One paper I wrote shortly after attempting to read Derrida was about conversion and the binary between internal and external reasons. Internal reasons are one for which an agent has something in his or her subjective motivational set, some desire or inclination, that gives him or her motivation to act. An external reason has no such component in the agent’s subjective motivational set, so while the agent may recognize the logical validity of the external reason, he or she has no reason to act on it. Here is the pertinent argument:

McDowell’s counterexample of conversion is similar to Williams’s example of the reluctant soldier. In both cases, the agent is initially unmotivated to do something which others in his social group thought he should do. Williams solves the problem of the soldier’s change of heart by saying his internal reasons changed through deliberation. McDowell proposes that the community standards which define an “ethical upbringing” and “suitable modes of behaviour” (McDowell 101) are the way of ‘considering the matter aright,’ and that through conversion, and agent may come to accept reasons which had previously been external to him. McDowell does this to establish the existence of external reasons. But if the reason is external, in that the motivation to act based on it came from the community rather than the individual, and if the reason becomes internal through conversion, that reason is at once both external and internal. Instead of only making room for the existence of external reasons, McDowell has proven the slipperiness of these categories. His conversion example can be taken a step further to show that the binary of internal and external reasons is a false dichotomy. The binary between internal and external reasons is broken as soon as an external reason is accepted as an internal reason by an agent. Instead of only one or the other, a reason will fall on a continuum, at some point on an internal to external reason axis. A reason may be both internal and external, with differing degrees of motivation for the agent.

Note the “slipperiness of categories” and the “false dichotomy.” Oh, this post-structuralism was heady stuff!

But as under the influence of any intoxicating concoction, my inebriated brilliance did not stand up to sober scrutiny. My professor did not accept my slippery categories or broken binaries. My inspired continuum was rejected in favor of the original definitions made by real philosophers, and the good doctor was not be moved beyond them. He stayed securely within the box, and I, deflated, and dependent on him for my grade, packed my slippery categories back away and excised them from the next draft of the paper.

It didn’t hurt the paper to drop that fun little contradiction, that brilliant logical twist. Because really, it wasn’t that brilliant. It was not even original. Sadly, I must confess it was the shoddy work of a script kiddie, not the elegant script of a true hacker. I’m not a real post-structuralist, remember? I can’t even claim understand post-structuralism.

The destruction of the binary using self-contradiction and deconstructive post-structuralist techniques is just a trick, a clever little game that means nothing and everything at the same time. It is as pointless to use in an argument as an appeal to authority; in either situation, the person deploying one of these tactics is doing so to shut down the discussion. Neither move is constructive. With post-structuralists there is at least a playful recognition of their counter-productiveness. Yes, they are throwing the chessmen off of the board; it’s because they realize it is an empty game. Look, they say, see the fantastic pattern of the scattered fall. Generally those who appeal to authority have is no such light hearted self-awareness; instead there is earnestness or closemindedness or some combination of the two. They have no sense of levity and would be insulted to be accused of participating in mere game.

I may be too timid to ever be a real post-structuralist. I am no superman. But I am willing, here and there, to call out the games I play for the games that they are, even if I have to deny some authority in the process. And so I say to Derrida, So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Adams, Douglas. So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish. Del Rey. 1985.
McDowell, John. “Might There Be External Reasons?” Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998. 95-111.
Whipple, Rachel. “Implications of Conversion for the Internal/External Reason Binary.” Unpublished student paper for Philosophy 413. 2012. And yes, I know it’s unreadable.
Williams, Bernard. “Internal and external reasons.” Moral Luck: Philosophical papers 1973-1980. Cambridge University Press, 1982. 101-11.

[Disclaimer: In what follows I offer a brief phenomenological sketch of human intimacy. Read on at your own peril.]

In chapter 12 on “Immutability and Impassibility” in The Attributes of God, Ostler claims that: “In the view I am proposing here, the ultimate moral criteria is the intrinsic value of creativity exemplified in its highest form in personality realized in full personhood” (386). Or again, taking Martin Buber’s phenomenological analysis of “I/Thou” versus “I/It” ways of relating to other people as a frame, Ostler says:

The highest good consists precisely in the relationship that is created between two persons who fully and properly value each other through entering into relation with one another. This relationship is accomplished precisely in entering into the emotional life of the other so that the “other” enters into the shared life of the lover. God enters into this relation constituted as a Thou by taking our very experience and value into his life. God penetrates our being and envelops us in his being. He allows us to enter into him and become a part of his experience just as he enters and induces, to the extent we value him and accept his love, sublime unity and joy.

The most analogous human experience is the intimate agape united with eros of husband and wife in sexual union. The spouse who is properly valued in the relationship is a source of greatest value and the most extreme pleasure and satisfaction known to mortals; but a spouse who is used as a mere thing in such an intimate relationship is a whore. (386)

I think Ostler is on to something here, but I wonder if, in general, we’re not still too Platonic (in all applicable senses of the word) and/or too German-Romantic, in our discussions of sex.

Does sex – in all its raw emotional, material, and spiritual intimacy – really involve bodies as vanishing points for the reciprocal interpenetration of two free subjects? If I am clearly both a subject (a “Thou”) and an object (an “It”), does sex unfold as the union of two increasingly transparent Thou’s?

I wonder if we’d be better off inverting the frame.

Granted the profound intimacy of sacred sex, what is the character of this intimacy? What is the most obvious thing we can say about sex?

Sex (especially sex as sacrament) is about bodies and aspects of bodies.

Take pornography as a counterpoint. From the perspective of consumption, the problem with pornography is not that it involves too much flesh, too much objectification, too much materiality. The problem with pornography is that it disconnects sex from the difficulty and demands of real bodies and substitutes air-brushed spectacle instead. Pornography is spectral and it is consumed by ghosts.

Being a body, being human is not simple. We are objects, not just subjects. And our bodies, as objects, vastly exceed the grasp of our subjectivity. A defining phenomenological feature of my lived experience of my own flesh is its strangeness, its opacity, its willfulness, its quasi-autonomy.

What’s to be done?

Sex, it seems to me, is that one place where we jointly confront, negotiate, and celebrate precisely this being-body, this being-more-than-a-subject. The intimacy of sex hinges on the intimacy of a shared confession that we both are bodies and that these bodies we share are, even to ourselves, a mystery.

In sex, we are smack at the intersection of divine purposes we don’t quite understand and a blind animal drive 3.5 billion years in the making. In sex, we are two Thou’s joined in the intimacy of a shared It.

Practicing intimacy, do you find the other person’s thoughts and desires and feelings growing increasingly transparent, obvious, accessible? Or do you find instead that the intimacy spreads from a common willingness to trust in both the opaque mystery of the other’s body and your own?

Is sex an emptying of the body’s opacity? Or a joint emptying of selves into the opacity of these bodies?

Sacred sex is sacred because, in all material tenderness, it allows our It-ness to actually take center stage.

Or so it seems to me.

With respect to theology, we might then ask two related questions:

1. If Ostler is right that sacred sex is as close as mortals analogously get to divine union, then is the centrality of our intertwined but opaque bodies an accidental feature of this sexual intimacy, a feature that will eventually be purified and rendered translucent in divine light? Or is this dark matter essential to sex being what it is?

2. Further, on what basis should we decide what’s accidental and what’s essential to this intimacy? Scripture? Metaphysics? Phenomenology? Biology? All of the above? Which in light of which?

The basic problem is this: “If there is anything in [an agent's] circumstances which precludes a person from exercising a power, then the power cannot be exercised under those circumstances” (249). Blake argues that God’s strong foreknowledge is just the kind of  causally implicated circumstance that compromises a person’s freedom to exercise their agency. As a result, the power to choose in this instance is no real power and agency is compromised. I recommend a close reading of the chapter’s details.

As a non-specialist, though, I’m wondering about the larger context that frames these really difficult questions.

Both with respect to the larger question of whether agency is compatible with determinism and with respect to the narrower question of whether agency is compatible with God’s foreknowledge, the difficulty seems to me to revolve around a kind of figure/ground problem.

The figure/ground problem is this: how do the actions of a local figure fit with the generic background of conditions and circumstances that constitute its field of action? Or, more pointedly, how can the local exercise of a heterogeneous agency be compatible with a pre-existing field of homogeneous and comprehensive conditions?

With respect to the narrower issue of God’s foreknowledge, the question is: how can the heterogeneity of a local agency be compatible with a pre-existing field of conditions and circumstances already packaged, totalized, and homogenized by God’s absolute and limitless foreknowledge?

With respect to the wider issue of determinism, the question is: how can the heterogeneity of a local agency be compatible with a field of conditions and circumstances already pre-formatted as a single, homogeneous background of cause and effect?

In short, how can a local agent be invested with power to act freely and heterogeneously in relation to a homogeneous, pre-formatted field?

This is a really difficult question. It shows up again and again in philosophy in a thousand different forms.

I want to suggest, in what may be a naive way, that part of the problem here may be with the form of the question itself.

Blake, for instance, argues against God’s absolute foreknowledge on the grounds that, given the background of such a homogeneous, pre-formatted field, agency is compromised. The centrality of agency ought to trump our commitment to the existence of that kind of pre-formatted and totalized field of foreknowledge. So absolute foreknowledge is out. (I think this is right.)

But why not make the same argument in relation to the wider ontological question? Why not argue that agency ought to trump our assumption that actions unfold in the context of a field of conditions and circumstances already pre-formatted by a single, homogeneous background of cause and effect?

In short, why think about agency as something that unfolds in a single, smooth, field period?

What if there is no single, shared, pre-formatted, metaphysical background against which agency plays out? If the reality of agency is incompatible with the idea of such a field, then what if we ditched the field?

What’s the alternative?

There’s no space to give a very convincing answer here, but the alternative is roughly something like this.

Rather than agency playing out in relation to a single, shared, and pre-formatted field, agency plays out only in relation to other agents. There is no absolute figure/ground relation. There is no ultimate frame of reference. There are no agents interacting in a single field. There are just agents embedded in and acting in relation to other agents. Reality is agents all the way down (and all the way up). There is no meta-container, no set of all sets. There are only agents. To be sure, there are localized “fields” of action but these “fields” are themselves nothing but partially overlapping (and only partially commensurable) agents. Every “field” is local and every “field” is itself an agent (and/or composed of agents). There is no “global.”

The traditional notion is that the universe starts out whole and complete. The traditional problem is then how agency is possible. Note, especially, that, to the degree that agency does show up in this kind of world, it shows up only as sin – as something that breaks and kills the integrity of world such that the world needs to be saved.

Mormons don’t have to start with this assumption of an original unity or meta-contextual totality. What if we tried out the alternate scenario? Let’s begin instead with the assumption of a multitude of only partially compatible agencies that are not embedded in a single, prefabricated whole. Let’s assume that unity is not pre-given and then lost, but only painstakingly (and only ever partially) made by way of agency. Let’s assume that it may well be our job to try to put the universe together, but let’s not assume that it is our job to put it back together.

In this scenario, we may be able to not only make room for the existence of agency, but for its goodness as well.

Am I Siamese?  How many conjoin me? How many compose me? How many do I host? How many have I colonized? How wide does my cheesecloth interviduality spread?

It’s pretty clear, I think, that my “individual” self is largely a story I’m selling myself. Jesus wants me to lose this self and get on with life, but it’s hard. I find that I love this story more than life. At least, I choose the one over the other again and again.

My “self” is a shadow that my multitude casts. The shadow is simple, clean, flat, and black. That simplicity is a fiction. Given where my multitude stands, the cant of the sun, the shape I’m bodying, my shadow may give an accurate adumbration – but the adumbration hides more than it shows.

There’s nothing wrong with shadows. Shadows are real shadows. The trouble starts when, instead of just casting a shadow, I try to identify with it. (O’ that I were my shadow!) The trouble starts when I try to bottle its simplicity, its clean-cut individuality, as the truth about what I really am. Sin is this compulsive attempt to forget the unruly multitudes that compose me and to finally, successfully sync with my shadow. Hell is succeeding.

The main characters in Steven Peck‘s novel, The Scholar of Moab, all display this kind of messy irreducibility. (Read BHodges excellent BCC review here). Here’s the book’s official synopsis:

What happens when a two-headed cowboy, a high school dropout who longs to be a scholar, and a poet who claims to have been abducted by aliens come together in 1970’s Moab, Utah? The Scholar of Moab, a dark-comedy perambulating murder, affairs, and cowboy mysteries in the shadow of the La Sal Mountains.

Young Hyrum Thane, unrefined geological surveyor, steals a massive dictionary out of the Grand County library in a midnight raid, startling the people of Moab into believing a nefarious band of Book of Mormon assassins, the Gadianton Robbers, has arisen again.

Making matters worse, Hyrum’s illicit affair with Dora Tanner, a local poet thought to be mad, ends in the delivery of a premature baby boy who vanishes the night of its birth. Righteous Moabites accuse Dora of its murder, but who really killed their child? Did a coyote dingo the baby? Was it an alien abduction as Dora claims? Was it Hyrum? Or could it have been the only witness to the crime, one of a pair of Oxford-educated conjoined twins who cowboy in the La Sals on sabbatical?

How many is a two-headed cowboy? Riding under the open sun, the cowboy and his horse cast just one (three-headed) shadow.

At one point, early in the novel, the Oxford-educated conjoined twins are in Paris attending a lecture given by the brilliant French obscurantist Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze, working to explain what he calls the Virtual, spots the twins and seizes the illustration:

Suddenly, Delueze pointed at us with his long-nailed finger and said, “There! There is repetition caught in the moment between virtuality and actuality, between possibility and the unification of multiplicity, between the qualitative and the quantitative. There! There is ‘différance’ screaming towards existence, existence sluicing through potentiality, and potential itself skating unforgivingly toward emergent unity.” Thom called us a topological manifold of singularity, a “projection” resisting reduction in complementary planes of asymmetry. (32-33)

Conjoined twins are an easy target if you’re talking about “a topological manifold of singularity” or a “projection resisting reduction in complementary planes of asymmetry,” but Peck’s novel presses the point that the twins are not unique in this respect. Rather, they dramatize for us a general truth about the human condition. To be a human being is to exist simultaneously on complementary but asymmetrical planes. Who doesn’t feel like a repetition caught between virtuality and actuality?

The human way of being is split, composite, spread, distributed, and open-ended. The human way of being is to be of two minds, to depend on bodies we can influence but not control, to think thoughts we don’t understand, to repeat words that are not our own, and to pursue goals we’re not sure we want.

For the conjoined twins, things are even more complex than Deleuze imagined. Doctors discover that the twins have a “third mind” – affectionately referred to by the twins as Marcel – a “neural mass” that is at once a hub, a relay, and something independent of either of its heads. An abstract of the doctor’s report indicates that

at times, the neural mass acts according to the desires of neither twin – e.g., to run from ambiguous danger (one, say, that neither twin has noticed) or to seek out sexual activity. Some activities require coordination of both the neural mass and the twins. For example, bathroom functions require the integration of all three personalities with the neural mass alone detecting, for instance, the need of urination. . . . However, the mass can make decisions independent of either. What this implies about the nature of consciousness is discussed, including whether this neural mass is an independent and separate consciousness. Thoughts on what this means for personhood are explored. (58-59)

What have you named your neural mass? Your third mind? Your fourth one? What New Year’s resolutions have you made to better integrate the assemblage that you are? What rogue parts of you probably need more compassion rather than more discipline?

Hyrum Thane, the novel’s main character, suffers a more subtle version of interviduality than the conjoined twins. Fresh from the trailer park, he works as a hired-hand for geology PhDs surveying desert strata and he feels pretty keenly his “ignorance” in relation to them. One day, the butt of a joke, one of them says to Hyrum: “Man! What a Dickensian life you lead” (19). Hyrum, however, doesn’t know what this means and, as a result, it drives him crazy. This comment, Hyrum says, “got under my skin & started Itching so bad it wouldn’t go away until I got it Scratched” (25).

Here, rather than having two heads, Hyrum gets something stuck in his head, a unknown word, a foreign phrase, that lodges itself there, takes root, colonizes his mind, and hacks his attention. It shapes him and compels him. He can’t stop repeating it back to himself and ends up with a big pile of rocks. That first day, he says,

I started counting & every time I thought it I threw a rock at a tree. When it was time to head down I just walked over to the tree & counted up the rocks. That is exactly how many times I thought it between the time I ate my lunch & the time we packed up to go back to the base camp. I wanted to let you get a feel for my afternoon ruminations. (19)

To give you a feel for the force of it’s self-replication, Peck then fills five pages with “Man! What a Dickensian life you lead. Man! What a Dickensian life you lead. Man! What a Dickensian life you lead,” to the exact number of rocks (118!) Hyrum counted himself as having thrown that first afternoon.

I am Hyrum, except that rather than a foreign phrase colonizing my mind, I’ve got a whole book. The Book of Mormon, lodged like an eccentric body between my ears, spools in an endless loop. Like Hyrum, I didn’t ask for it,  suspect it may be an insult, and don’t know what it means.

Still, it composes me, conjoins me, compels me, and overwrites me as literally as any third-wheel neural mass could. The Book of Mormon is a life-sized brain hack spanning my years, itching under my skin, interrupting my story, deforming my shadow. The Book of Mormon exists in a complementary but asymmetrical plane. It’s an irrational number, a tangent reorienting my bundle of divergent lines.

What the Book of Mormon is meant to do or mean, I am not sure. But to what it does do, I can attest: it keeps me up at night, it wakes me early in the morning, it keeps me from folding in on myself, from coinciding with the shadow I work to project, from imploding into a vacuum-packed hell where my “self” and my life become one and the same.

This is a little bit crazy, but it saves me from being completely sane.

I remember the day and time and place that I stopped believing in God, but not the date.The date may be missing because I both believed in God long after this and stopped believing in God long before it.

The story goes like this.

I’m in Orem for a conference. It’s late Saturday afternoon, the sun is low, and I’m alone in my hotel room. I spent the afternoon with a doubting friend. We skipped whole panels of papers. It’s something like ten years ago. Now I’m kneeling bedside, my pose classic, my face wet, my one dependable quality on display. I pray overearnestly.

I explain to God that I can’t be responsible for his existence. That’s not a burden I can bear.  And then, as if in answer to my prayer, it occurs to me that I’m right: God’s existence is not my responsibility. It’s his. If God wants to exist, that’s up to him.

Relief comes in like the tide. I wash my face and go back to the conference, my prayer answered. From then on I stop believing in God.

I don’t tell my Mom, but I don’t stop going to church either. I don’t stop praying or reading or doing my home teaching. I don’t stop going to the temple. I don’t go away. I stay. I’m relieved. I sit in the pew and hold my wife’s hand and color with our children and over years and years a great stillness settles.

This stillness is a door.

I walk through the door backwards. I start to read scriptures and hear talks and give lessons literally. That baptism of fire is no metaphor. That rest of the Lord is no pie in the sky. I know less about Jesus than I ever did, but the kingdom keeps taking on weight and definition and solidity. Without any supernatural recourse, without any fuel in the rocket of belief, Jesus’ words have no place to go and they just stay where, with a thump, they land: at my feet, at the end of my nose, ringing in my ears, knocking at my red, red front door.

Unable to substitute for what’s given a belief in what isn’t, I’m saved. Something is happening to me – something redemptive and penetrating and difficult and not entirely welcome – but it’s nothing like belief. And its happening here and now and in this Mormon pew.

You, work out your own salvation. Undergo your own ascesis. God’s ways are not my ways. He is free to exist as he will (or won’t) and do with me as he wishes.

Designating a device that is unnecessarily complicated, impracticable, and ingenious.
—“Rube Goldberg,” Oxford English Dictionary

Theology is a diversion. It is not serious like doctrine, respectable like history, or helpful like therapy. Theology is gratuitous. It works by way of detours. Doing theology is like building a comically circuitous Rube Goldberg machine: you spend your time tinkering together an unnecessarily complicated, impractical, and ingenious apparatus for doing things that are, in themselves, simple.

But there is a kind of joy in theology’s gratuity, there is a pleasure in its comedic machination, and ultimately—if the balloon pops, the hamster spins, the chain pulls, the bucket empties, the pulley lifts, and (voila!) the book’s page is turned—some measurable kind of work is accomplished. But this work is a byproduct. The beauty of the machine, like all beauty, is for its own sake.

Theology, maybe especially Mormon theology, requires this kind of modesty. As a scholarly discipline, Mormon theology is for people who like that kind of thing. The Church neither needs nor endorses our Rube Goldbergian flights. The comic aspect of the arrows we wing at cloudy skies must be kept firmly in mind. The comedy of it both saves us from theology and commends us to it. It is painful to watch a theologian who thinks he’s finally bolted together “the one true Rube Goldberg machine.” But there is joy in a shared comedy that invites us to laugh and wonder as ordinary religious objects are lovingly pressed into doing unusual and amazing things.

Thomas Aquinas is a model. At the end of his life, embraced by God’s own mystery, Thomas throws up his hands and claims that all he’s written—the sum of Catholic theology—seems like straw. Theology is only worth doing if, in full light of this admission, we can take Thomas’ confession as a punchline to be celebrated rather than a disgrace to be brushed under the rug.

Self-aware, such comedy never starts from scratch. It never gets its feet planted. Like an amateur juggler, theology weaves around the room chasing its borrowed pins. Theology works with found objects. It repurposes ordinary stuff in pursuit of ad hoc projects. Nothing is ordered to specification. Our Rube Goldberg machines are made out of ordinary, mismatched, everyday religious objects. Start with a couple of doctrines here, a few rituals there, a pew, and a prayer, then throw in some historical qualifications for good measure, grease the wheels with a sociological observation or two, and wind the whole thing up.

The more ordinary the stuff, the more material the objects, the sturdier their composition, the better for theology. You can’t build a working machine if you rely too much on supernatural ephemera. When the gears crank, the wheels turn, and the hammer swings, you want that head to connect—whack!—with a satisfyingly solid thump.

Good theologians need two skills above all others: they must be shameless packrats and they must be imaginative tinkerers. Because they work with found objects, theologians need to be collectors of religious texts, rituals, and objects of every sort. The collector needs to gather a wide variety of objects from a wide field of sources—Eastern, Western, ancient, modern, literary, scientific, etc. Working just with what is at hand, it is best to have a lot on hand.

Repurposing these ordinary gestures, altars, and texts—sometimes subtly, sometimes wildly, sometimes both—for theological ends requires invention and sensitivity. Tinkering requires patience and care. The only way to successfully exapt an object is to be sensitive to its given shape, heft, strength, and history. Then, in light of this attention, the object can reveal what untapped work it is able do it. Constellated into an unnecessary apparatus, the object can show both itself and the objects aligned with it as possessing a new and surprising strength. Yoked together, the whole thing can shamble along handsomely, showing us the gods and moving us closer to them.

Engaged in this work, theology has only one strength: it can make simple things difficult. Good theology forces detours that divert us from our stated goals and prompt us to visit places and include people that would otherwise be left aside. The measure of this strength is charity.

Theological detours are worth only as much charity as they are able to show. They are worth only as many waylaid lives and lost objects as they are able to embrace. Rube Goldberg machines, models of inelegance, are willing to loop anything into the circuit—tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, Democrats, whatever. This is their joy. Here, the impromptu body of Christ is a Rube Goldberg machine.

In charity, the grace of a disinterested concern for others and the gratuity of an unnecessary complication coincide.

Theology helps us to find religion by helping us to lose it. Theology makes the familiar strange. Theology ratchets uncomfortable questions into complementary shapes. Theology recovers the trouble that is charity’s substance.

When, in the end, all the levers are pulled, all the buttons are pushed, and all the switches are switched, it is a small, hard, round, red, shiny ball of charity that rolls out of the detour machine—or, otherwise, theology is nothing.

I throw out all of these numbers to suggest that, as a society, we have a problem. That problem needs to be fixed. And we, as Mormons, undoubtedly have something that we can bring to the discussion of how to fix it. As I think about how we can fix poverty, though, I’m hugely influenced by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill’s book Creating an Opportunity Society.[fn3]

Haskins and Sawhill point out that Americans care about desert.[fn4] That is, as Americans, we want those who have the ability to work for a living. And I’m interested in this idea of desert. Because I’m not convinced that we have a religious dispensation to withhold assistance from those don’t somehow “deserve” our help.[fn5]

Still, as a practical matter, irrespective of whether we have religious dispensation or not, we care about desert. And no social program that is blind to to recipients’ refusal to work is going to go anywhere. As a pragmatist, then, I have to confront desert. But, as we consider how to provide aid to those to whom we have the political will to aid, I want to keep two things in mind:

(1) Notwithstanding our cultural faith in Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches is not the norm in America. You are much more likely to end up in roughly the same economic condition as the family you were born into. 42 percent of the children of families in the bottom quintile of income themselves end up in the bottom quintile of income as adults, twice the percentage that would be expected to end up there by chance.[fn7] And only 6 percent of Americans move from the bottom quintile to the top quintile.[fn8]

So Americans’ socioeconomic movement is limited. And this limited mobility between socioeconomic classes suggests that some portion of our economic success or failure is a result of the situation in which we were born, not of anything for which we were responsible. This is not to deny our ability or need to work, but, while some portion of my relatively comfortable financial situation can be attributed to my hard work, some portion is also attributable to the fact that I was born into a middle-class family. Likewise, while some portion of an indigent’s lack of financial success may be attributable to her not working, some portion is also attributable to the bad luck of not being born in a middle-class family. So while looking at a person’s desert has significant emotional and political resonance, we need to recognize that luck and society play their roles, too.

(2) Still, though I think it’s hard to argue with my conclusions in (1), I don’t think that’s going to seep into the public consciousness any time soon. Which is one reason why, if we want to create a truly just society, there is value in focusing on those to whom we can’t assign any blame for their situation. And here, I basically mean children. Because children can’t be held responsible for their poverty—that is, because they didn’t have the ability to opt out of being born in poverty—providing them with some sort of help should be uncontroversial, even to the most desert-focused person.[fn9]

—

So this could go in one of several directions. If you believe my story that, as Mormons, we’re not given religious dispensation to only help the deserving poor, maybe the question is, how do we expand Americans’ view of who is the deserving poor (again, assuming that the political importance of desert isn’t going to go away)? If you don’t buy my story, then maybe the question is, how do we make sure that those who need and deserve our help get that help? Either way, there’s always the question of how much help to give. What, for example, does it mean that, among the people of Enoch, there were no poor among them? Assuming it doesn’t preclude all income inequality,[fn10] we need to determine how much inequality we can leave. Etc.

—

[fn1] Note that the poverty line, for these purposes, is $22,314 for a family of four, or $11,139 for an individual.

[fn2] If you go to the Wall Street Journal link, I recommend clicking on the interactive map. The variation between the percentage of people in a state receiving food stamps is interesting. I haven’t looked carefully, but in my quick glance, Wyoming has the lowest proportion of food stamp recipients, with 6%, while Mississippi has the most, with 21%.

[fn3] I’m not going to review their book, although I will refer to it and concepts it embraces. I highly recommend it to anybody who wants to think through how we can solve poverty. The two authors have different views—my impression is that one is politically liberal and the other, conservative—but they work to lay out a concrete way that the country could work to reduce poverty without being ideological about it. Because—and this is an important point—neither liberals nor conservatives like poverty, as far as I can tell, and both are interested in solving the problem. Their policy prescriptions may differ, but both seem to want a society that is more just.

[fn4] Note that, in this case, “desert” takes one “s.” Why not two? This Snopes article discusses it. (Did you know, by the way, that Snopes also tackled language myths and mistakes? Me either.)

[fn5] For example, take a look at the parable of the workers in the vineyard. Or maybe King Benjamin explaining that we are to give to the beggar, whether or not she brought her poverty on herself, in the same way God gives to us, lest we be condemned. But contrast that with the Lord’s statement that the idle shall not eat the bread of the worker (although, to be fair, this is the Lord commanding those who enter into the law of consecration not to be idle; it’s not the Lord excusing His people from being charitable. Still, I’ll concede that there may be some wiggle room).

[fn7] That is, if we had complete socioeconomic mobility, with no constraints based on our family of origin, a person who grew up in the bottom 20% of income should have an equal likelihood of ending up in any quintile; only 20% would end up in the bottom quintile of income.

[fn8] These numbers all come from Opportunity Society p. 63.

[fn9] Yes, I know I said my next post in this series would probably deal with New York’s recent sex ed law. But this really belongs first. So probably next time I’m addressing social justice issues, I’ll deal with sex ed. If you’re really disappointed that something came between that post and sex ed, you can pretend this post never happened.

[fn10] I assume it doesn’t eliminate all income inequality—it appears to me that, even under at least one formulation of the United Order, people received according to their needs, which may have been different between individuals and families.

I teach at a Jesuit law school. Part of our mission is to “prepare graduates who will be ethical advocates for justice and the rule of law.” This social justice emphasis is inspired by the belief that each human being “deserves dignity and respect.” And Pope Benedict XVI takes this dessert further: he says that charity is inseparable from justice.[fn2]

So why spend this time, on a Mormon blog, talking about Catholic conceptions of social justice? Because not only does the Mormon tradition has the same biblical and traditional Christian justifications to pursue a just society,[fn3] but Restoration scripture and modern prophets provide additional impetus.[fn4] That is, as Mormons, we have a duty to pursue a just society.

Recognizing this duty doesn’t, of course, define the contours of a just society, or prescribe the route we use to arrive at this just society. We still need to ask what and how. Neither is a simple question, and I don’t have an overarching vision for what I believe a just society would look like. I do, however, want to ask, with respect to discrete issues, what Mormonism adds to the discussion of social justice and how we, as Mormons, can contribute to that justice.

So I mean this post mostly as an introduction to that project. I don’t plan on doing it as a multi-part series with a common title and links back to all of the parts, and I certainly don’t plan on blogging about nothing but social justice issues, but I do plan to return the subject on occasion with more specificity with respect to a variety of particular issues.[fn5]

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[fn1] I don’t want to suggest, of course, that Mormons (whether pundits or not) are the only religious persons up in arms over socialist social justice churches. But I don’t feel like taking the time to search for anti-social justice invective, so I’ll stick with the two sources I knew of off the top of my head.

[fn2] “If we love others with charity, then first of all we are just towards them. Not only is justice not extraneous to charity, not only is it not an alternative or parallel path to charity: justice is inseparable from charity, and intrinsic to it.” Caritas in Veritate.

[fn3] See, e.g., the story of the Good Samaritan.

[fn4] I’m thinking of things ranging from the City of Enoch to the Nephites after Christ’s visit to our belief in the ultimate spiritual significance of even putatively temporal concerns to the affirmative side of the Church’s political neutrality statement.

[fn5] For example, the first post in this series will probably revolve around New York’s recent requirement that schools teach a comprehensive sex ed curriculum. But we’ll get to that later.

You notice that the people who gave you the binoculars have their own. You hear people talking about the dazzling sights the binoculars bring into view.

You try out the instrument, anxious to see for yourself. Like most people around you, you pan up at the sky and . . . everything’s blurry. You can’t see a thing.

You’re asked what you see. Embarrassed, you make vague, general statements about how amazing the binoculars are. What a gift! You are, after all, impressed with the workmanship.

Oh, your interlocutor responds, obviously unconvinced by your him-hawing. Sometimes, they explain, it’s hard to see stuff at first. The trick is that you not only have to look through the binoculars but, at the same time, you have to really super believe that you’re seeing dazzling sights out the other end. Then the binoculars will work.

You’re game. You fit the binoculars to your face and try substituting a strongly-willed belief in the stuff you don’t see for the stuff you don’t see. You’re not screwing around: you really try and you do it for a long time. You’re not ashamed to publicly admit your belief in these dazzling sights. You even put some effort into getting other people to believe.

But the sun is hot, the days are long, and you still don’t see any of those dazzling sights.

Your will flags. Other people start to get suspicious of you. You start to get suspicious of you. The whole thing is about believing – really, truly, fervently believing – and you, my friend, don’t appear to believe. Otherwise you’d see stuff, right? Or, at least, find enough comfort in the strength of your belief in those dazzling sights that you won’t mind not seeing them?

You have to be honest. It hasn’t worked. You’re ready to give up. You sit down on a rock, the binoculars dangling from your knees, your knees hugged to your chest.

You turn the instrument over and over, admiring its heft, its precision machined parts, its black pebbled casing, its shining lenses.

And then – whammo! – lightning strikes.

You turn the binoculars around and look through them “backwards.” And you cry. The world at your feet comes into focus and it is filled with dazzling sights.

You believe now even less than you did a moment ago.

The binoculars didn’t need you to believe in them. They needed you to look through the right end.