Journal of a Soul 53

People and Systems

As I write these few words, The Irish Times reports the following:

Sgt Maurice McCabe, whose allegations about malpractice prompted the establishment of the inquiry by barrister Seán Guerin, welcomed its findings and said it had vindicated him. “It is a good day after six years of fighting the system. Now I hope my family and I can move on,” he said, expressing his thanks to Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin for taking on his case and passing on his concerns to the Taoiseach. (See here )

Thorny branch versus water: Marley Park April, 2014

For non-Irish readers of these posts, the gentleman in question, Sergeant Maurice McCabe is a whistle blower within the police service, namely An Garda Síochána, here in Ireland. He and another former Garda, one John Wilson, have been treated atrociously by "the powers that be" within that police force, being viewed as traitors and as "letting the side down," to such an extent that the latter former officer had a dead rat nailed to his front door.  Wilson had this to say about the revelations of the Guerin Report: “I find the contents of the Guerin report to be disgusting, truly disgusting.” (see here )

What interests this writer here is the blind loyalty to systems that dulls the conscience and moral sensibility of the majority of individual members of those systems.  It would seem that very few of us are courageous enough to stand up and be counted by "blowing the whistle" on policies, practices and actions that are downright immoral. One needs only to recall the banality of the excuses of many of the leaders of Nazi Germany at the time of the Nuremberg Trials, viz., "I was only following orders."  The great philosopher Hannah Arendt would call this very ordinary and utterly childish use of excuses the sheer "banality of evil."  Indeed, all of the top Nazis were such flawed, weak and all-too-ordinary individuals that truly one feels a certain sense of incredulity when one looks at their pictures in defeat that such weak individuals could have unleashed such evil on the world of the twentieth century.

The present writer works in a small school with some 300 pupils only in the inner city area of Dublin, Ireland.  Even within our small system, there is often an unwritten rule of conformity to the system and of "keeping things running smoothly", of "not rocking the boat" and of not "washing one's dirty linen in public."  It would seem to this writer that systems create their own sense of morality or moral behaviour which are essentially self-referential, and that a sense of a greater moral criterion outside the system is simply not recognized or acknowledged.  Further, such systems seem to override individual conscience.  

Now, dear reader, I am a neophyte in social theory and in the theories of systems and how they evolve and organize themselves.  While the French founder of sociology as a science, Émile Durkheim did not live long enough to propound a completely refined sociology of morality, it appears to me that his thoughts on the matter are quite interesting.  In his moral theory, Durkheim rejected theorists who relied on "a priori" moral concepts, that is, concepts that are independent of experience or that can be reasoned out, "without leaving your couch" (as the contemporary philosopher Galen Strawson says) and are apparently immediately and obviously true. On the contrary, Durkheim treated all moral phenomena  as conditioned both socially and historically.  Each society, he argued, creates over time its own set of moral rules, which can vary dramatically from one society to the next.  In other words, Durkheim is here ruling out the existence of any universal moral code. (This intrigues me, as all the prosecutors at Nuremberg, in my humble opinion, had to stretch their moral vocabulary to include such a universal moral code because of the sheer horrific nature of the Nazi crimes.  The criterion is surely somewhere on an horizon beyond the system or the group.  (Of course, Durkheim had died at a mere 59 years of age before the end of World War 1 in 1917 and before the atrocities that WW II would unleash on the human race, and some 30 years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).  Morality, he argued, is a social fact and should be studied as such. Further, he argued, it could be studied just like physics in a system he called a physique des moeurs (physics of morals). 

In summary, then, we can say that according to the father of sociology, morality is a wholly social phenomenon, that is, it cannot exist outside the limits of society. He argued strongly that morality begins only when an individual pertains to a group.  And yet, how does this account for those heroes who stood out against Nazi injustice like the German lawyer Hans Litten who protested against Hitler, even calling him as a witness in a famous court case where he cross-examined him for three hours (1931), a action Hitler never forgot?  In fact, when the latter dictator came to power, he sent Litten to a concentration camp where he was eventually hanged: see here.

Durkheim argued that there is a central moral authority at the heart of morality that commands the enactment of its moral precepts. (One could ask what is the nature of that central moral authority, is it an "it" or an "energy" or a "person" as in a being like a God?). The individual in any specific situation, he argues, feels constrained to act in a moral way by society, and therefore, we may conclude that obligation is a fundamental element of morality.  This higher authority is not so much authoritarian, but rather a desirable authority (Durkheim speaks of the "desirability of morality" in this context) that is worthy of respect and devotion.  In such situations, an individual feels that he or she is working towards some sort of higher goal that Durkheim equates with the good, what he calls "le bien" - a very Platonic concept, indeed.  One could also say that this is a very philosophical/theological concept, too.  

And so, we may infer that this dual obligatory-desirability element of morality interweaves nicely with the influence of religion.  Indeed, this founder of sociology as a science would argue that morality and religion are closely linked as social phenomena: indeed, the moral life of a society, he says, is intimately intertwined with religion.  Moral authority, then, is born out of religious life and draws its authority from the power of religion.  However, to my neophyte mind in this area, Durkheim does not see morality as a one way street where an edict is issued from "on high" by a central power or an image of that central power (i.e., God or a god.  Remember that morality and religion are two sociological phenomena in our argumentation here).  For Durkheim there are two poles at play here: on the one hand, there is the morality of the group, which exists objectively outside the individual. However, on the other hand, there is the individual's way of representing that morality. While society creates many of the moral rules, the individual can add some little personal interpretation and nuances in understanding to them.  Each individual expresses that morality in his/her own way.  Indeed, while conformity to society and to collective rules and mores is often the greater reality for all of us in practice, there is still room for our individual conscience. Durkheim suggests that we all can add elements of our own personality and moral beliefs to society's moral codes and thereby build it up and refine it.  In other words, he leaves room for the individual to create, albeit in such a small way, their own morality. 

There is an old English saying that runs "there's nowt so queer as folk," meaning that there is nothing to account for the strangeness in people's behaviour.  There is a lot of truth in that old colloquialism, and yet if we are to live together in civilized societies we have to have codified behaviours.  There have to be rules and regulations and laws to ensure the doing of justice and the maintenance of peace.  However, as we have seen from my opening paragraph, it is so very difficult to stand up and be counted, especially to stand out from the crowd in any organization and openly reveal its errors, indeed its sheer corrupt practices, to the public.  All such people of such great courage, who have done so, have experienced the contumely, derision, opprobrium if not vilification, defamation and character-assassination of many individuals within that organization or society.  Some, as we have recounted above, have even paid with their lives for their courage in speaking out.

And so I will ask some questions, addressed to myself primarily:

• Do I speak out against corrupt practices within my organization or work place?
• Do I ask the hard questions of my own practices and those of my colleagues?
• Do I sleep easily at night? Why? Why not?
• Do I have the courage to speak my truth openly in my work place?
• What is my truth? Who am I? Am I an authentic human being?
• If I don't speak out for justice and right practices, why is that?  Is that due to my laziness, my cowardice, my lack of interest or my lack of commitment?
• Do I have causes I care about?  Why?  Why not?
• Do I read about whistle blowers and heroes?  Do I admire then?  Why? Why not?

Martin Niemoller

I will conclude this post with one of my favourite short poems about people who failed to speak out. It was written by pastor Martin Niemoller (1892-1984): It basically is a severe criticism of the failure of German intellectuals to speak out against the rise of Nazism:

First, they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Socialist. 

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Trade Unionist.  

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew.  

Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.

Journal of a Soul 29

Beyond Debate

Self writing in a notebook , Pisa Summer 2007

Debating is a skilled activity that allows the intellect to show its cutting edge, as it were.  It is, moreover, wonderful to witness when practised by those who know their subjects well.  It is even more thrilling, still, to behold one debater either totally demolishing the argument of another or, at least, painstakingly taking it apart and showing its inherent flaws.  As this is a blog with a spiritual/psychodynamic/psychotherapeutic thrust, I shall here confine my comments to matters of faith and reason with respect to the methodology of debate. Examples of debates that come to mind here are: (i) the famous debate on evolution at Oxford in 1860 between the scientist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 - 1895; biologist and coiner of the term "agnosticism," his favored religious stance) and the great orator, Samuel Wilberforce (1805 - 1873), Bishop of Oxford and later of Winchester, and (ii) the wonderful debate between the late wonderful journalist, writer, atheist and polemicist, Christopher Hitchens (1949 - 2011) and the former British P.M. Tony Blair, Catholic and wonderful orator and politician. This latter debate may be accessed : HERE

However, debating is cerebral and cognitive and is mainly confined to linear argumentation, though debaters may, of course, present in a logical way the findings of their reflections on experiences - religious and spiritual - and on emotions in general.  They may even, and very often do, employ humour and respect for their opponents.  But, my argument here is that debate is a limited, albeit, at times, very sharp and precise, methodology of approaching knowledge and truth.  There is, so much more to what makes us human than arguing about our beliefs and stances in life.  Our beliefs, contrary to what Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett think, cannot be confined within the parameters of logical, cerebral or inferential debating.  In other words, I am here adumbrating what in fact the great nineteenth century theologian, John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) expressed succinctly in the following words: "Faith is not a deduction from premises" or as he also expressed it "faith is never inferential."  It is as much a matter of the heart as well as the head.  He was, in these remarks, of course, echoing the comments of the great French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623 -1662) who emphasised the following: "le coeur as ses raisons que la raison ne connait point." ("The heart has its reasons which reason can never know.")

More to Life than Logic  

St Peter's Square from the Cupola

As I write these lines here, I am listening to the wonderful debate and ensuing discussion to which I alluded above and to which I have given the link.  Yet I am still convinced that more is needed, and that the methodological structures of debate, argument and discussion, while effective, are nonetheless lacking is something.  It is to that lack that I wish to confine my musings here. These are my thoughts after some 55 years as a wee ant on this little minuscule anthill we call "earth"which is hurtling through infinite space.  So what I say is said in as humble a way as I possibly can.  I have no great reasons to give on either side of the debate like either Wilberforce or Huxley or Blair or Hitchens, though it is wonderful to listen to, to read and/or ponder the learned musings of these great erudite debaters.  No, rather, I wish to widen the debate in the following points.

(i) Debaters seem to forget that Religion is both a sociological and psychological phenomenon, not to mention an anthropological one, not essentially amenable to logical debate, though nonetheless may be expressed and eruditely explicated in reasonable terms.  Peoples have always been religious because it is a way, be it primitive or primal, but no less true or authentic for all that, of making sense of their lives as a community as they encounter the world in its entirety.  In coming up with how they make sense of the mystery they encounter in the world as a complete entity these peoples collectively came up in a natural manner over time with firstly the various primitive religions, animist and polytheistic, and then the major great monotheistic religions of the Abrahamic Faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and the more holistic, and perhaps more psychologically friendly religions of the East namely Hinduism and Buddhism.  

Religion as a sociological Phenomenon

(a) The contemporary Irish journalist John Waters, speaking of the few positive things one can attribute to the Roman Catholic Church, averred that it was exceptionally good at those ceremonial things associated with "hatching, matching and dispatching."  When I first read his words, I delighted not alone in his light rhyming humour but also in his sound appreciation for ritual.  The religious rituals he had in mind here, without doubt, are baptisms and christenings, marriage and funeral ceremonies respectively. Sociologically speaking, it is not a question of whether another life exists or not, or even whether it can be proved one way or another; it is rather a question of dealing with death as a human reality within a community context in as meaningful a way as possible.  Such ceremonies are ways of dealing with the phenomenon of death and they have naturally evolved over the years to help the bereaved family, friends and acquaintances deal with their emotions at a community and by implication at a personal level.  Rituals, no matter what religious faith they occur in offer a collectively and individually healing avenue to express and contain grief. Sociologically rituals have evolved to help us in that containment.  Even a humanist or atheist funeral service offers a similar emotional expression or containment.  Indeed, I have attended one humanist funeral recently and the ceremony, which studiously and purposely avoids any mention of God needless to say, was akin to a religious ceremony replete with readings and "minister."  It obviously had no overtly religious element like a mass or scripture readings, but it emphasised instead secular readings from books which the departed person loved and encouraged the bereaved by playing the dead man's favourite music.  There were also three tributes to the departed by his family and friends.  There was interestingly a period of quiet where people of all faiths, beliefs and no beliefs were asked to think of the departed man in silence.  Obviously, any believer could choose to pray to his God if he so wished at that time.

To Be Continued