Religion

Malice Towards None: Orson Scott Card, Gay Marriage, and the “Ender’s Game” Film Controversy, Part Two

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Note: This is the second part of this essay. Part one can be found by clicking here.

“It was just him and me. He fought with honor. If it weren’t for his honor, he and the others would have beaten me together. They might have killed me, then. His sense of honor saved my life. I didn’t fight with honor… I fought to win.”
–Ender’s Game

“Somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer we needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn’t do it. If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood [them] well enough.”
—Ender’s Game

Perhaps one of the most troubling things to me about the whole Ender’s Game boycott is the chill and fear it creates not only for those who, on personal, religious or ethical grounds, oppose gay marriage, but also to those who choose to work and associate with them. In these scenarios, all tainted parties are punished, even those who happen to be supportive with the gay rights movement.  It’s a modern McCarthyism, creating a feeling that all people who do not pass that sociopolitical litmus test must be shunned and, if you do not shun them as well, you’re suspect as well. Thus, in the case Ender’s Game, Lionsgate, Harrison Ford, Gavin Hood, Asa Butterfield, and the rest of the cast and crew of the film would be punished by this kind of attitude, even though they have all come out staunchly in the favor of gay rights, and insist the story of Ender’s Game is a story about compassion and empathy, so has nothing to do with Card’s stance on gay marriage.

Fortunately, a lot of the more level headed members of the liberal community see the implications of such actions. Juliet Lapados at the New York Times, even though she hardly agrees with Card’s more extreme views, called out this sort of action:

Generally, boycotts are used to pressure companies or governments to end objectionable activities; consider the boycott of Chick-fil-A to protest the chain’s financial support of antigay organizations. What Geeks Out has in mind is closer to blacklisting. The group wants to “send a clear and serious message to Card and those that do business with his brand of antigay activism — whatever he’s selling, we’re not buying.” This isn’t about stopping the dissemination of antigay sentiments; it’s about isolating Mr. Card and shaming his business partners, thus cutting into their profits.

If Mr. Card belongs in quarantine, who’s next?

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“I, Pencil” and the Providential Invisible Hand

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In the December 1958 issue of The Freeman, economics writer and FEE founder Leonard Read published his now-famous essay “I, Pencil.” The essay traced the “family tree” of the modern pencil, demonstrating the complexity of its creation and the numerous people involved. Nobel laureate Milton Friedman was so impressed with the essay that he used it in one of the episodes for his TV series Free to Choose. More recently, science writer Matt Ridley borrowed from the idea by declaring that literally nobody on the face of the planet knows how to build a computer mouse. Despite the individualistic rhetoric that often accompanies markets, Read’s essay provides a much needed reminder that markets on the whole are more communal, more cooperative, and more interdependent than the centralized planning that often employs these rhetorical fronts.

The discussion of the “invisible hand” toward the end is almost spiritual in nature. And with good reason. As Peter Harrison, historian and director of the Centre for the History of European Discourse at the University of Queensland, explains,

[D]uring the early modern period, in addition to increasing frequency of occurrence, we witness the emergence of a more distinct pattern of use or, more correctly perhaps, of two related concepts of the operation of ‘‘the invisible hand.’’ Most commonly the invisible hand was used to refer to the manner in which God exercised providential control over the course of history by subtly influencing human actions in order to bring about his ends. These ends are thus accomplished in spite of the intentions of human actors and without their knowledge. The second pattern of usage also refers to God’s providential action, but in the context of his superintendence of the natural world. Thus God’s invisible hand was glimpsed in the contrivances of the creatures and in the wisdom and foresight evidenced by the laws of nature, which again promote his ends. These two conceptions between them represent the most predominant uses of the expression in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and hence the most relevant background for Smith’s uses of the expression.

Just as the laws of nature were originally seen as “exemplif[ying] design, so too…did the laws of morality.” For Smith and his contemporaries, “the general laws of the moral, as well as of the material world, are wisely and beneficently ordered for the welfare of our species.”

Seems to be working out alright.

Monday Morning Mormon Madness: Maybe We’re All Right

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2013-08-12 Blind Men Elephant

This Monday’s post for Times And Seasons is based on the story of the blind men and the elephant. It’s an ancient and familiar story, but I’ve got a slightly different take on it. What happens if the blind men can’t step back (metaphorically) and get the complete picture by just aggregating their individual perspectives? What happens when conflicting points of view are irreconcilable? Is there hope for tolerance and progress? I believe there is.

Conservative Mormon America vs. White Conservative America

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Salt Lake Tabernacle

The stereotype of American Mormons (according to socio-demographic data) is true:

  • We’re really, really white
  • We’re well-off financially
  • We’re highly educated
  • We’re overwhelmingly Republican

However, economist Miles Kimball of the University of Michigan finds that this white, conservative demographic is quite different from the typical white, conservative American. In his post “How Conservative Mormon America Avoided the Fate of Conservative White America” over at Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal, he notes that

  • Mormons invest in marriage with an avoidance of premarital sex (and thus out-of-wedlock births) and relatively low divorce rates.
  • The Mormon prohibition of alcohol and tobacco leads to healthier and longer lives
  • Geographic congregations known as wards function as “ersatz small towns” and plug Mormons into an extensive social network

Kimball makes several other observations with extended commentary. Check it out. It goes along quite well with some of Megan McArdle’s comments in a recent Bloomberg article (which was covered here at Difficult Run):

The highest income mobility in the country, it turns out, is found in Salt Lake City — almost three times higher than the rate in Atlanta, the lowest-ranked city…Salt Lake City is in the reddest of red state places — not a lot of taxes and transfers going on there. And yet it’s highly mobile, presumably because of the influence of the Mormon Church, which essentially runs the most comprehensive and effective social welfare system in the country…maybe in the world. There’s money and other help to tide you over in bad times, but arguably more importantly, there’s all the efforts of your ward to get you back on your feet. Churches do this sort of thing everywhere, of course, but in few places is it so comprehensive and organized. And unlike the government system, it’s combined with intense social support, and a community whose norms about things like work, marriage and family (and drinking and drug abuse) encourage what you might call a prosperous lifestyle.

Social capital and cultural factors are big players in economic well-being and should not be ignored.

Richard Dawkins: Troll

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Richard Dawkins - Eid tweet

I couldn’t manage even a dozen pages of Dawkins insufferable smugness in The God Delusions, and his ghastly guerrilla interrogation of Brandon Flowers on a talk show is equally painful to watch, but I had assumed that, being a noted academic and so forth, he still had some handle on basic civility and common sense. Apparently not.

All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

There’s his Tweet on Eid, the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Responding, Nesrine Malik makes two observations:

  1. To wearily engage with his logic briefly: yes, it is technically true that fewer Muslims (10) than Trinity College Cambridge members (32) have won Nobel prizes. But insert pretty much any other group of people instead of “Muslims”, and the statement would be true. You are comparing a specialised academic institution to an arbitrarily chosen group of people. Go on. Try it. All the world’s Chinese, all the world’s Indians, all the world’s lefthanded people, all the world’s cyclists.
  2. The whole process of trying to parse the painfully obvious fallacy reminded me of the task of arguing against extremist Muslim clerics when they try to denigrate non-Muslims, the same momentary sense of helplessness and not knowing where to start.

Her logic in point #1 is impeccable and as for her feelings in point #2: they are sadly, sadly familiar. Reminds me of trying to respond to counter-cult accusations about my own faith. It’s sad to see another example–and so prominent!–of this kind of lazy bigotry, but nice to take some solace in commiseration with someone else who gets it.

One Eternal Whole: Worship and Corporeality

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2013-08-06 Enoch the Shoemaker

Over at Worlds Without End, Walker Wright (along with Allen Hansen) have an absolutely awesome blog post called: “All Things Unto Me Are Spiritual”: Worship Through Corporeality in Hasidism & Mormonism (Part 1). It’s an ambitious work, embracing millennia of religious history (from ancient Judaism to early Mormonism) and some theology that is really dear to my heart. 

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Monday Morning Mormon Madness: Sin

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2013-07-29 MilgramToday at Times And Seasons I went back to Grossman’s On Killing for a second post. This time I used his model of wartime atrocity as a vehicle for exploring sin. The short version? Acts we consider sinful are generally committed under some degree of mitigating circumstance, such as partial coercion and ignorance, and so in a sense are less important than our reaction to our own behavior after the fact. It’s at that time that we choose to either protect the ego by rationalizing our bad decision–and thus fully internalizing the implicit immorality of the action–or “lose ourselves” and sacrifice the ego in order to reject sin.

For the most part, we choose the former, unfortunately, and in so doing construct our own individualized Hells.

Edit: Nate pointed out that I left off the link the first time around. Oops! Here it is.

Two Responses to NYT Piece on Mormon Doubt

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2013-07-23 Hans Mattson
Hans Mattsson with his wife. Hans is featured in the NYT piece on Mormons and doubt.

There’s been a lot of reaction to an NYT piece from this past weekend called Some Mormons Search the Web and Find Doubt. The gist of the article is that a relatively high-ranking Mormon (Hans Mattsson) found out about Joseph Smith’s polygamy on the Internet and it shook his faith. The general idea is that the Church has a whitewashed view of history, but you can’t hide stuff in the Information Age, and so now people are learning all sorts of uncomfortable truths and it shakes their faith. First, because they didn’t know, but secondly and more importantly because they feel betrayed.

There’s absolutely some truth to the description, but there’s much more to it than simply “Mormons fear history”.

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Monday Morning Mormon Madness: Malicious Compliance

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2013-07-22 Wheels Within Wheels

This morning’s piece for Times And Seasons was a tough one to write. I wrestled with it for about 3 of 4 hours before getting it into shape that I thought was good enough for public consumption, but just barely. I think there are too many different themes poking out in odd directions, giving the piece a sort of misshapen, rough texture. I’ll revisit it one day.

In the meantime, however, I think there’s still some interesting points about the difference between being exactly obedient and being maliciously compliant.