Ths I Believe - My Ethics

I believe that the universe, while having a natural order, has no inherent moral order. I believe that human nature can be seen as good or evil with ample evidence for either doctrine. I believe that there is no first principle that can be known, no God we can prove, no Platonic absolute forms which inform our soul or our ethics. We are, in one sense, alone in the universe - left adrift and without guidance. In the end, I believe that the soul of the universe is essentially amoral in any sort of human sense.

So in the end, without guidance, there is only existential choice...there is only the Sisyphean task of creating the meaning of our lives. Consequently, I believe that the dignity of human consciousness derives from our continued perseverance in endeavors for which the universe affords no foothold of encouragement. As human beings, our fundamental nature is to aspire - to create meaning where none exists apart from our efforts. These acts of aspiration are essential to our humanity.

We chose to take a moral stand when there is no reason given by the universe for us to do so.
By my very existence, I have no choice but to plant a stake in the ground - that is predestined from the moment I was born. But what is not predestined is my choice as to where to plant that stake. We all chose a morality that is not required of us and so, in the end, our moral self is an expression of our aspiration - built on the slenderest of threads.

Because I must plant my stake, I chose to believe certain things...not because I can prove them but because I aspire for them to be true. I believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings. There is no compelling evidence to prove that my belief is rational. Just so, neither is there evidence to refute it. And if I chose to believe that all human life has value, then justice, equity and compassion become my watchwords and the values I aspire to live by. Because I believe in the inherent worth and dignity of human life, I also believe in the importance of community for the future of humanity. Salvation lies not solely in individual experience, but in the experience of the community B in the connections of human beings to one another and to the universe as a whole. All people are islands; while they are born from another, they die alone. Yet in community we breach the isolation of personal existence and have the opportunity to discover the inherent worth and dignity of the other. In this is love.

I believe that each person is responsible for finding truth and meaning, yet I believe that we have much to learn from those who have come before and those who we journey with today. Wise teachers -- Siddhartha Gautama, Hillel, Jesus, Mohammed, Lao-Tsu, Gandhi and others -- have all aspired, and by their aspirations, inform and inspire me. In this is hope.

I believe in the interconnected web of all existence of which we are a part. Morality does not exist. Yet we aspire to morality and in the human quest we aspire to give evidence to the divine we cannot prove in that mystery of the web of life. Here lies faith.

Finally, I believe that the universe is evolving and that we are at the tip of that process with respect to consciousness on our planet. While the universe is impersonal and fundamentally amoral, there is a development of ever increasing levels of complexity that are drawing humanity to deeper and more complex levels of consciousness. Along with those structures of consciousness there evolves increasing dimensions of care and concern. These dimensions are not moral imperatives in any classical sense, but rather are the epiphenomena of the very nature of human consciousness and he cultural structures it creates. Thus, while the universe offers no foothold of encouragement in our decision to act with deeper compassion, it is drawing humanity in that direction. This increase in the capacity for understanding, holding, being present to and loving the emergence is, it seems, close to the heart of humanity’s evolutionary imperative.

Faith, hope and love abide, but the greatest of these is love for it is in love that our aspirations become flesh.

I believe in these ethics, this morality, not by reason, but because in aspiring to them, I become part of the realization of that greater human endeavor. And in that sense we are not alone in the universe. I chose these ethics because of that distant human dream, that by our consciousness, we make a tiny corner of the universe a moral place after all and in that space god becomes real.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

This I Believe - My Metaphysics

“The Tao that can be differentiated is not the Tao” – Lau Tzu

The existence of God has radical implications for any metaphysical system, and so, it seems, a fundamental question any metaphysics must answer early on is the question of the existence of God.

The sages, philosophers and great traditions agree that any conception of God worthy of serious religious or scientific consideration requires that God not be bound by concepts of time or space. Thus, God cannot exist as a finite reality in the same way as a table or a chair or even a human exists. As we explore the term “existence”, we understand and use it in common and philosophic discourse, as fundamentally an Aristotelian attribute of a thing – something either exists in space and time or it does not. Yet to be true to the most nuanced conceptions of God that humanity has formulated to date, God must be beyond space, beyond time, beyond mere matter, beyond energy. God is therefore no thing in this space-time Universe. Being nothing, by definition, God does not exist. As Lau Tzu suggested, the Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao. This quality of nothingness is essentially non-dual for it if was dual, it would be something in opposition to what it is not.

Ironically, Eastern and Western religious mythic traditions and recent scientific cosmology all suggest that all that is (Being) arises out of nothing. God as Nothing – in absolute non-dual non-existence, becomes the ground or field giving rise to Being and consequently space-time. The Beingness that arises from this nothing apparently quickly differentiates itself into Matter and Energy. At root matter and energy are different manifestations of one thing (i.e. Being or Such-ness). However, Matter and Energy appear or manifest as differentiated and qualitatively different (and thus a prime, fundamental duality arises). Matter and Energy came to arise from this Nothing and are bound together in a “sea” of Nothingness (or divinity).

I therefore believe in a trinity – Nothingness, Matter and Energy (mythological expressed in the West as Father–Son–Spirit, and in the East as Brahman–Maya–Atman).

In this field of nothing there is an endless collision of processes – of interactions of matter and energy. “Objects” in the Newtonian sense do not exist in the field of Being but are rather the way in which we mentally organize a continuum of events or processes. These events are not random. They are governed by the structure and nature of matter and energy themselves and by the nature of space-time. The universe is structured as it is because matter and energy, by the conditions of their existence in space-time, must interact in certain and predictable ways.

Collections of processes of energy and matter arise and coalesce and then return to the whole. Being continually reconfigures itself as collections of processes and interactions. Everything in the universe is therefore a manifestation of this great sea of Being comprised of matter and energy. Human beings are no exception. We come from dust and return to dust – to the great sea of Being that is not God but arises from God.

In that I believe reality is fundamentally random, but ordered by the rules governing the matter and energy, I am led to conclude that Being is, in some sense, teleological. There is directionality to existence, a “τέλος” (telos). Time moves forward, conditions beget effects, things arise, exist and then cease to exist. This directionality and self-organization is, for want of a better term inanimate “consciousness”. At least on this planet, this teleology gives rise to distinct evolutionary processes. Being flows from nothing, from that being come occasions of interactions of energy and matter to form inanimate things (first particles, then atoms, then molecules, then compounds, and so on). From some of this more complex matter comes Life which organizes in ever increasingly complex processes. From some Life comes sentience, and from some sentience comes animate consciousness. I leave open the question is open as to whether Life is a fundamentally different state of Being than Matter or Energy. Sentience seems an evolutionary development of Life (much as complex compounds are an evolutionary development of matter).

In humanity, animate consciousness is capable for complex self-reflection. We are Being reflecting on itself. This development suggests that there are more evolved stages of development and that we are inexorably moving towards those stages. The goal of this evolution cannot be known philosophically. The stages of development cannot be predicted with certainty. While we can examine the stages of development on this planet and the short experiment that is humanity to glean what we can of the higher reaches of this evolution, but we cannot predict what stages will evolve. Nor can we know whether Man represents progress on this evolutionary road or is soon to be discarded by the Universe as a failed attempt at higher consciousness.

There is, I believe as an article of pure faith, a hint of the τέλος or end-point of it all. Mystics and sages of all religious traditions - Western and Eastern - say that the goal is the eventual union of Being and Nothingness (the Atman with Brahman or the Soul with God). This is perhaps the ultimate spiritual destination of humanity as we arrive at ever higher reaches of consciousness. It may also be the ultimate end of the Universe as Being and Nothingness become undifferentiated.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Prolegomena to Metaphysics

I have debated about how personal to become in sharing my own deepest spiritual beliefs. Ulimately, however, to be honest with this blogging process it is important that you, dear reader, know the core of where my perspectives originate - what is the the central fountainhead of the pieces you see here. Before I do that, however, I have to provide some context.

The title of this blog - Prolegomena to Metaphysics - is an homage to Immanual Kant's "Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics". This work was a distillation of the conclusions of his most famous work "Critique of Pure Reason" written to gain wider readership of the main work. A prolegomena is short essay that precedes and explains the more substantive work.

The Great Traditions

Two great traditions have struggled with the issue of the nature of reality.

The ancient Greeks had the leisure to invent philosophy. In a span of less than 50 years, the fundamental substance that would form the core of the Western debates for next 2200 years was said. Aristotle and Aristocles (better known as Plato) defined the parameters of Western thought and indeed, some would argue, that all of Western intellectual history has been a footnote to these two intellectual giants. The significantly different perspectives of these two greats have been debated in different forms until the very recent past.

Scholars agree that Aristotle, that premier taxonomist, got it about right when he divided philosophy into four areas: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics. Respectively, these ask: What is the nature of reality? How do we know truth? What is the good? What is the beautiful? Every other philosophical question seems to lie in one of these four areas. To oversimplify a bit, but not much, the west has attempted to understand these realities by looking primarily at the outer world through the lens of reason.

While a simplification, Indian philosophy created six systems (darshanas) which seek to map human knowledge: Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaiseshika, Mimamsa and Vedanta. Each of these schools addresses questions recognizable as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. To again oversimplify, the East attempted to answer these questions by looking primarily within through the lens of observation.

These questions - What is reality? How do we know the truth? What is the good? What is beautiful? - are the central questions of human existence. The West and East agree on this much. To ask these questions is what make us human – we are reflectively self-conscious.

In the area of metaphysics a number of issues emanated from the central question – what is reality – and these issues recur in Eastern and Western philosophy are the same. Mind and Matter, God and No God, Unity and Multiplicity, Identity and Change, Reality and Illusion, Will and Fate, Causation, and so on.

And both traditions spent thousands of years rehashing the same discussion, endlessly exploring nuance. In the West, reason refined the argument to the point where metaphysics died with Immanuel Kant. Kant who conclusively proved the limits of pure reason in determining the nature of reality as it was then understood. The East was less decisive. As people observed, they drifted into an endless array of sects and practices limited only by human experience with no rational metric to determine whether these beliefs bore relation to objective reality.

The Revolution in Human Perspective

And then a remarkable thing happened, again within the course of 50 years. In 1905, in his spare time over several months, Albert Einstein wrote four articles that fundamentally changed the course of human thought. During that same period, observations of very small particles lead to very strange conclusions about the very fabric of the nature of reality itself. Unfortunately, the two views were at odds with one another. Because these views fundamentally shifted the way the world is viewed for the first time since the ancient Greeks started thinking on these things, the implications of these theories on the nature of reality began to work their way through the world of philosophy in the West. Because these ideas had resonance with mystical insights form the East, the East began a process of grounding its philosophy in outward reality. These developments forced both traditions to question assumptions and recast their world view from more or less common ground. In other words, integration became possible and an integral world view based on multiple traditions could begin to emerge.

While many writers and thinkers could be chosen to discuss the emergence of this new level of human consciousness, the writings of two have had a most profound impact on me personally. These two seem somehow "essential" in that they articulate the core of what this revolution is about.

A. Whitehead

In 1927/1928 a brilliant mathematician, theoretical physicist and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, delivered the Gifford lecture series in what was eventually collected in the book Process and Reality. This book is very tough sledding, made even more so by the fact that Whitehead never bothered to polish his lecture notes. The process cosmology elaborated in these lectures proposes that the fundamental elements of the universe are in process as occasions of experience. According to this notion, what people commonly think of as concrete objects are actually processes. Occasions of experience can be collected into groupings; something complex such as a human being is thus a grouping (or nexus) of many smaller occasions of experience. According to Whitehead, everything in the universe is characterized by experience (which is not to be confused with consciousness); there is no mind-body duality under this system, because "mind" is simply seen as a very developed kind of experiencing while "body" is a lower order process. Whitehead's occasions of experience are interrelated with every other occasion of experience that precedes it in time. Inherent to Whitehead's conception is the notion of time’s directionality; all experiences are influenced by prior experiences, and will influence future experiences. An occasion of experience consists of a process of prehending other experiences, and then a reaction to it.

By application of his ideas, Whitehead is able to fundamentally reconcile a number of very difficult Western philosophical problems in unique and compelling ways. His solution – when stripped down, look profoundly Eastern – reality, as we perceive it, simply arises as processes – that being is a potential for becoming. Because of its density, this book has not seeped into popular conceptions, but it is the first and most profound attempt at a post-Kantian philosophic cosmology after Einstein. Whitehead essentially provides the intellectual freight needed to ground much of the intuitive insight expressed by the Continental existentialists and to a lesser extent the German Idealists, who were otherwise too easily dismissed by more rigorous approaches. It is not so easy to dismiss Whitehead.

B. Aurobindo

In India, between 1914 to 1949, a western educated Indian mystic and philosopher, Sri Aurobindo, wrote a series of articles that would eventually be collected into book – “The Life Divine”. He realized that Einstein and the developments of evolutionary biology pointed the way to a reconciliation of Eastern and Western thought and that it was possible for human beings to perceive the world in way that brought reason and subjective experience together. In his book The Life Divine, he posited that humans represent a apex of evolution to date and that they are uniquely situated to lead a spiritual life. By this he meant that Matter and Spirit are met in human consciousness. He posited that the purpose of existence is to discover the latent spirit in all things and release infuse and elevate all of life by application of higher forms of human and transpersonal consciousness. The importance of Aurobindo cannot be overstated. His influence in Western thought has been far reaching through the seminal work of Allan Watts, Aldous Huxley, the Beat Movement. Indeed, the entire gestalt of the 1960’s (and New Consciousness thinking) was fundamentally shaped by his work. Whether people recognize the lineage or not, most progressive thinking in the Western world since then has been significantly influenced by his work.

Based on these two pillars of early 20th Century thought, as well as some sother ignficiant writers, I have begun to develop a personal metaphysics.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

The Pace of the Posts

I have received a couple of queries regarding the drop off in the number of posts this month. I decided early on that that I could not keep up the pace of what I had been doing before (3 or 4 posts a week) and that it would make sense to post at a pace of about 1 or 2 posts per week. This will keep me fresh and engaged and is much more likely to make this project sustainable over the long haul. I the meantime, thanks for your encouragement.

Boomeritis

Ken Wilber and others have put their finger on a very real set of problems associated with late stage pluralism. Wilber calls this complex of issues “Boomeritis”. As I mentioned in my last entry, much of our church reflects a consciousness reflective of post-modern pluralism. We live in a world of diverse cultures, races, and religions and increasingly these coexist in close proximity. From that melting pot comes the intellectual capacity to appreciate differences, deconstruct perspectives, and form identities that are not derived solely from one’s family and traditions. For the first time in human history, entire generations are able to transform the ways that they view themselves and revolutionize their understanding beyond the narrow confines of provincial enculturation. What this has produced is a remarkable mix of political activism and intentional personal development. However, the latter has, in many ways, gotten us into trouble.

The Deeply Subjective Self

The postmodern self is a deeply subjective self. By rejecting traditional values and even recognizing the limits of scientific understanding, and by understanding intuitively that we construct reality as we go along, we are left with only our inner, subjective experience as authority. Our truth is relative. We cannot exercise judgment because there is no place to stand to determine validity. We reject the notion that anyone has anything of real value to say because we distrust both authority and hierarchy. And our feelings become the ultimate arbiters of good and bad, right and wrong.

In the end, we evade personal responsibility, because, after all, there are no true standards which can universally govern our behavior. We alternate between terminal “niceness” (because, after all, a person’s feelings are at the core of the truth of their being) to a rampant meanness (because I have a “right” to my opinion and a responsibility to assert myself to avoid giving in to my “victimhood” or to establish appropriate “boundaries”). This is the world of the sensitive self, the “Me” generation, self-righteous political correctness and cultural creativity.

When you strip all of this away, you are left with a very loud mantra: “Nobody tells me what to do!” This, in essence, is a deep form of narcissism and it is potentially quite dangerous. As Elizabeth Debold says in her article “Boomeritis and Me”:

[I]n the context of a world careening out of control precisely because we are so out of control, this is actually no joke. Narcissism is a force in us, built up over hundreds of thousands of years of human history, which must be renounced in order to make the evolutionary leap to a new way of being. It is a willful, and aggressive, denial of the creative force of the universe, whether we call it the Divine or God or what you will. This core motivation—Nobody tells me what to do!—sounds like the peevish rant of a two-year-old, which it is, but it is not harmless when it provides us with an excuse not to care beyond ourselves, destroys the true nobility of the spiritual quest and the imperative to reach for the highest in human potential, or justifies the rage of the innumerable sensitive selves who feel victimized in contemporary culture.

Boomeritis in the UU Church

I see this in myself and I see it everyday in our church. We UUs participate in this cultural complex without even thinking about it. We see it in our culture of criticism. We see it in our intolerance of conservatives. We see it in our stated commitment to liberal political action but failure to back up that commitment with sacrificial action. We see it in our token environmentalism and our claims to seek diversity (while our churches remain overwhelmingly homogenous). I am the first to admit to my own hypocracy in all of this. I am infected as well. However, for the good of the planet, I have to move on and I suspect we in the UU church have to do the same.

The trick, it seems to me, is to recognize that I am not here to have my way but to serve. I am here to contribute, not to take. I am here to lay my life down. I can no longer afford to say “Nobody can tell ME what to do!” but rather I must fundamentally say “My only hope lies in being of use in this world and what gets in the way of that is my self.” To my mind, that requires that I seek deeper spiritual truth -- that I learn and realize the true nature of my egoic self.

Jean Gebser, Don Beck, Chris Cowan, Ken Wilber and many others claim that we are on the threshold of a new level of consciousness. If we manage to negotiate that process, we open ourselves to new stages of human evolution in which we deeply see and understand the integrative nature of reality. Those perspectives hold promise for our solving some rather pernicious and dangerous problems. But those perspectives require that we let go of myopic understandings of who we really are and begin to understand that all that we think we are is merely a passing emergence in flow of infinite time and space.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Pluralism in UU Churches

On earlier blog posts, I took on humanism, arguing that it is a fundamentally played out moral view of the world resting on assumptions that were conclusively debunked in the late 1700s. I have taken the position that building a faith on a humanistic worldview is doomed to failure and that we, as a movement, have to look beyond mere humanism.

This article takes on the next step of development – post-modern pluralism. If our modern church was founded on humanist values, it is now dominated by post-modern pluralism.

Pluralism Defined.

What do I mean by pluralism? Specifically, pluralism refers to a post-modern understanding of the world that recognizes the relative nature of “truth” and the central reality of human experience. With the breakdown of epistemological certainty ushered in by Hume and later Kant, it became evident that what can be known is extremely limited if, indeed, it is possible to know anything at all with an appreciable level of confidence. As is often the case, it took awhile for humanity to catch up to the implications of these philosophic conclusions. However, by the early 20th Century, the philosophic schools of phenomenology, logical positivism, linguistic philosophy, semiotics, existentialism, structuralism and a few others reflected the full blown attempt to come to terms with the notion that “man” is not the measure of all things. By the 1960s, these intermediate ideas had penetrated the general culture and “post-modernism” in art, literature and social criticism. Representative intellectual apologists of this post modern movement include Thomas Kuhn, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Richard Roty and Jean Baudrillard.

While this is a diverse crowd and any generalizations are bound to oversimplify, for the sake of this blog, it seems the central theme is the general consensus of these schools of thought that our reality is, largely, constructed by human beings. There is no “objective” truth which is out there that we perceive. Rather, we attempt to make sense of a maelstrom of phenomena and in the process construct reality. Schools differ as to whether the primary drives of this construction lie in language, political structures, or cultures. On the positive side, this leads to recognition that no one has a corner on the truth. Truth can be found in all cultures and in all peoples and all cultures and value systems must be honored. This world-centric understanding is profoundly important on the level of political action.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Post-modern Pluralists, at their best, have a deep desire to act politically on behalf of oppressed peoples. being deeply sensitive to matters of race, sexual orientation, gender, poverty and marginalization. On a societal level, this postmodern worldview has accomplished much: the civil rights movement, feminism, environmental protection and ecological sensitivity, the beginnings of health care reform and an awareness of political marginalization in all manner of forms

However there is a very real downside to this world view. Postmodern pluralists share a common and fundamental mistrust of the spiritual, especially when experienced at the individual level. They are also thoroughgoing materialists. Given a lack of any basis for determining validity claims, and a radical mistrust of individual subjective experience coupled with a denial of the notion of transpersonal reality, they end up with a highly relativistic world-view. Because everything is constructed, there is no place to stand to evaluate value systems. You, in your perspectives, are as conditioned by language, society, culture and so on as everyone else and so you have no authority to “judge” the value systems of others. This leads to is a significant distrust of subjective experience, a rabid dislike of hierarchy, and spiritual experience and as a logical consequence, the result is a relativistic moral despair. (In its inevitable extreme, we can’t condemn Hitler because, after all, his value system is just one of many and who is to say, in any absolute sense, that his viewpoint wasn’t valid.) Indeed, it becomes very difficult to ultimately justify actions of liberation and political action – if every system is as valid as any other, then what allows us judge the oppressor’s way as “wrong”. Ultimately, postmodernism ends up becoming form of moral nihilism. Foucault recognized this, rejected his deep constructivist approach in the middle of his career and began working towards a different model.

In response to this moral quagmire, Pluralism hypocrically simply asserts an elitist moral system. All systems that are less broadminded are simply declared to be inferior on the grounds that they are not inclusive. Thus, in the name of inclusiveness, the Pluralists exclude vast swaths of human culture. Their ire is directed towards what are perceived as dominator worldviews – namely mythic religion and rationalist scientism. In self-contradiction to the notion that there is no morally superior worldview, the pluralist sees any moral system that cannot tolerate other systems as intolerable. There is also a tendency to romanticize and exalt cultures that are indigenous or non-Western. These are seen as pure and the victims of the dominator cultures of Europe. Moreover, feminine values are exalted over male values. The former are seen as inclusive and connective while the later are seen as destructive and purely agentic. Thus for all of its vaunted open-mindedness, the pluralistic worldview cannot admit even the partial validity of the moral stance of religious or scientific worldviews.

Consequently, postmodernism tends foster the apotheosis of victimhood. Victims should be rescued from the dominating forces of Western culture (whether religious or scientific/industrial). There is a great deal of anger and judgment against those who are perceived to be seeking the imposition of their value system on others. On an individual level, this leads to a certain degree of narcissim (which I will explore in a different blog entry).

Politically, pluralists tend to have a very difficult time figuring out how to address “evil”. They are deeply conflicted around issues of crime and punishment, terrorism, use of force and other agentic action. They simply don’t have the bandwidth or the categories to figure out how to address such issues from their framework. They recognize that lower tier responses are wanting, but they have nothing compelleing to offer in their stead.

The Fundamental Failure of Open-mindedness

While the entire ethos of this worldview is a purported open-mindedness, the irony, of course, is that this elitist and monoptic view of the world denigrates any value system perceived to be less open-minded. Despite that fact that it has a deeply nihilistic moral fabric, it seeks to impose its view of what is moral on anyone it perceives to be less morally developed. In fact, postmodern pluralism is a very closed system. Political correctness and thought policing are endemic. Straying from relativistic notions is met with fierce opposition and castigation.

If humanists are alive and well in the UU church, so are post-modern pluralists. Our denominational academic institutions are predominately pluralistic (as are most higher level academic institutions). Post-modern pluralism is also easy to spot in our churches. Most Unitarian Universalists claim open-mindedness and tolerance, yet cannot tolerate political or religious conservatives. There are certain things which could not be said in a UU church without provoking a virulent response. There is a stark dualistic thinking that takes hold of many with certain things declared to be good and other things declared to be evil. Our ability to think in nuanced and creative ways is hampered by the fact that we simply write off vast amounts of cultural and intellectual legacy that could be used as fodder for advancing our understanding of the world.

What's Next.

So why do I bring all of this up. A few posts ago, I talked about Jean Gebser and his view that humanity is on the brink of a significant transformation. Pluralism may well be a way station in the evolutionary development, but it is a mistake to linger there for too long. Indeed, post-modernism may represent the final stage of the mental structure with its insistence that material reality is all that exists. Gebser would encourage us to recognize that there are orders of consciousness that are above this worldview.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.