductive. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. And the narrative of the fight is the easiest one to quickly market in an environment where you may only have a single headline to gain the interest of a potential reader (and maybe only a few sentences to make your point). It’s hard to stand out in a sea on content, so you need to make your content and pithy and demanding of attention as possible.

I’ve read a few good books on the subject of how the way we receive information and the way we process information don’t line up properly. It’s a tricky subject, because the issue isn’t whether the data is correct, the issue is with how the data is gathered and how it is interpreted and acted upon (or reacted to) by people. That makes it very hard to argue with either the fact or people’s very strong feelings about them. And the urgency people feel in hearing it all justifies the work of the “journalists”, commentators, editorializers, pundits, and so on. It proves that people want to and need to hear about it. And they dig and dig to find anything else that will feed the narrative they’re marketing to, the story, the scandal, the danger, the outrage.

The problem with the way information, especially moral/emotional information is exchanged today is that it corporatizes it. I don’t mean that it reduces it to a means to make money, although money does get brought into it. Keeping your channel afloat means drawing views, and views mean revenue. Even if you aren’t in it for the business (and so many people and entities in the environment are), you’ll soon be in business even if you didn’t intend it, or have to be if you want to keep making an impact. The system is awash with money, it’s a fully commoditized process. The temple court is full with the tables of the merchants and money changers.

But, no the money isn’t what I mean. And this isn’t a criticism of corporations. They can be very useful and productive and powerful. But they come with certain structural challenges that just arise whenever you crate a social machine of that nature. And although we have some awareness of what those dangers are when it comes to big business, we’re less aware of how those dangers arise in the context of the social machine that is modern media and the trade in moral/emotion narratives.

So what do I mean by saying that this structure corporarizes moral/emotional information? Well first off, it pools power while removing those who wield it from the proximity of the things upon which it will be used. We all know the stereotype of the big corporate manager who doesn’t really know the people in their company and doesn’t care about them, maybe doesn’t even know what’s going on, they get reports and data drawn from across this huge company and make big decisions about how things are and what needs to be done. And they can fire hundreds of good people without ever needing to see them or work with them. They have access to a huge pool of data and collective power, and they can wield it to great effect. But they also do so with a lot of anonymity and I personality and distance that’s very different from, say, a small family business. Your bosses don’t know you and don’t care about you, except as an abstraction (a good or bad worker), and deal with you as an abstraction rather than as a person. The world they look over is so big, they can’t really bother (and realistically have no time) to consider small details about the granular realities of individual employee’s work. They just care about the numbers.

Social media has essentially turned us all into big corporate vice presidents of our own media moral/emotional media empires. We gather the numbers from across a vast swathe of people and places specially selected for our attention. We don’t know them, we’re not concerned with the details, except those that serve our bottom line or harm it, we don’t have to work with or live with any of the people. And the kind of power we wield is at a great, impersonal distance from its objects. It’s very different from the kind of intimate knowledge and experience and authority we have when dealing with, say, ourselves in our daily lives, or the way we treat our families, our kids, or our coworkers. It’s also different from the of efficacy we have in those situations. We’re embedded and invested, and we also have skin in the game. We can’t make sweeping or casual pronouncements or actions against others without some real cost to ourselves. In the corporate world, and in the world of modern media and social media, you don’t have to worry about any of that. You can safely make all the easy judgments and shoot all the arrows you like at people you’ll never meet. Having tangible risk and having a tangible investment in the lives of people around you but over whom you may have little control (neighbors, family, coworkers) affects how you will behave. It affects the information you get, how you interpret it, how you act on it. Moral/emotional content may arise less often or more often, it depends on your life and the lives of those around you. Statistically, it will probably be less extreme on average than whatever content get presented to you through the media. My average day tends to be pretty banal and involves a lot of basic things like work and errands and taking care of my kids and having various mild encounters with other people doing the same things. But somewhere in this nation of 350 million, there’s something crazy going on. And thanks to the immediacy of internet media, I can be right next door to it. Every single day. And that freaks me out. And that means I need to find out more about these dangers, seek them out even more, ferret them out, get fed more examples. And the world of experience and the amount of new channels for gathering and disseminating information are so big that they will be able to capture whatever it is I’m looking for. They probably won’t capture much more than what I was looking for. All those fine details and humanizations and especially perspective (all the extra stuff that isn’t part of the data that I was selecting for) gets left out.

The problem is, much like the so-called “junk DNA”, all that extra fluff that in previous times ande of the bulk of our daily information stream was actually pretty important. The junk DNA affects how the coding DNA is expressed. And it’s the same with all that baseline banal information. You mind is set at a level where it expects to have a certain reach for daily information gathering, gauges the general state of things based on the baseline values of what’s going on around you (95% pleasant, banal interactions focused around everyone’s daily lives), and judges the overall need for arousal and stress levels and reactions by those measures. Your mind is a bit like an ant colony. They receive information that provokes chemical signals from the ants, that provoke responses from other ant, or even from the whole colony. Most of the time it’s things like “there’s food over here, why don’t we get it” or “I need help carrying this thing”, but sometimes it’s “there’s a whole bunch of fire ants about to eat our whole colony alive”. It is possible for the whole colony to be going about their business peacefully or for the whole colony to be aroused for battle and be weaponized, depending on whether the chemical stimulus is there. We humans have stress reactions and fear reactions that affect our thoughts, our attitudes, our reactions. They affect how we see other people and how we respond to stimuli. They weaponize us. They weaponize out normal, working mental structures and instincts and ways of processing and responding to information.

So what would happen to the ant colony if you gave every ant in that colony a little chemical emitter that passed on the signals from every ant in the entire city, so long as it passed a certain threshold of urgency? What would happen to the colony? Well, first off, messages of a certain urgency would be favored and would quickly dominate. You would see a lot of upset ant running around like crazy. All the little subtle information, all the locally meaningful signals, would be drowned out and lost in a sea of urgency. There would be a lot of distress with a lot of unclear unfocused action. Ants would be going nuts about perceived threats that, while real, were not relevant to their individual situation, and were not representative of the general stage of things and the attitude they should take to it. They would probably get a lot less of the real day to day work done, and even if they did would be terribly stressed, because their emitters would be telling them they were in a sea of danger and enmity. They would have a very hard time sorting out when they really were in danger too. They would have a hard time figuring out what they actually needed to do for their actual colony, because their means for gathering important information and exchanging it and reacting to it had been radically altered. They would likely become quite obsessed about the signals coming from their emitters, so urgent and constant, and would miss out on what was actually, quietly happening around them. And if there was anyone who had a way of profiting from their attention to engagement with their little emitters, you can bet this would all be to their liking. Would the eggs get hatched, would the food get gathered, would the colony prosper from their new knowledge and connection? How would it affect their relationships with world around them, with other colonies? Remember, nothing they’re hearing is false. All we did was alter the scope and means for how their signals are gathered and distributed. We didn’t change anything about them or about the world itself.

In fact, that’s the problem. We radically altered how we gain and process information, but we didn’t alter ourselves or the world much and how they work. We’re onto just starting to catch on that we may not be able keeping up with our own cleverness and the ways we’re changing the world. We’ve changed the environment around us drastically, in both physical and mental spaces, and it’s hard for us to adapt to it because our instincts and mental and emotional structures, our means for assessing and drawing conclusions about the world around us, were made for a very different process. We keep wondering how people changed so much, or how the world changed so much. But the truth is, people haven’t changed, and the world hasn’t changed in its nature either. What’s really changed is the medium between them, the way that we access and understand and react to the world and ourselves. We sort of took for granted that the pipeline itself was a neutral entity, and what it was carrying was what was changing or what was receiving it was changed. But I think we need to seriously consider whether the pipeline itself, how it works, is not a neutral matter. It isn’t of little substantive significance how it works. It’s not just that it’s a little faster moving or draws from a broader reservoir, or that it does it in a slightly different means. It’s a massive change to the whole landscape of human interaction, and one we were not entirely prepared for. At the least, all it took was the right circumstances for it to have some major unforeseen results. Because we didn’t understand the inherent risks and challenges and distortions. We were already living with some version of them, in a lesser form, before, in fact we have been for ages. We just took it so much farther than anyone had ever dreamed, to impossible to imagine places.

But surely, we say, it’s better to know? Better than to stick our heads in the sand? Surely there are vast challenges that present themselves collectively, before which an individual focus seems almost selfishly and unjustly myopic? And to that I would say, certainly, there is a place for such long-view insights into the broader dangers and problems that beset the world. But, I don’t think that’s how humans were designed. And I think the foundation of any approach to our problems needs to begin with an understanding of who we are and where we actually have efficacy, authority, understanding, investment, restraint, and power. And I think the foundation of all of that is first and foremost, in the individual. In our own lives. And next in our family. And next among our close coworkers and neighbors and among other who labor beside us in our community. That is the foundation of our strength, as well as the battleground of our nearest dangers. Our greatest threats and dangers lie much closer than Washington or New York or Hollywood or red states or blue states. Our greatest dangers and our greatest responsibilities lie within the scope of our own hearts and minds. And if we lose sight of that, and if we lose sight of the colony around us, there’s little hope for us us accurately or effectively grasping or addressing the problems that beset the world. In the end, all those problems have to be faced by actual people. And if they are good people, strong people, wise people, they will face it well. If they are confused, if their perceptions are distorted, their reactions misaligned, then they will not be able to accurately and successfully judge what the problems are the need dealing with or how they should be dealt with. A treatment is only as good as your diagnosis, and if your diagnostic machine has been severely altered, then you’re going to get all kinds of readings that will likely cause you to exacerbate rshtet than curr the problem. It’s also simply the case that humans aren’t gods. They have a limited amount of meaningful knowledge they can achieve in any given area or situation, a limited number of meaningful relationships they can maintain, a limited amount of energy and time, a limited amount of insights and abilities. And the world has a vertusoly limitless amount of problems for people to throw their efforts and emotions at. People need tangible, personal, situations over which they have some measure of tangible personal control and efficacy. Otherwise they get depressed, jaded, angry, resentful, impatient, and judgmental.

Our media environment (and the moral/emotional narratives that drive it) is basically teaching us that the world is constantly attacking us, and that we need to always be seeking out our enemies and responding and attacking back. It’s driving us toward war, not peace. And war for all good causes, all for things we really care about, all dangers that we really in some way face. What would you expect of a generation raised in such an environment? Is it any wonder that they’re suffering from terrible anxiety and symptoms of depression, anger, and mental distress? Is it any wonder they feel the need to shut down the alarms that rouse them and seek safe spaces? That they turn themselves into warriors against a world around them in which they see constant threats and evils? That they feel righteous and justified in the crusade? That those who question them are spurned as traitors and supporters of death and tyranny, as callous deniers with their heads in the sand, sleeping fools who houses are burning? Awake and see the world burning, is the message on everyone’s lips, regardless of where they stand or where they think things should go or are heading. Wake, be aroused! Wake up to the world of fire and war and revolution around you?

And what should we expect of such a revolution, wherever it proceeds from, whichever side prevails? Wisdom? Peace? An accurate and subtle understanding of the problem and how to fix it, avoiding any excessive and misguided consequences? When the corporate fixers come in from outside to cut the fat and reorganize the company, do we expect to see it all go peacefully and perfectly, with no one harmed? Or will this revolution simply be followed by another, as each new CEO passes through, testing their theory, taking apart the company and disrupting the work, only to have someone new take their place and do it all over again when they fail the next year? Will anyone learn anything from such a process? Or simply complain that the strategy was not tried properly with enough commitment and zeal, or it was ruined by the swing to a different strategy, or it was this or that person’s fault. Will chasing the need to defeat the other strategies inadvertently ruin the ones we pursue, and our confusion push us to just blame the others all the more? When do we have to admit that our efforts are simoly not working and not making the problem better, but worse. And not because the world or the people were trying to fix are so awful, but because we don’t really understand or know how to treat the problem? How much of our frustration belongs at the feet of our own misguided process?

So where do we go? Is the new media simply so dangerous and distorting that we should drop it altogether and give up on the knowledge and communication it brings? If it’s taking us away from our proper focus, if it’s endangering our fundamental basis for understanding and reacting to our lives, than I would have to say yes. For the young, almost certainly. It seems to be too dangerous for their minds to expose them to it. Unfortunately that’s who embraces it and desires it and is affected by it the most. At the least we need some distance. We need a break. We need to pull back so we can get a different kind of perspective. We could all use a vacation to get inside our own lives a bit more. The world has changed. People have changed. Because we changed the conditions for how those things communicate. I’m not sure that we can turn back the clock. I’m not sure many people will want to. And it would be terribly hard to give it up, something that not long ago we never imagined we can hardly imagine living without. This is a feeling that requires further analysis, and I cannot say what it means or what I should take away from it. It’s precious, it’s addictive. Is that because it’s so good or because there’s something dangerous about it? Both maybe? And can it be managed? I don’t know yet.

There’s always a more complex story. It doesn’t matter what happened, there’s always more to the story. And focusing on the people, rather than the behaviors, choosing sides instead of focusing on bringing everyone on board and improving everyone’s behaviors, is an easy solution but a bad strategy. A parent can’t pick winners and losers. But you can identify when someone went too far and crossed a line, and where things could have been done better. And you need to be willing to do that with both sides, all the time. That kind of analysis and discipline is productive. You always need to be ready to listen to both sides and be willing to take both sides to task. Otherwise you’re not being fair any more. You’re not honoring the law we all want to follow, you’re not representing authority or justice, you’re picking sides.

But boy is it frustrating and boy does it take way more work. You have to listen to both sides, get behind and advocate for both sides, be willing to challenge and criticize both sides. You need to find yourself inside each of them and try to sort out the mess of how things got where they are and why everyone is so upset. Why one walked away, why another lost her temper. And it’s such a painful, frustrating place to put yourself. And you don’t get to win any points or acclaim by endorsing a side. You have to stay neutral. Which sometimes feels like being everyone’s enemy. You have to be there for both of them. And that means being there for who they could be, together, if both of them could only follow our shared ideals. You can’t side with who they are.

Because the line of good and evil runs down the heart of every person, choosing any side is failing to choose good and committing yourself to approving some evils and ignoring some goods. Choosing the good means choosing the good in everyone and resisting the mistakes in everyone. It means loving everyone for who they could be and being willing to stand up to who they are. It means winning them over with your fairness and your desire to see both of them benefit and grow and flourish. It means maintaining hope for the best from both of them and not being willing to ignore the worst from either of them.

Of course the real problem is, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. If one girl genuinely doesn’t want to compromise or be in harmony with the other, then I can make them. I can set limits and enforce consequences for crossing those limits, but I can’t make them want to love each other or listen to each other. I can’t make them play together. Sometimes all I can do is put up walls and separate them from each other and prevent further fighting. Which means they both miss out on a lot. A lot of what happens in our house rides on mutual goodwill.

I can try to make that easier. I can try to help them understand the other person’s perspectives. I can help them see the flaws in themselves and the reasons behind the other person’s feelings and actions. But ultimately it’s their decision if they want to play of if they want to fight, if they want cooperation or competition. Neither of them has an inherent right to prevail over the other, neither has an inherent right to dismiss the other. Apart from an appeal to rules to which we can all be subject. By that measure, one may pull ahead and one may fall behind (usually they’re both chasing each other down as they both accuse the other, rightly in both cases, of being mean or stupid or careless). But anyone could find themselves on one side of the law or the other at some time.

We’re only a family of four, but sometimes I feel like I’m running a small country, with warring states within it. Every day there’s a new dispute. Every day negotiations break down and resume a dozen times. Somehow I have to keep them both at the table. It’s a thankless position. Everybody likes people who will take their side. No one likes having their side challenged. We love one and hate the other.

Still, I try to take the long view, and I remind myself of what happened when I worked at a hotel in college. It took me a while to figure out that almost everyone there was caught in a web of competition and resentment. All the employees were gossiping about one another. They all resented each other and resented the customers, but everyone needed everybody else and had to work with them to get what they wanted. So they gossiped and criticized and played their little schoolyard games. It was very tempting to join in, but I never did, and I often had to cross just about everyone, or at minimum resist the affirmation and comradeship that comes from joining in with the group, the sympathy of the chosen side. I felt isolated, like I was no one’s friend, always on the outside, always resisting and refusing everyone and never giving them what they wanted. I didn’t like it, but I felt like it was right.

And then, on the day I quit, I got a big surprise. Every single employee came up to me one by one and told me privately that I was their favorite employee, that I was the only person they could trust or stand. Not just one, not just a few. Every single employee. That was such a confusing day for me. I thought nobody liked me. I thought I was outside every group. And only on the last day did I realize that, while that was perfectly true, my position had bought me something no one else had. Access to every group, because my loyalty wasn’t to any of them. My only loyalty was to how I acted within each of them, never willing to embrace their worse habits, always willing to embrace their best ones. Always wanting to greet everyone on their best terms, never willing to join them on their worst (in hating the others, particularly). That’s where real trust comes from. Trust that’s bigger than just a party platform. Not from loyalty, not from standing behind someone. But from standing behind something bigger that transcends us all, and even myself.

I don’t know if things will work out with my kids the way they did with my coworkers. This is a way more complex situation, and to be honest I’ve made way, way more mistakes. I have not always been the best parent (understatement). In fact I’m sort of horrified sometimes thinking back on how impatient and unfair and angry and frustrated I’ve been. I have high ideals, but I’ve had an awfully time trying to live up to them. But maybe, overall, I’ve done more good than harm? I guess we’ll see. I’m still in process as a person and as a parent, unfortunately. I didn’t get that anointing I somehow thought would come when I had my first kid, that would transform me into an adult and a parent and grant me all the knowledge and power in the universe. It turns out, I have to do all this as me. Just me. And that’s a terrifying burden. But it’s my burden to carry.

What modern science has shown us, ironically, is that science itself, like philosophy, depends for its results upon some very human and fallible elements. The growing conflict between the “hard” sciences and the social sciences helps illustrate this.

One thing we have learned is that intention and purpose directly affect data selection. This has been one of the ongoing challenges of artificial intelligence and robotics. They world contains too much data, too much undifferentiated content. In order to navigate it, that data must be winnowed down, selected, according to a specific purpose. It is not enough to tell robots to gather data to be able to move, we must teach them to preference relevant data that serves their programmed intention. That allows them to filter out all the noise and focus on what is relevant to their goals.

This also applies to human neural processing of all kinds. We select for what information matters to our purposes and ignore the rest. We structure information unconsciously in our minds, by necessity, according to our purposes. We’re made to do that. Our mind is not a blank slate taking in an undifferentiated stream of pure data. It is a thing with a structure, with purposes, with built in mechanisms designed to further specific goals and activities. It filters, it conditions, it interprets, long before we’ve even reached the conscious level. And there are broad difference between people. We are not even all uniform in our mechanisms (although much is shared). Differences in personality reflect differences of personal motivation and strategy that affect what filters and selective mechanisms we have. They affect our goals and approaches to those goals, and so affect what data we deem relevant or irrelevant and significant or insignificant.

The next thing we’ve learned is that data selection plays an extremely powerful role in what conclusions we reach. It’s all about how you pick your data. You can alter the results of any almost any study with data selection. Not only what data you choose to include, but even how you choose to organize it can affect your results. This has been proven many times in many ways, using examples too numerous to explain here. If you can control the sample, you can control the outcome, is the gist.

Finally, the interpretation of results, deciding what they mean, deciding how to act on them, is a very human process. These are questions of decision and meaning that depend on purpose and interpretation, on the frameworks of value that inhabit our minds. This is the most obvious conclusion, frankly. Give a hundred different people the same information and ask for their recommendations, and you’ll likely receive a plethora of differing suggestions. When it comes to interpretation and action, you’re leaving the tidy world of wherever you collected the data and going back into the real world, where that slice of data is embedded in an entire complex ecosystem of competing information and competing values all pressing against one another.

This is why the secular world is so often dismissive of ideas and conclusions cooked up in the isolation of the academic world. That isolation may be useful for close study, like plucking a fish out of the ocean so you can study it carefully in a tank. But real life and real behavior doesn’t take place in a tank, and being in a tank may even limit or skew your results. That doesn’t mean the results are invalid, as some might argue, dismissing the cloistered conclusions of academics, but it is a problem. Life is much messier and more complicated and influenced by far more factors than the narrow (and necessary) focus of scientific study can contain.

Thus the businessman may have little regard for the theories of the economist. At his level of existence, they seem very unreal, and may make up only a portion of the factors that he has to consider and confront in a daily basis, whereas to the economist they seem like the whole of the reality (because they have reduced reality, in their study, to this aspect), and the businessman has no such luxury. As I said, this doesn’t mean that the economist studies only fancies of no relevance. They may be of immense relevance. But they may not describe the totality of the ecosystem of the real world, or our experience of it, and all the ways these affect our understanding of and response to the discoveries of the scientist, and this is a problem.

Science has its methodology, as does philosophy (that of logical argumentation). But a methodology, however much it might be designed to promote fair play (and both the laws of logic and the scientific method are aimed at that goal), still depends for its operation on many other factors. And what sort of players are playing the game is the biggest one. And in both science and philosophy, the answer is: humans. And humans are not a method. They have goals, they have filters, they have prejudices, they have built in psychological structures and values and purposes. Not only one, either, but many in conflict and competition and interplay and relationship. And these human factors, however much the system might provide for means of mitigating them, cannot be removed and play a large determinate role in how the game is played and what results are produced.

So, does this mean science isn’t…scientific? Not exactly. Is logic itself logical? It depends what you mean. Both are structured, determined, and organized by realities that are not themselves instances of science or logic (much as the laws of physics themselves are dependent on realities of existence that are not themselves instances of those laws). And they’re both performed by humans, who may be both scientific and logical, but are surely not only that. We recognize the use of science, the claims of logic.

Science, as a concept, may be perfectly scientific as method, in its own identity. But actual practical science that is being done, a game that is actually being played, is in the real world and is being done by people. There’s a very big difference between the rules of baseball and a game of actual baseball. And that’s a pretty small, confined game, whereas science attempts to address a plethora of different games all being played simultaneously on top of one another, that we call life.

This is not a call for skepticism, rather, for humility. When we attach the veneer of “science” to our ideology, it does not remove the contentious content or effects of that ideology. We cannot fully scrub the personal element from either the collection or organization or interpretation of data. It is present at all three levels. If we operate without this understanding, it will only be easier to misunderstand the meaning of our own results. This is also why peer review and replicabilitiy have always been so important in science. The headline “study shows” may be enough to convince the layperson that the objective nature of reality has been uncovered. But an informed scientist will be familiar with the challenges of considering competing theories, the need to take take the scope and structure of the study into account, alternative explanations necessitating further study and confirmation, and so on, and wait before they start drawing any big conclusions. There is also the problem of environment, how much the environment that produced the study, bound as it is by personal, economic, ideological, and career concerns, has been affected. If, for example, the demographics of an entire field have become homogenous in some significant way that does not reflect the normal distribution of human cogitators, how might that be affecting how the results are selected and interpreted? If there is significant social or political or intellectual pressure to either consider or not consider certain questions or conclusions, how might that be affecting a field’s ability to obtain valid results?

Of course, study will always tend to be done by certain sorts of people with certain concerns. People who are interested in how people think and behave will be the ones doing psychology research, and by necessity most of those people will be highly intelligent, be of a higher social and economic class, and have a certain kind of education. That’s true for every field. There is no “neutral human” to set to work in any field. You’re always going to be dealing with a very specifically selected sort of group. And that’s going to have an effect on how they gather, organize, and interpret the data, and it’s going to be different from how someone else might do it.

These are simply the conditions under which we must labor. They are the reason why we have seen the need to codify such concepts as the laws of logic, argumentation, the scientific method, research practices, etc. They’re offered as solutions because there’s a challenge to overcome. And while we should never lose hope of overcoming those challenges in the moment, we must never forget that they are always with us. They are always a reason for us to be cautious, not only about the work of others, but most especially about our own work, our own thoughts. That is where we are most blind, most at the mercy of our filters and proclivities and motivations and desires, most under the influence of the ecosystem in which we are embedded and most under the influence of our own nature. We must watch what we approve, what we fail to test, because it slips so easily into what we’re used to and what we want. We should be wary of always being comfortable and never having to seriously reconsider or revise or expand or narrow our ideas. We should always approach information that pleases us with a bit of humility and a bit of self awareness. As a wise man once said, the kisses of an enemy are profuse, but the wounds of a friend can be trusted.

Racism is real.

Racism isn’t simple, it’s complex and is founded in much deeper levels of human instinct and psychology than mere considerations about skin color.

Some of the psychological bases of racism are inescapable, and some are even important.

Racism is therefore an expression of a proclivity that is present in all humans.

Therefore racism is universal.

Racism is less common than some people think.

White people are not especially racist, as a group, historically or at present.

Not all structural inequities or unequal outcomes among people groups are the result of either deliberate or unintentional injustice.

Some are.

Sorting out which is which requires more than a mere consideration of outcomes.

Other factors besides race may be determinate of some outcomes, but those factors may cluster by race, especially if that race has a shared culture.

This is also true of positive outcomes.

The default state of humankind is poverty and distress, not wealth and comfort.

Therefore, it may be more important to ask, what are the shared factors that create good outcomes, wealth and peace, than asking what causes poverty.

Both are important questions.

Politics is organized around certain shared narratives that help you explain and navigate the world, that appeal to us in a large degree because of our personality and circumstances, both of which affect which explanations and which strategies most accurately map onto the world and the challenges that we face.

Because circumstances and personalities vary across the population, all of us will be right some of the time, and all of us will be wrong some of the time.

Because the world is complex, it is even more likely that at any given time all of us will be both partly right and partly wrong.

Any great crisis or disaster or large negative result will be leveraged by differing groups to promote their perspective and strategy.

It is likely that there is a particular group whose perspective and strategy is most appropriate and correct, but in isolation from other strategies and perspectives it will be less correct and helpful than it could be.

The simplest route to direct action is to have a clear mandate to our use a single strategy without interference.

This kind of efficient dictatorship can be vested in a single person, or in a single group that achieves dominance.

This allows that strategy to achieve maximum effectiveness of its strengths and insights, but will also maximize its inherent flaws, excesses, and omissions.

A system where differing strategies have to compete and negotiate and make allowances for one another will yield a less efficient system for direct action, and may even tend toward paralysis, but will have the efficiency advantage of either anticipating or actively avoiding or blunting the greatest flaws, excesses, and omissions of any given strategy.

Such a system is largely dependent on individual wisdom and collective goodwill, an effort toward education and responsibility at the personal level combined with filial loyalty and affection and communal identity and trust at the societal level.

Unequal outcomes threaten communal identity and trust.

Therefore it is in the interest of such a collaborative society to seek to mitigate unequal outcomes as much as is reasonable.

Unequal outcomes are a natural function of voluntary human behavior. Wealth, mating success, city and town sizes, casualty losses, all follow a general trend called a paredo distribution.

Preventing certain unequal behaviors from yielding their natural results, mitigating their outcomes, is one way to reduce inequality.

Preventing unequal outcomes by restraining the positive forces that create great good may also prevent good and cause general harm.

Preventing unequal outcomes from receiving their appropriate outcomes is what people instinctively mean by injustice.

Therefore injustice does not consist in the absence of unequal outcomes but in the existence of appropriate outcomes.

Humans desire appropriate outcomes but wish to relieve suffering, and in a collaborative society its in everyone’s interest to reduce divergent outcomes as much as possible.

Denying people the natural results of their actions may reduce inequality, but it may also promote injustice.

Removing negative consequences or negative stigmas for certain actions may relieve inequality of outcomes in the sort term, but may increase them (and the burden of mitigating them) in the long term, as they become less unfavorable to the population and their consequences become less known and less feared.

This intervention can cause a disconnection and alienation between how we wish the world worked, a world where everyone gets what they want and there is no real danger to be avoided, no inequality of outcomes, and how the world actually does work, which is often quite merciless.

In the long run, the kindness of removing immediate painful consequences and associated negative stigmas and emotions for certain behaviors may result in worse pain and consequences that will not be easily understood and will likely be blamed on others (if we proceeded in life based on a belief that everyone has a right to expect equal outcomes and equal access to success and acclaim).

It is the desire of many humans to escape or relieve pain, not only their own, but that of others.

It is the desire of many humans to confront and provoke or endure pain, not only their own, but that of others.

Both groups may seek these ends for the good of themselves and of others.

They may also seek it in excess and in ways that are actually harmful for themselves and others.

So both the pursuit of pain and the avoidance of pain can result in good or bad outcomes.

As well, the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pleasure can result in good or bad outcomes.

Therefore it is neither pain nor pleasure that is fundamentally good or bad to experience, they are simply differing channels for valuable information about ourselves, our actions, and their consequences.

Emotions are a higher level extension of the nervous system. They are the mind/body reaction to complex positive and negative stimuli (not only physical but social, intellectual, etc).

Emotional pain, then, is much like physical pain. The desire to remove it may be helpful in the short term, or if serious surgery must be done, but removal of pain and its negative associations as a faculty is a long term danger to the organism.

Therefore, safety and comfort, positivity, freedom from pain or its associated negative emotions, is ultimately neither possible nor necessarily desirable.

The fundamental power that both positive and negative physical and emotional reactions grant, then, is discrimination, the ability to tell the difference between what is good and what is harmful, what is pleasant and what is painful, what will promote growth and what will promote disease.

The primary complaint to be made against discrimination is not that it exists, for it both must and should exist for creatures such as us who have advanced capabilities that allow us to observe and choose how to react to the world, and who are able by process of thought and imagination to eliminate negative outcomes and promote positive outcomes without having to actually risk ourselves by pursuing them individually in every case, and who are able to take courses of action with very far reaching consequences.

The primary complaint to be made against discrimination is that it is not accurate, that its assignment of values to its objects are wrong.

Therefore the goal of any forward looking society is not to end discrimination as such, but to fix the proper values to the proper objects.

And in fact this is something all people agree on, regardless of rhetoric. Whatever side of things they argue, what they really mean is, end negative discrimination against the things I approve of and engage in negative discrimination against the things I do not.

The fixation of values to their objects is heavily determined by prevailing cultural values and beliefs.

These beliefs are more instinctive and personal and less inevitable and universal that we like to believe, and so conflict is inevitable, brining us back to the problem of differing perspectives on an assumed shared object.

If a people can agree about what the good is, what it means to flourish as a human, and if they can agree that there is an objective, shared object which we all share access to, then our disputes can possibly be resolved productively through study and discussion.

Most people share an instinctive structure that provides them with similar fundamental ideas of what is good and what success is and what is bad and what should be avoided, even if the details of what form they take and the details of strategies for getting them vary.

The pain of a negative outcome can be a gift, because it teaches us about the world and about ourselves and any truths about one or the other we might have missed, any mistakes we might have made.

This is a gift we are often loathe to accept, because it challenges our settled ideas about the world, our strategies, and our identities.

Because some of the negative outcomes we experience are the result of human action, it is very easy to conflate the negative aspects of those actions and results with the person themselves.

There are three levels at which both good and health and evil and disease can live: bad results, bad actions, and bad identity (or character), and good results, good actions, and good character.

All of ethics is largely concerned with the relationship between these levels, and attempts to formulate understanding and action and value in terms of them.

Much of ethics makes the mistake of attempting to reduce moral value to only one or the other of these dimensions, thus resulting in the many theories of ethical understanding (which focus largely on either consequences or principles or character).

Ethics exists and entangles across all these levels organically, just as humans exist and entangle simultaneously across many levels: chemical, psychological, social, historical, and intellectual levels.

Because of this entanglement, it is not easy to separate the categories of good and bad outcomes and our reactions to them from our thoughts and feelings about either principles or people.

So it is the easiest thing in the world to leap from one level to another if we do not keep our heads, assigning bad outcomes to the operation of bad principles and bad people, because that sort of elevation is part of how the system works to protect us and inform our choices and future identity.

When things go well, we naturally assume that it is because of the rightness of our strategies and principles, and that their action within us is both caused by and constitutes our own righteousness and excellence.

This assumption is often preserved even when our outcomes are not so good.

Because our strategies proceed from our character, if there is any divergence between our results and our assessment of our own personal value, it is an extremely painful conflict.

A conviction of our own lack of sin (if I may use the term, meaning deformity of character, resulting in unhealthy action and diseased results), coupled with a painful experience of poor outcomes is a distressing quandary, because it defies our understanding of ourselves and the world and how it should work.

The danger we fall into continually is one of oversimplification. Because although all levels of good and evil are connected, all levels are not identical with one another.

Bad experiences may produce bad principles and bad character through negative education, and bad character will usually produce bad principles and outcomes.

Bad outcomes may also drive us to good principles and good character, if we understand them well enough.

And good outcomes may drive us to bad principles and bad character if we do not understand them well enough.

So, too, good character will usually produce good principles and good outcomes.

We affect, and we are affected.

Although this relationship is very strong, it is not uncomplex.

Some divergence among outcomes is not dependent on unequal actions but are the result of chance, circumstances, and and other structures and obstacles beyond our individual determination or prediction or action.

Even good people who do the right thing sometimes fail, and even misguided people who do the wrong thing sometimes succeed.

It is in the interest of society to especially mitigate and or prevent these kinds of outcomes.

Not all differences in outcome are due to these kinds of forces.

If all differences in outcomes are the result of chance, then there’s nothing to be learned to improve the likelihood of either individual or collective human success, and all results are essentially determinate, the result of forces beyond our control.

This is obviously false.

Both choice and chance circumstance play strong roles in our outcomes.

We cannot completely control either (collectively, on behalf of others).

We have far more control over our individual choices than over any other aspect of reality or human experience and outcomes.

Therefore the foundational investment of any attempt to improve collective inequality of outcomes should be in improving individual choices.

Secondarily, mitigating the effect of circumstances that resist the effect of positive individual choices should be our next priority.

Principles are the bridge between character and consequences.

These principles can often be codified as laws.

However, it is not clear in what way it is possible or within our power to legislate matters of character, of the power to make good individual choices (or to what degree and in what ways we can and should directly discourage bad character).

It is within the scope of the law to punish, prevent, and stigmatize bad choices, both for the protection of the individual from the consequences of their actions and for the protection of those around them.

It is the role of religion, both formal and informal, to explicate and elaborate the foundational value structures of a culture.

Religion engages in both the positive and negative tasks of encouraging and discouraging certain characters, extolling certain principles as representative of or conducive to good or bad character and promissory of certain good or bad results.

Religion does this through many means, addressing the holistic plurality of human nature, means of interaction and education and enforcement that touch the physical, aesthetic, social, economic, and intellectual aspects of our being.

Music, plays, stories, essays, traditions, art, social organizations, charity, all of these are expressions organized around the guiding narrative of the religion, played out in the many facets of human life and being.

The greatest religions reach the deepest into all these areas.

Because this is a natural function of human nature, religion is essentially built-in to human experience.

Therefore religion cannot be removed, but whatever you replace it with will eventually become constitutive of it in time.

This explains why religions themselves vary across time and place, but religion as such is a fixed feature of all human society.

Whether this means we were made for religion or religion was made for us is unclear.

What is clear is that it is inescapable for creatures such as ourselves.

The thing that we don’t believe we possess but cannot escape is often a very dangerous possession.

This is also true for greed, for prejudice, for anger, for jealousy, for arrogance, for callousness, for all the great diseases that plague humankind.

Like discrimination, their danger is not in their existence but in their application; all have some necessary power or virtue at their core that is part of what preserves our species, that at certain times and in certain ways is needed.

A disease can only exist as a corruption of something that has a proper health and function. Apart from that it has no existence and the term has no meaning.

Flaws are always very easy to see in others and very hard to find in ourselves.

Recognizing the pathology of our own treasured identity is the hardest but most valuable task a person can set themselves.

As an aside, it is extremely difficult for any one person to be and know and see and do everything at once. That is why human variation exists, why there isn’t just one perfect one of us, because the psychic and metaphysical burden of containing everything at once, essentially, the burden of being God, the totality of all knowledge, perspectives, goodness, and justice, is too much for any one human to bear alone. We each can carry just part of it. And we mutilate the world and the human heart when we seek to be God because we can only do so by making the world less than it is.

In navigating the complexity of the entanglement of moral value, it is important to keep many different, seemingly conflicting, truths in mind.

Because the interaction of moral and informational narratives is so complex and the results, while often consistent, are complex and require testing and interpretation, in any matter of great moral moment it is dreadfully necessary to pause, to restrain our endorsement of our own reactions, resist the tyranny our emotions demand, and listen to one another.

This may feel like a betrayal, because it resists the dictatorship of purpose we instinctively feel is both necessary and universal.

Unfortunately, it is in these cases that restraint is most necessary, because the potential consequences, the scope and scale of the moral narrative and question, are so great. And any solution we seek has a vast potential for error in either aim or perspective or detail or scope.

These are the circumstances we will least be willing to listen or compromise, because such compromises touch directly upon the integrity of our collective and personal moral narrative and identity. It is a battle overt he soul of our nation, and over our own souls.

Unfortunately, those who have a different perspective or instinct than us will also perceive it so, and if they sense the threat that their own perspective is about to be silenced and eradicated by the urgency of the claims of the others, deligitinizing their claims, they will push back.

This pushback is likely to get excessive and ugly.

Frustration and demands by the inciting side are also likely to get more unreasonable, misdirected, and ugly, as both seek to claim the whole world for their viewpoint and claim a mandate for their response.

Pushback by both sides against one another is likely to take the worse, most imbalanced and excessive, weaponized form, and so will further deligitimize those perspectives in the eyes of their detractors.

Therefore, the instinct of many people will be to embrace the most deligitimizing version of their own viewpoint as that which it is most necessary to promote and support.

This fact will only be obvious to people of the opposing viewpoint.

Therefore we must confront the danger that our own best arguments and efforts to solve a problem, especially if they are in conflict with the prevailing views of another large segment of society, are in fact quite likely to be counterproductive and may be making the problem we purportedly seek to solve worse.

This making the problem worse, causing increased opposition from and conflict with the other side, will only appear to confirm the need for our strategy and reassure our judgements. Being opposed by the bad guys is part of what confirms to us that we’re in the right.

It is in our interest to desire conflict, then, not accord.

This conflict makes the need for us and for our zeal even more apparent. It makes us more necessary and important.

This is why extremism always seems more honest and true to the cause than moderation. People don’t like the waffle, the politics, the compromises, the changing of minds, the contradictions, the double speak. They want action.

It is very tempting to pursue oppositional strategies even when they don’t seem to work, because they don’t work well, and so reinforce the idea of the resistance and opposition of the other. If there was no battle there would be no need for the warriors, so it is in our psychological interest to pursue oppositional, extremist policies and in our practical interest as representatives fighting for them, in part because they will go wrong.

That does not mean that we are aware of it when we do so. But we might be, on an emotional level, when we measure how much we enjoy the fight and enjoy opposing the enemy, consider how much we hate them and desire to see them defeated (regardless of what they might actually need to contribute to make our world better).

Racism is one of a host of many terribly complicated moral/emotional matters.

It is at least possible that the values promoted by different groups will not actually bring racism to an end but might actually contribute to its development.

.

And we find that this is true. Divisions of race are unclear, genetically. They are vague, they are messy. They show our history, our adjustments and adaptations to a particular time and place. But they are quick to fade, quick to change, and quick to be mixed and remixed into something new. They are like personalities, individuals formed from a particular confluence of birth, circumstances, physical and mental potential, innate human structures, innate variety. They vary just as individual people vary. But, like all individual people, they can come together to produce something new out of both. Like all people, we all come from one man and one woman. From one man and one one God created, nay, even today creates, all nations.

However you wish to interpret this idea: literally, symbolically, archetypally, psychologically, or as a generalization of biological and genetic concepts, it hold true, and it teaches us the same thing across all of them. Every individual, no matter how different they may be, is the product of one man and one woman. From one and one woman God made all people of all nations. That is a fundamental racial truth of humanity. We all come from the same origin. The same fundamental union. The same structure. The same unity of differences. And we can make new generations across any division of individual personality or cultural or historical or genetic personality. We can unite one man and one woman, and by it all nations become one. We are mixed one with another, we bring together our individual differences and histories, and we recreate, we share together.

Are differences of race real? Of course they are, as real as the differences between individuals. Differences of how you or I look, our family history, our personal history and experiences, our differences in how and where we grew up, our differences in ability and inclination, our temperament, our tastes, our language, our stories and concepts, even the different scars we carry. But we share our nature, our deep nature. We are all of the same stuff. We are all human, we are all made from one man and one woman, and so we also share that structure, and we all share that freedom. To choose to unite those differences within our kind and create anew.

Race isn’t unreal any more than individual persons are unreal. But just as individuals of many kinds are still united by a common nature and origin, just as they come together to create and birth the whole of the world’s people, just as my brother and sister and mother and father together make up my individual family, so too do the races make up the family of mankind. We are all cousins to one another. We all draw from the same wellspring, however different each of us may be. And we can all return to it. The differences are beautiful and exist at the most basic, most individual level, that of a single life. But the things that unite us exist across time and space between all of us, and we can always find room to reach out and find one another or bring another in. Both the differences and the unity are real, but in different ways. The differences are relative, individual, particular, in the material. The unity is transcendent, natural (in the nature), objective, in the plan and the meaning rather than the material, available to all and belonging to none.

Both are quite real in their own, different ways. And where we mistake is when we cannot keep them straight. Imagining differences of material to be absolute, imagining differences of the transcendent to be relative. We take the wrong lessons from each. We fail to learn the lessons of the other. We seek freedom where there should be unity and unity where there should be freedom. We try to reduce the world and ourselves down to a single category. We wish to be all individual or all species. We make the individual everything or we make it nothing. We make race everything or we make it nothing.

We must have an idea that unites of from our individuality through to our racial consciousness that spans across time and space. From one man and one woman (from differing, paired individuals) God (the ultimate, transcendent power of creation and organization) made all nations (the collective plethora of unique individuals and histories and societies, spread across all time, the many that is made of the ones that is itself one). We are the one race made of many nations, which are made of many individuals who come from one origin. We are the one who are many and the many who are one.

That is our heritage, our privilege. Our opportunity. We are all as flawed and gifted and unique in our races and nations as we are in ourselves. And we are all as unified and similar and have a shared value and power as we all posses as members of humanity. We are all equal in our essence, we are all diverse in our individuality. We are not diverse in our essence, nor equal in our individuality.

Our essence and our individuality and our power to combine them are implicit in the two becoming one. In the power of male and female to produce a new being. From one man and one woman all are made. That’s a universal truth about our species. Two, united in essence, different in individuality, are able to unite by means of both their shared essence and unique differences. And by the necessary and sufficient power of both, new creation is born and the story of our species goes on. Neither one it’s own is sufficient to produce life. We cannot be all alone, all unique and individual, an isolated island of reality, with no shared structure or essence. A being of no kind finds no mate with whom to continue their kind. Neither can we be a sea of kind alone, with no tokens. We cannot split ourselves like flatworms and so perpetuate our essence, with no need to confront the difference of another.

Both the uniqueness of male and female gametes are required, each split to be half of the story of our kind, half of the book that tells our individual and species-wide tale, united in their difference, to make a new and unique individual of our kind. The story of the life of every human tells the same tale in its DNA. Humanity. The shared genetic legacy of our species, the shared characteristics of our species. And within that vast, shared heritage, we see also the shape of two unique individuals, their lives, their essential and necesssey differences, that came together in halves to make this one. Both difference of individual and unity of essence are required.

And that is the heart of what I have arguing. It is not about unity vs diversity or individuality vs uniformity (or principle, or nature, or however you wish to label it). It is not relativity vs absolutes or objectivity vs perspective. We are not merely individuals, nor are we merely nations or races. We are not merely singular nor merely a web of connection. We inhabit all and are inhabited through all. We are unity and we are diversity. We are different and we are of a kind. We are I and we are us. We touch the universal and the particular.

And because we are both, we often confuse one for the other or expect them to be the same across all levels of reality. We try to either carve them up or smoosh them all together. We seek to find in one what can only be found in the other. We contradict and we complement, we unite and and we are often terrified. We fear to lose our freedom and we fear to lose our identity, we fear to become lost and alone, and we fear to become lost in the flood.

Where, then, does our identity rest secure? In our commonality or in our individuality? In our shared structure or our relative differences? And how do we tell which is which? Is it when we are rest, alone, or when we leap into the tide and race ahead together? In what curious, circular world can we lose our lives by finding them and by losing them, find them? What is this eternal realm where all things by becoming one with God become more themselves? Neither eradicated in unity nor isolated in individuality. Neither the end of ego in subsummation, nor its ultimate triumph in solipsism and subsuming all.

Jesus says that it is when we do it “for his sake” that the two stop working against one another and begin working together. It is when the unified and the divided both serve the incarnation of ultimate good, ultimate truth, and ultimate beauty, that all divisions unite and all unity divides. He is the firstborn because he is both incarnation, particularity, individuality, and eternity, purpose, unity, transcendence. He is a picture of the gap we seek to bridge. Whether you believe he bridged it is up to you to decide. But it is certain that he correctly identifies and confronts the crux of the problem that faces–and has always faced–all mankind, in their very persons. How can we be of both worlds? How do we bridge them, how do we resolve their struggle? How can I be I in this vast world of others? How can we be we in this disperate sea of individuals? How does eternity not eradicate the moment or the moment not disperse eternity? How do man and God meet?

This, then, makes some sense of why Christian theology and art places the cross at the heart of all human reality. It is a crux, a crossing, a coming together. Is it merely chance that it should be so symbolically apt? That warring concepts like sin and grace, duty and freedom, suffering and glory, pain and redemption, all come together in one moment, to war at last no more and be resolved? That contradiction finds at last on the cross the unity of division and creates resolution? Is it merely a coincidence that it presents such a perfect picture? The cross is a historical fact, not only an artifice or illustration. If it is coincidence, then it is a fortuitous one, that neatly captures the problems we all face and the idea of facing them and triumphing over them in surrender. In acknowledging all claims, surrendering to all, taking on the burdens of God and man, Jesus buys his death, and so purchases life for every woman and man.

Or so he claims. It is easier to offer such a gift than it is to accept it. One that has the power to give it by nature knows no limits. But our own limits to take hold of it are far greater. We have to surrender ourselves, like him, admit the claims, suffer our most terrifying loss and insecurity. And for many of us, what part of life we have is to precious to risk for the sake of obtaining more. And who knows if it truly awaits us? Surely my bit of individuality or my bit of the species is worth too much to risk losing either for some promised renewal I may never be able to live up to. What proof do I have that the door we all seek has been opened for any of us, or ever can be? Maybe it is only a picture of something we seek, and the picture hides the tragedy that only death and catastrophe await any who try to take it into the real world. Maybe it is just a dream of who we wish we could be but never can. Maybe chasing such a dream is more precious than whatever fractured reality we are acrsuooy consigned to. And how absurd is the world if that is so.

And yet somehow all will survive, or most, or some. Many will be hurt, many will be lost. The power of life goes on, and as far as we fall, still we rise again and again. We solve our problems, we perfect ourselves, only by creating new problems, new sins, new ways to degenerate. Because we never solved our problem, only countered it. We never removed the sword, only parried and returned the thrust. We never discovered the good, only found a contradictory kind of sickness to drive out the one we had. And we wonder why the more things change the more they stay the same, the more things improve the worse they get. The more problems we solve, the more problems we discover.

And we tell ourselves it’s because it wasn’t done properly, that it was because the others got in our way and slowed us down and perverted the course of our endeavors. As if removing the others has ever done anything but hasten our descent into our own excesses and abuse. We invent weapons to fight the danger and find that the danger has only increased. And yet still we go one hoping and complaining and blaming. Maybe this time will be better. Maybe if we just get what we wanted this time it will work. Maybe we can finally rout out the dissidents. Maybe this time we can really bring the blame home to those who deserve it.

They do not see. It is not them that are the problem. It is not us that are the solution. It is against the powers, the spirits, the principalities, the principles, the viruses of mind that capture the hearts of men and women. There too, the true good lives, the solution, the meaning of the path behind the different mistakes. What both seek but do not see.

Normative examples are very useful as as examples, so long as we don’t start mistaking them for the actual principle. It is their particular, individual way they express the principle behind them that makes them valuable. And in different circumstances, with different elements to make use of, you can build something quite unique and individual, but still show that it fulfills the same purpose, adheres to the same principle.

Clothes across many times and nations have varied immensely, according to fashion, available materials, prevailing body types, environmental differences, and practical and cultural needs. But we all recognize them for what they are, clothes. We understand the purpose, the principles behind them. And so even when we share few of the same conditions that produced or required such clothes, we are able to understand and appreciate those of another time and place and see the creative ways they adhere to and fulfill the idea and purposes of clothing.

Relative differences in clothing, far from disproving the existence of an absolute concept, in fact are what truly prove it, disabusing us of the notion that such things are a thing relative to us, defined only by the particulars of how we have done it. Ours is revealed to be but an instance of a greater, universal whole that all men and women share access to and comprehend. It is not a little thing that belong to us, nor is it nothing, something that has no meaning or purchase across time and space, no definition, no fixed character. Clothes change, fashion is eternal.

That may sound a bit too Platonic in conception, and I don’t want to lean too hard into the technical aspects of the theory. It’s enough to just consider it as a part of the fabric of psychological and experiential reality we all encounter. A materialist like Stephen Pinker would argue that such concepts have no abstract metaphysical existence but are simply fixed structural realities of how human thought and consciousness and the brain work. That doesn’t make them relative or insubstantial, for him, there is a fixed human nature according to which all are constructed but which is interpreted individually. But whatever level of your belief in such concepts and divisions of type and token, idea and instance, principle and product, whether you see them as observable biological or psychological or metaphysical realities, the point is that we observe them and are affected and confined and also freed by them. They are the rules that define the games and provide a structure for individual actions within the game. They are the individual actions and strategies and endeavors, victories and losses, that take place within the game over time.

When you watch an exciting game on the TV and the commentator reflects, “Now this is football!” we know how to interpret that. We know he doesn’t mean that this particular game is the entire extent of football. He ain’t expecting someone to come with him with a recording of another game being played somewhere else and have them say, “Look, here is a different game of football with different teams, therefore I have disproved that your game IS football.” No, it’s quite simple. He means that there is an idea of the game of football, a concept with specific purposes in mind that are being pursued (an intense competition for the sake of challenge and delight and entertainment, according to certain defined rules), and this game is an exceptional embodiment of the game. This is the meaning of the game brought alive in a particular instance. That doesn’t mean there can’t be other, different games that do the same. There will likely be dozens of such exceptional games all across the country every year. But they will all be great instances for the same reasons, because they all uniquely fulfill the same purposes and are confined by the same rules that define and limit and direct action according to those purposes. The purposes determine the rules, the rules confine action according to the purposes and make the game possible, individual action within the rules results in unique expressions of the game.

I use football as an example because it’s simple. The main difference between football and life is that it’s not clear that the rules of the games of life that we call society are as arbitrary and within the scope of our invention as the rules of football. But, to be honest, it’s not clear that the rules of football are as arbitrary and we imagine them to be. We have no rules against flying because humans are not a creature that is able to fly. We don’t have rules about how Buffalo should behave during the game because we know that they cannot grasp or play it. We take for granted all kinds of things about the nature and limitations of the game (no teleporting the ball or phasing indeterminately through other players who try to tackle you) because we understand the nature of the world and of humans, the physics, our physical makeup and capabilites, the way that balls and bodies will behave when acted upon, the human ability to think and follow rules, whistles, symbolic lines, all kinds of things. All of these things are given to us as part of the fixed nature of humans and the world. And there is good evidence that the world of the human mind and soul is not such an unformed and undifferentiated place as some postmodernism would have us believe. There seem to be genuine natures to both the world and to human minds and bodies. Scientific, psychological, and philosophical evidence accumulates all around us, discarded (after having been the collective conclusion reached based on the evidence and cogitation upon experience of the last 10,000-100,000 years of humankind) in favor of the denaturist thinking that was codified around the idea of the tabula rasa theory of mind

The action of philosophy (and also its children psychology and biology) is to help us sort through the many tokens and types and discover the beautiful and sort out the natures of each. It helps us test our own assumptions about our actions and whether they actually conform to our principles. It helps us challenge false examples and exaggerated and defied idols of particular examples and see where their limits are. It helps us discover new depths and riches and possibilities. It both clears away the dead wood and helps break up the ground so new growth can take root. It clears away the weeds that could choke the garden and stunt and deform its growth and trains and cultivates the plants so they grow according to the design and their fruitfulness.

We must be absolute at the level of absolutes and individual at the level of individuals. The two primary mistakes people make are either to absolutize the individual or individualize the absolutes. Absolutes are essential, relativity is essential. Both are part of the structure of reality and the human experience. But absolutism and relativism, that lay their structure upon one another to obscure and simplify the fabric of life, are both distortions of reality. Both will stunt the garden, both will undermine the game, both will steal fruit from our future for the sake of their freedom or dominance today.

None of that is an endorsement, just a reflection on the different forces that make people feel like they have to take the positions they do. And, in my opinion, the environment that distorts meaningful experience and discussion and dislocated it from proper human experience is really the culprit, not the diversity of reactions. It disconnects us from the human reality of both the event and the discussion, and from one another. There are some people who are less sympathetic and emotionally reactive, without being better or worse people, just as there are people who are more sympathetic and emotionally reactive, without being better or worse people. And one might need very little to arouse a strong reaction in personal, moral, and emotional terms to something that happened to someone far away in an unfamiliar place. Another person might be slower to connect to the personal emotional realities and perceive such an event more from the locus of abstraction and their own specific concerns and sympathies. One type of person might be terrified by the spread of lawlessness and be desperate to protect against it at all costs, even myopically so. And their concerns are valid; the danger they perceive, and the injustices, and the value to be honored and preserved, aren’t unreal. They have a claim to their concerns and their narrative that foregrounds them. Another person might be horrified by the abuse of power, desperate to put a stop to it at all costs, dedicated to rooting it out and exposing it, to the exclusion of all other concerns and arguments. And their concerns are valid too, the danger and the injustices and the tragedies are real and costly. They also have a claim to their concerns. In a more natural environment, where people actually have to deal directly with the totality of other people and the narrative is primarily about this person and this place and this act and this tragedy and what we who are involved must do, who we must place a hand on for comfort, who to place a hand on for justice (and both are focused and purposeful and directed and have meaningful limits to guide them centered around actual involved humans) where instead we wage a shadow war of our own limited understanding of one another over our personal meta-narratives. rather than isolating our reactions and culling them from the distance of whatever we’re able to share across a soundbite on social media

Is there a problem? Yes. But our differing and exclusively antagonistic narratives about the problem are also a problem, because they distract and distort and get in the way of our actual ability to understand or solve or react appropriately to the problem.

We have a hierarchy of fundamental moral duties. First, to look after and cultivate our own souls, to make our selves more kind and honest and peaceful and patient and good and self-controlled. Second, to look after and understand and care for our families. To love the people placed around us, to show them value and help them grow and challenge them and encourage them and spend time with them and listen to them and make them better and stronger. Third, to care for our neighbors, those people placed close to our lives. Our coworkers and those we labor next to, the people in our neighborhood and our church and our childrens’ schools. And beyond that, to represent ourselves and that goodness as a fixed power and light of growth to the rest of the wider world. Those are the different rings that spread outward from the point in time and space and moral and relational embedding, efficacy, and understanding that is you. All of them are important and valuable. But the power, and the true growth of goodness, starts from the center. You realistically can only meaningfully know and touch and live within the lives of a group of around 150 people. And your investment your growth, your roots, have to start there, start as close to your own soul as possible. Because whatever you try to build at the extremes, if it’s not supported by a healthy, balanced heart, a trunk of strength from which the branches can grow tall and straight, it will be in danger of collapse, disease, instability, distortion, and corruption. You wont have the control to maintain your design if you don’t have the infrastructure to support it. And, as important as those outer ripples are (and they may be terribly important), if you’re engaging in life in a way that distracts you and distorts the world around you and takes you away from your core, that erodes your ability to love and listen to understand and invest in the people closest to the heart of your life, if they draw you in an make you feel like you’re engaging in real moral activity and understanding and and action, that that’s the real world surrounded by and invested in and emotionally reacting to and spending your efforts on, you’re going to end up in trouble. The highest tower may be the light that all nations see, but if you don’t build to it from the bottom up, it won’t stand. If you invest in a system that erodes your focus by simulating the effects of moral/emotional engagement but draws you away from the most important battlegrounds (your own heart, your family, your friends and coworkers) and makes it harder to understand and love them, you’re going to suffer. And so will others eventually, when what you construct doesn’t reach the heights or give the light you hoped it would. You’ll become frustrated, seek more extreme constructions, start looking for blame, start seeking the enemies who are holding you back or threatening what you have. Some modern systems do this addict you, engage you, draw you in, by appealing to your own better instincts. But they do so by drawing them away from their first soil, because that forum can’t be monetized or leveraged for political or social power.

How much time have we spent on media simply because our investments there seemed more valuable or more rsl than investments in the real world around us. And they’re so much easier. And simpler.

It distorts because we operate at the level of the mob. We understand, judge, react, interpret, feel danger and outrage.

You cannot export what you don’t produce at home.

So before you go everywhere with your anger and outrage, go home first. Talk to your spouse or parents or brother or sister. They’re probably a good bit different from yiu, but you love each other, so you have a connection to build on so you can learn from one another’s perspective. A communion of difference that isn’t built on mutual love and need and respect won’t enlighten many hearts. And first of all, go to your own heart. Find yourself in that person standing against another person. See the world through their eyes, see how that could be you. Find yourself in the heart of whoever seems furthest from your instinct. If that means finding yourself in the eyes of the perpetrator, then do it. If it means finding yiurself in the eyes of the victim, do it. Then, and only then, when you’ve confronted the possibilities of your own heart, will you be ready to judge and steer rightly when you hurl yourself into the sea of the further world.

Data selection 100% drives the interpretation of results.

The problem with having political purpose as your chief end, for either a university or the media, is that in effect it resigns you to being in the business of propaganda rather than reporting or discussion. Certsi ly, because we each come with our perspectives, there is a sense in which all dissemination is a kind of propaganda, a pitch for our way of seeing the world. But the modern institutions of the university and the press were founded with trying to avoid and mitigate and acknowledge this tendency as part of the central mission. They were very concerned that they strive not to become tools of propaganda and not be overly influenced by social and political concerns, the better to promote the pursuit and transmission and testing of knowledge. The very fact that a large percentage of the current surveyed student population believes that a professor who says something offensive on a single occasion to his or her class (and exceptions are not made for scientific or historical facts or theories) should be fired, and the fact that they have the power to accomplish that goal quite easily in today’s system, means that the university as a free enterprise of intellectual enquiry is essentially over. If the mob can dictate what you can and cannot say, if they can report and remove you for a single perceived offense (and perceived is the key word, it doesn’t have to be intended, perception is sufficient evidence), if how a fact or statement might make someone feel is the guiding test for whether something can be spoken and discussed, then free speech and enquiry has long gone out the window. Only correct speech and correct thoughts are allowed and may be advanced. Only those voices and those facts that support the noble cause may be spoken and considered and allowed a platform. That is why the work of the media and of much of the university can no longer be considered the pursuit of truth any more, but rather the pursuit of noble lies.

The lies are most sins of omission, a failure to consider alternative arguments or viewpoints, suppression of data that doesn’t support the narrative, blind spots both deliberate and unintentional, and a strength founded largely in the narrative and editorial powers that capture the human imagination and emotions. Is this any different from what people have always done? Well, maybe not entirely. But we at least believed for a while that there were alternatives.

Unfortunately, in a postmodern ideological world, it’s not clear that there really are alternatives. Truth is a construction based on values (our desired goals and outcomes), not objective processes and universal standards. It exists as a construct within the values, prejudices, and structures of meaning of the person or culture that has produced them. Because there is no independent basis from which to criticize different viewpoints, no objective truth that each was claiming to access, just different constructions based on different values, then any victory of one viewpoint or culture over another must be inherently oppressive, whatever means were used to achieve it. Unfortunately, I don’t think the problem is confined to any group. It’s a reciprocal process, and both of the major ideological parties in our country make use of it in different ways.

What all this process adds up to is the slow motion end of Western Civilization. Not by external threat or pressure, but by internal threat and pressure. By its own efforts to disprove and undo itself. Possibly, when this has sufficiently weakened it enough that it collapses, or when it becomes weak and divided enough that external threats see the opportunity and sieze their moment, and whatever results after arises, there will be time for reconsideration. I’m not arguing, of course, that Western civilization doesn’t have its problems. But it built the world we live in, and there seem to be some reasons why it was successful, and there was a reason everyone wanted to jump on the bandwagon and gain those advantages. It also isn’t, and never was, a unified or uniform system in any sense. It was always local, diverse, changing, over extending itself, making mistakes, collapsing, correcting itself, rising again, moving to a new place, taking a new form, going in a new direction.

So what exactly are the core concepts that form the basis of Western civilization? That’s harder to pin down definitively. And it’s been explored by wiser heads than mine. There are some ideas, and there are also some values. One idea that’s very prominent is the idea of a fixed, objective truth. Another is the idea of transcendent moral truths or values. Both of these are available to all humans, belong to no one, and have claims upon everyone. Knowledge of them grants vitality and effective power, conformation to them creates health and stability, strength and wisdom.

A child is entitled to their parents’ love by birth, and if they do not have it, or lose it, they have lost almost everything. Life will be hard. Not impossible, but their greatest asset will have been lost. At a very young age, touch is the chief signal to an undeveloped sensation and mind that that love exists. Lack of touch for babies of many mammals will result in death, regardless of provision.