On Arrogance & Evangelism

I'd like to respond to a very thoughtful article by Kristin Dombek, “Swimming Against the Rising Tide: Secular Climate-Change Activists Can Learn from Evangelical Christians.”¹ Despite the rather specific subtitle, the essay is really about the nature of belief and understanding—and on how those of us of different beliefs read arrogance into each other's positions. I have never been able to understand what seems to me the self-willed ignorance and blind literalism of many religious people, evangelical Christians certainly included. But Dombek's discussion of why such people think secular, science-oriented people are arrogant helps me to understand what's going on here.

I am a secular, metaphorical thinker—in no way a dogmatic literalist, as so many religious people are. And I fully believe that secular, metaphorical thought is much more inclusive and universal than dogmatic literal thought. So, when I read Dombek's assertion that evangelicals think of the likes of me as “arrogant,” I was amazed. How could that label be applied to a way of thinking that is open to even evangelicals, whereas they are closed to my way of thinking—almost militantly so. Who, I had to wonder, is really arrogant?

Here's how Dombek describes her feelings as an evangelical Christian:
“My belief . . . was the bridge between my otherwise insignificant life and the universe: I was not my own, but belonged to something bigger. But it also meant I was scared a lot. Atheists, evolutionary biologists, abortionists and climate scientists wanted to tear down that bridge — or so I’d heard — by denying that the history of the planet was God’s story, not ours.
It was hard to understand who would want to do this — only arrogant people, people who presumed they could comprehend the world with merely human minds, who wanted to put their concerns at the center of the world, no matter the cost.”

This passage characterizes nicely much of the misunderstanding between secular and religious people, I believe. All human beings, I would assert, need to feel a part of something larger than themselves, to different degrees. Personally, I find great peace and consolation in the understanding that I come from and will return to the natural world, which I often think of in its wholeness as Gaia. Even though the natural world is, to a great degree, under assault from human culture, it is still a whole entity, struggling to maintain its integrity, and I am part of that process and that whole. That's enough for me, whereas human culture, which is so diverse and fragmented, cannot do a lot to console me or help me feel I belong—the arts, yes, but not much else.

Here's Dombek after losing her faith and beginning to understand a more scientific sense of the world: “You have to trust that your individual life is linked to something bigger: that you belong, body and soul, to a larger story for which you are responsible.” Again, there is language here that helps to explain differences between secular and religious modes of thought. We all want to feel part of something larger. The difference is in what we choose to be the something larger. As the evangelical Dombek noted, religious people tend to think secular people are arrogant because they replace “God's story” with “merely human minds.” This is, on the surface, true, but let's think a bit about what “God's story” is. There is, in fact, no one story from God. There are many, many, many, many. Even if you accept from your own culture that God's story is the Judeo-Christian story, as enshrined in the Bible, you are eliminating the beliefs and stories of the majority of people on this earth, who are not Jewish or Christian. And even if you add in the other religion of the book, Islam, you are still talking about only half or a little more than half the people on earth.² Buddhists and Hindus, for example, do not on the whole believe that there is a single divine figure who is ordering the natural world and guiding the progress of the human race. 

Isn't there indeed some arrogance here in assuming that ONE mode of religious thinking must supersede science in order to maintain the humility of the human race? I'm all for keeping humans humble, but when we're talking about global warming, for instance, which will affect all humanity eventually, the Judeo-Christian viewpoint has no more importance than any other way of thinking; in fact, if we go just by numbers of people in the world, it is a minority viewpoint. Why should Judeo-Christians have the right to willfully dismiss other ways of thinking about the world, when we will all be affected by the results? Again, this position is, simply, arrogant.³

 

And here I come back to Dombek's language. “God's story” is precisely that—a story put together by people to make some sense of their place in the world and to give themselves some hope and guidance. The problem is, there are many stories of God and gods, and also secular stories. The secular stories at least have the strength of not rejecting the values of other peoples, which are different from our own. The secular story of science is the most neutral and the most universal, since it is built on nature and the elements of nature that all of us in this world are made of and live within.  Culture is divisive; the natural world is our one common experience and inheritance.

Science is, in fact, the least arrogant of stories, because it is available to the understanding of all humans; it is an international language. Anyone in any country or culture can look into a microscope or telescope and see the same stuff. Science doesn't deal in preconceptions that rule what we can believe or cannot believe, as virtually any religion does. In fact, science cannot be science without challenging and testing any preconceptions that limit understanding. This takes us to Dombek's phrase “a larger story for which you are responsible.” Many religious people, in rejecting human understanding and defending the story of God as always central to understanding, are in fact turning away from responsibility. It's nice to think that an all-powerful, paternal God will always keep the world just the right temperature for human beings, but in fact such a supposed being has never done so in the past and will very likely not do so in the future. The only way we can help save the world for our descendents is to use science to understand what we can do to mitigate global warming. Sitting on our hands and waiting for God to do something will not help.

The religious might answer: if the world becomes too hot and wet for most humans, then that was God's will. OK--or nature's response to human activity run amok. But I really doubt that many evangelicals in the southern US, which will be greatly affected by global warming, accept that God may be allowing the world to become unlivable for their grandchildren or great-grandchildren. And if they don't like that scenario, then they are indeed being irresponsible in denying global warming just because it does not fit nicely with their picture of God. On the other hand, secular thinkers and scientists are doing what they can to overcome the irresponsibility of the religious deniers, for the good of everyone—not just for the good of people who think the way they do. Again, where is the arrogance? Where is the irresponsibility?

Let me finally anchor this discussion in metaphor. Scientific thinking is, essentially, metaphorical thinking, since it looks at real, concrete things in the natural world and derives abstract ideas from them. Religious thinking, on the other hand, CAN be metaphorical thinking, to the extent that religious people can understand their religious texts as metaphorical—as story, not fact. But literal and dogmatic religious thinkers are quite limited in their understandings of the world. Here's an example. I recently had to deal with a bout of poison ivy, and a phrase from the Bible kept popping into my head: “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” I thought it must be from the Old Testament, which does often seem to mean such things literally. But I looked it up, and it's from Matthew in the New Testament, King James Version. The New Revised Standard Version of this passage is also telling: “If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. . . . And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out and throw it away” (Matthew 18:8-9). (I have to wonder how many people who read the Bible literally actually obey this injunction?) 

I read the New Testament metaphorically, and when I thought about a metaphorical reading of this passage, I understood why it popped into my mind in reference to poison ivy. The great itching of the rash was causing me to suffer and taking up a great part of my conscious awareness. (This might be a narcissistic in-dwelling contingent to sin? At least it is true that the rash was offending me and causing me to stumble, psychologically.) Then I thought, if your leg (site of the rash) offend thee, banish it to the far reaches of consciousness; better yet, cut it off from consciousness! This is not easy, but it is possible—we all practice psychological distancing from hurtful situations at times. One might even say that many evangelical Christians are engaging in a kind of dissociation from scientific truths in order to reduce the challenge those truths present to their version of the God story.

There's a modern rejoinder to this advice: “An eye for an eye till everyone is blind.”⁴ This actually refers to the Old Testament attitude: “If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe” (Exodus 21:23-25, NRSV).⁵ If we think literally, we are bound to end up with such blindness; such rejection of difference hurts ourselves as much as others. If we can think metaphorically, there can be unity and healing. I can banish my itching to the outer limits of consciousness and focus on something more constructive, and human beings from a wide range of cultural and religious backgrounds can work together on the universal problem that is global warming.

1Published in the NY Times on 9 August 2014: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/opinion/sunday/secular-climate-change-activists-can-learn-from-evangelical-christians.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As%2C{%221%22%3A%22RI%3A9%22}

2See rough estimates of religious populations at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations

3Webster's definition of “arrogant”: “a feeling of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or presumptuous claims.”

4Variations on this saying have been attributed to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King; they also show up in songs and poems about the Troubles in Ireland, and in many other cultural sources.

5Curiously, this is all in regard to physical harm to a pregnant woman, causing a miscarriage.

Chicken Guts

A couple of reviews of Elizabeth Pisani's Indonesia Etc. have remarked on the complex mix of Christianity and paganism on the Indonesian island of Sumba. As Pisani puts it, “The people of Sumba are nominally Christian, though . . . many still cleaved to the ancient Marapu religion, guided more by what they read in the entrails of a chicken than by what they read in the Bible.”¹

Traditionally, sophisticated Christians see such acts as reading entrails (or tea leaves, etc.) as a superstition rooted in the physical world that is demeaning to the spirituality of religion. They would prefer to understand the physical world via the guidance of the abstract ideas of their religion. I was thinking of such practices and their relation to metaphor as I was later reading an essay on Hinduism in the New York Times.² In this essay Jonardon Ganeri, a scholar in Indian philosophy, explains why Hinduism tends to be tolerant of other other religious beliefs:

“[In Hinduism] religious texts are often not viewed as making truth claims, which might then easily contradict one another. Instead, they are seen as devices through which one achieves self-transformation. Reading a religious text, taking it to heart, appreciating it, is a transformative experience, and in the transformed state one might well become aware that the claims of the text would, were they taken literally, be false. So religious texts are seen in Hinduism as 'Trojan texts'. . . . Such texts enter the mind of the reader and help constitute the self.”

In reading, there is a meeting of the ideas presented in the text and the self of the reader. In part, yes, the ideas of the text “enter the mind of the reader and help constitute the self.” But reading also involves the opposite process—the pre-existing self of the reader making sense of the ideas of the text, projecting his own understandings and expectations onto the text. That's why one person can read the same text several times during a lifetime and understand it somewhat differently each time—a somewhat different self is reading it each time. In literary texts in particular, several readers can understand one text in several different ways, and that reality enriches the text rather than diminishing it. We too often forget what the mind brings to the text. 
 
So, when a shaman is looking at chicken entrails or tea leaves or any other external object that is supposed to reveal some truth or prophecy, what happens might be a case of the thing itself giving meaning to the mind, as it seems to be in Sumba, according to Pisani: if the fatty tissue of the chicken is “thick and yellow, the owner has a marvellous year ahead”; if it is “thin and whitish, . . . the owner leaves in tears.” But what if the shaman is dealing with tea leaves or patterns of smoke, manifestations that don't assume an either/or form? And what if, as is likely, the shaman knows the people of his village well? Is it not likely that the shaman's conscious or unconscious understanding of a person's or a people's abilities and disabilities might be projected upon the external image? I would think so.

We really should not scorn such pagan practices as reading chicken entrails, since it is really just another form of metaphorical thinking. The concrete object functions as the image, the vehicle that is used to carry and present the more abstract thoughts and perceptions of the shaman. This seems to me a very efficient way to transfer wisdom. The entrails operate essentially like a book; the shaman attaches certain ideas to the chicken, and the “reader” takes in those ideas.

Think of the image of the U.S. flag; think of what different thoughts and feelings patriotic Americans and extremist Muslims project upon that same concrete object. So much of meaning is what we project onto a text or an object. As long as we don't read literary or religious texts literally—so long as we don't abandon our own knowledge in the face of what we see in the text, then certainly reading helps us to create a self. And reading is, essentially, a metaphorical process—the meeting of marks on a page with the abstract capacities of the individual mind.

1Elizabeth Pisani, Indonesia Etc. (NY: Norton, 2014), pg. 57. Also see pg. 64.

2http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/what-would-krishna-do-or-shiva-or-vishnu/?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Aw

Misleading Metaphors

I'd like to point out a great essay on how things get messy in society when metaphors are misused or outright abused: John Lanchester's “Money Talks,” New Yorker online, 4 August 1914.¹ Lanchester discusses a process he calls “reversification” in the “language of money”--the tendency of financial terms to come to mean the opposite of what they seem to mean in ordinary language. He illustrates his argument with a discussion of the term “hedge fund.”

“The idea is that, by putting a hedge around a bet, clever gamblers can delimit the size of their potential losses, just as a real hedge delimits the size of a field. . . . A hedge is a physical thing. It turned into a metaphor; then into a technique; then the technique became more sophisticated and more and more complicated; then it turned into something that can't be understood by the ordinary referents of ordinary language. And that is the story of how a hedge, setting a limit to a field, became what it is today: a largely unregulated pool of private capital. . . . This is reversification in its full glory.”

Lanchester also discusses the misuse in financial circles of the terms “securitization” and “austere.” Those terms are, of course, not metaphors, because they are not based on concrete images. When Lanchester refers to “a real hedge” as being part of “the ordinary referents of ordinary language,” he is obliquely referring to the hedge as an image, as when he more clearly describes a hedge as “setting a limit to a field.” I want to stick in this discussion to the misuse of this metaphor and not get into the misuse of abstract terms like security and austerity—because we can do something to monitor the misuse of metaphors.

What Lanchester says happens in financial language is a removal of the meaning of words from ordinary people—when we can't correctly understand what a hedge fund is, we need an interpreter to guide us—a “priest” of financial mysteries. And as soon as we do that, we tend to enrich the priests and impoverish ourselves, in several different ways. As Lanchester says about the misuse of the word “austerity,” “The word 'austerity' reflects an attempt to make something moral-sounding and value-based out of specific reductions in government spending that result in specific losses to specific people. For people who don't use any of the affected services—for the rich, that is—these cuts may have no downside. They're a case of you lose, we win.”

But back to the hedge. The reason that speaking and thinking in real metaphors can protect us from such avaricious financial priests is that we can relate to an objective thing, an image, with our senses within our imagination. In other words, the basis for understanding reality is within ourselves and not vested in outside authority when we use metaphors. The deception comes when people in power (often politicians and financial experts) move language away from the images we can easily relate to and understand. A “hedge fund” is still based on an image, but it deceives us in that, as Lanchester explains, it is really the opposite of a carefully hedged bet. 

When we allow authorities to misuse metaphors (or to use too much abstract language, lacking imagery), we give up our own power to judge for ourselves and we place our futures in the hands of people who wish mostly just to enhance their own power—the very people who brought about the recent financial crisis that affected so many of us! Our language is literally our power; to let some people redefine or obscure what words mean is to yield our power. We need to use language that we can think with and understand—and, even more importantly, we need to insist that others do that also when talking to us.

When I taught literature in college, I came to feel that the literary theory that was taking over basically all English departments was seriously disadvantaging students. Their professors became a kind of priesthood that could decipher the very abstract thinking of literary theory, and this put an unnecessary step between the student and the literary work. Literature is based on metaphor; theory is based on abstract ideas. I sought to return students to the literary text in front of them by getting them to respond sensually, imaginatively to the images and metaphors within it. 
 
Lanchester believes that the misuse of language by financial experts is “not a process intended to deceive,” but in fact it does deceive—and, personally, I cannot see how the financial experts can be not aware of that. Results in a case like this matter more than intentions, which are always slippery. (You can never really know an author's intention, but you can know how his language affects you—and that's what matters most. The author is not in your head; her words are.) But Lanchester calls for a new insistence on honesty in language.

“The language of money is a powerful tool, and it is also a tool of power. Incomprehension is a form of consent. If we allow ourselves not to understand this language, we are signing off on the way the world works today—in particular, we are signing off on the prospect of an ever-widening gap between the rich and everyone else, a world in which everything about your life is determined by the accident of who your parents are.”

Education should be the process of achieving equality, since in part education guides us toward metaphorical thinking (as long as we are studying the liberal arts, anyway). Personally, I think private schools and charter schools and religious schools and home schooling are a really bad idea, because they lead to impoverishment of the public schools and to our children growing up without a common cultural language, in effect. But I can't do anything about that. What I can do is insist that the people I talk to use language I can relate to, so that we are sharing an idea and so that I am not wholly dependent on the other person to guide me toward a decision that would be in my best interest. As someone said of World War I, war is too horrible to leave to the generals. Any process that removes the power of metaphorical thinking from us disempowers us. We need to insist on the integrity of our own language.

Bravo, Mr. Lanchester!

1http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/money-talks-6?utm_source=tny&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyemail&mbid=nl_Daily%20%28226%29&spMailingID=6827528&spUserID=MjQ4NTYwMzUwNzIS1&spJobID=482987526&spReportId=NDgyOTg3NTI2S0