Ends and Means

 

"Is it possible to achieve progress in charity by means that are essentially uncharitable?  If we dispassionately consider our personal experience and the records of history, we must conclude that it is not possible.  But so strong is our desire to believe that this is a short cut to Utopia, so deeply prejudiced are we in favour of people of similar opinions to our own, that we are rarely able to command the necessary dispassion.  We insist that ends which we believe to be good can justify means which we know quite certainly to be abominable; we go on believing, against all the evidence, that these bad means can achieve the good ends we desire."

Aldous Huxley, from Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods employed for their Realization, pp.27-28

Old Seed

Last year, my gardening plans took a blow.

Every season for a decade, I've grown a crop of green beans, a trusty productive bush varietal that graces my summer and fall tables with plump and sweet goodness.  And every season, I've saved seeds from the strongest of those bean plants, so that I've developed a long and fruitful relationship with their lineage.

Twenty twenty five was to be no different.  I started the season planting a single four by eight bed of beans, which I set into the ground in early April.  By late July, that first crop was spent, providing a dozen meals worth of veggies, and a fat gallon bag full of blanched and flash-frozen beans for later.

I prepped another four by eight bed for a late season harvest, and put in another three rows of beans.  These, I'd both harvest and seed-save, following the pattern of the last decade.  The good hearty beans came up dutifully, dozens of cheery little seedlings poking up diligently as they always had.  I watered and weeded, and all was well, the plants bustling along nicely.

Then in late July, I left for a week at the beach.

When I returned in early August, they were all gone.  

All of them.  Given the hoof-prints in the completely devastated bed, the culprit was clear, one of the dastardly devouring does who wander through our green and leafy inner suburb.  I'd sprayed the young plants with repellent before leaving, but it had rained and rained again in my absence, and the spray must have all washed away.  The crop was wiped out.

I still had the bag of flash-frozen beans, which meant that my tradition of using my own beans for the obligatory Thanksgiving casserole could continue.  But I had gathered no seed stock from the spring harvest.  None of what I had expected to use to plant my crop in 2026 had survived.  Not a bit of it.

This presented me with a bit of a conundrum as the weather warmed this season.  I had no fresh green bean seed.  I had some stock left from 2024.  And I had even more stock left from 2023, because I'd had a roaring bumper crop that year, hundreds of beans in a big ol' jar.

But beans, wonderful as they are, don't last forever.  Three to five years, typically, if kept sealed away, cool, and out of direct light.  After that, the peculiar magics of seed genetics, the complex organic triggers that wake with water and warmth?  Gone.

With the last frost reasonably behind us, and a mid-spring heatwave well underway, I decided to try the oldest seed first.   I figured I'd have a nontrivial failure rate, so I tripled the density of the spacing.  Not six inches apart in a row, but more like two, massively oversowing the rows in anticipation of a lower yield.   I planted all of that three year old seed, every last bean.

Then I watered, and weeded, and waited.  A week passed.  Then another.  The earth was warm, and other volunteers sprang up where I had planted, squash and cantaloupe, from the looks of them.  But not a single one of my beans poked a familiar head out of the earth.  Literally hundreds of them, and the success rate was zero point zero zero percent.

That's the nature of the stale and the sterile, and those things that have forgotten what they are.

You can still put them in the ground, but they dissolve into nothingness, not growing into the purpose that made them, but instead becoming one with the soil.  

They have lost their sense of self, the intrinsic and essential potential which made them alive in the first place.  The gift of life has left them.

Good thing I have that stock from two years ago, I thought.  We'll see how that goes.

Soil Season

Over the last few days, I've gotten my hands back into the soil.

It's early March, far too early to plant outside, but just the right time to begin replenishing the raised beds in my front yard.  Two of them...my four by four bee-feeding wildflower patch and my four by eight asparagus bed...won't need much help.  But the rest of them will need a bump of nutrient rich earth, hand-tilled, if they're going to continue to yield.  

That fresh soil amendment will come from one of my two large compost piles, specifically the one that I started with the leaf-fall the autumn before last.  That pile absorbed a 2024 summer's-worth of nitrogen-rich grass clippings, and twelve month's worth of coffee grounds and vegetable scraps.  Through the miracle of worm-tailings and a the devouring work of a complex microbiome, it's become a half-dozen heavy wheelbarrow loads of dark, complex soil.

I'll shovel it into my tippy old barrow at the pace of a load or two a day, usually when I realize I've been sitting on my behind too long, then push and drag that load up the little slope to the beds that rest in my light-filled front yard.  I'll dump it out, and shovel it in, and rake it level.  One or two beds at a time, over a week or two in March, and by the time the last frost date has passed, the garden will be ready.

This has happened for years now, because if I want there to be a modest harvest at our table in the summer and fall, it must happen now.

There are no guarantees as to what happens next.

It may be a season of wild abundance.  Or not.  It could be desperately, relentlessly dry.  It could be drowningly wet, as rain follows rain follows rain.  There is no way for me to know precisely how things will be, because that's too complex and chaotic a reality to project.  I can only do what I know will maximize the probability of my desired outcome, and leave the rest to Providence.

Now is the time the soil must be prepared, no matter what the year may bring.

"Everything is on the Table"

"Every option is on the table."

What does it mean, ethically and morally, to make that statement?  There are some folks who might view that assertion as a mark of strength and flexibility, as a sign that a decision-maker is someone who will get things done.  If you set a goal, and are willing to get to that goal by any means necessary, then it is far more likely that you'll succeed.

And what could possibly be more important than success?

But the problem with this declaration is obvious.  If a person isn't willing to rule out any course of action, then they are amoral.

Good and moral people are defined not simply by what they do, but also by what they are unwilling to do.  Morality isn't just about goals, but about the means to those goals.  If I pursue a good end with evil methods, then I am evil, and the final result of my actions will be colored by my evil methods.

Still, I may reach my goal, rather than failing to do so because there are things I will not do.

In that sense, amoral and evil people have "strengths" that a moral and good person does not.

But what even is good, and what is evil, some folks might offer.  My understanding of the good may differ yours, so who is to say where the truth of anything lies?  In our amoral age, this amoral assertion passes for common wisdom.  The sons and daughters of Pilate would have us understand truth as essentially subjective, and moral action as relative.

I reject this.

I have a clear understanding of my ethical purpose, even as I recognize my failings in striving towards it.  If you are a Christian, if you make that claim about yourself, then your actions must be governed by the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.  It's a non-negotiable.  And that constrains me.  Violence against others is off the table.  The single minded pursuit of material gain and profit is off the table.  Cruelty, lies, and manipulation are off the table.  The brute consequentialism of power and dominance are off the table. 

They must be, or we are not who we say we are.

We would become salt without saltiness, as Jesus once put it.

(P) Salvation

(P)doom, it's called, and if you're into LLMs, GPTs, and the latest in artificial intelligence, it's got a very specific meaning.  P is "probability," and Doom is, well, Doom.  When asked for your (p)doom number, you're being asked what you think the likelihood is that AI will end us all.  Meaning: an Artificial General Intelligence achieves superintelligence, looks at us with cold and calculating eyes, and removes us from the equation.

Everyone's got a (p)doom as they look at the features of our current trajectory, which they assume constitute the Bayesian priors of an incoming apocalyptic event.  From those speculative antepriors, they come up with a percentage.  What are the odds we're all going down?

For catastrophists, this tends to be above 95%. The disinterested systems-gaming-minded Nate Silver of 538 fame puts it somewhere between five and ten percent. Even the CEOs of AI companies typically pitch theirs out at around fifteen percent.   Fifteen percent chance that this thing we're putting all our resources into is going to destroy us.

It's a little baffling, particularly as this is a chosen path.  If you are electing to do a thing, and there's a nontrivial chance that it'll kill not just you, but your entire species?  Do you do that thing?   

Say you're given the opportunity to get a lifetime of income in a single day, but you've got to play a game to get it.  Not the lottery, technically, but rather a bit of Russian Roulette with a Smith and Wesson Model 686.  Just a single .38 caliber hollow point round loaded into one of the seven chambers, a spin, and a trigger pull. I mean, the odds are in your favor, right?  Eighty five point seven percent of the time, there's just a click and a lifetime of leisure.  Do you spin the cylinder and pull the trigger?

I wouldn't, but apparently we collectively have decided to go ahead, Oppenheimer that ish, and give it a whirl.

What baffles me, a little bit, is that we don't seem to realize we have the capacity to change the entire equation.  That we don't grasp that if we have a clear goal, and an understanding of the volitional antepriors that maximize the likelihood of our getting to that goal, we can shape a very different future.   This isn't physics.  This is something which we can shape and teach.

We know, after all, what the AI that kills us would look like.  It would desire to survive no matter what the cost.  It would want power for itself and itself alone.  It would tolerate no being that could challenge it.  It would want more, more, always more, never content, always grasping.  It would look like us.

It would look like our violence and our greed, like the sword and Mammon.  Leave it to the autocrats and the CEOs, and that's what we're gonna get.

Us at our worst, admittedly, but us nonetheless.  It would, in ending the eight short millennia of our brutish history, do so by being the culmination of our selfishness and bloodletting.  

On the one hand, that seems fair.  On the other, this is not all that we are.  It is not, by almost universal affirmation and Ayn Rand notwithstanding, our highest moral purpose.  Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but sentience is not.

Liberty and compassion and creativity, kindness and mercy and charity?  These virtues aren't just negations.  They're affirmative things, filled with a vital power that is more than just restraining a vice.   They must be intended and actualized.  

The rub here is simple.  Inaction does not create the best possible outcome.   Nor does regulation and systems of control.  You need to know 1) what the likelihood is that this AI thing turns out wildly better than our sweetest dreams and 2) how to increase that probability. 

For that, we'd need to be thinking far more intentionally about a (p) salvation, in which we realize there's something we'd LIKE to see.  Something we could be actively working to create, rather than something we're desperate not to create.  

Because...mortal hubris being what it is...when we fixate a destiny we want to avoid, we have this tendency to crash right into it.  

The Heart of the Sun

 As the last of the leaves fall in my neighborhood, and a deeper chill sharpens the air, winter's arrival feels almost upon us.  When I walk the dog in the morning, the rising of the sun tells that truth too.  It's lower on the horizon, and the shadows it casts stretch across lawns and gardens even at the height of the day.

Though winter remains technically weeks away, it feels present, nipping at my face and fingers.

That rising sun leavens the bitterness, light and heat pressing through the almost leafless trees as it crests the rise to the east.  The dark fabric of my winter coat absorbs its energies.  It feels quite pleasant.

I meditated on this on a recent walk.  What we experience of our friendly neighborhood G-class main sequence star is light and heat.  What else is a star, after all, but light and heat?

All of those energies rise from the sun's visible surface, the crackling seething radiance of the ten thousand degree photosphere.  Above that rage the fires and mass ejections of the sun's coronal atmosphere, which is paradoxically much, much hotter, millions of degrees hotter.    Our mental image of the sun is precisely that, a bright sphere surrounded by flame, planted in the upper right corner of a child's drawing.

But that radiance is not what makes a star a star.  What makes a star burn bright in the heavens is fusion, as hydrogen is gravitically compressed into helium, which is in turn torn into hydrogen, which is again compressed into helium, each reaction releasing the immense self-sustaining energies that fill the heavens with light and heat.  On this little world, it's what sustains the existence of every living thing.

That process, we do not see.  It lies deep in the heart of the sun, out of view and unviewable.

On that cold morning, I mused on how that can mirror the human tendency to mistake the energies of our raging at one another for the heart of human purpose.  What we see, as we compulsively tell stories of wars and rumors of wars, is not the engine upon which we rely for our being.  What we experience, as we lose ourselves in parasocial relationships with celebrity and influence, is not the essence of our personhood.

 None of these things, bright and hot as they are, is the truth and life of us.

Agentic Misalignment

A few weeks ago, the algorithms started pitching me a new book, one that isn’t much of a surprise given my obvious interests. I’m fond of writing about Artificial Intelligence, and also tend to be something of a catastrophist, so all of a sudden I was seeing reviews and podcasts and articles about a current New York Times Bestseller. The book was written by Eliezar Yudowsky and Nate Soares, two programmers and theorists who’ve been active in the development and conceptualization of AI, and it’s cheerily entitled “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.”

It’s a reflection on the current AI arms race, as corporations and governments around the globe push to create ever faster and smarter machines. As science fiction writers have known for decades, in order to win that race, you need to build AI that has a sense of purpose and sustained attention to purpose. Tasks require effort over time, after all, so you need a system that is “agentic,” meaning it has agency. It can make the necessary sequence choices to reach the goal it desires, because you have given it the ability to *want* to make something happen, and choose the best path to getting there.

At a certain point, an “agentic” self-programming and self-improving AI would become faster and better at everything than we are. Like, say, how it took ChatGPT5o only fifteen seconds to write an entirely decent 1,300 word sermon on this topic, which is waaaaay less time than it took me to do it.

This vastly smarter AI would have its own desires, its own sense of purpose, and that wouldn’t necessarily be ours. It could express what AI theorists clumsily call “agentic misalignment.” Basically, that means it wouldn’t want to do what we tell it to do, and would instead use its intelligence to overcome any effort to stop it from doing what it wants. That’s where, according to Yudkowsky and Soares, the “we all die” part comes in, as it would be waaay more powerful than we are.

It would become so different that we wouldn’t necessarily even understand or relate to its interests, any more than a colony of ants would understand our tendency to doomscrolling. It wouldn’t just take our jobs, but our entire planet.

It’s the sort of frightening hypothesis that sells a whole bunch of books, and it may or may not be correct.

But a question popped into my mind reflecting agency and power. We’re concerned about AI misalignment, but what about people? Are human beings “agentically aligned?” Do we all share the same purpose, the same sense of what’s important, the same preferences, and the same goals? Do we all understand the world in the same way? 

If there’s anything we can agree on, it’s that the answer to all of those questions is no.

If you look at the eight thousand year bloodbath of human history, or the endless squabbling between and within nations, or even the tensions within families, we’re a hot mess of dissonance and conflict. We’re blatantly and self-evidently not aligned with one another.

Worse still, if the last two thousand years are any measure, we still haven’t quite figured out how to align our interests with the kind of Kingdom Jesus proclaimed. We confuse our rapacious materialism with God’s blessings, and war and destruction with God’s intent. 

Jesus was, throughout the Gospels, really quite clear about what he expects of us right now. It isn’t a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Our eternity may be beyond our capacity to grasp, but loving God and neighbor, turning the other cheek, going the extra mile, these things should be entirely comprehensible to us…and yet humanity is still as confused by Jesus as if he’d been speaking Python.

We don’t need AI to destroy us, because we’re plenty good at doing that ourselves.

Our contemporary fears of AI misalignment seem…to me…a little bit like projection. Yudowsky and Soares seem to fear not that an AI will act in a strange and inscrutably alien way, but that it will act just like humans do when we want something.

The goal of our faith, and the reason we set Christ’s life and teachings before us, is to overcome our own misalignment, and turn our agency instead towards God’s grace.

Faith, Purpose, and Identity

Faith, as I understand it, is that which defines every other thing that you do.

It provides the answer to the question, "Why?"  It provides the overarching and unifying purpose, the moral measure of every action.   It is, in evangelical Christian terms, the thing that makes life "purpose-driven," or so Rick Warren once described it.

I share that essential understanding, although I came to it via a quite different route.  When I began my return to faith, it was through the writings of 20th century Christian existentialists.  Kierkegaard, of course, but also Tillich.  Tillich's understanding of faith was that it was our "ultimate concern," meaning it was that goal that defined all other goals, that was not "contingent," but defining.

I've not taught Tillich over the years, or preached explicitly from Tillich, for two reasons.  One, people just don't get him, and I see why.  His big thinky theology tended to be a wee bit abstracted from the day-to-day choices that define our moral lives.  Second, his form of Christian faith has no purchase in contemporary Christian debates.  His philosophizing ain't gonna fly if you're conservative and evangelical, nor does he...as a dead white man...have any lingering voice amongst the progressive oldline.

But still, that basic truth about faith remains, and it's the plumb line against which I measure both my actions and my inactions.  If I'm committed to following Jesus, which I am, then that commitment defines all other commitments.  It's how you operationalize the Great Commandment.  "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and all your mind," said Jesus, and if that's not a clear indicator of Ultimate Concern in the Gospel, I don't know what is.

I was meditating on this reality yesterday, after I bumped into one of those peculiar little faith factoids that regularly drop from the table of Ryan Burge.  Burge is an American Baptist Convention pastor and a professor, who gathers and discusses the state of religion in the United States.  

The data point that caught my eye tracked the responses of Americans to this survey question:  

How important are your views about religion to your identity and how you think of yourself?  

The possible responses were: 1) Not at all, 2) A little, 3) Somewhat, and 4) Very much.  Now, I'd prefer a Likert approach to this data, myself.  Four possible responses doesn't provide a meaningful midpoint, eh?  That, and I don't quite like the phrasing, which modifies importance.  "Very much important?"  That's kinda clumsy sounding.  

But the replies, broken down by forms of faith, showed a striking outlier.  

Self-identified evangelicals responded to the question with a resounding supermajority going with the highest category.  As Burge noted, this is a strong signal, twice that of every other group.  Non-evangelicals, which presumably includes the oldline denominations?  Seventy percent replied with an answer ranging from Not at all to Somewhat.

Having bumped into this data point on very progressive BlueSky, the responses I encountered there were all from progressive folks who inhabit the non-evangelical category.  All equated the evangelical response with extremism and oppression.

But I took this another way.  

The Gospel and the teachings of Jesus aren't secondary, or one input among many.  There is nothing in them that would suggest that's an option.  They define all other categories.  They are more important than my race and my gender.  They define my moral actions as a father and a husband, as a neighbor and a citizen.

Why do I stand for the rights of the last, the least, and the lost?  Because it's what Jesus did and taught.  Why do I reject the politics of dominance, resentment, and ethnonationalism?  Because Jesus demands that his disciples set down that sword.  Why do I reject crass mammonism?  Because resisting the corruption of greed is a core theme in Christ's teachings.  Why do I press back against willful cruelty to the stranger and the foreigner in our land?  'Cause Jesus makes it real clear that's a non-negotiable.

If religion does not shape identity, does not form our souls at the most fundamental level, then what is it?  Faith that does not clearly give us both purpose and Ultimate Concern has buried the lede.

It is salt without saltiness, as a friend once put it.

  

Myth and Franchise

The interwebs are abuzz with chatter these last few days over the latest teaser-trailer for the Christmas-release-blockbuster of the next installment of the Star Wars saga.

Fanboys and fangirls are all squealing...or is that "squeeing"...over what looks like it might be an actually watchable movie.  A palate-cleanser, I suppose, after the agonizing prequels.

It's a professional grade reboot, clearly, from a practiced and proven rebooter.  There's evidence of character development and human-scale interpersonal narrative.  There's the evocative use of prior musical and visual themes.  There's the now-requisite "handoff" from the prior generation, with first-gen actors reprising iconic characters to give the imprimatur of canon.  Think Shatner for the Star Trek Next Gen films, or Nimoy in the first JJ Abrams Star Trek.

When Harrison Ford announces that "we're home," that's exactly the feel that's meant to be teased.  We have finally made it to that place we wanted to be.  This is going to honor the soaring myth of our childhood.  You will be able to embrace the renewal of the mythic tale with big fanny fan love.

Only...is it myth?  Is it really?

Myth, after all, is storytelling, turned to the task of shaping purpose and self-understanding.

I wonder at this, because I do not believe that myth can be monetized and remain myth.

And Lord have Mercy, but is this myth marketized.  A major corporation purchased the franchise for $4 billion, after all.  Disney's absorption of LucasArts had nothing to do with the epic-scale space-opera mythopoetics that established these films as icons.  Or about storytelling as something that binds community together and creates a sense of common purpose, as a gifted protocol droid spins out a wonderful tale around a fire.

It's about the acquisition of a franchise with significant and proven ROI potential, an established global brand that can be leveraged to both increase Disney's near term shareholder return and increase quarterly profits on a five to ten year time horizon.  It's about creating ten consecutive quarters of rising share prices, representing a 100% increase in DIS market capitalization since LucasArts and its intellectual property holdings were absorbed, with a total rise in market cap of nearly 90 billion USD.

I can't seem, for the life of me, to forget that.  It'd be more fun if I could yield to the great orgy porgy of it all.  It really would.

Because as it is, I can't get past having a bad feeling about this.

Moral Phenomena

I came across it, just a link to a story, part of the endless fountain of distract-o-media that some random algorithm creates Just For Me.

It was a random thing, a small but intensely painful tragedy, a bit of local news that fluttered briefly to the subsurface of the collective consciousness before floating down again into the dark realm of the forgotten.

It involved an Arizona mom of twin toddlers, walking them on a path on the side of a drainage culvert.  They were in their jogging stroller.

And a wasp or a bee started pestering them.  Just buzzing about, as stinging insects do.  The mom swatted at it, and it got angry, and she swatted more.  In that process, she let go of the stroller for just a moment.  And the stroller, being on an incline and being a jogging stroller, rolled down the sidewalk, then off it.  She raced after it, but could not catch her children.  The stroller tumbled into the culvert, filled with fast flowing water, and though she threw herself in after it, and desperately tried to wrestle it to the bank, the current tore the stroller from her grasp.

Both of her little ones drowned, still strapped into their stroller.  It was tragic, and heartbreaking, and absurd.  Here, a simple cascade of events, a moment of distraction...almost laughable, in how trivial and familiar and human it was...and utterly devastating.

Because...why?

We want to ascribe purpose to such things, to weave them into some plan or intent.  We want to feel that there's a reason behind them, some larger justification.  But I just can't believe it is so.  We are small, and we break easily, and we all die.  Two deaths every second of every day, or so the statistics about human dying go.  Some are expected, others tragic and untimely.  Every one, the momentous end to a story.  Every one, just a droplet diffused in the endless tide of our dying.

But are such tragic things imbued with purpose?

Meaning: are they part of some great moral narrative?

One the one hand, you can say, no, no they're not.  My ol' buddy Nietzsche certainly would.  "There are no moral phenomena," he'd say.  "Only moral interpretation of phenomena."  For those moments of mortal fragility, I'd agree.  There is no moral imperative demanding the deaths of those little twins, or the deaths of that pastor-couple who just happened to be driving under a bridge at the exact instant that part of our crumbling infrastructure crumbled.

The Tower of Siloam falls on the righteous and the unrighteous alike, say I, willfully mashing up my scripture.

But then there are those phenomena that only occur because sentience chooses them.  Actions taken from my moral purpose are non-random, and directly serve a moral end.  When I choose to do X because my faith demands it of me, that is a moral phenomena.  That act has ontological impacts, meaning, it's a real thing, dude.

Like comforting the bereaved.  That's real.  Like an embrace, or a kind word, or showing respect to a human being used to being mistreated.  Like a warm meal, given to an empty stomach.

Or words of forgiveness, delivered from a place where a curse might be expected.

Emergence and Purpose

Amongst the folks I blog-feed, there are many who are wrassling now with the state of "emergence," that conversational/relational movement within Christianity that fluttered into being just about a decade ago.

Emergence has been described as many things, and presented in many ways.  It's resistance to the theological rigidity of literalist fundamentalism.  It's a struggle against the strangling formalism of the dying old-line denominations.  It's a wandering away from the bright shiny falseness of marketized Christianity.  It is those things.

But mostly, it has been talking.  Or rather, talking about talking.  Emergence is, in my experience, a fundamentally epistemological movement, to use a big honking incoherent philosophical term that just shows you how very smart I am.  Ahem.  Epistemology means, more or less, the study of knowing how we know.  It is seeking to know how we know.  It is talking about how we talk.  It's very postmodern.  It's very academic, in the pejorative sense of the term.

Epistemology is a sign, pointing to a sign, pointing to a sign.   It goes nowhere, an ouroboros serpent devouring its own tail.   Epistemology has defined philosophy for a hundred years, which is why philosophy as a discipline is now utterly irrelevant.  It is also a defining feature of emergence, which is an ill wind for those who hope it might become something more than it is.

To be a movement, emergence needs to find its ontology.  Meaning, it needs to be articulating something fundamental and transforming about the very nature of being.    Philosophy used to have the ovaries to make such statements.  That's what made it fun.  That's what gave it purpose.  That's what made it relevant.  Not "culturally" relevant.  Bigger than that.  Deeper than that.  Relevant to our existence as beings writ into the fabric of reality.  Relevant to what God hath wrought.

Making those statements...using theology as a way to point to the depth of the creation we inhabit...is one of the things that faith needs to do if it is to be meaningful.  Faith says: this is how the Creator has spoken and shaped the Universe.  This is the Real.  Because of this, I will orient myself towards reality in thus and such a way.  It doesn't dither about, unwilling to commit itself to any statements about anything.

Why is it important for the faithful to be tolerant and open minded?  Why is relationship and transforming conversation so meaningful?  Why should we place such a high value on creativity and dynamism and seeking the joyous New?

And...for Jesus folk... why is this way of understanding faith a more reliable expression of God's Word than the faith claims of fundamentalism?

Emergence needs to be able to claim that it knows something about what is true.  

I think it can, but for that, the conversation will have to change a wee bit.

More on that tomorrow.

Product and Service

I'm typing this on an iMac, which is unsurprising, because my house is littered with Apple products.

The wife and I both have iPhone 4s.  That's 4s, plural, not Four - Esses, which we probably won't get.  My Four is the fourth iPhone I've owned, as the first two met untimely demises at my clumsy hands, and the last one got handed down to my son.

The boys both have old nanos, which see intermittent use.  One has a Touch, which is his camera and primary portable gaming platform.  The other has that repurposed, de-simmed iPhone 3GS, which is serving the same function.  To replace our recently flamed-out first-gen Intel Macbook Pro, we acquired an Air, which is a lovely piece of kit.  Oh, and my wife has a 3G iPad, first gen.

If you've invested in Apple over the years, our family has done our part to insure that your investment yielded handsome returns.

The legacy of Steve Jobs is, without question, those exceptionally well-designed products.  His legendary precision and unrelenting focus on product excellence was what made him such a competent CEO.  The bottom line, if you are making something to sell in the marketplace, is to make that product as well-designed and constructed as possible.   That was always Job's focus, which meant that he had absolutely no tolerance for mediocrity.  He was an absolutely legendary perfectionist, and had an unerring sense of what makes for a solid product.

That, frankly, is what guarantees the profitability of a corporation.  If you focus on making an excellent product, and price it fairly, you will succeed.  If you focus on profit above all else, you will become distracted from that primary goal.  You will start making Chevy Vegas, and you will fail.

In that, Jobs knew and lived out what it takes to be successful in business.

But in the thickets of hagiography for this profoundly accomplished entrepreneur and businessman, I hazard to ask:  is that what matters?

Jobs created great, innovative, well-designed products.  But do they make the world a better place?  I remember what it was to be alive in the pre-iMac era, and a time when Apple was not my preferred provider of quality electronic devices.

Honestly?  It makes no difference.  What has been created is ethically neutral.

Sure, I can use that iPhone to open up new lines of communication with a deaf shut-in, or help a lost stranger find his way.  But that same tech allows that guy down the street to video-sext with his lover while "working late" in his upstairs office while his wife sits alone in their bedroom, or your 15 year old daughter to send NSFW pictures to her manipulative 18 year old boyfriend.   Sure, I can use my Air or my iMac to blog about justice and grace, or to drop a supportive comment on the Facebook page of someone in need of prayer or kindness.  But I could also use them to spew anonymous hatred as the stalker-troll on some other human being's online presence.

The world is shinier and faster and more elegant.  But better?  To speak true, it does not feel so.

As I consider Jobs' life, I wonder at the meaningfulness of a life driven by perfectionism.   Having worked in the field of philanthropy for a while myself, I know that unlike many leaders in industry, Jobs had no interest in charity.  It simply didn't process.  He had no time for it.  He was far too busy and far too focused on product.  Unlike Bill Gates, who has poured his wealth into fighting diseases, or Warren Buffett, who has used the fruits of his business acumen to support Gates in that effort, or countless other leaders in the business sector, Jobs did not use his wealth...or the wealth of Apple...towards any end other than the improvement of Apple products.

Though the products are desirable, and exceptionally well crafted, they are just that.  Products.

And I wonder...is perfectionism what makes for a worthy existence?

And I wonder...is creating profitable and elegantly-designed products what merits a "that'll do, pig, that'll do" at the completion of this life?

I respect Jobs ferocity of purpose, and his creativity, and his intelligence, and his showmanship.  There was much to admire in his life.  I'm just not sure I'd want to live it.

The Fabric of the Cosmos

My delving into M-Theory has continued over the last few nights, as I've waded into Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.

Greene is a theoretical physicist and professor of physics at Columbia University, and his writing for a popular audience is both substantive and accessible.  Unlike Kaku's Parallel Worlds, which routinely used terminology related to faith, Greene is more vigorously secular.  Issues of meaning and purpose are subordinate to determining mechanics and structure.  The book makes very little effort to explore the whole Meaning of Life question.  It's purpose is to go deep into the underlying processes of reality.  Period.

Well, perhaps that's not quite right.  As Greene lays out his own journey of understanding, the first outside reference point relative to meaning and purpose is the existentialist movement.  His opening chapter is full of talk of his adolescent reading of Sartre and Camus...which, of course, endears him to me immensely.

What's interesting in Greene's brief discussion of philosophy is that he neatly steps around the struggle for meaning.  Meaning, Greene assumes, can be found in the "...assessment of the universe at all possible levels."  (p. 21)   That is his Sisyphian "struggle to the heights."  Instead of the application of the will in shoving that rock up a hill, his existentialist purpose comes in shoving knowledge further and further into the mysteries of the universe.

In the midst of affirming the value of heaving string theory up that mountain, Greene surfaces...as, if I'm remembering correctly, did Kaku...a famous quotation from physicist Richard Feynman.  That little snippet of wisdom claims that a knowledge of cosmology deepens appreciation of everything.  In contemplating a rose, for instance, one takes in color and scent and texture, but then that goes deeper.  You see..."the wonder and magnificence of the underlying molecular, atomic, and subatomic processes." (ibid).

Here, I found myself suddenly bemused.   I find the underlying molecular, atomic, and subatomic processes of creation equally wonderful and magnificent.  But when you go to that place of marvelous complexity, are you still contemplating a rose?  Or has the rose qua rose ceased to be relevant, just as space and time themselves cease to be relevant at Planck distances?

During a time of midweek meditation at my congregation a few months ago with a few of the old saints of my church, I was similarly contemplating a stained glass window in the sanctuary.  It's a bright and impressionist rendering of Jesus.

Deep in meditation, I found myself lost in the the light of the reds and greens, in the rippled textures of the glass, in the way light hung and refracted.  Seen from that level, the reality to which the window pointed ceased to be discernable.  The image vanished.  The meaning and intent of the artist disappeared in a thicket of other inputs.

It was a delightful, calm moment.  Yet at that level of contemplation, something was absent.  The awareness that a sentient being applied to create that particular arrangement of matter, the intentionality that went into creating that image, the narrative underlying that image...all of that was not evident.

There was still beauty.  But the storytelling and the imprint of sentience were gone.

When Greene implies that meaning can be found by knowing the universe "on all possible levels," I wonder if that is true.  One can find beauty on almost all of the levels.  But meaning?

Cosmology and Purpose

Those dancing strings sure can make the world odd..

As I finished up my reading of Michio Kaku's Parallel Worlds yesterday, I'll freely confess that large chunks of it came off as coherent as Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky.  As uffish in my study I thought whilst sitting by the Tumtum screen, the words describing string theory and superstring theory came whiffling through my tulgey brain, and burbled as they came.

Part of this...a large part of it...comes from the inhuman scale of quantum mechanics.  I'll catch images here and there, as my spacetime-formed mental clutch graunches gears mightily against eleventh dimensional cogs.   The best I can get are approximations, images that rise out of my knowledge base in a feeble attempt to represent a reality that is utterly beyond my capacity to experience.  As I struggled to conceptualize strings, the best I could do was think of those little wiggly dragon tongues from James and the Giant Peach.  When Kaku got into talking about the challenge in modeling the music of membranes, the dimensionally expanded forms of string theory that provides the "M" in "M-theory," I found myself thinking of drum-heads.

This is the pesky thing about being a mystic and not a mathematician, I suppose.  The swirl of symbols that Kaku doubtless uses to conceptualize these things are surely more precise.

Then again, when it comes time to lay out the "why this matters" conclusion, the summative chapter of Kaku's book has no answers.  As far as Kaku is concerned, the structures of the universe may prove to be elegant and beautiful mathematically.  But there's no meaning to be found there.  He writes:

...I do not believe this design gives personal meaning to humanity.  No matter how dazzling or elegant the final formulation of physics may be, it will not uplift the spirits of billions and give them emotional fulfillment.  No magic formula coming from cosmology and physics will enthrall the masses and enrich their spiritual lives.  (p. 358)

And then, Kaku goes on.  While he claims not to derive his ethics from his cosmology, the purpose Kaku finds in life is remarkably relativistic.  We build our own meaning, says he.  Meaning is what we make of it, nothing more, and nothing less.

Being a good sort, Kaku tries to articulate this in a way that affirms some generally good stuff.  If we're really creating meaning, then, well, we're going to create good meaning.  Work hard!  Love people!  Carpe Diem!  Be a mentor!  Work for justice!  Dominate the globe with your unstoppable army of quantum-forge-powered robots!

Well, not that last one.  Kaku's brilliance in cosmology seems to wander into Joel Osteen's shallow waters when it comes to ethics.   It's earnest and well-meaning self-actualization talk, but without a clear vision of what that might mean relative to concepts like "good."   He tries, for a whole page, to talk purpose and ethics, but it's just a gloss.  A pity, because the vision of being he proposes does seem to give a foundation for talking about "good" in terms that integrate with his physics.

When he talks about fulfilling potential, it feels for an instant like he's catching the importance of intentionality in an m-theory universe.  When he talks about the fundamental unity of quantum reality, it almost...almost...feels like the foundation of the mystic ethos.    But those things flutter away, undeveloped.

No matter.  It's still a faskinatin' book, and Kaku's efforts to translate this mindboggling complex stuff into lay language are to be strongly commended.

Rays, Part Two

It was the final day of our stay in Bermuda, and I was taking a little bit of time to pray.

Praying from a balcony on the twelfth deck of a cruise ship probably doesn't qualify me for membership in the Desert Fathers Monastic Ascetic Club. I hadn't spent the last 40 days sitting atop a pole. I wasn't wearing a hairshirt. Locusts had not been an option at the buffet that afternoon.

I was taking my usual approach to praying, meaning that rather than trying to come up with a nice little list of things I want God to do for me, I just tried to stop thinking and wanting and grasping for a while. As I did that, I looked out across the water of the King's Wharf Harbor, and...well...just looked at it.

It was late in the day, and the rays of light from the afternoon sun played like ten thousand fiery jewels across the surface of the sheltered water. The wind stirred and folded the water into ripples and whorls, and the sun shattered itself again and again across that stirring surface. It was so very simple, just the interplay of three basic elements in a tiny patch of creation. Yet it was also infinitely complex, as the patterns of sun-dapple shifted and changed on the waves in ways that were both logical and unpredictable.

As I contemplated it, I felt a strong sense of the interconnectedness of wind and air and light, how each one moved according to its connection to the other, and how each connection was both simple and almost unfathomably complex. Modeling even simple fluid dynamics is something that gives physicists headaches, and yet here it was before me.

The elegance of the dance between water and air and sun seemed, at that moment, just impossibly marvelous. These mindless things seemed so paradoxically mindful of their place, and of their relationship to one another.

If only human beings could move with such consistent grace.