Personal Manifesto 2: Ability Versus Gift

Initially, I thought that this post would have to be longer, but really, I only have one serious point to make. It won't be long or complicated, since I've discovered that the topic I really want to get at is God and vulnerability. This discussion of Ability and Gift is really just a major stepping-stone in that direction.

Here at L'Arche, we read alot of Jean Vanier and his descriptions of the "spirituality of L'Arche."

The problem with digesting this material is two-fold: (A) Jean Vanier speaks to a very specfic, often Roman Catholic audience and there aren't that many assistants here who are themselves Roman Catholic, and (B) Vanier isn't a typical "philosopher" type, so those points that he does make about spirituality come in various writings and collections of thoughts. The arrive only piecemeal in the minds of assistants. For us at L'Arche Kapiti, a few are from the book Community and Growth, but for the most part, we draw on a lecture that Vanier gave in 1991 called "The Poor at the Heart of L'Arche."

I'd say I'm unique here in that the majority of the assistants who currently work under L'Arche Kapiti would tend to self-identify as Secular Humanist, Atheist, Agnostic, or Non-Religious. While these folks are definitely committed to L'Arche just as much as any "religious" person would be, there tends to be a disconnect between the spiritual language used by Jean Vanier and our own experiences as assistants on the ground floor of the organization. Primarily, the problem lies in all this language of "poverty."

L'Arche is living in family with people who have been rejected, regarded as foolish, looked down upon, put away by society.

-"The Poor at the Heart of L'Arche" p.2

The relationship with people who are broken and in anguish reveals to us our own brokenness, our own darkness and our own poverty.

-"The Poor at the Heart of L'Arche" p.18

While I don't think that any L'Arche assistant would disagree with these statements directly, we do tend to question the supposed "poverty" of our core members. I have heard my fellow assistants say, time and again, "These people are not poor, they are very capable in many ways." And I, for one, completely agree.

But I can't deny that Vanier has a very good point. The reason we're here, after all, is to be a kind of alternative vision to what the rest of our society tends to do, which is disregard the humanity of those who have disabilities. We do (and need to) acknowledge this sense of "disability" in order to have a L'Arche in the first place. Once inside, however, the lines of disability get very blurry. Are disabled people disabled or not? Are their assistants disabled or not? The answer to both, on a day-to-day basis seems to be both "yes" and "no." We ad-hoc it to make the community go when we need it to go, but we lack a real sense of clarity with regard to our language around ability and disability. What I'd like to do here is to take those questions and find a "hidden, third way." To reframe them in light of my philosophical influences to shed more light on what, exactly, I think I'm doing here.

The problem with the above questions is precisely that that they revolve around a language of the status quo: the language of Ability. The very paradigm that L'Arche wants to overturn is that of categorizing people based on who is more able than whom. If that's the case, then we have to put on some new spectacles. We can't answer questions about "ability" if that's the very thing we want to disregard.

So, instead, let's take a cue from Jean Luc Marion and put in some language of (you guessed it if you've read the title) Gift. In a social, spiritual, and (for me) religious sense, the economy of Ability is rendered completely irrelevant when we start to look at phenomenon in terms of Gift.

For starters, let me just say that there really aredifferences in ability from person to person. Moreover, the practice of Ethics requires that we acknowledge them. I love my housemate, Julie. The reality is that Julie simply cannot do mathematics. Her brain doesn't work that way and, yes, her overall abilities will probably always be less than those of her assistants. We wouldn’t want to trivialize disability by saying that “we’re all disabled.” That’s an easy road and is also an injustice because it denies the reality of people’s lives and the frustrations that they face. We all face frustrations with ourselves, of course, knowing our limitations. We need to acknowledge these, to accept them, in order to truly live. To tie this in with my last post, it's important to acknowledge that no matter how much I want to be "free" of my being, I never will be. I am not truly free. And, for the record, no, I don't need to be free. Without such limitations, personhood just isn't personhood.

The burden of proof for L'Arche as an alternative community (a branch of the Body of Christ, a piece of the Kingdom of God), however, doesn't rest on the back of Ability. It rests on Gift. And that's because Ability is a shifting sand. If people don't "measure up," then they have to be cast aside, unable to contribute to the whole of society. This, I think, is the brokenness which Vanier describes. Gift, by contrast, is a firm foundation because it acknowledges uniqueness by disregarding the measuring stick. You don't have to "measure up" to have gifts, you just have to be the provocative Self that you already are. Every accepted gift changes the very way in which we do the measuring, making the measuring a far less-important gesture.

I've mentioned the size-scale of Being before, using a language that describes differing "levels of Being." I'd like to use that again as a metaphorical aid here, so I'll be talking about "cells" (individuals, components) and "bodies" (wholes, collectives).

For cells, Ability is important because it determines their survival in a given environment. Without necessary Ability, cells die. I say that Gift is always more important than Ability, but that is only for bodies; the whole; the collective cells; the aggregate. For the individual; the component; Ability is, naturally, the greatest qualifier for happiness and well-being. Yet, it is not Ability that makes a body. Rather, it is Gift that, as Paul so put it, creates specialization (the "many parts" bit). A blood cell looks at a brain cell and figures that it must be really poor because it's so bad at absorbing Oxygen. The brain cell thinks likewise about the blood cell's lack of ion channels. The Amoeba looks at them both and figures they'll make an easy meal, if not for that pesky immune system, but the Amoeba can't help them all to make a whole body and, therefore, misses the point of this fictional conversation.

These differences in Gift from one cell to the next that create specialization also create a need for relationships, since-rather than surviving on their own, the components discover a need to survive together. The discovery of weakness is a goad which prompts a larger level of Being to com into its existence. And here's where Gift can become apparent. Any difference between two components can only be perceived by one as a lack of Ability in the other. A collective body, however (looking back down the chain) can understand how the uniqueness of each contributes to all. L'Arche doesn't need Julie to do math. Julie doesn't need me to teach her. But what L'Arche needs; what the Body of Christ (the Kingdom of God, the Just Society, the Good Neighborhood) needs, is for us to know one another; to be in relationship. We find the gaps, we provoke one another, we contribute to the larger Being.

So, I say: Let's knock off all this talk about differences in ability. Yes, it's good to understand what we're good at, just as it's good to understand what our limits (read: disabilities) are. That's a normal process. But it's not what we came to the party for. If it were, then we'd spend the whole of our existence just replicating, fighting back everyone who seems to hold a different level of ability than ourselves. In other words: we'd all befundamentalists, just wearing differently-colored tee shirts. I don't intend to simply swap one form of Empire for another. I feel that the overall intention of God is to overturn Empire itself and make all things new. (And, yes, I acknowledge that that is my particular, very subjective world-view. I'm just being honest about what that world-view is.)

Having traded "teams" a number of times in all manner of conversations, political, social, cultural, and religious, I don't particularly care about the labels anymore. Every form of Empire is as bad as the next. The real answers are too sticky, complicated, and interwoven to encapsulate in any one ideology or collection of thought. Christians: Yes, secular people look strange to you. No, their existence will not benefit you. Non-religious folks: Yes, religious people look strange to you. No, their existence will not benefit you. The same thing goes for both the disabled and the enhanced. The same thing goes for those of different nationalities, races, sexes, genders, sexual orientations, and so on.

But NO, no one has the right to erect an empire over anyone else because, if you came to this party, then it's the party itself that happens, not you. At the same time, being ourselves, we really can't help but replicate. We're all imperial in some capacity. We're all different. We're all limited. Most important for the life of the party (the body, the society): We're all gifted.

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Before I close this post, I'd like to clarify my thoughts on freedom from the last one. I've said that people don't need to be free in order to be good. That, at some essential level, we're all basically caged anyway. But what I ought to write down is that just because free wills don't exist, that doesn't mean that Freedom itself doesn't exist. It does and it is important.

I think that the phenomenon of Freedom, the desire for us to be "free," comes into play when we are not allowed to respond (not allowed to have responsibility) by circumstances that we also can change. For instance, a man with a large family goes to prison. Within the barred walls, he makes little to nothing for his dependents. He feels trapped because, despite the fact that a great many vulnerabilities occur to him, he cannot respond to them. Robbed of his responsibilities, he feels worthless. He wishes only to be "free" again and, when released, feels a wave of freedom settle into his sense of self.

The thing that I did not intend with my earlier writing was to whitewash and baptize the actions of every charismatic cultist and nationalist despot, simply because they all create collectives from groups of people. I merely intend to highlight some of the deeper existential boundaries of being human.

Up next in this "deeper" series of posts, I'll get into a sketch of God as, not the ultimate cosmic Power, but rather, the ultimate cosmic Responsibility.

Personal Manifesto 1: The Responsible Will

So, here are the beginnings of the things I’m putting together for myself and collecting into a (semi) systematic worldview. I’m going to start here (again) with Dennett as a launching point. Let’s being in earnest and talk about the will.

I’m almost sick to death now of the quest for free will. This is mostly because I’m much more concerned with being ethical than being free. I can credit my incessant need (perhaps addiction) to constantly question morality and uncover Ethics to one particular influence: Emmanuel Levinas. As those of you who read my papers and these blog entries will no doubt know already, Levinas continually astounds me with his cleverness at avoiding a metaphysical projects. Instead of saying that Ethics is a kind of system, he turns his thoughts outward and takes Ethics really seriously in saying that it is founded on things (Others, with a capital ‘O’) that we literally cannot think about. He cuts through all the nonsense and bull crap and beating around the bush that usually goes along with doing philosophy and brings us right to the very edges of our imaginations; to the unknown, the hard places. If “moral” means “confidence” in its French etymology, then this is not a place in which we can have any confidence at all. I continue to be impressed by the courageousness expressed in this thinking.

I say I’m sick of the quest for “free” will because it seems like everyone I meet, layperson or scholar, needs to somehow come up with a justification for it, as if it’s a vital organ that might blink out of existence if we stop believing in it. Perhaps it’s a deep-seated psychological need to be independent or perhaps it’s the leftover memetic traces of the Enlighenment period that gave us “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” but whatever it is, it seems that the desire to be free, above all else, has gotten quite stuck into us, especially in the western world where we’re all considered as individuals. Now, for the purposes of this little manifesto, let me completely cut through all of that and just come out with my position: The free will is an illusion. “Free will” is a contradiction of terms.

Why do I say that? Well, I don’t mean to step on any toes here, I just don’t understand the paradox. Remember Levinas? Well, he was largely the philosophical heir to another guy named Edmund Husserl. Husserl was a minor revolutionary figure because he treated knowledge, not as the result of observations, but as a phenomenon by itself. The question of how knowledge is formed quickly leads one to ask how consciousness is formed. (How do you know that you know something, anyway?) Well, the major conclusion here is that consciousness cannot exist by itself. Go ahead, try it. Try to just be conscious. What this exercise ought to demonstrate is that, in order to be conscious, you need to be conscious of something. Heidegger and Levinas both expand this realization to the level of Being. You can’t just “be,” you have to be about something. Imagine trying to sense without having intention. You’ve got a sense of smell, you’ve got a senseof sound, you’ve got a sense of sight, but what you don’t have is a completely objective “sense” that just hangs out in space, unaffected by particulars. Rather than being unaffected by particulars, your senses have been shapedby particulars.

Let’s define some terms before we go any further. I’m using a definition of the term “free” here that essentially means “unbound.” Freed birds, for example, become untied, freed prisoners become unshackled, etc. Now, “responsibility” here simply means “the ability to respond.” If a friend speaks to me and I turn away so that I can’t listen, then we’d say that such an action isn’t fair. It’s just not responsible, because I’m not responding. What about a definition of will? What makes a will? Well, if consciousness can’t exist by itself and being can’t exist by itself, then certainly it must hold (as an aspect of both Being and consciousness) that will cannot exist by itself either. In other words, just as you have to be conscious of something, so too you cannot simply have will, but must will something. Will must be a desire toward some end. You will goodness. You will love. You will peace. You will toward a better world and a better life and those desires are completely acceptable and understandable.

So here’s the paradox I don’t understand: If the will must be about something, if it must be tied to some goal or striving (intention), then it cannot also be free (unbound) at the same time. Free will is like a free slave: there’s no such thing.

Now, having said that, I can understand why we wouldwant to be free. It seems easy to be free, with nothing to tie us down. Freedom means no worries and no waste. We want to have more choices and more options in answering the questions of our lives. We believe that freer people have more choices and more options to make these choices. But are those with more options also freer? Do democratic voters have more degrees of freedom than their counterparts in totalitarian regimes? On the contrary! Democracies are not freer than Autocracies. An autocratic system need only be responsible to the desires of one, but a democracy needs to be responsible to the desires of all. That’s not more freedom, it’s less freedom. Why? Because it ties this new gestalt being of society down by so many more chains; it must respond to so many more intentions. Instead of being a servant with only one master, as its autocratic peer is, a democratic system is a servant with millions of masters.

Then why do we say that democracy is a good way to go? Why do we want to replace fascism with civic participation? What’s all the fuss about? I, for one, posit that we naturally desire civic participation over mindless, autocratic droning precisely because it makes us more responsible. We want to be responsible, because we want to have intentions. We want a will. Indeed, if we did notintend then we simply wouldn’t be.

(To draw upon my own Christian tradition for a moment: If God is the ultimate collective of the cosmos, then isn’t it better to have a God who “comes to be a servant” as the Gospel of John says? It seems only natural that a God who is ultimately responsible morally would also utter the words, “I have come to serve, not to be served.” This sentiment rings true for me now in so many ways because it deeply reflects the outlook of Jean Vanier and L’Arche. Rather than seeking to win and have victories, we begin down the “descent into littleness.”)

Why do we want to be more responsible if having a will also restricts our freedom? Let’s take a society’s-eye view of the situation. Pretend, for a moment, that you are a total society. “You” have become the collective of desires that make up a whole human social system; you are that servant with either one or millions of masters. We’ll compare the two variations in a second. Now, since you’re alive (people “made” you, you exist), let’s also apply the principles of evolution to you as an entity: You, as a society, want to survive, regardless of the survival of any one individual citizen. You’re like the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The individual people (think of them as “cells”) who constitute you can come and go, but you must carry on somehow as a whole.

If you’re an autocratic society, then you’re going to experience a very hard and probably very short life. If your autocrat goes, so do you. And, as opposed to the democratic society, you’re much more likely to die or become seriously injured. In the event of a coup or invasion, you’re history. Even without a complete death, with regime handovers, you’re going to be experiencing a lot of mood swings and unnecessary pains. What about the democratic society? Well, in that case, you’ve got a much longer life ahead of you. Social problems can be noticed through civic participation and they no longer need to fester until blowing up into a full-on regime turnover or coup. Change can happen more gradually. You’ll feel much more in tune with your desires and needs. And it’s all because you’re simply more responsible. Of course any servant with so many masters must be clever in order to survive. After all, they all want different and often competing things from you. As a democracy, you’ll have to strike deals and compromise constantly, but you’ll be smarter for the efforts; much better adapted for survival than your autocratic cousin.

At least part of the reason why Dennett and others go down the track of making free will and determinism compatible is because they want to explain the phenomenon of human morality: our shaming, praising, and blaming. Because, before answering questions concerning morality of whether or not we should shame, praise, or blame, we’ve got to understand why these things happen in the first place. Dennett figures we can get there by having more freedom. But, in order to achieve and reasonably explain human blaming and shaming, we needn’t come up with a good sense of “free,” we need only achieve a good sense of “responsible.” Indeed, this is the very thing that blaming, rewarding, and shaming work toward. They are ways in which we become able to respond to the Others that surround us (other people, other cultures, other species, our environment, etc.).

I’ve heard the argument too that substituting in responsibility for freedom takes away our human capabilities of agency. But, just as with consciousness, what makes a person into an agent is intention. There is no such thing as a plain, purely objective agent. Again, a person would have to be an agent of something. Consciousness is not by itself, we must be conscious of something. Reponsibility is not by itself, it must be responsible to something. Agency is not by itself, we must be an agent of something.

So, let’s just do away with this desire for freedom. Why worry about increasing our freedom when what we really want is just more responsibility? Dennett’s big claim inFreedom Evolves is that the whole can be freer than its parts. At first, I agreed wholeheartedly, but now I understand that any whole is not necessarily more free. The one thing a whole is, however, is much more responsible. Personally, I can’t understand the experience of a person who lives in poor, rural Uganda. If, however, that person has the right to vote and participate in the same society as I do, then “I” don’t have to be responsible because my society can pick up the slack merely by having a vote tied to that person’s intentions. In being more vulnerable, a gestalt whole can be more responsible; more vulnerable than I could ever be as a single person. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to be personally responsible to that other person, only that I don’t have to be in order to achieve agency.

Presumably, we must be agents of something “larger” than our “selves.” These larger levels of being (biosphere, society, cosmos) make agents of the smaller. What we would not want is to be agents of this or lower levels of being. I would not want to be an agent of another human individual or a hermit crab, for instance. That would be ridiculous and harmful. But it’s perfectly alright if that hermit crab, that other person, and I are all agents of our society. We should not make the easy mistake (as Dennett and Kane, among others) do of conflating the concepts of flexibility and freedom. A simple increase in our flexibility does not necessarily stem from an increase in our freedom. Freedom is not required to increase a being’s flexibility. All that is required is an increase in its responsibility. The free will is an illusion. A free will isn’t because a will isn’t free and freedom doesn’t have a will. Even if that wasn’t that case, free will is not worth wanting since an unbound and invulnerable will cannot give us the responsibility we crave as moral beings.

Personally, I believe that God is the most ultimately responsible kind of being imaginable; the most ultimately vulnerable. I also believe that this sort of ultimate responsibility is what we long for most in all of our human striving. More on this topic to come, however.

My experience in L’Arche confirms and guides me in these conclusions. If I weren’t here while thinking this, I might still have come to the conclusion that a free will is worth wanting. Being here, however, I can see that it is certainly not. Who is free? Certainly not I and not anyone else I have ever met. Our world is a determined world, full of casual connections and correlations. We can observe patterns and create knowledge from them. Those are the “facts” of our lives. We’re not supernaturally special beings, even if we are spiritual ones. We’re made from the same stuff as the stars and planets and the scrub brush and the nematodes and corals. It’s all determined. It’s all bound up in influences, chemical, physical, biological, cultural, etc. Likewise, you and I are determined as well because, as members of creation, we’re bound up right in there with everything else. Your body is determined, your brain is determined, you are determined. Because you exist and because you have intentions, you can’t be free, not truly free, anyway. But why would you want to be when all you really need is to be responsible? You don’t need to be free to participate in the cosmic project of creativity. In fact, if you were free, then that would take you out of the game entirely and I’ve never heard of anyone who likes being lonely.

L’Arche has shown and is showing me that I am bound in so many ways, that I must be responsible; be vulnerable in a myriad of interwoven and complex matrices of existence. You don’t have to look very far to discover all the things that influence you and who you are and how you are. The concept of disability, for instance, is a great bind. In L’Arche, as I’ve said before, people learn to discover their own disabilities. There are things that hold me back, things about my character that I’ll probably never be able to change or compensate for. If it were possible to know and love my friend Julie without her William’s Syndrome, then we would want that, of course. We don’t want people to be disabled, because that would be a kind of abuse to use another person for our own desires. The point however is that there is no way for me to meet Julie without the William’s Syndrome. It’s just a part of who she is. By the same token, I imagine that there are lots of folks who would rather that my cynicism and negativity and selfishness just weren’t there. But, hey, they are there. Whether lodged into me genetically or learned as behaviors, a lot of my disabling character traits are just here to stay. Does that mean I don’t feel loved? Does that mean that I can’t find a place in the world (or in the Body of Christ)? Of course not, because, in addition to our shortcomings of ability, we all have something important to reveal. We all have this amazing feature known as Gift. I’ve explained it somewhat before, using what I know from Jean Luc Marion, but I’ll try to articulate exactly what I mean more in my next post. So, now that we’ve taken care of free will and replaced it with responsible will, part two will be on ability and gift.