In an earlier essay, A Brain Shaped to Geometric Thought?, I responded to evidence that the brain does abstract from physical distance to derive, for example, an idea of emotional distance. This isn’t a matter fully understood, though the scientists seem to believe, as do I, that human beings have learned to unconsciously and consciously use the physical skills of their brains to abstract from distance in such a way as to make it a powerful source of metaphors and I’d even say a source of metaphysical insight. I’d say that this process works because distance is a concrete manifestation of abstract forms of mathematical being which are also part of Creation. Those abstract forms can be made a little more concrete as emotional distances or the distance between the states of being of a complex system including those such as human communities which are far from fully quantifiable.
Our use of distance in the abstract, distance between points or regions of abstract spaces, is a very deep matter indeed and one which has proved to be of great use and also fruitful in truths. We are able to design machinery, regulate oil refinery production to supply and demand involving complex groups of possible products, carry out certain analyses at the highest levels of theoretical physics and chemistry, conduct with a lot of qualifications some good analyses in politics and other social sciences, and so on. From there, we have learned general skills of abstraction, abstract skills of generalizing.
So it is that I set out, with my tongue lightly in cheek, to first ask: What is patriotism and what is jingoism? This is a specialized form of the question: what is a good and disciplined way to describe and analyze the processes by which individual human beings come together to form communities?
The sociobiologists, such as E O Wilson, present solid arguments that our tendencies toward moral behavior are part of our physical makeup, selected over the years to improve the chances of successful reproduction of the genes of our family lines, not of our individual selves. Whether or not we feel close to our families, we tend to act in their `Darwinian’ interests because we are made to endure even great suffering to help bring children into the world and to help raise them so they can bring more children into the world. And so on. We act in favor of our family-lines (far more accurate than speaking of genes which are only part of our makeup) largely because of intermediary factors, such as sexual desire. When we speak of family-lines instead of genes, this is very similar to the view in the Old Testament. I discuss these issues in a little more detail, from a Christian viewpoint, in The Body of Christ: A Christian Sociobiology and Sex, Traditions, and the Modern Scientific Materialist.
True morality rests upon that physical foundation, genetic and somatic and relational, but has been subjected to various selective processes at the social level. Great thinkers and saints can present new possibilities but these are then subjected to those various selective processes of God’s world, selective processes which—after all—produced the likes of Isaiah and Jeremiah and the Buddha and Socrates even before the Son of God became incarnate as a man. Aristotle was a noble gentleman of the ancient Greek sort and gave true nuggets of wisdom to mankind as well as a system which is worth studying but is not true by Christian standards. (See the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre for the gory scholarly details.) Taken naively, the current trends of history would indicate that Christian teachings are also fading in importance; certainly, Christian civilization seems to be close to flatlining. This is but one sign of the failure of Christian intellectuals and Christian leaders in general to deal properly with the questions of the modern age; we live in a world described by Darwin and Einstein and their successors, we Christians profess belief in a system of thought in which the Creedal truths have been combined with a largely early modern view, in part ancient and Medieval views, of God’s work as a Creator. With a few notable exceptions, such as Joseph Ratzinger, few Christian religious thinkers or teachers take science seriously outside of liking those shows about the so-called Big Bang—which they often misinterpret as a creation event rather than a phase change. Spiritual books and homilies give the impression we are descended from a couple who were part of a special creation rather than being descended from an ancestor common to men and chimpanzees. Those two stories imply radically different understandings of sin and other aspects of human nature.
In any case, we are bound primarily to those in our family lines and bound with decreasing strength to those who share our genes to a lesser extent. Sort of. This is to say that genetic relationship can be coherently argued, as Wilson and others have done, as the primary factor in the binding of living creatures into various sorts of favorable activities toward one another right up to the behavior of social creatures which can be labeled as `moral’.
We don’t have the ability to detect genetic relationships directly though there have been research claims that, as one example, human beings detect (by smell?) enough about each other’s immune systems to bias them toward mating choices which might be more likely to produce children who survive diseases and parasites. Yet, I’d say it seems most likely for now that we `detect’ close genetic relationships by way of observing facial and other external features and by way of being familiar with other persons at a young age, but too great a familiarity activates an instinct against incest—not an all-powerful instinct, at least not at a conscious level, since Abraham and some Pharaohs married half-sisters or sisters and many in history, including Charles Darwin, have married first cousins.
On the whole, this issue of the evolution of moral nature is a problem for idealists. Moral nature and abstract thoughts, if not the moral creature and abstract thinker, will remain—if only implicitly—in the domain of non-being or special creation long after other forms of dualism die. I recommend we take seriously the idea of a self-contained Creation, a realm of created being which we can’t escape. In particular, I claim with no qualification that created being lies upon a spectrum of abstract to concrete, with concrete forms of being coming into existence largely as the result of `abstract’ relationships. Human communal being is real—the Body of Christ is real—even if a bit more abstract and somewhat invisible to creatures yet in this mortal realm; yet, we can conceive with our minds what our eyes can’t quite perceive if we but acknowledge the reality of what lies in front of us.
Much of what happens to bind us to others and into complex communities doesn’t involve signs of any sort of direct kinship but rather is the result of proxies. The oversized and soft eyes found in mammal babies draw us toward human babies in our own communities and also toward puppies and bunnies and even calves. Some evolutionary biologists have argued that romantic love between mates, found in various species but most explicitly in humans, is the result of a transfer of that love of one’s offspring to one’s mate. If this were true, it would be plausible human females with such crippling gestations and giving birth to such slowly developing babies might be selected to have many of the characteristic of youngsters, large and soft eyes as well as soft skin. This would tie males to them more strongly. The (quite defective) monogamous nature of human beings, even males who would seem to have better reproductive strategies if we watched most other species, is itself an evolved human behavior which is not the result of morality but rather leads to moral rules reinforcing successful reproductive behavior. That there might be a divine purpose taught to us by Jesus Christ and taught since then by the Christian churches doesn’t undo the path behind us as I tried to warn my fellow-Christians in a recent essay, Repeat After Me: The Church Has Accepted Evolution and Our Ancestors Were Sex-Crazed, Killer Apes.
This is deep stuff, not simply the rearranging of the deck chairs which most Christian thinkers engage in when dealing with moral and social and political and theological issues. It requires a lot of study of modern empirical knowledge, a lot of contemplation, and a sustained effort to develop complex and long lines of thought.
For now, let me leave this part of the puzzle of community-formation by claiming we are drawn to form communities with others by a force which is actually our desires and is stronger as genetic relationship (by way of various proxies) grows closer though the distance measurement is likely complex and the basic metric of the state space might make the metrics of the two theories of relativity look quite simple in comparison. (In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if the concepts of state-space and metric might need generalizing, though not sure what that might mean.)
We are looking at a situation where evolution has produced tight bonds between human beings closely related. This isn’t a situation entirely promising from the Christian viewpoint. Secularists in the post-Enlightenment world are in the same boat—partly because modern secularized views are little more than diluted or deformed versions of Christian teachings, though sometimes becoming photographic negatives of a sort. How do we move toward an inclusive Body of Christ if we have strong desires to, for example, protect and nurture our own children even at the expense of the children of human beings relatively far away in physical distance and distances of other sorts? It doesn’t work to do what Christian leaders and charitable groups are inclined to do—throw together human beings from a variety of cultures and ethnic groups and pray that brotherly love develops—see We Prefer to Cooperate With Those Like Ourselves and Networks of Public Spaces Rather Than One Square for discussions of some sobering facts about multicultural neighborhoods as discovered by Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor and collectivist liberal who was very upset with his own research results.
We shouldn’t even think of despairing because there are various ways in which the various bonds of human communities can be extended in sometimes modest ways which can be powerful over a long enough time. Yet, we should respect nature, moving forward slowly and carefully; history tells us of many occasions when groups seemed to have assimilated to a common culture but genocidal rampages or lower-level violence interrupted those movements toward multicultural Heaven on Earth.
In analogy to modern theories of gravity and consistent with what I said above about the metrics of state-spaces, I’m proposing that our deepest inclinations, those treated by sociobiologists and brain-scientists, cause our social state-space to bend, causing us to slide toward great masses; if we passively allow ourselves to slide close to that great mass or if we fail to successively struggle against the slide, then we add to that mass and help to further bend our social spacetime. As we merge into that mass, we perhaps will even change what had been deeply held moral beliefs. The attraction between human beings is inside of us and likely doesn’t produce anything physically detectable, like an electromagnetic field or a spacetime bent near a black-hole, but that attraction is real and so are the communities which result if we respond properly to our attractions to other human beings. Again, abstract being is real including invisible sorts of attraction between human beings.
A theory should be as abstract as necessary but no more abstract and it has to abstract from a realistic understanding of concrete being as we know it—of course, we can also build upon existing abstractions which we accept as at least plausible. Download A More Exact Understanding of Human Being for a summary of my understanding of human being in the concrete and the abstract. This understanding is the foundation of my ongoing efforts. In particular, I discuss both individual and communal human being.
What is the difference between legitimate patriotism and the illegitimate form of patriotism which we can call `jingoism’? I think the problem is somewhat similar to that of sexual love and sexual lust and greatly similar to the common failure for communities to distinguish between truly dangerous aliens and aliens who could be accepted as trusted friends or neighbors.
Patriotism is dominated by processes of inclusion, of bonding, of concrete attachments, though the alien can’t be admitted if he endangers what it is that the patriot loves—that alien must be loved as a Christian brother, or at least a fellow human being, at a distance. Jingoism is dominated by processes of attraction toward oddly abstract ideas or entities, ideas and entities which often have a doubtful reality—some abstractions are delusions rather than real abstract being. On the human level, jingoism is dominated by process of exclusion, of refusal to bond beyond a certain population of human beings and institutions accepted as friendly and trustworthy and worthy of something akin to love. I suspect that ethnic forms of jingoism develop largely because groups are pulled together and begin to push against or hate the other when there are too many differences in culture or appearance—as noted in the essays about unwise forms of multiculturalism I referred to above.
So let’s move forward and try to find a way of thinking and speaking of patriotism and jingoism, that we may test my claim that modern ideologies, including some of the “good ones”, are based upon misunderstandings of human communities, typically the denial of the reality of human communal being.
In an essay I published in September of 2010, Freedom and Structure in Human Life — As Go the Immune System and Neurological System, I began:
Analogies can be taken too far and too literally, yet I wonder if we can apply to the human social organism, ultimately the Body of Christ, the example of a long-ago and primitive immune system ‘spinning off’ a neurological system. As I understand this particular line of speculation in evolutionary biology, and it was years ago that I read about it, that primitive immune system was largely a set of cells which tried to distinguish between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’, between what was supposed to be inside that particular organism and what was an invader. Somehow, that effort to distinguish between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’ led to a central nervous system, ultimately thought, as well as to defenses against diseases.
I went on to propose a line of questioning:
Government as we know it has grown out of systems to identify unfriendly or alien human beings (or sometimes to subjugate the other) or to protect against non-human dangers to the physical and moral aspects of our communities. As we mature towards the Body of Christ, is our government going to split into a policing (immunological) system which operates with some independence but under conditions where it has only as many resources as it needs for the task at hand and a planning and thinking (neurological) system which plays a role in the ongoing functions of the parts of the Body but also plays a central role in understanding the environment of that Body and planning for the future?
Here’s where I see a problem in radical forms of liberalism, including libertarianism: it denies the reality of communal human being. Thus it sees no cultural ties or heritage which are beyond voluntary acceptance or rejection, not even that of families, Some might think that the more modern collectivist liberals have adopted a belief, a poorly formed belief perhaps, in communal human being, but this would be wrong. Collectivist liberals try to force individuals into tight relationships controlled by central powers, but the forms—if not always the reality—of those relationships are contractual and voluntary, deformations of the relationships accepted by classical liberals but essentially the same. Modern collectivist liberals and the citizens of societies they control travel as herds but those herds don’t honestly respond to objective reality, in terms of immediate experiences or in terms of disciplined traditional knowledge or modern empirical knowledge. Those herds change direction, change relationships between the members of the herd, mostly according to changes in opportunities to feel good about themselves. The classical liberals, including libertarians emphasize the individual’s feelings of self-goodness while the collectivist liberals, including modern warmongering `neo-conservatives’, emphasize some sort of shared but not truly communal feeling of self-goodness and recently this has decayed into outright jingoism.
Yet, I think even those who fail to recognize the reality of communities desire to belong to some community or communities which might exist only in their dreams or in something they read, perhaps in the book of The Book of Isaiah or The Gospel of Matthew. I maintain that this desire comes from the most basic level of what we are as human animals, before we’re even able to consciously evaluate the goodness or badness or mediocrity of communities—probably some are never able to do this in an intelligent manner.
I’ll end by pointing out that my understanding of human being as individual and communal, both real and not just ways of speaking, slowly emerged after meditating upon the insight of the philosopher Kurt Hubner that the real debate between Einstein and Bohr over the nature of reality was: “Einstein was claiming that reality consists of substances which remain unaltered by their relationships with other substances while Bohr was claiming that it is the relationships which are primary and those relationships bring substances into existence.”
See my short discussion of this issue in one of my first internet writings: A Christian View of Einstein’s and Bohr’s Debate on Reality. I pointed out the similarity of Bohr’s `radical’ position to the teachings of the school of St John the Evangelist in another early essay: Quantum Mechanics and Moral Formation.