Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part V

In a series of posts (most recently, Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part IV) I've talked about being a "neo-Manichaean": seeing the world as a battleground between a good God and an evil Satan.

The "neo" in "neo-Manichaean" reflects my idea that sometimes good and evil embrace so tightly in real-life situations as to be hard to distinguish. Order and chaos are quite literally joined in battle so as to create a zone of fecund evolutionary change, the "edge of chaos." As a result, not only is chaos sometimes benign — the weather over the long term is a chaotic system, after all — but there is such a thing as too much order.


Those are my metaphysics. My stance on good and evil is more or less one of moral relativism.

Moral relativism stands in contradistinction to moral absolutism. I'll contrast the two with reference to a book I'm reading, The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, by Peter Beinart.

Beinart writes (p. 121ff.) of how today's political conservatives don't want to fight terrorism by using foreign aid to attack economic root causes such as too little funding for public schools in many Arab and Muslim countries. Too many young people in the Muslim world are educated in religious madrasas, where some are taught jihadism. Yet American conservatives object to funneling U.S. tax dollars into aid to institutions abroad that would undercut totalitarianism.

Why the objection? One big reason, says Beinart (p. 121), is that such a policy

... shifts blame from the terrorists themselves, and thus threatens the quality conservatives cherish most: moral clarity. As conservative commentator William Bennett has written, the question "shouldn't we work on getting rid of the poverty and oppression that are the root causes of terrorism" bespeaks a "want of clarity about the difference between good and evil."

After 9/11, writes Beinart (p. 133):

Bernard Lewis, the eminent Arabist who became the Bush administration's leading guide to the Muslim world, explained that in the jihadists' view, "the United States had become morally corrupt, socially degenerate, and in consequence, politically and militarily enfeebled." And conservatives found that argument compelling because it matched their own deep fears about American society. They too saw the Clinton administration's foreign policy weakness as the product, ultimately, of its moral weakness — a weakness they feared had seeped into the marrow of American life. Beneath the superficial novelty of America's terror war lurked the same old conservative fears. Could America match the absolute confidence of its fanatical foes? Had liberalism produced a nation of relativists, unable to distinguish good from evil? The religion of non-judgementalism ... has permeated our culture, encouraging a paralysis of the moral faculty," wrote William Bennett, in a book titled Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism. "We have been caught with our defenses down — our intellectual and moral defenses as much as our physical ones."

Hence, Bennett is a moral absolutist. As a relativist, I don't agree that we're in a moral morass if we don't see the world purely in black and white. That is the basis of my moral relativism.

Beinart speaks of the moral absolutism of conservatives as making the achieving of "moral clarity" or "moral purity" job number one our fight against terrorism. Accordingly, don't attack anything but terrorism itself, say the moral purists. Home in on that which is purely and unremittingly evil, and fight that.

Moral relativists such as I say that's too simplistic. The real world is ineluctably complex. Sometimes you have to fight evil using subtle, nuanced strategies that lack ideal moral clarity.

I'll come back to the topic of moral relativism later on in this post, when I will investigate it more thoroughly as a philosophical position.


Meanwhile, some words on the basic ideas of "good" and "evil." I am also reading the new book by Francis Collins, the scientist who headed the Human Genome Project. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief is Collins' testimony that his love for science and his faith in God are not irreconcilable.

Collins began life indifferent to religion, moved into agnosticism and outright atheism in his college years, then in his mid-twenties started to take the "God hypothesis" seriously. He began to be convinced by the book Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis that humans are universally guided by a Moral Law or "law of right behavior" (p. 22ff.). We have trouble sticking by it or discerning how it applies to particular situations, but we all have an inner sense of right and wrong that is common to all members of our species in all cultures, places, and times.

Collins says that our innate, shared human moral sense could only derive from inside us and thus bespeaks a God. Collins argues that no strictly scientific explanation, based on Darwinian evolutionary pressures or anything else, suffices to explain what Lewis called our uniquely human love for agape (ah-GAH-pay) or selfless altruism. Collins identifies our notion of true selflessness as the basic kernel of the whole concept of goodness.


I'm not wholly convinced by Collins' argument alone, which I feel could be a bit more rigorous, but I note that it goes along with something I've just read in an old college textbook, an introduction to philosophy. In the section on moral judgments, one of the book's authors points out that "the most influential writer on ethics during the last fifty years," G.E. Moore — the book I have is now over thirty years old — found a way to prove that "good" cannot really be defined.

There are some words, Moore showed, that are not meaningless but can be explained only by pointing to instances of what they convey: words like "yellow" or "bitter" or "pleasure" ... or "good." These words are all incapable of being analyzed into simpler concepts. "Yellow" and "bitter" refer to natural phenomena that are of the senses. "Pleasure" and "anger" and "fear" are natural but introspective. "Good," however, is not strictly sensory or introspective, since it is not "natural" to begin with; it is instead a "non-natural" quality.

Our capacities for pleasure, anger, and fear, Collins would argue, are natural inasmuch as they derive from evolutionary processes. But our capacity for moral judgment is by this same reasoning non-natural, just as Moore said.


Now for the further discussion I promised on moral relativism. I have a second book, this one titled Ethics and Metaethics, from 1963. Ethics or morality asks questions about how specific human actions are to be evaluated, and metaethics or metamorality asks whether, and how, such ethical/moral issues can in fact be settled, once and for all.

The book has a section on "Right Action," whose introduction by the book's author, Raziel Abelson, suggests to me that what I above called my "moral relativism" may be a misnomer. My position may actually be one of "intuitionist absolutism."

Abelson presents five readings in this section of his book, whose subtitle is Readings in Ethical Philosophy. They alternate between absolutism and relativism. The religious absolutism of Anglican Bishop Robert C. Mortimer (1902 - ?) leads off the parade with an assertion that an act is right if and only if God commands it. Filtered through "natural law," à la Thomas Aquinas, God's commands are also for Mortimer mediated by personal conscience and church pronouncements.

Mortimer's religious absolutism is challenged by the secular "conventionalism" of Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679), who based morality and ethics on something other than an appeal to higher authority. This was in an age when the prerogatives of kings were giving way to the rights of individuals and their voluntary mutual associations. Instead of divine or monarchical fiat, morals and ethics were grounded by Hobbes firmly in society's own laws, customs, traditions, and agreements: "an uncritical conformity to social authority and custom," Abelson says (p. 304). Hobbes' conventionalism was relativist in that moral laws did not derive from anything immutable or absolute; still, they could not be meaninigfully challenged or criticized.

Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) sought to derive moral laws from critical appeals to absolute reason, not to absolute divine will. He "was a devout Pietist and regarded Christianity as the highest moral ideal, but he made ethics more fundamental than theology" (p. 306). For Kant, "logical consistency [is] the single standard of what is right." Thus, "the single condition that qualifies a rule of conduct as a moral law is that it be logically possible to want every rational being to want to follow it under any conditions" (pp. 306-7, my italics).

Kant's rational absolutism was challenged by the utilitarian relativism of John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873), who says that which is morally right is such because it produces the most pleasure, or alleviates the most pain, for the most people. Ethics derive, that is, from worldly situations. But Mill's utilitarian relativism doesn't explain why (among other things) "we feel that actions such as breaking a promise are wrong, even when we are sure that they produce more pleasure than pain" (p. 308).


Thus we come to the intuitionist absolutism of W.D. Ross (1877 - ?). Why is is wrong to cause unnecessary pain, intuitionists (or "deontologists") ask of utilitarians? Why right to alleviate suffering? Ross and other intuitionists "maintain that the rightness or wrongness of an action cannot be inferred from any other facts, but must be recognized directly and immediately, as a self-evident feature of the action itself" (p. 309).

That seems to accord with my own ideas — which surprises me, since intuitionism is classified as an absolutist position. True, it doesn't appeal to divine commandment or to Kant's reasoned "respect for universal law" as the bedrock of moral judgment, but only to the highly abstract notion that whatever is right is right in itself. We must ultimately rely on our personal intuitive faculties to recognize what that right action is.

"There is no simple or easy answer" to the question of how we are to decide which of our moral duties are "absolute" and which are merely prima facie, according to the intuitionist view (pp. 310-311). Though we have a prima facie duty to keep our promises, that duty can be overruled under special circumstances, such as if we have promised to meet a friend for some trivial reason and an opportunity arises to alleviate some great suffering, at the cost of breaking our promise.

"The relative weights of our various duties," Abelson writes (p. 311), "develop slowly through the accumulated experience and wisdom of mankind, and are matters of intuitive recognition." They can thus appear as self-evident to us; or, failing that, we can sharpen our moral intuition by "consult[ing] those of greater moral sensitivity and wisdom, to whom right and wrong are intuitively clear."


To me, when you start talking about the "relative weights" of various moral duties, you're very close to being a relativist. Indeed, per Abelson, "The intuitionist view as stated by Ross combines the merits of relativism with the merits of rational absolutism" (p. 311). Absolute duties are independent of circumstances, while prima facie duties are indeed situational.

Yet, whither objectivity? There's the rub, with intuitionism. How can our moral obligations be justified with reference to something other that the inner workings of our own minds?

W.R. Ross sidesteps this cavil by likening our prima facie duties to mathematical axioms such as 2 + 2 = 4, the truth of which become self-evident at some point in our intellectual development. Yet, crucially, our axiomatic prima facie obligations are unlike our mathematical axioms in that they fail to make the results they tend toward absolutely obligatory:

... no mathematical object (no figure, for instance, or angle) ever has two characteristics that tend to give it opposite resultant characteristics, while moral acts often (as everyone knows) and indeed always (as on reflection we must admit) have different characteristics that tend to make them at the same time prima facie right and prima facie wrong; there is probably no act, for instance, which does good to anyone without doing harm to someone else, and vice versa. (W.D. Ross, "Right Action," p. 374)

According to Ross, what our actual or absolute duty is in any given situation is determined by weighing the prima facie rights and wrongs of all the moral elements which make up the situation, no one of which is by itself determinative. If our conscientious decision to act causes us to shortchange one of our prima facie obligations, we naturally feel a sense of compunction and do whatever is necessary to seek forgiveness or make amends afterwards. At the same time, however, we need feel no "shame or repentance" (p. 371).

For this reason, I would prefer to call intuitionist absolutism something else. Most absolutists are like Kant, as characterized by Ross: they say "that there are certain duties of perfect obligation, such as those of fulfilling promises, of paying debts, of telling the truth, which admit of no exception whatever in favour of duties of imperfect obligation, such as that of relieving distress" (p. 369). For the intuitionist, "duties of imperfect obligation" can outweigh "duties of perfect obligation." Sometimes, relieving distress takes primacy over moral punctilio. I'd call that relativistic. It's "situation ethics."


Abelson points out (p. 312) that religious absolutism, conventionalist relativism, rational absolutism, utilitarian relativism, and intuitional absolutism form a progression:

Religious absolutism generalizes from the rudimentary moral consciousness of the small child, who identifies right with whatever his parent [i.e., God as Father] commands. Conventionalism or cultural relativism expresses the next stage of development in the child, when he becomes aware of social authority outside his home. Kantian rational absolutism recognizes the authority of individual reason which the child, on reaching maturity, employs in criticizing both parental and social authority. But no matter how well developed his reason may be, a person cannot discover the best rules of life without enough experience to predict the consequences of his actions for himself and for others. Utilitarianism brings attention to the need for this practical wisdom in evaluating rules of conduct. Finally, intuitionism points out duties and obligations independent of one's own welfare and even of the common good, and expresses the moral consciousness of the cultivated and mature man, so deeply committed to his moral principles that he no longer needs a practical motive for following them. This unwavering committment to a moral code expresses a very high level of moral consciousness. But the actual code of conduct to which the moral individual is committed may vary from one social environment to another. Consequently, intuitionism does not provide a final answer to the question, "What is right action, and how can we prove it to be right?" ... .

At this stage of the evolution of my own moral consciousness, I'd say I'm an intuitionist who doubts that that question can ever be settled, once and for all, except by an appeal to prima facie axioms of right and wrong.

Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part IV

I am not sure that in my previous posts in this series, most recently Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part III, I have managed to convey adequately that my idea of what "neo-Manachaean" means is not all that much like what "Manachaean" (or "Manichean," without an extra "a") means to a great many people.

In The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, Peter Beinart writes (p. 71), "Immediately, liberals and conservatives divided into opposing camps [over what to do about the leftist Sandinista rebels who overthrew the anti-Communist dictatorship of Anastazio Somoza in 1980s Nicaragua]. As in El Salvador, [President Ronald] Reagan waxed Manichean about his dubious right-wing allies, infamously calling the [anti-Sandinista] contras the 'moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers'."

That use of "Manichean" is not what I have in mind. It suggests that there is a simple, clear dividing line between good and evil, and only if we stay well to the good side of the line, exercising our might for God aganist Satan, will things turn out for the best. That sort of thinking, says Beinart, fueled Reagan's "dreams of military victory" in Central America.

The American left generally opposed Reagan with an anti-imperialistic and equally simplistic "U.S. out of Central America" stance. Yet there was a split among liberals. A few, like "left-leaning" journalist Paul Berman, defied the wishes of editors like Michael Moore at Mother Jones (yes, that Michael Moore) and condemned the "human rights abuses and disastrous economic policies" of the Sandinistas. Democratic congressman Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma visited Nicaragua and was disturbed by "evidence of growing Sandinista repression" (p. 72).

McCurdy, Democratic senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, and others in the fledgling Democratic Leadership Council (its members were called the "New Democrats") backed nonmilitary aid to the contras and efforts at economic development conditioned "on respect for human rights ... [and on purging] former Somoza loyalists from leadership roles." By the time all was said and done, Nicaraguan voters had rejected both combatants and elected Violetta de Chamorro, the leader of the nonviolent opposition, as their new president. Beinart chortles, "Both the Sandinistas and the contras had lost, and a genuine democrat had won."

True, Beinart adds quickly, most of the forces leading to this outcome that was so fortunate from the U.S. perspective had lain outside our control. But ...

... for the evolution of liberal foreign policy, [the efforts of the New Democrats] mattered. Whether they realized it or not, the New Democrats were stumbling toward the synthesis that had eluded [President] Jimmy Carter: a liberal antitotalitarianism for the post-Vietnam world, which prized human rights without taking refuge in morally pure isolationism, promoted liberty without pretending that the threats to liberty came only from the other side [i.e., the Communists], and ceded some U.S. control to gain legitimacy abroad. It was a synthesis that would reappear years later, once the cold war was gone. (p. 73)

Neo-Manichaenism as I envision it is big on synthesis. Philosophers have noted how an antithesis (Reaganism; the contras) to a thesis (Carter-style post-Vietnam liberalism; the Sandinistas) gives way to a synthesis (the New Democrats; Chamorro). It's called dialectics, and in different guises it's been embraced on both the left and the right.

Neo-Manichaeanism embraces it as a reflection of the "dance" of good and evil in the world. One side of every thesis-antithesis pair is always called "good," the other "evil" ... though different people choose, in perfect conscience, opposite sides as truly representing the good.

Somehow, then, a synthesis emerges in which those erstwhile unbridgeable differences are bridged after all. Result: progress. But also, there is inevitably a new thesis which calls forth a new antithesis ... and the dance goes on. God never defeats Satan. Satan never defeats God. Time, and progress, march on.

Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part III

In Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part II, I tried to give an indication of what I mean by saying I am a neo-Manichaean. The ancient pseudo-Christian heresy, Manichaeanism, posits (as I understand it) a God who is all-good but not (and herein lies the heresy) all-powerful, such that His struggle with Satan is ongoing. That translates, in my version of the story, into a world where order and chaos square off to create the "edge of chaos," where evolution develops its outcomes good and bad, there are new species and extinctions, and there are multitudinous births and deaths, for better or for worse.

We have at least three possible responses, the two most obvious of which are not what I urge.

Perhaps the most obvious of the three possible responses is a studied, even principled amorality. If God and the Devil are roughly equipotent, why choose sides? I find that a copout both repugnant and ridiculous. After all, good is, by definition, better than evil.

The second most obvious of the three possible responses is to go to the opposite extreme and seek — nay, insist on — moral purity. Extirpate all reflections of Satan from the circumstances of our lives.

That, too, I reject; this post discusses why. But first, here is the third option, the one I favor: Understanding and dealing squarely with the fact that, in life as we live it, goodness and purity are not the same things.


A good way to illustrate what I mean comes from the recent book by The New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart, The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.

Beinart is not talking about religion, philosophy, or theology, but about political ideology. His book is a call-to-arms for latter-day liberals to take up the mantle of their august forebears in the earliest days of the Cold War.

It was a time just after World War II, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the Communist Soviet Union, our erstwhile ally, had gobbled up Eastern Europe and begun to prove itself, under Stalin, as totalitarian as the Nazi and Fascist enemies we had just defeated together. Many on the American left were themselves Communists, ex-Communists, aligned in some way with Socialism/Marxism, fellow-travelers, or dupes.

In the years from 1946 to 1948, there was a bifurcation between leftists who were willing to shortchange liberty in favor of equality and fraternity, and those who weren't. The latter group formed Americans for Democratic Action, underwrote the Truman presidency, and laid the foundation for the anti-totalitarian American liberalism to come — that of Presidents Truman and Kennedy, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., diplomat-historian George Kennan, Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and the like.


Not long thereafter was born the anti-Communist right, led by such thinkers as James Burnham and National Review founder William F. Buckley. They did not approve of Truman's emphasis on foreign and military aid. Economic assistance to floundering nations in the postwar period, countries such as Greece and Turkey whose governments, albeit anti-Soviet, were not model democracies, would, they said, just undermine our chances of winning the Cold War. Why? They betrayed our lack of moral purity and clarity.

The anti-Communist right embarked on a series of domestic witch hunts, led by the likes of Joseph McCarthy, U.S. Senator from Wisconsin from 1947-57. "For the right," writes Beinart (p. 20), "the question lurking behind all these cases [of alleged Communist sympathies] was whether America believed in its creed strongly enough to expel those who did not." For the anti-Communist left, on the other hand, the point was exactly the reverse: America needed to be strong enough to tolerate espousers of even those ideologies most adversarial to it. Anything less would mock liberty, not strengthen it.

It came down to a recognition by the liberal anti-totalitarians that America's goodness was not the same as its moral purity. "If the cold war liberal tradition parts company with the right," says Beinart (p. xi), "in insisting that American power cannot be good unless we recognize that it can also be evil, it parts company with the purist left in insisting that if we demand that American power be perfect, it cannot be good."


Moral purism thus has its left- and right-wing versions. Many left-wingers have traditionally objected to pragmatic, half-a-loaf policies that aren't squeaky clean, social justice-wise. Right-wingers, to those that leave something to be desired, liberty-wise.

This is just as true in the international sphere as on the domestic scene. The dust jacket of The Good Fight says, "Peter Beinert offers a new liberal vision, based on principles liberals too often forget: That America's greatness cannot simply be asserted; it must be proved. That to be good, America does not have to be pure ... ."

For God, of course, there is no distinction between goodness and moral purity. For us, there is. How can this be?


Here is where my understanding of neo-Manichaeanism enters the picture. If God, the supernatural source of good, is locked in battle with Satan, the bastion of evil, then we live in an edge-of-chaos world where the back-and-forth between order and chaos can't meaningfully be avoided. To try to quell the battle by unduly purifying our own little corner of the world, silencing or casting out all complexity or dissent, is ultimately self-defeating and counterproductive.

I am saying such things as if I find them easy to demonstrate the truth of and accept. The opposite is the case. My soul is actually torn between such an outlook and a strong preference for moral purity and clarity.

Little wonder. Embracing complexity and diversity is a lot harder than calling for purity and clarity.

Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part II

In Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part I, I set forth some of the reasons why I suddenly find myself something other than the good Catholic believer I had been for a decade.

Or, rather, why I still believe in a God who is all-good, but not in one who is all-powerful. We Catholics aren't supposed to be neo-Manicheans — latter-day descendants of those early Christians who were declared heretics by the Church for finding this world to be a perpetual battleground between God and Satan, neither of whose supernatural powers are limitless or decisive.

After I wrote Part I, something happened to me that I consider emblematic of what I'm getting at: I got stung on the left thumb by a yellow jacket. I had awakened from a nap and saw something on the carpet that needed to be picked up and disposed of. I couldn't tell through sleep-drenched eyes that it was alive, if near-dead. It injected me with its venom before I could say ouch. Today my swollen hand is painful.

Symbolically, chaos zapped my life with that bee sting. Though slight in itself, it set my immediate future off on a wholly unexpected trajectory.

My life will of course recover its accustomed order soon enough — which in my worldview means a personal return somewhere to the orderly side of the "edge of chaos," the locus of change and growth where chaos' eternal novelty is tempered by the world's capacity to refine what has been introduced. Evolutionarily, according to the laws of natural selection and self-organized complexity there is nothing so constant as change.

By those laws of nature, order that is statically frozen — or that repeats itself ad infinitum, world without end, amen — is never preferred. By those laws, surprising emergence is followed by graceful evolution that transpires in a mathematically describable regime at the edge of order, cheek-by-jowl with chaos. When chaos obtrudes, there is death and destruction.


That's the way I see the world. It is no longer possible for me to square it with my Catholicism.

I've never been able to square it with what I know of evangelical Christian worldviews. I have friends and relatives in that realm of religion, and in fact my own family, on my mother's side, is Southern Baptist.

Mainline Protestant outlooks, as well, are determinedly non-Manichean. My late father's abandoned Methodist upbringing qualifies here.

All Christian approaches today, as far as I know, insist that God is both thoroughly good and omnipotently great. They are heirs to the belief of the Early Church, after it had purged itself of Manichaeanism alongside a litany of other heresies, in this regard.

But it is Roman Catholicism and its closest Protestant cousin, Anglicanism, that I know best as a religious tradition.. The Church of Rome and the Church of England share much theology and a good deal of liturgical practice, including a belief in sacraments — though they still quarrel over the exact nature of (among many other things) Holy Communion. They have in common their emphasis on the Trinity, on bishops as direct successors of the Apostles, on "high" liturgies, and on the Church as a unitary institution that is God's beachhead in a sin-corrupted world.

The Church thus stands between us and God. We have a mediated relationship. Theology is essential to it — not just you and I reading our own Bibles and possibly sharing our conclusions, posssibly not.


The foregoing paragraphs suggest the sheer variety of Christian outlooks in the modern world. There is not just one. All of them assume, though, that God's victory over evil has "always already" been won.

God, theologians say, foreknew that man would fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, that he would not be able to redeem his own sin, that God's own death on a cross would be needed ... and provided, in due course, in Christ, the Son of God, who would suffer and die like one of us. He would be one of us, in all ways but sin. After his resurrection and eventual departure from this world, Satan's defeat would be secured on our behalf for the rest of time.

That defeat of Satan would be manifested, though, only at the end of time. Meanwhile, we would have our strong faith to shield us from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

My faith in that upbeat scenario is not so strong any more.

Perhaps it never was.


It is a beautiful picture, I grant. In fact, I would say that all the elements of good Catholic understanding (I'll revert to the particular system I know best) dovetail and interlock in ways that make for a lovely jigsaw puzzle, all the individual pieces serving one another to create a compelling, seamless tableau of thought and belief.

For the longest time, I habitually averted my gaze from those details of the Catholic theological tableau which otherwise might have bothered me. Among them: the historical tendency of the Church to dictate to believers, rather than solicit assent; the tendency to stifle free inquiry; the lack of openness to other points of view; the self-protectiveness to the point of failing to confron, say, anti-Semitism within the Church; and so on.

But I also studiously ignored how central to the magisterium of the Church is its doctrine about sex, gender, marriage, contraception, and so forth. That is not properly part of my topic here, but I need to fully disclose that I now believe the coherent "jigsaw puzzle" falls apart if you, say, affirm homosexual lifestyles. I'll return to this difficult topic in some future post.

For now, let me just say that I and Pope Benedict XVI probably agree on this much: a neo-Manichaean outlook implies we humans confront evil on a completely different footing than does a "good Catholic" point of view.


To a neo-Manichaean such as I now call myself, evil is not severable from any aspect of our human experience.

I'm struggling to find the words to express my thoughts here. Please bear with me: Just as chaos is not severable from order, just as the "edge of chaos" is essential to the evolving world that has produced our human species, everything that happens, everything that we know, is potentiated by the struggle between a good God and his evil adversary.

I use the word potentiated advisedly. An electrical "potential" is a voltage set up by the difference in charge between two elements of a battery. Without the other element, nothing happens.


This is not to say that the ideas of good and evil are any different from our usual pure conceptions of them. What is good is of God; what is bad is of the Enemy. We still ought to favor good and hate evil, in my neo-Manichaean outlook. We still need to be idealists. It's just that we're also realists who recognize that it's never really possible to surgically cut out the cancer of evil from any organ of the living, breathing world.

Every cell is healthy. Every cell is also potentially cancerous.

As I write this, the Middle East has blown up again. Israel, responding to abductions of soldiers by Hamas and Hezbollah, is engaging in military strikes many say are disproportionate. There are those pundits who recommend we deal with Iran as the only power broker in the region who might put Hezbollah back on its leash. Iran could, in fact, become a new source of regional stability, if we deal with it cagily. But we're not talking to Iran. They, after all, seem to be developing a nuclear arsenal.

Every cell is healthy. Every cell is also cancerous.

There are other pundits who say our best option is to treat everyone and everthing that might be anti-Israel or pro-Islamist as absolutely malignant to the rest of the world. Cal Thomas, for example, recently wrote in Understanding the Temper of the Times, "Israel's enemies are all of the same piece by whatever name they call themselves. There are no 'moderates,' at least none who have the power to make peace."

To Cal Thomas, a well-known and dedicated member of the religious right, some cells are evil, some good.

I agree with Mr. Thomas that radical Islamism, as a pure idea, is fundamentally totalitarian and evil. And the notion of a permanent, secure Jewish state in Israel is one I, too, who recognize the absolute intolerability of the Holocaust and genocide in general, support without reservation.

But I disagree with Mr. Thomas that the fight against evil can ever be antiseptic. If the white hats in America don't talk to the black hats in the Middle East, America loses power like an anode without a cathode.


But my intention is not to talk of politics and ideology. Nor is it to evangelize in favor of a Manichaean outlook on the world. It is rather to try to state what that Manichaean outlook entails, and why it appeals to me so. More on that in upcoming posts.

Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part I

A snippet from the latest Adam Dalgliesh mystery by P.D. James, The Lighthouse, in which Commander Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard is questioning a witness in a murder investigation, Jo Stavely, about Adrian, an ex-priest and a possible suspect whom Stavely has nursed for a time while he was drying out:

"Was it the alcoholism [Dalgliesh asked Stavely] that made him [Adrian] leave the church? Did he confide in you about that?"

"Yes, as far as we could communicate at that level. I don't understand religion. Partly it was the alcoholism, but mainly because he'd lost faith in some of the dogma. I can't understand why that worried him. I thought that that was the thing about the dear old C of E [Church of England]: you can believe more or less what you like. Anyway, he came to believe that God couldn't be both good and all-powerful; life's a struggle between the two forces — good and evil, God and the devil. That's some kind of heresy — a long word beginning with M."

Dalgliesh said, "Manichaeanism."

"That sounds like it. It seems sensible to me. At least it explains the suffering of the innocent, which otherwise takes some sophistry to make sense of. It I had a religion, that's what I'd choose. I suppose I became a Manichaean — if that's the word — without knowing it the first time I watched a child dying of cancer. But apparently you're not supposed to believe it if you're a Christian, and particularly not if you're a priest. Adrian is a good man. I may not be good myself, but I can recognise it. Oliver [the murder victim] was evil; Adrian is good."

Dalgliesh said, "If it were as simple as that, my job would be easy. Thank you for telling me."

When I read that passage, I felt a surge of recognition: I, too, seem to have become a Manichaean without quite knowing it.

I, too, increasingly feel that life in our world is an ongoing struggle between a God who is all-good but not all-powerful and an Enemy who is evil through and through. The Dark Enemy — call him Satan or the Devil — is likewise unable to claim victory, once and for all, in the battle with his luminous adversary.


For over ten years I have been a practicing Roman Catholic, and before my conversion to that faith I was a high-church Episcopalian: an "Anglo-Catholic" adherent of that branch of the worldwide Church of England which we encounter here in the U.S. Before that, going back almost twenty years now, religiously speaking I was not much of anything.

During the past two decades, I have investigated the history and theology of my adoptive church enough to know that Manichaeanism was a heresy, one of several that came to be denounced by the early Church Fathers in the first centuries of Christianity. I recall even having read what the M-word originally meant to its adherents at some time in the distant past, but it was a scholarly definition that I admit went in one ear and out the other.

I now suddenly find that the M-word, or rather what I consider its updated meaning, resonates in my soul.


The resonance is set up for me by the fact that for several years, until just a year or two ago, in fact, I was absorbed in an attempt to write a book. It was to be a book about how the new sciences of complexity chime with my personal understanding of Christianity.

Complexity study is a fledgling branch of science which finds that "chaos" — another long-used common noun recently folded into the empirical scientist's lexicon, now in a mathematical way — can be found cheek-by-jowl with "order" at a conceptual location dubbed "the edge of chaos." I have written in another of my blogs, Beyond Darwin, of how the edge of chaos is the favored location for the fountainhead for all Darwinian evolutionary change. See, for example, my post The Edge of Chaos, Chaos, and Heroism.

As the regime where surprising innovations can burst forth in dynamical systems and then proceed to evolve gracefully, à la Darwin, the edge of chaos has been documented by theoretical biologist Stuart A. Kauffman in his book At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. Kauffman calls self-organization the "handmaid" of natural selection, Darwin's primary principle, and says the two together better explain the world's evolutionary history than does natural selection alone.

That idea has fascinated me since I first heard of it some ten-plus years ago. At first I thought I could reconcile it fairly easily with my religion.

I thought that especially, inasmuch as self-organization makes evolution very, very likely to produce a species like us; Kauffman accordingly calls us "we the expected." Straight Darwinism, by itself, seems to make the odds 0f our advent highly improbable.

When self-organization is added in, Kauffman shows, the broad outlines of the earth's evolutionary history become anything but happenstance. Rather, there seem to be laws of nature, the laws which Kauffman seeks to find, which predispose this planet to advancing biological complexity over the course of evolutionary time, leading to brains, leading to us.


As I tried to dovetail that theory of self-organized complexity with my understanding of Christainity, "the gripping hand" of the argument seemed to me to concern a new understanding of the nature of the opposition between order and chaos.

That metaphor, "the gripping hand," comes from (according to this Wikipedia article) "the science fiction novels The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, [in which] the gripping hand is literally the strongest of the three asymmetrical arms of the aliens called 'Moties.' Some species of Motie have two weaker arms with better fine control on one side, and a single much stronger arm on the other side."

The Wikipedia article goes on:

Figuratively, [the term "gripping hand"] was typically used when presenting a third choice or fact after two others, usually after the second had been presented with the phrase "on the other hand...". Thus, a discussion of choices could follow the typical pattern of saying "We could do this, but on the other hand we could do that," followed by what would in conventional English be a non sequitur, "but on the gripping hand, there's another alternative." In keeping with the idea that this represents the strongest arm, the last fact is often one that is most unpleasant or difficult to deal with, in some way, although sometimes it is merely a third alternative. An alternate method uses "On the gripping hand" to present a stronger or more compelling option, point, or fact than the previous two.

I thought my view of the edge of chaos to be one of those "gripping hands": a third alternative between the customary identification of God with order — order being thoroughly "good" — and Satan with chaos, the latter being thoroughly "evil." If there is an edge of chaos from which all evolutionary novelty wells forth, I reasoned, it could not exist without order and chaos existing as well, both of them together, creating the necessary borderland.

I spent countless hours — days, weeks, months — trying to write about how this insight fits with traditional Christian understandings of the world. In the end, I ran dry: I hated to admit it: by such lights, the sheer cruelty of evoultionary history "takes some sophistry to make sense of."

Too, I failed to come to grips with the fact that so does the cruelty of our own history, and the pain and suffering of our human experience in general. Stuart Kauffman shows that our historical, cultural, economic, and technological trajectories are very likely guided by the very same laws of self-organization and complexity as is biological evolution — with the edge of chaos and all that implies.

The sophistry I chose to fall back on revolved for the most part around the longstanding notion of free will: what we do is truly not determined by any external force, personal or impersonal, divine or satanic. Nor is what nature does. Neither we nor the natural world are puppets of a supernatural will or an overarching determinism.

Except ... except that Christians typically believe that an all-good, all-powerful God takes charge when we ask him, in heartfelt prayer, to change things.


I've lost my faith in that. I no longer feel God answers prayers — at least not reliably.

For quite a while, I rationalized unanswered prayers this way: they are the necessary concomitants of free will. Whenever God intervenes in the world, freedom takes a hit. How can God bring about the outcomes we pray so earnestly for without forestalling all other possible outcomes, thereby robbing the world of the freedom to do its own thing?

That kind of thinking inevitably shades itself into the longstanding philosopher's conundrum the problem of evil, also called the problem of pain. If God has some subtle way of intervening in this world to bring about that which he wills on our behalf — a way that somehow does not abridge the world's intrinsic freedom — why doesn't the all-good, all-powerful deity use it to banish evil and woe altogether?

Oh, I know very well what Christian dogma holds: that evil and woe have been vanquished by Christ's redeeming death on the cross, a salvific act initiated by God the Father, carried out in history in the person of God the Son, but foreordained from the beginning of time. Theologians are apt to say, in reconciling an all-good, all-powerful God with the human experience of ongoing woe, that despite present appearances God's defeat of Satan was "always already" guaranteed, from before day one.


But from our point of view, evil and woe persist. Chaos continues as part and parcel of this world. Evolution continues, orienting itself to the edge of chaos where the separateness of order and good from chaos and evil is called into question from one moment to the next.

It now occurs to me that a simpler explanation than the one I have, admittedly, just barely begun to sketch in the words I essayed above, is that God is all-good, but not all-powerful.


Another traditional explanation for worldly woe is original sin. The rebellion of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden stains all our souls to this day and necessitates the saving cross of Christ.

The doctrine of original sin, or something much like it, impresses me as being absolutely necessary, as long as God is said to be both all-powerful and all-good. But if God is perfectly good, yet less than omnipotent, the explanation for woe becomes much simpler: God and Satan create good worldly outcomes (evolutionary advance) and bad ones (death, destruction, extinction) as a spinoff of their cosmic ongoing struggle.

That idea appeals to me quite deeply. It furnishes me with a reason to side ever more strongly with good while recognizing crucially that real-world problems are rarely cut and dried, black and white. It justifies, for me, being both an idealist and a realist at one and the same time.

In subsequent posts, I'll explore those thoughts further.