Henry Louis Gates, Jr. concluded the Beer Summit on a far more gracious, even presidential, note than President Obama. Gates had the courtesy to acknowledge, however belatedly, that “police officers put their lives at risk to protect us every day.” Obama said nothing about the police, even though he had previously fit the Gates incident into the ACLU’s master narrative about a national epidemic of biased policing. In his post-summit official statement, however, he pretended that the controversy could be deflated back to a matter between two individuals and disposed of with nearly meaningless platitudes. His silence about anything policing-related carefully let stand his previous allegation that “blacks and Hispanics are picked up more frequently and often time for no cause.” Obama’s embrace of activist-generated misinformation about the police, which I contest here, here, and here, will be the most damaging consequence of Gates-gate, one with the potential to erode the public safety gains in minority neighborhoods achieved over the last fifteen years.
I was struck nevertheless by the sudden infusion of God talk in Gates’ post-beer statement:
Let me say that I thank God that I live in a country in which police officers put their lives at risk to protect us every day . . . .
Thank God we live in a country where speech is protected, a country which guarantees and defends my right to speak out when I believe my rights have been violated . . . .
And thank God that we have a President who can rise above the fray, bridge age-old differences and transform events such as this into a moment in the evolution of our society’s attitudes about race and difference. President Obama is a man who understands tolerance and forgiveness, and our country is blessed to have such a leader.
I suspect that those activist conservative believers who argue for American exceptionalism and the essential role of faith in American life will not necessarily agree that we have God to thank for Obama’s election. Conservative and liberal believers undoubtedly loop each other like a double helix in their clairvoyance regarding the beneficent workings of God in the world. But if Reagan or Palin are the answer to prayers, why not Obama, too?
I am puzzled as usual, however, by the implications of such an interpretation of human experience as Gates here proposes. If it’s God to whom an individual American owes thanks for the good fortune of living under a stable, constitutional government, why doesn’t God confer such a benefit on Africans or the Burmese? An African baby no more deserves his birth circumstances than an American baby deserves his. If we’re all guilty of original sin from conception on, why are the consequences so much more severe for some people than for others? Predestination doctrine tells us to just shut up and accept such blatant injustices as the way that God does business, but I do not consider it an advance for human understanding to replace a medium-sized conundrum with a gargantuan one.
Many believers view the randomness of fate as the enemy of meaning. In No One Sees God, Michael Novak writes: “The unbeliever submits to randomness while the believer submits to the inscrutable will of the Creator.” Without faith in a supervening divine order, Novak and others argue, humans must live in an absurd universe. Such a view has it exactly backwards. It’s the religious alternative to randomness that is absurd, indeed, too horrible to contemplate. It is a random roll of the genetic dice that determines whether one child is born with the full complement of human faculties, while another lacks part of her brain or harbors a genetic defect that will kill her before she is six. Undirected fluctuations in the earth’s tectonic plates dictate whether an earthquake will wipe out whole families in this poor village, while sparing the next village over.
The believer, by contrast, has no out from absurdity. He must come up with an explanation beyond randomness for the daily massacre of the innocents, because his world is, as Novak emblematically puts it, “under the direction of a loving, personal God” who “sees everything,” knows each of us “by name,” and shows his “care every day.” It is for the believer, not the unbeliever, to give a reason based in logic or desert, and consistent with his idea of a loving God, for why this little baby has no arms or this young father will die prematurely of lymphoma. No one has ever succeeded in doing so.
I’m all for gratitude and thanks for the countless unmerited blessings of our lives, but let’s try to direct them at the right source. The human passion for justice is gradually shrinking the territory over which blind randomness once ruled. Medical researchers work tirelessly to ensure that all children have a fair shot at a normal human life. To lessen the number of orphans and widows, engineers fortify buildings against random “acts of God,” as common parlance and insurance premia have it. Agronomists develop pest-resistant crops, to guard against the famines that have plagued humanity throughout history. And as for the blessings of ordered liberty that Gates rightly celebrates, those are human achievements that we can either strengthen or destroy. Gates’ generous outreach towards the police is an admirable example of how to shore up the precious rule of law.
I suspect Gates was using the repetition of the phrase “thank God” as a rhetorical flourish rather than an invocation. I also suspect The Skipster’s avowed gratitude for a police presence wasn’t sincere. One of his advisors probably said, “Look, Skip, throw the cops a bone and maybe this embarrassment will go away faster.”
Heather — you are without peer as a framer of empirical arguments for conservatism, for which I respect and admire you. But when it comes to religion, your Johnny-one-note (Janey-one-note?) harping on questions of theodicy as though they were new and electrifying discoveries rather than ground well trod by philosophers and theologians for 2500 years is tiresome to anyone decently educated in philosophy or theology (a minority of majors graduated from the contemporary academy, I grant you), or indeed to any person who takes the trouble to think through what is entailed in the claim that a universe so varied as ours has a Creator, whether one accepts that claim or rejects it. The heart of the reflective theist’s answer to the sort of question you pose is nicely stated by Austin Farrer in his _Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited_: “What would a physical universe be like, from which all mutual interference of systems was eliminated? It would be no physical universe at all.” (51) “There are many flaws in the physical realm, through the mutual interference of physical systems; but the interferences are such as a realm of this sort is bound to throw up. Any single adverse accident could have been prevented, if circumstances had been altered. But the alteration of the circumstances would have made other accidents. Accidentality is inseparable from the character of our universe.” (75–76) There are plenty of other authors from whom to learn how thoughtful theists have answered the question of theodicy; but one can only learn from them if upon opening them one is prepared to grant that they might not be idiots unworthy of one’s intellectual effort. I’ll content myself with the one suggestion until I see some indication that this is an admission you’re prepared to make. (I assume it doesn’t not to be pointed out at length that there are unreflective theists as well as reflective ones, as is also true of atheists and agnostics.) I look forward to your next discussion of race, policing, etc.
I noticed a typo toward the end of the comment I just submitted (“not” for “need”). If possible, please use the corrected version that I’ll submit immediately after this. Thanks
Heather — you are without peer as a framer of empirical arguments for conservatism, for which I respect and admire you. But when it comes to religion, your Johnny-one-note (Janey-one-note?) harping on questions of theodicy as though they were new and electrifying discoveries rather than ground well trod by philosophers and theologians for 2500 years is tiresome to anyone decently educated in philosophy or theology (a minority of majors graduated from the contemporary academy, I grant you), or indeed to any person who takes the trouble to think through what is entailed in the claim that a universe so varied as ours has a Creator, whether one accepts that claim or rejects it. The heart of the reflective theist’s answer to the sort of question you pose is nicely stated by Austin Farrer in his _Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited_: “What would a physical universe be like, from which all mutual interference of systems was eliminated? It would be no physical universe at all.” (51) “There are many flaws in the physical realm, through the mutual interference of physical systems; but the interferences are such as a realm of this sort is bound to throw up. Any single adverse accident could have been prevented, if circumstances had been altered. But the alteration of the circumstances would have made other accidents. Accidentality is inseparable from the character of our universe.” (75–76) There are plenty of other authors from whom to learn how thoughtful theists have answered the question of theodicy; but one can only learn from them if upon opening them one is prepared to grant that they might not be idiots unworthy of one’s intellectual effort. I’ll content myself with the one suggestion until I see some indication that this is an admission you’re prepared to make. (I assume it doesn’t need to be pointed out at length that there are unreflective theists as well as reflective ones, as is also true of atheists and agnostics.) I look forward to your next discussion of race, policing, etc.
I’ll be happy to help you straighten this out, Ms. Mac Donald. The difference you’re missing is between the apparent arbitrariness of a personal ruler (human or divine) and the true metaphysical randomness of a roll of the dice. Religious people don’t have to “come up with an explanation beyond randomness.” They have to have faith that there is such an explanation. Whether that faith is founded in reason is a separate question, a less interesting question because it’s already been answered on this blog over and over and over. A much more interesting question is whether one should or (collectively) must have this faith, whether or not it corresponds to reality, as we have faith in other, nonreligious metaphysical lies.
There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit in this Gates story which bloggers and reporters have ignored. You mentioned one here: Gates’ invocation of God, which comes across as a lot more sincere than Obama’s. The center-left knows that they need to get God-talk on their side, and here Gates shows how to do it.
Some other low-hanging fruit: the liberals and leftists who were sympathetic with Crowley and/or critical of Gates in the controversy (before the beer, at least). This would make a great story. Counterpunch ran a scathing attack on Gates, though one could discount that as just typical of Counterpunch feuding. But there have been other left-wingers who sided with the cops or thought that Gates’ race-baiting was wrong. FeministX told about how Crowley had actually helped her once. She was very sympathetic to him in this case.
Liberals and leftists aren’t stupid or evil or corrupt. Partisanship and ideology make you stupid, whether it’s on the left or the right (and yes, I’m an ideologue too). This whole Gates story is actually pretty interesting, once you get past the knee-jerk responses on both sides. The last sentence in your article is a good example of getting past that.
That “No one has ever succeeded in doing so” seems to be affirmed implicitly by the earlier comment that your question has been considered for 2500 years by philosophers and theologians. But they have not been trodding ground. They have not been able to answer based on logic because they have stumbled into the quagmire of a God defined as omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. The only way out is to admit, as modern philosophers such as Farrer apparently does, that God is not omnipotent. He cannot create a universe in which physical systems operate harmoniously. This “explains” natural evil. Another Christian philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, takes the same approach. Although claiming God is omnipotent, he crafts an elaborate argument that concludes God cannot create a world where free creatures always choose right. This “explains” human evil. If this answer does not satisfy, he writes, it is a pastoral problem, not a logical one. See your pastor, not your logician. How encouraging. One might as well challenge the omni benevolence of God and argue that God just does not give a damn.
@Jeff Peterson
Jeff, yours is a version of the “best of all possible worlds” theodicy. I think the best answer to this is to look at room for marginal melioration on God’s part. For instance, as you’re reading this there are a myriad of morally innocent creatures dying an agonizing death. Are you really saying that it’s impossible for an all-powerful God to relieve one creature’s agony for just one second before it dies, without causing worse suffering somewhere else or throwing the whole order out of whack?
A universe as tightly determined as the one you describe doesn’t leave an all-powerful God much wiggle-room all. If God can’t even relieve one creature’s suffering for one second without screwing up other things worse, then it’s practically inconceivable that he could part the sea or bring forth water from a rock or bestow an act of grace upon a sinner without wrecking the whole darn cosmos. And forget about raising the dead.
If you are waiting for Obama to express gratitude to those humans past and present who have truly made this nation stable, prosperous, and great, you are in for a long wait. He believes in plenty of demonstrably false propositions, so it is no surprise he believes in something that can’t be proved.
Empirical reality is no friend of Obama’s.
Your blog was of course amazing again even though it was terrifying for me to read what happened to you.You turned what could have been a very bad thing into something funny and positive. Do take care. Also your live radio news broadcast was also amazing.I love you xoxox