TG Mortality 25 - 2 Nephi 2 (II)

It’s interesting that Lehi joins Schopenhauer, Margulis and Sagan in recognizing the category of “purposefulness” or “will” that seems to be connected to the condition of life.  He speaks of creation being full of “things to act and things to be acted upon” (verses 13 and 14).  In doing so he makes the same kind of distinction Margulis and Sagan make between living and non-living matter.  It is a side note, however, for he is not really concerned in his final message to his son Jacob with the state of all organisms.  The freedom he wishes to discuss is the freedom that Man experiences, and Lehi’s discussion of this category of freedom begins with the moral law—

“And men are instructed sufficiently that they know good from evil. And the law is given unto men…” (v. 5).

The normal, universal state of mortality (the world of “men”) involves being able to perceive (“know”) that some things are right and some things are wrong.  That knowledge is, to some degree at least, dependent upon “instruction,” but mortality is so structured that for everyone who is in a normal, mortal experience, the instruction available to him is “sufficient” and he finds himself existing in a moral universe, bounded by “good” and “evil.”

            For Lehi, the distinction between these two types of freedom is absolutely fundamental. So much so that he spends some time trying to imagine the implications of Man existing in a world where “freedom” just meant “purposefulness” or “will” without the existence of an objective moral law and its attending imperatives and consequences (verses 11-15).  He finds himself trying to imagine a universe “created for a thing of naught” because “there would have been no purpose in the end of creation” (v. 12).  Such a situation he recognizes implies the absence of a God who possesses wisdom or purpose, much less power or mercy or justice (v. 13).  He finds it impossible to believe in the real possibility of a creation without such a creator (v. 13), but concludes that if it did exist, many of the distinctions we human beings find most important would cease to make much sense.  Such a world view, he intuits, quickly empties such concepts as Morality (with its opposing conceptions of “good” and “evil”), Justice (with its principles of “righteousness/happiness” and “wickedness/punishment”), Consciousness (along with its divide between “sense” and “insensibility”), and even Life of their meaning because the distinctions (“oppositions”) we make in defining them cease to be true in any fundamental or ultimate sense.  The resulting conceptual muddle makes everything just a “compound in one,” where it is impossible to make clear distinctions in any of those things that matter most to human beings with any degree of certainty or authority (v.11). With eerie precision he anticipates the intellectual climate of post-modernity where the central concerns of human existence (Freedom, Love, Beauty, Truth, Meaning and Consciousness) become evolutionary epiphenomena.  Such a climate indeed tends to drain the life out of a culture.  It becomes “as dead” (v.11), because all of its tendencies flow in the opposite direction of “God’s eternal purposes in the ends of man” (v. 15).

            The modern cult of “scientism” has the tendency to create just such a world-- a world that exists without a creator (“universes happen…”); life that arose without any goal, intention or purpose (remarkable since the scientific underpinnings of such an assertion haven’t progressed much further than Darwin’s original attempt to imagine “a warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity etc.,” with “a protein compound… chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes…”); a race of men who are nothing more than the fortuitous result of natural selection on the random variations of genetic material; and a mind whose moral “laws” are simply a small subset of his randomly created instinctual responses that turned out (so far) to have tended towards the improved survivability of one’s progeny.  And as Lehi suggests, there IS something about a world view that reduces all things to material and mechanical properties, that takes all the tools of human thought and experience and subordinates them all to just one of them (the scientific method) that tends to deaden and empty life of much of its vitality.

            Here I am going to use as an example a quote much pooh-poohed by Mormon intellectuals, but I’m sorry, I think it illustrates the point quite adequately.  It’s the quote from Charles Darwin’s Autobiography that Elder Packer used in “The Law and the Light.”

“I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music.—Music generally set me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did.”

“This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes, depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organized or better constituted than mine, would not I suppose have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied could thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

            You can actually read Margulis and Sagan’s work as an attempt to reinfuse a scientific view of life with some of the values and qualities mankind began to lose when it embraced a materialistic/mechanical outlook on phenomena.  From the outside I’m afraid that emphasizing symbiosis, biophilia, and planetary autopoiesis seems to be woefully inadequate for the task they wish to accomplish.  I sincerely applaud their groping towards “something more,” but I am fairly certain that spiritual values are going to continue to be problematic for those who continue to deny the spirit. 

TG Dreams 14 - Jeremiah 29:

Again Jeremiah takes up the theme of false revelation, among which dreams have a place. 

"Let not your prophets and your diviners, that be in the midst of you, deceive you, neither hearken to your dreams which ye cause to be dreamed. 
For they prophesy falsely unto you in my name: I have not sent them, saith the Lord."

The Lord sends dreams, but we can also cause ourselves to dream dreams.  How can we tell?  No short term answer is given, but the long term answer is again alluded to - fruits.  Those engaged in false revelation ("spoken lying words in my name, which I have not commanded them") have "committed villainy in Israel, and have committed adultery with their neighbor's wives and have spoken lying words" (v. 21). 

אֲשֶׁר אַתֶּם מַחְלְמִים 

"Which you (pl.) cause to be dreamed"

The Hebrew implies we can cause/create dreams.

TG Mortality 24 - 2 Nephi 2 (I)

This post (and the ones that follow on 2 Nephi 2) are a series of emails to some friends and family about this chapter about a year ago.

   I’ve been reading several books at once again.  As has happened before, I find one book serendipitously commenting on another.  The first book is What is Life by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan.  The second is Essays and Aphorisms, an abridgement of Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena.

            Margulis and Sagan have been talking about life as “purposeful matter.”  Though perhaps none too clear about what to replace it with, they complain about the classical scientific model of the universe as a mechanism which (in their own words) “fails to account for our own self-awareness and self-determination because the mechanical worldview denies choice.  Mechanisms, after all, don’t act, they react.”  As they contemplate the Gaia hypothesis (based on the unlikely miracles of the long term maintenance of the earth’s temperature, atmospheric balances and oceanic salinities across geologic time) they even speak of a “mammal-like purposefulness in the organization of life as a whole.”

            Schopenhauer’s thought also seems bound to his experience of the existence of “will.”  He complains about the scientific model of mechanism in words that are eerily reminiscent of What is Life?  “If there exists no natural force whose essential property is just as much to act purposefully as it is the essential property of gravity to keep physical bodies together, which moves, directs and orders the entire complex workings of the organism, and which expresses itself in the same way as gravity expresses itself in the phenomenon of falling, then life is only a semblance, an illusion, and every creature is in reality a mere automaton, i.e. a play of mechanical, physical and chemical forces.”  Like Margulis and Sagan he has no truck with those who deny “will” or consciousness to other mammals and even sees will or mind pervading the ostensibly “dead” matter of the world we inhabit.

            Margulis and Sagan invoke the principles of “autopoiesis” and “emergence” as a non-theistic explanation of the existence of freedom.  Schopenhauer invokes the still scientifically respectable concept of the “life force” from his own time.  From the outside it seems to me that both of them are groping for “sciency” words to express from within an avowedly empirical worldview some of the insights of the mystical experience, specifically the experiences of consciousness and freedom.  Odd how “empirical,” which is supposed to mean ‘based on experience’ has come instead to mean ‘based on a very narrow set of experiences – those that involve measurement.’  Margulis/Sagan seem to me to be trying to widen the scientific view of the world to include some universal (but not quantifiable) human experiences.  I’m going to resist a temptation to take a detour down the side passage that opens up here into the limitations of mechanical/mathematical/scientific models of knowledge, but maybe we’ll come back to it before the end (I hope it does, because I think you would find it entertaining to watch me champion some major components of Elder Packer’s much maligned “The Law and the Light”).

            What I want to do instead is continue down the path of thinking about freedom.  For the third text I have been reading is the Book of Mormon.  Here I’ve been reading topically, rather than straight through as I’ve been doing with the other two.  With the New Year approaching and its normal accompaniment of evaluation of past directions and the setting of new goals, I’ve been reading on the topic of CHOICES.  My starting point has been Second Nephi Chapter Two.  Early in my life this chapter seemed to me to be a glimpse into the underlying structure of the universe.  Though my conclusions differed markedly from Skousen’s, my approach to the text was similar to his – I assumed the intent of the passage was to reveal the mechanics of how agency worked, and that by carefully piecing together insights here with other scriptures a reasonably complete schematic or wiring diagram of the true “nature of things” could be assembled.  Though three decades later I’m still awed and amazed by the depth of Lehi’s insights, I find myself less certain about just what it is I am being given a glimpse of in this inspired text. 

            I bring this up because I want to make clear what I am and what I am not trying to do.  I’m not trying to create a Mormon Theology in the style of Blake Ostler.  I’m not working on the assumption that the revelations we have are, say, the equivalent of an automotive manual that details the workings of a car and its systems in such a way that we can clearly trace the details of causes and effects.  I’m assuming that they resemble much more the sketchy user’s manual that comes with any new automobile and which contains useful and necessary information for the safe long term use and maintenance of the vehicle.  I am assuming that the information is accurate but limited – i.e. geared to the understanding of a mortal being working WITHIN the veil, with no memory and little direct experience of the vast realities that lie beyond the narrow confines of this specialized environment.  A user’s manual does not provide a wiring diagram.  It doesn’t trace the flow of fuel through the engine, nor the path of air intake and the exit of exhaust.  A careful reading of it does, however, allow us to know that fuel and air and electricity are all necessary to the functioning of our automobile.  That is all I aim to do with Freedom in these emails, tease out a few of the elements involved in the functioning of agency and the admittedly limited things we might be able to say about how they relate to each other.

 I have no intention of attempting the systematic theologian’s self-imposed task of recreating some kind of authoritative mechanic’s automotive manual (a task that Mormon theologian Adam Miller usefully describes as follows – “Doing theology is like building a comically circuitous Rube Goldberg machine: you spend your time tinkering together an unnecessarily complicated, impractical, and ingenious apparatus for doing things that are, in themselves, simple”).  I also have no intention of being all that careful or complete.  These emails are working notes of a study in progress, not the thoughtful statement of a completed project of analysis being prepared for publication.  There will be dead-ends, mistakes, revisions, recantations, back tracking and some covering of the same ground yet again in an attempt to refine my understanding.  Assume all conclusions to be perennially tentative.  Feel free to question, challenge or expand on what I’m doing.     

TG -Dreams 13 - Jeremiah 23:32

From Jeremiah 23 we raise the question, how do you know that a dream/vision/word is from God?  Jerusalem had plenty of priests and prophets, but not of justice and righteousness.  Those who styled themselves prophets were lying, committing adultery, not calling the wicked to repentance and in fact were strengthening the hands of those who did evil (v. 14).  Following their example the people were given to adultery and lying as well (v. 10).  When these prophets spoke they spoke "lies" (v. 26), "a vision out of their own hearts and not out of the mouth of the Lord" (v. 16), or "after the imagination of his own heart" (v. 17).  They were not prophets of the Lord.  They were "prophets of the deceit of their own heart" (v. 26).

Dreams were among the tools of these deceivers, the Lord complains that they "prophesy false dreams...and do tell them, and cause my people to err by their lies, and by their lightness; yet I sent them not, nor commanded them: therefore they shall not profit this people at all" (v. 32).

None of this was meant to discourage legitimate prophecy or the use of dreams -
"The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream; and he that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully.  What is the chaff to the wheat?" (v. 28)

The question we raised is not directly answered in this chapter, though the issue of fruits is quite directly pointed to.  Those who were dealing with "false dreams" were caught up in financial and sexual immorality and in giving support to others who were so doing.