I'm publishing a version of what follows in four shorter posts, Parts I - IV, as well as the present extended version. Link to the stand-alone Part I (Free Will)
Free Will
The concept of free will is foundational to the American ethos of the rugged individualist, who, purged through wilderness survival of ancient religious and political corruption by power, lives out an egalitarian and de-theologized Protestant ethic.
I was confronted with that notion in this book review (of The Last of the Mohicans), although I take full responsibility for my interpretation and thought processes.
Even though the ethos of which I'm speaking has roots in American
Protestantism, it also has resonance for other traditions. But at first
the bulk of immigrants consisted of Protestants, giving them the
first crack at what the American ethos would be.
That rugged-individualist aspect of the American ethos, forged in the era of Manifest Destiny, was subject to the prejudices as well as the heroics of the time. The odds to be fought and difficulties to be overcome included prevailing over Native Americans. That particular narrative of history and character has come under revisionist challenge, yet I dare say is unofficially alive and well in the hearts of many--not only those who would defiantly champion it but also those who would abjure it. It lingers not so far under the surface in assumptions about the national character, for example, in our detective fiction, on which Adam Gopnik has a fascinating piece in The New Yorker's 2013 Summer Fiction Issue.
A case in point: Charles Seabrook, author of the "Wild Georgia" column for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote the following in his June 29, 2013 column on how the national parks protect our cultural heritage:
Mystery
writer Nevada Barr, a former park ranger whose novels are set in
national parks, sums up in Sierra Club Magazine the feelings of many
park lovers: “Our (national) parks are the home of our wildness, our
pioneer spirit. Seeing them we know we can do much, go far, withstand
the harshest punishment. We know we can make it; we can survive and
thrive and flourish.”
With a foundational narrative rooted in heroic individualism, no wonder the great majority of Americans went ballistic regarding New York Mayor Bloomberg's anti-supersize soda initiative. The phenomenon certainly wasn't limited to Protestants. The uproar also cut across the liberal-conservative divide, uniting almost everybody in opposition to Bloomberg's perceived tampering with our free will.
Self-discipline in our culture is usually seen in terms of
free will; that is, using one's own will power to do what is right and avoid doing wrong.
Free
will is experienced as voluntary choice made within the realm of one's
own awareness or consciousness. The Web definition of
free will is:
"the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the
ability to act at one's own discretion." As an adjective, the
definition is: "given readily, voluntary: 'free-will offerings.'"
Mirriam-Webster Online says: "Voluntary choice or decision; 'I do this
of my own free will,'" and "
freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention."
Now that I've looked a little at free will, the upcoming section will focus on rules, and on how we think of rules in relation to free will.
Rules
Having started with free will, next let's look at
rules, positioning rules as the opposite of free will, as if to say, if there are rules and I can't do anything I want to do, that means somebody is trying to intrude on my free will.
I'm going to spend considerable time on rules, given their importance in everyday life, in religion--in fact, you could say, in the whole scheme of things--as well as to the thesis I'm developing.
In America, rules don't come to mind initially as
something we praise. We see rules as confining, as an impediment to
freedom, as something to be overcome. Can that view of rules be unrelated to the prototypical American ethos--individualistic, independent,
anti-authoritarian?
Anti-authoritarianism is as American as apple pie. Yet there is also a familiar Christian subtext to the objection to rules. It is not for nothing that there is "protest" in "Protestant."
Let's look at that etymology a little further. It's worth noting that
protest comes to us through Middle English and Old French from the Latin
pro-testari, to testify before or publicly testify--to declare--retained in statements such as "He protested his innocence," or "He protested his love for her." In Shakespeare's day,
to protest in the sense of
to proclaim wasn't limited to abstractions such as protesting one's sentiments; Shakespeare could speak of "Unrough youths who even now/Protest their first manhood" (dictionary example).
So it may be that imagining the verb
protest to have meant, for Martin Luther, "to strongly object," is to read back into the past what it has come to mean today. Scholar John Madden, in a lecture on the Reformation (
Odyssey of the West IV--Toward Enlightenment, Modern Scholar), says Luther did
not defiantly hammer his 95 theses to the church door as we visualize the scene now; he merely tacked up the subject of his forthcoming lecture. In other words, the way he got angry was the way university professors still get angry: they put it into a lecture.
It's also noteworthy that, according to Wictionary, the transitive usage by which we say, "I protest the results of the election," or, "I protest the building of a shopping center in this residential neighborhood," is chiefly North American.
Nevertheless, whatever the spirit in which Luther posted his theses in 1517, Protestants today usually picture themselves as having stood up to unjust authority, including declaring their freedom from Catholic "dogma" (rules).
From my vantage point as a Jew, I have often thought I could pick out a central tension within Christianity. Jesus vs. Church, rebellion vs. authority. As soon as anything gets established, there are
rules; those who disagree with the rules (and there are always some who disagree) condemn the rules in the name of following Jesus, tarring the objectionable religious establishment as rule-bound and authoritarian.
A. N. Wilson, writing in
Paul: The Mind of the Apostle, parses that tension in terms of Paul and Jesus, with, in his rendition,
Paul representing established political authority--the conservative end of the spectrum--and
Jesus representing liberalism, or sometimes even theocracy-based anarchism and revolution:
...The Paul/Jesus dichotomy is never more sharply shown than in its political implications; nor is it a Catholic/Protestant divide. On the whole, the more Paulist the Christian, the more likely to support the political status quo: Luther shored up the German princes and Cranmer baptised not merely the Tudor realpolitik but the English idea of themselves as an independent entity at the birth of the nation state in Europe. Ignatius, by contrast, served a theocracy of which he believed Jesus to be king, and saw nothing wrong with undermining and spying against sovereign states. Paul would have been amazed by the idea of Jesuits; Simon the Zealot would have understood them. The United States was founded by Protestant Jesus-worshippers....
Back in 1950s and '60s America, and still sometimes detectable, there was a notion that Protestantism vs. Catholicism was the crucial issue; as we just saw, A. N. Wilson says not.
In a Christian context these days, I more often hear of "rules" in terms of Judaism and what "the Jewish leaders" did.
In that Christianity vs. Judaism narrative, rules can function as the opposite of Christianity--rules, accordingly, becoming something "the Jews" followed but Jesus didn't, something the
"Jewish leaders" imposed but that he overthrew, rules being what Paul even calls (according to some traditional readings) the veritable
cause of sin. As a result of the language of the Gospels and the Epistles and of later theology, there is a wealth of Christian suspicion of rules and "law." That is a notion that frequently surfaces.
Please note that the Christian habit of seeing "rules" as "Jewish" in a pejorative sense says more about Christianity than it does about Judaism.
In other words, it's part of Christianity's
picture of Judaism and the general usage of Judaism as a foil for Christianity, for the purpose of saying this ("we"--that is, Christianity) is good, while that ("they"--Judaism), is bad, so join up with us and repudiate them.
By extension, since "we" (here, Christians) have now declared "them" (Jews) bad, their rules, by definition, are bad, too--meaningless regulations for the purpose of "holding people down," or whatever "we" (Christians) perceive as the opposite of what "we" are about.
What I have just described is a
polemic: a common type of argument that, unlike debate, aims to establish the truth of one position and the falsity of the opposing position, between which there is no middle ground. In a polemic, the opposing position is caricatured for ease of demolishing it.
Those accused of holding the opposing position then are conveniently available for use as a "common enemy," which works like this:
A common enemy functions to paper over all troubling internal disagreement. By means of the common enemy a group outsources all disruptive conflict. The group makes some person or segment the scapegoat and pins everything on them. By that sleight of hand, those "others" are now the outsiders, the troublemakers, the divisive ones, the cause of all difficulties, and the deserving focus of ire by an ingroup now purified and united against--the common enemy.
Here I'm claiming that, just as the issue of rules is not an issue of Protestantism vs. Catholicism, neither, in fact, is it one of Christianity vs. Judaism, certain familiar habits of thinking notwithstanding.
Theologically speaking, Judaism cannot be reduced to rules, regulations, and the established order. To take one example: While on one hand, the creation story may capture the pole of bringing order out of chaos, on the other hand, the calling down of messy plagues on Pharaoh reflects the opposite.
Nor is lawlessness an accurate portrayal of Christianity.
Last summer (2012) I was a guest at a Sunday School
class during which someone brought up rules in the familiar light--as though they were something Jewish that Jesus was against--but the Sunday school
teacher, who happened to be a seminary faculty member, said, no, that was incorrect. The tension over rules--what, how much, and how many--was a tension
within Christianity, not
between Christianity and Judaism, she said.
Be that as it may, the Christian habit of thinking about rules as meaning Judaism is so common and deeply entrenched that "rules," if one is a Christian, is something of a codeword. Just
say "rules" in a certain tone, and everybody knows what's meant. It's
like the old saw about the people who know each other so well, they just
say "Joke Number 17" and everybody laughs.
Rules
as representing the difference between Christianity and Judaism, or as evidence
that Christianity is a better religion, may be one that is neither official nor theologically justified,
but nevertheless seems to be understood that way in the hearts and
minds of many Christians.
One example comes from the 2006 book
The Faith Club, about a trio of women, one Jewish, one Muslim, and one Christian, learning from each other. The Christian woman of the trio said that prior to her transformative experience with her two friends, she used to teach in Sunday school that Jesus' proclamation of
to love God with all one's heart, soul, mind, and strength and one's neighbor as oneself as the greatest commandment was a "radical departure" from the "don't do this" rules of the Old Testament. As the result of her interfaith experience, she came to understand her old view as wrong. Jesus was
not opposed to his Judaism but was building on it.
A
sermon I heard several years ago provides another example of the way Christians so often think of rules and Judaism. Criticizing the behavior of Jews as portrayed in the New Testament, the pastor capped his sermon with, "Sometimes you
have to do something beside
just follow rules."
I'm not saying that preacher didn't know better, but, if he did, he couldn't or didn't stand up to what his congregation expected to hear.
Although that particular sermon was preached at a
very politically liberal church, opinions about rules may not be so very different
on the conservative side. A Christmas Day opinion piece several years ago by the local paper's conservative columnist proclaimed that
"Christianity is
news; other religions are
advice."
That view of Judaism by Christians--that it is (just) rules--is close to the one my own Christian husband held before we began studying together. Although his belief that Judaism was
an ethical system revealed itself in more benign language, the implication was that Christianity, in contrast, was a
religion. It was not something he had thought about or questioned; it was just an assumption that came with the territory.
Of course, before we began studying, I myself was largely clueless, neither knowing much about Judaism nor being clearly aware that many Americans look down on it as consisting of only rules, ethics, or advice.
The emphasis on "advice" can reflect, I think, an attempt to get around the issue of rules by implying that Christian rules, such as they are,
do involve ethics--that is, right and wrong--while the more distasteful sort of rules "just tell people what to do" or say "do this, don't do that."
One need only think of rules for young children, which concern safety, not ethics, to see the limits of that dichotomy. (Sometimes it's quite hard to say whether a rule is for safety or for right and wrong; think about it.) Or, consider advising people to come to church regularly. Don't sleep in on Sundays, or how to dress for church:
advice!
Nor is it an issue of telling people what
to do vs. what
not to do, a rationalization preferred by some.
Yet those sorts of rationalizations are in common parlance. Their purpose is to make logical-sounding the polemic about Judaism being a religion of rigid rules and regulations while Christianity is one of spiritual freedom--part of the narrative built into Christianity at the foundational level.
The very focus on freedom vs. rules that has functioned to outsource conflict and establish boundaries has also served to
exacerbate the tension between authority and freedom
within Christianity, so that the fact that some people, some of the time and in significant numbers, are thinking that
freedom is the opposite of
rules, is sufficient to sow dissension and disunity.
All of the above feeds into our heightened American fixation on individualism, free choice, free will, and freedom from rules.
As I have mentioned, that ethos affects not only certain segments of the population (that is, not only Christians, and not only Protestants) but all of us. The culture in which we live permeates all of us.
Having made the foregoing foray into the territory of religion, we're going to step away from religion in the next section and turn to science. The next section focuses on the new cognitive psychological science and what it has to do with free will and rules.
Science
We've talked first about free will, and then about rules as a perceived
impediment to free will. Now we need to take a look at the new cognitive science as it pertains to free will as usually conceived: the ability to make unconstrained choices.
What does science, specifically, cognitive psychology, but also anthropology, neuroscience, and even experimental philosophy, have to do with that ability to make unconstrained choices?
At first blush science seems to pose a challenge to free will in the ordinary sense, since it has shown we are profoundly but subtly influenced on an ongoing basis by our surroundings. The source of that influence is said to be evolutionary, that is, our minds are programmed to respond interactively to our environments so that we might process oncoming floods of data rapidly enough to make judgments that enhance our survival. One example of a scientist working in that vein is Daniel Kahneman, who, in his 2011 bestseller
Thinking, Fast and Slow, breaks down how it works.
Kahneman designates fast and intuitive mental responses as "System 1," while calling slow and deliberative mental processing "System 2." System 1 includes both automatic responses and overlearned responses. For example, an illusion in which one line looks longer than another depending on the angle at which fin-like lines are attached (the
Müller-Lyer illusion) is an example of a relatively automatic response, while the seemingly instantaneous decisions of an emergency room physician or a chess master are examples of the effect of expert learning. Kahneman makes the point that expert decisions are rapid because they are based on overlearning and practice, even though we may
call them "intuitive" decisions.
Many of our rapid-fire habitual responses started out as slow. Take
reading. Think back to what reading was like at age five or six. If that's difficult to remember, picture a child learning to read. Now that we have practiced and honed the
skill of literacy over the years, just think what our brains and minds do for us in
the area of reading! Perhaps you've seen those examples of how easily we can read despite multiple errors and omissions. For another example, think of
learning to drive, juxtaposed against your current level of skill. Through discipline and practice, what began as System 2 is now largely in the realm of System 1. Reading and driving are two examples of areas in which, once beginners but now experts, we make rapid-fire, "intuitive" responses.
While Systems 1 and 2 have no objective existence, they are useful descriptive devices. Here is some of what Kahneman has to say about them:
When we think of ourselves, we identify with System 2, the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do. Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book (Thinking, Fast and Slow). I describe System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of system 2....
...We are born prepared to perceive the world around us, recognize objects, orient attention, avoid losses, and fear spiders. Other mental activities have become fast and automatic through prolonged practice....
Our actions run the gamut from completely involuntary to those subject to apparent voluntary control; System 2 behaviors are characterized by their need for our attention and are disrupted without it. As for attention, we have a limited amount of it and have to allocate it. When we're spending it somewhere we do not have it for somewhere else; to demonstrate that phenomenon Kahneman uses
this apt example.
Next, we need to look at Kahneman's discussion of
priming, to show how it's a problem for what we consider to be free will. An example of priming that we are all familiar with is the notion of going to the grocery store when hungry, then purchasing more and other than we intended.
But priming goes much further than that. It affects word association. For example, if you see the word SO_P when hungry, you will read it as "soup," but if you see the same word when feeling dirty, you'll read it as "soap." Subsequently, those primed words will retain a weaker ability to prime still other words, in a ripple effect.
The impact of priming goes further yet. For example, subjects who saw words associated with being elderly, such as "gray" or "wrinkle," literally walked more slowly after the ostensible end of an experiment than did people who had seen only words neutral as to age. All of that happened outside of conscious awareness, that is, outside of their attention.
Similarly, if you hold a pencil in your mouth with the eraser pointing right and the point left, you will have different emotional responses to stimuli than if you hold the pencil in your mouth by pursing your lips around the eraser end. The first way of holding the pencil forces your face into the shape of a smile, and the second way, into a frown; simply holding our faces in one of those alternate ways
primes our emotional responses.
Those are only a few examples, but the impact of priming is pervasive.
You cannot know this from conscious experience, of course, but you must accept the alien idea that your actions and your emotions can be primed by events of which you are not even aware....
There is research showing how priming by money affects us: it makes us more independent and persistent. It makes us more self-reliant. It also makes us more selfish. It makes us less oriented to helping others. In experiments designed to test the impact of priming by money, primed subjects spontaneously sat further apart. When the experimenter contrived to clumsily drop a bunch of pencils, money-primed subjects were less likely to help pick them up. And so forth.
And what constitutes being primed by money? Priming could consist of putting money-related words in order, as opposed to the control group's money-neutral words. Priming could consist of seeing toy monopoly money on a nearby table, or it could be a randomly glimpsed screen saver of dollar bills floating in water. Or simply hearing the word "money."
We could extrapolate from the results that in our society, based as it is on self-interest (that is, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), we are very often money-primed. Kahneman asks the reader to consider the cumulative impact of a society imbued with reminders of money, in contradistinction to that of a society imbued, for example, with reminders of the "Dear Leader," or of respect, or of God.
Kahneman says people react with disbelief when told the results of studies of priming. Our sense of awareness gives us the impression that we are in charge. He says it is not the case that we are
completely at the mercy of primes that happen to be in our environment at any one time. On the other hand, for example, if only
some people vote differently on a school-related issue because the polling place just happens to be a school rather than a church (or vice versa), it could tip an election. In Kahneman's words:
The idea you should focus on, however, is that disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusion of these studies are true. More important, you must accept that they are true about you. If you had been exposed to a screen saver of floating dollar bills, you too would likely have picked up fewer pencils to help a clumsy stranger. You do not believe that these results apply to you because they correspond to nothing in your subjective experience. But your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on. Priming phenomena arise in System 1, and you have no conscious access to them.
In a similar vein, this
June 21, 2013 PBS Newshour story reported on psychological research that showed wealthy people reacting less generously than poorer individuals. Moreover, people who merely
felt richer, after being set up to win at Monopoly, reacted similarly to the rich. Notably, the experimental effects were mitigated when subjects who were rich or felt rich were then re-primed by being shown pictures of people in need.
The news story also told about how, when the research report appeared in
a scientific journal, readers reacted with disbelief. Many accused the
experimenters of "liberal bias" since they were based at the University
of California, Berkeley.
Moving on from
priming, Kahneman proceeds to explain that, in their beliefs, people confuse familiarity with truth. People are
biased toward their own current beliefs, in that they select evidence that will confirm those beliefs over evidence providing the opportunity to explore and learn.
People will believe a story that fits together coherently over one that is complete, and the less they know, the easier they find it to fit what they do know into a story. And we routinely confuse plausibility, a characteristic of a good story, with probability, that is, actual likelihood.
And there is much, much more in Kahneman's book showing how events and predispositions rather than rational choice affect what we do.
Another psychological researcher, Michael Grazziano, concludes that even consciousness itself is not some God-given domain from which determinism is excluded and in which free will in our traditional sense reigns (consciousness being the foundation from which Descartes famously proclaimed "I think, therefore I am"). According to Grazziano's
interview recounted in the June, 2013 issue of
Monitor on Psychology, and in his Huffington Post blog, and apparently in his books, too (which I have yet to read), consciousness is a matter of attention. In his view, awareness reduces to a sort of evolutionary bookmarking system.
These scientists whom I've mentioned are only a few examples of so many--for example, Jonathan Haidt (
The Happiness Hypothesis, 2006, and
The Righteous Mind, Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, 2012) and Steven Pinker (
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, 2002, and
The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, 2011).
Just what the findings of cognitive psychology, as well as other
scientific findings of the day, say about the ultimate nature of reality is not
necessarily a foregone conclusion. For instance, I've struggled with
philosopher Thomas Nagel's book
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.
He protests against present-day scientific orthodoxy to the extent it
claims all of reality can be understood in mechanistic physical terms.
Not all scientists make such claims, though, and, anyway, Nagel argues that scientific
findings don't depend upon the correctness of such claims.
I agree that the validity and the impact of the scientific findings are not affected by whether or not the scientists are making so-called reductionist claims (that is, reducing all of human experience to materialistic, evolutionary terms). As my quote from Daniel Kahneman indicates, the findings are true about us, even if we don't "believe in them" or "agree with them." Unless we
want to be like those people who "don't believe in evolution" or the like,
we
must consider those results.
The aim of my section on science has been to give the uninitiated a taste of the new findings and to show why they present a problem for free will. As I think is clear, if what we call "consciousness" is a story we tell ourselves
about ourselves that strings together what we have paid attention to, while in the meantime most of our functioning proceeds full-steam ahead without even breaking into awareness, then the realm of free will as we traditionally conceive of it is greatly shrunken.
In fact, we could say science plays havoc with our notion of free will.
It remains to be explored how we might adjust our vision of what free will is, in light of the findings of science, and how
rules might figure into that picture. That's the task of the next (and final) section.
Where Do We Go From Here?
In this section I intend to examine free will in light of the new cognitive science that seems so at odds with it, and also to show in a new light what
rules have to do with free will.
How, then, might we begin to talk about free will in view of scientific findings that intrude into its territory? The answer, but only in part, is to be found in the second part of Kahneman's book title (
Thinking, Fast and Slow):
slow thinking. To the extent that we can sometimes inhibit our instantaneous "intuitive" responses in those areas in which we are
not experts, in favor of the more laborious, fact-based "slow" thinking, our minds will be less a mechanism for "jumping to conclusions," as he puts it. In other words, in many cases, we can make decisions less susceptible to control by extraneous factors to the extent we slow down and "Think!"
Fact-based? Ah, there's the rub! Jonathan Haidt (
The Righteous Mind) has reported on how rare truly
exploratory thinking is--that is, thinking based on seeking the truth. Most often we indulge in
confirmatory thinking--that is, thinking oriented to confirm the correctness of what we already believe. Only under very limited circumstances can we or will we seek the truth.
One reaction to the new cognitive psychology might be to declare the findings heretical, which is not unheard of in history; think "Galileo." But it's not time for panic or drastic pronouncements.
Let's think about our predicament. Let's think about our concept of free will as it now stands.
It's worth considering that, rather than free will's being some Platonic absolute existing in ideal form somewhere in the stratosphere, what we call "free will" may be a human concept--one that human thinkers came up with in the past to avoid the deterministic aspects of their theologies. Later we had to contend with science as well as theology. Now we're having to make some sense of yet further scientific developments.
Maybe what our concept of free will needs is adjustment in light of the new scientific findings.
For one thing, as Kahneman's comments and the rest of the preceding discussion of cognitive science suggests, free will encapsulates what "feels" to us to be our situation. It
feels as though we're making free choices. But all we know is "System 2," which constitutes our conscious awareness--System 2 being
that story we tell ourselves about ourselves, while System 1 largely runs the show outside the spotlight of conscious awareness.
To the extent we acknowledge that the story we tell ourselves about ourselves isn't the whole story but only part of it, we can consider the implications of that situation and how they require us to view free will differently.
It is at that point we come back to the fraught territory of
rules--even the biblical ones.
Whether or not we believe the bible represents the literal words of God, is it possible at least to consider that the words of scripture represent a pinnacle of humankind's level of understanding and compilation of wisdom
in the times in which those words were remembered and recorded?
The critics of rules in the "Hebrew Bible/Old Testament" are many. Sometimes (as I discussed earlier, in the section on
rules) they are Christians who are criticizing their Old Testament relative to their own "more enlightened" Testament (to use the words Stephen King put into the mouth of one of his characters in his novel
Under the Dome). Sometimes the critics are atheists wanting to show up the bible as violent and punitive. And sometimes, too, the atheists can even be Jews who are steeped in the same culture as those other critics.
While professing a different religion from that of the biblical writers (or no religion), the modern critics of Levitical and other such biblical rules take the words at face value, that is, take the words literally, for the sake of argument. Those critics all have in common the goal of hoisting the bible on its own petard, so to speak, which requires that they misconstrue it as literal, whether intentionally or not. By
literal,
I mean their take on the apparent plain text meaning of the English translation of Leviticus we happen to have before us, without acknowledging that translation equals interpretation, or considering temporal or social contexts, or levels of understanding, or ongoing religious evolution.
If those rules aren't what the modern critics think, then the critics are attacking a straw man.
Imagine that those words partake of the language of promise and threat, as in contracts between ruler and ruled in the Mideast of a millennium and more BCE, because that is the way the people of that area--and not only the Israelites--thought back then. Imagine that the words employ simple reward-punishment language, not to mention anthropomorphism, because that reflects on the
limits and also the evolution of people's understanding, in layer after layer of tradition, from pre-biblical times to the final priestly spin in the seventh or sixth century BCE.
Leviticus is primarily a manual for priests. While the Israelite way of
life had heretofore been all about the land, the 6th century BCE exile
and subsequent return, under the auspices of Cyrus and the Persians,
tipped the balance away from monarchy toward theocracy. The priests,
being the final redactors, put their stamp on it, so it's largely the
priestly feel that we later readers get. Biblically speaking, theirs was the last layer.
Time has passed. We are not stuck with those same limitations. Our understanding has grown.
Just as we understand that a parent may threaten a child with punishment if that child fails to follow some important safety rule, we also grasp that the parent wants all to go well with that child. Even if that child--or today's critics--might misunderstand the parent as nothing but threatening or punitive, that's not the point of parental rules.
Nor were biblical rules there to give God an excuse to smite people for breaking rules. That's a familiar claim one hears from critics. And, no, the rules are not there so people who break them will go to Hell. (The concept of Hell hadn't yet been invented when those rules were first rehearsed and then written down.) Nor did the rules function to help an upper class suppress the people until Jesus arrived to free them from the law. Those misconceptions serve certain underlying political and theological functions, such as claiming to have "the better way," or smearing religion in general. Those sorts of misconceptions may take the rules out of their proper context, or they may be anachronistic, erroneously placing back in history current social situations that didn't exist back then. Whatever, they are polemical readings of the text.
A corollary of that way of reading the text may be that Christians who are intending to confront "Old
Testament thinking" by their criticism are also giving aid and succor to
atheists.
I've been trying out the notion that the rules are there for people to follow and walk in God's way so that it will go well for them--and for God. The rules are there to point people in the right direction, and, so that by concentrating on the rules, they will be focused on what would be recognized in biblical understanding as God's will. The rules are there because we need headlights to see our way.
In terms of today's cognitive science, without such a discipline we are at the mercy of extraneous forces.
The critics seem to misconstrue biblical rules for the sake of criticizing them. Or maybe some of the critics are railing against biblical language, insisting that it should reflect views from the vantage point of today, or should be discarded because it is not better than it is--although those same critics may typically value creativity and freedom of speech and may not ordinarily be in the habit of suppressing
other forms of literature or media.
The bible is in the language it is because it was written a very long time ago, and not only that, but because of how it happens to have been translated.
The critics likely have in mind, too, misuses to which they believe it has been put.
We ask again, then: what in the world are the rules for and what good are they?
I have been trying out the idea that they are there for the benefit of the discipline--and the light a discipline can shine on the way ahead.
The same Americans for whom the concept of "rules" is at first blush a negative concept are not
averse to discipline, that is, self-discipline, for their children and for
themselves.
Likewise, the same Americans for whom "rules" is a negative codeword also tend to
admire the "nuns on the bus." Although I'm speaking primarily of
mainline liberal Protestants, not Catholics, they nevertheless often admire the cloistered
religious orders in general, particularly if the order's aims are toward
greater spirituality or mysticism, or if the brothers or nuns provide
care for others at the cost of everyday selfish aims. For example, not
long ago I saw a notice in the paper announcing that "author, retreat
leader, and Benedictine Sister Macrina Wiederkehr will talk about 'Finding your Monastic Heart: A Way to God,'" at a local Episcopal church. What do monastic communities have, if not an order, a rule? In other words, a
discipline.
Then there's mindfulness, which is big nowadays--and what is mindfulness if not a form of discipline?
Yes, but, some people may say, the biblical rules are another story. My answer is that that negative perspective is largely in the eyes of the beholder, coming from the polemical habits of thinking about Judaism in Jesus' day with which they have been imbued, or, one might say, indoctrinated.
In the section on science I aimed to show there is no neutral territory; no automatic realm of free will or freedom from influence, either over our decisions or even our perceptions of how the world is. Freedom may not be "just another word for nothing left to lose," but it's the case that there exists no rule-free, less arduous way to which we have access through a passive abandonment of effort. No discipline (no rules) is a passive stance that entails giving in to our biological programming and our societal preconceptions: what Hannah Arendt, for example, seemed to believe was the
abandonment of thinking--the passivity of falling head over heals into conventional ideology. The freedom to choose that we
do have is the freedom to use a discipline.
Before we can practice a discipline, we have to find a one, and before
we can find a discipline, we have to decide where to look. Choosing
where to look means choosing what to open ourselves up to and what to
neglect. The world is full of stimuli. Not choosing a disciplined
approach does not mean the stimuli stop. If we don't direct our
attention according to a discipline, our attention will be directed by opinion makers
du jour. Only via a discipline can we have some say in the matter, and therein lies such free will as we have.
Otherwise we're at the mercy of money and power, or whatever is the going ideology, which history tells us can be one that exploits others (for example, slavery) or even worse, even a murderous one.
A discipline requires practice. What seems confining and unnatural becomes easy and natural, through practice. Take learning to read, learning to drive, learning to swim, learning to play an instrument, or a sport, or becoming expert in one's field.
In their 1989 book
Resident Aliens, Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon exhort Christians not to confuse the Church with the culture at large, but rather to
be the Church. By that, they mean to follow a way separate and distinct from the culture at large. What they are describing is very close to following a discipline.
Hauerwas and Willimon waffle only at the point of confronting what are to be the rules. They do enumerate several ethical rules. Then, though, they talk about trusting Jesus and getting rid of the "false" baggage, by which I'm afraid they may have intended to refer to their conception of Jewish law or the like, and their vision of Jesus as having jettisoned it. There's mention of sending out an army to convert people in a foreign country--a penetrating army, no less. Then they go theologically vague. They talk about the necessity of narrative (stories). They talk of the virtues of adventure--revolution, communal life, patience, dependability, being linked to a true story--and trusting Jesus to give the rules--which, however, they never seem to get around to enumerating.
I fear that their apparent avoidance provides another example of Christians shying away from words about rules and discipline, because of their theological understanding of what is Christian and what is Jewish, but of course Christians
do have rituals other than the ethical--attending church, for example, or taking communion, or serving others. Christians used to observe their Sabbath although lately that too has seemingly fallen under the rubric of meaningless rules to be eschewed.
To be a people, as Hauerwas and Willimon advocate, living and on the march in the real world, is going to require rules to light the way. Considering "rules" to be a dirty word is a problem.
I recommend we remember the good advice of the Sunday school guest teacher/seminary professor whom I quoted in the section on
Rules: The conflict about rules really was never between Christianity and Judaism. It was within Christianity. That is easy to forget with "rules" having been almost institutionalized in the public imagination of many Christians as part of what sets Christianity apart from Judaism.
As a counter example to my criticism of
Resident Aliens and to what I have said about Christians and rules, mention is due to a movement with which my husband was involved in his youth and which he has said saved Christianity for him: The Ecumenical Institute, later known as the
Institute for Cultural Affairs. That organization, begun within Methodism and supported by the World Council of Churches, had its heyday in the 1970s. Its goal was not proselytizing but taking action in the world. Its backbone was The Order Ecumenical, a covenant entered into by couples. The organization saw itself as a family order. It consisted of people following a rule, but out in the world, not in a cloistered setting. Its strength was not in scriptural orientation, but in Christian liturgy and ritual centered especially around mealtime, with the goal of producing an intentional community. The organization also conducted educational courses on their methodology, which my husband prevailed on his siblings as well as myself to sample, although none of us was affected at the deep level he was; he has characterized the invigorating and life-changing message of The Ecumenical Institute for him and others as, "Get up; pick up your bed and walk" (John 5:8). The Order Ecumenical called itself out of existence in 1988, although ICAI lives on as a nonprofit organization.
In the matter of free will, in light of the new cognitive psychology, the fact we must face is that free will requires a discipline. We need rules to focus attention, that is, to focus conscious awareness. That focus determines what we pay attention to--what we
see and where we go--and that is how it is like headlights. We have to choose our discipline or our choices will be somebody or something else' decision, if not randomly expended energy. Sheer waste, in other words. In fact, I'm tempted to use the biblical
injunction against "spilling one's seed upon the ground" at this point,
in the sense of wasted energy, wasted potential. Under such a
circumstance we cannot be
said to be exercising free will except in the sense of abdicating it.
The priestly laws of Leviticus bestowed the freedom to focus on God and live in God's way.
That was the purpose of the rules; in other words, it was the way--
halacha.
To summarize the essence of what rules do: If consciousness is attention, and we only
see that to which we attend, then the purpose of our discipline is to illuminate our direction, using the spotlight of our consciousness to cut into the darkness, creating as we go.
To recapitulate, the biblical rules
never were there to provide the
chance for missteps and consequent punishment
or as a way for "Jewish leaders" to suppress the people. Christianity in some of its forms may have
made hay with that characterization of rules, but it is a stance that also has backfired,
contributing to internal dissension and fragmentation. Meanwhile,
within Judaism, times and rules may have evolved, but a discipline of
how to live will always be involved. The fact remains--no discipline,
no freedom. That is what it means to say the discipline constitutes the
God-given laws of life. Although biblical language is that of reward and
punishment and also is God-centric, because that was the
language people understood,
we don't have to be fundamentalist
about our theology.
When we contemplate illuminating not merely our own personal futures but the future of
people, no one person and no one culture or tradition can do it alone, because that spotlight requires not just me and not just you, but all of us, so that we can strive, not toward some end that is already written, but creating as we go. Only in that way we can truly do what Gandhi said: Be the change we want to see in the world.
Postscript
My inspiration for this writing on rules, religion, and free will began with my struggle with the findings of cognitive psychology regarding what consciousness is and regarding what is it that I consider "I." It was the reading of Daniel Kahneman's book that first got me thinking about free will and noticing how the scientific findings he was describing might relate to aspects of Judaism. All the while I was being confronted with ordinary Christian beliefs and attitudes about Jews and rules, as those beliefs reverberate through society and also as they are expressed by particular individuals as well as in some preaching, too. All this learning, stimulation, and confrontation from multiple sources and with and by different people became a fertile primeval soup of for the generation of ideas. At first I thought the subject would be a short and simple one to write about, but it has grown on me. I have to learn as I go, and have to try to state my ideas descriptively rather than with blame.
For those wanting more, I recommend Nikos Kazantzakis'
The Saviors of God.
Here is what looks like a complete version. It is subtitled
Spiritual Exercises and consists largely of rules and story. Even though it was written around 100 years ago and uses terms like "mankind" and "race" in ways we now consider outdated, I consider it a fantastic illustration of what I've been describing.
Needless to say, hopefully, is that I've been putting ideas and information together according to my own thinking, exploration and struggle, and not based on those of any group or denomination.
