Human being is complex, as is true of most interesting entities. Even God’s simplicity, touted rightly by ancient and Medieval theologians and their not-so-worthy successors in modern times, is only a way of speaking against very specific types of errors. Mostly, they were concerned in ages which saw change lead eventually to decay that God not be seen as a being moving, however slowly, towards decay and death.
More generally, interesting and rich entities seem to be highly organized systems of sub-systems, some of which are simple and some of which are complex. These sub-systems interact to produce various sorts of—speaking anthropomorphically—simple and complex communities.
I’ve written a little about the real nature of simplicity of complex entities, human beings or human societies or other organisms or parts of Creation—see Enriching Our Moral World: Simple Is Digested Complexity.
Responding to a New York Times overview of some recent literature discussing and, sometimes, advocating one or another position on how to raise morally well-ordered children, Razib Khan wrote an short essay in April of 2014, It Takes a Village More Than Parents, which provides some well-grounded cautions:
Two insights from behavior genetics can shed light here. First, shared-environmental effects are often the smallest proportion of the variation in behavior. This is the part which is due to the family home and the parental influence. Second, the proportion of variance explained by shared-environment tends to go down as people get older. So parental influence tends to diminish.
Obviously part of the reason you behave as you do can be put down to genes. Or more precisely genetic dispositions which express themselves. And another portion can be chalked up to what your parents teach you. But a large proportion, in fact in many cases the largest proportion, is accounted for by factors which we don’t have a good grasp of. We don’t know, and term this “non-shared environment.”* In The Nurture Assumption Judith Rich Harris posited that much of non-shared environment was one’s peer group. This is still a speculative hypothesis, but I do think it is part of a broader set of models which emphasize culture and society, and how it shapes your mores and behaviors, as opposed to the nuclear family.
[* This might actually be genetic or more broadly biological; epigenetics, epistasis, and developmental stochasticity.]
Khan was responding to a New York Times article by Adam Grant to which Khan was responding: Raising a Moral Child . One claim that struck me regarded the difference between shame and guilt:
Praise in response to good behavior may be half the battle, but our responses to bad behavior have consequences, too. When children cause harm, they typically feel one of two moral emotions: shame or guilt. Despite the common belief that these emotions are interchangeable, research led by the psychologist June Price Tangney reveals that they have very different causes and consequences.
Shame is the feeling that I am a bad person, whereas guilt is the feeling that I have done a bad thing. Shame is a negative judgment about the core self, which is devastating: Shame makes children feel small and worthless, and they respond either by lashing out at the target or escaping the situation altogether. In contrast, guilt is a negative judgment about an action, which can be repaired by good behavior. When children feel guilt, they tend to experience remorse and regret, empathize with the person they have harmed, and aim to make it right.
The author, Adam Grant, quite plausibly concluded: “If we want our children to care about others, we need to teach them to feel guilt rather than shame when they misbehave.” Discipline is needed but the right sort, the sort which makes it clear the child can become a better person.
One part of Grant’s discussion of this issue struck home for me in a rather personal way: “The ashamed toddlers were avoiders; the guilty toddlers were amenders.” That’s me, an avoider, and even now I have trouble facing up to my own weaknesses and figuring out how to amend; I also have trouble confessing to even non-moral failings, such as lack of knowledge of some matter that I feel I should know about or simple errors of judgment or mistakes in carrying out a task. This is a common American trait, in my experience, and Grant’s discussion raises obvious questions about the possible prevalence in this country of parents who raise their children to feel shame rather than guilt.
Another result from these particular experiments and studies discussed by Grant is the evidence that children learned generosity better when they saw adults being generous without preaching generosity. Preaching the moral lesson would decrease the effect of seeing generosity in action, though some effect remained.
On the other hand, as a modern thinker appreciative of the mind and its importance to some extent in many individual lives and its great importance in our communal lives, I think that preaching is distinct from the types of conversations—not to be forced—which can lead to understanding and to the type of mind which can respond more flexibly to the world. Stories might be even more effective in reinforcing lessons taught by action.
From here, I’ll be making a general critique which applies to nearly all human thought, including modern human thought, on the nature of human being in its various aspects. And `critique’ is the right term—I’ll propose no answers and don’t think anyone can yet properly phrase questions which might lead to plausible answers. I’m working on those questions and hope to generate a framework for proper discussion of human nature, individual and communal, so that I can fill in the rough outline in my book: A More Exact Understanding of Human Being.
Much modern thought assumes a sort of reductionism, but one allowing a privileged position to being as organized in human individual being although there is no evidence from empirical science and even surprisingly little from the Bible or serious literature and history that such privilege is real. Under bad circumstances, which might be due to genetic or environmental traits. we are deeply fragmented creatures though always—so far as I know—striving to pull ourselves together or at least justifying our fragmentation in terms that salvage something of an `I’. There is the literature on the so-called split-brain (see Split-brain). There are also creative works, such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde—where the fundamental fragmentation was caused by a poorly formed conscience but Stevenson added an factor of a drug. I’ve also written a book A Man for Every Purpose in which there was a fundamental cultural division—Mom was a Norwegian Lutheran and Dad was a Jamaican of Pentecostal practice—and an added factor of a terribly painful, mind-twisting disease.
But my goal is not so much to cast doubt on the reality of human individual being as it is to open up human minds to the possibility—as a Christian, I’d say certainty—of the reality of human communal being.
Most reductionists (see Reductionism ), and probably most Nominalists (see Nominalism) would deny on principle the reality of human communal being. “Sure,” they might say, “there are ways in which groups of people act as if they form a true entity, but this is just a way of speaking `as if’, for convenience, for shorthand.” But most reductionists and nominalists accord a privileged position to individual human being, to the `I’ they feel to be.
To me, it seems the reality of a community is no more, and no less, puzzling than the reality of a fragmented man of biological pieces yet being a true, unified entity—if far from perfectly so. For both an individual human being and a communal human being, empirical reality seems to push upon us the necessity of treating as a real entity what acts as a real entity.
As a Christian, I believe in the reality of human communal being because the Body of Christ is the ultimate human community where each member remains an individual and yet is entirely the Body, that is, entirely Christ. That Body of Christ can’t come into existence unless it be possible for human beings to form true communities of a lesser sort in this mortal realm.
This is background to informally justify my claim that our human communal being is real, yet, I think there to be a difference: I think human communal being is still more of a potential at our birth than is our human individual being. We human beings have communal being in us when born, but some can be forced into a life largely lived as a loner perhaps because of some disaster or a psychological disability. The possibilities for human community, though constrained are great if not necessarily infinite. We can live in a tribe of shared thoughts never questioned or as a more cosmopolitan person with at least the possibility of both a well-developed individuality and also a rich and complex communal life. Even when we speak of a type of life, tribal or cosmopolitan, there are uncounted ways of actually manifesting those sorts of lives.
This is the point I’m driving at: we can’t analyze the development of the total human being as if there is some sort of preset `configuration’ of a human being with a contribution of, say, 40% from individual factors and 60% from communal factors. My feeling is that not only do those percentages change in different sorts of communal life but also the very structure of the total human being.
The reader should consider my understanding of created being as levels or realms beginning with that which God first created: the raw stuff of created being, the truths He chose for Creation. From this raw stuff, He shaped successively more concrete layers of being culminating in this concrete, thing-like world of narratives, even of moral order and disorder.
This forces, or should force, a different understanding of not only being but of also knowledge of created being—see Four Kinds of Knowledge for my understanding of the actual unity of knowledge of created being and the practical need for specialized fields of knowledge. This situation leads to both problems and opportunities for those wishing to explore God’s Creation, whether as physical explorers on the ocean blue or scientists probing the elementary constituents of matter or philosophers exploring various realms of created being from speculative versions of various viewpoints. I deny the modern—often implicit—viewpoint that the divisions between metaphysics and particle physics and farming are true and absolute: when one field of knowledge advances ahead of others, those other fields of knowledge can borrow true insight at an appropriate level of abstraction and travel down the road of concretization toward their own subject matter.
This is my general suggestion for developing a Christian understanding of Creation which respects both Christian revelation and modern empirical knowledge: let’s borrow from those fields of empirical science which have advanced far more rapidly than Christian thought in recent centuries.
I’m the early stages of studying and contemplating relevant fields of mathematics and also reading works of history and literature which might lead to inspiration and insight as I try to understand on its own terms a Creation which can now be seen as far more rich and complex than prior generations of men could have imagined. I’m groping my way in what is, for now, a foggy region. In my next essay, I’ll try to better justify this idea of moving up and down through levels or realms of relatively more abstract or more concrete being in terms of modern mathematics and an apparent turn to qualitative knowledge, often geometric in a general sense.