Atheism 26 - On Chaos and Justice

I finally have one commentator who has playfully accused me of being long-winded.  Many have made that accusation in the past, and none too few of them were far less gentle and good-natured than my current interlocutor.  I'm afraid that this post is about to prove them all right! ☺ Since all comments to this blog are public, I don't believe I am telling any tales out of school by mentioning them here.

In a recent comment exchange, my gentle reader pointed out the utterly chaotic nature of the human mind and the resulting chaos of any society made up of said minds.  I couldn't agree more.  I have been dealing with this same observation for probably 50 years or more.  What follows are my own conclusions regarding said observation, and I admit that my motive in moving it from the comments to a separate post is that I expect it to be quite long-winded!  I am once again compelled to remind the reader of my place as a layman, being no expert in psychology, theology or any other -ology, for that matter.  I am in no way attempting to teach anything here in the conventional sense.  As Richard Bach has written "Find the greatest teachers, ask the hardest questions, they never say, 'study philosophy,' or 'get your degree.'  They say, 'you already know.'"  I am completely convinced that, regardless the reader, everything written here (or anywhere in this blog) is something you already know.  Perhaps if you've forgotten, I can remind you.  Now, to the subject at hand, but one quick credit where due - what follows is a recollection of observations I made when I was in my 20s and 30s.  By the time I was in my 50s and reading C.S. Lewis, I found that he had made the same observations 30-40 years ahead of me, and that he was far more articulate in describing them.  Therefore, I acknowledge that what follows is a hodge-podge of Jack's words and mine. 

If you've never done so, try to eavesdrop the next time you encounter two people quarreling.  You will find the exchange enlightening if not at least slightly amusing.  The offended party will say things such as "How would you like it if someone did that to you?" or "Leave him alone; he wasn't doing anything to you!" or "Come on, you promised!"  Everyone says such things, young and old, educated and ignorant.  The interesting thing is that the offended party isn't merely saying that the offender is acting in a way that happens to displease him/her.  It sounds more as if the offended person is appealing to some sort of universal standard of behavior that the offender should know about but to which is not at the moment adhering.

This becomes all the more apparent when you listen to the offender's response.  Rarely will they say anything akin to "to hell with your standard!"  Rather, the offender will almost always make out that what they have been doing doesn't actually violate that standard, or there is some special excuse why violating the standard should be acceptable in this instance.  They will explain that this poor fellow deserves what he's getting or that the situation was quite different when you did the same to them or if they had known how busy they were going to be, they would never have made that promise.  That is to say that they do seem to agree that the standard exists, but they are attempting to excuse their violation of the standard by claiming some extenuating circumstance.

What we find in this little exercise is that there is some sort of unwritten standard or rule or law of behavior or morality - what I have in previous posts conveniently labeled the "Tao" - that we all seem to instinctively know and to which we all should adhere but don't (and I confess that I am no better at it than the next).  And we do all know it.  One may choose to call it the Tao or the Ren or the Code or the Eightfold Path or the Ten Commandments or the Five Pillars or the Beatitudes.  Across societies, it's all the same.  Now, to me, the most obvious question to ask about this realization of the Tao is "from whence does the Tao come if not from our own minds, which seem to acknowledge it but are constantly in rebellion against it?"  If the reader has perused this blog at all, they already know my opinion regarding the answer to this one, but we'll circle back to that later.  I'd prefer to move on to other questions that intrigue me at least as much as the first.  Namely "was there ever a time when people actually adhered to the Tao?" and "why, if we all know the Tao, do we do so poorly in following it?"  To the first, I have a single, simple response.  To the second, things will get more complicated. 

"Was there ever a time when people actually adhered to the Tao?"  No one knows for sure.  According to biblical custom, yes. As the story goes, Adam and Eve perfectly obeyed the Tao prior to their fall from grace.  In an episode of "Cosmos," Neil Degrasse Tyson speculated (based on anthropological and archeological findings) that prior to the invention of agriculture - and thus the invention of property - people worked together in small groups and never had any ideas like theft or sloth or war.  Obviously, we will never know, but religion and science agree that there may have been a time when humans not only understood the Tao, but actually obeyed it.

 "Why, if we all know the Tao, do we do so poorly in following it?"  My response to this one is multi-layered, but we must begin by firmly establishing that this Tao does, in fact, exist.  When we compare the ethical codes of ancient peoples - the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians and Chinese, let us say - we find a fair number of discrepancies in their ethos, but overall we find there to be far more similarities than differences.  Perhaps in this culture, one is expected to be loyal to one's family or in the next to one's country or in a third to everyone, but in none of them is pure narcissism acceptable. In this society, men are considered the leaders, in that one the women, in a third the elderly, but in none of them are individuals allowed to simply run amuck.  Across history and societies we find variations on the theme, but the theme itself appears universal.  Even people who claim that there is no such standard, that codes of ethics vary among cultures and even subcultures, will show their hands pretty quickly.  Perhaps John has no qualms about breaking his promises to you, claiming no such standard exists, but break a promise made to him and he'll be crying "foul" before you can shake a stick.  Some politician may claim before the press that treaties don't really matter, that there is no universal law that requires adherence to them, but have someone else break a treaty that this politician wants enforced and the country is going to war in no time!  This sort of behavior goes by many names: rudeness, selfishness, chaos, anarchy.  In religious terminology, we call it "evil." For purposes of convenience and convention, I shall be using the latter. I personally do not get hung up on synonym choices, but those who do may substitute any of the above.

By using the word "evil" I may appear to be overly harsh.  After all, we're saying nothing more than that people aren't perfect, and who am I to judge?  This would be a good point if my purpose was to fix a certain amount of blame for all this evil on this person or that, but I'm not attempting any adjudication, I'm merely looking at certain facts of human behavior and trying to reason out the why.  Why is there this universal dichotomy between what we all agree we should do and what we in fact do?

Again, in religious parlance, there is a spirit - usually called the devil - that is behind all this evil, causing us to do that which we know we oughtn't and creating heartache and chaos with every stride across the face of the world.  I am willing to give my gentle reader the benefit of the doubt in assuming that you do not believe in a demented being of red hue bearing cloven hooves, horns and a tail, toting a trident pitchfork and cackling over the morbid plight of humanity.  It may comfort you to know that I suffer no such delusions myself.  But I do believe in the concept - the spirit, if you will - personified by the devil; the type of proud, self-centered ostentation that creates this conflict in the Tao.   This disunion between "should" and "do" is precisely what Jesus was addressing when he said "do to others as you would want to have done to you." (Matt. 7:12)

But if there is, as I claim, this all-powerful God who is good, then why is God's creation so bad?  Setting aside the discussion of free will for another day, we must begin with an acknowledgment that something has obviously gone wrong in this creation, and what has gone wrong is what the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition calls "the devil" (although the idea of an actual devil has its roots in Zoroastrianism; it was not part of Jewish thinking until the Babylonian exile).  As an atheist, this whole God-devil-evil business impressed me as a rather complicated excuse for a fairly simple problem: that the world is just plain unfair.  But that brings us round to the question of "from whence do I draw this idea of fairness?"  To what am I comparing this unfair world?  A fellow cannot call a line crooked unless he has seen a straight line at some point and has a fixed idea of what it should look like.  If the whole world is bad, how could I, as a part of that bad world, have ever come to recognize its badness?  If I were to fall into the lake I would feel wet, but that is because I do not live in the water. I have a sense of dryness.  Do fish feel wet? Are clouds aware of the wind?  Do trees yearn for mobility?  Every one of us is at home in our own backyard.  It is only on foreign soil that we begin to sense that things may be amiss.  If I am at home in an unjust world, how would I have ever known it to be unjust?  To a child reared in an abusive home, abuse would be considered normal.  It would only be in an environment such as church or school or the kindly neighbor's house down the way that the child will have a point of comparison and begin to question their home life and wonder if it might be less than ideal; to wonder if, in fact, some homes might do things differently than their own, homes in which there is no abuse.

Of course, I could have given up this whole idea of justice, and the apparent lack of it, as a private fancy of my own, but if I did that then my argument against God would still collapse, because the argument is based on the premise that the whole world is entirely unjust and not simply that it displeased me personally.  Thus, in the very act of trying to disprove God's existence, in saying that the whole of reality was ultimately senseless, I had to admit that at least one part of that reality - my idea of justice - made perfect sense.  Finally, I turned to belief because disbelief became too simplistic.  If the entire universe has no meaning, we would never have known it had no meaning.  If we were all born without eyes, we would never have come to know that we were in the dark.  I came to realize that the very fact that I know the world to be unjust was itself a strong argument for the existence of God.  Ultimately, if I cannot feel "at home" in this world, if I have a desire which nothing in this world can fulfill, the most plausible explanation seems to be that I was made for a different world.

Pax