Dialogue on Suffering

[Begin full fiction mode. This was based on nothing but my imagination. To pretend to be not totally arrogant, I’m going to put my arguments in the mouth of the character Paul. But even that’s pretty presumptuous. I suppose that’s an inherent problem with dialogue. It’s like playing chess with yourself. Of course you’re going to win. So watch as one figment of my imagination totally works another. So here goes another attempt at this medium:]

I was walking with my good friend Paul (he’s from a place called Tarsus, right off I-5, if you know where that is). We were enjoying the crisp January air when we saw our mutual friend, Job.

“Good day, Job!” said I.

“What is good about it?” he asked.

“Light and life and breath, to begin with,” said Paul. “We live in a wonderfully ordered world under an astonishing heaven ruled by a Good God.”

“Good God?” asked Job sarcastically. “How can you dare to say that? And to me, of all people? Don’t you know that He killed my ten children? Don’t you know that this has been my daily torture for these long years?”

“Dear Job,” said Paul, “I have wept with you about your children. And I have walked with you through those valleys. But this attitude is unbecoming. What alchemy has transmuted your sadness into anger? What has made the pure cold gold of mourning into the boiling lead of rage?”

“It is only rational,” Job retorted. “Rage is the only proper response to so blatant an offense. What have I done to deserve this? What possible good is it accomplishing? And even if there is some good, could it not be accomplished with less suffering?”

“These are all excellent questions,” said Paul. “To answer them, I will need to tell a story and you will need to do a bit of imagining. Would you like me to answer your questions?”

“Though I know it is a dangerous thing to do with you, I will play your game.”

“Wonderful!” exclaimed Paul. “Imagine a woman is pregnant. The pregnancy is complicated and the woman dies in childbirth. The woman’s husband and now father of the child names him Jamal. Jamal’s doctors notice that he looks blue. He is worked up and diagnosed with Tetralogy of Fallot, a birth defect of the heart. Untreated, Jamal has slightly better than even odds that he’ll make it to his fourth birthday and almost no chance of seeing adulthood. The doctors tell Jamal’s father that there is a cure, but it will require multiple, painful heart surgeries. What should Jamal’s father do?”

“He should get the surgeries.”

“But wait,” said Paul. “He is causing terrible pain to his own son. He’ll have to spend countless days in a nightmarish hospital, away from the sounds and sights and smells of home. It will involve a hundred needle sticks that Jamal will not understand, tape and tubes, beeping and buzzing. For his first few years of life, Jamal will several times be thrown into a whirlpool of confusion and pain.”

“Yes. But it will be for his own good. Several short years of pain will lead to a tenfold longer life.”

“Alright. But shouldn’t we get the consent of someone before performing a procedure on them?” asked Paul.

“If it is possible. But here, it’s not possible.”

“Why not?”

“Because Jamal cannot understand,” said Job. “He doesn’t understand about the genetic inheritance patterns, ventral septal defects, the failure to adequately oxygenate blood. He can’t even know about adequate hydration and the need for a needle stick and IV fluids, let alone the complexities of cardiothoracic surgery. ‘Informed consent,’ requires that a person understand at least the very basics of their condition and the procedure. Jamal, being a newborn, cannot understand these things. His father must make the decision for him.”

“So you think that when someone cannot give informed consent, the decision should fall to another?”

“Yes. In this case, the father is clearly the one who has the responsibility to care for him and to make decisions on his behalf until he is old enough to make his own decisions.”

“So now imagine,” said Paul, “that it’s four years down the road, and though he should be cured, Jamal’s case is complicated and he needs one final surgery. He’s now old enough to fear hospitals and hate doctors. Jamal’s father tells him, ‘Jamal, we need to go to the hospital again to get you healthy.’ This time Jamal pleads, ‘No! I won’t go! It hurts! Why are you hurting me, Daddy?’ What could the father reply? After the reply, what should he do?”

“There isn’t much he could say that would satisfy Jamal. He could say, ‘Jamal, I know it hurts, but it is what is best for you. Do not worry, because I will be there with you, and I will suffer with you.’ And then, whether Jamal likes this answer or not, he should still take him for the surgery.”

“So even in this case when Jamal has clearly against the idea, his father should do his best to explain it, promise to be with him, and do it anyways.”

“Yes.”

“So,” said Paul, “We have established that because a child lacks understanding, certain decisions should be made on his behalf. Now what if Jamal asked, ‘Daddy, if I have to go, can you ask the doctors to make it hurt less?’”

“The father should reply, “Jamal, they are already doing everything they can to make it hurt less. The cure for your sickness requires a lot of pain. If there were a better cure, don’t you think I would have chosen it?’”

“So long as the father is minimizing pain in his attempt to reach a good end for his son, he is justified in causing it. Is Jamal capable of knowing if a given needle stick is a required part of his medical care?”

“Of course not,” said Job.

“What about the number of surgeries? Can he know by the apparently gratuitous number of his surgeries that his father is actually not loving?”

“It would be impossible. Such a question is difficult for health policy experts, let alone for four-year-old children.”

“It this is impossible, wouldn’t it also be impossible for him to then to know that his father loves him?” Paul asked.

“No. Jamal can see it. He can feel it. Most of all, when he sees his father suffer with him. When he cries at a prick, his father’s face looks as if it were hurt. The promise I put in the father’s mouth at the beginning, that he would always be with Jamal, is perhaps the greatest proof of love when it is fulfilled.”

“But can he prove that his father loves him?”

“Love is not the sort of thing that can be demonstrated by mathematical or scientific proof. It is something that is sensed on a deeper level. Jamal can know it, but he cannot prove it.”

“So,” said Paul, “We’ve established that the father should act in Jamal’s best interest, regardless of how painful it might be.”

“Yes.”

“And we’ve agreed that Jamal would have no adequate understanding of his condition to make any judgments.”

“Yes.”

“And finally, we’ve shown that even though he lacks understanding, he can still know that his father loves him through his pain.”

“Yes.”

“Now allow me to tell the story in a different way,” said Paul. “What if instead of a newborn named ‘Jamal’ we were talking about an adult named ‘Job.’ And instead of an earthly father, we were talking about God. A physical birth defect in the heart becomes a spiritual one. Jamal suffers for four years to gain 70 of life; Job suffers for 80 years to gain a millennium of life and more. Job, how is your position any different from Jamal’s?”

Job was silent for several minutes. His eyes darted to and fro, searching for an escape but finding none. Finally, with a reluctant tone, Job said, “I see your point: I am Jamal. I will have to reflect on this.” 

The three of us walked along the road together, enjoying the warm sun and bright blue sky.

Judging Evil

I’ve recently had a number of conversations about evil men and their evil deeds. As I’ve listened to the judgments cast on these men, I found myself silently disagreeing. Not with the badness of the men, but on the judgment of them. So I’ve had to reflect on why I disagreed.

Firstly, I think I disagree because of my view on what evil is. Evil committed by men is a mis-ordering of goods. Success in business is a very good thing; but you are greedy when you overemphasis on this success. You do indeed have great value as a human being; but you are guilty of being prideful when you value yourself more highly than you should. I believe every sin or evil deed is like that.

Men do what is right in their own eyes. Nobody does evil simply for the sake of doing evil. We can pick out unrealistic bad guys easily by their pure desire to do evil. Even sadists don’t do harm for the sake of harm; they do harm for the sake of pleasure, which, by itself, is a good thing. A person may do wrong knowing it is wrong, but it is because of some other good thing that is overvalued. An adulterer knows that adultery is wrong, but counts the pleasure greater (or gratified desires, or rebellion, or relieved boredom) than the value of lost faithfulness.

When considering bad people, I realized that the greatest evils don’t come from selfishness, but from foolishness. It comes from men who do not well think and pray through their motivations and actions. It came from bad philosophy (“love of wisdom”; philosophy in the Platonic sense). Nazis wanted a good thing: a strong Germany. Some of it was misplaced priorities (a strong Germany was more important than a strong France). But the most vile part of it was strong and good ambitions mixed with very bad philosophy. In this case, Social Darwinism and Anti-Semitism inspired the Holocaust and good German ambitions were driven to very evil ends.

Similarly with Colonialism, it was originally motivated by a desire for richness for friends, family members and countrymen. Later, it morphed into badly-executed altruism. Kipling’s infamous poem, “White Man’s Burden,” relates this altruistic desire: “Take up the White Man’s Burden/ Send forth the best ye breed--/Go bind your sons to exile/To serve your captives' need.” But in the case of the Colonialists, even those with the good ambition “To serve [their] captives’ need,” were thwarted by racism (i.e. viewing the colonized as “captives”), and the result has been the Pandoric post-colonial world. It is their fault that I get asked a hundred thousand times by children in Kenya, using the only English phrase they know, “Give me money.”

As a result, I think it’s possible that men who have good hearts do harmful things. I think there were many benevolent men who were also colonizers. Some good men who destroyed continents may only be guilty of foolishness, if indeed they acted by benevolence. In fact, I myself may be one of them; men may look back in a century on development workers and show the terrors that were made possibly by our work. But I believe I will be judged good; my motivations are benevolent, though it may turn out that I am guilty of some foolishness.

So what does that mean for “evil men”? I face “evil men” on a daily basis. But how different are these men from me? How often do I mis-prioritize Goods? And how much of my goodness was just a historical and social accident? I was raised in a good time and by a good family. Would these men have been the way they are if they had my advantages? Moreover, is what I’m doing even Good in the long run? These questions cannot be answered by mortal minds. And I suppose this is why we are told “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

An old Christian-ism is when watching and evil person to say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” No person is special. No one is immune from the risks of sin and evil. And we cannot judge one another because we are all guilty of sin. Though sins do have different gravities, we as sinners do not have different categories. I am in exactly the same moral situation as the “worst of sinners;” even the best of sinners is still a sinner. All of us mis-prioritize.

I can (and should) look at actions and call them evil or good. But I cannot be certain, so I should not judge another; the proclamation of damnation and salvation is not my domain. We certainly need to make judgments on actions; we need to aspire to the good and fight the bad as best we are able. But for the purposes of ranking humans above or below myself, I can see neither the heart which produces an action nor the action’s ultimate outcome. I cannot look into the future to show what will come of his action. I cannot look at a man and presume to know his heart. Even if I could, I think I would be horrified by the lack of diversity in shades of black.

Note: I think I am totally ripping off C.S. Lewis with this essay. His ideas have so inspired my own I cannot identify which were originally planted by him.

Miniposts

My Friday-night "Overtopping" explosion has done no good. Ideas beget ideas! I was up to 17 pink notes a few hours ago. So I'll go super short. Here are a few stubs for ideas that should be developed. Comment if one of them strikes your fancy.

Salvation
There seem to be two senses of salvation. There is a sense in which we "have been saved" and another in which we "are being saved." It seems to me that with the past-tense part of salvation, we can also say we have been saved by faith; it is justification (Rom 8); it's focus is on our relationship to God: "Love the Lord thy God..."

The second sense is more dynamic and may seem to require works. This may be where the James "faith without works is dead" fits into salvation. This is sanctification. This 'being saved' depends on the first sense, but it's focus is outwards, on the second Great Commandment "Love thy neighbor as thyself."

If this were the case, both sides of Grace vs. Works would be right on salvation; it depends on the tense of 'saved.'

Life Expectancy at conception
We like to think of ourselves as civilized because our "life expectancy at birth" has gone way up after all our babies stopped dying from diseased we figured out how to prevent. But we would still look like barbarians if we calculated our life expectancy from conception, counting the millions who don't make it out of the womb because of abortion. Perhaps our life expectancy hasn't changed since the Dark Ages.

Axioms
We all have to make assumptions about our worldview. Do we have to assume God? In what sense can we 'prove' Him? I had a friend strongly disagree with the Cosmological argument on the grounds that we could not know the nature of the universe 'before' the beginning. I then made the argument that if we could not know before the beginning for certain, we must at least be agnostic about it; we would have to consign it to an axiom or assumption of our worldview.

Was this a valid argument? Are we able to be more confident about God's existence on purely logical grounds? Or is God an assumed precondition of the universe?

Evil Is Singularly Human
I was discussing the difference between Humans and the animals and I argued that our absurd (in Evolutionary terms) altruism was something that set us apart. After a bit of discussion on that, my discussants (<-- I thought I made that word up... spell check isn't underlining it) suggested that no other species commits acts of evil. After reflecting, I think I agree. We are the only gratuitously evil species. Even in cases where it is against our best interest (survival or social), we'll commit terribly evil acts. This, I think, supports the view that Man is a Moral being. That is, he has the capacity to go above and below the call of instinct. I previously only focused on how he went above it in altruism, not below it in malice. Whew
Down to 9 pink notes. Single digits. Now it's bedtime.