Nathaniel

Nathaniel launched Difficult Run in November 2012 and ran the website alone until August 2013, when he invited the first Difficult Run Editors to join him in adding content to the site. Nathaniel has a background in math, systems engineering, and economics, and his day job is in business analytics. His real interests are science fiction, and theology, however. He is an avid runner, but not a very fast one. He is married to fellow DREditor Ro and they have two little children. In addition to Difficult Run, Nathaniel blogs regularly for Times And Seasons and writes a lot of reviews on Goodreads.

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

This week I’m going to start out with pop culture and Dietrich von Hildebrand before bringing it home to Elder Eldred G. Smith’s talk from the Friday morning session of the October 1971 General Conference: Decisions.

The crux of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s The Heart: An Analysis of Human and Divine Affectivity is that Western philosophy has been wrong to ignore the heart (“the affective sphere” or, in simple terms, our emotional nature) in favor of its obsession with rationality and will. His argument is complex and covers a lot of ground, but here is perhaps the one quote that has stayed with me the most since finishing the book:

If a man were impelled by a Kantian duty ideal to help suffering people by efficient actions of all kinds, but did so with a cool and indifferent heart and without feeling the slightest compassion, he certainly would miss an important moral and human element. It may even be that the gift bestowed on a suffering person by a true and sincere compassion and by the warmth of love cannot be replaced by any benefit we can bestow on him by our actions if these are done without love.

Serving is not enough. Your heart has to be in it.

I believe this is true, but in a way it also confounds our beliefs about obedience. The trick is that we can force our actions to conform to standards, but we cannot directly force our heart to feel a particular way. Anyone can give 10% of their income to tithing, if you just exercise the will power to do it. But how do you make yourself love your neighbor? How do you make yourself love God?

Of course there are good, practical tips for fostering and protecting feelings of love (often discussed in self-help books for marriage or family relationships), but we can’t avoid the fact that our control over our heart is indirect. And, at first, there’s an odd contradiction here between Nephi’s “I will go and do” attitude toward obedience (which is very much centered on action) and the actual greatest commandments: to love God and to love our neighbor involve action, of course, but they are also focused on emotion. So, how do we “go and do” something that relies on our heart feeling a particular way?

We can’t. Not alone, anyway.

This has been a really profound realization for me, and I had it on my mind already as I read Elder Smith’s talk where he said, for example, “the Lord will not permit Satan to try us beyond our ability to resist or withstand his efforts, if we will accept his help.”[ref]Emphasis added.[/ref] That’s a really important qualification, and for me it’s new.

In a sense, of course, the information has always been there. Nephi’s famous “go and do” speech[ref]1 Nephi 3:7[/ref] includes the statement that he knows God will provide a way for us to accomplish the commandments we’re asked to perform, but somehow I’ve always had the idea that this means there is a way—a road or a path—but that we’ve got to walk it on our own. That’s not actually what Nephi said. That’s just how I’ve always heard it.

But going it alone is never a part of the hero’s journey. I’m reminded of the classic 1986 Nintendo game The Legend of Zelda. The hero, Link, gets his first weapon from an elderly man who tells him, “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.”

Dangerous to Go Alone - Original

Another example would be Harry Potter’s confrontation with Serpent of Slytherin in the Chamber of Secrets. Prior to the battle, Dumbledore told Harry, “Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it.” During the battle, the Sorting Hat appears and gives Harry the Sword of Godric Gryffindor, with which he is able to defeat the basilisk.

You might think it’s a little silly for me to quote children’s books or 1980s video games alongside Catholic theologians all to make a point from a General Conference talk. And I’ll admit, part of it is in fun. But I also strongly believe that there are so many sources of light for us in this world, if we only know where to look for them. In a way, that’s one of the things that reading the General Conference talks helps me to do: calibrate my relation to the Spirit so that I can find sources of inspiration all around me.

And I need that constant reminder. Because, returning to Elder Smith’s talk, “The Lord has made no promise to those who try to go it alone. As soon as you think you can lick the devil alone, on your own, without the Lord’s help, you have lost the battle before you start.”

That exact quote has come back to my mind again and again: “The Lord has made no promise to those who try to go it alone.” I had another chance to feel the bite of that mistake on Sunday. I am a Gospel Doctrine teacher, and I love this calling. There is no calling I would rather have ever, and I try very, very hard to do a good job of bringing the Spirit into my lessons and teach what the Lords would have me teachr.

But I don’t always succeed.

There are basically two variables in how a lesson goes, at least from my perspective. The first is how much I prepare. The second is how I feel as I go into the lesson.

On Saturday, I spent four or five hours working on my lesson, which is longer than the 1-2 hours that I usually spend. I was really pleased with my research and my outline. I felt confident that I had it covered. And when I went in and taught my lesson… it didn’t go very well. Not as well as I’d hoped, anyway. I frequently felt lost as I was teaching, struggling to remember where I’d placed a quote in my notes or unsure about which way to take the lesson when there was not enough time to do everything.

The problem was I thought I could go it alone. I thought I had this one. And so I didn’t rely on the Lord as much as I ought to have.

The sad thing is how many times I’ve had to relearn this lesson. I’ve been teaching for 3-4 years now, and the pattern is always the same. I have to work hard to prepare the lesson and I have to rely on the Lord. In practice, this means I have to be a little bit scared going into it. Hopefully I’ll grow out of that and be able to rely on the Lord with confidence instead of out of nervousness, but the point is: I need to realize that I need help. And then it’s there. As Elder Smith said, “When you desire to do what the Lord wants you to do because he wants you to, then ask him for help; then keeping these laws and commandments becomes easy.”

Here are some quotes from the other talks that I also liked:

The Purpose of Life: To Be Proved by Elder Franklin D. Richards

“Although it is not customary for one to seek out the difficult or unpleasant experiences, it is true that the trials and tribulations of life that stand in the way of man’s growth and development become stepping-stones by which he climbs to greater heights, providing, of course, that he does not permit them to discourage him.”

“A temple, first of all, is a place of prayer; and prayer is communion with God. It is the ‘infinite in man seeking the infinite in God.’ Where they find each other, there is holy sanctuary—a temple.”

“I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” by President John Fielding Smith

“The supreme act of worship is to keep the commandments, to follow in the footsteps of the Son of God, to do ever those things that please him.”

The Only True and Living Church by President Boyd K. Packer

“Some members of the Church who should know better pick out a hobby [piano] key or two and tap them incessantly, to the irritation of those around them. They can dull their own spiritual sensitivities. They lose track that there is a fullness of the gospel and become as individuals, like many churches have become. They may reject the fullness in preference to a favorite note. This becomes exaggerated and distorted, leading them away into apostasy.”

A Time of Testing by Henry D. Taylor

“We will all have our Gethsemane.”

“This Is My Beloved Son” by Loren C. Dunn

“Although the amount of time we spend is important, probably the more important thing is the ability to build our children into our lives.”

Satan’s Thrust—Youth by President Ezra Taft Benon

“The critical and complaining adult will be less effective than the interested and understanding… We must love our young people, whether they are in righteousness or in error.”

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Here are some of the other talks from this weeks’ iteration of the General Conference Odyssey. Not all the links were ready when this post was finished, however, so check out the constantly updated index for a complete list. You can also follow along by joining the Facebook Group.

Difficult Run Best Books of 2015

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Continuing the tradition that we started last year, I asked the DR Editors to each pick their five favorite books from 2015.[ref]Not everyone followed the rules. That’s how we roll.[/ref] Once again, we’ve got a fantastic, eclectic selection of books. Without further ado, and in no particular order, here are best books that we read last year.[ref]Note: that doesn’t mean they were published last year.[/ref]

Walker Wright

Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (Brené Brown)

Brown’s approach to shame and vulnerability has had a significant impact on my worldview, including how I interpret my religion. However, my exposure to her work over the last couple years was largely through her TED talks, articles, and professional counseling. I finally read a couple of her books this year, Daring Greatly being my favorite. The book is a fantastic mix of research, anecdotes, and application. The insights within it are themselves therapeutic, providing a language capable of capturing many of the turbulent emotions we experience. The result is better self-understanding and increased self-awareness. A paradigm shifting book.

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace)

As a huge Pixar fan, I expected to enjoy the book. I didn’t expect it be one of the most enthralling management books I’ve ever read. Stanford’s Robert Sutton was right when he described it as, “One of the best business/leadership/organization design books ever written.” The narrative acts as both a biography of Pixar and an investigation into its organizational structure and managerial styles. The process of creativity is explored, revealing the importance of autonomy, candid discussion, and the expectation of failure. Perhaps the biggest takeaway, however, is that the collective brain is the creative brain. High-quality innovation spurs from the constant flow of information and ideas through a network of diverse people and backgrounds. Managers should read this, yes, but so should anyone interested in embarking on a creative endeavor.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Jonathan Haidt)

My experience with Haidt prior to reading his book was similar to that of Brown’s above. I had watched his TED talks and lectures and read a number of his articles. Plus, he started showing up over at the libertarian site/magazine Reason. I was familiar with his Moral Foundations Theory and found his discussion of moral psychology absolutely fascinating. Yet, despite being familiar with his work, his book yielded an enormity of new, illuminating details about human nature. His emphasis on the primacy of emotions (the elephant) over reason (the rider) as well as our evolutionary nature as social creatures paints a vivid picture about what it is to be human. Given the often absurd assumptions about human nature we find in the 21st-century Western world, this is refreshingly rooted in reality. A much-needed book.

Markets without Limits: Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests (Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski)

“If you may do it for free, you may do it for money.” That is the premise of this meticulously argued book by Georgetown philosophy professors Brennan and Jaworski. Economist Bryan Caplan has identified what he calls the anti-market bias among voters and the authors demonstrate why this bias is unfounded. Most talk about the “moral limits of markets” focus on something other than the actual market. For example, a market in slaves doesn’t prove that markets are problem, but that slavery itself is wrong and would still be wrong if done for free. The authors go through the objections of various commodification critics and convincingly show that their arguments are (1) faulty in their logic and/or (2) not grounded in empirical social science. The arguments are powerful and should fundamentally change the nature of the debate. Should be the starting point for any discussion about markets and morality.

An Other Testament: On Typology (Joseph Spencer)

Philosopher Joseph Spencer is one of the most careful readers of scripture in modern Mormonism and this book puts his skill on full display. A stellar combination of close textual analysis, biblical scholarship, and theology, Spencer explores the tension between two different interpretations of Isaiah within the Book of Mormon: Nephi’s collective, covenantal approach vs. Abinadi’s Christological, individualistic view. Spencer’s book is evidence of the kind of deep, intricate reading that can be accomplished through constant study of the text. What’s even better is that Spencer’s reading can accommodate both sides of the historicity debate (though perhaps leaning more favorably toward those championing historicity). One of the most engaging and enlightening books on the Book of Mormon I have ever read.

Ro Givens

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (Sheryl Sandberg)

I know there were a lot of complaints about this book, but I say, that’s insanity.  Even if you’re not in business, even if you didn’t start life in the upper class (and will never approach it), you can get insight from Sheryl’s life.  Love her.

The BFG (Roald Dahl)

This book is adorbs.  And hilarious.  It was the first chapter book my 6 year old asked me to keep reading, and he then asked me to start it again when we finished.

Princess Academy (Shannon Hale)

Another piece of evidence that middle grade fiction > young adult fiction.  The writing is better, the message is better (ie, exists), and I’m not embarrassed to admit that I like it.  This book has strong female characters and is about the importance of education, cooperation, community, and friendship. #Mormon #represent

Lauren Ipsum: A Story About Computer Science and Other Improbable Things (Carlos Bueno)

A fairy tale about problem solving. Alice in Wonderland meets Computer Science (theory). Adorable and perfect.  Read it myself, and now my kids are laughing along while I read it to them.

(FAQ: Yes, I like children’s lit.  I read more on my own than to my kids.)

Allen Hansen

Preachin’ the Blues: The Life and Times of Son House (Daniel Beaumont)

Continuing my reading of blues biographies, I picked up this one about a man whose music electrified me when I first heard it. A feel to it which is completely out of this world. The new crop of blues biography are interested in getting behind the mythology of the blues and into the murky details of the musicians lives. House grew up in a decently educated home with a religious background, found religion, found the blues,  travelled around the south quite a bit, experienced racism and oppression, worked all sorts of manual labor only somewhat removed from slavery, went to prison, moved north during the war years and was rediscovered the same year that massive race riots broke out in his city. The bigger picture of black history in 20th century America is covered from House’s perspective, so you get an idea of how an individual experienced religion, navigated racism, and responded to various challenges. Life was no monolith, especially for bluesmen rebelling against the strictures of society. There is also a sense of profound tragedy in Son House’s life, an intelligent man of significant ability who could never conquer his twin demons of alcohol and womanizing.

The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations (Jacob N. Shapiro)

I read quite a few books on terrorism last year, but this one stands out. Shapiro looks at terrorist organizations from a management perspective. Terrorist leaders, it turns out, use Excel spreadsheets, handle time-off requests, and issue write-ups in order to run terrorist activities, but the stakes (naturally) are much higher than they would be in legitimate corporations. The tighter the control, the more the paperwork the greater the risk of being compromised. That Excel spreadsheet can cost your life if discovered, but without it you might not be able to counter waste and theft of resources or prevent operative’s violence from spinning out of control  (even for terrorists there is such a thing as too much violence). As Shapiro pointedly observes, terrorists face a major personnel challenge. Someone willing to do horrible things to other human beings is not likely to be an upstanding and conscientious agent or keep violence subordinate and appropriate to achieving political goals. This weakness can be exploited to minimize the ability of terrorists to act. Shapiro analyses multiple terrorist groups from different times and places, showing this common thread, and in the process making them a little less exotic, and more banal.

Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate (Kenan Malik)

You might not expect such a book to be written by someone like Kenan Malik. Malik is a British journalist born in a Muslim family in India, a philosopher of science trained in neurobiology, and a secular humanist on the political left. In the book he traces changing attitudes on race from antiquity to the present where it has become entrenched in the twin forms of scientific race realism and identity politics. He skewers race realists or essentialists, but not as much as he does anti-racists. The former conflate the issue of genetic differences with constructs of race, and the latter transformed cultural and genetic differences into dogmatic philosophy. Both reject enlightenment ideas of universality and scientific rationality. Malik is witty, thought-provoking, and has a great way of getting to core of whatever issue is under discussion.

The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (Margaret MacMillan)

There is fierce debate over what started the First World War, but this book poses a different question. Why did peace end?  Europe was not facing its severest crisis, it actually had a good system in place for preserving peace, but it failed in 1914. There was nothing inevitable about the process, and MacMillan does a great job of unpacking the various social, intellectual and political currents which along with personal factors influenced the small group of decision-makers who ultimately chose war. The writing is very engaging and never dry, painting a remarkable portrait of Europe in the early 20th century. MacMillan knows her stuff, but isn’t afraid to be entertaining, like when she draws (an apt) comparison between Wilhelm of Germany and Toad of Toad Hall.

Yosef Haim Brenner: A Life (Anita Shapira)

Growing up in Israel, Brenner was a legendary figure from our past, a cultural messiah of the founding generation.  This is probably the narrowest-interest book of the five, but it is still superb. Brenner was born in a religious Jewish family in 19th century Ukraine, fell in love with secular Hebrew literature, and abandoned his religion. His father retaliated by making him serve in the Russian army so that his religiously-minded brother would be exempt from military service. Unsurprisingly, Brenner suffered from bouts of depression throughout his life. He still had a tremendous attachment to his people and the new Hebrew literature while his unflinching honesty and ascetic lifestyle spun a myth around him even in his lifetime. He moved to Palestine in 1909, and was murdered by an Arab mob in the 1921 riots. Shapira scrupulously avoids the myth, making Brenner’s tortured life all the more compelling.

Monica

Blueberry Girl (Neil Gaiman, Charles Vess – illustrator)

This is a lovely book about all of the gifts a parent wishes for his or her newborn daughter, such as freedom from fear, protection from false friends, and help to help herself. Neil Gaiman wrote the book as a poem, and the rhymes and cadence make it pleasant to read to your own daughter (over and over and over). Charles Vess illustrated the poem with beautiful paintings that show girls exploring the world in a carefree, whimsical way. I was pleased to notice the girls in the paintings are different ages and races with different hairstyles and ways of dressing. I like that variety because I like to think about little girls from many walks of life examining the paintings as their parents read to them and feeling the poem is about them too.

As a Christian deconvert and secular parent, I regret that I miss out on the comfort of praying for my daughter. This book has served as a kind of substitute for me. I’ve read Blueberry Girl to my own girl dozens of times, and it’s been not just pleasant but cathartic to say out loud so many of the hopes I have for her.

Bryan Maack

The Religions of Man (Houston Smith)

One question I think every religious person should ask themselves is “Why I do I believe what I believe?” And part of answering that question is answering why you don’t believe anything else. In order to answer that question, I believe that the very best case must be made for every religion.

Here’s where The Religions of Man by Huston Smith steps in. Smith gives you a sympathetic account of many major world religions–Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. The author helps you understand why so many people follow these religions earnestly. If anyone has authority to speak on this topic, Huston Smith does, having practiced Vedanta Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, and Sufi Islam for over a decade each [citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Huston_Smith#Religious_ practice].

I will admit that many of the chapters challenged me to seriously consider why I am a Roman Catholic and nothing else. This experience inculcates a sense of humility and understanding of why people of good will hold to many different religions. But far from descending to syncretism, The Religions of Man illustrates the particular problems that religions are addressing and the diverse solutions that they offer, creating a real chance for the reader to discern among unique options.

The book was originally published in 1958. A new 50th anniversary edition, entitled “The World’s Religions,” was published in 2009 with revisions and an added section on indigenous religions.

Nathaniel Givens

I read over 100 books in 2015, but I’m going to narrow it down to just 5. That’s really hard–in the sense that I don’t like leaving good books out (and I’m leaving a lot of good books out!)–but in actuality it only took me a few minutes of going through my Goodreads reviews from 2015 to pick my top 5. Here they are:

Golden Son: Book II of The Red Rising Trilogy (Pierce Brown)

Golden Son is the second book in the Red Rising trilogy. The first book (Red Rising) was good, but it was a little violent for my tastes and also a little derivative: it was basically Ender’s Game + The Hunger Games (Book 1). The second book blew me away, however. Pierce Brown took things to a new level in two ways. First: the action was non-stop from start to finish. The phrase “break neck” gets used a lot in describing the pace of a fun adventure book, but it’s never been more true than of this book. There was scene after scene where I thought for sure the characters were dead (or that the resolution would be silly), but again and again Brown pulled it off.Second: the book was much more original thoughtful than the first. This is true in terms of politics and also in terms of characterization. The cast of characters is unusually large but, thanks to the investment you put into Red Rising to get this far, you know who everybody  is and how they relate to each other. Like Ender’s Game, we’re dealing with a bunch of geniuses and–like Orson Scott Card–Brown writes intelligently and thoughtfully enough for that to believable. Moreover, the moral/political aspects of the book are deep enough to be truly interesting. They aren’t just an excuse for righteous anger and action, they are really meaningful to the point where it gives you something to think about and (most importantly) really make you identify with the characters. Also: the setting. Started out pretty hackneyed (futuristic sci-fi patterned after ancient Earth mythology), but Brown kept at it so long and so seriously that the result is (1) believable and (2) distinctively his own.

I can’t wait to read Morning Star: Book III of The Red Rising Trilogy when it comes out in February.

The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu)

This was the first time that an English-translation of a foreign language (Chinese, in this case) book won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and boy did he deserve it! There was all kinds of drama in the Hugos in 2015, but the one thing that ended up definitively right was that this book won.

It  definitely comes from the “literary sci-fi” end of the genre, which is where you’ll find books like The Handmaid’s Tale, The Road, or Never Let Me Go. These are all books by writers who have at least one foot outside of the genre, and they aren’t well received by the folks who grew up on the Holy Trinity of Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke. But me? I love them all. I love the fusion of legit sci-fi (read: “not just time travel”) with literary sensibility, and this is perhaps one of the best examples of that sub-genre. I was hooked from the very first scene, a vivid and beautiful depiction of the chaotic internecine political clashes during the Cultural Revolution and the book never let me go. The sci-fi was serious, in that it was very intense extrapolation of actual cutting-edge theoretical physics. But it never became one of those “look at my engineering prowess!” ego-cruises that bedevil hard sci-fi (looking at you, Ringworld.) That’s because the characters were too sensitively drawn and too human for the science to overshadow them.

What I’m trying to say is that it worked as sci-fi and as literature. And that’s peanut butter and chocolate, right there. It doesn’t get any better.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Steven Pinker)

Steven Pinker did not pull any punches! In this tour de force he takes on the reigning social science model head-on without apologies and also without taking prisoners. He outlines the social science model as having three essential premises: the Blank Slate (i.e. human nature is socially constructed rather than biologically determined), the Noble Savage (i.e. the trendy obsession with “all natural” foods and opposition to vaccines) and the Ghost in the Machine (there’s more to the mind than the brain and bod). He describes the dogmatic defense of these views in the social sciences this way:

This is the mentality of a cult, in which fantastical beliefs are flaunted as proof of one’s piety. That mentality cannot coexist with an esteem for the truth, and I believe it is responsible for some of the unfortunate trends in recent intellectual life.

The rest of the book is a long, empirically-based attack on all three of these fallacies and, secondarily, an attempt to explain why they are not actually necessary to defend the kind of classical liberal values they are often employed to defend. This is one of Pinker’s most important points: if you defend equality on the basis of the Blank Slate (which is by far the most prevalent philosophical basis for feminism, etc.) then you are actually endangering the value you’re trying to defend. Because the blank slate is false. Gender is not (entirely) a social construction. Men and women are biologically different in meaningful ways that go beyond just anatomy. And if you have erected your theory of equality on that false foundation, then when it gets destroyed–and it will get destroyed eventually–the value you were trying to defend is going to get taken down with it.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that I don’t agree with Pinker all down the line. When he stops talking psychology or neuroscience and starts talking political philosophy he loses me on several occasions. In addition, I find Thomas Nagels repudation of reductionist materialism entirely persuasive, and that means that I find Pinker’s assault on the Ghost in the Machine to be, ultimately, a failure. But that’s his least-important point (there’s a reason the book is named for the Blank Slate and not the Ghost in the Machine) and, in any case, I do think that his critique of the Ghost in the Machine as it relates to the standard model of social science theory has traction. In other words, the kind of dualism he is attacking is unsustainable. I agree him there. But the absolutist physical reductionism he erects in its place is also a failure.

Still, this was  great book, strongly argued and full of interesting information that I’m continuing to assimilate into my view of myself and the world.

The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates (Frans de Waal)

This is another brilliant book that I love to both agree and disagree with. Primatologist Frans de Waal has a pretty straightforward objective: demonstrate empirically that the foundations of moral behavior are found in primates (and other mammals). Well, that’s the first half, anyway, and it’s the half that he gets resoundingly right. The experiments and stories–both first-person and collected from others–are fascinating reading and deeply impactful.

I was particularly struck, for example, by his descriptions of how primates care for each other, including the disabled. He described one young rhesus monkey that was born with a condition similar to Down syndrome, and how that monkey was cared for by the rest of the troop and tolerated when she did unusual things (like try to pick a fight with the alpha male) that would have gotten any other monkey a severe beating. He also pointed out fossil evidence that Neanderthals also cared for the disabled who could offer nothing in return.

The book never veered into sentimentality, however. De Waal’s view of primates is clear-eyed, and this led to additional insights into the nature of social order and its relationship to the threat of the violence. He wrote in one passage, however, that after observing a tribe of chimpanzees wait patiently for their turn to use a nut-cracking station to crack nuts that were too tough to crush with their teeth:

I was struck by the scene’s peacefulness, but not fooled by it. When we see a disciplined society, there is often a social hierarchy behind it. This hierarchy, which determines who can eat or mate first, is ultimately rooted in violence… A social hierarchy is a giant system of inhibitions, which is no doubt what paved the way for human morality, which is also such a system.

As with Pinker, however, I disagreed with some of de Waal’s conclusions. In particular, he believed that if you can show the origins of moral behavior then you have found the origins of morality itself. This is a major flaw, and also happens to be another one that is addressed by Thomas Nagel. It’s the basic is/ought fallacy (a topic de Waal addressed explicitly but did not handle satisfactorily) and the rebuttal to it is the same rebuttal to pretty much all forms of relativism: you can’t argue for relativism without enacting objectivism. If you say, “subjectivity holds,” you’ve already made a contradictory, objective statement.

Merely because you can show how a thing arises through evolution doesn’t get you out of this problem. You could explain how humans came to have the ability to reason objectively, but that wouldn’t mean that logic and math were suddenly subjective. It would just prove that somehow evolution managed to get us in touch with non-contingent, objective reason. Same idea here: you can explain how humans came to behave morally or even to understand and think about morality, but it’s a colossal mistake to think that, in so doing, you have proved that morality is “constructed” or in any way subjective any more than reason or logic are. (For fun: let someone try to reason you out of the position that reason is objective. See how that works? It’s a non-starter.)

Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues (N. T. Wright)

This was one of the first books I read in 2015, and it feels like I read it even longer ago than that, but Goodreads doesn’t lie. I finished it on Jan 9, 2015. This one was a huge eye-opener for me. I am very religious, but I come from a Mormon background, and we don’t always have the most sophisticated grasp on the Bible (relative to other Christians) because we split our attention between the Bible and our unique books of scripture: the Book of Mormon in particular.

So for me to see how N. T. Wright connected all kinds of contemporary political debates to the text of the Bible was incredibly mind-expanding. It really deepened by respect for the Bible and also for the traditions of Protestant and Catholic Christianity. It was not really a surprising experience–I read the book precisely because I already knew I was weak on Biblical understanding–but it was still a humbling one in the best way possible. Humbling because when you see a real expert at work you are too distracted by the beauty and skill of their craft and knowledge to feel bad about your shortcomings.

N. T. Wright’s writing style is engaging and this remains an incredibly important book for me, with a serious and ongoing impact on how I view my own faith.

And now, because I can’t resist, honorable mention. Some additional great fiction I read this year includes:

Cibola Burn (The Expanse) – The fourth book in The Expanse is definitely the best, and is significantly better than the first three. Five was also quite good, and I can’t wait for six.

Half-Resurrection Blues: A Bone Street Rumba Novel – This book blew me away. The prose was my favorite part. In fair warning, there is a lot of vulgarity, but for some reason it didn’t phase me as it usually did. I had to stop the audiobook (which is narrated by the author, fantastically) on more than one occasion just to save what I’d read. (Also: just noticed that the sequel Midnight Taxi Tango is out!)

Son of the Black Sword (Saga of the Forgotten Warrior) – Larry Correia started as one of those self-publishing sensations who finds a diehard audience (in this case, gun nuts who want to read a mashup of a gun catalog and a zombie-slaying video game) and makes it big. The big question for me is often: what happens next. As you can tell, I wasn’t ever the biggest fan of Monster Hunter International, but I thought his other series (starting with Hard Magic (The Grimnoir Chronicles)) was really great. Well, this is his third new series and it is–without any doubt–the best. His writing, plotting, characterization: everything has progressed. This is a guy who, in some ways, got lucky, but then he made it count.

The Cinder Spires: the Aeronaut’s Windlass – Jim Butcher is still my favorite living author, but if The Dresden Files are not your cup of tea: you should still try this one. The style is totally different, so is the setting, so is the plot, so are the characters. It’s an amazing post-apocalyptic forgotten-technology-as-magic with a crew of unforgettable and awesome characters.

The Path Out of Shadows

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We’ve reached our first major milestone in the General Conference Odyssey: we’re wrapping up our first conference. Today we’re covering the Tuesday afternoon session of the April 1971 General Conference. Next week, we’ll be covering the Friday morning session of the October 1971 General Conference. One down, a whole bunch more to go!

The talk that struck me the most from this session was Elder William H. Bennett’s Help Needed in the Shaded Areas, which echoed one of my favorite themes: intellectual humility:

As individuals, we have some limitations when it comes to our understanding of things as they really are. We can see so far, and then the earth and the sky come together, so to speak, and we cannot see beyond.

And then again later:

It is important that we remember also that no matter how intelligent we may be, no matter how hard we work, no matter how good our teachers are or how favorable the other conditions for learning, in our allotted span of years on earth we can master only a very small fraction of the total field of knowledge; and what we do master usually is in a narrowed-down, specialized area. Consequently, we, in and of ourselves, have limitations.

This reminds me a lot of some of the things that Marcelo Gleiser had to say in his recent book The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning. For example: “Because of the very nature of human inquiry every age has its unknowables.”

Now, don’t get me wrong, as an atheist I’m sure Gleiser would not agree to the principles that Bennett is teaching. But that doesn’t mean that the connections are purely spurious, either. Consider another quote from Gleiser:

Both the scientist and the faithful believe in unexplained causation, that is, in things happening for unknown reasons, even if the nature of the cause is completely different for each. In the sciences, this belief is most obvious when there is an attempt to extrapolate a theory or model beyond its tested limits, as in “gravity works the same way across the entire Universe,” or “the theory of evolution by natural selection applies to all forms of life, including extraterrestrial ones.” These extrapolations are crucial to advance knowledge into unexplored territory. The scientist feels justified in doing so, given the accumulated power of her theories to explain so much of the world. We can even say, with slight impropriety, that her faith is empirically validated.

The separation between religion and science is not as stark as many would like us to believe in these days when (again, citing Marcelo), “scientific speculation and arrogance are rampant.” Religion and science are not enemies. They are, fundamentally, siblings. They are two branches of mankind’s pursuit of knowledge that branched off when new tools—from mathematics to telescopes—allowed the study of quantifiable, physical phenomena to become a community project in a way that religion, because of it’s internal, personal nature, can never be.

So there are definitely differences, but there are also commonalities, and it makes sense to talk about “faith” in both religious and scientific contexts. The scientific “faith” that Marcelo talks about is the willingness to extrapolate beyond empirical evidence in the pursuit of intuition. Two of Marcelo’s biggest examples are Newton and Einstein who followed their instincts beyond empirical boundaries:

As Newton had done with his universal theory of gravitation, Einstein extrapolated his new theory of gravity from the solar system—where it was tested—to the Universe, confident that the same physical principles applied everywhere.

As Marcelo pointed out in the previous quote, however, the scientist must then validate her intuitions. Which is essentially the same model that Alma famously presented: even if you can’t muster anything more than a desire to believe: start there. Then experiment. See what happens.

Intellectual humility, the understanding that our knowledge is limited, is the first step to the path towards greater knowledge. Marcelo wrote, “We strive toward knowledge, always more knowledge, but must understand that we are, and will remain, surrounded by mystery.” But, as Elder Bennett said, “we need not walk alone.”

There was one other comment that I wanted to share as well. It came from the session’s closing remarks by President Joseph Fielding Smith: A Witness and a Blessing.

There are good and devout people among all sects, parties, and denominations, and they will be blessed and rewarded for all the good they do. But the fact remains that we alone have the fullness of those laws and ordinances which prepare men for the fullness of reward in the mansions above. And so we say to the good and noble, the upright and devout people everywhere: Keep all the good you have; cleave unto every true principle which is now yours; but come and partake of the further light and knowledge which that God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever is again pouring out upon his people.

The idea that being a Mormon consists in finding truth wherever it may be is famously associated with Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, who often spoke about truth in expansive and inclusive ways. But clearly this vein of our faith didn’t end there. It was still alive and well in the 1970s just as it is today. As members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we have something unique and precious to offer the world, and it’s our duty to share it. But we do not have a monopoly on truth.

Here are the other posts in this week’s installment of the General Conference Odyssey:

Saving the Lost Battalions

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey series.

Until last week, I had never heard of Dietrich von Hildebrand. Then my father told me that it was important for me to read one of this books, The Heart, and lent me the copy that had been traveling back and forth between his study and my mother’s.

Von Hildebrand was a Roman Catholic philosopher and theologian who live in Germany until his outspoken criticism of Adolf Hitler meant he had to flee to Austria. He fled to France next, after Hitler annexed Austria, and then from France to the US (by way of Brazil) after the Germans invaded France as well. Pope Benedict respected him so much that he said “When the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is written, the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time.”

In The Heart, Hildebrand argues that the heart (by which he means the metaphorical heart, the “affective sphere” or, more simply, our emotions) has been “under a cloud throughout the entire course of the history of philosophy.” Going back to the ancient Greeks, the emphasis has always been on rationality, with reason regarded as a weakness or a defect. Hildebrand argues that—while of course emotions are susceptible to error—that the heart is an equally important aspect of our human experience.

In particular, Hildebrand separates different kinds of feelings. On one end of the scale, you’ve got raw biological facts: things like hunger or exhaustion which we call “feelings.” On the other end of the scale, you’ve got the reaction we feel to exquisite music, or to stories of great moral courage and sacrifice, which we also call “feelings.” Using the same word to describe such disparate events, is, according to Hildebrand’s argument, a major reason that we don’t take the heart as seriously as we should.

For Hildebrand, the heart is capable of great nobility when it unites intellect and emotion in a response to truth and beauty. So much so, that loving the good is superior to merely knowing or recognizing the good. As he writes:

The transcendence proper to the value-response reaches even further than in knowledge. The fact that our heart conforms to the value, that the important in itself is able to move us, brings about a union with the object which goes even further than in knowledge. For in love the totality of the person is drawn more thoroughly into the union established with the object then in knowledge. We must not forget, moreover, that the type of the union proper to knowledge is necessarily incorporated in love.

This echoes something that Anglican bishop and scholar N. T. Wright wrote in Surprised by Scripture:

Just because it takes agape to believe the Resurrection, that doesn’t mean all that happened was that Peter and the others felt their hearts strangely warmed. Precisely because it is the love we are talking about, not lust, it must have a correlative reality in the world outside the lover. Love is the deepest mode of knowing because it is love that while completely engaging with reality other than itself, affirms and celebrates that other-than-self reality.

So, according to both Von Hildebrand and Wright, love surpasses knowledge, for one. And, as a corollary, affective (i.e. emotional) responses can be full of nobility. Quoting Hildebrand one more time:

To be moved by some sublime beauty in nature or in art or by some moral virtue, such as humility or charity, is to allow ourselves to be penetrated by the inner light of these values and to open ourselves to their message from above. It is a surrender which implies a reverence, humility, and tenderness.

Why am I sharing all of this with you? Simple: this is what I had in mind as I found myself crying while I read the last talk from the Tuesday Morning session of the April 1971 General Conference. That talk in question is Lost Battalions. The title is fairly familiar, but I’m pretty sure that’s because I have read about the Lost Battalion in question. The talk, as far as I can tell, was completely unknown to me before I read it last week as part of the General Conference Odyssey.[ref]Which, in a nutshell, is why we’re doing the General Conference Odyssey.[/ref]

Now, I’ll have a hard time quoting you my favorite passages because after a while I gave up highlighting the talk on LDS.org. It just looked like a wall of yellow. For that, y’all will just have to go read it yourselves. [ref]Really, it’s worth your time.[/ref] Instead of specifics, I want to talk about the overall arc of the piece.

I wondered, at the outset of the piece, about the juxtaposition of the story of the Lost Battalion with the Christ’s message of love. Juxtaposing a story of military heroism with Christ’s message of love in the Gospel of John was, to put it mildly, arresting. If your model of Christlike love is fighting in combat, then you’re going to be raising some fairly difficult questions.

But it was I who was missing the point, because instead of treating the story of the Lost Battalion as the pinnacle of the story—the example to which we strive—instead the talk turned immediately from the literal Lost Battalion of World War I to the lost battalions all around us. First: the “lost battalions” of “the handicapped, even the lame, the speechless, and the sightless.” Next came more “lost battalions”: the elderly, the sick, and broken and estranged families.

In these cases there was a stark challenge, and it was one perfectly tailored to a nation steeped in a tradition of deference of military heroism: if you admire the heroism of World War I stories, then be a hero by donating your time to help the people who need you in your own neighborhood. Go read to the blind. Go give food to the hungry. Quench your anger and reach out in love to your family. The conventional narrative of militaristic self-sacrifice was slowly being co-opted into a message of practical, mundane, every-day service.

These passages were beautiful, both the prose and the stories, but it didn’t stop there. The biggest “lost battalion” is all of us. All of us who “struggle in the jungles of sin” or “wander in the wilderness of ignorance.”

In reality, each one of us is numbered in what could well have been the lost battalion of mankind, even a battalion doomed to everlasting death.

But our battalion isn’t lost. It’s already been saved. The talk cites the angel’s words to the women at Christ’s empty tomb, “Why seek ye the living among the dead?” and then concludes:

With this pronouncement, the “lost battalion” of mankind—those who have lived and died, those who now live and one day will die, and those yet to be born and yet to die—this battalion of humanity lost had just been rescued.

I’d had misgivings at the outset about using a war story as the model for Christ-like love, but by the end I realized I had it all backwards. The real war—and the real war story—is the Gospel. The true struggle is the spiritual one, and the one true hero is Jesus Christ.

I haven’t mentioned the author yet. That’s because I read the talk without checking the author first. And so at the end I scrolled back to the top. It makes sense now—given the preponderance of stories and the overall style—but I was surprised when I read the name of Thomas S. Monson. My favorite talk of the odyssey thus far was given by the man who is currently the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Now, here are a couple of snippets from other talks that I particularly liked.

“The Spirit Beareth Record” (Elder Boyd K. Packer)

There are those who hear testimonies borne in the Church, by those in high station and by members in the wards and branches, all using the same words—“I know that God lives; I know that Jesus is the Christ,” and come to question, “Why cannot it be said in plainer words? Why aren’t they more explicit and more descriptive? Cannot the apostles say more?”

How like the sacred experience in the temple becomes our personal testimony. It is sacred, and when we are wont to put it into words, we say it in the same way—all using the same words. The apostles declare it in the same phrases with the little Primary or Sunday School youngster. “I know that God lives and I know that Jesus is the Christ….

To one who is honestly seeking, the testimony borne in these simple phrases is enough, for it is the spirit that beareth record, not the words.

I had this very much in mind today as I listened to the testimonies in my ward. Men and women, old and young, stood and bore their testimonies, saying at the conclusion of each: “I know that Jesus is the Christ”[ref]Or very similar words.[/ref]

And I was struck by Elder Packer’s observation, that both the General Authorities of the Church and the kids in primary express their testimonies in the same way. It’s kind of beautiful, if you think about it, and I definitely kept Elder Packer’s warning in mind: “We would do well not to disregard the testimonies of the prophets or of the children.”

Practicing What We Preach – Elder Marion D. Hanks

I was struck by a story Elder Hanks told about his sister’s family holding family home evening in the hospital, around his gravely ill sister’s bed:

Her husband and family were surrounding her bed, holding their family home evening, led by their fourth missionary son just returned from foreign fields. I joined them, and then went home rejoicing and thanking God for that kind of example, and met my own family who were waiting, and prayed that we might do a better job of practicing what we preach.

I was struck by a General Authority telling a story of a family that, implicitly, was doing things better than his own family. Of a General Authority telling us, over the pulpit, that he looked up to his sister’s family, and wanted to do better a job with his own. It was refreshingly humble, vulnerable, and real.

Marriage Is Intended to Be Forever – Elder James A. Cullimore

I highlighted an awful lot of this talk, but in general two things stood out.

First, I was surprised at how clearly the same points that the Church has brought up in the recent debates over same-sex marriage were clearly articulated back in 1971 when same-sex marriage was the last thing on anyone’s mind. There have been many who believe that the Church’s position is either inertia at best (well, this is how things have always been done) or outright bigotry at worst. But, reading this talk, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the Church’s emphasis on the role of the family as it was expounded in the recent political debates is exactly the same as what Elder Cullimore was talking about when the biggest perceived threat to marriage was divorce. For example:

Marriage is a sacred relationship entered into primarily for the rearing of a family, in fulfillment of the commandments of the Lord.

And:

President McKay said, in reference to the seriousness with which we enter the marriage contract: “… to look upon marriage as a mere contract that may be entered into at pleasure in response to a romantic whim, or for selfish purposes, and severed at the first difficulty or misunderstanding that may arise, is an evil meriting severe condemnation, especially in cases wherein children are made to suffer because of such separation.”

I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind with these quotes. That’s not my point. My point is simply that the Church’s stance on this issue—whatever you think about it—is pretty clearly based on genuine, sincere, and serious religious commitment rather than ignorance or hate.

The second thing that struck me was the way Mormons insist on having their cake and eating it too when it comes to romantic and pragmatic views of marriage. And I mean this in the best way possible.

The most amazing thing is that, in general, I think we manage it. We have both the romance and the pragmatism. Maybe it’s even because of the pragmatism that we have the romance. A firm foundation provides the basis for trust and vulnerability that allows romance to flourish. And it’s possible that it’s because of the romance that we have the pragmatism. Mormons are willing to make sacrifices and concessions to preserve what we value so highly: marital romance.

One thought along those lines:

I suppose there is no surer need in marriage than constant compromise. It is through compromise that we grow closer to each other. As we acknowledge our own faults and recognize the virtues in the other and make the adjustments, we strengthen our marriage.

I’ll just add my own perception to this: there’s very little that is more toxic to a marriage than an emphasis on fairness, equality, or justice. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying those things don’t matter. But in a relationship where abuse is not a concern, then emphasizing justice is basically the absolute worst way to handle conflict in your marriage. Justice is about what you deserve. It means that disagreements are seen as conflicts. And justice automatically mitigates against compromise and flexibility. If it would be “fair” for your spouse to do something, then if you give in and your spouse doesn’t do that thing, it’s unfair. You are a victim, your spouse is an aggressor, and there is now a rift between you. The result is either bitterness or recrimination. The best way forward—and again, I’m talking about marital problems in a relationship without abuse—is to abandon fairness as a concept. Instead, trust your spouse. Focus on making them happy and forgetting anything that bothers you. More than anything else: trust your spouse. You married them for a reason. Your love your spouse. Your spouse loves you. Chances are, anything you could complain to your spouse about, he or she already knows and is already working on. Give him or her a chance to do that without pressure or a sense of obligation. (And definitely without a sense of guilt! Leave justice out of it.) And then concentrate on doing the same yourself: you already know what you need to work on. So work on it.

Two people who are both trying to improve for eachother and both trying to give the other slack are two people who are going to be happy and in love and at peace a long, long time before either one of them is anything that looks like perfect. But two people who are constantly evaluating the other’s actions and behavior against an “objective” standard[ref]No such thing exists in a marriage anyway.[/ref] are going to find that even if they were on the very threshold of perfection there would still be conflict, strife, and hostility.

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These are the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week.

Comforting the Afflicted and Afflicting the Comfortable

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St Michael Defeating Lucifer's Army, by Luca Giordano (MediaWiki Commons)
St Michael Defeating Lucifer’s Army, by Luca Giordano (MediaWiki Commons)

This is the fifth week of the General Conference Odyssey, and we’re covering the talks from the Sunday Afternoon Session of the April 1971 General Conference. Before I get to the talks, however, I’m going to start with three disparate exhibits.

Exhibit A: Affliction and Comfort

You’ve probably heard some variant of the phrase, “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” American humorist Finley Peter Dunne (writing as the fictional Mr. Dooley) penned the original.

Th newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward”.

It’s supposed to be about newspapers, but I’ve always felt it applied much better to the Church. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a welcome haven for wayward sinners, but for those of us who are comfortable it can seem more like a frustrating and confusing bootcamp than a quiet refuge. That is not a bug. It is a feature.

Exhibit B: The Military Mental Model of Mormonism

One of the most important bloggernacle posts I’ve ever read is “The Military Mental Model of Mormonism.” In it, MC contrasts two models of Mormonism, the military model and the school house model. According to the schoolhouse model:

mortality is sort of like a giant high school where we are primarily here for self-improvement, and where the ultimate goal is to get good grades and hopefully be one of 50 million or so people tied for valedictorian[ref]I’d describe it as a slightly more personal variant of moralistic therapeutic deism[/ref]

The schoolhouse model is optimally suited for comfortable people leading comfortable lives, and it has a lot of truth to it. However, it also has pretty serious drawbacks. The military model is not perfect either, but it has the potential to explain aspects of Mormonism that seem irredeemably problematic under the schoolhouse model.

I embarked on this General Conference Odyssey not because I found General Conference talks soothing and enjoyable but because I found them challenging. (You can see that in the Times and Seasons post I wrote before the Odyssey started: The Assurance of Love.)

For the first four weeks, I was pleasantly surprised by the talks I read, however. I wasn’t challenged by the talks. I was predominantly comforted, impressed, and reassured. You can see that in my posts from the third and fourth weeks: “Love Fervently” and “The Mormon Way to Love.”

For this fifth week, however, the talks were a little harder on me, however. And—as I alluded to earlier—I think that pattern is a feature rather than a bug. Christ’s Church is a shelter first, but once you start to feel comfortable it begins to feel more like an obstacle course.

President Harold B. Lee’s talk “The Iron Rod,” (the first in the session) seemed very stern to me. It includes surprisingly strong language that appears very political, as in his recounting of a friend’s statement that “A liberal in the Church is merely one who does not have a testimony.”[ref]I’m not a liberal, so you might think I would enjoy this kind of frank talk. I don’t. It troubles me. Some of that might be that I don’t fully understand the way “liberal” was used, of course, but it’s troubling nonetheless.[/ref] Then he quoted Dr. John A. Widstoe:

The self-called liberal [in the Church] is usually one who has broken with the fundamental principles or guiding philosophy of the group to which he belongs. … He claims membership in an organization but does not believe in its basic concepts; and sets out to reform it by changing its foundations…It is folly to speak of a liberal religion, if that religion claims that it rests upon unchanging truth.

Elder Bruce R. McConkie also spoke during this session, and his talk “The Lord’s People Receive Revelation” contained more of what Laman and Lemuel might have called “hard things.”

“We do not come to a knowledge of God and his laws through intellectuality, or by research, or by reason,” declares Elder McConkie. Instead, revelation is the key. “Unless and until a man has received revelation, he has not received religion, and he is not on the path leading to salvation in our Father’s kingdom.”

He further elaborated the pitfalls of intellectualism:

I know people who can talk endlessly about religion but who have never had a religious experience. I know people who have written books about religion but who have about as much spirituality as a cedar post. Their interest in gospel doctrine is to defend their own speculative views rather than to find out what the Lord thinks about whatever is involved. Their conversations and their writings are in the realm of reason and the intellect; the Spirit of God has not touched their souls; they have not been born again and become new creatures of the Holy Ghost; they have not received revelation.

This is, to me, a fairly harsh line to take. If someone has “never had a religious experience,” my reaction would be one of concern first and foremost. But Elder McConkie’s stance seems to run the risk of compounding the sense of failure such an individual might feel when he says, for example, that “God stands revealed or he remains forever unknown.”

So I have explained some of the things that troubled me in these talks. Now I will talk about working my way through them.

Let’s start with something I mentioned at the outset: the Church ought to make you uncomfortable from time to time. This is true even in the schoolhouse model. When discussing secular education, we often talk about the need for children to be challenged. Well, being challenged is not always comfortable. It means stretching beyond what is comfortable. It implies being asked to do things you have never done before and are, in a sense, not ready for yet. In the Church we are always learning, and we learn by doing.

Additionally, the entire point of having a prophet is to have someone who can warn you of danger when you don’t recognize the danger for yourself. Of course there are times when—upon being given a warning—you will immediately look and see the danger yourself. In that case, gratitude is easy and instant. But the most valuable warnings are those which tell you to beware of something that you already see, but that you think is not dangerous. A grateful reaction is not as automatic in these cases. For starters, you might simply refuse to believe the warning, especially at first. What’s to be grateful for, if there’s no danger? Moreover, if someone is telling you not to do something and you can’t see any good reason for their restrictions, then there might be resentment at being bossed around. And lastly, there’s a risk that even if you do see the danger you will begrudge a sense of embarrassment that you didn’t see the problem yourself first. If a prophet is doing their job, then they are not very popular. That’s the whole point.

Now, the leaders are not perfect. If they were, this would all be very simple. We could simply turn off our brains and do what we’re told. Just as relevantly, the General Authorities give general advice. It’s up to us to understand where and how to apply what we hear in our own lives. There will be exceptions, and there isn’t a comprehensive guide to each and every possible exception. This means we cannot pass the buck to the leaders: we have to decide for ourselves what we’re going to do with their counsel.

But—given our understanding of a prophet’s role—we should be careful that dismissing their words as incorrect is not our first recourse. If you’ve got a prophet, you should use the prophet. And that means that you do your utmost to second-guess your own beliefs, your own cultural assumptions, and your own expertise. You can’t learn unless you’re willing to be taught, and there are times when you can’t receive more and better if you’re not willing to let go of what you’re currently holding.

And so, returning to Elder McConkie’s talk, something he said is worth highlighting: “It is the right of members of the Church to receive revelation.” His talk will be utterly incomprehensible without understanding that precept. At a minimum, it means that we can (and should) understand his stern statements regarding those who have not received revelation not as condemnation for failure, but rather as encouragement.

I also found Elder Hartman Rector, Jr.’s talk “Ignorance is Expensive” interesting. We’re all familiar with the idea that a theme develops in General Conference sessions, often when the talks touch upon the same themes in the same ways. But in this case Elder Rector’s talk—which immediately followed Elder McConkie’s—tackled many of the same themes with different emphasis.

In contrast to the almost anti-intellectual tones of Elder McConkie’s talk, Elder Rector’s seemed downright intellectual, using terms like “intelligence,” and “enlightened.” “We all should place the pursuit of light and truth, or intelligence, uppermost in our selection of goals, since we may have them eternally,” he said.

He also tackled head-on the issue of why we sometimes have difficulty receiving the light we seek:

But why do we receive not the light? The Lord tells us why over and over again in the scriptures. Simply stated, the reason we do not learn is because we are not in condition to learn. We are not in condition to receive the light because we are not willing to receive it. We just plain don’t want it.

We are prone to say that we are waiting on the Lord to receive light and truth when, as a matter of fact, the Lord is waiting on us—waiting for us to get into condition so he can reveal the light we seek and so desperately need.

Most importantly, he explained that “commandments are calculated to get us in condition so that we can receive light and truth, even intelligence.”

Elder Rector’s talk flowed seamlessly into Elder Loren C. Dunn’s (Drink of the Pure Water), which emphasized this importance of keeping commandments to revelation-seeking, and delineated what that revelation might look like:

If things go properly, you’ll notice some by-products, such as a growing awareness and concern for your fellowman and greater appreciation and consideration for other people.

Elder Bernard P. Brockbank’s talk (Love of God) and Elder Joseph Anderson’s (Eternal Joy is Eternal Growth) also had interesting insights into the idea of commandments. “The price the Lord has asked us to pay to be delivered from evil is to sincerely ask him,” said Elder Brockbank. In other words: the Lord stands ready to bless as soon as we are willing to receive the blessings. And “commandments are God’s laws—nature’s laws too,” said Elder Anderson, emphasizing that God’s laws are not capricious or arbitrary demands but rather wise and benevolent directions. God isn’t bribing us to jump through hoops. He’s trying to teach us to be like him.

So here are my thoughts on a session that was, at least initially, rather hard for me to read.

First, keep in mind the military model. The stakes are high and the decisions are real. This explains a lot of apparently troubling aspects of our faith: both individual commands and also the entire, hierarchical aspect of the Church. We are here to learn, but we’re learning under fire, as it were. Parents sometimes yell at their children out of love, for example not to run out into a busy street. Even if that is not A+ parenting, it shouldn’t be conflated with a lack of love or an unrighteous desire to dominate. Thus: even if our leaders do err in some ways, we should not assume that it is out of some kind of warped, selfish motive.

Second, keep in mind that discomfort is a feature, not a bug. We’re creatures of least resistance. We need to be prodded. And no one likes to be prodded. So you shouldn’t expect to feel comfortable in the Church. At least, not all the time. Sometimes it is a refuge. Other times, however, it is more akin to physical (spiritual) therapy.

Third, read what the leaders have to say in context. And not just in context of their own talks, but in context of how different leaders talk about the same issues. We have Twelve Apostles for a reason. We have dozens of Seventies for a reason. Revelation is neither easy nor precise. Not even for our leaders. But if we integrate their words together, I believe we can best discern the message that our Father has for us.[ref]In this case, the message I got was an emphasis on experienced religion that takes personal revelation seriously and also offers a road map on how to get it (via obedience) along with an accompanying discussion of why and how that method works.[/ref]

Which, when you think about it, is kind of the point of the General Conference Odyssey. No more cherry-picking what strokes your ego or what stokes your indignation. The goal is to read everything (at least starting in 1971). We’ll see where that takes us.

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Other General Conference Odyssey blog posts for this week:

You can also check out the full index of all posts so far here.

The General Conference Odyssey

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764 - Beginnings and Endings

The General Conference Odyssey is a group project by a number of Mormon bloggers. We decided to read all the talks[ref]Alternatively: some folks are reading only the talks from those who were or became Apostles.[/ref] from one session of every General Conference per week starting with the April 1971 session[ref]The first one readily available on LDS.org[/ref] and continuing until we catch up.

Our first post went live on December 1, 2015. We’ve posted every single Tuesday since then. Every week, we all post our reviews of the talks from that week’s session along with links to the other folks blogging that week. [ref]This format is what’s known as a “blog carnival.“[/ref] The only exception are current General Conferences, when we all take a break from reading the historical sessions to give our full attention to the current ones.

We call it the General Conference Odyssey because–assuming that future General Conferences maintain the 6-session format–we will not finish this task until 2029. Late in the summer of that year, we will finish re-reading the talks from the April 2029 General Conference before the October 2029 General Conference begins. If future General Conferences have more than 6 sessions, our odyssey will take longer. If they have less, then it will take shorter. In either case, however, an approximately 14-year blogging project seemed to merit the term “odyssey.”

The goal of all the participants is pretty simple. We say that we sustain the general authorities of the Church as prophets, seers, and revelators, so it makes sense to put our time and effort where our mouths are. Reading and then writing about these talks is one way of making sure that we have an eye on the watchmen on the tower.

It is also important, in a time where controversies and viewpoints abound, to keep track of the message that the leaders choose to reiterate. As Elder Eyring taught, “When the words of prophets seem repetitive, that should rivet our attention.” The only way to know which messages are being repeated, however, is to make sure that we’re paying attention to all of them.

Finally, we hope that in surveying a large number of talks over a long time period we will also be able to see trends or changes in emphasis that can help us better understand the Lord’s counsel through His prophets in response to a changing world. The Gospel doesn’t change, but the particular opportunities and dangers we should be most attuned to do change as the world does, and that is another good reason to pay close attention to the words of our prophets over an extended period of time.

This post serves as an introduction to the concept (which you’ve just read) in addition to a more detailed history, a FAQ, and a continuously updated index of all the blog posts in the General Conference Odyssey.

History

On October 25, 2015, J. Max Wilson shared a quote from a talk President Hinckley gave during the Saturday Morning session of the October 1981 General Conference: “Faith: The Essence of True Religion.” I was very struck by this quote, and I spent quite some time mulling it over and discussing my thoughts with friends and family. Eventually, I wrote a blog post for Times and Seasons detailing how I worked through incorporating the talk into my own beliefs. The post I wrote included this paragraph:

President Hinckley’s talk was given 34 years ago. I was a baby then, so of course I have no memory of this talk. I did not know that it existed until last week, when I read the excerpt. And I must confess a sense of shame as I read it for the first time and realized that this past year was the first year (since my mission) that I even tried to listen to all the sessions of General Conference. How many more talks have been given over my lifetime that I have never heard? Never read? Never considered? I say that I sustain the apostles as prophets, seers, and revelators, and yet I have nearly two centuries of their official talks given in General Conference and I have never even considered that I might want to go back and systematically read them to see what they had to say. I think it’s time I change that.

Not long after my post went live, J. Max sent me an email. He shared that he had been working through General Conference talks starting with his birth year. We got together with a few other bloggers we know (basically: the earliest participants in the General Conference Odyssey) and started talking about doing a group version of J. Max’s personal project. We settled on starting with April 1971 because it was the oldest easily available. We settled on a pace of one session per week because it seemed manageable over a long time-frame. I put together the schedule and a Google Doc we could use to coordinate and share links, and then suggested Dec 1 as the start date because: why wait? The holiday season is busy, but if we couldn’t make it through the first one I didn’t see any chance of making it through 14 years of them.

And so our first posts went live on Dec 1, 2015. At that time, we still didn’t have a name of the project.[ref]My working title was GenConCar, since it’s a General Conference Blog Carnival, but I never liked it.[/ref] Michelle Linford said she liked the term “odyssey” that I’d used in my first blog post,[ref]In a Facebook comment.[/ref] however, and with no other contenders, the name stuck.

FAQ

Q. Who can join the General Conference Odyssey?

A. If you’d like to be included as a blogger in the General Conference Odyssey, please contact any of the current bloggers and ask. [ref]If you don’t know any of us personally, you’re welcome to reach out to me using this site’s contact form.[/ref] In general, we’re looking for anyone who wants to read the General Conference talks for the same reason that we do: to better understand the words of Lord’s modern prophets.

Q. Who is in charge of the General Conference Odyssey?

A. The General Conference Odyssey is strictly a volunteer, team effort with no official leader or leadership. I do my best to facilitate by maintaining our schedule and sending encouraging emails and writing posts like this one, but anything else is decided by informal consensus.

Q. Why didn’t you answer my question yet?

A. Because we didn’t think of it. Go ahead and send it to any of the participants or just use this site’s contact form.

Index

The Mormon Way to Love

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey series.

I’m going to start my discussion of the talks from the Sunday Morning session of the April 1971 General Conference in a slightly different place: science fiction and fantasy. There’s going to be some wind up (which I hope you’ll find interesting), and then I’m going to tie it into President Gordon B. Hinckley’s talk “Except the Lord Build the House…”

749 - Star Wars Utah Fanws

Writing for the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, Christopher Ingraham noted that—based on Google search data—Utahns were “are the biggest Star Wars fans.”

During the past week, Utahns have done more Star-Wars related Googling than people in any other state. People in Utah are about 25 percent more likely to Google “Star Wars” than their nearest competitors in fandom, Californians. And they are more than twice as likely to Google the topic as people in Oregon and Mississippi, the two least Star Wars-crazy states.

Ingraham doesn’t have any idea why this is so. He doesn’t even speculated. Instead, he concludes his article with an invitation: “If you have a pet theory for why Utah is home of the nation’s #1 Star Wars Googlers, drop me a line.”

I’ll bite.

The connection is not between Mormons and Star Wars in particular. It’s between Mormons and all forms of geeky entertainment: Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr. Who, The Lord of the Rings, etc. The connection between Mormons and sci-fi and fantasy is so well known that the question (What’s the connection between Mormonism and speculative fiction?) is a recurring topic that many in the genre have taken a crack at. (Including me, one time for Times and Seasons. And also Matt Bowman, more recently and also at the Washington Post.)

In fact, one of my hobbies is to try to suss out Mormon influences in the work of Mormon authors. Historically, you’ve got Orson Scott Card as the big one. There’s also Stephanie Meyers as a really prominent Mormon author, but let’s not go there today. A trio that I’ve been following with great interest, however, are Brad Torgersen, Larry Correia, and Brandon Sanderson. Torgersen’s excellent short story collection Lights in the Deep has a great story called “The Chaplain’s War.” In it, Torgersen deals with issues of faith and the relationship of religion to secularism that–to my mind–show a distinctive Mormon perspective.

Then there’s Larry Correia, whose recent Son of the Black Sword is an incredible epic fantasy tale with some really interesting Mormon influence, which I outlined in my Goodreads review.

But it’s Brandon Sanderson I want to talk about for a moment.[ref]Spoiler alert: I’m going to be going over some spoilers for the Mistborn series through the most recent book, Shadows of Self.[/ref] Like Correia, Sanderson’s work frequently contains echoes of Mormon theology, culture, and scripture. The quote “it was better that one man suffer than an entire nation continue in heresy” from Elantris, for example, is an obvious echo of “It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.”[ref]1 Nephi 4:13[/ref] In my favorite series, Mistborn, themes of apostasy, restoration, and religious pluralism that borrow heavily from Joseph Smith’s writings are very prominent. In the conclusion of the first Mirstbon trilogy, the character Sazed’s understanding of numerous different religious traditions helps him rebuild the world and he remarks, “The religions in my portfolio weren’t useless after all. None of them were. They weren’t all true. But they all had truth.”

Compare this expansive view with quotes from Joseph Smith and Brigham Young:

“We should gather all the good and true principles in the world and treasure them up, or we shall not come out true Mormons.” – Joseph Smith[ref]Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 316[/ref]

“I want to say to my friends that we believe in all good.  If you can find a truth in heaven, earth, or hell, it belongs to our doctrine.  we believe it; it is ours; we claim it.” – Brigham Young[ref] Discources of Brigham Young selected by John A. Widtsoe, p. 2[/ref]

But one of the most Mormon aspects of Sanderon’s writing (especially in the Mistborn books) is his treatment of romantic relationships, and that’s where we’re going to finally bet back to President Hinckley’s talk. Here’s an excerpt from my review of The Well of Ascension (the second in the original Mistborn trilogy):

[Sanderson’s] take on relationships is very Mormon… You can tell this is a guy who grew up in a culture saturated with reverence for and wisdom about making marriages work. That’s an incredibly refreshing breath of fresh air in a genre fiction novel. Dynamic, fun, believable, and healthy relationships are just incredibly rare in popular entertainment, which almost always emphasize the pursuit and never spare time for the relationship itself.

So what are the hallmarks of a Mormon view of relationships? I would say there are two: prominence and practicality. Marriage matters to Mormons, and it matters a lot. That comes across in Sanderson’s writing, which not only focuses on romance but does so in a way that emphasizes relationships over sex. This gives Sanderon’s writing—and Mormon culture in general—a very romantic attitude. (There’s a reason Jane Austen is so popular with Mormons, leading to novels like Shannon Hale’s Austenland.)

But the other aspect is a very interesting contradiction with the romantic aspect of Mormon culture: practicality. Sanderson tackles this issue in the newest Mistborn novels, The Alloy of Law and Shadows of Self. These books includes the most unique and the most Mormon relationship plotline I have ever read in my life. The protagonist (Waxillium “Wax” Ladrian) returns from self-imposed exile on the frontier to take control of the struggling family business. He soon faces a dilemma. A marriage to Steris will restore the family fortune, but is a marriage of convenience for both of them. Or there is Steris’ half-sister Marasi: she is younger, prettier, and completely infatuated with Wax, but has no fortune to offer.

The Disney expectation is clear:  Wax has to put his heart first and marry Marasi, which is what his friend encourages him to do. The darker, more contemporary approach would be for Wax to marry Steris, but then cheat on her. Or maybe relapse into bitterness and regret. Sanderson—taking the Mormon approach—does neither. He has Wax move forward with the engagement to Steris, remain completely honorable, and slowly—very, very slowly—the two begin to find a mutual affection for each other despite their differences.

Now this is a long digression, but I think it was worth taking, because it shows how deeply the teachings that President Hinckley discusses in his talk have permeated Mormon culture. Sanderson shows Mormonism’s romantic view of the importance and possibility of love, but also the practical side of Mormonism that insists: all marriages are compromises.

Compare that with President Hinckley’s talk, “Except the Lord Build the House …” The talk begins with President Hinckley expressing concern for divorce (the symptom) and marital dysfunction (the disease):

Even in those lands where divorce is difficult if not impossible to obtain, the same disease is evident—the same nagging, corrosive evils of domestic misery, of separation, of abandonment, and of immoral and illegal relationships.

But, ever the optimist, President Hinckley quickly turns from what can go wrong to a discussion of what can go right, providing these four principles for building a strong and happy marriage:

  1. Respect for One Another
  2. The Soft Answer
  3. Honesty with God and with One Another
  4. Family Prayer

Here are some specific quotes from each section:

Respect for One Another

This respect comes of recognition that each of us is a son or daughter of God, endowed with something of his divine nature, that each is an individual entitled to expression and cultivation of individual talents and deserving of forbearance, of patience, of understanding, of courtesy, of thoughtful consideration.

The most important thing to note here is that the “recognition that each of us is a son or daughter of God,” is entirely generic. It applies to everyone. This is a major departure from modern views of love, which enshrine the idea of compatibility between two specific people above all else. That ides is totally absent from this view, which leads to President Hinckley’s stark statement:

True love is not so much a matter of romance as it is a matter of anxious concern for the well being of one’s companion.

This is pretty much exactly the opposite of what the world believes about love and marriage. Not coincidentally, it is exactly the kind of relationship that is beginning to develop between Wax and Steris in Sanderson’s books.

Companionship in marriage is prone to become commonplace and even dull. I know of no more certain way to keep it on a lofty and inspiring plane than for a man occasionally to reflect upon the fact that the help-meet who stands at his side is a daughter of God, engaged with Him in the great creative process of bringing to pass His eternal purposes. I know of no more effective way for a woman to keep ever radiant the love for her husband than for her to look for and emphasize the godly qualities that are a part of every son of our Father and that can be evoked when there is respect and admiration and encouragement. The very processes of such actions will cultivate a constantly rewarding appreciation for one another.

This is another example of President Hinckley’s teaching that the love within marriage doesn’t depend on finding your soulmate, on being compatible, or on any particular attribute of the spouses. It’s also a very realistic view of marriage, and one that emphasizes work. According to this view, it is a husband’s duty to protect his own love for his wife (and vice versa).  Mormons don’t believe in finding soulmates. They believe in making soulmates.

The Soft Answer

President Hinckley’s second principle is very simple: “We seldom get into trouble when we speak softly.”

It is also an opportunity for President Hinckley to again emphasize the importance of work within a marriage: “There is need for a vast amount of discipline in marriage, not of one’s companion, but of one’s self.”

Honesty with God and with One Another

President Hinckley’s observation here is both practical and profound:

If you will share with the Lord whom you do not see, you will deal more graciously, more honestly, and more generously with those whom you do see.

Family Prayer

President Hinckley’s last principle includes a long series of beautiful promises that any husband and wife will cover for their family. It doesn’t really fit the theme of this post (emphasizing the collision of practicality and romance), but it is beautiful so here it is:

Your children will know the security of a home where dwells the Spirit of the Lord. You will gather them together in that home, as the Church has counseled, and teach them in love. They will know parents who respect one another, and a spirit of respect will grow in their hearts. They will experience the security of the kind word softly spoken, and the tempests of their own lives will be stilled. They will know a father and mother who, living honestly with God, live honestly also with one another and with their fellowmen. They will grow up with a sense of appreciation, having heard their parents in prayer express gratitude for blessings great and small. They will mature with faith in the living God.

The destroying angel of domestic bitterness will pass you by and you will know peace and love throughout your lives which may be extended into all eternity. I could wish for you no greater blessing, and for this I humbly pray in your behalf, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

I thought it was fun to compare Brandon Sanderson’s writing with the teachings of President Hinckley to show how extensive the Mormon adoption of President Hinckley’s (and other leaders’) teachings on marriage and family peace and unity and harmony had become. These are clearly some of the lessons that many Mormons have taken to heart.

And now, here are just a few of quotes from other talks from this session that struck me.

In “Choose You This Day” Elder N. Eldon Tanner  writes that “there is strength in humility and weakness in pride.” That is a good thing to keep in mind.

In My Brother’s Keeper Elder John H. Vandenberg writes about the connection between sacrifice and love, reversing the ordinary causality:

What is the seed of mother love? Is it not sacrifice? Such love is considered to be the deepest and most tender. Is this because a mother passes through the valley of the shadow of death to give birth to her child and is continually sacrificing for that child’s welfare?

Is this why Christ loves the world? Because he toiled to make it? Because he sacrificed his life for the world and its people?… We all love that for which we sacrifice.

So, instead of loving motivating sacrifice, sacrifice can engender love. Elder Vandenberg also included a poignant reminder that is work keeping in mind as we think about everyday service: “The chips are down someplace every day.” There is always someone who needs our help.

—

Here are the blog posts from the other participants in the General Conference Odyssey.

Mass Shootings and Missing White Woman Syndrome

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Girls' rifle team at Central High, Washington, DC. November 1922. (Wikimedia Commons)
Girls’ rifle team at Central High, Washington, DC. November 1922. (Wikimedia Commons)

I haven’t posted anything about gun control in the middle of this most recent medley of outrage. This is primarily because I haven’t seen anything that looks remotely like a rational debate in which I could participate. It’s also because I’ve written on this topic at great length already[ref]Especially here and here.[/ref], and there is not a whole lot new to add.

It’s not that I’m opposed to considering new policies to solve the problems of widespread gun ownership.[ref]Note that I’m not denying that such problems exist, either.[/ref] Nope, the problem is that I find most of the folks who are calling for greater gun control are suggesting the wrong solutions to the wrong problems.

The degree of irresponsibility this time around has been particularly shocking. The most prominent example of this is the way that the media has adopted a completely baseless definition of “mass shooting” to sensationalize the issue. You’ve probably heard that there have been “more mass shootings than days this year” or something similar. All those articles are using data assembled by the Mass Shooting Tracker website. Their definition is, shall we say, non-standard: it includes any shooting in which at least four people are injured. The FBI definition is more stringent: a shooting in which there are at least 4 fatalities. The database maintained by Mark Follman and Mother Jones[ref]Not exactly a mouthpiece of the NRA.[/ref] is even more narrow: it excludes attacks related to gang violence or domestic violence. Follman explains this logic in a piece for the New York Times[ref]Again: not exactly an NRA-friendly outlet.[/ref]:

While all the victims are important, conflating those many other crimes with indiscriminate slaughter in public venues obscures our understanding of this complicated and growing problem. Everyone is desperate to know why these attacks happen and how we might stop them—and we can’t know, unless we collect and focus on useful data that filter out the noise.

German Lopez of Vox (which uses the Mass Shooting Tracker data) thinks Follman is being silly for caring so much about specific definitions: “this entire debate is ridiculous. A shooting is a shooting.” But of course, if that were true, Lopez would have to deal with the fact that gun deaths in America are in a steep decline. According to the Pew Research Center[ref]Yet another source that has never been accused of being in the NRA’s pocket.[/ref], “Compared with 1993, the peak of U.S. gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010, and there were fewer deaths, even though the nation’s population grew.” I’m not saying the current level is acceptable, I’m just saying that  there is no possible way for a person to simultaneously believe “a shooting is a shooting” and also believe that we’re in some kind of unprecedented crisis. Follman has a point: mass shootings (narrowly defined) are on the rise. Lopez—and anyone else jumping on the Mass Shooting Tracker bandwagon—has nothing but hand-waving and posturing.

752 - Gun Homicide Decline

So, if gun violence is actually at historical lows and on the decline, why are gun control advocates convinced that we’re facing some kind of massive epidemic? After all, the New York Times ran a front-page editorial for the first time in almost 100 years to support gun-control. What explains such an extreme reaction?

One theory: missing white woman syndrome:

Missing white woman syndrome is a phrase used by social scientists and media commentators to describe the extensive media coverage, especially in television, of missing person cases involving young, white, upper-middle-class women or girls. The phenomenon is defined as the media’s undue focus on upper-middle-class white women who disappear, with the disproportionate degree of coverage they receive being compared to cases of missing women of other ethnicities and social classes, or with missing males of all social classes and ethnicities.

Although missing white woman syndrome is primarily about kidnapping cases, “it is sometimes used to describe the disparity in news coverage of other violent crimes.”

So, to be perfectly plain about it, mass shootings are sensational because the victims are often white, often middle or upper-class, suburban and–relative to homicide rates in general–female.[ref]According to stats collected at Wikipedia, 91% of drug homicide victims are male, 95% of gang homicide victims are male, and 77% of all homicide victims are male. If mass shootings are random, then only about 50% of victims will be male, which means that females make up a much larger proportion of mass shooting victims than they do of overall homicide victims.[/ref] Crime might be down overall, but who cares? If college students and suburban white kids can be killed, then we have a crisis.

It’s not just the perception of the problem that is skewed by race and class, but also the proposed solutions. You see, there are policies that have been tried and found to be effective in combating urban violence. But no one seems to know or care about such initiatives, leading The New Republic to run an article to explain “why no one in Washington—not even President Obama—will embrace a program that could actually reduce gun violence.” Lois Beckett points out that “America’s high rate of gun murders isn’t caused by events like Sandy Hook or the shootings this fall at a community college in Oregon. It’s fueled by a relentless drumbeat of deaths of black men.” He then went on to talk about a program called Ceasefire. It isn’t new and it isn’t sexy, but “in Boston, the city that developed Ceasefire, the average monthly number of youth homicides dropped by 63 percent in the two years after it was launched.” The US Department of Justice has officially labeled it “effective.”

If “a shooting is a shooting”, and if the highest rates of crime are in inner cities, and if the disproportionate rate of murder victims are black Americans, and if we have a proven program to reduce those crimes… why isn’t anyone talking about them?

751 - Gun Homicide by Ethnicity

Timothy Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney quoted in Beckett’s article, has a pretty simple hypothesis:

I think that people in those communities are perceived as not sufficiently important because they don’t vote, they don’t have economic power. I think there’s some racism involved. I don’t think we care about African-American lives as much as we care about white lives.

So the problem is misdiagnosed, and the most promising solutions are ignored. But it gets worse than that. The reality is that the proposed “common sense” gun regulations will have basically no impact on mass shootings whatsoever. For example, Marco Rubio recently stated that “None of the major shootings that have occurred in this country over the last few months or years that have outraged us, would gun laws have prevented them.” The Washington Post fact-checked his claim[ref]Yet again: not an NRA shill.[/ref] and ended up giving out “a rare Geppetto Checkmark.”[ref]Did you even know they gave those out?[/ref]

The idea of “common sense” gun regulation coming to the rescue is a politically convenient fiction. It is designed to appeal to moderate voters, but it’s just an empty slogan. The only kinds of gun laws that would have any kind of impact would have to involve a massive reduction in the number of firearms currently in circulation with a forced buyback and stric enforcement. But those laws are guaranteed to be enforced in unequal ways, a point that Ross Douthat made on Sunday:

I suspect liberals imagine, at some level, that a Prohibition-style campaign against guns would mostly involve busting up gun shows and disarming Robert Dear-like trailer-park loners. But in practice it would probably look more like Michael Bloomberg’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy, with a counterterrorism component that ended up heavily targeting Muslim Americans. In areas where gun ownership is high but crime rates low, like Bernie Sanders’ Vermont, authorities would mostly turn a blind eye to illegal guns, while poor and minority communities bore the brunt of raids and fines and jail terms.

If that sounds at all farfetched you simply need to ask yourself this question: has the War on Drugs had a disproportionate impact on poor and minority communities? Then what makes you think a War on Guns would be any different?

Nor is this hypothetical. The history of gun control is a primarily racist history in which gun control was used as a pretext to disarm African Americans to make them easier targets. The Atlantic covered this thoroughly in an article called The Secret History of Guns, noting that “no group has more fiercely advocated the right to bear loaded weapons in public than the Black Panthers—the true pioneers of the modern pro-gun movement.”

And let me just end with a note about how spectacularly bad some of the proposed new “common sense” regulations are. In his address to the nation, President Obama doubled down on the idea of using the terrorist watch list to screen gun purchases. This sounds entirely reasonable for about a second or two. After that, however, you might remember that—before it was brought up in this context—the terrorist watch list showed up in the news only in story after story of how horrifically mismanaged and unfair it was. This is the same terrorist watchlist that contained 72 Department of Homeland Security employees, a finding that led the DHS director to resign. Even ThinkProgress[ref]Need I point out how much they are not on the NRA’s Christmas list?[/ref] thinks it’s a terrible idea. Aviva Shen quoted Marco Rubio in The Problem With Banning Guns From People On The Terrorist Watch List:

The majority of the people on the no-fly list are oftentimes people that just basically have the same name as somebody else, who doesn’t belong on the no-fly list. Former Senator Ted Kennedy once said he was on a no-fly list. There are journalists on the no-fly list.

It’s not just a matter of plain bureaucratic incompetence, however. Ken White pointed out the philosophical problems with the idea for Popehat:

Last night the President of the United States — the President of the United States — suggested that people should be deprived of Second Amendment rights if the government, using secret criteria, in a secret process using secret facts, puts them onto a list that is almost entirely free of due process or judicial review. Because we’re afraid, because they could be dangerous was his only justification; he didn’t engage the due process issue at all.

Do I even need to point out that this list is also guaranteed to skew along ethnic and religious lines? The exact same folks who are horrified by Donald Trump’s bigotry[ref]And they should be horrified. Everyone should be horrified and revolted.[/ref] don’t seem to realize that a proposal like adding the terrorist watchlist to the background check is basically a backdoor method of accomplishing the same kind of religiously-based stripping of civil liberties from American citizens.

This is what passes for “common sense” regulation? Clearly some people are using the phrase “common sense” in novel and fascinating ways.

To recap: gun violence is ignored when it effects primarily young black men, but when it happens in suburban schools or movie theaters it is a crisis that demands swift and thorough response. Anti-violence programs with a proven record of lowering gun crime where it is worst—in inner cities—and thereby saving the lives of young black men are also ignored. Instead, we hear about “common sense” gun regulations that sound reassuring but would help no one and end up (you guessed it) further compounding the systematic inequalities in our society that target the poor and minorities.

The left is very, very good at sniffing out the faintest whiff of white privilege from the right, but—when it comes to handling the gun issue—it’s time to say: physician, heal thyself.

Love Fervently

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745 - I Want to Believe in Love
(Snagged from Flickr. Click image for link)

Three weeks is a little early into a 14-year project, but I’m already impressed with how my view of the Church and the General Authorities is changing. And it comes down to one thing: love. I didn’t expect to hear and feel so much love from the 1970s-era Church leaders. I expected the concern for crumbling moral standards of the day and the (by our standard) harsh language with regard this deterioration. I didn’t expect so much love.

I’ll have to back up very briefly to mention Elder Marvin J. Ashton’s talk from the Saturday morning session of the April 1971 General Conference, “Love of the Right.” In his talk, Elder Ashton explained the famous quote we have all heard, “No other success can compensate for failure in the home.” This is what Elder Ashton had to say:

Following one of our recent general conference sessions, a troubled mother approached me and said, “I need to know what is meant by the statement, ‘No success can compensate for failure in the home.’” Knowing a little of the burdens this friend of mine carries in her mind and heart because of a rebellious, wayward daughter, I shared this meaning with her: I believe we start to fail in the home when we give up on each other. We have not failed until we have quit trying. As long as we are working diligently with love, patience, and long-suffering, despite the odds or the apparent lack of progress, we are not classified as failures in the home. We only start to fail when we give up on a son, daughter, mother, or father.

Elder Ashton’s response demonstrates a genuine love, both for the parents of wayward children and for wayward children. And so I was especially struck when (in the priesthood session we’re responding to this week), Elder Harold B. Lee returned to the same topic in his talk “Today’s Young People.” He said:

I would have you remember a remark of Brother Marvin J. Ashton in his very excellent address today when he said no home is a failure until it gives up on that son, or that daughter, or that husband, or that wife. It must not give up, no matter how difficult the task to save one of ours.

This is a beautiful new way of looking at President McKay’s famous statement. While no success can compensate for failure in the home, no home is a failure so long as we refuse to give up on our loved family members.

In his talk, President Lee (then Elder Lee) recounted a story of a speech given by Horace Mann (“that great educator somewhere back in the time of Abraham Lincoln”) to the effect that a new school—which had cost a huge amount of money to build—would be worth it “if [it] is able to save one boy.” One of Mann’s friends replied that surely Mann was exaggerating. But, according to President Lee, he was not.

Horace Mann looked at him and said, “Yes, my friend. It would be worth it if that one boy were my son; it would be worth it.”

I want you to know that it would be worth it if it were my grandson, or one of mine. It would be worth it if it were one of yours.

Another talk that really conveyed to me a sense of warmth and love was Elder N. Eldon Tanner’s “Search for the Wanderers.” The talk, which emphasized the importance of reaching out to inactive members, returned again and again to a beautiful theme that Elder Tanner once told an inactive member that he was extending a calling to: “Listen, brother, you need activity in the Church, but we need you, we really need you.”

He then went on to say:

Brethren, there is nothing more important in your whole lives than to save souls. We have programs and we have planning outlines for teachers, and we give them teacher helps, and all those things to take care of those who are attending, but I fear too often we are forgetting and neglecting and ignoring those who are not always there, satisfied to say we had 50 percent or 60 percent in attendance.

I don’t care at all for percentages or statistics, but I do care for that boy and the outside young man, and I appeal to you tonight, my brethren, every one of you who is holding the priesthood of God, and particularly those who hold office in the Church, to set about to do as the Lord said, to find that lost sheep, bring him back into the fold, so that you will find joy with him when you meet your Heavenly Father.

I was also struck by Elder Tanner’s ability to empathize with those who wander. He said:

There are those who are discouraged and inactive because they have felt neglected or have been offended; or they are guilty of some transgression of their own, and as a result feel that they are outcasts or that there is no place for them, that they are not worthy or wanted. They feel that they are lost and cannot be forgiven. We as leaders must let them know and make them know that we love them, and help them to understand that the Lord loves them, and that the Lord will forgive them if they will truly repent.

We have an old song, “Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight?” and I was wondering if that could not be changed to mean more to us in these words: “Why is my boy wandering tonight?”

This is a very near echo of how Elder Ashton talked about the problem of drug abuse in the talk I quoted from earlier, Love of the Right. For Elder Ashton it was not enough to simply teach our youth that drugs are dangerous and immoral. We had to ask the deeper questions:

If we as parents and friends advise our youth that drugs are bad, evil, and immoral, and yet we do not try to understand why our youth turn to this evil substitute for reality, then the drugs themselves become the issue and not the symptom of the greater issue of unhappiness. We need to know why our loved ones want to run from their present life to the unknown yet dangerous life of addiction. What causes a strong, lovely, vibrant young person to allow a chemical to control his or her behavior? What is there at home, school, work, or church that is so uncomfortable that an escape seems necessary?

If we were not faced with the evils of marijuana, LSD, speed, and heroin, we would be faced with some other type of escape mechanism, because some of us as brothers, sisters, parents, friends, and teachers have not yet been able to reach our youth in such a way as to give them the confidence and love they seek.

All of this came to my mind as I was preparing my lesson for Gospel Doctrine. In my ward, today was lesson 43, which covers 1 Peter. A lot of Peter’s tone is very similar to what we hear in General Conference, and especially the emphasis on love and unity. And this phrase in particular stood out: “see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently.” (1 Peter 1:22)

We’ve all heard the command to “love one another” many, many times. And, just as many of us (me foremost!) are perhaps a little too willing to discount General Conference talks as more of the same, I can imagine that Peter needed to hammer the point home a little to get people to realize—again—how fundamentally important it is. Love one another, he said. Fervently.

Here are a couple of additional snippets from the Priesthood session that I liked:

And one of these days he is going to come.

I liked the matter-of-fact tone in President Joseph Fielding Smith’s reference to the Second Coming in “Our Responsibilities As Priesthood Holders.”

It is not difficult for men who are true to themselves to be true to others

An elegant aphorism from Elder Victor L. Brown in “The Meaning of Morality.”

Brethren of the priesthood, in your own circle, in your own home, in your own lives, you must do all you can of your own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness.

President Harold B. Lee urging us to go beyond what we are commanded to do in “Today’s Young People”

—

Here are the other folks participating in this grand scheme who have also written blog posts responding to the Priesthood session of the April 1971 General Conference. (If any of the links don’t work, try back later. They are all coming online during the day.)

Bites from the April 1971 Priesthood Session (by G at Junior Ganymede)

LDS Conference 1971 – Meetinghouse Libraries and UX for Gospel Learning (by J. Max Wilson at Sixteen Small Stones)

Dear to the Heart of the Shepherd (by Daniel Ortner at Symphony of Dissent)

Deep Down Inside Us There is Good (by John Hancock at the Good Report)

Betty Friedan and Bishop Brown (by Ralph Hancock at The Soul and The City)

Why I support Friends of Scouting (by Michelle Linford at Mormon Women)

God’s Plan to Exalt His Children (by Miachael Worley at Michael’s Thoughts and Ideas)

 

Beyond Star Trek (About the New Star Trek Trailer)

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So there’s a new Star Trek trailer out, and people are mad. As far as I can tell, everyone is mad.[ref]Sample size of about 6 from my Facebook feed.[/ref] And they’re general reaction is: “this isn’t Star Trek.”

747 - Star Trek Whiners

Me? I’m too busy feeling smug to be mad.

When I complained about little details like long-distance transportation in the first rebooted Star Trek and the all-around plot confusion of the second, other Star Trek fans called me a whiner. But I could see what they couldn’t see (yet): the reboot isn’t really Star Trek.

What do I mean by that? Well, here’s what Keith Phillips had to say about the first movie back in 2009:

It is, undeniably, a reconsideration of what constitutes Star Trek, one that deemphasizes heady concepts and plainly stated humanist virtues in favor of breathless action punctuated by bursts of emotion. It might not even be immediately be recognizable to veteran fans as Star Trek. [emphasis added]

So, to every Star Trek fan who told me I was being too critical: I. Told. You. So.

Now, the second reason I’m not mad is this: the movie looks like it might be fun! See, here’s the rest of Phillips’ quote:

But they’ll have to actively tune out Abrams’ eagerness to entertain not to enjoy the ride.

For me, this comes down to how you define science fiction. The definition that means the most to me is the idea that science fiction is “the literature of ideas.”[ref]Attributed to sci fi author Pamela Sargent[/ref] This is often linked to science, and it was Isaac Asimov who wrote that sci-fi was “that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings” [ref]WritingWorld.com[/ref] That’s a good description of what was being written by serious sci-fi writers in the 1960s and 1970s, but it mistakes the tool with the goal. Extrapolating scientific advances to create new situations has always been primarily a method to ask philosophical “what-if” questions. It’s the what-if that really matters. The extrapolated science was just a way to get there, and it ended up not being the only way.

This is why I stand by my designation of Frankenstein as the first real work of sci-fi. You can find older texts with, for example, trips to the moon in human-created craft, but in Frankenstein Mary Shelley wasn’t just postulating some advanced medical technology for the sake of a good story (although there’s that too), but also using those imaginary inventions to ask questions about creation and responsibility that you couldn’t get to in any other way. The philosophical aspects of the work were at least as important as the scientific ones.

That, to me, is the heart of sci-fi. And it’s what Star Trek has always done when it is at its best. The science in most Star Trek is ridiculous technobabble nonsense. But the world–and the individual episodes–were crafted to ask meaningful questions. That’s where the romance of the world came from.[ref]Even if, on closer inspection, the whole United Federation of Planets is a kind of creepy fascist state.[/ref]

This new Star Trek? Not only is it not recognizable Star Trek, but it’s not even recognizably science fiction in the “literature of ideas” sense of the word.

But there has always been another definition of sci-fi living side-by-side with the “literature of ideas” version. The other definition is all action and adventure, and instead of Frankenstein you’d think of something like Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom series. This view of sci-fi is just action-adventure with lasers and rocket ships instead of handguns and airplanes. And you know what? I like that kind of sci-fi, too.

Of course in practice, these two views of sci-fi not only live side-by-side in the same bookstores, but often in the same books. Lots of people–myself included–find spaceships to be fundamentally romantic. We like them in the same way that other people really like tall ships. And so you can see a series like the Vorkosigan saga or the Honor saga as really just Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series or C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series… but in space.

And that’s OK!

In other words: I gave up on the Star Trek reboot as “literature of ideas” sci-fi back when the first one came out. I’ve had time to get over it. And so I’m ready to watch a new Star Trek movie as what the reboot series clearly wants to be ray gun and spaceship sci-fi. And who knows, on that basis? It could be really great.