Thoughts on Pantheism

Libertarian pantheist philosopher Tony Flood (check out his blog) thinks that God is real, but that s/he is completely feckless, a blob of intense compassion and nothing more. Flood has said,

“I have come to accept that the all-knowing and all-loving lure of the cosmos lacks any coercive physical power. For me, asking why God couldn't prevent an earthquake is almost like asking why you couldn't. (Almost, because you at least have some coercive physical power [albeit insufficient for preventing tectonic shift], but God has none [not even enough to lift a pebble].) If mainstream theists cannot imagine worshiping such a deity, that says more about them than it does about what it takes for something to be God.”

This is an interesting notion, but to me this perspective on God and pantheism is simply too abstract to be compelling. I am not a pantheist, as I seem to more identify with philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s notion that the “universe is stupid”. In a sense, this view could be considered the exact opposite of pantheism, as the pantheist’s central claim is that the universe and God are one and the same. But I cannot believe the universe is all-knowing and all-loving, an infinite sink of love and mercy. The universe is not compassionate, nature is not merciful. Like Bertrand Russell said, the earth will one day be engulfed by the sun, and every human endeavor will be wiped away without a trace. Forever gone, and the universe will care not a whit. Pantheism, said Dawkins, is a “sexed-up atheism”. And in a way I see his point. The modern liberal, positivist (pantheist?) project wishes for people to place their faith and good works into solving global warming and reversing environmental destruction, erasing cultural identity and superstition so that people may worship the scientific truth of nature, restoring the external, non-human world to its natural state, unmarred by grubby human hands.

How can Tony Flood consider himself both as Rothbardian anarcho-libertarian and pantheist? Doesn’t the pantheist worldview require one to give up his individualism for the good of the universe? If the universe is God, are you not beholden to protect her? Do not the ends (protecting God) justify the means, even if the means involve crushing human individuality? Or is God so feckless and abstract that any amount of ecological destruction and warfare is beyond his purview? In which case, I don’t really see the point of even believing or caring about this God.

On the other hand, if the universe is stupid as philosopher Slavoj Zizek claims, and all human works will one day be destroyed for all eternity, all memories wiped clean, what is the point of living? I take comfort in Arisotle's notion that we are put on earth for the purpose of fulfilling our human potential.  We must live to our potential, flourish as best we can, live out our lives as it must be lived according to the rules we accept for ourselves. Whatever God is, his spirit lives inside each one of us. When the human story is over, when vertical cultural exchange is no more, then God is dead. But we would do well to cherish every moment that God is with us. We would do well to fight for our own ability to flourish as human beings: to have relationships, conversations, raise children, choose our own irrational loves.

Many tea-partiers tend to favor a reduction in the power of government because they would rather obey their God (in the form of organized churches and parishes) instead. I do not belong to any organized religious group, yet I strongly subscribe to this same argument. If God is just an abstract notion of the aggregate of individual human spirits, coercive bureaucracies are in direct opposition to God.

Still life with pipe and book

“With Pipe and Book”, the great used book store/tobacconist in Lake Placid, has closed. The store was wonderfully anachronistic, a monument to a time when pipes and books mattered.  The era of leisurely reading in the evening, pipe in hand, has long since passed. Now we have so many more choices: to read or to surf the internet. To watch TV, chat electronically with friends. The choices are killing us! We have the choice to eat lovingly-prepared foods or to eat processed junk, and we choose the junk. We have the choice of reading books that stretch our imagination and our intellect, but we choose to overload our senses with noisy nothingness. We choose to shop at Wal-Mart, eat at McDonalds. When given the choice, we repeatedly fail to live well. Back in the era of pipes and books, there was little choice but to read or to have face-to-face exchanges with fellow humans.  Either that or waste away in silent darkness. Sometimes the only choice we had for occupying our minds was to sit and think (pipe in hand, of course). Now we have the choice: to think or not to think. And we often choose not to think.

As a libertarian it feels strange to say this, but I guess I don’t always want a choice. Maybe sometimes we just have to consciously surrender our choice, not to the government (of course) but to our own social and religious affiliations. For instance, if I were to name a child, I would probably choose a family name. There are far too many names out there- never mind all the made-up names I could potentially conjure. I would choose to select from a far more limited set of choices that includes the names of my grandparents, great uncles, great grandparents. Perhaps freedom is living in a world of respected mores, family customs and cultural and religious traditions, of unspoken rules and structure, where individuals choose their choice-limiting structures out of love and honor and commitment. True freedom of choice is bewildering, unsettling. Like the world envisioned by Sartre, who claimed that we must formulate our own personal essence from the ground up, one agonizing choice at a time. But really nobody can do that. Nobody can self-create. We need structures: parents to lean on, customs to follow, mores to obey.  Perhaps libertarianism is a pragmatic political ideology in that it allows communities to flourish without outside intervention and allows people to limit their choices in ways that imbue their lives with meaning and self-worth.

Free markets are surely not the ultimate answer, as they largely fuel the fire of excessive choice. Why is it that so many libertarians think that free markets will solve everything? Without strong communities, strong families, strong cultural grounding, free markets will just fuel our destructive joyride through life. Free markets are good for getting people what they want, efficiently and cheaply. This is marvelous and indispensable, but there is more to life than getting what we want. The free market will turn us all into spoiled children if we don’t watch out.  The free market is not a path to a satisfying life, it is not inherently good or evil. It is just an efficient means for distribution of scarce goods among people. And certainly central government is not the answer either. Central government takes the most important choices away from the people who actually care about the outcome.  Central government removes choice but replaces it by the evils of fear and indifference.  A central government does not respect the self-worth of the individual and makes decrees that people have no personal stake in obeying, except out of fear.  

I guess what I'm saying is that the virtues of hard work, hard thought, hard love, are paramount. We can’t sink into complacency and think that free markets or government will solve all of our problems. A satisfying life requires character, developing strong ties with other human beings, working hard to reach difficult goals. But developing character is hard work. It’s easier to watch TV, following the political circus on MSNBC as if we’re affecting the play, or to lose ourselves in video games depicting a better, more exciting world.  And the choice is ours: to lead a meaningful life or to make the comfortable choice.  To trek into the wilderness or to buy the heated mattress pad.

So we haven't arrived at any answers, really.  Whatever, the questions are always more interesting than the answers anyway.  I don't know what I'm going to do this next week, never mind for the rest of my life, but for now maybe I'll just fall back in time for a few moments, and sit down with a book and a pipe.  I don't own a pipe, but doesn't that sound pretty good right about now?  

The Grinch that stole Copenhagen...

I guess I'm a contrarian, but the words "global consensus" kind of give me the chills.  I've been thinking a bit about Copenhagen, and global warming, and I'm not really comforted by the thought of the world coming together on some sort of agenda for action. I could probably get behind a treaty of non-violence (non-action?), a global agreement not to mess with other peoples business. But I don't like the thought of large numbers of people - entire countries - agreeing to engage in some action. As a contrarian, I love discord, disagreement, debate, and I can't stand to see the Whos down in Whoville singing their happy songs in unison! Maybe my heart is just a few sizes too small? Or maybe, just maybe we need to step back and think about what we are doing here. Global warming is a statist's dream- an opportunity to centralize power at a global scale. I don't want to sound like one of those right-wing nuts screaming about the New World Order, but let's just make sure we understand what we are giving up for the possibility of slightly reducing the expected magnitude of climate change. Is 350 really worth it? Might we do something better with all this youthful passion for saving the planet? How about this: rather than placing our faith in some global consensus, each of us expresses our love for the planet spontaneously and willingly, in our own way...

Freedom and the Central Limit Theorem

This may sound dorky, but I think we need to retain maximum degrees of freedom in society, in a statistical sense. The more degrees of freedom we have, the more the law of large numbers - the central limit theorem - can work its magic.  The central limit theorem is a buffer against tyranny.  In the absence of force lies true normality.  Under the law of large numbers, humans and society itself will tend toward its natural mean. Variance is important to our system. In variance lies our societal resilience. Inter-personal variance is the source of innovation, new ideas. But without the large numbers, the degrees of freedom, the sample mean can easily become biased from the true mean. When the law of large numbers breaks down, the mean becomes subject to increasing random drift. The more governments or large institutions control the people, the more correlation among people, the lower the effective population size and the effective degrees of freedom. At the extreme, we become a society of ants, in which we are so inter-correlated that we are in effect one superorganism- a sample size of one.

But we can feel it already- the subtle clamping down of inter-personal variance that occurs every day in our society. Before we can have power over ourselves and our family, we need to convince those already in charge that we are ONE OF THEM. We need to don suits, or (more importantly) close our minds to certain possibilities that we are not supposed to consider. The pressure to conform is real, and it causes our opinions to correlate with dominant opinions (which may or may not be the "normal"). It reduces the effective population size.

We are a social species. We like to copy others and we will always emulate and copy, but that’s why it’s dangerous to have highly centralized social political structures. To have diversity, we need localism, we need freedom to diversify. We need the power to act on our convictions, even if it differs from the dominant view. When we talk about freedom, we need to make it clear: freedom does not mean the freedom to escape poverty, the freedom to have a secure job with health care benefits. Freedom is a function of the total effective population size: the number of independently acting, free human beings in the system. Freedom is the amount of power that is in the hands of independent human individuals. The more we talk about self-reliant, independent people, and not countries, or institutions, the more we are free.

Just another political/environmental/philosophy/science/poetry blog...

In this blog I will critique the modern environmental movement generally, sometimes harshly, sometimes lovingly, but always respectfully I hope. My arguments will spring from many different fields, including (gasp!) politics, philosophy, poetry, and science. So just to start, here is my basic creed :

Act Locally!
What is an environmentalist to do in the land of the free? Why not follow the old motto of the environmental movement: “Think globally, act locally”. Except forget the “global” part. Just act to protect what you love. Don’t meddle in other people’s business. Don’t force your values down their throats- they are living, breathing, adults just like you are. Practice kindness and respect. Be modest. Don’t pretend that you speak for the animals, the trees, or anything like that. You don’t- you speak only for yourself. Don’t forget that you are only human. Relax- everything will be OK, as long as power isn’t concentrated in the hands of the few.