Value Competition

Yin-Yang Faith within an Existing Religion

Thoughts jotted down at a Unitarian-Universalist New York Metro District conference in Stamford...

Imagine a friendly opposition between mainstream contemporary Unitarianism and a heterodox yin-yang stream that could be identified with the Universalist part of U-U:

Unit is liberal religion...Univ is Enlightenment religion;

Unit's ideal is justice...Univ's ideal is yin-yang;

Unit is rooted in Christianity...Univ is rooted in Daoism;

Unit is rooted in good vs. evil...Univ is rooted in good plus some bad vs. and with good plus some bad;

Unit is moral fervor for left-liberal politics and against right-conservative politics...Univ is moral fervor for the truth-goodness-beauty of opposites and against sectarianism on behalf of one side.

 

 

 

A Concern about a Future Yin-Yang Faith



Major themes of Christianity--loving your enemies, God as universal rather than the God of a people, and the primacy of the spirit over the law--both arose from Judaism and are a reaction to Judaism.

The close but also antagonistic relationship between Christianity and Judaism has had some highly troubling consequences over the past two millennia.  If one were back with Paul as a colleague and trusted advisor as he wrote his epistles, could one have made that relationship work out better?    One may hope, but one may also believe that antagonism against the parent faith was a key part of what gave the Christian gospel of universal love its emotional power.

The history is relevant for those of us who hope for the rise of a yin-yang faith in opposites in the West and the rest of the world.  One logical way in which such a faith could come into being is as an offshoot of the political left and a reaction to it.   Yin-yang could rise as an affirmation of the spirit over the secular domain of politics, as an affirmation of a universal dual truth over a leftist-progressive truth, and as an affirmation of love for the enemy over partisan antagonism toward the enemy.

One may wish--should wish--that a future yin-yang faith will not have the tormented, often deeply hostile relationship with leftism that Christianity has had with Judaism.  But one may worry that yin-yang will be forever too dry, at least for Western tastes, unless it becomes both emotionally linked to and opposed to a leftist-progressive faith in secular salvation through politics.

 

 

An Enlightenment Faith that Engages Business and Politics

Two elements of one such faith:

1.  One believes in the truth/beauty/goodness of competing and cooperating opposites;

2.  One believes in loving/forgiving/embracing one's enemies.

The applicability of these two credo elements to politics is something I've written about before, and won't belabor here.  The applicability to business?...here are some semi-spontaneous ideas...

a) Instead of the substantive/principled opposites of liberalism and conservatism, equality and equity, etc., the process/temperamental opposites of calculation and culture, reason and passion, etc., seem like the applicable yin-yang dichotomies of a faith that engages business...these dichotomies strike me as having at least as much juice as the political ones...

b) Intead of the ideological other, the other in a competing firm or on the other side of a business transaction is one candidate for the enemy to be loved...maybe...that doesn't seem as hard or as inspiring as the ideological other in politics...with that in mind, it seems like the better other to be loved for the business person or the pro-business person would be the taxman (or other government official) or the anti-business person...for the anti-business person, the other to be loved would be business and the business person...

 

One way to learn from the Gita

[riding on the bus to visit my parents...feel like a brief break from working on the Society for Business Ethics matrix project paper due 3/15 that the last post is about...feeling a certain enthusiastic spirit at the moment that doesn't work too well for that basically cool-spirited paper..so, here goes...]

I am a non-Hindu who is a loyal Unitarian-Universalist.  At the same time, I have something of a missionary's enthusiasm for the Bhagavad Gita.  It seems to me to be a full peer of the Garden of Eden story and the Crucifixion and Resurrection story in its power, and the vastly lesser knowledge of it by people in my country seems to me something that should change.

Perhaps the story is best appreciated by people like me if it is told not only in its original version but also in a way that suggests how it can be received by someone like me...the Gita's story of Arjuna's unwillingness to fight and Krishna's remonstrances to him, potent as it is, is embedded in a cultural pattern that is profoundly distant from that of the modern West...Arjuna's reluctance to fight is articulated not in terms of a universal objection to killing, or of an overarching "we are all equal" ethics, but rather of a specific objection to killing kin.  No matter how bad the foes are--and Arjuna has no doubt, at least none that he expresses, about the superiority of his Pandava side over the greedy opposing side commanded by Dhritirashtra--they are still kin, and killing them will disorder the laws of caste.   Similarly, Krishna's admonitions to Arjuna are couched not in the universalist lexicon of a moral duty that applies to all, but rather in terms of a particular duty that lies upon Arjuna as a member of the warrior caste, the commander of his army, and a warrior of singular power--"The Scorcher of Foes".

So how to cast Arjuna's deep self-doubt and Krishna's advice to him--Fight, for the Self, as opposed to the body that is born to die, is imperishable; Fight, for there is in truth neither a Slayer nor a Slain--in a contemporary cultural context?  

Here is one way that resonates for me...I believe that others can recast the Gita in their own way to make it live for them...

The reluctant warrior-politician-businessperson-spouse, etc: "I do not want to fight.  I do not trust myself, for I see inside myself hatred and anger that makes me judge myself and makes me doubt that I am any better than the side I fight.  I do not want to fight.  I am too afraid of what may happen if the other side prevails and the burden of failure lies upon me, for it would be a terrible thing if the other side were to win and I were to be the bringer of that catastrophe.  I do not want to fight.  It is wrong to fight.  I should walk in the ways of peace in all the days of my life."

The guide: "Fight. The causes you cherish and the causes the other cherishes are alike impermanent and corporeal, just as you and the other are.  They are the causes of a day or a millennium, born to die.  What lives forever is the idea of you and the other and the idea of your cause and the cause of the other locked together eternally in harmonious struggle.  Fight, for that idea is imperishable.  The husk of your body and your cause is only that.  Fight, for there is neither a slayer nor a slain."

Reflections on an Unread Book

Off to board for PDX in a half hour...the comment the other week on Charles Murray is still on my mind...Murray has an exceptional gift for provocation, and the theme of his new one--the moral collapse of the white American working class over the last fifty years--indeed provokes me, even or perhaps especially since I haven't read it...

One reaction/thought embodied in a pompous title I just drafted for this post and then scratched: A Dream of a Better Future for a Distressed Working Class: Politics as the New Opium of the People and Why That's a Good Thing.

The thought: Instead of banging on about decline and decay, we need to think about what can give a renewed purpose to the lives of people in the American working class. 

I completely respect the claim--I take it this is M's own normative position--that if the American elite starts affirming the socially conservative values by which it lives that that affirmation might help the working class.  The elite believes, and the people follow.

Fair enough--but I just don't think that claim corresponds to a big part of social reality in which non-elites need to define themselves against elite ideology rather than simply adopting it.

Thus my line: Just as the recession of certain elites from religious belief centuries ago opened up space for a popular embrace of religion that helped people down the socioeconomic ladder at one stage in history, a recession of certain elites from political belief now could open up space for a working class embrace of politics.

Currently American elites dominate the ranks of true believers of both red and blue stripes.  I am highly hopeful that if that became much less true, the prospects for working class people in our country would become much better.  If blue faith and red faith became the heartland properties of people in the lower ranks of our society instead of those at the top, the worrisome features of contemporary working class life would have a much better chance of turning around than under our current regime.  Or so it seems this morning at Newark airport :)

 

 

Was Shared and Monotheistic Religion Pacifying in its Time?

Did life for the Jews and their neighbors become less violent as local myths gave way to the more sweeping tales of Yahweh, Baal, and other deities with a wider scope than their predecessors?  Did Greece become less bloody when local gods were replaced by a more or less shared religous pantheon, even as it remained politically divided?  Did the Dark Ages spread of Christianity across Europe lower homicide and war deaths, or at least make any increases caused by the collapse of the Pax Romana smaller than they would have been?

Pinker's tables in The Better Angels of Our Nature do not directly deal with this issue; his summary of the bloodcurdling contents of the Old Testament implies a negative answer.

My own intuition is that the move away from local gods and toward shared and monotheistic religion was pacifying in its time; raiding your neighbors at night to steal their sheep, kill their men, and abduct their women is less likely to appeal when that neighboring band's gods or god are also yours.

Indirect support for the shared religion as pacifying hypothesis can be found in Pinker's tables. It's interesting to compare Figure 2-3 on p. 53, which shows an average yearly war deaths rate of around 500 per 100,000 people in various 19th and 20th c. non-state hunter-gatherer and hunter-horticulturalist societies like the Hiewa of New Guinea that I suspect have fairly local gods to Figures 3-1, 3-2, and 3-3 on pp. 60-63, which show annual homicide rates per 100,000 in England and other European regions from 1200 to 2000.  The European homicide figures for 1200, when shared religion prevailed but central authority was weak or very weak, are a great deal lower--around 20 to 90 per 100,000--than the war-only estimated death rates for the societies in New Guinea, etc.

Pinker's New Book

The Better Angels of Our Nature is excellent.  Three reasons why:

1) Pinker's ability to combine his broad argument about the ongoing pacification of the species with telling details is admirable.  For an example of the latter, consider Figure 7-14 on p. 411, showing the overall decline in homicides of intimate partners in the US from 1976 to 2005, along with a much sharper decline in male than female victims, and P's concise and reasonable explanation of the graph on pp. 411-412;

2) P's defiance of the norm that one argues by poor-mouthing the situation of one's own side is refreshing.  It's nice to read a book that decisively rejects the "Things should be at least 50-50 our way, and we've got much less than 50 so give us more!" style in favor of "Peace and reason are winning, and that's wonderful!";

3) Related to #2: P's confidence reinforces the case for the humanitarian values he espouses: Why torture or execute if the bad guys are pathetic figures on the wrong side of history?  Why not be tolerant, mellow, and reasonable?   Why not, indeed?

Pinker's book is as good as it is partly because it should cause readers of almost all persuasions to disagree with at least parts of it.  Three things I disagree with:

1) P suggests that the good Enlightenment of Locke, Hume, the American Revolution, Kant, etc.  embodies the true spirit of modernity and that bad phenomena that have occurred over the last few hundred years such as the Terror, Marxism, Communism, and fascism are atavistic in one way or another and contrary to a basically benign ethos of modernity.   I disagree.  Ideology that is rationalizing as well as demonizing seems to me much more of a distinctive problem of modernity than an aberration from modernity.  After reading P, I remain a believer that modernity as it has developed over the past few centuries involves (among other things) a strong ratcheting-up of ideological moralism that fuses the traditional groupishness of human beings with a rationalized "our values are better than yours" stance.  That rationalized groupish ideological moralism can be found, it seems to me, in the good groups as well as the bad groups of modernity, in classical liberals as well as fascists, in liberals and conservatives as well as Marxists, ultra-nationalists, and Communists.   A view of modernity as Faustian seems to me right; our modern ratcheting up of moralism to include rationalized rather than supernatural ideological value systems brings us a great deal of good in both practical and moral terms--as P very nicely chronicles--but it also risks much.  

2)  P implies--to me at least--that enlightenment can be universal at some point.  I disagree.  I believe that even if the whole world becomes Sweden and Sweden itself becomes the most advanced liberal suburbs of Stockholm, there will still be more disciplined and reasonable people and less disciplined and reasonable people in all countries; that members of certain socially salient groups, such as middle class people and working class people, will on the average be closer to or further away from the rule of reason and nonviolence; and that those who are more peaceful and reasonable will owe that desirable state partly to a group-based sense of moral superiority to their less disciplined and reasonable compatriots.  

3)  P implies--to me at least--that the right substitute for theistic religion is a faith in humanitarian values and human enlightenment over time.   I disagree.  As a politics, belief in humanitarian values and human progress is an agenda I'm very happy to subscribe to.  As a modern religion, though,I would plump instead for a yin-yang faith in opposites and in competing and complementary values in oneself, society, and the cosmos.  If a modern religion of progress and humanity is identified with the political left or center-left, it is too sectarian and too prone to its own demonizing moralism.  If it is identified with three cars in every garage and everyone a college grad, it is too materialistic and mundane to be satisfactory as a religion, much as it may be an estimable practical politics.  If it is identified with the feats of Darwin, James Joyce, Steve Jobs, and other modern gods it is too elitist, too little in touch with the part of the religious impulse that raises up the lowly and humbles the exalted. 

 

 

Turning the Other Cheek as a Winning Strategy

[Working on my advantageous altruism paper for the 1/10/12 Academy of Management deadline and then for business ethics journal submission...some draft notes for the "Jesus" section of the paper follow...comments welcome as always]

If your enemy hits you on the cheek, turning your other cheek, rewarding as it may well be in giving one a satisfying sense of moral superiority, does not seem to have much potential as a way of getting ahead in the world.  The fact that a preacher of a gospel of turning the other cheek and loving one's enemy became the central figure of the world's most widely followed religion, though in some sense a confirmation of the idea that altruism can in some fashion redound to one's practical benefit, is also a profound challenge to that idea.  Compared to Plato and Aristotle, with their successful lives and their notion of a virtuous character whose self-interest lies in following the good, Jesus with his disastrous end and his notion of radical self-sacrifice is on the face of it a great rebuker of the notion of advantageous altruism.   Think not of the morrow...be not like unto the Pharisees...it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God: In all of these maxims attributed to Jesus one senses a spirit radically opposed to calculation and to a morality of egoistic prudence and self-advancement.

And yet, the logic of relative success and resultant Darwinian advantage in cultural reproduction is not simple.  It can be the case that the way to get ahead is to disdain getting ahead, and that the way to win is to disdain winning and indeed to embrace outcomes in which one loses.   In what follows, I will trace out a claim that the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount can be reasonably understood as advocating not only self-sacrifice that loses in practical if not moral terms, as he indeed does, but also as advocating a form of altruistic forgiveness that is highly advantageous to the forgiver in his interactions with an egoist.  Further, I will suggest that this advantageous form of forgiving altruism has two great virtues compared to the egalitarian altruism of Plato and the masterful altruism of Aristotle.   First, forgiving altruism solves an important family of assurance (or trust) games that are not solved by the Platonic or Aristotelian forms of altruism.  Second and even more important, forgiving altruists do well with other forgiving altruists.  Not everyone can be a successful egalitarian guardian or great-souled man, but everyone in a society can be successful together as forgiving altruists playing games with other forgiving altruists.  

The basic idea of advantageous forgiving altruism can be stated as follows: You as the forgiving altruist have a deep positive feeling for the other's payoff, for yourself, and for the situation when you as the forgiving altruist choose an action that could or should result in the highest combined payoff for both of you (with either the best payoff for you and the second best for the other, or the second best payoff for both of you), but the other player "messes up" by choosing an action that gives both of you lower payoffs than you could have enjoyed.   The basic concept is expressed much more succinctly in Luke 23:34: "Jesus said, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." 

Forgiving altruism as just defined is helpful to the forgiving altruist because it amounts to a commitment to play a strategy that is as good as or better for the forgiving altruist as it is for the other player when the other player responds optimally to the commitment.  It is also good for the other player--though not quite as good as it is for the forgiving altruist--because the other player receives no worse than her second best payoff, and may well receive her best payoff along with the forgiving altruist. 

Although forgiving altruism is not an approach that wins for the altruist or for both players collectively in all games, it has a considerably broader sweep than egalitarian altruism and masterful altruism do.  While those two types of selective altruism are effective in three out of the seven games of interest, forgiving altruism is effective not only in Leadership and the Battle of the Sexes, but also in the three assurance games--Trust, Schelling, and Stag Hunt.  The only games on which it has no purchase is the Prisoner's Dilemma, where no form of selective altruism can have any purchase given the dominance of non-cooperation for the egoist, and Chicken. 

In Chicken, the Greek altruists rule the roost because of their commitment to lead, which causes the egoist to yield.  By contrast, the forgiving altruist as defined here does not commit to lead, because doing so would stick the egoist with her second worst payoff.  (footnote--A less nice variant of forgiving altruist--Jesus with more Aristotle in him?--who commits to the highest value outcome when it is best for him even when it would stick the other player with a second worst outcome does win Chicken with an egoist.  Further, that un-nice but forgving altruist avoids lead-lead wrecks in Chicken with another un-nice forgiving altruist because both commit only to a highest joint value outcome.)  The result is that the game is up for grabs with a forgiving altruist and an egoist (or two forgiving altruists), just as it is in a game with two egoists.  (footnote--Socially, the "up for grabs" outcome in Chicken in which both players play mixed Nash is not as good as the outcome in which the leader gets first best and the follower gets third best.  That is the one case in which the Greek altruists socially outperform the forgiving altruist in interactions with an egoist.)

The Greek altruists clean up in the two pure leadership games.  By comparison, the forgiving altruist takes a smaller though still preponderant share of the pie in Leadership and Battle of the Sexes games with an egoist.  The reason is that the forgiving altruist as defined here, unlike the Greek altruists, does not play the strategy that gives her the highest payoff if it is not also the strategy that has the highest joint value.  That restraint has the very considerable virtue of allowing two forgiving altruists to do very well indeed in playing leadership games with one another.  (footnote--One will get his or her highest value payoff, and the other will get her second highest value payoff.)  But it also means that the forgiving altruist will not commit to leading if the highest joint value outcome is for the egoist to lead.  In those situations, the game between a forgiving altruist and an egoist is up for grabs, as it is in a game between two egoists.  (footnote--A nicer type of forgiving altruist than the basic type defined here has a warm glow when the other messes up by deviating from an outcome in which the forgiving altruist earns her second highest payoff and the other earns her highest payoff.  That type does not beat the egoist in leadership games; combined with the fact that the basic type as defined here does not beat the egoist in assurance games, the result is that the nicer variant on forgiving altruism does not prevail over the egoist overall, though it also does not lose to the egoist.)

In the three assurance games--Trust, Schelling, and Stag Hunt--the forgiving altruist as defined here does not beat the egoist.  In these games, the best payoff for both players comes if they both trust.  The "forgive them" commitment by the forgiving altruist to play trust leads to both players getting their best outcomes, not to a win over the egoist by the forgiving altruist.  (footnote--A less nice variant of the forgiving altruist that is only committed to trust when his cardinal payoff is at least as high as the other player's will prevail over the egoist.  Such a less nice or competitive forgiving altruist will not throw away value in playing assurance games with another un-nice forgiving altruist, since both players will recognize and follow the other's commitment and coordinate on trust-trust.) 

Overall, the forgiving altruist does not take the egoist to the cleaners the way the Greek altruists do.  But the forgiving altruist does indeed outperform the egoist.  And crucially, the forgiving altruist does even better in interactions with another forgiving altruist than she does with an egoist.  In contrast with the guardian and the great-souled man, who are both elite types, the forgiving altruist is an excellent candidate to be a general or universal type. 

The (Im)possibility Theorem and the Future of Political and Religious Ideologies

If one believes that Arrow's (Im)possibility Theorem is important--and I do--well-functioning democratic politics will wind up having one basic dimension along which parties, pols, and the people array themselves.  If one further believes that the modern competition between a center-left that trends solidaristic-populist on economics and individualist-elitist on culture and a center-right that trends solidaristic-populist on culture and individualist-elitist on economics is effective in countering both the tyranny of the majority and of the elite minority-- and I do--the future of politics--or so one may hope-- is more of the same, with the center-left versus center-right politics of the affluent democracies eventually extending to all nations and to some form of world democracy with global elections between center-left and center-right parties as well as national and local elections.

A likely and/or desirable future for religious ideologies strikes me as a trickier matter.  Four possibilities:

1) In the end, religion and politics will always be fused, Madison's hopes to the contrary notwithstanding.  Accordingly, the future of politics will also be the future of religion.  Protestantism in the US is a leading indicator of the way the world will go: fragmentation, but with the customized religious sects arrayed on the same left-right dimension that defines politics;

2) Madison will win, and religion and politics will decouple, with religions flourishing along multiple dimensions in addition to left and right.  In particular, there will be libertarian-elitist religious sects even in the absence of significant libertarian parties, and solidaristic-populist religious sects even in the absence of significant populist parties; 

3)  Religion will continue as a key element of clashing civilizations, as in Huntington's vision, and existing religions and new religious sects will increasingly become ethno-national.  Hopes for the extension of democracy to all nations and for world democracy will be decisively defeated by assertive ethno-nationalist religion;

4)  A new version of religion will arise that is based on rejecting both left religion and right religion in favor of a different, non-political ideal of the sacred in human life.

The political side of me likes alternative 1 while the religious side of me likes alternative 4.  The political side of me worries about alternative 2 undermining democratic stability, and both my political and religious sides find alternative 3 a highly unappealing though entirely possible future.

 

 

After God and Politics, What?

Suppose Nietzsche was right, and that God--at least the Jewish/Christian/Muslim God who has prevailed over other versions--is an expression of an egalitarian impulse to identify virtue with weakness and power with evil.  Further suppose he was right in claiming that the dominant philosophies or substitute religions of the Enlightenment, such as liberalism, utilitarianism, and Kantian rights/duties, are reflections of the same egalitarian impulse.

The abandonment of the worship of power in favor of the worship of God was egalitarian not only in the sense focused on by Nietzsche, but also in the sense that it left more room for athletic strength and skill in fighting--formidable old noble virtues--to become the possession of a lower echelon of people.  So too with the Enlightenment abandonment of the worship of God in favor of the worship of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity and other political visions.  That switch by a significant portion of the intellectual elite over the last few centuries to a worship of politics has had the egalitarian side effect of leaving the formidable passions and power of belief in God more in the possession of the less sophisticated and the less advantaged.

Will the intellectual elite of Western civ, or perhaps the global intellectual elite more broadly, someday lose faith in politics in favor of another egalitarian movement that would be to Enlightenment what Enlightenment was to God?  What would that movement look like?

FWIW, my speculations: First, I think Nietzsche is right about the fundamental and enduring importance of an egalitarian impulse in intellectuals who see themselves as opposing a more forceful elite, though I am much less inclined than he to see that impulse as irrevocably and hopelessly corrupted by resentment.  The world always has been, and always will be, the nerds against the jocks. 

Second, I suspect that history has not ended with the ascension of politics over God.  Politics is itself subject to criticism, just as nobility and God are--the incoherence of the constructive left and right, the destructiveness of the coherent left and right, and the deep connection between politics and violence are the three criticisms of politics that I find the most persuasive.  It is possible that one day those criticisms, perhaps combined with others, will resonate, and that then the graduates of the best schools of the world will be less likely to be political believers than average citizens are, as is now the case for religious belief.   As with the earlier losses of faith, there would be an egalitarian side effect if the elite lost its faith in politics--a world in which average citizens are more likely to be passionate liberals or conservatives than the intellectual elite would be one in which ordinary people would have considerable advantages relative to the world we live in now.

Third: I don't think faith in politics will diminish absent the rise of a rival egalitarian faith.  As to what that future egalitarian faith might turn out to be: I'm not sure :)  My best guess, based on personal inclination as much as anything else: A Daoist belief in opposite truths fused with an egalitarian criticism of success/power/fortune as morally deficient to the degree that it involves focusing one's life on excellence in a single sphere rather than on excellence in two (or more) spheres.