PoGitA 2

Yesterday I tried to write a refresher on the "problem of evil" - see below if you dare. That's the common name for a set of issues which has exercised me since graduate school in various ways. I had lots to say - more, almost certainly, than my argument about the "problem of good" in the Anthropocene requires. But it was a useful exercise, at least for me. A few things it helped me surface:

1) Evil is a deeper problem than the existence of bad things, bad people, mortality. Once you come down from the abstraction of philosophical questioning, you find in each evil a wrenching mystery. To give some current examples: this life cut short by fleeting exposure to a virus, that willingness to live in lies in order to maintain the only world one can imagine true, this devastation of one population by the heedlessness of another far away, that murderous scapegoating and dehumanization... I've always thought that "evil" is overrated. Whatever its origins, it's interesting only because it is succesful. For me the true horror is the good things that evil destroys, and the scandal is why it succeeds. How is it that charlatans gain a following? Why is good susceptible to becoming the victim of evil - and its agent? Good is corruptible because it is good: open, resonant, available, eager for connection. 

2) Perhaps because evil confronts us with this porousness of the good, it is tempting to distance oneself from both. Modern western thought is focused unsustainably on evil rather than good, but its understanding of the problem of evil draws from hellenistic sources. Like its hellenistic forebears, it works out different ways of coming to terms with a disappointing world without being hurt by it. While religion isn't the only or even perhaps best way to allow oneself to be be heartbroken over evil, the truest response to evil is to let our hearts break.

3) What our hearts break over isn't the existence of evil but the precarious miracle of good - that is, goods. We relate differently to that miracle post-Darwin (goodbye argument from design) and post-Margulis (goodbye indifferent universe of competition), but the precarity and the miraculousness of life are perhaps clearer than they have ever been - or can be, if we can resist the commoditizing consciousness of consumer capitalist culture.

4) Traditions, including those we term "religious," can help us lean into the awareness of the fragile and irreplaceable good. They teach us how to open our hearts to breaking, and not to flee into fantasies of invulnerability, permanence or oblivion.

All this is what I mean by "the problem of good," a problem in an urgent new way in the Anthropocene... 

Yesterday:

So what is the problem of evil again? My musings on a problem of good take for granted that people are familiar with it, but it's been a while since I've had occasion to spell it out.

In its narrowest sense, the problem of evil is a topic in monotheistic philosophy of religion. The classic formulation comes in David Hume, referring back to the hellenistic philosopher Epicurus. 

Epicurus’ old questions are yet unanswered.

Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent.

Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent.

Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?

(Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion)

"Evil," as Aquinas argued, has always been the greatest challenge to faith in God. This articulation of the problem, sometimes referred to as the "trilemma," juxtaposes the reality of evil with the supposed omnipotence and benevolence of God, and seems to leave only unattractive options: an impotent God, a malevolent God, or none at all! This stark "problem of evil" is a perennial favorite of philosophy of religion classes, meeting students struggling with the claims of religious traditions. A friend in graduate school put it succinctly: the problem of evil is the main reason people leave religions - or at least change their affiliation.

Philosophers of religion have teased out a "logical" and "evidential" version of the challenge, but my approach has always been a little different. With William James I've never thought that people believe because of philosophical arguments, though arguments may help some live into beliefs they're already inclined toward. And from Robert Merrihew and Marilyn McCord Adams I know that for theistic believers, the trilemma constitutes not an ultimatum - which of these is false? - but a mystery - how can they all be true? God is for them no less a reality than evil is. How can both be real? It's a different project, which the Adamses called "aporetic." This has inspired my understanding that part of what religious traditions do is let us abide with important questions, especially the ones we can't seem to answer. On the problem of evil they provide things like the Book of Job, which is everything but an answer. Traditions keep difficult questions open (at least some of the time!). It's not that one or more of the trilemma premisses may have to go, but that each seems a squib for more profound, and more existentially involving, realities. The glib atheist who concludes "no God, no problem!" seems out of touch with the true claims of all these realities, including even evil.

One can go in a few directions from here. One is into the other resources which traditions generate and are generated by as they allow us to abide with otherwise overpowering mysteries. These range from narratives to liturgies to contemplative practices - all of which overlap in practice. I've explored this most fully in connection with the Book of Job where I'm always at pains to emphasize that what readers find in Job (already a tangle of stories and ideas) is shaped by what other texts or stories they are committed to. Genesis? Psalms? Ecclesiastes? The Gospels? Oral and apocryphal traditions? Jewish and Christian interpretations of Job differ and should differ. Jewish and Christian traditions aren't "monolithic, impermeable, tightly systematic, and unitary wholes" (to borrow Thatamanil's words) anyway but congeries of overlapping communities, shifting canons of practice and thought and ongoing conversation. Each of these conversations, like the diverse early Christian communities, has its own set of other questions and commitments, its own tools for approaching challenges of various sorts. Until modern times none would have thought to understand the Book of Job by itself - or to understand the mystery of evil through Epicurus' old questions. Evil is no simple reality or, to put it another way, if evil is real then reality is more mysterious than we thought. Traditions marshall all the resources they can find for these challenges, leaving the thin air of philosophical fiddles with the trilemma far behind.

Emboldened by the wealth of materials proffered by biblical traditions, one might go in a second direction and question "Epicurus' old questions." Hume traces them to Epicurus, although (as I argued a long time ago) it makes more sense to see it as Skeptical than Epicurean. In either case, it's a hellenistic question, not only not a part of biblical monotheism but not part of the monotheistic world at all. It's certainly interesting that this philosophical formulation emerged in the space where these different ways of responding to late antique polytheism overlapped. (Stoic responses to it clearly shaped emerging Christian thought.) We'll see in the next paragraph that it suggests this may be a general or generalizable problem. But for the moment it's useful to tag it as emerging in a space where the gods seem distant, where human must decide what relation to take to them. The gods Epicurus has in mind, after all, are indifferent to things they can't change, and serve for us as models for a similar detachment. This isn't the space most monotheists occupy, or wasn't until the early modern period, when hellenistic forms of thinking reemerged in a big way (in part as a lingua franca for a Christian world divided against itself). Susan Neiman has argued that the problem of evil is the defining concern of modern western thought - a sign of the importance of this hellenistic revival. But one might also say that hellenistic philosophies aren't, well, very deep. Therapeutically powerful but existentially thin. It may be that not only the gods but the evils they describe are a little too conjectural. All promise to help one avoid getting one's heart broken by life, but it may be that such heartbreak is the beginning of true humanity.

A third direction one might go is to say that the problem is not only not exclusive to monotheism but may be broader than theism or even religion itself. What is the problem, then? Philosophers of religion distinguish moral and natural evils - wickedness and suffering - but the greatest intellectual challenge may be the perennial mismatch between these, however we understand them, and the greatest existential demand for the Anthropocene the increasing impossibility of distinguishing them. Max Weber took this idea and ran with it, appropriating the term "theodicy" for the problem spurring religious intellectuals on, in every tradition. Intellectuals, he argued, work to make of experience a "meaningful cosmos," refining and deepening the assumptions of their traditions as they do so. He thought there were a few "rationally satisfying" solutions sprinkled across the world religions, but that none of these was existentially bearable. All made one want to exit this "ethically irrational" world, perhaps into the maw of mysticism. The world may or not be "ethically irrational" in this way but clearly much religious creativity (and retrenchment) can be traced to the effort to shore up systems of practice and belief in the face of painful realities. And it does seem that these realities can be described, to a point, in general terms. These general terms make comparative religion possible, even as they construct "religions" in ways the hellenistic philosophers might have recognized. And they suggest that the problem of evil is not a problem only for religious folks. There is something in the reality of evil - in the reality of a reality which contains evil - which wrenches every human attempt to find meaning, a home in the world.

But of course, and so we come finally to the problem of good, it may be that challenges of wickedness, suffering and bad things happening to good people aren't the only challenge to thought, the only thing that might touch the heart in a profound way. With or without Weber's help it's clear that deep pondering on the varieties and processes of "evils" point one to ontological abysses - and peaks. This is more than run of the mill duhkha. How can evils do such harm? Where do they come from? There are other conundra, too. How can good nevertheless come out of evil, as it so often does? As moderns, fed the thin gruel of Neo-hellenistic philosophy for a few centuries, we almost need to be backed into the problem of good. You know, this one:

If there be a God, from whence proceed so many evils?

And if there be no God, from whence cometh any good?

(Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy)

This is no more an argument for the existence of divinity than Epicurus' old questions are arguments against it. It points rather to a second set of reasons for wonder. It reminds us that,  although we accept them as a matter of course, the existence of things for evil to despoil isn't obvious. Boethius ends up going in a more hellenistic direction: none of these things should matter as much to as as they customarily do, compared to eternal things. But the question is a profound one. Excavating it is my project, which begins with wondering why it needs excavating in the first place. If evils are so evident that we assume they can be defined in a general and generalizable way comprehensible to people of every and no faith tradition, why not also goods?

A whole bunch of problems rear their heads at this point: awareness of deep cultural difference and the ways it has been silenced by universalizing discourses, as well as a batch of skepticisms regarding the ontological bona fides of our judgments of good. Aren't they just things we like? Don't cultures have greatly differing understandings of the good? Anyway, aren't any and all the things someone might choose to call good just things produced by the random and morally neutral processes of evolution - and inseparale from whatever we might deem evil? The hellenistic temptations are strong to conclude that, in the end, nothing really matters. Except for evil! Can we make evil matter without letting the goods it compromises matter in the same way?

I've heard a sort of hellenistic response to the Anthropocene from some students: it's good to know that though the human story end Earth will survive, that life will endure. Things come and things go, that's the way of the world. Geological time scales make it hard to see things any other way. Sure, we get sentimental about our vanishingly thin slice of history, but really it's no big deal. A shame, but not a problem. Maybe, in fact, it's time for us to go. Also in its way hellenistic is the apparently contrasting thought that, though life as we know it (especially non-human life) is doomed, humanity will find a way to adjust, whether on this planet or somewhere else.

But, but, but, one wants to say, how dare we come to terms with the great destruction we have unleashed? The potential extinction of other species matters because their existence does. Whether we understand this in terms of the beauty or ingenuity of individual species or their valued place in ecosystems, the deeper reality is their existence at all, the existence of life, which, now, belatedly, again we are learning not to take for granted.

The problem of good in the Anthropocene

I've been trying to find a new angle on religion and the Anthropocene, without much success. Lots of other people have interesting things to say, and it's fun to introduce students (or other scholars) to them, but I'm finding the two terms - "religion" and "Anthropocene" - have too many problems of their own to serve as a stable frame for an argument of I want to make. There are definitely what Lisa Sideris calls "religion-like" features to arguments about the Anthropocene, whether the apocalyptic versions or the "good Anthropocene" ones where humanity takes the baton as the "god species," but it's a little tedious to be analyzing others' thoughtlessness, and to be trucking with generic concepts of "religion." 

I'm not sure critique of the hubris of the "Anthropocenologists" (Bonneuil and Fressoz's term) is qualitatively different from arguments which have been made for many years now about the ecological dangers of certain kinds of monotheism, and of the patriarchal colonialist capitalist forms of thought with which it was allied in recent centuries and which perpetuate its dangers. What is new - that some of our shameless shenanigans might be leaving a trace discernible by future geologists - isn't obviously important, when (some) humans have been devastating human and other-than-human worlds for half a millennium. Indeed, the supposed novelty of the Anthropocene can serve as a distraction from longer term ecological problems folks have been thinking and organizing about for decades. From this perspective the arrival of "Anthropocene" discourse is an unwelcome reaffirmation of human exceptionalism (the Man!) just as the extent of colonial damage and the delicacy of our entanglement with other species are coming into focus.

Beyond understanding and redressing the forms and structures of devastation (some) humans have wreaked, I find promise in the effort to articulate the "Anthropocene" change in (some, my) people's sense of the harmonizability of human plans with earth and its systems and communities. Isabelle Stengers describes as the "intrusion of Gaia" the experience of a planet no longer content to let (some) humans instrumentalize and exploit it, a world which hurts us back. The experience of the Anthropocene isn't near-invisible layers of geological residue in the future but a widening gyre of devastation from fire and flood and storm right now. This is not the Anthropocenologists' safely sublime experience of newly discovered power - who knew we could be so baaad! - but one of what seems a new difficulty and resistance, frustration and confusion. Bronislaw Szerszynski has suggested that these experiences are giving rise to new "gods" and "spirits," as the no longer safely secular background of the natural world becomes feisty foreground - powers which demand devotion and sacrifice. But Stengers' Gaia can't be placated. The world may seem newly unruly because of what (some) humans have done, but it's not interested in repairing its relationship with us. 

At at that conference in Indiana three years ago I tried linking this sense of a nature grandly but disconcertingly oblivious to our concerns to the theophany of Job - other scholars had too - but it didn't take. That ancient text may somehow recall an earlier time when human beings were less confident of their place at the table of the world. The Holocene was in fact a lot less stable than it seems to us now in retrospect to have been! But the pertinence of any ancient text now seems open to question. I'll keep bringing Anthropocene questions to Job but only because I'm already working with Job; I don't want to be arguing that this is a text folks not already so oriented should turn to. Its intrusion of Gaia is contained within a relationship, however sublime (a command performance is hardly an intrusion!), with an ordering care that addresses us by name, and, more troublingly, the story is very much one of a solitary human master of the universe experiencing a (passing) crisis of privilege. The former seems important to work through, within a Christian theological framework, but the latter is a formidable problem in this time of clarity. And I realize neither is what I want to bring to the broader Anthropocene and religion discussion. (Even in Indiana I was really rewriting the book to make it less anthropocentric, its form less cyclical.)

But a few days ago I had an idea for a contribution I might be the one to make, a possibility at least. It would connect to arguments I made way back when about the problem of evil - and the problem of good. The main argument then was that until modern times the problems of good and evil were engaged together. The most profound responses, to me at least, linked them - evil was understood as the privation or destruction of good, whose vulnerability was as heartbreaking as its existence was gratuitous. What happened to make the problem of evil so eclipse the problem of good that we don't even hear about the latter anymore was, in part, that the world came to be experienced as stable, habitable, controllable. Order became a background we could take for granted, not a precious or precarious gift, and it was the disruption of order, always the more urgent "problem," that came to monopolize attention. Thus could a Schopenhauer turn the old argument that philosophy begins in wonder on its head and say it had always been wonder at evil that was the source of thought. Modern thought has indeed been fed by and feeds the problem of evil, but I argued that reflection on evil without good was ultimately a hollow thing, undermining the claim of the good as well as our understanding of its nature. (That there is a good - not just varied and competing fancies about ultimately valueless reality - seems to me one of the unnoticed implications of the certainty that there is a universally acknowledged problem of evil.)

Here's the new idea. What if Stengers' "intrusion of Gaia" marks the wobbling end of that confidence in a natural order we felt we could take for granted? Objectively speaking, the Anthropocene centuries (and millennia) ahead will be less stable than the centuries (and millennia) of the Holocene which cradled the development of human civilizations. But until the era when modern science, technology, and fossil fueled fantasies of transcending biological cycles made it feel stable, the Holocene world order, too, felt precarious. Widespread belief that the world order was breaking down may now look to us like part of a deep confidence in cycles of death and rebirth - a confidence no longer warranted! - but they report experience of failing rather than resilient order. As even Job knew, hope has always been hope against hope. It's not clear that all fruits of Holocene culture are rendered obsolete by the Anthropocene, when not indeed complicit in it. The damage wrought by the Anthropocene is vast but recent. Popular and scholarly attention is drawn by "indigenous" traditions thought to have a better grasp of how to live with our non-human kin in a disrupted world, but as Frédérique Appfel-Marglin's "reverse anthropology" reminds us, most people in history - and even today - lived outside the deadly imaginings that drive the Anthropocene. There are many, not few, resources for living on a "damaged planet" if we look beyond colonial capitalist western modernity.

Arguing about periodization isn't a game I want to play. But I'm sensing it might be an intriguing way to dislodge the sense of Anthropocene doom to restore the complementarity of the problems of evil and good. I'd have to venture a historical story, as I sketch above, but what would make it interesting is the resonance the problem of good might now again have. My main work would be evoking how good was conceived and experienced before it became background noise - precious and precarious and mysterious - and then bringing this into conversation with contemporary fumblings with ontology and recoveries of wonder. Gaia will remain implacable, but perhaps we can find better ways to find and sustain refuges from the deceptive claims and compromises of Anthropocenology.

(Image: the pre-Holocene "Shigir Idol")

76,000:1

John J. Thatamanil, a professor of theology and world religions at Union, has written an important essay on the moral damage the Trump presidency is doing - unfortunately hidden from American eyes on an Australian page. Aside from material harm, he argues, the president's vileness (on daily display in the daily coronavirus misinformation sessions) is a spiritual threat.

Daily exposure to such debasement, whether by tweet or by briefing, raises dispiriting questions: Is this the best our nation’s leader can do? Is there in him any redeemable character trait that can serve as a beacon of light in an otherwise dark and deadly situation? Under the cumulative barrage of lies and life-threatening misinformation, the questions morph and become broader. Rather than ask about just about one man’s peculiar degradation, we begin to wonder about human nature itself. Are some human beings irredeemable, incapable of learning and growth? Are we naïve, even foolish, to expect human beings to set aside self-interest and rise to responsibilities thrust upon them by extraordinary times? Under the relentless of assault of his pettiness, we are rendered vulnerable to rage, cynicism and a subtle, pervasive lowering of moral expectations for ourselves and others.

Breathing in spiritual pollution is akin to the breathing in air pollution in New Delhi. Just as air pollutants harm lung capacities, so too our spiritual capacities, love, resilience, trust and confidence in human goodness are diminished by constant exposure to such spiritual toxins as hubris, venality and hate.

I'm surely not the only one to have felt this for a long time, and grateful for Thataminil's finding such powerful words for it. But what's even better in his essay is the source of hope he finds in the covid-19 inspired goodness we don't hear enough about.

[C]all to mind the number 76,000 — that is the number of volunteers who have answered Governor Cuomo’s call to join the frontlines in the struggle against COVID-19. Many have come out of retirement and so are in the age bracket most vulnerable to this disease; nevertheless, they have stepped forward bravely.

We are inclined to believe that heroic goodness is found only in a handful of extraordinary people like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Mother Teresa, but it seems that New York State alone has 76,000 Mother Teresas. Truth be told, that is a vast undercount. After all, those of us who are sheltering at home do so because we too want our neighbours to be safe and healthy. This too is a form of quotidian kindness, an unheralded and humble heroism.

Good bests evil, if only we have the eyes to see it.

And yet, as I used to point out when I was writing on "the problem of evil" - really, I argued, the lifeless half of the problems of evil and good - evil gets all the attention. Even if it's the focus only because of the damage it causes to goods, evil can seem more real to us than good. It's a genuine problem, since it isn't in the nature of good to try to commandeer us, to make us forget the world, to eat our brains. Evil will always win as clickbait. Something like that happened even with this essay, which some well-intentioned editor gave the title "Why Donald Trump is a threat to the United States' spiritual well-being." A better title might have been "76,000 Mother Teresas"!

In the beginnings

As we weigh the "Lynn White thesis" that the "dominion clause" (Genesis 1:26, 28) has made Christianity uniquely anthropocentric and so uniquely destructive of the living environment in "Religion and Ecology," I usually have students read through the creation accounts in the first two chapters of Genesis. This is inevitably exciting since everyone's heard about these texts but few have read them in all their strange glory; for most students it's news even that there are two accounts!

This year I split them up. We read the first (Genesis 1:1-2:3) on Tuesday, with Lynn White's eponymous essay and Mari Joerstad's account of personalistic forces in Genesis 1. Today we read the second (2:4-25), with a retrieval of Genesis 1-2 by Mmapula Diana Kebaneilwe, an ecowomanist theologian from Botswana, and a queer reckoning with the narrative exclusions of Lynn White's argument. Taking time over them this way led to many more discoveries - for me, too. Everyone knows (well...) that in Genesis 1 God creates humanity in his image, "male and female" (1:27), whereas in the better known rendering of Genesis 2 the LORD God creates the man first, and the woman later as a helper - from his rib. But somehow I'd forgotten that the woman is created only after the man is offered every sort of animal companion, created for this purpose out of the same ground.

¹⁸ Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” ¹⁹ So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. ²⁰ The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. (NRSV)

In the account of Genesis 1 the animals are of course created before humans. For that matter, in the Genesis 2 account, even the trees are created after the man is (2:8-9)! The second account is not just patriarchal but profoundly anthropocentric. None of the animist moments Joerstad identifies in Genesis 1 has a correlate in Genesis 2. The patriarchal dominionist view White critiques helps itself to bits of both accounts - those which maximize the distance between man and everything else, beginning with woman. Man is created to rule the rest of creation - a creation in need of rule. Forgotten are all the parts which suggest that humanity was part of an ecosystem, a tiller of soil, a steward of creation.

What other stories might one tell if one paid attention to the other parts? Kebaneilwe's essay does this, focusing on Genesis 1's insistence that each of God's creations was good, indeed very good. Nothing is deemed good in Genesis 2's account, but there is "It is not good that the man should be alone" (2:18). From Genesis 1 we should have learned that no one human being alone can be the image of God (the image was plural!), certainly not one kind of human in contrast to another! Thinking this through, Kebaneilwe arrives at a dazzling hope.

I believe that we should concern ourselves with the questions of “what does goodness mean?” What does it imply and what is its significance with regard to the relationship between the creator himself and all of his creation? Further still, what is the significance of the said goodness with regard to the relationship between human beings themselves, as male and female as well as between human beings and the rest of creation: animals, plants, land and seas, birds and everything that exists? There is something that needs attention in the idea of an overall good creation. That is, there will be liberation for all of creation if human beings could ponder the view that in “all things” there is divine goodness as suggested by the creator at the end of every creative activity as suggested by Gen 1-2. (Mmapala Diana Kebaneilwe, "The good creation: An ecowomanist reading of Genesis 1-2," Old testam. essays 28/3 (2015): 694-703, 701)

Students had not noticed the absence of the good in Genesis 2 but some spotted what seemed to them a suspicious absence of evil in Genesis 1. Zeroing in on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (2:9), the one the eating from which would introduce death into the world (2:17), they theorized that God got bored while resting on the seventh day, introducing evil, death, knowledge, gender hierarchy. But this was all for the best, one student suggested, because you can't have good without evil.

This idea, as you may know, is one of my all-time pet peeves and I let loose. One of the most baneful and consequential mistakes of western thought has been the idea that you can't have good without evil, or even know it! Genesis 1 is all about the obvious goodness of good, and it's in that joyous discovery that Kebaneilwe finds the hope for an end to oppression. You don't need contrast of that sort; goods complement each other, as when humans are "created in God's image, male and female"! Our problem is that we don't trust our experiences of goodness; we lose track of our natural attunement to the world, we make evil necessary! And once that idea is in place, complementary relations like those of the male and female human, or the human and the other creations, become unrecognizable, distorted into hierarchical, even qualitative oppositions!!

I think I got a little carried away; the class seemed a little stunned! I'm sure we'll return to this, perhaps when we wander into Daoism in a few weeks...