Month: May 2017

Full Moral Alchemists

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Caring about a loved one’s seemingly non-moral values may in fact moralize them according to a new study. The authors explain,

[W]e believe that many of our everyday moral anxieties center on cases where there is a conflict between our belief in any proposition (including morally neutral ones) and our belief that actions consistent with that proposition will upset someone we love. It is in this sense that love can lead to what we will call moral alchemy: caring for others (and indeed the moral obligation to do so) allows propositions with little or no moral weight in themselves to become morally charged. To be very clear, our hypothesis is distinct from the claim that our moral values depend on the values of our close others; many researchers have investigated the degree to which our sense of moral value is affected by moral contagion, or social affiliation (see e.g., Eskine, 2013; Haan et al., 1968; Haidt and Hersh, 2001 ;  Hofmann et al., 2014). Here we are interested in cases where although our own opinion about the actual rightness or wrongness of the behavior may remain unchanged, we nonetheless assign the behavior an elevated moral status.

They provide the following examples:

We will start with a trivial example: the moral status of Pogs. (For those of you who were neither a parent nor child in the 1990’s, Pogs are collectible colored disks, originally from bottle caps.) Clearly in the world at large, if someone steps on a Pog, uses one to prop up a table leg, or publically disparages them on national TV, he is morally blameless. He is morally blameless even if he knows that Pogs are valued by millions of school children in his culture. Suppose however, your child comes up to you and says, ‘‘Pogs are the best thing ever.” Most of us would be (morally) appalled if you replied, ‘‘Pogs are stupid” and snapped a Pog in two.

Of course what is bad in this example is hurting your child’s feelings, not hurting Pogs. Nonetheless, we suggest that the effect of moral alchemy is to (locally) change the moral status of Pogs. You cannot disregard them as objects worthy of care and attention without insufficiently valuing your child’s values…All that matters is that you knew he cared about Pogs and you did not take his utilities as your own. Note that this is neither moral contagion nor moral duplicity: you do not adopt your child’s attitude of valuing Pogs for their own sake but neither do you merely act ‘‘as if” you care about Pogs when you do not. Rather, insofar as, and for as long as, failing to care about Pogs would be hurtful to your child, you represent Pogs as objects worthy of care (e.g., you would likely feel guilty about intentionally destroying a Pog, even in private).

…It is after all, uncontroversial that people value idiosyncratic things and that morality requires respecting things that others value. However, we suggest that taken together, these commonplaces of human psychology play a key and underappreciated role in real life moral dilemmas, moral learning and moral change. Consider a proposition less trivial than ‘‘Pogs are the best thing ever.” Consider ‘‘Academic achievement is important.” For the sake of argument, let’s presume that within a given cultural context, this counts as a value but not a moral one: everyone concerned accepts that mediocre students can be morally unimpeachable. Suppose however, that your parents are among those who care about this (non-moral) value. If you underachieve in school, rip up your homework, and refuse to study for tests, are those moral transgressions or not?

The researchers tested the hypothesis that non-moral concerns could be moralized based on close relationships with the following steps:

• participants rated how much they cared about a set of behaviors.

• Next they rated how much a close other or an acquaintance cared about different items from the set.

• On a third set of items, they rated “how most people” would judge the behavior.

• Experiment 1 looked at permissibility judgments.

• Experiment 2 looked at whether the behavior was seen as a norm, value, or moral.

Their results?

Experiment 1 suggested that failing to engage in a behavior is perceived as “more wrong” by third parties when someone you care about cares more about the behavior than you do. Experiment 2 suggests that the behavior may also be perceived as “more moral”. To the degree that positive behaviors exist on a continuum of importance, with conventions regarded as relatively unimportant, values as moderately important (insofar as their importance varies from person to person), and morals as extremely important, believing that a loved one cares more than you about a behavior elevates the significance of the behavior, making conventions somewhat more like values and values somewhat more like morals.

The results further suggest that this was not due to a general elevation of the status of positive behaviors in the context of thinking about a loved one. Relative to participants in the Distant Other condition, participants’ ratings in the Close Other condition were only higher when they believed the loved one cared more about that kind of behavior than they did themselves. This is consistent with the idea that concern for the interests of close others makes us treat some behaviors more seriously than we otherwise would because failing to so value them risks interpersonal harm.

…[C]oncern for the loved one added moral importance to behaviors perceived as more important to their close other than the self, leading participants to elevate the moral significance of these behaviors to third parties.

Looks like we’re all full moral alchemists.

Image result for fullmetal alchemist brotherhood gif circle

 

Priesthood Authority vs. Priesthood Power

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This is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

We’ve made it to the Priesthood session of April 1976’s General Conference. Most of the talks were kind of blah for me, but President Kimball had a few interesting things to say:

Indecision and discouragement are climates in which the Adversary lives to function, for he can inflict so many casualties among mankind in those settings.

Image result for true story

The next bit stood out to me largely because of my research on the theology of work:

We hope you will make no less effort to fellowship those members and prospective members who are tradesmen and craftsmen. We must never come to feel in the Church that those who labor in the crafts and skills have somehow done less than they should. We are grateful, of course, for the many professional men in the Church and for those who are thought of as being in our white-collar occupations; but I want us to reach out more than we now do for the men—young and old—who labor in the so-called blue-collar skills, which are more essential to our society than many realize. Indeed, some of these skills are in short supply! Let us reach out in a special way to these men, for among them are many of our prospective elders whose strength and skills we need and whose families will fully affiliate only if these men come and join us in greater numbers.

I think there is something metaphysical about physical labor. Blue-collar work deserves more respect.

And finally:

Please avoid, even by implication, involving the Church in political issues. It is so easy, if we are not careful, to project our personal preferences as the position of the Church on an issue.

This was unexpected, especially given the recent debate over Mormon conservatism. But it’s a much-needed warning to not confuse political partisanship for discipleship.[ref]To be clear, I’m not accusing the authors of the Deseret News articles of putting politics before discipleship. I think politics should be influenced by religion.[/ref]

My favorite talk, however, was Elder Peterson’s. Look at the way he breaks down the difference between authority and power:

From [D&C 121:34-36] I understand that there is a difference between priesthood authority and priesthood power. Power and authority in the priesthood are not necessarily synonymous. All of us who hold the priesthood have the authority to act for the Lord, but the effectiveness of our authority—or if you please, the power that comes through that authority—depends on the pattern of our lives; it depends on our righteousness. Note again, “The powers of heaven cannot be controlled nor handled only upon the principles of righteousness.”

…If we live for it, ours can be a power given us from our Heavenly Father that will bring peace to a troubled household. Ours can be a power that will bless and comfort little children, that will bring sleep to tear-stained eyes in the wee hours of the morning. Ours can be the power that will bring happiness to a family home evening, the power to calm the unsettled nerves of a tired wife. Ours can be the power that will give direction to a confused and vulnerable teenager. Ours, the power to bless a daughter before she goes on her first date or before her temple marriage, or to bless a son before his departure for a mission or college. Ours, my young brethren, can be the power to stop evil thoughts of a group of boys gathered together in vulgar conversation. Ours can be the power to heal the sick and comfort the lonely. These are some of the important purposes of the priesthood.

When we have the power to bless families in some of the ways mentioned, then we are using this God-given authority for its most exalted purpose—to bind family ties and perform priesthood ordinances that will endure through the eternities.

For me, this focus on priesthood blessing families is rooted in Joseph Smith’s temple theology. It is about solidifying relationships in eternity, calling on the power of connection and love that transcends death. The approved words by the approved representative (authority) fall short without the meaning intact (power). It makes little sense to speak of eternal relationships via authoritative rituals if the very essence of the relationship has fizzled. This is why Peterson highlights the following when it comes to holding authority:

Many are the brethren who do not understand what these sacred words [D&C 121:39-40] mean:

We must not be inconsiderate;

We must not command;

We must not be dictators;

We must not become puffed up in pride.

These things are toxic to relationships.[ref]Peterson also states, “May I also suggest to you that it is important for the brethren to develop the same concern for the training of girls as they have for the training of the priesthood boys.”[/ref] And toxicity erodes the very essence of what priesthood is supposed to maintain.

Family First, Church Second

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

This is a principle that I have long suspected is true, but have not seen stated plainly very often. I think that’s because it’s an easy principle to misunderstand. God is the God of Nature. That’s true. But the idea that you can worship as easily in the woods as you can in the pews is false. It takes one true principle—God is the God of Nature—but forgets another—we are saved together and not alone. The important part of going to church is not the building or the pews.[ref]Anyone who has seen our pathologically ugly cinder-block meeting houses intuits this at once.[/ref] It is the other people sharing the building and the pews next to us.

Same basic idea here: the church exists to serve the family and not the other way around, but—perhaps—there’s a risk of the teaching being used as a rationalization to shirk responsibility that need not be shirked. In any case, I highlighted an awful lot of Elder H. Burke Peterson’s talk, with passages like this:

May I suggest that many of us have lost sight of one of the most important reasons for our holding the priesthood. To be an effective teachers quorum president, elders quorum president, bishop, or counselor is important—we spend many hours in training these officers. To perform the vital priesthood ordinances is essential. But even more important than all these is the need to learn how to use the priesthood to bless our families and homes.[Emphasis added. Then added some more.[/ref]

There’s always a risk of taking a single passage—or even a single talk—and making too much of it. One of the major reasons for this entire General Conference is precisely to avoid that. To see a large volume of prophetic preaching in context. But I don’t think I’m stretching too far because the centrality of the family is a central teaching across all the conferences we’ve read, even if it’s not always expressed in such start terms. Elder Peterson goes on:

If we live for it, ours can be a power given us from our Heavenly Father that will bring peace to a troubled household. Ours can be a power that will bless and comfort little children, that will bring sleep to tear-stained eyes in the wee hours of the morning. Ours can be the power that will bring happiness to a family home evening, the power to calm the unsettled nerves of a tired wife. Ours can be the power that will give direction to a confused and vulnerable teenager. Ours, the power to bless a daughter before she goes on her first date or before her temple marriage, or to bless a son before his departure for a mission or college.

Let me emphasize: these are not suggestion for auxiliary or optional exercise of priesthood power. This is it. Actions like these—the service of our family—is the whole point. It’s the rest—the Church and all its ordinances—that are appendages to the family, and not the other way around. Families are not God’s preferred method of raising new church members. The Church is an instrument by which God intends to reclaim His family. Or, as Elder Peterson puts it:

When we have the power to bless families in some of the ways mentioned, then we are using this God-given authority for its most exalted purpose—to bind family ties and perform priesthood ordinances that will endure through the eternities.[ref]Emphasis added.[/ref]

That—brothers and sisters—is what it’s all about. The whole point. I don’t think we get it. And I think the failure to grasp the correct priority, family then Church, is a major contributing factor leading to misunderstanding of so many of the moral issues where well-intentioned members are hoping for changes from the Church that, frankly, will never come.[ref]I have no grounds to make that claim authoritatively. I’m simply expressing my view of the implications of the theological primacy of the family in conjunction with the Church’s repeatedly-demonstrated willingness to fight and die on this particular hill.[/ref]

So, where does this lead? One more quote to leave on:

He who has developed the power and uses it to do the things we have mentioned will honestly consider the righteous desires of his family, even though they may not be exactly the same as his. He will listen to those in his home with the same attention he would give a priesthood leader. He will listen—even to the smallest child.

He will put his family’s welfare ahead of his own comfort.

He will learn to control himself. He will not use a quick temper as an excuse—he will rise above it. It needn’t always be with him.

He will understand that a soft answer turneth away wrath. His voice will never be heard in anger in his home; he will never punish in anger.

As one of his most significant attributes, he who has developed this priesthood power will not only by his thoughts but also by his actions give honor, respect, and dignity to the loveliest of the Lord’s creations—his daughters.

God knows I desperately wish my wife and my children could have a husband and father like the man described here. Since they’re stuck with me instead, it is my greatest desire to become that man.[ref]My second-greatest desire is for them to be able to forgive me for who I am in the meantime. My third-greatest desire is to be a world-famous author.[/ref]

I believe Jesus can fix what is broken, find what is lost, heal what is sick, and sanctify what is unholy. He has performed miracles with clay before. This is my faith: that He can do so again. If I can just learn how to let Him.

—

Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

An Upside to Trump?

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It’s no secret that I was, am, and will remain #NeverTrump. But two stories I saw today made me think of a possible upside to the Trump presidency.

Now, I’m not saying Coulter is turning on Trump because he endangers our relationships with allies by handing over intel that has been trusted to us to a third-party without permission[ref]And not just any third-party, but our strategic opponent in Syria![/ref]. She’s mad he hasn’t built that wall yet or what-not.

Still, the depth, breadth, and stunning intricacy of Trump’s incompetence is such that all those who backed him–the Ann Coulters and Sean Hannitys of the world–may take a serious, serious hit as Trump’s once bright star turns into a screaming, self-annihilating meteor crashing from the heavens.[ref]Let’s just hope it’s small enough not to take us all with it, yeah?[/ref]

This occurred to me today as I was driving around after 7pm when NPR has started playing weird jazz instead of news and talk, and so I flipped to AM radio and hear Sean Hannity. I’ve always disliked Hannity–even when I was at my right-wingiest–but tonight was different. I only caught a few minutes, but he was interviewing a guest about Hillary Clinton and (as far as I could tell) her emails.

Seriously. In 2017. With the election over. And Trump as president. And he was talking about Hilary. Clinton’s. Emails.

If that’s not the definition of sad irrelevance, I don’t know what is. The fever-swamp of paranoid right-wing alternative media conspiracy theory peddlers is a major reason we ended up with Trump. The idea that he takes a few of them down when he falls has a pleasing symmetry. Oh, I’m sure his hard core will praise him until the end, but their audiences will be much, much smaller.

Or so we can hope.

An Antidote for Smugness

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Suppose Frank and Joe get into a Facebook debate, and suppose Frank knows a lot more about the issue over which they’re disagreeing. Neither one of them is really an expert, but Frank has read a lot more and maybe even has some sort-of relevant background. The longer the discussion goes, the more he realizes that Joe doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.

Let’s give Frank the benefit of the doubt. He’s not just a victim of confirmation bias. Joe really doesn’t know that much about the issue, it’s evident in what he’s written, and Frank’s assessment on that score is accurate.

So, naturally, this can lead Frank to feel a little smug, and smugness is toxic. It’s a poison that clouds our thinking, alienates us from people who could be our friends, and fuels arrogance and pride.

Frank is self-aware enough to realize that he’s having this reaction, but–as it turns out–there’s more to good character than just being able to recognize your own bad behavior. It’s good to suppress an angry outburst, for example, but it’s even better to overcome the anger itself. Controlling behavior is nice, but shaping character is better. Unfortunately, character can’t be shaped directly. We have to come at it sideways and ambush our own bad character traits when they least suspect it. We have to–wherever possible–cheat.

So here’s an idea.

The reason that Frank knows more than Joe about this issue is that Frank took the time to research it. He read dozens of articles. Joe didn’t, and so Joe doesn’t know as much. Instead of attributing his superiority in this one realm to some kind of personal attribute, Frank should ask himself: “What was Joe doing with the time I used to study this issue?”

 

Maybe Joe is lazy, and Joe was just watching reality TV show reruns. Maybe Joe is actually very curious and diligent, and was using the same amount of time studying some totally unrelated topic which–if they discussed it–would quickly demonstrate to Frank what it feels like to be the one who doesn’t really get it. Or maybe Joe wasn’t  studying, but he uses his time volunteering to make his neighborhood a better place.

It doesn’t really matter, because–in practice–Frank will never know. The point of the question is to ask it, because asking it reframes the context of Frank’s smugness. It’s not about some kind of overall, general superiority of intellect. It’s about the simple fact that Frank spent time studying a particular issue, and Joe didn’t. This is a smugness antidote. On top of dispelling the person-to-person comparison, it raises questions for Frank, such as: Was studying this particular issue really that wise an expenditure of his finite time and energy? Maybe it was, but maybe it wasn’t, all things considered. This should make Frank a little uneasy. That’s healthy. Certainly fair healthier than smugness, at any rate.

I am not a very good person. This isn’t a statement of false humility. I suspect, all things considered, that I’m probably about average by most comparisons with others, although I’ll never really be sure.[ref]Assuming that I’m average seems a good rule of thumb, all things considered.[/ref] But that’s not the point. I don’t care about comparing myself with others; I care about the gap between who I am and who I’d like to be. And the person I’d like to be doesn’t have to devise strategies for decency or play tricks on himself to mimic virtue. That’s what I mean when I say I’m not a very good person.

But we don’t get to choose the kind of person we are. Not in an instant, anyway. We come into this world with a load of genetic and environmental baggage that, by the time we get around to being thinking, self-aware little human creatures, is already more than we could ever hope to sort through in a life time. All we can ever do is start where we are. Hopefully we make incremental steps in the right direction, but human character can’t be perfect in a life time. There’s the old expressions, “fake it ’till you make it.” We’re never going to make it. So we just have to keep faking it. Play-acting at being a good person–when it’s done out of a sincere desire to learn to be good–is the best we can hope for.

This is one technique I try to remind myself to use in that game, and I thought I’d share it.

The Economic Consequences of Political Partisanship

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Image result for partisanship

I’ve mentioned the tribal nature of politics before and its tendency to make us mean and dumb. Now check out the findings from a new paper:

In the first experiment, carried out in a nationwide online labor market, we assess whether partisan congruence between employer and employee influences the willingness of the latter to work, as well as the quality of work they perform. We do so by tracking the wage proposals and task performance of freelance editors when the document they edit indicates whether their employers are co-partisans or supporters of the out-party. Study 2 examines whether partisan considerations also affect consumer behavior. Specifically, we explore whether people are less likely to pursue an attractive purchasing opportunity if the seller is affiliated with the out-party, and more likely to do so if the seller is a co-partisan. We conducted another field experiment that uses an online marketplace to study this question in a more naturalistic setting, albeit one that relies on ecological inferences. Finally, we replicate these patterns in the context of an incentivized, population-based survey experiment, where we find that fully three-quarters of respondents are willing to forego higher personal remuneration to avoid benefitting the opposing party.

Taken together, our studies offer substantial evidence that partisanship shapes real-world economic decisions. All four experiments offer evidence that partisanship influences economic behavior even when there are real pecuniary or professional costs. Although the effect sizes vary somewhat across contexts, in some situations, they are quite large. For example, the effect of partisanship on reservation wages in the labor market experiment is comparable to the effect of task-relevant skills such as education and experience. In the marketplace, consumers are much more likely—almost two times as likely—to engage in a transaction when their partisanship matches that of the seller. In our survey experiment, three quarters of all subjects forego a higher monetary payment to avoid helping the other party. We show that these effects of partisanship are at least as large as the effects of religion, another well-known and salient social cleavage. Even among weak or leaning partisans, fully two-thirds of them reject the partisan offer. In sum, partisanship’s effect on economic decisions is not only real but often also sizable, extending throughout the electorate.

…The results underscore the power of partisanship as a social identity in an era of polarized parties—partisanship can shape apolitical behavior, including economic transactions. The results also call for paying greater attention to potential discrimination based on partisan affiliation. To date, few social norms are in place to constrain it, as they are with respect to unequal treatment along other social divides (e.g., race and gender). Our analysis suggests that partisan-based discrimination may occur even in the most basic economic settings, and as such should be the subject of more systematic scrutiny (pgs. 3-5).

Hooligans in action.

Solving Conflict With Business

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From the World Economic Forum:

Last year, the World Bank revised its position on conflict – upgrading it from being one of many drivers of suffering and poverty, to being the primary driver. In Somalia, despite some political progress, the conflict has put more than half the population in need of assistance, with 363,000 children suffering acute malnutrition. In Nigeria, conflict with Boko Haram in the country’s northeast has left 1.8 million people still displaced, farmers unable to grow crops, and 4.8 million people in need of food assistance. In Yemen, an escalation in conflict since 2015 has worsened a situation already made dire by poor governance, poverty and weak rule of law. Now more than 14 million people need food aid.

Only if we understand conflict can we understand these hunger crises…Across the places we work, where people are facing starvation, the pattern is the same. Hunger is not some freak environmental event; it is human-made, the result of a deadly mix of conflict, marginalization, and weak governance…In South Sudan, as in Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen it is not generally a lack of food that has caused famine-like conditions to occur. The crises exist because of violence and conflict. They don’t need more food, they need investment into conflict prevention and the stability that brings.

Who do they turn to to help stabilize these conflict-prone regions? Businesses:

The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Fragility, Violence and Conflict found that corporate partners can foster stable, inclusive and prosperous societies that respect the rule of law and benefit from accountable governance. Both local and multinational businesses can play an important role, often working alongside each other to support and grow local and national economies and, in the process, help support efforts undertaken by others to reduce fragility and conflict.

The WE Forum has highlighted the way businesses can foster peace before.[ref]You can find the referenced study here.[/ref] Business leaders should take note.

Death Note (2006-2007)

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This is part of What I’m Watching.

Image result for death note

Since I’ve been on an anime kick the last few months, I’ve been searching for various series and movies to gorge. My brother-in-law was recommended Death Note by a co-worker and he in turn suggested that we try it out. The premise is that a shinigami (god of death) drops his Death Note–a notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it–in the human world to alleviate his boredom. The notebook is discovered by genius high school senior Light Yagami. Following the book’s instructions, Light tests the notebook on a few criminals and discovers it’s inherent power is legitimate. His handling of the notebook also allows him to see the shinigami who initially dropped it. Quickly developing a god complex, Light becomes determined to shape a new world free of crime and evil using the notebook, eventually gaining media infamy and the nickname Kira (derived from the Japanese pronunciation of “killer”). The mass murder of criminals via (largely) heart attacks leads the world organizations to turn to an anonymous super sleuth that goes solely by the alias L. The two engage in a increasingly complex game of cat-and-mouse as the two seek to bring about their conflicting views of justice.

The story alone intrigued me. That’s what kept me going after the first episode. But it was the introduction of L and his first confrontation with Kira/Light in Episode 2 that made me go all in. You can watch it below.

 

Watching the two attempt to outsmart each other was exciting, at times jaw-dropping, and occasionally absurd. In fact, I loved the unorthodoxy of L so much that I ended up with a T-shirt (much to my wife’s dismay). Unfortunately, the freshness of the series wears off in the last 1/3 with its attempts to be more and more clever and the introduction of new, but unoriginal characters. Furthermore, the emotional impact of the show is a bit stunted due to a lack of true connection with any of the major players (the exception for me being L). Nonetheless, I was satisfied overall. Definitely worth checking out.[ref]A less-than-stellar-looking Americanized movie version will be released later this year by Netflix.[/ref]

Failing Forward

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Jesus walks on water, by Ivan Aivazovsky (1888, Public Domain)

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

I stopped reading the conference talks of the Saturday afternoon session when I got to Elder Maxwell’s talk, because I’ve learned that Maxwell talks are meant to be savored. His testimonies of Christ are always sincere, and are often frequently provocative in the best sense of the word. If you’re a Mormon adult, you’ve heard a lot of talks about Jesus. Like, a lot. So finding something new to say—without being trivial or silly—is hard. And also refreshing, when you find someone who can do it.

Of all the lines I highlighted from the talk—and there are a lot of them—here is the passage that meant the most to me:

I thank him now for the tender times, the jarring times, the perplexing times, and even for the times when my learning is so painfully public—lest in such moments to come I am too taxed to testify or too anguished to appreciate. [emphasis added]

I can’t fully explain why this passage means so much to me. I hope one day I can. For now, the best I can do is say that I love something about the idea that we recognize when our ideals outstrip our capacity, and we choose to fail forwards anyway. That is, I think, the quality I aspire to more than any other in life, and the one that affects me most deeply. It’s why I love the song, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” with that line, “Bind my wandering heart to thee.” It’s why I love Peter jumping overboard to walk on water, and then nearly drown. It’s even why I love this seemingly incongruous quote from Kurt Vonnegut, the most meaningful literary quote of my life so far:

I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored.

I made that joke, of course, before my first near-death experience — the accidental one.

So when my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, “He’s up in Heaven now.” Who really knows? I could have dreamed all this.

My epitaph in any case? “Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt.” I will have gotten off so light, whatever the heck it is that was going on

Let me give you just a little context for this Vonnegut quote. Vonnegut, as anyone who has read his books will know, was not a happy man. He was, in many ways, obsessed with the incomprehensible pain of life. That comes through in the quote a little bit, but maybe not enough if you’re not already familiar with Vonnegut. He is, after all, talking about laughing hysterically at a memorial service for a dead friend. He also mentions a near-death experience that was “the accidental one,” implying non-accidental near-death experiences. And there was one, he tried to kill himself in 1984. Other tragic experiences in his life include his World War II combat experience (his unit was overrun in the Battle of the Bulge with 500 KIA and 6,000 captured, on his to a prison camp his train was attacked by British planes killing 150 prisoners, and as a prisoner he was a witness to the aftermath of the firebombing of Dresden) and his mother committing suicide on Mother’s Day weekend when he was visiting on leave. Vonnegut was not a happy man, and yet his epitaph? “Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt.”

This is failing forward. It is aspiration beyond capacity, and knowingly so. It is the same kind of devotion that Elder Maxwell is talking, the same commitment to an idealism we know we cannot accomplish. The only real difference is that in Vonnegut’s case the aspiration is somewhat abstract while in Maxwell’s case it is reified in the person of Jesus Christ. But the underlying motivation—the willingness to fail forward, to shoot for the moon even though you know you’ll go down in flames, to eek every ounce of idealism out of our exhausted and overwhelmed selves—is the same.

I don’t know if I’ll ever accomplish anything genuinely good or useful in my entire life, but I hope I can do that. I hope I can say—along with Vonnegut—that everything was beautiful. That nothing hurt. That I got off light.[ref]That part is true.[/ref] And I will strive to pray—along with Maxwell—in gratitude for even the experiences that hurt while I’m capable of doing so, knowing that because of my own weakness I might not always be able to form the words.

—

Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

An “Anthem of Appreciation”

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This is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

It’s been a long time since I’ve participated in the General Conference Odyssey, but I’ve decided to repent and attempt to get back in the habit. So what offerings do we have from April 1976 Saturday afternoon session? We have Boyd K. Packer’s famous “Spiritual Crocodiles” talk, which has likely been drilled into the head of every seminary student (or maybe just every seminary teacher’s kid) thanks to the CES video from the 1990s. We have the newly-called Elder Haight dismissing (unintentionally, I imagine) the missionary folklore that all modern apostles have seen Jesus: “I have not seen, but I know. I have always known, but now I have received a greater assurance and pray that I will always know that this is the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, that it has been restored in our day, that God is a reality” (italics mine). Instead, he emphasizes personal revelation: “I pray the divine spark will develop into a firm knowledge and conviction in all of us, and that through personal revelation we will know that Jesus is the son of the living God, that President Kimball is the only man on earth who holds and exercises in righteousness the keys of the kingdom and is the mouthpiece of God on earth.”

This emphasis seems to be further solidified by the following talk by S. Dilworth Young on “the still small voice.” What I find interesting in most discussions of revelation that employ D&C 9:8-9 as a model is that “study it out in your mind” is either glossed over (as is the case with Young’s talk) or given bare minimum attention. I’m reminded of an MTA presentation by independent historian Don Bradley in which he states,

Perhaps our approaches to the spiritual and temporal should reciprocally inform each other. Maybe instead of just transferring the simplicity with which we often approach spiritual problems to deal with temporal problems, we should transfer some of the complexity and rigor we’ve developed in dealing with temporal problems to how we engage spiritual problems. In temporal problem-solving we take for granted that we might need to learn methods and practice, practice, practice in order to hone skills. Yet, in spiritual problem-solving we seem to expect that God will do all the work except for the nominal “studying out” the problem in our mind, after which God is obligated to give us the right answer…We expect that calculus will be hard, but that gaining revelation from God Almighty will be easy. One implication of the intimate relationship of temporal and spiritual is that lessons learned in our temporal lives may have relevance for how we pursue our spiritual lives.

As for John H. Vandenberg, he dropped a nice quotable slogan: “A true principle discovered, properly applied, brings a correct result.” This followed an interesting story that could’ve been a case study by experimental psychologists like Dan Ariely. Readers of Theodore Burton’s talk on the Word of Wisdom would be better off reading some of the scholarship and historical research on the subject.

Now on to the good stuff by Elder Maxwell.

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I love the way Elder Maxwell speaks. Even though the topic isn’t anything new, he packs it with so many choice words and qualifying phrases that convey a deeper understanding of both the gospel and the world at large. The implications behind his words are powerful, at least to me. Here are a few highlights from what would otherwise be a run-of-the-mill chronological testimony of Jesus Christ:

  • Thus, foolishness, fear, and fashion have flattened the theology of many. For them, there is neither shelter nor landmark on the horizon: In 1972, the book Why Conservative Churches are Growing was published, arguing that theologically conservative churches were on the rise. Even recent research confirms this. Sociologist Rodney Stark blames the shift from mainline Protestant Mainline denominations to more conservative ones on “clergy disbelief in the essentials of Christianity, and their faith in radical politics.”[ref]Stark, The Triumph of Faith: Why the World Is More Religious Than Ever (Wilmington, DL: ISI Books, 2015), 196.[/ref]
  • This testimony involves my reason and my experience—the two limited but helping witnesses! Happily, there has been given to me the third witness of the Spirit—the unimpeachable and convincing witness! My only regret is that what follows is apt to be the verbal equivalent of a child’s enthusiastic finger painting—because my tongue cannot tell all I know: I’m not sure I would separate the Spirit from personal experience considering that the witness of the Spirit is an experience,[ref]Richard Swinburne has relied on “the principle of credulity” when it comes to religious experiences, while Alvin Plantinga has argued that belief in God can be properly basic.[/ref] but the point still stands: reason and lived experience should be coupled with–and enhanced by–the promptings of the Spirit. Our intellect should be refined by the Spirit, while our reason and experience should open wider channels of revelation.
  • He helped to prepare this planet for us and led—not pushed—us from our premortal post: Loving relationships are freely chosen. This is likely why Maxwell later states that Christ “reflected both an astonishing selflessness and a breathtaking commitment to freedom as a condition of our genuine growth” in the premortal realms. Or “his discerning way of knowing us without controlling us[.]”
  • I thank him, further, for not deserting those of us who are slow or stragglers: The Lord doesn’t leave you behind when you drag your feet and when shouldn’t leave others behind either.
  • I testify that he assisted in the creation and management not only of this planet, but other worlds. His grasp is galactic, yet he noticed the widow casting in her mite: Jesus as manager. Makes my heart sing. Stanford’s Robert Sutton has noted, ““Big picture only” leaders often make decisions without considering the constraints that affect the cost and time required to implement them, and even when evidence begins mounting that it is impossible or unwise to implement their grand ideas, they often choose to push forward anyway…[T]he worst senior executives use the distinction between leadership and management as an excuse to avoid the details they really have to master to see the big picture and select the right strategies. Therefore…let me propose a corollary: To do the right thing, a leader needs to understand what it takes to do things right, and to make sure they actually get done.” This is why Christ was “the Perfect Example and Leader,” according to Maxwell, “not asking us to do what he has not done, not asking us to endure what he has not endured.” His led by “divinely demonstrating directions—not just pointing.”
  • He who did not need to die himself was willing to be bound by the chains of death so he could break them for all mankind: I think we sometimes forget the victory and liberation of Christ’s resurrection.
  • I thank him for likewise not interceding on our behalf, even when we pray in faith and reasonable righteousness, for that which would not be right for us: We’re getting into problem of evil territory, but I think there is definitely room for prayers going unanswered because the request isn’t in our best interest eternally speaking.
  • …that program of progress—repentance, which beckons us to betterness: Repentance is so often seen as self-flagellation. But to see it as incremental progress is life-altering. It is a recognition that some things which are “known” are “beyond the border of [our] behavior[.]” And yet, Christ helps us “to advance that border, bit by bit. His relentless redemptiveness exceeds [our] recurring wrongs.”
  • …rising above his beginnings without renouncing them: This cuts to the heart of the shame too often associated with poverty. There is sometimes an embarrassment of one’s origins. But Jesus shows that one does not have to be ashamed of her background, her home life. One can rise above her original circumstances, but still recognize them as part of her story and identity.
  • I thank him for such repeated reachings out to mankind, whether in phenomenal power or in quiet conversation at a wellside: The ways for God to communicate are vast and multifaceted. I have no doubt that he can customize it for each and everyone of us.

So ends his “anthem of appreciation” for the Savior.

And that’s why I love Elder Maxwell.