RED/BLUE versus BLACK/GREEN

I’m trying to figure out an article from Aeon, an online mag, by Steve Fuller, “a social epistemologist at the University of Warwick. His book The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism, co-authored with Veronika Lipinska, is due out in spring 2014.”  Part of my problem is that I keep confusing it with last night’s movie:  “Angels and Demons,” a continuation of “The Da Vinci Code,” which develops out of the opposition between early science (Galileo and the Illuminati) versus the Catholic church (the Pope and the human given).

The article is itself an attempt to understand “a jet-setting Iranian playboy, transhumanist author and corporate consultant who argued that this divide [left-wing versus right-wing] was due for a 90-degree rotation. F M Esfandiary — or ‘FM-2030’ as he began calling himself in the 1970s — predicted an axial shift to ‘up-wing’ and ‘down-wing’ political priorities.”  “‘up‑wing’ meant looking toward the heavens, and ‘down-wing’ was looking toward the Earth.”  You might as well lie down to think about it. It’s the velvet black of deep space versus green grass.  Space ships versus geodesic domes.

The crux seems to be whether it is better to force the universe to accommodate us through the use of clever technology or whether it is better to adapt and fit into the earth we belong to.  Human beings are the only animals who have this choice beyond, say, building a shelter or encouraging the growth of things we like.  Ants do not build spaceships, though I’m sure they would if they could.  This opinion shows that I’m not at heart a “black.”  Fuller (Steve) claims this fix-it attitude (even tinkering with genomes) is popular on TED as well as among the young.   I do enjoy TED talks but I am not young.  He says “the up-winging Blacks combine the old libertarian Right and the old technocratic Left, while the down-winging Greens bring together elements of the old conservative Right and the old communitarian Left.”

Much of the difference comes in the attempt to understand anew authority, territory, and social justice.  Instead of resisting authoritarian law-making or even compassion through social programming or the military capacity to preserve order, this way of thinking challenges the notions of authority and territory in the first place.  Welfare doesn’t work; revolution doesn’t work; taxation doesn’t work; governmental design doesn’t work, capitalism doesn’t work.

So what works?   And what IS working?  Informing this sensibility is a more general metaphysical belief that there are objectively ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ ways of being human.  I would add ways of “being” at all.  Is it natural or unnatural to try to diminish the inadvertent extinguishing of species by putting enormous effort, money and emotion into recovering the condor or the swift fox?   Is it natural or unnatural to recreate a dinosaur by tinkering with the genome of an ostrich egg?

But when we’re playing with the “god particle,” as in the re-weaving of creation according to CERN, aren’t we risking the accidental destruction of the lynch pin that holds it all together?  I was interested that the designers for the explosion that is the capstone of “Angels and Demons” at first drew on images of atomic bomb explosions, but then moved to telescope photos of galaxies exploding which oddly looked more like Renaissance religious paintings.  Darker.

This is the sun -- a contained explosion -- natural.

Part of the argument seems to be whether humans can be trusted to define their own freedoms and pleasures.  Should some philosophical technology establish and justify the basic parameters of human happiness?   (I suspect we prefer the self-determination for ourselves and the prescriptions for others.)  Should infants be “adjusted” to meet our standards of bimorphic sex when they “naturally” might have mixed attributes, neither male nor female or maybe both?  Should we save premies, knowing they are likely to have damage?  Or does love sweep all that aside?  

Two friends have had idealized dental work.  I don’t like it.  They’re not “them” now.  But bad teeth are a marker of poverty, a loser clue.  If all the poor people had excellent Hollywood-standard smiles, would they become successful?  But is it really different to supply Headstart for all youngsters, knowing that success then is a marker for achievement throughout life?  (Well, assuming that the society stays enough the same that the same abilities will count.)

These questions become much sharper when heavy stigma is involved.  Right now in Europe there is political strife about the Roma, the Gypsies, who are have been so outcast for so long that they have formed their own society with their own standards -- many of which prey on the mainstream -- at least from the point of view of the mainstream.  Theft, child trafficking, spontaneous encampments with deficient sanitation.  And yet they are alluring: sexy, mysterious, accessing forms of knowledge we only imagine.  So do we want to suppress that?  But scrub them up, make them go to school, take away their fortune-telling -- that’s cultural destruction.  “So we are thieves!” they say.  “How else can we survive since you shut us out everywhere?”  So what do we do -- subsidize MBA degrees for everyone?  (I’m hearing that MBA degrees are no guarantee.  In fact, nothing is a guarantee, despite all the social technology.)

Those “black/up” folks who want to think out the problem neatly always deal in clear edges and definitions that stay on the obvious surface, while the green/down folks are more likely to understand the earthy mycelia that link the stigmatized to the whole mainstream.  For instance, sex work.  One side thinks of medical inspection, vaccines, regulated spaces, standards and licenses.  The other knows full well that sex for personal motives that might or might not include money, might or might not be planned, might or might not be exploitative -- well, that’s where the story begins.  Maybe poetry and song as well.  We already know that a pure technological approach to human society is likely to end up in gas and ash.  

Is this really different from the blue/red spectrum that has led us into purple paralysis?  Where does it show the alternatives in governing or categorizing?  How does it define humanness in a way that prevents kings as well as cannibals?  From watching the You Tube of Fuller (Steve) explaining http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6J8y6K178c I get the idea that he’s talking about a two-step process:  encouraging or even forcing experiment but also supplying a safety net if the experiment fails.  What we see over and over is that we take the chance and then there is no second stage:  empty the mental health warehouses but don’t provide the community centers.  AND suppress the news of the consequences, so we neither feel badly about it nor learn from it.  Throw everyone off welfare -- but people are already starving in the streets.  Now what?

Maybe the biggest risk we took in recent centuries without any fall-back position was the War Between the States.  Slavery only morphed into new forms: they say there are more black men in jails now than were ever in chains on plantations.  Prosperity for the South has not returned "organically".  Or maybe an even bigger deliberate social experiment was Native American reservations.  It hasn’t worked out the way we expected.  

So what have we learned?  If we can define “social epistomology,” does that help us?  It’s a lot more fun to just go to the movies.

HANS KUNG FOR POPE !!!

When I was in seminary, Hans Kung, Swiss priest theologian, was a rock star who appeared on pop television shows, was on the cover of Time and a guest of JFK in the White House.   I saw him preach from the elegant high pulpit in Rockefeller Chapel while Dean of the Chapel Bernie Brown’s chandelier of a thousand paper cranes moved quietly overhead.   Handsome and challenging, Kung questioned such rigid ideas as papal infallibility, and promoted global ecumenicism, common sense rules for conduct and euthanasia.  He even criticized John Paul II for betraying the ideals of Vatican II.  He accepted the dearness of nature (though not the wilder ideas about it) and the value of science, including evolution and neuroscience.  

Worse, he put all these ideas in books that sold well.  He was repeatedly disciplined, but the Vatican never set Hans Kung outside the gates, only forbade him to teach theology.  If they had elected him Pope, the Roman Catholic Church would have been quite different.  Too late now.  He’s 85, about as old as Ratzinger, whom he once supported, though Kung’s clear conscience seems to have preserved his health.

Kung has continued to be politically active, working with the UN to endorse non-violence and respect for life, solidarity and a just economic order, tolerance and a life of truthfulness, equal rights and partnership between men and women.  What this proves to me is that Benedict XVI may be the institutional Pope, elected and wearing red kid shoes never worn by any fisherman, but Kung is a natural Pope, his status earned through a lifetime of wisdom and pastoral care.  He may turn out to be a rallying point in the struggle for control now beginning.  In fact, he marks a difference between authority that is achieved by politics (reference “House of Cards”) versus one that is earned by service and thoughtfulness. 

Since I pretty much share Kung’s worldview, I would give the following advice to the College of Cardinals.  (It’s safe for me to be radical since no one will pay the least attention to what I say.)  The first thing I would advise is a tectonic shift in the church’s obsession with sex and disease.  What forces could possibly produce priests who prey on children instead of praying with them?  Why force unwanted children to be born? 

Science has so totally reframed our understanding and management of sex and disease (somehow linked in the mind of the church) that even the supposed healing practices of former times have now become sources of damage.  What are hospitals but monasteries with doctors instead of monks?  In England they call nurses “sisters” because once they were nuns.  Prayer has been replaced by antibiotics, used just as indiscriminately until they lose their efficacy.  The Rites once called forthrightly the LAST rites, are now just for “illness.”  What kind of religion can’t face death?

Marriage has been overwhelmed by commercial ceremony, (rather like a Vatican mass -- so good for tourism), detached from tender sex and joyful reproduction, which have detached from each other.  The old rules about how to handle birth, coitus and death in Sacred Ways are hardly even remembered.  Communion?  What does it mean in a world of alcoholics?

What happened to overturning of the tables of the money changers?  Economics have become a source of demonic evil.  Celibacy and poverty were once ways of ensuring that power and wealth remained with the institutional church instead of defaulting to priestly empires and family ownership.  That wasn’t very admirable, but now such rules are worse -- vows that deform and separate honorable people from their vocations. 

In places where the power of the institution is still rooted in the conviction of supernatural powers and in images of eternal life, there is still comfort to be offered -- even practical help if the local priest is willing to spend the money the church would like to keep secret for their own aggrandizement.  But STILL the power of the church as an institution is NOT used to influence nations.  There is no financial support for the cure for HIV-AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis -- a once-Christian charge now taken up by cyber-CEOs (Bill Gates as Bishop), showing that the secular tech world has more heart than cardinals have. 

Kung has accused Benedict XVI of going back to the Council of Nicea in 325 AD.  Those who “know,” will understand that this was the historical moment when the institutional church opted for control and rigidity, the ultimate political moment that determined which books of the New Testament would be called “gospels” (there are many more than four) and which policies would shape decisions.  It was sort of an early version of the United Nations where the Assyrian Church of the East, the Eastern Orthodox, the Oriental Orthodox, and the Roman Catholics all met at the invitation of the Roman Emperor Constantine I.  There were several hundred delegates, only five of which were from the Roman Catholic church.  But the pattern was the Roman Empire.

Among the politically negotiated decisions was the Trinity, a way of dealing with the sticky issue of how a “one and only” monotheistic God, could have a son named Jesus.  Was He an illusion?  Did it mean that God had had sex, meaning that He also must have had a body?  Just how human is God Himself? 

The meeting also set the formula for calculating Easter which was meant to focus on the “second birth” of Jesus when he escaped death.  (Also conveniently co-opting the Easter bunny-and-egg fertility ideas of the pagans and the ancient vegetable ceremonies of spring.)  

This was the beginning of canon law, unchanging rules of discipline.  A summary follows for your amazement.

1. Prohibition of self-castration.  (Why so important that it’s first on the list?)

2. How long persons had to study before being baptized. (Citizenship is parallel.)

3. Prohibition of the presence in the house of a cleric of a younger woman who might bring him under suspicion.  (Subintroductees.  They’ll never suspect altar boys.)  

4. Ordination of a bishop in the presence of at least three provincial bishops and confirmation by the Metropolitan bishop. 

5. Provision for two provincial synods to be held annually.

6. Exceptional authority acknowledged for the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome (the Pope) for their respective regions.

7. Recognition of the honorary rights of the see of Jerusalem. 

8. Provision for agreement with the Novatianists, an early sect.

9–14. Provision for mild procedure against the lapsed during the persecution under Licinius.

15–16. Prohibition of the removal of priests.   (And they want to take tenure away from teachers.) 

17. Prohibition of usury among the clergy.  (How is it the lay people are excused?)

18. Precedence of bishops and presbyters before deacons in receiving Holy Communion.

19. Declaration of the invalidity of baptism by Paulian heretics.

20. Prohibition of kneeling on Sundays and during the Pentecost (the fifty days commencing on Easter). Standing was the normative posture for prayer at this time, as it still is among the Eastern Christians.

I’ve colored red (rubrics) the rules that are “moral” which immediately reveals that this conference was not so much about sin as about table manners: who sits where (when they are allowed to sit) and who is not allowed to come to the table.  The rest of Canon Law, about which I know little, has accumulated over the centuries, one way or another.

Are you watching House of Cards?   We’ll all be watching House of Cardinals for a while.  Maybe Hans Kung will have words for us. Maybe we should learn to make origami cranes.  What if we folded a thousand Black Swans?

FAMILY LIFE

No one realized that Pope Benedict cared so much about male whores that he would give them a dispensation that allowed the use of condoms in the course of their daily (er, nightly) work. Of course, they weren’t going to get anyone pregnant anyway. They weren’t going to stop the rain of babies that floods the world.


Did this mean that married couples could use condoms for contraception? Oh, no no no no. A man who wants sex must want babies. Then if he wants sex but not babies must he go to a whore? Does it matter whether it’s a male or female whore? (An off-label use of condoms. Maybe anatomy.) If he carries HIV or even has AIDS, then can he use a condom to protect his wife? If a male whore should use a condom as an act of compassion to protect his customers and maybe the wife of his customer, then who is it that will perform the act of compassion that will cure AIDS altogether? The United States will write a check to Big Pharma so they will send pills to Third World Countries, but that’s only if the country accepting the check will also accept other concessions, like military access or Big Pharma Third World drug trials. What does the Pope say about this?

What would Jesus say about all this? I think we know. We also know what Saint Paul would say, that man suspicious of all passion (except the Crucifixion). It is pointed out quietly in seminaries that Jesus is not the foundation of any institution. It is Paul -- oh, and Peter but he was not a very good bureaucrat -- who started the church and it was the Roman Emperor who solidified and located it. But a church is an institution, not an emotion. A church has no compassion. Only people can be compassionate.

A journalist is sent to interview a typical Catholic family about all this. “So,” the journalist asked the married couple, “Is this a big relief to you? Will it make a difference in your lives?”

The husband snorts. “Are you kidding? The Pope knows nothing about marriage. We haven’t paid attention to him for a long time.”

And the husband’s gay brother remarks rudely, “The Pope lives in a bubble smaller than the Popemobile. Nice shoes, though.”


The wife says, “Poor man. I hope he lives better than our parish priest who is too old and never gets a decent meal unless some married couple has him over and who is never sent the assistant he begs for. His cassock is threadbare and his rooms are too cold.”

Her brother-in-law laughs bitterly. “Maybe he can find ways to comfort himself.”

The twelve-year-old son says, “Yeah, but why use a condom anyway, now that you can just take a pill every day to prevent AIDS? What’s the difference between that and taking a contraceptive pill?” He gives a meaningful glance at his big sister who is home for Thanksgiving from Boston University.

The father bristles. “Five bucks a pill! You got that kind of money?”

Sulking, the son kicks a chair leg. “Only forty cents a day in third world countries.”

Now the mother bristles. “You can’t even remember to brush your teeth. Do you think you can remember to take a pill every single day without fail? That’s what you have to do.”

The sister looks over the top of the New York Times she has been checking. “My theology prof, Lisa Sowle Cahill, says the politics of AIDS has finally crowded the politics of contraception over to the side of the radar screen.”

“You’re right,” says the journalist, which causes the sister to reconsider -- maybe he’s cuter than she originally thought. “Back in 1987 when the doctors finally realized that AIDS was a retrovirus, an American committee of Bishops wanted a change in the policy on condoms but Ratzinger, then just a cardinal, whacked them hard with his doctrinal ruler. In 2001 -- that’s ten years ago -- the South African Bishops Conference issued a letter that said, ‘everyone has the right to defend one’s life against mortal danger.’ Even Opus Dei, that right wing of the church that Justice Scalia belongs to, agreed.”

“Let me see that,” says the gay uncle, taking the New York Times into his hands. “I’ve lost so many close friends since 1987. So many.”

The co-ed is indignant. “The Pope specifically said ‘male’ whores but in Italy they changed the wording to say ‘female whores.’ What is this? They think all whores are females? It’s not whoring if men do it? All females are whores?”

Her mother sighs. “How can you talk this way? You sound so cold-blooded. It makes me worry about you. If you say all these things, what might you do?”

The journalist is scribbling madly. “Don’t you believe that knowing things is good? Dr. John M. Haas, the president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, who is on the governing council of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, asked the publisher not to publish the book because it would cause so much trouble. Do you agree?”

“Knowledge is power,” says dad, tight-lipped, “And power is never easy.”

The mother wrings her hands. “What about the babies? The babies that shouldn’t be born because there’s no way to take care of them, no one to love them? What about the babies born with AIDS? Why can’t everyone use condoms?”

The twelve-year-old boy grumbles, “Heck, there are dispensers in the bathrooms of all the bars.”

Both parents look at him sharply. “How do you know THAT?” they demand.

The uncle is sheepish. “I told him.”

The father, angry, says to his brother, “I’ll take care of my son’s sex education, if you don’t mind.”

“But, Dad, you don’t know everything.”

The journalist begins gathering up his materials. “None of us knows enough. The world has been living in a Popemobile. It’s time we opened the doors and got out.”

The wife looks at him sharply. “I love my church.”

The daughter says, “I’ll help you carry your stuff out to the car.”