C.S. Lewis On Astro-Ethics

The field of ethics in astrobiology and space exploration is small but growing.  Does anyone own the rights to the moon?  Who may profit from resources found on asteroids, or on other planets?  What obligations, if any, do we have to other species we may one day encounter?

C.S. Lewis was well ahead of his time in considering these questions.  As Matthew Dickerson and I have discussed at some length, Lewis's novel Out Of The Silent Planet takes up questions like these.  Lewis worried that our stories and myths about space exploration made aliens into monsters and made us into conquering heroes, when the facts could really be quite the reverse.  He was not sanguine about the likelihood that we would treat other species ethically: 

“We know what our race does to strangers. Man destroys or enslaves every species he can.Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage man. Even inanimate nature he turns into dust-bowls and slag-heaps….I therefore fear the practical, not the theoretical, problems which will arise if ever we meet rational creatures which are not human.”* 

We often make ethical decisions based on appearances, but resemblance to us shouldn't be the basis for considering other species to be rational agents or patients.

His prescription must have seemed wildly impractical, namely that we begin preparing ourselves to encounter other sentient species by teaching ourselves that they may be every bit as worthy of life and God's love as we.  One need not believe in God to see the significance of such a decision, since it amounts to deciding that other species have claims to rights that are every bit as strong as our own.  Here is Lewis again:

"What I do know is that here and now, as our only possible practical preparation for such a meeting you and I should resolve to stand firm against all exploitation and all theological imperialism. It will not be fun. We shall be called traitors to our own species. We shall be hated of almost all men; even of some religious men. And we must not give back one single inch. We shall probably fail, but let us go down fighting for the right side. Our loyalty is due not to our species but to God. Those who are, or can become, his sons, are our real brothers even if they have shells or tusks. It is spiritual, not biological, kinship that counts.” ** 

"Even if they have shells or tusks"

Astro-ethics isn't the same as astropolitics, though Lewis's prediction is that if we ever find another sentient species, the two studies would come together quickly. If this all seems impractical and irrelevant - as even astrobiology does to some people - let me insist that this is not idle ivory-tower speculation.  Astrobiology and exobiology help us to understand our own home better by forcing us to rethink the boundaries of life, which helps us to look for life in places we previously thought there could be no life, like deep-sea vents, deep underground, and under Antarctic ice. Out of the Silent Planet was the first of a trilogy; the third book brought the ethical issues home again.  Thinking through a fantasy of meeting alien species can provide a proxy for meeting others here on earth, and for beginning to recognize the importance of treating the other inhabitants of this terrestrial ball ethically.

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*(“Religion and Rocketry,” available here)
**(“Shall We Lose God In Outer Space?” Great Britain: SPCK, 1959. 10) Emphasis added.

The Other Drones Problem: The Tragedy of the Unexplored Commons

John Brennan's nomination hearings brought about a slew of articles about drone warfare.  On the one side, people like William Saletan in Slate argue that drones (or UAVs) minimize civilian casualties while safeguarding American soldiers.  Others, like John Kaag and Sarah Kreps in the New York Times remind us that the technological advances come with moral hazards we might not have anticipated.

But there is another ethical issue related to UAVs that doesn't have to do with war.  Or, if it does, it has to do with a "war against crude nature."

The technologies we invent in wartime don't go away when the conflicts end.  Already, UAVs are being deployed for a number of other uses, and we can expect their uses to increase.  I'm no flag-waving Luddite here.  The things we invent can be put to diverse uses, some helpful and some harmful.  But if we care about promoting the helpful uses, we'll need to be intentional about that.

UAVs are a brilliant platform for remote-sensing technologies.  They can cover a lot of ground and stay aloft for a long time. Drone aircraft are adding to our ability to conquer unknown spaces.  If you've used Google Maps to explore places you've never been before, you know what an aesthetic boost and letdown this can be: it's a boost to see what you've never seen, and at the same time, we find ourselves sharing Aldo Leopold's lament in "The River of the Mother of God": the unknown places are being replaced by maps, and our deep genetic need to explore runs up against the feeling that everything has already been seen.  When I lived in Madrid, I tried to make places like the Retiro park my places of natural exploration and solitude, but I couldn't escape the feeling that I was treading where millions of others had already trod.

We have a deep need for exploration, and so we need places that feel unexplored.

But that is a small worry compared to the bigger issue of the world's oceans and natural resources.  For the whole history of our species we have been able to act as though the world contained unlimited resources.  Our species is an explorer species.  We have "restless genes," as a recent National Geographic article put it.

Gone is the age of Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea.  We no longer take to the seas in small craft and fish commercially with handlines.  The last century has pushed fishing fleets thousands of miles from the places where they will ultimately bring their catch to market.  We can no longer treat the oceans as limitless resources; we are fishing them out, and some species may collapse under the pressure and never come back.

In the race to find the last remaining schools of fish, we are beginning to use UAVs to scour the seas.  Where fishermen once looked for birds circling schools of sardines, robot airplanes now skim the waves and do the searching for us.

At the crossroads

Ethicists and game theorists refer to this as the "tragedy of the commons": if we each only take resources in proportion to what we can use, the resources can be shared indefinitely.  But if some of us take more than our share of the "commons" or the resources, they will have a short-term gain at the expense of the long-term gain of everyone.

The STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) are brilliant, and wonderful.  New technologies give us new access to the world, and they can save and improve lives. But they lack the ability to regulate themselves, which is why as the STEM fields grow, we need the humanities (and their critiques of technology) to grow with them.  If we are not careful, new technologies can also permit us to do great harm to our common world - and to ourselves.  If fish seems cheap and plentiful, stop to ask where it came from, and whether that source is sustainable.  If it's not, vote with your dollars and eat something else.

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 Here is one of my favorite sources of fish news.

Happy Praise

I recently read this line in the Book of Common Prayer, in the BCP's translation of the Phos Hilaron prayer.  The Phos Hilaron is one of the oldest Christian hymns:  

"Thou art worthy at all times to be praised by happy voices, O Son of God, O Giver of Life..."

It needn't be translated that way, by the way.  It could be translated as "reverent voices" or "opportune voices."  I like this translation, though.  The sentiment is positively Epicurean.  Consider the opening line of Epicurus's Kuriai Doxai*:

 "What is blessed and indestructible has no troubles itself, nor does it give trouble to anyone else..."**

In Epicurus's view, a god that is petulant or demanding is a god that is needy and manipulative.  Such gods may force us to make sacrifices, but they won't earn our praise so much as our derision and scorn.  A god worthy of the name is one that needs and demands nothing for itself.

I'm preparing a scholarly article on St Paul's response to Epicurean philosophy, one I hope to publish soon.  For now, I will summarize one of its points: Christians and Epicureans disagree about the imperturbability of the divine (Christians disagree among themselves about this as well) but they agree that if something can't be praised with gladness at least sometimes, then it's probably not worth praising at all.

This is not just abstract philosophy or theology; it matters for all of life.  We are all always engaged in worship, as David Foster Wallace once said.  We don't get much choice about that.  We do have a choice about what we worship - what we ascribe worth to. We do that all the time when we vote, when we spend and invest our money, when we decide what our laws should be and what our children should learn.  We constantly make decisions about ends that should be pursued, and these are all acts of worship.

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* We usually translate this "Principal Doctrines."  The word "kuriai" or "kurios" means "principal" and has the same breadth of resonances and meanings as that word: princely, first and foremost, primary, authoritative.  The word "doxai" or "doxa" has a similar breadth of meanings, ranging from opinion or estimation to reputation and even glory.  The Epicurean title kuriai doxai would have sounded familiar to early Greek-speaking Christians, for whom it would have sounded like "Lordly glories."  The familiar prayer Kyrie eleison is related to the word kurios or kyrios.

** Diogenes Laertius, 10.139; from The Epicurus Reader, Brad Inwood and Lloyd Gerson, translators.  (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994) p. 32.

Have We Met?

This weekend I found myself standing next to an older woman I've met a number of times before.  For a moment, I struggled to remember where we'd met, then it hit me: she has taken a few of the classes I've offered for senior citizens from time to time.  As I recall, she's always been a great student, though I confess I'm having trouble remembering her name right now, and feeling a little sheepish about my memory.

As it turns out, she has it even worse.  When I greeted her, she asked me with her usual winning smile, "Have we met?" I told her we had, and where we had met.  She said she had no recollection, and I thought she must be joking.  Then she added that she has recently suffered a head injury and has lost her memory.  She remembers that she once had such a powerful memory she was reluctant to tell people how much she remembered, lest she appear to be boasting.

Now she has very little of that memory left.  She was cheerful, as always, but I thought maybe a little sad at what she had lost.

A little earlier in the day I had been speaking about C.S. Lewis and ecology to a church group.  There I spent some time reflecting on a passage in Lewis's novel Out Of The Silent Planet where Hyoi cannot understand Ransom's culture. What kind of people would insist on having a pleasant experience again and again, Hyoi asks.  Isn't that like wanting to hear a single word from a beautiful poem over and over, but not the whole poem?  Isn't memory a part of the pleasure?

I have often taken comfort from that passage, since Hyoi's position is that growing old is not a loss but a gain, just as it is a gain to listen to a full symphony and not just the overture.  Perhaps this is why we fear losing our memories: as the symphony of life approaches the finale sometimes we forget the overture.

As my former student turned to go, I told her "It's nice to meet you - again."  She smiled, and walked away.

Pragmatist Scripture: Peirce and The Book of Acts

A few months ago a friend who is interested in both scripture and philosophy asked me which scripture mattered most to Charles Peirce.  One obvious answer would be the writings of John, the gospeller of agape love, since agape plays such a great role in Peirce's philosophy.

The Book of Acts has recently come to mind as another strong candidate, for several reasons.  I plan to write about all this in more detail soon, but I'll use this space to jot down my thinking quickly, in order to make it available to anyone who might be interested, in the Peircean spirit of shared inquiry.

The Greek title of the Book of Acts is Praxeis Apostolon, or the Deeds of the Apostles.  We guess that the author of the text was the same as the author of the Gospel attributed to Luke.  The title might well have been added after the book was in circulation for a while, but that's probably inconsequential.  It occurred to me recently that this text begins with reminding us that the author wrote a previous book about "the things Jesus began to do and to teach," and then it narrates, without further introduction, the things that the first Christians did after Jesus' death and resurrection.

In other words, it is a book of acts, of deeds.  It is a book of narratives about what people did.

Which is to say that it is not primarily a book of prayers, or of songs, or of doctrines.  It tells a story, without much attempt to interpret that story.  And it is the story of a community learning to work together, and learning how it must adjust its doctrines in light of the community's expansion across and into cultures, and in light of the surprising things they find the new community is empowered to accomplish.

This is appealing to Pragmatists like Peirce, who are more concerned with the way decisions lead to actions than with fixing metaphysical doctrines and whose notions of truth, ethics, and metaphysics are more experimental and transactional than systematic and permanent.  Pragmatists are given to the idea that it is good for communities to work with tentative, revisable and fallible tenets, ever striving to improve their practices as the community grows.

*****

Peirce is not exactly easy to read, which helps to explain why most of what he wrote remains unpublished even a century after his death.  Nevertheless, the patient reader of Peirce is often rewarded by a writer who took words very seriously.

Some of the words he used to great effect in his lectures and essays are derived from the Book of Acts.  Among these phrases are a phrase he uses in his 1907 essay "A Neglected Argument For The Reality Of God," and one that comes at the end of his Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898.  The phrases are "scientific singleness of heart," and "things live and move and have their being in a logic of events."   See Acts 2.46 and 17.28 for the sources of these two phrases.  (The first one might also have come to Peirce through the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, as I have argued elsewhere.)

Two such phrases are not enough to make the case that Peirce was dependent on the Book of Acts, but thankfully that's not the case I'm trying to make.  Peirce was well read and he cited other portions of scripture and, of course, many other books, after all. I only want to suggest that Peirce might have found the Book of Acts to be a scripture that resonates with his Pragmatism.

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That being said, I wish to point to one figure in the middle of the Book of Acts who might be taken to be a kind of Pragmatist saint: Epimenides.

I won't belabor that point here, as I have already written about it elsewhere.  I'll only add that Epimenides appears to be the unnamed source that St Paul appeals to and cites in Acts 17.28.

The Cost of War

What is the true cost of war?  It is not the cost of the materiel, training, salaries, and post-war reconstruction.  It is not factored in costs of healthcare, in the rise or fall of GDP or due to manufacturing losses or gains.  The true cost of war - which I cannot begin to calculate - must be in the dreams of those who survive.

*****

My grandfather wore a .45 caliber pistol at his hip when he fought in the Pacific theater in WWII.  The trigger guard was shot off.  He kept that pistol until he died. It was a kind of reverse sacrament, an outward and visible sign of an inward, invisible wound, of a bullet that nearly ended his life, of the bullets and bombs that ended so many others.  To me, he was a hero, but I wonder if he was ever able to see himself that way.

As a young child I asked him, in wonder, if he had ever seen a man die in war.  I did not know what I was doing.  He was a good man, and a kind one, but that question drew from him the most anger I ever saw in his eyes or heard in his voice.  "Of course I have!" he shouted.  He got up from his chair and left the room, leaving me with my firmest impression of war, of anger and pain stored up for thirty years, like the shrapnel in his back that set off airport metal detectors until his death in the late 1980s.

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My neighbor Bob died a little while ago.  His father fought in the first World War, and when Bob wanted to sign up to fight the Germans, Bob's father begged him not to go.  Bob went, and entered the war at the Battle of the Bulge, "my baptism by fire," Bob once told me.  When Bob's son signed up to fight in Viet Nam, Bob begged him not to go.  Jim went anyway.  Three generations of men survived wars, each one eager never to see it again.

I sat next to Bob at a Christmas party ten years ago.  On his other side sat another veteran of the Great War.  They huddled close and whispered loudly, as old men do, thinking I could not hear.  I looked away to preserve their imagined secrecy, but could not help hearing bits of the stories they could speak of only with one another.  The war was sixty years behind them, but their voices still trembled as they unburdened themselves in that moment only brothers in arms can share.  I recall Bob saying this:

"...I checked on my men, and they were fine.  I turned and began to walk away when the shell fell, right between them in their machine gun nest.  All three were killed instantly.  I had been speaking to them just a moment before, and now they were gone...."  Both men were silent for a while after that.  The men were gone, but their deaths lived on and on in Bob's dreams.

*****

That cost, that's what I find impossible to calculate: the cost of asking men to carry in their hearts and in their dreams all of the deaths of other men.  I do not know how they carry it all. I do not know how we can lightly ask others to carry it anew.

*****

If you don't know his work, let me recommend Brian Turner's book Here, Bullet.  He's a young veteran and a brilliant poet who writes about his experience as a soldier in Iraq. 

All Your Deeds

I just read the seventy-third psalm.  I don't understand much of it, but it begins with a complaint about injustice, and I certainly feel like I get that part.

The last line caused me some trouble, though. In it Asaph, the psalmist, says "I will tell of all your [God's] deeds."

Okay, what exactly are those deeds?  What can we ever reliably say about God's deeds?  If God had done something in history that were not open to historical doubt, there would be no atheists.

The tradition gives us stories about God, and a century of biblical criticism calls those stories myths.  Still, as I have argued elsewhere (here, and here, for example) myth is not - or should not be taken as - a synonym for falsehood.  Stories may be myths and true, even if not historically true.


As Howard Wettstein argues in his Significance of Religious Experience,

The Bible’s characteristic mode of ‘theology’ is story telling, the stories overlaid with poetic language.  Never does one find the sort of conceptually refined doctrinal propositions characteristic of a doctrinal approach.  When the divine protagonist comes into view, we are not told much about his properties.  Think about the divine perfections, the highly abstract omni-properties (omnipotence, omniscience, and the like), so dominant in medieval and post-medieval theology.  One has to work very hard—too hard—to find even hints of these in the Biblical text.  Instead of properties, perfection and the like the Bible speaks of God’s roles—father, king, friend, lover, judge, creator, and the like.  Roles, as opposed to properties; this should give one pause. (108, emphasis added)

The stories may not be about historical "deeds" but may be about the character, the roles of God.

Which makes me wonder: what roles does God play in my life?  What "deeds" may I speak of?

The preface to the complaint in Psalm 73

Before I reply, let me hasten to say this: I am often reluctant to write too strongly about this sort of thing because I do not want to say that others must believe what I believe.  If God has led me to belief, (grant me that for the sake of argument for a moment) God has not strong-armed me into belief but allowed me to arrive at my beliefs over time, letting them be shaped by experience.  I do not see why I should allow you less liberty than God has allowed me. 

So I write the following admitting that I do not know what I am writing about.  As Augustine confessed, when I speak of my love for God, I do so simultaneously wondering what I mean by "God."  What can I compare God to?  What is God like?  I do not know how to answer those questions, except by telling stories, expositing roles. So here goes:

When I was a child, belief in God motivated a family in my neighborhood to care about me and to welcome me into their home when my family was falling apart. Without that love...I shudder to think what I would be today.

God gives me a name for what I pray to.  God gives me a focal point for my attention in the vast cosmos, and God gives me a sense that in such a cosmos persons matter.  And because persons matter, justice matters.  This is not to say one cannot be just without belief, or that belief makes one just - far from it! - only that I find for myself the two ideas closely bound together.

God gives me solace in my mourning and hope when I pray. My mother is dead, but when I speak to God about her, she is not lost.

God gives me a story about the centrality of nurturing love.  A reason to think all things are related.  Someone to thank.  Someone to be angry with.  Rest for my soul.  Quietness, and in it, trust.

God gives me a story about giving, and why giving and receiving should matter so much.

A story about why, and how, to turn a guilty conscience into repentance.  A reason to forgive, and, very often, the strength to forgive.  And to hope that I too am forgivable.

A reason to hope that no one is beyond redemption, beyond all hope, completely unworthy of love.

Belief that every person matters.  More than that, belief that a teenage girl could be a vessel of the divine; that a third-world martyred prophet could save the world; that an inarticulate foreigner could be a world-historical lawgiver; that a persecuting zealot could get hit so hard by grace that he lives the rest of his life to preach good news for all people everywhere.

Hope that prison doors could be opened, that tongues could be loosed, that great art and great music might be signs of the divine.

I could be wrong about all of this, I know.  I know there are other explanations of what I have written above.  I also know those explanations apply to music, too, and I'm not interested in hearing about them there either if the reason for offering them is to help disabuse me of my love for good music.  I know that people use the same word I use here to justify violence, self-interest, and hatred.  I cannot help but feel angry and disgusted when it is used for those ends, ends which seem so contrary to what the word means for me, ends that make me think someone has read the wrong script, mis-cast the character, not known what deeds God has done.

Worries Incompatible With Wisdom

Here is a thought-provoking perspective on the value and aims of studying the liberal arts.  Imagine a university promoting itself in this way today, saying, in effect, "You should study the liberal arts, and most likely this will help you not to worry about the wrong things."

“While there are many sorts of arts, the first to proffer their services to the natural abilities of those who philosophize are the liberal arts….The liberal arts are said to have become so efficacious among our ancestors, who studied them diligently, that they enabled them to comprehend everything they read, elevated their understanding to all things, and empowered them to cut through the knots of all problems possible of solution….They are called “liberal” either because the ancients took care to have their children [liberos] instructed in them; or because their object is to effect man’s liberation, so that, freed from cares, he may devote himself to wisdom. More often than not, they liberate us from cares incompatible with wisdom. They often even free us from worry about [material] necessities, so that the mind may have still greater liberty to apply itself to philosophy.”*

This is one of the things you don't need to worry about.

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It may not be immediately obvious that there are cares that are "incompatible with wisdom," but it doesn't take too much reflection to see that there are certain kinds of worries that we really are unwise to cling to.

My dog worries about hot-air balloons. I do not know why, but that's okay.

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I don't think that "cares incompatible with wisdom" means "foolish cares." John is not simply being polite; he is also being compassionate, and acknowledging that we do not generally choose our troubles, and it can take training, and hard work, not to worry about them.  Sometimes, worrying isn't even a choice, and we should be slow to damn those who worry uncontrollably.

*****

*John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon. Daniel D. McGarry, trans. (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2009) Book I, ch 12. P. 37.