The Hunt for Purity

As a Roman Catholic in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Maryland, I receive the weekly newspaper The Catholic Review. In a recent edition there appeared a "From Time to Time" article by our Archbishop, Cardinal William Keeler. (I'd like to include a hotlink to it, but can't figure out how. Go to the website, click on Electronic Edition in the upper right corner, select "Th 2/24/2005" from the appropriate drop-down menu, then use another drop-down menu to select "Page 7." You can then click on the image of the article to read its text.)

The thrust of the article is that an interfaith "Religious Alliance Against Pornography" has been formed, with (I understand) Cardinal Keeler as its co-chair. Its mission: to fight "the evil of pornography," today "a multi-billion dollar business, now ubiquitous because of the internet and other new technologies."

I personally doubt — let me say this right up front — that Jesus had pornography in mind, or any aspect of human sexuality, when he said, “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.” This, though, is the phrase with which Cardinal Keeler closes his essay.

What does Cardinal Keeler have so against pornography that he co-chairs this alliance?

Firstly, a matter of sex education worries him: Today's youngsters are learning "about the facts of human sexuality from peers and from the media, with little religious content. Only a few [are] instructed by their parents."

Secondly, worries over a growing lack of chastity: "Objective moral principles are rejected while a very subjective philosophy of instant gratification is put in their place."

Thirdly, the decadence issue: "What happened long ago in the Roman Empire, as it lurched toward collapse, is occurring now in our own culture."

I'd say that all three rationales for opposing pornography can be subsumed into one: a hunt for purity in a world of doubt.

Purity equates to the kind of intelligibility which Plato said could alone make the world lucid and knowable — and which ultimately fails to exist in this material world, only being existent in higher, metaphysical Forms or Ideas. We can truly know only that which is wholly A — where A is some quality such as roundness or goodness — and therefore to no extent not A. And that which we cannot truly know, because it's impure in its qualities, is not truly real.

Take Plato's ultimate ideal, the Form of the Good, make it a (metaphysical) person, and you have God.

Take God as commanding us to purify the world of the Bad which pollutes the Good and compromises the world's knowability — threatening its very reality — and you have a rationale for going to the mat over pornography.

That's what I think is happening here — and I doubt that it's necessary.

Oh, I think it would be a good idea for parents to take better charge of their children's sex education. Nothing wrong with that. (And if in the education process they want to use materials some would call pornographic, fine. There once was a time, I am told, when the way a father educated his son about the birds and the bees was to take him to the local house of ill repute and seek the ministrations of a professional expert.)

But I don't see that the Cardinal's decadence issue is real. Where is the evidence that we are heading the way of the Roman Empire? What I see around me is a vigorous, thriving culture that has somehow defied all the doomsayers for decades now, if not centuries.

As for the chastity issue ... here I think the Cardinal is right! We do have, more and more, a culture of instant gratification and (as the Catholic priest Ronald Rolheiser puts it in The Shattered Lantern) of "unbridled restlessness." All the time in today's world, it's "me me me," and it's also "now now now." Impatience is one term for it. Another is "lack of chastity."

That's not just chastity as in too much casual sex. It's chastity in this sense (from p. 47): "To be chaste means to experience things, all things, respectfully and to drink them in only when we are ready for them. ... Unbridled restlessness makes us unhealthily impatient for experience ... Greed and impatience push us toward irresponsible experience."

Yes, I agree. It's very important to learn pace and patience and the contentment they bring. The Taoist, though from a radically different tradition, would concur. Chapter 44 of the Tao te ching or Lao-tzu reads, in part:

Know contentment
And you will suffer no disgrace;
Know when to stop
And you will meet with no danger.
You can then endure.

But there's a big difference between the personal, individual, and voluntarily undertaken cultivation of chastity — the grace of "knowing when to stop" — and going so far as to try to impose purity on the world at large.

A Dawning Age of Unreason?

This article by The Baltimore Sun editorial page associate editor Will Englund is a good place to start an inquiry into today's doubt-vs.-certainty wars in America. Englund's thesis is that we Americans are entering "A Dawning Age of Unreason." By that he means that science and technology, the fruits of an earlier Age of Reason, are being demoted in favor of a religiosity characterized by a "certainty" and a concomitant "lack of curiosity."

Why, he asks, is this happening? One reason is that, until recently, Americans could tinker with their technology: take it apart, see how it works, "squirt a little oil here and there." Now, no:

Our technology isn't approachable anymore, so the mind is free to cast about for explanations. God's will? Intelligent design? Voodoo? Why not?

Ergo, the opaqueness of our latest technological marvels has ironically set us up for an anti-technology, anti-science, anti-reason outlook. Can that be right?

Maybe. But, indicates Englund, there may also be deeper (ahem) reasons for it. Such as Auschwitz, the "logical conclusion" of a "line of thinking" that "said that humans could be bred like peas or hogs to produce a better specimen." Or such as Hiroshima,
the payoff of a scientific line of inquiry that "said that energy and mass are related."

It seems to me that one can lay the blame for all this yet deeper. In another blog of mine, my Tai Chi Journal, I posted this article and this one which contrast Taoist philosophy with what we in the West inherit from Plato. The crux of the matter seems to be this: Plato, intolerant of the imperfection and consequent imperfect knowability of all objects in this material world, posited the existence, if only on a higher metaphysical plane, of Ideas or Forms that were pure in their perfection and in their attendant knowability.

That notion of perfect knowability later got incorporated, as neo-Platonism, in Christian thought. If now we (in St. Paul's words) "see through a glass, darkly," we can expect in heaven to see God "face to face." For Paul, this equated to saying, "Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." In other words, my (or our) faith today is redeemable for certainty in the hereafter.

It seems to me that today's religious conservatives are impatient for certainty in the here and now.

And even some scientists are poisoned by this tendency to assert certainty where none can be found. Witness those who talk as if the theory of evolution were a "fact."

Oh, I believe in Darwinian evolution, as far as it goes. Subject to the proviso that as a theory it's not "finalized" — new concepts are constantly being added, such as punctuated equilibrium and complexity theory — I think of it as the only theory which makes sense scientifically.

Why do I short-shrift "creationism," or the recent talk of "intelligent design"? They fall prey to a common mistake, one which, writer Englund says in his article, Christian fundamentalists have shared (oddly) with the erstwhile Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union: "adherence to tenets that were a matter of faith and could not be proved wrong by any amount of evidence."

But Darwinian evolution theory only goes so far. It's not actually atheistic, as many of its opponents claim. Rather, it's agnostic. It simply can't settle doubts about certain things, like exactly how life on earth began, much less why.

Yes, I'm aware that such "why" questions — questions of "purpose" and "meaning" in the universe — have been called "meaningless" by some, simply because the questions cannot be decided by any form of scientific inquiry.

On the other hand, I'm not immune to asking them.

And then, after I've asked them and come up with some sort of personally satisfying answer, upon further consideration I typically find I start to doubt the answer — and eventually the possibility of ever coming up with a once-and-for-all solution to the problem of "purpose" and "meaning."

It's then that the Taoist in me comes to the fore — which, as I've indicated, leads me to question Plato's (and St. Paul's) basic assumption that there is some higher Form or Presence which infuses the world with some (albeit imperfect and through-a-glass-darkly) measure of intelligibility.

This does not, however, necessarily mean we should not use science to mine whatever intelligibility we can out of our unruly and imperfect worldly situation. But nor should we get so caught up in doing our science that we forget (in the words of the Tao Te Ching):

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.

We would do well, in other words, to cultivate doubt, even as we hunt for certainty.

Welcome to "A World of Doubt"

Certainty vs. Doubt — it appears to be one of the abstract questions underlying the so-called "culture wars" in America today. These "wars" are often cast as "religious" vs. "secular." I see them as being mainly between those who insist on certainty and those who tolerate doubt.

For an overview of the nature of the dispute, see this recent article by an editorial page editor of The Baltimore Sun. Will Englund writes in "A Dawning Age of Unreason" that "with religiosity comes certainty, and with certainty comes a complete lack of curiosity."

On the other hand, secular science, at its best, is characterized by unquenchable doubt. "Philosopher Karl Popper's definition of the difference between religion and science," writes Englund, is that "science is always open to new facts."

Yet I doubt that scientists themselves are always as open-minded as the late Karl Popper would have had them be. Some scientists seem as bigoted against religion as some religionists are against science.

Meanwhile, I personally seem to exist in a world of doubt. This is not necessarily a bad thing — it just means that I have a hard time coming up with any pronouncements which I feel are absolutely and finally true. There always seem to be exceptions which are just as real as the pronouncements. For me, there can never be an end to questioning and curiosity.

I'd better mention right off that I happen to be a religious person. I'm a believer in God and a practicing Catholic. But I have doubts. And I find I resent any aspect of my religion, or any other religion, which becomes so self-certain that imposing that certainty on others seems the only righteous thing to do.

I'm also a believer in science. But I have doubts that science can ever hope to answer all the questions we have about where we came from and how we got here.

I have lots of doubts, and here in this blog, I plan to give vent to them all.

At the same time, I have a reasonably large amount of faith. As I go along, I'll try to spell out why I don't think doubt and faith are mutually exclusive.