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.

Heaven is Other People

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Eve covers herself and lowers her head in shame in Rodin’s Eve after the Fall. (MicheleLovesArt – Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Walker’s encouragement, I’ve been reading Brené Brown recently. Brown is a shame researcher, and she defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging – something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.”[ref]From her website.[/ref]

Not everything Brown says resonates with me. I don’t like the route she takes, but I do like the destination she’s aiming for. For example, above she says that shame involves “believe that we are flawed.” Well, we are flawed, so we have a pretty good reason for that belief! She also has an affirmation she repeats a lot: “I am enough.” I think that’s nonsense. She’s not enough, I’m not enough, no one is enough.

On the other hand, the rest of her quote is that, because we are flawed, we are “therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” And that, I agree, is a soul-destroying lie. Similarly, I don’t like the phrase “I am enough,” but I do like a very similar phrase that I think gets to Brown’s point: “I am a child of God.” Or, in the lyrics of my favorite band Thrice:

We’re more than carbon and chemicals
Free will is ours and we can’t let go
We can’t allow this, the quiet cull
So we sing out this, our canticle
We are the image of the invisible

We all were lost now we are found
No one can stop us or slow us down
We are all named and we are all known
We know that we’ll never walk alone

We’re more than static and dial tone
We’re emblematic of the unknown
Raise up the banner, bend back your bows
Remove the cancer, take back your souls
We are the image of the invisible

Though all the world may hate us, we are named
Though shadow overtake us, we are known

The theology is a little confused from a Mormon standpoint, but the sentiment is one we embrace. Because we are the offspring of God, we are worthy regardless of whether or not we’re flawed and regardless of whether or not we’re enough. That’s my only beef with Brown, really. I don’t like people trying to tell me that I’m good enough to love. What does “good enough” have to do with anything? I don’t have to earn the love of my Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother. That’s sort of the whole point.

King Benjamin told his people that “Ye cannot say that ye are even as much as the dust of the earth” and that—no matter how hard we try to obey God—we are “unprofitable servants.”[ref]Mosiah 2:21, 25[/ref] On the other hand, the Lord said, “Remember the worth of souls is great in the sight of God.”[ref]D&C 18:10[/ref]

This isn’t really a contradiction, in my eyes, and anyone who has had children can see how. The rugrats are useless, slimy, stinky, sleep-depriving monster who will as soon vomit or defecate on you as smile at you. And we love and cherish them with all our hearts. Children, especially very young children, are supremely “unprofitable.” They are little black holes that suck away our time and energy and youth. And they fill our lives with meaning.

So, this has been a long, long digression. Sorry, folks! Should have saved it for the book review!

The reason for this digression is that, although he never uses the term, Elder Hales’ talk We Can’t Do It Alone is all about shame. Because here’s the thing, the part about Brown’s definition that is in some ways the most important is the very end: shame “makes us [fee] unworthy of connection.”[ref]Emphasis added.[/ref] That’s what it all comes down to. As humans, we have a deep need to belong. And what shame does is convince us to abandon the attempt and settle for being broken and alone.

But, as Elder Hales says, “we did not come to this life to live it alone.” On the contrary, “the true nature of the gospel plan is the interdependence we have upon one another.” And what stops us? Shame. Again, he doesn’t use the word, but the concept is clearly identical to Brown. For example:

When we are marred spiritually or physically, our first reaction is to withdraw into the dark shadows of depression, to blot out hope and joy—the light of life which comes from knowing we are living the commandments of our Father in heaven. This withdrawal will ultimately lead us to rebellion against those who would like to be our friends, those who can help us most, even our family. But worst of all, we finally reject ourselves.

The heart of the Gospel, as we understand it, is the atonement. It’s unity. Shame, which is not the same as guilt[ref]Guilt, according to both the scriptures and also Brown, is a useful response to our own mistakes that encourages us to improve and do better in the future.[/ref], is the wedge shaped to break that unity, the lure that holds us back from the atonement, and we need to be—as Brown puts it—“shame resilient” in order to prevent it from stopping us or turning us aside from our mission to improve ourselves individually and collectively during our mortal sojourn.

Oh, and now for the brave, here’s Thrice’s song that I quoted earlier. Be warned, the message is fantastic but the rock is hard.

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On Syria and Delusions of Isolation

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There’s a piece I’ve been meaning to write for months about the end of Pax Americana. This is not the post, but it is a prelude.

Traveling in Turkey last week, American Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that “longer-term status of President [Bashar] Assad will be decided by the Syrian people.” This may not sound shocking, but it’s a thinly-veiled euphemism (similar to ones employed by long-time Assad ally Vladimir Putin) for a shift in American policy away from overthrowing the Assad regime and towards allowing Assad to finish suppressing the Syrian rebels and retain power.

Within a few days of that, Assad’s forces apparently launched a chemical weapon attack that killed at least 69 civilians, including women and children. It’s not hard to draw a line from the first event to the second. Although Obama infamously and catastrophically failed to back up his “red line” threat, global disapproval is the key feature that has kept the Assad regime from repeating the chemical weapons attacks of 2013. In signalling the shift in American policy, Tillerson effectively handed the Assad regime a blank check. They cashed it.

What’s fascinating to me is the reaction by American isolationists to this fairly mundane and predictable series of events. If the implacable foe of a murderous, WMD-deploying dictator suddenly decides that they’re placcable after all, it shouldn’t shock us when that murderous, WMD-deploying dictator uses his suddenly longer leash to go out and use those WMDs to murder his enemies. That is what murderous, WMD-deploying dictators do. And so this is what American non-intervention looks like.

But the isolationists–led by Ron Paul–can’t face that reality because they have been telling Americans for literally decades that the real source of all the violence in the Middle East is American meddling. If only America would back off, they say, the level of violence would diminish. In order to preserve that narrative, we suddenly get outlandish conspiracy theories about how the attack was a false flag operation at the behest of American neocons. Yes, according to Ron Paul (and a lot of his followers), it is more plausible that John McCain, the CIA, and Syrian rebels are in a conspiracy to frame Assad for using chemical weapons than that Assad himself used chemical weapons.

This is not the post where I present my full case for continued American participation on the global stage. That will come soon, I hope. This is the post where I remind everyone that extremism is almost always a symptom of absolutism. Absolutism is a natural reaction to a tragic world in which tradeoffs, ambiguity, and complexity are unavoidable. Humans hate all of these things at a visceral level. We would much rather live in a simple, black-and-white world with easy answers to all of our toughest problems.

When I was a little kid, I was viscerally upset about the Chinese crackdown of the Tiananmen Square protests.[ref]Yes, that’s the kind of thing that really bothered 8-year old Nathaniel.[/ref] I fantasized about the US sending F-15s to blow up the bad guys and save the student protesters. Real life doesn’t work that way, and it seems that some of the loudest voices calling for us to “do something” in Syria never learned that lesson. As though it was self-evident that anything we did would have a net-positive impact. That’s one kind of extremism. The other is the kind that says if the US just packs up and goes home, vicious dictators won’t take advantage of that power vacuum to drop chemical weapons on unarmed families. As though it was self-evident that anything we did would have a net-negative impact.

So let me be clear: this isn’t an argument for more or for less intervention in Syria. I don’t know the best strategy for us to take there. This is simply an argument against oversimplification and the vilification that inevitably follows. Why does oversimplification lead to vilification? Because if the world is simple and the answers are easy, then you have to come up with an explanation for why all our problems still exist. The only plausible answer is that there are really bad people who just want everyone to suffer and somehow they are in control. That is why belief in a fundamentally simplistic world leads directly to belief in astonishingly ornate conspiracy theories and cartoonish supervillains. It’s just the cost of sustaining the illusion that the world is orderly, predictable, and comprehensible.

No matter what we do in Syria, there will be costs, they will be high, and they will be borne by the most vulnerable. I hope we can try to debate with a little more good faith and sobriety what–if anything–we can do as a nation. It might not seem like the emotionally appropriate response to tragedy, but it’s the only responsible one.

Threading Needles

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The Shepherd and his Flock, c. 1905 (Public Domain)

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Whenever General Conference rolls around, we suspend the ordinary General Conference Odyssey schedule to pay attention to the current conference, and that’s what we did this past weekend as well. There were a lot of great talks from this session, but I don’t really want to go into them in great detail until I can read the text.

Instead, I just want to make a general observation.

During talks by Elders Uchtdorf and Renlund, which touched on themes that tend to be near to the heart of left-leaning Mormons (e.g. love, tolerance, refugees), there was a lot of excitement and enthusiasm. This turned to consternation when Elder Christofferson spoke, however, especially when he pulled from conservative thinkers David Brooks and Ross Douthat. I couldn’t resist joking about that on Facebook, because I knew perfectly well the effect it would have.[ref]Read through the comments if you’re curious.[/ref]

Really, though, my motivation wasn’t so much immature “neener neener” and more genuine excitement. The Douthat article in particular is one of the most important op-eds I’ve ever read, and it has had a really significant impact on my thinking. I was thrilled to hear the ideas from it over the pulpit in General Conference.

This can be dangerous, of course. One of my friends sardonically:

I go into every General Conference with faith that I’ll be provided the authoritative ammo from a commonly accepted authority so I can combat Mormons who disagree with me.

It’s really important to remember that the fundamental role of prophets is to warn. That means, pretty much by definition, that when we like to hear the least is what we need to hear the most.

I had one other thought that I wanted to share when it comes to the supposed Uchtdorf vs. Christofferson divide, and that is that our job as members is to listen to the General Authorities as a body. Of course it doesn’t hurt to have your favorites—the ones who seem to speak directly to you—but the possibility of fandom turning into factionalism is anathema to the unity of the Church.

Or, as I put it in that Facebook conversation:

Trying to convey complicated ideas to a large crowd is like herding sheep, in that you need at least two people coming from opposite sides to keep the sheep inline.

If you have some sheep veering off to the west (I’m trying to avoid left/right), then placing someone over to the west will fix that problem, but it might actually exacerbate the problem of sheep who were already headed off to far to the east. And vice-versa. So what you need is one guy on the west herding in and another guy on the east hearing in and–taken together–you can actually keep your flock together and where they’re supposed to be.

In particular, Christofferson’s talk exists so that people don’t get a little too carried away with their interpretation of Renlund’s, Holland’s, and Uchtdorf’s talk. And Renlund, Holland, and Uchtdorf’s talks exist so that people (like me) don’t get too comfortable with a talk like Christofferson’s.

We need them both.

All in all, I thought it was a great General Conference.

That being said, next week we’re going to be right back on our usual schedule with the October 1975 General Conference.

Thanks for embarking on this odyssey with us!

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

Mr. Pence and Mrs. Butterworth

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Let me start out at the outset by saying that The Onion’s spoof of the WaPo’s revelation[ref]Actually, just a mention of something Pence told the Hill back in 2002, but never mind that detail.[/ref] that Mike Pence “never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won’t attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side, either” is hilarious: Mike Pence Asks Waiter To Remove Mrs. Butterworth From Table Until Wife Arrives.

Let me add, as a second point, that the issue of unequal treatment of women is very much alive today, and affects many women, especially those working in male-dominated sectors like engineering and computer science. We’ll come back to that at the end.[ref]I added this paragraph on 2017-April-01 after a Facebook discussion with a woman in one of these sectors. I hadn’t added it before then because I thought it was obvious.[/ref]

The mini-debate that has been ongoing on about Pence’s policy has been quite interesting. At least one friend on Facebook compared it to The Great Dress Debacle of 2015: conservatives found Pence’s stance perfectly normal while liberals were split between ridiculing him and accusing him of practicing Sharia. Lest you think I’m joking, here’s one example cadged from The Federalist:

So, here are a couple of thoughts.

First, some folks seem to be missing the primary point of a rule like this. It is not, as the mockers deride, because Mr. Pence’s self-control is so flimsy he is afraid that merely sitting next to a woman in a restaurant without supervision would place him in danger of fornicating right there on the spot.

This isn’t a minor confusion. It’s a fundamental misapprehension of an ancient worldview that Christians still adhere to. In religious language: we’re all weak, vulnerable, and prone to sin. In modern, secular language: we’re irrational and often behave in ways that counter our own best interests and/or confound the values and goals we think we have. Doesn’t matter if you call it “fallen nature” or “cognitive bias”, in this context we’re talking about the same thing.

So how does this play out? The most common way that Christians (or other social conservatives) might try to explain a rule like Pence’s goes something like this: Anyone who goes on a diet will start by throwing out all the tempting food in their house.

The problem is that this analogy is very easy to misunderstand. One interpretation–the wrong one–is that cheating on your wife is the same kind of momentary lapse as cheating on your diet. It’s as though absent-mindedly chomping down on a Krispy Kreme you forgot to throw out is equivalent to absent-mindedly wandering into a hotel room with a woman you’re not married too. Lots of folks get as far as this (silly) interpretation and stop there.

The actual interpretation of the metaphor is quite different. It is saying that good behavior is not just about making the right decisions in the moment. It’s about manipulating your environment to make it conducive to the kind of behavior that you want in your life. Social conservatives understand that because we’re irrational creatures with amazing abilities to rationalize our ways into following short-term desires part of being virtuous isn’t just saying no to temptation in the moment, but avoiding it altogether.

Pence’s rule doesn’t draw the line at the moment when he’s tempted to be sexually unfaithful to his wife. It draws the line much, much earlier and so prevents the first seeds of infidelity from ever having a chance to take root in the first place.

I don’t follow Pence’s rule. I think it’s overkill. I’m not interested in trying to convince anyone that his particular rule should be some kind of universal standard for everyone. But I don’t think it’s ridiculous or absurd either. After all–in addition to the concerns about compromising marital fidelity out of an initially innocent friendship–there’s also legitimate concerns about being taken advantage of. Politicians are powerful and that also makes them vulnerable. Just ask the KGB (the FSB, these days) which has employed agents to try and seduce traveling politicians and officials for decades and decades in order to blackmail their targets into betraying state secrets. This is, by the way, one of the reasons that the CIA, FBI, and many other agencies are fond of hiring Mormons.[ref]Catch up here, if that is news to you.[/ref] Not only are we extremely family-focused (I know lots of Mormons who follow Pence’s rules), but we also don’t drink. Taken together, this means observant Mormons are less likely to be compromised in this way than the average population.

In the wake of the Republicans failing to pass the AHCA, there was a nauseating avalanche of cutesy Facebook posts from liberal fans of Hamilton. Here’s one:

If you missed the reference, it’s from Cabinet Battle #1, when Madison and Jefferson taunt Hamilton. Other favorites included “Winning was easy… Governing’s harder” and “Do you know how hard it is to lead?”

The funny thing is, if Alexander Hamilton had followed a rule like Mike Pence’s, he could have avoided his part in America’s first political sex-scandal, saved his family a lot of agony, and spared Lin-Manuel Miranda a song or two.[ref]Die-hard Hamilton fans are probably not persuaded by that last one, of course.[/ref]

And that brings me to my second point. Just as liberals are happy to take very selective lessons from Hamilton, there’s an awful weird dichotomy in a town where liberals practice all kinds of non-judgmentalism for open marriages but are more than happy to ridicule and deride someone for trying to keep their marriage closed. That’s the point Jonah Goldberg made at the National Review:

Last summer, when Bill Clinton spoke about his wife at the Democratic convention (“In the spring of 1971, I met a girl . . . ”), liberals gushed at the “love story,” and the rule of the day was that marriage is complicated and the Clintons’ ability to stay married (though practically separated) was admirable. Besides, “Who are we to judge?” — no doubt Bill Clinton’s favorite maxim.

It’s a very strange place we’ve found ourselves in when elites say we have no right to judge adultery, but we have every right to judge couples who take steps to avoid it.[ref]Emphasis added.[/ref]

He’s not wrong, you know.

I do think there are some legitimate concerns. The most important being that if you’re, say, a business executive who follows these rules, does it mean that you’re creating an environment where you give preferential treatment to men? If a young, up-and-coming male executive could ask you out to lunch to seek your advice, but a young, up-and-coming female executive cannot, then we do have a legitimate problem. It’s also possible to simply take this stance too far. I don’t recall conservatives having a problem with forcing Muslim boys to shake hands with their (female) teachers in Switzerland, for example.[ref]Unsurprisingly, liberals have a double standard that cuts against traditionalist Christians while social conservatives have a double standard that cuts against traditionalist Muslims.[/ref]

So I’m not saying that it’s impossible to have questions and concerns about a position like Pence’s. But the degree of hostility and deliberate (or at least, lazy) misunderstanding of the rules that the Pences have agreed on for their own marriage are at least as concerning as the rules themselves.

The Perfect is the Enemy of Space Exploration

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It’s hard to find a good reason to wag your finger disapprovingly at Elon Musk’s idealistic crusade to take us in to outer space, but wherever a talented individual is working hard to make the world a materially better place you will find a contrarian academic with an axe to grind and rhetorical snake oil to peddle. After all, that’s really the inevitable consequence of the ideological homogenization of American academia.[ref]See Walker’s post.[/ref] In a world where professors have substantially divergent views, there’s room for substantive arguments. But in a world where professors are all cut from the same ideological mold, the drive to differentiate oneself from the herd leads to increasingly bizarre and extreme signalling. Novelty supplants ingenuity, provocation supplants integrity, and the next thing you know space travel is racist.

That, essentially, is the point of Andrew Russell’s piece at Aeon: Whitey on Mars.[ref]You thought I was exaggerating, didn’t you?[/ref] The motivating question can be summarized this way: why throw away money on science that’s of no benefit to anyone while we’ve got real problems to solve down here on Earth?

Like much that passes for serious conversation today, the question is sheer Bulverism. Russell isn’t sincere. He doesn’t want to talk about the relative trade offs of money spent on space exploration vs. money spent fighting poverty. Nope, that would be much too old-fashioned. In the 21st century, we never make the argument we say we’re making. We just assume conclusions and skip straight to psycho-analyzing, the better to virtue-signal. Here, I’ll let C. S. Lewis explain:

You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.

In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism”. Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third — “Oh you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment”, E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.

I know Russell isn’t interested in an argument on the actual merits, but I’m going to pretend that he is. Why? Because I don’t really know of any other way to respond to Bulverism, for one thing. And because the subject is actually pretty interesting, for the second. So: why should we seriously consider spending a lot of money on space travel while things are so desperately out of whack down here on Earth? I present two arguments.

The first begins with a video game analogy. Most modern multiplayer games come int two flavors: PvE and PvP. The first stands for “Player vs Environment” and the second for “Player vs. Player.” In PvP game modes, the primary action comes from players trying to kill each other. Of course, cooperation is possible. In fact, cooperation is often essential in these games. This is an age-old truth of human biology: we cooperate in order to become better at competition. As the old proverb goes: “Me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the stranger.”

In the alternative PvE mode, combat between human players is impossible. Cooperation is still usually required, because the the environment becomes the enemy. Players have to work together to overcome computer-controlled bad guys (in the most common arrangement) or other constraints and challenges.

My contention is that the PvE and PvP paradigms are the only two major paradigms through which human beings can confront the universe. We define ourselves in contrast to something else. In the short run, at least, that much is inevitable. Waiting around for an age of enlightenment when conflict and oppositions disappear is–at best–a kind of foolish utopianism. If you want to deal with humanity as it exists today you have to accept that these are basically you’re only oppositions. It’s either us-vs-them (PvP) or us-vs-it (PvE) where “it” is the challenge, danger, risk, and opportunity of hazardous exploration.

I do not believe that a robust space program that captivated the popular imagination would in a single stroke obviate all the political tensions dividing Americans let alone the older and deeper ethnic and national hatreds separating so many people around the globe. But I do believe there is nothing wrong with moving a little bit along the spectrum away from PvP and towards PvE. More than that, I believe it would help–in a small but meaningful way–to give Americans and humans something to root for, some opposition entity that enabled an us without relying on an otherized them. I can think of no program more amenable to this goal than a program of exploration and really our only choices in this regard are space or the ocean. Since space is both more romantic (for most people) and less hazardous to our own ecosystem, the choice seems clear.

So let’s get to the second major reason that space exploration is a worthwhile investment: survival. The reality is that as long as the human race lives exclusively on Earth, we’re literally keeping all our eggs in one basket. This is a recipe for extinction. The most likely source of this extinction will be from asteroid impact. Small rocks routinely impact the Earth, most frequently burning up in orbit and doing no harm. Here’s a map of small asteroids (1-20 meters in diameter) hitting the Earth between 1993 and 2014.

Map of 556 impacts on the Earth from 1993-2014.
Map from NASA/Planetary Science. Click for more information. (Public Domain)

These little rocks are no threat, but they illustrate that asteroids hitting the Earth are not some kind of rare event. It’s very, very common. The question is just: when are we going to get hit with a really big one? By studying impact craters on the Moon, it’s possible to come up with some basic estimates, which Wikipedia summarizes:

Asteroids with a 1 km (0.62 mi) diameter strike Earth every 500,000 years on average. Large collisions – with 5 km (3 mi) objects – happen approximately once every twenty million years. The last known impact of an object of 10 km (6 mi) or more in diameter was at the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago.

So, these are very rare events. But they are also–over a long enough period of time–inevitable. We’re a sitting duck, and one day another one of those really big space rocks is going to come hurtling our way. With no extra-terrestrial humans and no active defenses whatsoever, that would spell the end of human civilization and possibly the end of the human species. It probably won’t happen. Not in our lifetime, not in our nation’s lifetime, maybe not in our species’ lifetime. Then again, it might.

These are the two simplest reasons I believe we shouldn’t wait to turn Earth into an egalitarian utopia before we turn our eyes to the stars. There are a couple more that I will only skim over. One is that research into space exploration has already led to lots of benefits for life on Earth. Another is just the general problem with trying to solve the world’s problems in serial instead of parallel. This is a ludicrously bad model for tackling the problems we face for the simple reason that we couldn’t all coordinate on attacking just one problem at a time even if we wanted to, and even if we agreed on what problem that would be. It makes more sense for different people and institutions to work on the problems that they are–by temperament and opportunity–most able to address. In other words: we don’t have to pick either/or. It’s always going to be “yes, and…” Let’s embrace that.

Final thought: NASA’s budget has been slowly climbing towards $20billion for the last few year, but it’s relative share of the federal budget has fallen from about 1% in the early 19990s to 0.5% today. This is significantly down from the all-time high of 3-4% in the mid 1960s when the Space Race was at its height. Throwing a few more billion NASA’s way seems like a small investment in a critically endangered resource: social unity. Of course, the most striking thing about Russell’s article is that he’s attacking Elon Musk’s privately funded space exploration efforts. It’s very, very hard to understand how one man’s quest to bring a widely-shared human dream to reality and make the world a better, safe place for humanity could draw condemnation as racism, but these are the times we live in.

 

With great responsibility comes great power

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

This week we’re covering the priesthood session of the October 1975 General conference. Next week, we’ll take a break from hour General Conference Odyssey to cover the entire April 2017 General Conference. The week after that we’ll return to the Odyssey with the Sunday morning session of the October 1975 General Conference.

As for this priesthood session, there was at least one very clear them: sacrifice more. In the first talk Elder Brown said “a law of life” was that “Only if you sacrifice for a cause will you love it,” and stated:

In the world, many organizations, churches, governments, even families have lost much of their vitality because they are afraid to ask people to sacrifice. It is imperative that we not make the same mistake in the Aaronic Priesthood. We must be fearless in expecting Aaronic Priesthood holders to do the work which the Lord has commanded.

In the second, Elder Bangerter said “the devil taught us” to ask the question “[have you] got your home teaching done?” He explained:

That is a very poor way to refer to the comprehensive mission embodied in home teaching. By getting us to ask “Did you get your home teaching done?” the devil destroys 90 percent of our effectiveness. All that question implies is a quick visit the last day of the month so that we can send in the report.

In other words: give more.

Experience since 1975 have born this wisdom out. The churches that have gone the farthest in lowering expectations for their adherents have seen those adherents walk away. Living according to the strict discipline of a traditional faith is hard, but—it turns out—living according to the lax guidelines of a modern faith is pointlessly easy.

With great power, the saying goes, comes great responsibility. One thing Mormons understand is that the converse is also true.

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Gorsuch and the Frozen Trucker

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Neil Gorsuch, nominee for Associate Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, and President Donald Trump, via the official White House YouTube page. (Public Domain)

As you might be able to tell from my last post, I like Judge Gorsuch. I’d never heard of him before his nomination, but I listened into a lot of his hearing, and quickly came to respect his philosophy of judicial integrity.[ref]That’s actually what was at the heart of my last post about his hearing.[/ref]

Earlier today, I had a Facebook friend castigating Gorsuch for the “frozen trucker case.” This refers to a dissent that Gorsuch wrote in 2016. According to a critical Slate article by Jed Shugerman, here are the basic facts of the case:

Alphonse Maddin was a truck driver for TransAm. Late on a January night in temperatures below zero, he discovered that his trailer’s brakes had locked up due to the cold weather. (The truck itself could drive but not when attached to the trailer). He called TransAm’s road service for help at 11:17 p.m., and then discovered that the truck cabin’s heat was broken. He fell asleep and woke up two hours later with a numb torso. Maddin also could not feel his feet. He called the road service again, and they told him to “hang in there” despite the life-threatening conditions. He waited about 30 more minutes before unhitching the broken trailer. Although his supervisor ordered him to stay, Maddin decided to drive off with the truck after almost three hours in the subzero cold. A service truck did arrive 15 minutes after he left, but it’s hard to blame him for deciding not to risk his life. It’s amazing he waited so long at all.

TransAm fired Madding for leaving behind his trailer. In his turn, Maddin filed a complaint with OSHA, arguing that his decision to drive away from the trailer was statutorily protected. Then Tenth Circuit sided with Madding and OSHA, but Gorsuch wrote a strong dissent. This strong dissent has come back to haunt him, as Democrats in his confirmation hearing and journalists and pundits outside of it are using the dissent to paint him as having an “arrogant and cold judicial personality.”

I thought I’d look into this, so I read Gorsuch’s dissent, which you can find online here. Here’s the most important paragraph, where Gorsuch explains why he believes TransAm’s firing of Maddin wasn’t illegal:

It might be fair to ask whether TransAm’s decision was a wise or kind one. But it’s not our job to answer questions like that. Our only task is to decide whether the decision was an illegal one. The Department of Labor says that TransAm violated federal law, in particular 49 U.S.C. § 31105(a)(1)(B). But that statute only forbids employers from firing employees who “refuse[] to operate a vehicle” out of safety concerns. And, of course, nothing like that happened here. The trucker in this case wasn’t fired for refusing to operate his vehicle. Indeed, his employer gave him the very option the statute says it must: once he voiced safety concerns, TransAm expressly — and by everyone’s admission — permitted him to sit and remain where he was and wait for help. The trucker was fired only after he declined the statutorily protected option (refuse to operate) and chose instead to operate his vehicle in a manner he thought wise but his employer did not.

The logic is pretty straight forward and irrefutable. The law protects people who don’t operate equipment out of safety concerns. It doesn’t protect people who do operate equipment under safety concerns. And so–applying the statute–TransAm was free to fire Maddin as far as the law is concerned. And that is the only thing that Gorsuch (and his fellow judges) were called to decide. Gorsuch goes on:

… there’s simply no law anyone has pointed us to giving employees the right to operate their vehicles in ways their employers forbid. Maybe the Department would like such a law, maybe someday Congress will adorn our federal statute books with such a law. But it isn’t there yet. And it isn’t our job to write one — or to allow the Department to write one in Congress’s place.

This is a theme that Gorsuch talked about frequently during his hearing. Again and again he reiterated his position that a judge has to apply the law as it is actually written and can’t simply “interpret” the law in ways that suit our notions of justice or fairness or propriety or even common sense.

Reading between the lines, the majority opinion in this case was especially egregious because the judges invented a rationale for their position (siding with Maddin) that wasn’t even raised by the OSHA lawyers. Gorsuch points out that the majority opinion cites a prior ruling (Cehvron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.) even though:

…the Department [OSHA] never argued the statute is ambiguous, never contended that its interpretation was due Chevron step two deference, and never even cited Chevron. In fact, the only party to mention Chevron in this case was TransAm, and then only in a footnote in its brief and then only as part of an argument that the statute is not ambiguous.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that Maddin should not have been fired. As a matter of morality and basic decency, that’s a given. But the responsibility to grant him that legal protection rests with the legislative branch. It’s their job to write the law to cover that case. They failed to do so. Relying on the judicial branch to fix their mistake by–in effect–amending the law to be what it should have been is impermissible under American rule of law. As Gorsuch put it, “it is our obligation to enforce the terms of that compromise as expressed in the law itself, not to use the law as a sort of springboard to combat all perceived evils lurking in the neighborhood.”

 

I don’t like the ruling that Gorsuch came to, and Gorsuch didn’t like it either, but it was certainly the correct ruling to make under the Constitutional system of law we are supposed to live under. According to his critics, this case is supposed to make me like Gorsuch less, but it’s not working. It makes me like him more.

Gorsuch Would “Walk Out the Door” If Asked to Overturn Roe

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President Donald Trump introduces Gorsuch, accompanied by his wife, as his nominee for the Supreme Court at the White House on January 31, 2017. (Public Domain)

The following was an exchange between Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch and Republican Senator Lindsay Graham during yesterday’s marathon confirmation hearings:

Graham: I don’t think there’s any reason to suggest you’re his [Trump’s] favorite. Had you ever met Mr. Trump personally?

Gorsuch: Not until my interview.

Graham: In that interview, did he ever ask you to overrule Roe v. Wade?

Gorsuch: No, Senator.

Graham: What would you have done if he had asked?

Gorsuch: Senator, I would have walked out the door.

This exchange is getting all kinds of coverage, and most of the analysis concludes or strongly implies that Gorsuch’s statement is a commitment not to overturn Roe v. Wade. As one example, here is Sophie Tatum’s take for CNN, where she puts Gorsuch’s statement at the hearing in the context of Trump’s promise to nominate a pro-life judge and then segues into “Gorsuch also defended the value of precedent…” This kind of analysis is making some of my pro-life friends furious and some of my pro-choice friends breathe a sigh of relief, but it’s a misunderstanding of what Gorsuch actually meant.

First, Gorsuch was not rejecting the possibility of overruling Roe v. Wade in particular or of overturning court cases generally. This is pretty clear from ths rest of his statement. After saying, “I would have walked out the door,” Gorsuch paused for a long moment before continuing: “That’s not what judges do.” So what, exactly, did Gorsuch mean here? What is it that “judges [don’t] do” and that would have prompted him to walk out on an interview with the President?

The answer is that Gorsuch is committed to rule of law, and that means that as a judge he is bound to only rule on the merits of the cases actually brought before him in light of the law and the relevant facts. To commit to the President–or to anyone–how he would rule on a hypothetical case that hasn’t even been brought yet is a flagrant violation of the judicial process that would have substituted politics for law. Gorsuch reacted so strongly not because he was defending Roe v. Wade, but because he was defending judicial process. In other words, it doesn’t matter which Supreme Court case Trump had asked about, the answer in any case would have been to “[walk] out the door.” You do not nominate anyone to the Supreme Court as a way of setting policy. You do it as a way of sustaining the Constitution. Therefore, Gorsuch’s reply here tells us absolutely nothing about how he would actually rule in a case involving Roe v. Wade other than that it would depend on the specifics of the case as it was actually argued before the Court.

Second, we still have every indication that Gorsuch is most likely an extremely pro-life nominee. The evidence for this comes from his book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. I haven’t read the book, but here are two quotes that I think reveal quite a lot about Gorsuch’s thinking in ways that are directly relevant to abortion. The first comes from a Vox article, I read Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch’s book. It’s very revealing, and it sums up Gorsuch’s argument in the book:

Gorsuch’s core argument in the book is that the US should “retain existing law [banning assisted suicide and euthanasia] on the basis that human life is fundamentally and inherently valuable, and that the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”

Right off the bat, this is characteristically pro-life rhetoric. For all that they are derided as merely “anti-abortion,” the pro-life movement is united in opposition to abortion and euthanasia by a commitment to the idea that “human life is fundamentally and inherently valuable.” You simply never hear the pro-choice side use this kind of language.

In terms of logic, the key here is that “human life” is a broad category, and if it is broadened to include unborn human beings, then Gorsuch’s argument against legalized assisted suicide and euthanasia also applies to abortion. This is made clear in the second quote, this one from a New York Times article:

What gives individuals such an inviolable right, he has reasoned, is a status that legal scholars call “constitutional personhood,” defined by the 14th Amendment. Under that amendment, a state is prohibited from denying any constitutional person “life, liberty or property, without due process of law,” and cannot “deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The Roe decision expressly excluded human fetuses from that definition. As the court put it in 1973, “the word ‘person,’ as used in the 14th Amendment, does not include the unborn.” But if the Supreme Court were ever to recognize fetuses as constitutional persons, however unlikely that might seem now, then under Judge Gorsuch’s framework, the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause would require that they be entitled to the same legal protection as constitutional persons. Laws that prohibit murder thus would have to be extended to them.

Judge Gorsuch has said as much himself. In his book, he wrote, “Abortion would be ruled out by the inviolability-of-life principle I intend to set forth if, but only if, a fetus is considered a human life.” He noted that had the court “found the fetus to be a ‘person’ for purposes of the 14th Amendment, it could not have created a right to abortion because no constitutional basis exists for preferring the mother’s liberty interests over the child’s life.”

The real give-away for me here, again, is Gorsuch’s very broad language. When he talks about “fetus” and “person” we can infer basically nothing, but when he says “if…a fetus is considered a human life“[ref]emphasis changed from original[/ref], then we’re talking about language that is interesting in two regards. First, it is deliberately secular/scientific as opposed to philosophical/theological. This is characteristic of Gorsuch’s thinking which, according to a quote from another article at The Atlantic, relies on “secular moral theory” rather than the stereotypically religious grounds common to much of the pro-life movement. What’s more: once we’ve entered that secular/scientific realm, the question of whether or not a fetus counts as “a human life” has an unambiguous, objective, and absolutely conclusive answer: of course it is.

So let’s recap:

  1. Gorsuch’s comment about walking out the door if Trump had asked him to overrule Roe v. Wade was not a defense of Roe v. Wade. It was a defense of judicial process, and it tells us nothing one way or the other about Gorsuch’s views on abortion in general or Roe v. Wade in particular.
  2. Gorsuch’s book opposes legalziation of assisted suicide and euthanasia under an argument that he explicitly states would apply in abortion as well “if… the fetus is considered a human life,” in ways that suggest (as science dictates) that this is in fact the case.

Taken together, I’d say that Gorsuch comes across as about the most unambiguously pro-life candidate that you could possibly hope for in someone who has not ruled on abortion cases or made explicit statements about the subject. It’s certainly not open-and-shut. He’s a smart person, and smart person and capable of all kinds of weird, circuitous, unexpected twists and turns in their thinking and philosophy. He  may indeed be pro-choice, but that’s not where I’d lay my money.

Final thought: I listened to parts of the confirmation hearing yesterday, and there was one exchange I have not been able to find (it was either from around 5:20 or around 8:40) when Gorsuch talked about the motivation for his euthanasia book. It came down to concern for the most vulnerable in society: the poor, the disabled, and minorities. Left unspoken was “the unborn,” but it fit so perfectly in that list–and with Gorsuch’s philosophy as I understand it thus far–that it almost didn’t need to be spoken.

 

What is a Prophet?

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Anna at the presentation of Jesus (right), from Giotto, Chapel of Scrovegni. (Public Domain)

Mormons use the word “prophet” in several different ways. Here are a few of them:

  1. “The Prophet” might refer specifically to Joseph Smith
  2. “The Prophet” might refer more generally to whoever is currently the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It’s President Monson today. It was President Hinckley before that. It will be President Nelson (most likely) next.
  3. We sustain all members of the Quorum of the Twelve along with the First Presidency (total of 15 men) as “prophets, seers, and revelators.”
  4. Using the word in its broadest—and perhaps most original sense—a prophet is anyone who prophecies.

Notably, this last definition is totally independent of all questions of priesthood authority or institutional hierarchy. This is why people who lived totally outside the leadership hierarchy, like Anna the Prophetess[ref]described in Luke 2[/ref], can also be prophets.

I had all of these in mind as I was reading Elder LeGrand Richard’s talk, Prophets and Prophecy. Elder Richard’s mentions one of our favorite verses and teases out the implications this way:

The prophet Amos said, “Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.” (Amos 3:7.) Now if we understand that, no one can look for a work here upon this earth that isn’t headed by a prophet. The Lord has never done a work that he has recognized without a prophet at its head. Thank God for our prophets, from the days of the Prophet Joseph Smith down to our present prophet, President Spencer W. Kimball.

Now—from context—it seems most likely that Elder Richards is using the word in its second definition. However, I think it’s just as appropriate to read it with the fourth definition in mind, although that changes the meaning from something like, “if you want to find any work of God, start by finding a formally called Prophet” to something like “if you find any work of God on earth, then the person leading it is a prophet.”

I like this second reading more, because it emphasis the universalism of goodness. This variety of universalism is not fluffy-headed, non-judgmentalism, everyone-gets-a-trophy nonsense. Or, if it is those things, it is those things with scriptural heft behind it:

But behold, that which is of God inviteth and enticeth to do good continually; wherefore, every thing which inviteth and enticeth to do good, and to love God, and to serve him, is inspired of God.[ref]Moroni 7:13[/ref]

UPDATED 22-March-2017: I said President Packer was next in line, but he died in 2015. Next up is President Nelson. Eric (first comment) spotted the error.

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On the Inseparability of Idealism and Pragmatism

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Jesus at the house of the Pharisean, by Jacopo Tintoretto (Public Domain)

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

When I first started this blog, the tagline was: “doing the right thing for the wrong reason for the right reason.” I loved the tagline, but nobody else did, and so I got rid of it. But this talk—Elder O. Leslie Stone’s The Importance of Reputation—is a great example of what I was trying to shoot for with that tagline.

The desire for a good reputation has itself earned a bad reputation in our society, and there are good reasons for that. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is an example of the sentiment that appearances—and reputation is a kind of appearance—are shallow ways to judge people that should be avoided. Concern for reputation and appearance is associated with hypocrisy, pride, and elitism.

But there is a kind of unrealistic utopianism behind all of this. As much as we say, “don’t judge a book by its cover,” the reality is that covers matter. They matter literally—the right or wrong cover has a huge influence on not only who buys a book, but also what they expect from the book—and they also  matter metaphorically. Humans are social animals. According to one theory[ref]The argumentative theory. You know a topic is cutting-edge when you can find scholarly and popular references to it, but no Wikipedia article yet.[/ref], human language and possibly even human intelligence itself evolved precisely because we  needed better ways of managing our reputations in dense, complex social environments.

Regardless of what you think about the evolutionary psychology arguments, the end result is that you can pretend that reputation doesn’t matter all day long, but in reality it does. So, what are we going to do about it?

You  might expect a talk to treat reputation as a kind of necessary evil: we can’t get along without it, but try to pay as little attention to it as possible. Try to ignore the reputations of others and give your own reputation only the barest possible attention.

But that’s exactly the opposite of where Elder Stone goes, and his willingness to dive right in and embrace the reality of reputation is the hallmark of my favorite aspect of Mormonism: the stubborn refusal to allow a glint of daylight between pragmatism and idealism. In Mormonism, we find our ideals in the mundane, and we’re unashamed of it.

And so Elder Stone freely admits that there are some nice benefits to having a good reputation—Elder Stone mentions how it has helped him in his business career—but he emphasizes the very real spiritual stakes of having a good reputation:

…as we live the gospel, our lives will reflect righteousness and virtue, and we will be a powerful influence for good in the lives of others. This is why it is not enough to be righteous for the sake of our own salvation. We must let our goodness radiate to others, that through our example and reputation they will lift their lives and have the desire to follow the Savior’s pattern of living.

This is close to what my old tagline meant. In the end, it’s more important to do the right thing than it is to have the perfect motives. If it’s possible to help someone privately—without drawing attention—then do so. But if you find yourself in a situation where someone is asking you publicly for help and you have to respond then and there, you’re not going to be able to separate the bad motives (you want to look good and impress people) from the good motives (you want to help someone in need). So what should you do? Well, the most important thing is that the person in need get help. So if you need to embrace less-than-perfect motives (impressing other people) as the kicker to do the right thing (lend a hand), but you wish you were doing it for the right reason: then go ahead and do it. Do the right thing (help people) for the wrong reason (it makes you look good) for the right reason (you’d rather help someone now and perfect your character later.)

You’ve heard the expression “the ends justify the means,” but this is the opposite. Instead of using good intention to justify bad behavior, I’m saying that—in certain situations—it’s OK to use bad intentions to motivate good behavior. We should all try to be saints on the inside, but if we acted like saints on the outside, that wouldn’t be such a bad start, would it?

This isn’t exactly what Elder Stone was talking about, by the way, and I realize that. It’s just adjacent to it. Now, back to what he was actually saying…

Because Elder Stone has decided to ignore the taboo against speaking openly about the positive aspects of reputation, he’s also able to grapple with what it means:

I prefer not to think of reputation as a superficial facade, attempting to indicate depth where there is only shallowness, honesty where there is deceit, or virtue where there is unrighteousness. Rather, I like to think of reputation as a window, clearly exhibiting the integrity of one’s soul. It is through this integrity of thought and integrity of conduct that we become pure and holy before the Lord. It is in this state that we can be most effective in serving our fellowmen.

And then, beating that drum of practical application of our ideals once more:

It is not enough for us to live the gospel inwardly; we need to be shining examples to all with whom we come in contact. In this sense, it’s not only what we are that’s important: what others think of us is also important. In order to be truly effective as missionaries, we need to be known for our good qualities, to have an unspotted reputation in all things.

It should go without saying that—no matter how we try—ultimately our reputation is not up to us to determine. Elder Stone acknowledges that, too:

We can’t always control what others think of us, or how others judge us, but we can control the kinds of messages we send out through our behavior.

There’s a new aspect to this that I think Elder Stone would have a lot to say about if he were to give this talk again today, and that is the fact that in 21st century America it is possible to get a bad reputation because of doing the right thing. That’s always been true to an extent, of course, but never more so then today, when there are so many who  “call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”[ref]Isaiah 5:20[/ref]

I don’t know exactly what he’d say, of course, but I’m pretty confident it would be something along the lines of: work hard to gain a good reputation to the extent that you don’t have to violate your principles. If possible, work even harder on those virtues the world still recognizes as virtues. But, when it becomes impossible to reconcile righteous principles with a sterling reputation, lay it on the altar with everything else we’ve been asked to sacrifice and thank God for the privilege.

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