The Argument from Design

A friend linked to this story today, gushing:

When I think of Love and Compassion... this is what i imagine. These are the good folks and the Christians who SHOULD be getting media time.

I'm not going to let Christians claim the copyright on helpfulness and compassion. They're universal human traits and practices.

In fact, now that I've read the story, I don't see a notable amount of "love and compassion" in it. The kid, a sixteen-year-old in Memphis, Tennessee, offered to help out in exchange for some food -- which is a perfectly legitimate thing for him to do. The man he offered to work for bought Chauncy a bunch of groceries and drove him home, where he got a look at the conditions he and his disabled mother were living in; that's a good thing, and fits "love and compassion."  He then started a crowdfund for them, which was nice, but it wasn't a gift: the idea was to buy him a lawnmower so he could mow lawns and earn money.  Again, perfectly legit, but not a shining example of love and compassion. I just looked at the GoFundMe page, which is up to more than $74,000 now. And that's very encouraging, and I wish Chauncy well.

Still, a loving and compassionate (not to mention cranky and tired) person might ask: why should any kid be living in poverty? Why should a sixteen-year-old have to support his family? (Yes, that often happens, but is it an ideal to strive and work for?) Does focusing on a story like this to make oneself feel good distract from all the other children and families and single adults who are living in poverty, thanks to an economic and political system that is meant to create large numbers of people at the bottom?  Or does it just make you feel different from all those Christians you disapprove of?

Just before I saw this post I was reading Richard Seymour's blog, and he had this to say about the mindset of those who believe in competition:

If competition is to be the law of all social life, if there are to be winners and losers, if we are to scorn and diminish losers, if we need an 'underclass', a lower-down onto whom to pile the humiliations that are visited on us - well, then, at least let Britain come first. And if we are going to be punished for all our minor transgressions during the boom, for having a little bit of debt, for not saving enough, for not buying enough, for not having a better job, for not working harder, then at least punish them more.

Remember, as a young, poor, black male, Chauncy is just an eye-blink away from being demonized as a superpredator by our respectable leaders and many of the nice older white people I know on Facebook.  It's easy to celebrate an exemplary, hard-working, straight-A student like Chauncy, but you shouldn't have to be a paragon to have a roof over your head or enough to eat.

Even worse, on the GoFundMe page the guy who started the page writes: "last week, by God's beautiful design, he met me." So, all the other kids in poverty who didn't luck out are going hungry "by God's beautiful design." (Remember, Jesus said we will always have the poor with us, so slather on that ointment, baby, for great is your reward in heaven.)

He goes on: "I've never felt so overwhelmed with compassion and faith and joy. I've never felt so good as this moment... What followed was perhaps one of the most cherished experiences of my life." See, it's all about him. And God. Chauncy is just a pawn in the game. Love and compassion? Not by my standards, but I'm an atheist. That's why I get all pissy when people talk about "karma" and "you're in my prayers and thoughts."  If Chauncy and his mother were poor and hungry, that was their karma; who are we mere mortals to judge the Universe?
 
I really should consider taking a sabbatical from Facebook; it's not good for me.  And it's all about me.

But Enough About You

The advice columnist Miss Manners made a curious and, I think, revealing misstep in answering a question on Sunday.  The questioner asked what to say on "learning that a friend has stage 4 cancer," if not "You will be in my prayers."  What if you're dealing with a selfish, unfeeling cancer patient who is "not of the same religious beliefs or is an atheist"?

Miss Manners suggested a good alternative -- "I am terribly sorry.  I'll be hoping for the best.  I hope you know how much I care for you" -- but framed it oddly.

There is the religious angle that you raise, though Miss Manners would think that a nonreligious person could appreciate a religious person's seeking the solace in which he or she believes.

I've read this and its context several times to try to be sure I understand it.  So, when a religious person's friend is terminally ill and the religious person promises to pray, it is for his or her own solace, not for the solace or benefit of the sick person?  I wouldn't be surprised, but I thought that there was usually at least a pretense that the prayer is offered on behalf of the other, not for oneself.  You learn something new every day!

Another of my Facebook friends and I have been disputing something related.  She's about my age, we went to the same high school, she's nominally liberal politically, she hates Trump and likes Hillary.  She likes to post feel-good memes, and last Saturday night she posted one that said "Do good and good will come to you."

We've had some exchanges about karma and related doctrines before.  I commented that I disagree. There are no payoffs, there is no karma. If you do good hoping to receive good in return, you'll soon be embittered. If you don't expect it, you'll often be pleasantly surprised. (And this leaves aside the very difficult question of what "good" is.)

My friend initially replied, "Oh, there IS karma, but you shouldnt liken karma with a fairy godmother.....it doesnt work that way, but there are times when there is such karma with others that its a delight to know about."  This was odd, because the whole point of the meme she'd posted is that karma (or whatever) is like a fairy godmother: do good, and you'll receive good.

We went back and forth a bit on whether "there IS karma," and a mutual FB friend admonished us that no one knows with 100% certainty what happens to us after death.  First, we weren't talking about what happens after death: the meme promises reward in this life.  Second, and more important, we do know with close to 100% certainty that bad things happen to good people and vice versa, because we can see it in the world around us.  That's what's known in philosophy as the Problem of Evil.  People have been grappling with it for thousands of years. To promise blandly "Do good and good will come to you" is to lie.  Even my friend recognizes this on some level, since she tried to backtrack a bit with the "fairy godmother" move.  But she continued to insist that karma is real, and that it works.  Maybe I should press her more to explain how karma works, if it's not a "fairy godmother," but I don't think she could articulate it; her idea of reasoned discussion is to report what a distinguished psychic told her.  Maybe I should press her on it anyway.  

After all, the Buddha is reported to have told a professional soldier who consulted him "that if the latter were to die on the battlefield he could expect to be 'reborn in a hell or as an animal' for his transgressions" (Brian Victoria, Zen War Stories, Routledge, 2003).  The Buddha took the safe path by threatening post-mortem punishment; Jesus of Nazareth, less cautiously, warned that "All who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matthew 26:52), which is as transparently false as "Do good and good will come to you."  Many professional soldiers have died in bed, and many if not most people who've been killed in war were non-combatants.  But both of these teachers presented karmic justice as a "fairy godmother," if a highly punitive one.

That good people do sometimes flourish and bad ones sometimes suffer isn't evidence for the meme's truth.  The distribution of good and bad fortune could just as easily be random.  I think it probably is, once you look beyond face-to-face personal relations, and even in that very restricted realm, there are no guarantees.  What this means is that pointing to "karma" or "You reap what you sow" (to which I'll return presently) or similar doctrines is not a fact about the world, but a person's interpretation and judgment about the world.  This is of course true of everything we say about the world, but I'm stressing it here because my friend, like so many people who share her attitude, loves to invoke karma when she's feeling Schadenfreude because someone she dislikes has taken a pratfall.

A few months ago while I was among a small group of people waiting for a bus, a young woman began talking to no one in particular about a former boss who'd treated her badly (I don't remember the details). After she left that job she saw in the newspaper that her former boss had been physically attacked for being Muslim. "I guess it was her karma," said the young woman complacently.  No one said anything.  I considered suggesting that working for that woman was her karma, but I chickened out.

Since then I've begun commenting when people on Facebook invoke karma in connection with other people's misfortunes.  None of them have done a good job of justifying their highly selective use of the concept; as with Christian belief in Hell, they don't seem to like to think about the possibility that bad karma might catch up with them, or with people they like, and they consider it very bad form to remind them of it.  Like Hell, karma is for other people, bad people, for Donald Trump -- not for good, nice people like them.

But if "there IS karma," it is no respecter of persons.  But as I've said before, it would be highly offensive to apply it to the drowned Syrian toddler who washed up on a Turkish beach last year.  Or to the victims of the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the morning after my friend posted her meme.  Which wouldn't mean that bad karma wasn't involved, only that people are often unwilling to follow their own logic to its unpleasant conclusion.  And there's nothing unusual about that.  I think that people talk about karma or "You reap what you sow" (and Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick did just that when he quoted Galatians 6:7 on his Twitter account on Sunday morning after the massacre) or other similar proverbial bullshit, less because they mean it than as a warding-off of the evil eye, to try to distract karma from their own doorsteps.  It's often women who sniff "What was she doing out alone at that hour anyway?" when a woman is raped, for example.  (The Stanford rape victim must have had bad karma too.  But then so did her rapist, whose apologists whine that his life is ruined by the notoriety he received and the judicial slap he was given on his lily-white wrist.)  My mother used to harumph, "Where are their parents?" when juvenile delinquency was reported on the evening news; if my brothers and I misbehaved, though, it wasn't her fault, she'd done her best with us, etc.

Magical thinking is something we fall back on in situations we can't control or make sense of, as Bronislaw Malinoswki found of Trobriand Islanders who had rigorous, practical, rational lore for sailing in the relatively safe inner lagoons, and magic for sailing on the more dangerous open sea.  But I think we must challenge magical thinking when it takes inhumane forms like belief in karma and "You reap what you sow."  I don't think that the Problem of Evil, insoluble though it is, is too complex for most people to understand.  Sometimes I feel a bit guilty for expecting my less-intellectual friends to inform themselves and learn to think about these matters.  Critical thinking is not just for academic elites; I once disputed with a nice liberal fellow who said that ordinary people don't need to learn to think critically.  Excuse me, I replied, but ordinary people are expected to vote, which requires critical thinking if it's to be done responsibly; just shopping at the supermarket, let alone for a car or a house, involves considering and weighing alternatives.  Ordinary citizens cultivate thinking skills in dealing with spectator sports; as Noam Chomsky has observed, they are often very well-informed and won't defer to the authority of coaches and team owners.  This is permitted because such knowledge and skill has no real social consequences, while thinking about politics and morality might lead to restiveness and rebellion against the legitimate rulers of society.  I don't know how well most people can learn to think critically, but I don't trust the elites who prefer that the proles leave the thinking to them.  After all, the elites have shown consistently that they aren't smart or rational either.

Room 101

This meme is unfortunately representative of so many more, and of a tendency in religion and spirituality that is far older than the Internet.

When this one turned up, I had just read a review in The Atlantic of Primo Levi's newly-published Complete Works, and the reviewer says that Levi rejected the idea of prayer when he was in Auschwitz:

He was not a believer, he explains, and “the rules of the game don’t change … when you’re losing.” Besides, to pray that you and not another should survive is such a prayer as the Lord should “spit … out upon the ground.”

I'm not so sure about that last part, though, because Yahweh requires prayer, and Levi's dilemma didn't originate during the Holocaust. I imagine you can see why I thought of that when I saw this. Life is good for me, but it's not good at all for many other people. Whom should I thank? Why should I thank them? For letting me off while crushing someone else? You can't give a deity (or whatever) credit for being nice to me while denying it's responsible for the bad things that happen to other people.

I commented to this effect, and the person who passed along the meme replied, first, that the meme doesn't mention God.  That doesn't work, because I was explicit that I wasn't talking only about gods.  Second, she was just thankful that she had enough good karma to receive good things.  That just dug her in deeper.  It would seem to follow that if someone is suffering, it's because they hadn't generated enough good karma; and that, not to put too fine a point on it, is vile.  That Syrian toddler who washed up on a Turkish beach: bad karma, right?  He must have done something bad in a past life for that to happen to him.  Not many people are careless enough to agree, but it follows from their understanding of karma as they express it.  They need to rethink their doctrine.

The doctrine of karma, from what I know of it (admittedly not much), doesn't mandate it, but it appears to be compatible with the understanding that those who suffer do so because they earned bad karma, and so deserve the bad things that have happened to them.  It is certainly used that way by many devotees of the idea.  Used loosely, as many people do, it's compatible with gloating over the downfall of someone they dislike.  They try to distance themselves from the imputation they are judging (which they generally pretend they don't do): it's not me, it's karma!  But like early Christians who imagined that their bliss in Heaven would be amplified by the pleasure of watching the torments of the damned in Hell, their denials are not convincing.  Thomas Aquinas proved it logically; according to the gospel of Luke, Jesus taught that the damned deserve and should receive no pity.

I have had a notably easy life, with relatively little suffering in it so far.  I don't imagine for an instant that I did something to earn it.  If there were anyone to thank for it -- as an atheist, of course, I don't believe there is -- my second impulse after doing so would be to berate him for letting other people suffer.  It's why I'm bemused when Christians deny that their god is a micromanaging god, especially when they're trying to explain away natural disasters.  If their god is responsible for the good things that happen to them, he is a micromanaging god, so he's also responsible for the bad things that happen to them, or to other people.  Since he's all-powerful and reputed to be quite touchy (R-E-S-P-E-C-T, what that word it means to Him!), it wouldn't be prudent to take him to task, but a bold person might do so anyway.  I don't know if I'd be that brave, but again, I don't think it's likely to come up.

People who grapple with the Problem of Evil, whether philosophers, theologians, or laymen, generally distinguish between what you might call natural evil (earthquakes, plagues, comets striking the earth and wiping out the dinosaurs) and what you might call moral evil (the Holocaust, Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge, Les Miz).  They generally take for granted that moral evil isn't really a problem for their god because (they claim) that he gave us free will absolves him of responsibility for it. (They don't do a very convincing job with natural evils either.)  I don't think this approach works: apologists don't even really believe it, because they routinely give their god the credit when people do good things.  If he could guide Jonas Salk to invent the polio vaccine, for example, or divert a bullet from someone's heart to a less vital part of the anatomy, he could guide a bad agent away from doing bad things.  It's no more a violation of free will to do the latter than to do the former.

Now, I'm not saying that whoever made this meme, or the person who passed it along, is a bad person.  They're just thoughtless, as most of us are much of the time.  But that's not anything to brag about.  As in George Orwell's 1984, who can blame a battered person for wishing the torture of Room 101 onto someone else, anyone else?  But the fact remains that they did it, and it's hard to live with yourself afterwards.   I know that after a course of treatment in the Ministry of Love, I would do the same.  But should I be thankful to the torturer for taking the rats away from my face?  (Remember: Orwell's target in 1984 was religious as much as it was political.)  I say no.  Many people disagree.