Jack Lewis, meet Matt Fox for an original blessing

Jack Lewis meet Matt Fox ... Matt, this is Jack. Matt, you may recall Jack by his nom de plume: CS Lewis. Now, I've brought you two together because you have both influenced me in a congruent way. I know it may be hard to believe, one of you apparently defending a Christian tradition that the other has found deeply alienating. Yet, actually I learnt a particular something from both of you and I find myself wondering how best to tell a story of human corruption against that background.

So, what is that particular something? Well, from you, Matt, I became convinced that we really do need to make sure that we tell the story starting with original blessing rather than making original sin the main and key point in our thinking. I became convinced mainly because that is where the Hebrew and therefore Christian scriptures begin; with "And God saw that it was good". But this is also where you come in, Jack. Because I had learnt something from you already which, over time, I realised was deeply congruent with the idea of original blessing. From you I had learnt in my undergraduate reading, that we must understand evil as derived, unoriginal and merely parasitic on the Good. Evil cannot be thought of in a dualistic way as somehow 'being' an equal and opposite force to 'good'. Your reasoning convinced me that behind every evil is a perverted or misused good; that evil is, in a sense a parasite feeding off what is good and unable to exist without goodness.

In this, I think, you are both united. Reality is fundamentally good and we are called to participate in that fundamental goodness, and indeed to tend it and help multiply it. This is our human calling before any other calling: to be blessed and to bless in turn. I actually think both of you would probably agree with that, in broad terms, leaving aside quibbles about terminology or which metaphors might be most apt and resonant.

What I want to do with this conversation is think about where we go next in terms of accounting for what has tended in the Christian tradition to be called 'sin'. Though, to be sure, there have been and are other terms for it and a variety of images to think it through.

You see, I think that a further dimension of what I think Matt has got right in all this is to be critical of where the fall-redemption model, as he tends to call it, sometimes (indeed, often) pushes Christians and those influenced by that way of thinking. On the other hand, what you, Jack, do really well in so many of your books is explore the inner world of sinning in a way that helps us to see how sinning is a non-dualistic thing. It's not an alien force that takes us over so much as a directing of drives and desires that in other circumstances and dealt with differently would be simply an ordinary good. What you also do is help us to see that there is a fundamental surdity about it. These things would sit well enough, I suspect, with the fundamental right insight behind the idea of original blessing.

So, in future blog posts, I hope to try to tease this out a bit further: what is sin in a non-dualistic account, recognising that so much popular thinking about sin is at root dualistic, I think that may be what you were saying, Matt. I don't recall you saying that Jack, but as I indicate above, I think that your approach amounted to that.

Of egregores and angels

A little while back, Steve commented on a 'Powers' posting of mine to link the approach I tend to take to the concept of egregores. I think it could be helpful.Notes from underground: Of egregores and angels

The post Steve pointed me back to raises interesting questions and issues. I think part of my response is to say that I believe at this point that we should think of these entities as emergent and therefore as also defined by their 'worldly' forms. For me the parallel is in anthropology: just as mind and soul are emergent properties of our physical arrangement (I know that some will want to disagree with this, but I think it perfectly consonant both with Hebrew wholism and contemporary science and probably a modified Aristotelianism/Thomism) so are the Powers emergent from human institutions.

One of Steve's interlocutors raises the question of moral responsibility. I think that is where it gets interesting: because it seems that responsibility is 'smeary'. Actually we know this from experience. The thing is to recall that we remain individually responsible for ourselves even while we may participate in the Powers to varying degrees. Part of the point, it seems to me, of Paul's forceful language about the Powers is to make sure that Christians realise that we do not need to be subject to them; we can resist and we remain/become, therefore, moral agents even embedded in a socially-constructed reality. The aim here, it seems to me is to prevent the Powers (egregors) from subsuming human beings totally or to make sure we don't give ourselves over to them (a kind of fascism, I suppose). The Sabbath was made for humans not humans for the Sabbath; so with the Powers.

The interesting thing beyond this with regard to sin is that we would do well, I think, to recognise that part of the mechanism for the emergence of the Powers from human corporisations is our mimetic nature. That is we are 'programmed' to learn from one another and that learning is kicked off by imitative ('mimetic') behaviour even as babes in arms (and probably earlier). I have a hunch that this fact enables us to see a mechanism for human participation in the fall which isn't prey to the difficulties presented by, for example, Augustinian accounts of original sin. We have an account which does justice both to the 'given-ness' and 'participation in something prior to us' of sin and also to personal responsibility.

Children and parenting studies

A series of studies highlighted by science daily today focus on parenting and upbringing. First up:
Good Parenting Helps Difficult Infants Perform As Well Or Better In First Grade Than Peers:

"The key to first-grade adjustment for both difficult and easy infants was good parenting," said Anne Dopkins Stright, associate professor of human development at Indiana University"

Then here is a study on how mothering in the first couple of years affects general 'bidability';

The study found that children who had developed a close, positive, reciprocal, and mutually responsive relationship with their mothers in the first two years of their lives did much better in both respects--responding to their mothers' requests not to do something and regulating their own behavior--than children who hadn't developed such ties.

In terms of social policy these might mean that there could be savings in what it costs to deal with crime and disorder if we were to support early years' parenting. I would suggest that supporting families to be able to devote one parent to childcare might be worth considering.
Then there is the wider social environment, via its effect or at least influence on parents,

"This study does not show that poverty leads to bad parenting, which in turn leads to poor outcomes in children," according to Dafna E. Kohen, adjunct professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Community Medicine at the University of Ottawa, senior research analyst at Statistics Canada, and the study's lead author. "Rather, this study shows that in neighborhoods where there is socioeconomic disadvantage, children's verbal and behavioral outcomes are influenced by poor parental mental health and parenting behaviors."

See more here. In turn then, this suggests that thinking more carefully about neighbourhood renewal might be good. Once we know these things we should recall Jesus' words, "It would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea than for you to cause one of these little ones to stumble." which seems to me to imply a culpability before God if we make it harder for people to avoid sin...

And while we're considering that, we might want to contemplate the effects of socioeconomic deprivation on sexual activity among teens.

results revealed that school level socio-economic factors remain very influential even after individual pupils' socio-economic status is taken into account. Dr Henderson explained: ''School-level socio-economic factors, such as levels of deprivation, do have a big influence. This suggests that an individual who is deprived but attending a school with an affluent catchment area may be discouraged from sexual activity, whilst an affluent individual attending a school with a deprived catchment area may be encouraged towards earlier sexual intercourse."

So the Christian right's agenda would appear to be better served, in the light of research, by promoting social justice and diminishing socioeconomic differentials. There's a turn up for the books.

Evidence of peer and status effects

The tobacco advertisers have known this for years, but now the rest of us have the evidence...
"- The more an adolescent perceived that successful and elite people smoke cigarettes, the more likely that adolescent was to smoke.
- The more strongly an adolescent perceived that his or her parents or peers disapproved of smoking, the less likely that adolescent was to smoke.
- The more an adolescent overestimated the percentage of smokers in the general population, the more likely that adolescent was to smoke. "
It supports more generally the intuitions that we are indeed strongly influenced by our peers, our perceptions of 'norms' and the behaviour of those we deem to have status. It's mimesis. It's human nature. It's a mechanism of the propagation of sin.
ScienceDaily: How Normal Is Smoking? Teens Don't Know, But Their Guesses Affect Their Habits: