The statement is presented neither as revelation, nor as inspired counsel, nor even as administrative church policy. It is a view of sexual ethics from a lofty philosophical perch — before we reengage, as we’ve recognized we must, in the scrimmaging in the Western nations about whether same sex marriage shall be permitted as a sacrament of Community of Christ, and/or whether the authority to hold the priesthood shall be unaffected by engaging in a committed, recognized non-heterosexual sexual relationship in those nations. Think of it as the referee determining how the kick off will be carried out before the teams take their positions, and hoping for divine guidance to be expressed in the coin toss.

If that seems overly cautious for a religious body, keep in mind what just happened at the United Methodist General Conference during the first week in May while the national gay rights movement was instead focused on the losing political contest in North Carolina:

“By a vote of 61 percent to 39 percent, the quadrennial legislative body of the nation’s largest mainline Protestant denomination rejected a proposal to change its position on homosexuality. The measure would have deleted the Book of Discipline’s contention that homosexual practice is ‘incompatible with Christian teaching’, replacing it with a call to ‘refrain from judgment regarding homosexual persons and practices until the Spirit leads us to new insight’.

“The motion to change United Methodist teachings on homosexual behavior was defeated by a bigger margin than a similar proposal at the 2008 General Conference. This year 54 percent of delegates also rejected a compromise that would have expressed Methodist disagreement on issues pertaining to homosexuality.

“…Gay rights activists then took to the convention floor singing ‘What Does the Lord Require of You?’ When the chairman of the morning session warned them they were hurting their cause by disrupting the General Conference, the gay rights demonstrators kept singing. An early lunch was called and there were threats to bar protestors from the proceedings.

“…What happened next was remarkable: proposals to ordain gay clergy and bless same-sex unions were effectively tabled. They were first pushed to the back of the agenda and then not voted on at all”

“… Avoiding further hurt feelings and unnecessary conflict was likely part of the equation. But the proposals weren’t voted on for another reason: they had no chance of passing. It now remains United Methodist policy that marriage is the union of one man and one woman; clergy cannot solemnize same-sex unions; and ordained ministers must be celibate outside of a marriage between a man and a woman or monogamous within marriage. Avowed, practicing gay clergy is prohibited.”

Even more illuminating for Community of Christ considerations is why the Methodists did what they did. As the report further notes:

“United Methodists have charted a different course than other mainline Protestants for a reason: while their church is losing members in the United States like the others, it is growing in Africa. Overwhelmingly orthodox Africans and American evangelicals are increasingly making up a working majority at General Conference. On many issues, the overseas delegates — now approaching 40 percent of the total — are more outspoken than their U.S. evangelical counterparts.”

This trend also places an important check on what CofChrist progressives, particularly in the United States, can hope to achieve in the National Conferences. Indeed, as I’ve written about previously, minimizing schismatic potential from the disagreement between American progressives and American and African conservatives on sexual cultural issues is one of the key motivations for addressing the discussion within National, rather than World Conferences (See also Stephen Marsh here).

And, for progressives within the LDS, where, unlike in the CofChrist, even the American leadership is still very conservative, the lesson is even more sobering. Expansion of LGBT rights may be on the trending side of Western history, but people are less prepared to say than they were even a few months ago (remember all the hopeful democracies peacefully arising from the Arab Spring?) that other nations are moving toward First World views on social issues.

So, what does the Statement actually say? Well, here, for American social progressives, there is actually a lot to like about the tone:

“We need to talk about sexual ethics.

“Human sexuality is a strong force experienced throughout one’s life. Depending on how we manage it, sexuality can bring blessing and wholeness or devastation and ruin. We need guidance for sexual ethics because our understandings and assumptions often are incomplete…

“The need for sexual ethics also come from the confusion, dysfunction, and suffering people experience in matters related to sexuality. Statistics related to sexual promiscuity, marital infidelity, unwanted pregnancies, sexual violence, child molestation, human sex trafficking, and the proliferation of sexually transmitted disease are sobering…

“We also must seriously consider the suffering of people who are sexually dominated, marginalized, and bullied. These often include children, women, and those whose sexuality does not include a heterosexual orientation. Therefore, in addition to individual guidance, a sexual-ethics statement should contribute to the strengthening of community that embodies God’s love and asserts the worth of all persons.

“Creating a statement about sexual ethics for a world-wide church is challenging. …Additionally, people from one culture typically have little understanding of sexual ethics in other cultures.

“…Another challenge is that the Bible offers no single ethic of sexuality, binding across time and cultures. It presents various sexual moralities in their historical contexts.”

“…However, scripture is essential to our consideration of sexual ethics. There are principles — such as love, justice, the worth of persons, covenant, and fidelity — that can be discovered through scripture and responsibly applied to sexual relationships through the Spirit’s guidance.”

Also notable is the adoption of a thoroughly modern “best understanding” of sexuality as a multi-dimensional topic. The Statement identifies seven separate aspects of sexuality:

1) Sex (chromosomal patterns, including arrangements other than female xx and male xy);

2) Gender identity (inner consciousness of sex as male or female, even if the consciousness does not match external form);

3) Gender expression (behavior, clothing);

4) Sexual orientation (primary sensual and emotional attraction);

5) Cultural expectations (how culture molds understanding and expression of sexuality);

6) Sexual behavior; and,

7) Sexual development (stages through which people pass as they sexually mature).

There is no statement affirming anything like the eternal nature of “male and female” in CofChrist theology, as there is in the LDS.  So principles of sexual ethics that are to govern church policies and practices — as well as individual behavior — can draw on insights from any of the seven aspects. Sexuality is “more complicated than many assume”, as one could already infer from Mormon Heretic’s post earlier this week.

And so the Statement’s principles become: 1) the worth and giftedness of all people; 2) protect the most vulnerable; 3) Christ-like love; 4) mutual respect; 5) responsibility; 6) justice; 7) covenant; and, 8 ) faithfulness.

The Statement then concludes with 15 paragraphs of affirmations and additions that elaborate on the principles, and partially bridge the gap between principles and the specific issues that individual cultures will have to address. I do not find any of the statements controversial, although they may strike hard at people who view sexual desire as inherently sinful. (That really is not a logical position for a Mormon theology that regards eternal replication of the heavenly family as a part of its cosmology anyway, so I don’t focus on that in this report as much as the Statement itself does.)

What do you think? The request by the First Presidency for comment is on a public official web site that does not restrict access in any way to CofChrist membership. So, after you comment in this thread, you can also review the full statement and email your own comments on the ethics statement to ethics@CofChrist.org. I can’t promise that you will influence the leadership, but they are a lot more accessible (because of the relative size of the church) than are the top leadership in the LDS.

Community of Christ President Stephen M. Veazey, assisted by his First Presidency counselor Becky L. Savage, delivered this year’s address by webcast from the church’s  Independence Temple on the evening of April 15th.

Like a State of the Union Address before the US Congress, the April 15th address was filled with references to specific plans and programs that drop below the radar of most people not involved  in the daily activities of running things in the actual institution. There are major themes, however, that set the direction of the institution, and — in the context of the church — show where the strategic direction from the First Presidency is going. There were three such strategic themes apparent to me in reading the transcript: 1) Implementation of the five mission objectives launched with much fanfare a year ago; 2) Implementation of a policy of accepting baptized members of other denominations into CofChrist membership without re-baptism; and, 3) Preparation for the national conferences scheduled in various countries in 2012 and 2013 to consider changing policies toward recognizing marital and other sacramental rights for non-heterosexual individuals.

I want to focus on the first of those themes in this post. I’ve already written on the second in some detail here. I’ve expressed my views on the third theme several times — most recently in the comment thread to Stephen Marsh’s post — and will undoubtedly do so again as the national conferences approach. However, the first theme intrigues me because it seems something of a retreat from what the church did last year rather than its mere implementation, and it confirms something about the relative importance of the CofChrist identity to the local members.

When I say “retreat”, I need to emphasize something about the “fanfare” that went into announcing the mission initiatives. The best way I know to do that is to quote from last year’s address to the church:

“What I want to emphasize today is that we now are going to do the mission of Jesus Christ with greater determination, alignment, wholeness, and effectiveness. And, here is how we are going to do it!

“From this point forward, we will focus all ministries, personnel, and resources of the worldwide church on the whole mission of Jesus Christ. We will do this through five mission initiatives.

“These five mission initiatives are not new programs that begin and end at certain times…They are unceasing emphases that ensure Community of Christ is being faithful now and in the future to the full mission of Jesus Christ.”

“…But that is not all! To ensure focus and accountability, we’ll align the entire World Church budget—all income sources and related expenses—with our five mission initiatives starting with the next fiscal year. What does this mean?

“The five mission initiatives now will define everything we do!

“All World Ministries Mission Tithes and every other World Church income source will be applied to the five mission initiatives. Each mission initiative will have a tithing income goal. We will grow mission by growing generosity.

“Contributors will be able to indicate through the offering envelopes, pre-authorized transfers (PAT), or electronic giving which mission initiatives they prefer to support. You can express your preference to support all of the mission initiatives. Or you can indicate which ones you especially feel called to support.”

“…Is your passion evangelism, pursuing peace on Earth, or helping congregations engage in mission? Is it abolishing poverty and ending suffering, or is it helping disciples of all ages deepen their discipleship?”

Now I don’t know how to interpret that as anything but decentralization of budgeting to allow the individual to hear the call of the Spirit without the intervention of the leading quorums in deciding how to balance the resources available to achieve the totality of mission. To be perfectly fair, President Veazey did say then that the world church would keep everyone informed regarding what the leadership felt was needed in each area. But apparently the people didn’t come up with “the right answer” when they heard their own callings, because President Veazey this year said the following:

“Today, I offer some observations as we go into the future:

“First, the five Mission Initiatives work best when they work together! They are not options to choose from. Each Mission Initiative enriches the others. They are like different parts of the Body of Christ. One part cannot say to another, “I don’t need you!”

“…Second, in some nations the initiative, “Invite People to Christ,” (evangelism) seems to be getting less effort. Perhaps a different way of looking at it would be helpful. This initiative is about the daily opportunities we have to invite people into loving community that generously shares the peace of Jesus Christ. It is not about talking them into anything.”

While he did not specify what he meant by “some nations”, the only example he named of the kind of evangelistic effort he sought was in Florida. Indeed, the only nations where the church shows both membership declines and also have the financial resources to significantly impact world church budgets are the established first world nations, primarily in North America.

So North American CofChrist members are not sufficiently hearing the call, in the eyes of the world church, to invite members into participation in the church. We can deduce this because that is the only metric — given that the other four mission initiatives  are getting planned support — by which he can claim to determine whether people are or not accepting Christ.

This is not the first time the people have heard something other than what the leadership wanted them to hear on the subject of growing the church. North American baptisms in the RLDS/CofChrist tradition peaked in the 1950′s, and there have been a series of theological, programmatic, and budgetary reorganizations in the past 60 years that have unsuccessfully sought to reverse that decline.

Consider just the budgetary category. In the 1950′s, the church’s practice was to fund local and world church programs as separately as possible. Congregations and districts (there were few stakes) had separate operating and building funds. Oblation (for care of the needy) and “surplus” (usually post-retirement gifts or bequests in wills) went to the world church when achieved. Tithing, defined as 10% of the increase (income less necessary living expenses, dated from birth) was sent to the world church whenever paid, and it was used to fund a fairly lean HQ staff and to support traveling missionaries who were almost invariably experienced Seventies, not young elders.

In the next generation, as the membership in North America aged and grew richer, and as the church expanded into new nations, a “lean” HQ seemed less and less adequate. Eventually, the church stopped defining a 10% target at all. Instead it adopted a language of “generosity” to govern financial giving. And when this language first appeared, no distinction was made between giving “mission tithes” to the world church, and giving to other organizations that pursued Christian objectives instead. The purpose, not the organization, was what defined tithe-giving, and the purposes acceptable as Christian had been made much more than the saving of souls. We moved, haltingly perhaps, toward being a “peace and justice” church.

But that budgetary openness didn’t last long, probably disappearing because the people found other organizations than the world church to be more effective in pursuing peace and justice. Mission tithes were redefined again exclusively as those contributions given to the organization — but the redefinition still didn’t meet HQ needs, and world church staff had to shrink. Indeed, qualitatively, the HQ staff had to decrease missionary staff and preserve or replace financial staff in order to prevent even more drastic declines in income to the world church.

The next shift in emphasis came in regard to the relative size of giving at the local and world church levels. Historically, CofChrist members tended to give about 2/3 of their contributions to local congregations, and only 1/3 of their contributions to the world church. So, the leadership stressed an “equal giving” meme: we should raise our giving to tithing (without reducing local contributions) until 50% of our giving went to the world church. The people were getting it “wrong” again. There was even the assertion sometimes that by concentrating on local needs, members were ignoring the needs of their foreign brothers and sisters.

Hence the mission initiatives, but still — even while paying attention to the peace and justice missions both domestically and abroad — the North American church does not find sufficient passion toward the one initiative that protects the survival of the institutional church. And so the “bungee cord” has stretched about as far as it can, and members have to be pulled back toward the institution for the sake of the institution even more than for the sake of the individual.

Latter-day Saints have their own parallel to the bungee cord, of course, which can be seen in discussions of the “big tent” Mormonism of people like Joanna Brooks or John Dehlin. Are people still attached to the church, however stretched the attachment, so they will eventually be pulled back, or are they destined to break away and crash? In many cases, it seems like those are the two options, and we easily frame our positions in those terms. But maybe there is a third option.

My wife, who has been listening to the audio version of a book by Caroline Myss called Defying Gravity, was talking about it at dinner recently and repeated one of Caroline’s observations that I found very profound. Tribes are very good at bringing people “below them” up to their level, but perversely, when a soul is ready to grow beyond where the tribe is, the tribal ties act to restrict growth.

Hawkgrrrl made similar points here. People tend to associate with “tribes” of no more than about 150 associates, and tend to strive for positions that leave them slightly above the mean in tribal esteem, where they can both be influential and be influenced. Presumably there is some evolutionary advantage in such group dynamics; perhaps this Lake-Wobegone-effect where “everyone is above average” does drive the entire group “upward”, whatever that might mean to the group. However, if people in the tribe start to spread too far from each other in esteem or in goals — if people start feeling that the tribe has become lost to them — the tribe will (and quite possibly should) split or reorganize.

If I may refer to the picture of the bungee jumper at the top of the post again, it is understandable if the focus of the leadership of a church is about keeping the cord tight enough to return the jumper to the safety of the bridge without anybody crashing below. But what if the member sincerely feels that the Spirit is calling him or her to get into the water and follow the river where the current is going? Then that calls for the faith to cast oneself off of the bridge.

But it equally requires the wisdom of leaders to know exactly how long to make the cord so that the jumper arrives at the river level at a safe speed — and then the faith of the leaders to cut the cord even if it means the loss of their own power and esteem.

Much of the terminology was unfamiliar to me — so I can testify that the secrecy of the rites remains intact — and I was fascinated by the twists the conversation took as comments addressed the literal and/or symbolic aspects of the ceremonies.

I was really hooked when a comment offered a literal plasma cosmology as explanation of the symbolism of the “veil”.  Nevertheless, I’ll save my anecdote about Nobel Laureate  Hannes Alfven theory on how the critical ionization velocity phenomenon in plasma physics drove solar system formation for a more appropriate post.

The Community of Christ tradition also contains the notion of the “veil”, but it is a physical thing whose origin in much more mundane, and it doesn’t symbolize much of anything for us. It isn’t the veil (the noun) that’s important to us, but rather recognizing (the verb) that the veil need not really be there.

Mormon Heretic transcribed an interview of two experts on the Kirtland Temple (the Saints’ first) by John Larsen (JL) of Mormon Expression. In the transcription, BW is Barbara Waldon, who has been Director of the Kirtland Temple Historical Site for the CofChrist, and JH is John Hamer, who is a past president of the John Whitmer Historical Association.  One portion of the transcript described what they veils actually were and how they originally functioned:

BW: “Well if you can imagine sitting in a sanctuary that has boxed in pews where during some of these Sunday worship services you could have anywhere from 500-1000 people meeting in the lower court and the early Latter-day Saint community encouraged people to participate in the worship services.  They believed in services being led by the spirit.  If you had 500 people all in one room wanting to share a prayer or a testimony, you can imagine how long some of these services would be.

They installed veils, or what we would consider curtains, that hung from the lower court ceiling and the plan was to have those same curtains or veils hanging from the upper court ceiling as well.  These heavy canvas curtains–one visitor described them as the sails of a ship that were painted heavenly white on both sides…they could lower those curtains to divide the room into quarters: a set of curtains going right through the center of the room, and then another set of curtains dissecting that in half.  During Wednesday Prayer and Testimony meetings, which Joseph Smith Senior, the Patriarch of the Church would preside over these services, he would send a priesthood member to every corner of the lower court to lead, more or less, their own prayer and testimony meeting.  And that would allow more people to participate in worship.”You also had the same heavy, canvas curtain hanging above the pulpit on both sides of the room.  And these curtains could be lowered through cranks that were located at each level of the pulpit.  So priesthood members could raise and lower the curtains as they wished, just like members out in the pew boxes could.  But these curtains would come down and divide off each level of the pulpit to give privacy to each level of the priesthood.  There are a number of accounts of private meetings taking place in the pulpits, of people kneeling down for prayer.”

JH: “In fact, you would almost think of it as the origin–a sort of utilitarian–you could divide it off for different meetings.  The thing that has survived in a meetinghouse, dividing the gym off from the chapel–whatever those walls that accordion out like that.”

[chuckles]

JL: “I think this is another one of those points of confusion, like the word ‘endowment’.  They talk about the veil in the Kirtland Temple, but it was more of a room divider than it served as the veil in, say, the Salt Lake Temple.”

Barbara notes elsewhere in the transcript that the most significant experience of the veil didn’t involve any leaving of the private spaces thus created when the veils were closed at all.

BW: “I think one of the most well-known, or famous, accounts comes right after the dedication when Oliver Cowdery and Joseph Smith kneel down for a time of private prayer.  As they begin to rise from prayer, they see the Lord standing upon the breastwork of the pulpit before them–a remarkable account that was recorded in Joseph Smith Jr’s journal.  For many of our visitors, it is the sole reason they come to the Kirtland Temple–to see the pulpits where that event took place.

JL: “Yeah, in the Salt Lake Doctrine and Covenants, that’s Section 110 I believe, where they saw Moses, Elias, and Elijah right there on the pulpit.”

Thus, this experience, at least, involved changing a perception about what was on their side of the curtain — the physical veil — and not passing through that curtain to somewhere else.

So, with that in mind, look again at the picture of the deer at the top of the post. How many deer do you see? I see two.

The first, I’ll presume is obvious: it stands in the lower left of the picture next to the evergreen tree.

The second deer is three times the size of the first. It faces left with its antlers extending nearly to the top of the picture. Its legs are formed from what appear to be tree trunks in the other perspective. The evergreen tree is revealed to be merely an evergreen bush as the deer moves through low, and not very thick brush; the little deer merely a garden gnome.

Which perspective is real? One is more familiar, but which is real? They are both equally real, I would argue, because they are equally composed of shaded pixels of information on a flat two-dimensional surface. The recognition of meaning in the pattern that gives us the experience and connects it to other experiences is not a property of the pixels. It happens in the human brain — exactly as the shaded pixels of this text have no intrinsic meaning until and unless something happens that recognizes meaning in the pixels “brain” and links a ream of other experiences to those pixels.

Now, certainly I can imagine (another thing that happens in a brain, and is not intrinsic to the pixels) rotating my camera perspective (or my written language) so that I would not register any awareness of the large deer, while I might still be able to link the more familiar small deer to other mental images. But it would be best to say my perception had changed, not that the large deer had vanished. The “external” pattern of information would still remain and be recoverable by reversing the rotation.

I would suggest that we perceive “familiar” things or, perhaps more accurately, perceive things “familiarly” because it is useful to our survival that we perceive them. As a species, we have only recently become able to perceive radio waves, but radio waves have always been there. Similarly, not perceiving the small deer in the picture might mean your ancestors didn’t eat, and therefore didn’t have any brilliant children like you. Failing to perceive the large deer in the picture had no more evolutionary consequences than failing to perceive radio waves. It still doesn’t; but the pattern of information is still there, just as real as the pattern of information in this text. Evolution is a divine principle and how God works.

A spiritual experience, I would suggest, invokes real perception changes about things that always were there within the capacity of the brain to perceive. It is not the only way to invoke such perception changes. The consequences of such changes may be for good or they may be for ill.  (See the article “Visions for All” from Science News.) Spiritual experiences may produce changes that are primarily intellectual or primarily emotional. They may be tied to visual, auditory, or touch perception systems. And they carry much less stigma in some cultures than they do in the modern West. The veil that matters is in our minds, not in a piece of cloth or canvas.

We simply don’t know where the early, unreliable potential to have such experiences may lead humanity. Any more than the organisms that first developed photo-receptor cells that might tell the presence of a predator or prey knew where “eyes” might lead. But the human brain is capable of experiencing far more about  ”external” reality than we imagine. Ultimate Reality perceives more about us, perhaps, than we perceive about Ultimate Reality, and there are many ways for Ultimate Reality to be perceived.

When I first showed the deer picture above to my wife and daughter, they both saw three deer — not counting the little furry doe by the evergreen. I’m still looking.

When I started to read Haidt’s answer to the interview question above, I was expecting the usual intellectual formulation of “fairness as equality of outcome” vs. “fairness as equality of opportunity”. When he instead suddenly brought up the spiritual/emotional notion of “fairness as karma”, I instinctively responded on a gut level: “That’s right! He gets me!”

I think humans are more rationalizing creatures than rational creatures. Our rational faculties operate in override mode in respect to our instincts, and sometimes rationality is confiscated to reinforce those instincts. Thus, exploring our emotional moral centers may reveal the true man or woman more fully. As I wrote in a post in a blog long ago and far away, there is scientific evidence correlating politically liberal or conservative beliefs with several critical personality axes. That suggests to me that our societal morality may be stronger when we acknowledge we need both perspectives on fairness to see our way forward.

However, I know what I feel fairness should mean, and the notion that good things should happen to good people, and bad things should happen to bad people is a deeply held feeling. The world seems profoundly unfair when the good suffer and the irresponsible prosper.

Mark D. Tooley expressed this notion recently; I’ve added the bolds for emphasis:

“Traditional Christianity envisions a world of balance in which all persons are called to contribute towards the common good with their own God-given talents.  Traditional Christianity sees all persons as moral agents responsible for their own decisions.  And traditional Christianity sees all persons as sinners who often need rewards, punishments and incentives as well as ongoing challenge and accountability.”

Is “traditional” just a subconscious moral translation of “conservative”?

Now, intellectually, I also know that my gut feeling about fairness as karma can’t be the whole story. I know that bad things happen to good people and bad people. I began writing a blog in the first place because I thought modern cosmologies offered some new answers to the dilemma that God as Creator and God as Destroyer are one and the same God. My gravatar shows one galaxy sterilizing stellar systems in another galaxy by the thousands. What could anyone do that could be bad enough to bring down that kind of karma?

So, when I made the connection to the emotional core of conservative fairness, I started trying to translate liberal fairness from “equality of outcomes” into emotional terms as well. What I came up with was this: progressives regard things as fair when everyone gets their “happy endings”. Progressives feel the same sense of profound unfairness as I do, but it is triggered when there is NO happy ending for somebody.

Perhaps this is what is classically meant by “liberal guilt”. Not unrequited love, but unsuccessful love. I didn’t save Snow White, so there wasn’t a happy ending. (Obligatory “The Hunger Games” reference — I couldn’t save my little ally,  and so I will keep my promise to my little sister, no matter what it costs!)

And guilt as a failure of love can be a strong motivator to save others, to show mercy irrespective of cost.

I am old enough to remember the moral agony of America as we divided over the Vietnam War. While we were there, we were horrified at the destruction; when we withdrew, we were not looking back even as the “killing fields” of Cambodia bloomed behind us.  However, one of the dearest friends of our family found himself and his wife taking in a family of refugees from that horror.

The refugee wife had been widowed with her child when the Khmer Rouge killed her husband (a high official in the education ministry of Cambodia) upon seizing the Cambodian capital. One day she lived in safety and comfort, trying to help her country prosper; the next day everything was gone into barbarism.

Our friends became life-long friends with that family, and years later, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, he felt compelled to go into Cambodia to take up the work of educational development in the devastated areas, even sacrificing his personal health to do so. That was the unhappy ending from which he couldn’t turn his eyes away.

The Book of Mormon contains a lengthy discussion (Alma 42 in the LDS version; 21 in the CofChrist version) of the complexities involved in navigating between the twin moral requirements of justice (karma?) and mercy (happy endings?). I don’t want to recapitulate that discussion here due to length, but I do want to observe that the existence of the discussion itself demonstrates that this dilemma has been a central pillar of Mormon theological questioning from at least the early 19th Century. Somehow, an understanding of Christ’s atonement has to plot a course between the two seemingly opposed requirements — without negating either one.

On earth, we have to similarly plot a way that addresses those twin demands in real issues of the day. And that brings me to the example of fairness as happy ending vs. fairness as karma in the context of the debate over Obamacare being heard in the US Supreme Court this past week.

The gut feeling of fairness in health care as happy ending goes something like this:

“Society imposed a requirement that if you come for emergency treatment without insurance or personal means to pay – doctors and hospitals still have to pay to take care of them, because otherwise we will feel terribly guilty. We’ll allow providers to spread the costs of that care over all of us, and we’ll have our happy ending.

However, there will still be people without means to pay and insurance for them is becoming increasingly unaffordable, even if we spread the costs over all of us to the extent that society will voluntarily agree. We will still not have our happy ending, and we will still feel guilty. So we will compel everyone to contribute to the solution of this problem about which we will otherwise feel guilty. That will be fair and that will give everyone a happy ending.”

Notice that this solution is chosen as fairer than either sacrificing more of the advocate’s own resources to achieve the happy ending, or of letting the persons who did not contribute (the “free riders”) bear the consequences of their choices.

By contrast, I saw TV reports last year of the extraordinary financial stress some local governments were under in providing fire protection services. In response, fire departments restricted all services to within the boundaries of their taxable jurisdiction after offering contracts to provide fire protection outside for a fee in advance. Otherwise, they stood by and let homes burn if there was no one inside. They did not provide coverage for “pre-existing fires”. That was harsh, but it was a different solution to the “free rider” problem. It was a “fairness as karma” solution.

Or, as Justice Kennedy, considered the swing vote on the Supreme Court for the Obamacare decision, put it:

“The reason this is concerning, is because it requires the individual to do an affirmative act,” he said at one point. “In the law of torts, our tradition, our law, has been that you don’t have the duty to rescue someone if that person is in danger.”

As much as this harshness alarms those who view fairness as happy endings, conservatives are alarmed by something that Tooley also expressed in the piece I linked above (bolds again added for emphasis):

“But in the Religious Left’s surreal universe, all persons are intrinsically good but victimized by oppressive social systems, for which they are entitled to endless redress by a mammoth, centralized state, controlled of course by the enlightened Left.”

This is indeed anti-karma, but also not a genuine happy ending for anyone but the rulers who are in control.

Once we accept the notion that I can compel you to accept the duty to address problems about which I feel guilty, we simultaneously grant me the power to deny you the opportunity and resources to address problems about which you feel guilty. The “happy ending” I seek for one becomes the “unhappy ending” for someone else. I would help the sick, but deny you the opportunity to help the orphan.  I am touched by the present poverty of African villagers, but you lose the chance to protect the environment of Africa for future generations. You help the refugees; I help the wounded soldiers; or we both protect Americans and leave women in Afghanistan to the generosity of the Taliban. Or we switch roles on particular issues; the permutations are endless.

And there is no end to the potential pain about which we may choose to feel guilty. Some people will be burdened by poverty, physical unattractiveness, cruel parents, incurable diseases, accidents, bad political systems, ad infinitum. And so we will always choose to embrace guilt over some problems and avert our eyes over other horrors for reasons that are not obvious even to ourselves.

Indeed, there seems no reason to limit the resort to compulsion to problems that evoke guilt. Once the mechanism is in place that I may compel others, what limits the acceptable emotional basis for compulsion to becoming something darker than guilt? What about fear, or revenge, or greed, or lust? Who picks up the mechanism we’ve established, and for what end? Perhaps it will be even those who believe in fairness as karma instead of happy endings who pick up the mechanism – and decide to give karma a governmental helping-hand. Ann Coulter quipped on TV last night that she wanted to be appointed Health and Human Services Secretary in a Republican Administration. She said she’d issue so many mandates that even liberals would hate Obamacare.

How many of the nearly 200 nations in today’s world are governed by “good karma for the rulers; bad karma for the opponents of the rulers”? The fairness as karma crowd wonders if that might be the road we are actually being diverted to follow in our pursuit of fairness as happy ending. What do you think?

The Norse reached the North American continent and tried, unsuccessfully, to settle there before the cold returned. They established a base on the northern tip of New Foundland at L’anse aux Meadows and tried to establish trade routes (and, perhaps, other settlements) into and beyond the Gulf of St. Lawrence. When the colony in Greenland failed, there was no platform to mount any expedition to return to America by the northern route.

But the presence of the Norse indicates that the northern route could have been viable at times in the past, particularly if North America had been uninhabited at the time.  (The Norse were strongly resisted by the early “Canadians” who the Norse called Skraelingar.)

In fact,  recently, more and more evidence has been showing up that the northern route across the Atlantic has been open — and used — much farther in the past than anyone thought. By comparison, those peoples who crossed to America from Siberia were young’ns.

As reported last month by the Independent:

“A remarkable series of several dozen European-style stone tools, dating back between 19,000 and 26,000 years, have been discovered at six locations along the US east coast. Three of the sites are on the Delmarva Peninsular in Maryland, discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware. One is in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia. A sixth was discovered by scallop-dredging fishermen on the seabed 60 miles from the Virginian coast on what, in prehistoric times, would have been dry land. The similarity between other later east coast US and European Stone Age stone tool technologies has been noted before. But all the US European-style tools, unearthed before the discovery or dating of the recently found or dated US east coast sites, were from around 15,000 years ago – long after Stone Age Europeans (the Solutrean cultures of France and Iberia) had ceased making such artifacts. Most archaeologists had therefore rejected any possibility of a connection. But the newly-discovered and recently-dated early Maryland and other US east coast Stone Age tools are from between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago – and are therefore contemporary with the virtually identical western European material.”

As a happy Marylander, I was intrigued enough to follow up by reviewing some things I’d seen previously in a NOVA science documentary:

NARRATOR: Clovis and Solutrean spear points not only look alike, they are made the same unusual way. To Stanford and Bradley, this was a powerful clue that prehistoric explorers had come from Europe and brought with them the technology that transformed Stone Age America: the Clovis Spear Point….Stanford and Bradley needed to find some artifact in the Americas to bridge the time gap. They scoured Clovis sites across the continent, places where other archaeologists had been digging for years. Then, from a site called Cactus Hill, in Virginia, a possibility, a point that resembled the Solutrean style, and it dated far earlier than the Clovis.”

The key issue here is how did the Solutreans make the journey during the peak of the last Ice Age. Well,  modern peoples of the North American Arctic have learned to turn their lemon-of-a-climate into lemonade by living off the food bounty that the sea gives them along the edge of the ice pack, and have successfully spread from Alaska to Greenland. The Solutreans could have done the same.

Small boats made of natural materials can easily traverse the sea in hop-and-a-skip voyages between the ice floes that cluster along the edge of the ice sheet, and if the weather turns bad, they can be pulled up onto the ice and used as portable shelters. When the Solutreans run out of room to continue spreading west because they run into a continent, they find themselves — ta dah — on the continental shelf of a Delmarva Peninsula enlarged because of all the ocean water locked up in the continental glaciers.

But if the Solutreans did get to America first, and brought with them the seeds of the technology that would become the dominating hunting weapon of the Clovis point thousands of years later, why did they, rather than the Siberian migrants, not inherit the continent? The DNA of the existing native peoples in America is dominated by four types (denoted A, B, C, and D) that has clear Siberian roots, but does not have similar European sources. Similarly, hunting weapons from Siberia that pre-date Clovis points are made by pressing small flakes of sharpened flint into the sides of spears. (The Clovis point is tied to the end of a spear, making the spear points easy to recover without damage and “reload”.) So the European technology outlived the European gene line, apparently, even though there are isolated pockets of DNA type X in eastern North America:

“… NARRATOR: There was a fifth source of DNA of mysterious origin. They called it X, and unlike A, B, C and D, they couldn’t find it anywhere in Siberia or eastern Asia. But it was similar to an uncommon lineage in European populations today. At first, they thought it must be the result of interracial breeding within the last 500 years, sometime after Columbus.

DOUGLAS WALLACE: We naturally assumed that perhaps there had been European recent mixture with the Ojibwa tribe and that some European women had married into the Ojibwa tribe and contributed their mitochondrial DNAs.

NARRATOR: But that assumption proved wrong. When they looked at the amount of variation in the X lineage, it pointed to an origin long before Columbus, in fact, to at least 15,000 years ago. It appeared to be evidence of Ice Age Europeans in America.

DOUGLAS WALLACE: Well, what it says is that a mitochondrial lineage that is predominantly found in Europe somehow got to the Great Lakes region of the Americas 14,000 to 15,000 years ago.”

What happened to the American Soletreans was truly catastrophic, but it is unclear what triggered the catastrophe. After warming from maximal ice conditions for thousands of years, the climate turned cold — much worse, and much faster than the cold that doomed the Viking colonies.

The onset of this “Younger Dryas” event plunged northern temperatures, as recorded by isotope ratios in the ice on the summit of the Greenland ice cap, by as much as 27 degrees F below today’s temperatures. And the change appears to have occurred in a decade or less. The Delmarva was buried under the debris of dry winds, producing an ancient dust bowl. And the Clovis point cultures throughout much of North America rapidly declined, if not disappeared entirely.

The effects were worst around the North Atlantic — although records of glacial re-advance show that even the Pacific Northwest was affected by the cooling — and so searches for explanations focused on what could have suddenly happened in that region of the world. Initially, changes in the circulation of the North Atlantic waters which might occur as increases in melting glacial ice lowered water salinity were suspected. Too low salinity, and North Atlantic surface waters can not sink as they cool approaching the pole. If they can’t sink, they can’t return to the equator at depth and rewarm. If they can’t rewarm, they can’t re-rise to the surface and return Northward carrying heat through an ancient analogue of the Gulf Stream.

However, the cold deep water takes something on the order of 1000 years to make a complete circuit (those flows are actually ocean-basin wide, unlike the narrow surface currents concentrated at the west side of the basins, and so are much, much slower moving), and so don’t really explain an event with the suddenness of the Younger Dryas.  So the case remained open for another suspect.

And if you want to redistribute atmospheric energy, melt a lot of ice to fool with North Atlantic salinity, and maybe burn the foliage of much of North America as well in a period much less than a decade, there isn’t anything that might fit the bill as well as an extraterrestrial impact above, or even into the ice sheet itself.

University of Oregon archaeologist Douglas Kennett proposed such an explanation, which was also the subject of a NOVA documentary, after geologists discovered an organic-rich layer dated to the Younger Dryas called a “black mat” at a number of Northern locations. As Popular Science noted, Kennett’s theory depended on being able to identify large number of shock-compressed microscopic particles (nanodiamonds) in the carbon layer and in the ice sheets from the time of the Younger Dryas. These nanodiamonds would have been raining out in the debris of any impact, even if the impactor shattered in an airburst and never rreached the ground to leave a crater. And Kennett reported finding them at the appropriate age layer in the Greenland ice.

“The theory soon drew a firestorm of criticism, with a concurrent paper dismissing the nanodiamond results as a false positive. The nanodiamond theory was all but ignored by mid-2011 after many groups of scientists could neither corroborate nor replicate the results. Now comes Isabel Israde-Alcántara et al., writing in the same journal that published the nanodiamond refutation.

“This time, the researchers studied a different location — a lake in central Mexico instead of Greenland — and used a different set of techniques to take their measurements. The team studied a 10-centimeter-thick, carbon-rich layer dating to 12,900 years ago, which contained nanodiamonds, carbon spherules and other material. Israde-Alcántara and colleagues at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicólas de Hidalgo in Mexico and the U.S. Geological Survey report their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”

This does not resolve the issue, but the difference of the environments, as well as the different — and more clearly extraterrestrial — crystalline structure in some of the nanodiamonds makes it more difficult for opponents to propose an alternative explanation as a false positive.

So what does this tell us about the origin of Americans, particularly from the standpoint of historicity in Book of Mormon interpretations? As I’ve argued here, believers in BofM historicity should just learn to take “yes” for an answer regarding the ancient origin of DNA in the Native American populations. Trying to force-fit a chronology for the Jaredite crossing into a Jewish biblical calendar simply borrows biblical problems for the Book of Mormon. Ether leaves gaps in its record in which many thousands of years of history could be fit, with only the most memorable of oral traditions eventually being written down for permanent preservation.

What we are learning is that boats fitted as an Arctic design are important to the peopling of America, and are feasible thousands of years earlier in pre-history than are boats suitable to cross the vast equatorial Pacific by a Polynesian route. As I also argued here, appreciation of the Arctic origins of Native American culture may help us better understand some of the quirks of the Book of Mormon language.

We are learning that peoples can arrive in America, and vanish, leaving nothing detectable of their DNA; yet the cultural advances and technologies they bring or invent once here still transform the civilizations they leave behind.

And we are learning that the universe itself can rise up and smash them down just when things seem to be going swimmingly. I wonder if there isn’t a Book of Solutrea carved on a rock out there somewhere.

With this job went the then princely annual salary of $12,500 per year, a well-funded, high interest-bearing pension plan to which I did not have to contribute a dime, and three weeks a year of paid vacation. I also had access to a restaurant-quality cafeteria that offered reduced prices for three meals a day if I wanted it — although that might have interfered with the use of the swimming pool at my apartment complex. I could participate in a softball league at a lighted field maintained behind the Lab. There was even a subsidized barber shop. It was like still being on campus, but being well paid to be there.

To put it bluntly, I had more money than I knew how to spend usefully, and when you are the grandson of a depression-era coal miner, you grow up learning to save money you can not spend usefully.

However, finding a wife of my own faith did fall under the “useful spending” category. It was the “next thing on my list” of life goals, even though that was about 100 times harder for an RLDS male than for an LDS male. We are, after all, only one one-hundredth of the size of the LDS in the US, and the East Coast isn’t exactly the hub of today’s Restoration.

So, when my mother tried playing matchmaker by asking an old friend from her WW2 days in Washington if he knew of any “good church girls” in the East, I soon found myself writing letters to a young woman I’d met once when we were toddlers, and who had been responsible for my first case of puppy love. Not long afterward, I was getting on an airplane at Washington National Airport to visit her in the Big Apple.

The weekend date went well, and she then escorted me through the subway and bus system to Kennedy for my return flight to Washington. I got on my flight, feeling really good about how our romance was starting and eagerly looking forward to the next time we could get together. I presume she was pleased as well — we have been married for more than 34 years now — but, while I sat back in my airline seat, she walked miles back from JFK (extreme right of map above) into Manhattan and up into the Bronx (north on map above) because she had no money to pay the return subway or bus fares.

For whatever reason, at the time she was unwilling to share that fact with me when I could have done something about it. But I was totally clueless that someone whom I liked and who seemed to come from so similar a background to mine could be viewing the world from a situation I’d never considered. And I don’t think that, afterward, whatever benefits she got from not telling me directly that she couldn’t escort me back to the airport felt as real as the blisters she acquired. Communication could have avoided problems, but we were too fragile in our relationship for that communication to occur.

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Last week on W&T we had threads here and here that explored some of the issues that hinder discussion in this forum. We were particularly drawn to concerns that some commenters stay away because they don’t want to express viewpoints that others don’t want to hear. It’s a pain avoidance mechanism that seems to make sense at the time, but may not avoid getting blisters from other sources.

It seems to me that there is increasingly a temptation to segregate ourselves from media we find unpleasant precisely as we obtain — through the internet, mobile phones, or cable television — so many opportunities to receive media messages that comfort and reassure us in our existing beliefs. But comfort media has some of the same risks as comfort food. We have to be sure there is enough variety in our media diets to maintain our intellectual health.

Indeed, segregating our media may be a sign, or perhaps even a reinforcement, of separating ourselves into different communities. Is that bad? Well, it depends on the degree of separation we maintain, and what we will do in order to maintain that separation.

This week’s New Scientist magazine contains an interview (available electronically only by subscription) with a “moral psychologist”, Jonathan Haidt, who studies the psychological underpinnings of moral decisions, and how they underline the differences between the moral reasoning of conservatives and progressives. Haidt notes:

“Dividing into teams doesn’t necessarily mean denigrating others. Studies of groupishness have generally found that groups increase in-group love far more than they increase out-group hostility. Dividing into groups increases social capital and trust; it’s generally a good thing. But when it crosses the line from ‘we disagree with you’ to ‘you are evil’, then people begin to believe the ends justify the means and all hell breaks loose… Yes. In my moral psychology class where I work with students for 14 weeks, I always find that the students don’t change their politics – they don’t become more centrist – but they stop demonizing others and actually become interested in listening to the other side… So if you just let one team – liberals, conservatives or libertarians – run everything, they’re going to screw up because they don’t have a full tool kit.”

Let me give a specific example of falling into the “ends justify the means” trap by limiting oneself to only a single media community. Over the last few days, a story has been making the rounds of both progressive and conservative media regarding the leaking of internal memos from a think-tank called the Heartland Institute that publishes research from scientists that question global warming, among addressing other environmental issues from a free-market perspective.

Initially, this release was compared to a reverse-Climategate. But, in this case, it quickly became apparent in discussions in the conservative media that there was something very wrong about this bunch of internal memos. Attention was immediately focused on the head of a West Coast environmental institute with a strong advocacy role for green technology development, Peter Gleick. As a result, progressive media were forced to come to Gleick’s defense — only to be undercut almost immediately when Gleick confessed to being the leaker, and to having obtained the memos by pretending to be a Heartland board member with a new e-mail address in order to trick a junior staffer into sending him Board correspondence.

A story from The Guardian is typical of the progressive backpedaling, but is as interesting for what it omits telling its readers. You have to work very hard to notice, deep into the last paragraphs of the story, that one of the positions Gleick held was as an expert on scientific ethics for the American Geophysical Union. His expertise as a “scientist” — which the story calls him instead — was not in global warming, but in water resources, and in particular, the very scientific ethics he confessed to violating.

But more, the story omits mentioning the most important part of the scandal. Almost all of the memos are legitimate, but uninteresting. They are about as much of an embarrassment to Heartland as would be a leak of Council of Twelve minutes that disclosed that the Brethren were discussing how to increase tithing compliance. There is only one memo that is embarrassing, and that memo is a fraud. It contains no author name, Heartland stationary, or mailing list. It was written by someone who already had access to the other emails in the leak, but who made mistakes about purposes of donor grants and the think tank’s self-image that no Heartland insider would make.

In short, it was written by an outsider pretending to be an insider. Since the memo’s metadata identifies it as being uploaded from the Pacific Coast, far from Heartland’s offices in the “heartland”, well after Gleick received his copies of the other memos, and since the memo specifically identifies Gleick (surprisingly) as one of the major voices in the global warming community, it was this fake memo that focused attention on Gleick as the leaker and as the likely author of the fraudulent memo initially.

So, far from being a reverse-Climategate, this is now being called  a “Fakegate”, more akin to the scandal that got Dan Rather fired as the anchor for CBS news when CBS aired fraudulent documentation regarding George Bush’s National Guard service immediately before the Presidential election. As Robert Tracinski noted in a column entitled “Fake But Accurate Science” a number of major figures in the environmental movement have come to view the environmental cause as important enough to justify lying about. Ironically, this is exactly the ethics-be-damned attitude that the original Climategate scandal seemed to highlight, raising suspicions of the “if-they-will-lie-about-this-what-else-will-they-lie-about” variety.To quote Tracinski:

“Anthony Watts, over at the skeptical Watts Up With That? blog, has been calling this ‘noble cause corruption.’ It’s a term that originated in law-enforcement to describe a dirty cop who plants evidence on a suspect because he ‘really knows’ that the guy is guilty, so he’s doing the world a favor by making sure he gets locked up. It’s the same rationalization: it’s OK to lie, because you’re acting in a ‘noble cause.’ The corruption, of course, is: how do you really know the suspect is guilty, if you have to fake the evidence against him? How do you know your cause is noble, if you keep having to lie to defend it?”

Perhaps in the context of Mormon discussion, we might consider the phrase, “Not all truth is useful.” But, avoiding the effort to expose ourselves to un-useful truths from someone else’s viewpoint may, in the final analysis, be the most un-useful behavior of all.

However, the guilty part comes because most episodes also pose the question as to whether some of the people the Troopers will have to meet are actually more foolish than the animals.

In one incident, a man took his 15-year-old daughter with him to a party, driving his truck up a side road onto a foothill and parking it there among other party-goers’ cars with no room to turn around. All of the adults at the party proceeded to consume far too much alcohol to legally drive, and no one paid attention when the 15-year-old decided to join the drinking, too.

So now it’s late at night. The sun is going down — this is Alaska in summer after all — and the father realizes he and his daughter have to go home. Therefore, the intoxicated father decides that this will be the perfect time to teach his almost-as-intoxicated daughter how to drive the truck. Of course, since there is no space on the road to turn around, the father instructs the daughter to back the car down the hill by looking in the rear view mirror to see where she’s going.

You can already imagine that this adventure was not going to end well. Fortunately, the truck went off the road and into a ditch so quickly that it had no time to work up any significant speed, and no one was injured. However, the attempts of the father to then convince the arriving Troopers that alcohol had absolutely nothing to do with his truck being in the ditch were comical.

Future space exploration will also contain a similar steering-behind-you problem. Star Trek imagined a technology called “inertial dampening” that allowed starships to accelerate between “rest” and warp speeds and back almost instantly without smearing everyone aboard into a biofilm along the bulkheads. Physicists have no way to imagine inertial dampening, but they actually have conceived of technologies that can get an unmanned probe to a nearby solar system (a mere six light years away) in a human lifetime. Figuring out the details is mere engineering.

Project Daedalus is a design for such an interstellar probe originally created by the British Interplanetary Society in the 1970′s. A 54,000 ton, 620-foot long, two stage starship (sketch shown in figure) would be constructed in Jupiter orbit and then launched toward Barnard’s Star with a fusion reactor engine. To acquire enough helium-3 for your fuel, you’d first have to build a fleet of balloon-suspended robotic mining factories to extract the isotope from Jupiter’s upper atmosphere for twenty years, but, like I said, mere engineering details.

Operating continuously for two years,  the reactor would boost Daedalus to 12% of light speed –or about 22,000 miles per second — before shutting off for a 46 year cruise. About half way through, Daedalus would deploy telescopes to start surveying the Barnard System in order to figure out where any interesting planets there might be when Daedalus arrived decades later. Still at 12% of light speed upon arrival, Daedalus would fly through the system throwing out subprobes for closer planetary flybys, radio its and their data back to earth, and continue onward into the great dark.

The mission was planned as a flyby because stopping in the system creates a whole new set of complications. To start, the ship has to be much more than twice as large, because it takes fuel to slow the ship down just as it takes fuel to accelerate it to 12% of light speed in the first place. In fact, the ship is mostly fuel, and it consumes a lot of extra fuel to first speed up the fuel you’ll need for slowing down upon arrival. Furthermore, you can’t, as in the flyby mission plan, store most of the fuel in a first stage fuel tank which you dump on route and arrive at Barnard’s Star with a mere 450 ton payload from the tens of thousands of tons you launched from earth orbit. You’ve got to carry all the braking fuel with you to the end. It takes much longer to get all of that extra mass up to cruising speed, so the whole trip takes much longer than 48 years.

So, depending on how you’ve optimized the specs and what your telescopes have told you about the star system, years before arrival, the ship rotates so it’s pointing back toward earth and refires its engines for those years to slow to orbital speeds. And that brings me back to the steering through the rear view mirror problem again. How accurately can you know when to fire up the engines? Remember,  you’re limited to on-board instrumentation and computation because earth is too far away to improve the accuracy of your work, even if earth’s ability to measure interstellar distances has gotten much better in the decades since you left. And you’ve got to start slowing down while you are significant fractions of a light year away. When you’re going 22,000 miles per second, inaccuracies in distance measurements to your targets matter. Be off by 11 seconds in firing your “retros”, and you come to a stop no closer to your destination than the earth is from the moon.

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The point of these little parables is this: it is really hard to direct where you’re going when you have to make decisions by looking backward and can not know exactly where you are in respect to where you’re trying to go. Yet, I now have  noticed that the assumption that the government can successfully manage modern economies containing huge international flows of demand, finance, labor, technology, and consumption contains the same steering-by-the-rear-view-mirror fallacy.

President Obama acknowledged the fallacy — perhaps without quite realizing it — earlier this week when he responded to an interview question about why he had failed to cut the annual Federal deficit in half as he’d promised in 2009:

“Everybody who is out there back in 2009, if you look back what their estimates were in terms of how many jobs had been lost, how bad the economy had contracted when I took office, everybody underestimated it. People thought that the economy contracted 3%. It turns it retracted close to 9%. We lost 8 million jobs just in a year’s span, about half a year before I took office and half a year after I took office,” Obama said. “So, the die had been cast, but a lot of us didn’t understand at that point how bad it was going to get.”

There’s some truth in that, but it proves the larger point I’m trying to make: it took more than a year after the fact before the government could gather the information to notice that a recession was really a Great Recession. The Obama Administration then spent that year focused on expanding health care entitlements and “investing” in next-generation green energy projects — which we now see are becoming an ever larger economic albatross — because it was falsely convinced by its own outdated data that a strong economic recovery was quickly guaranteed.

Similarly, two years earlier, before the housing bubble popped, the Bush Administration, the major banks, the Federal Reserve System, and the Democratic congress were all being fed equally  out-of-date information from the bureaucracy that led them to believe there were no major risks to the system, so rear-viewing the economy is a bipartisan risk.

And we are still doing exactly that!

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes more than most people ever want to know about employment statistics through the menus here. I’ve been spending a lot of time wandering through the information since last fall when the reported unemployment rate began to fall, but I noticed that employment was rising only among males.  The number of employed adult women was continuing to decline.

In fact, the number of seasonally adjusted employed adult women declined compared to the same month in the previous year (when “seasonal” factors should be similar) in 10 of the 12 months of 2011. By comparison, the number of seasonally adjusted employed adult men rose by over 500,000 per month compared to the previous year in every month of 2011. So, either there was a sudden gender-related new trend in labor participation over the last year, or the data samples were missing something important.

Turns out it was the latter. In the January 2012 data, when the BLS updated (as it does annually) population estimates — as is necessary to project employer sampling results over the entire economy — the number of men employed was only 90,000 more than in December. However, the number of women employed shot up by 700,000. And, due to the same correction, the number of adult women officially counted as “not in the seasonally adjusted labor force” went up by 780,000 as well (there was negligible change in the not-in-labor-force number for adult men between the two months).

Now, these 1.5 million women didn’t suddenly materialize on New Year’s Eve. They’ve clearly been here throughout 2011, but policy makers are only now finding out about them as 2010 Census data is better analyzed. The Census Bureau, according to oral reports I’ve heard, suggests these women are mostly over 55, meaning that they are approaching the age when they will be drawing on entitlements for their care. They show up most importantly now in producing a lowered labor force participation rate -– or, in other words, in the number of people we assume will be paying taxes and producing economic output to support future entitlements for all you young whipper-snappers. And a lower labor force participation rate means that the official unemployment rate (which is number unemployed divided by the sum of the number employed and the number unemployed) shrinks, even as the future debt problem gets amplified.

So just as the bureaucracy underestimated how bad job loss was getting because their data were outmoded in 2009, they are now overestimating how rapidly jobs are improving because things that actually happened a year ago are being counted as if they are happening today. This cannot simply be extrapolated to continue as if this was merely a delayed, but routine recovery from something that was not a Great Recession. You can’t just “party on, Dude!’

The BLS has to use seasonal adjustments in the first place because there are normally huge month-to-month swings in employment (for reasons, like weather and holidays) that have nothing to do with the underlying health of the economy. You add jobs for some months, and reduce them for others so that over the entire year a better picture of longer term trends emerges. Then you calibrate your formula for the next year based on later, more complete data from other benefit-related government sources on total employment.

As John Crudele noted:

“There really weren’t 243,000 new jobs created during the first month of the year. But there were 2.68 million [unadjusted] jobs lost…The positive figure was derived solely from favorable seasonal adjustments. Or, as Calculus99 wrote on CNBC.com: ‘Perhaps the reason why the consumers are feeling gloomy is because they don’t see the jobs that the statisticians tell everyone are being created.’ ”

“In a normal year, the economy picks up statistically in the spring and then swoons in the summer. This year — because the … weather this winter has been warmer than usual — there might actually be a dip in economic activity this spring.”

“…The Labor Department [also] removed a huge block of 367,000 jobs it thinks, but can’t prove, disappeared in January as companies quietly went out of business. But the assumption about the seasons outweighed the assumption about invisible birth/death jobs.”

Now, I am not suggesting in any way that these adjustments are being made to “cook the books”. They are the best our measurement systems are capable of doing with the time and budget constraints of current sampling technology, and in most stages of a business cycle, when large numbers of jobs are being gained or lost, they probably work pretty well. When you’re at the peak or trough of a cycle, when job growth is stagnating, isn’t one of those times! The “corrections” are several times as large as the jobs signal we’re trying to measure, and so errors in the corrections can be large enough to mislead policy-makers. Realize that due to sampling uncertainty alone, monthly job estimates come with an uncertainly of + 100,000 jobs before you include any uncertainties from things like seasonal adjustments and the business birth-death model. Yet the stock market and political commentary go manic-depressive based on whether or not the official jobs number is 50,000 more or less “than expected”. No one actually knows enough to “cook the books” even if they wanted to do so.

I note that we are continuing to wait (for short-term stimulative expediency) to do a “full-burn” on our retro rockets in regard to government spending. I expect we’re going to be a bit more than 11 seconds late when we finally discover that the system we’re heading toward looks entirely too much like Greece. Or, applying to the economic recovery the words of the old Meatloaf song, “Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are!”

In elementary school in the 1950′s, we used to be given as “enrichment” a little news magazine called the Weekly Reader tailored toward stories on current events that would appeal to children. The only one of its stories I still remember concerned the son and daughter of England’s Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and Princess Anne — both of whom were nearly my age.

The article showed me that Charles played with toys just like me. But he was going to grow up to be King of England (though he’s still waiting). When I messed up, my mother would make sure I knew about it. When he messed up, his mother’s position would ensure that eventually the whole world knew about it.

Born aristocrats just can not do certain things, at least not publicly. The future job twists the boy into the form expected. In Charles’ case, as the Academy Award-winning The King’s Speech chronicles, the Windsor family dynamic earlier had twisted his own grandfather (and certainly shaped his mother Elizabeth) in ways that required almost heroic self-control simply to function under the job’s expectations.

So, now we come to Mitt Romney.  How did knowing he’s supposed to grow up being part of a religious aristocracy affect his ability to connect with everyday people? And make no mistake about it. Mitt Romney was born into a religious aristocracy. He has always known — even as a young boy — that anything less than stellar performance according to the standards that are applied to High Priests would be letting down his family and his priesthood responsibilities. How high do you have to climb in the church to avoid being seen as a failure? Bishop? Stake President?

And I think this was key; he knew he was a future “churchman” even before he knew he was a future politician. I suspect he testified that he was sure that Jesus was the Son of God, that the church was true, and that the priesthood was of God at about the age of accountability — and that would have been several years before his father George entered Michigan politics. George would have been just trying to turn around –interesting, that — American Motors.

And for those of you too young to know how hard that turn-around was, they used to make pop songs that joked about the “little Nash Rambler” having to share the roads with the big, high power GM cars. No wonder they elected George Romney governor of Michigan.

Of course, Catholicism has nothing comparable to this family molding process.  If you are a Catholic boy, your uncle might be a priest, but chances are that your father isn’t! So, having you become a priest is probably only a secret dream by your mother, if that, and not an expectation that’s been drilled into you as a measure of your life’s success.

So this is another thing that Americans may not understand about Mormon men, and that mainstream media commentators may mistake for Romney’s lack of “fire in the belly”, or his awkwardness as a politician. A Mormon man born in the church is being raised as a “preacher’s kid” in a denomination that doesn’t go in much for fire and brimstone sermons.

Billy Graham has been speaking at revivals for so long that most adults in America would probably recognize his speech patterns and mannerisms as the archetype of an Evangelical minister. He has been accepted as a legitimate adviser to Presidents of both parties for decades. Franklin Graham, his son and organizational successor, has been subjected to criticism over the last few years, on the other hand, when he’s made statements that did not match the expectation of the archetype. His statements are too overtly theological — usually stressing the necessity of accepting Christ as a personal savior to receive salvation — and insufficiently pastoral and inclusive to pass muster in the American public arena, despite any actual charitable works Graham has performed.

The American religious scene is too diverse to be fully covered with any reasonable number of examples, but my point is this: few American denominations mass produce their future religious leaders by drilling that expectation into them from the nursery.

Mormon boys who are raised with the expectation of eventual important callings to High Priest, on the other hand, are going to have mannerisms that will be strange to most Americans, even when observers don’t know enough about the religion to associate the mannerism with Mormonism.

A Mormon High Priest can care deeply about people, but a Mormon High Priest is not a pastor, and gets into trouble when he tries to sound like one. He is supposed to meet pastoral care needs through good management of established programs, like a technocrat. Even behind-the-scenes actions will follow administrative channels and protocols. A Mormon High Priest may be fully aware of theological and ethical issues, but will never use the language of a theologian, and so will not be accepted as one. And he must always be detached enough to stand ready as a “judge in Israel”, because judgement is part of the job description, too. How does that not come off as awkward and out of touch with normal people?

Discuss: how do you think the Mormon concept of priesthood for all worthy males affects the style of Mormon men who run for national office?

Following both World War I and World War II, the coalition of winning nations attempted to reorganize the world under new laws. Borders of empires were redrawn, with new nations called into being for the convenience of the moment, not always paying much attention to the historical identities of the people living there, or to the economic viability of their futures. My own family’s links to military service (to the best of my knowledge) began at that time with a paternal grandfather who marched around Russia as part of an allied expeditionary force trying to keep the White Russians from being overwhelmed by the Red Russians after the fall of the Czar.

In many ways, this was what always happens after a decisive war; the winners always make the new rules and claim some “divine right” to do so. However, this was the first century in which the battlefields really ranged over the whole planet. Alexander the Great didn’t really conquer the whole world — the Chinese and Mesoamerican civilizations would have disagreed, for example. And, while the Napoleonic Wars did include  naval combat in every significant military theatre, the populations of the major combatants never permitted the massive land engagements seen in Europe to occur in many other parts of the globe.

So the 20th Century was the first time that a world-wide “monopoly of force” was possible. And in earthly civilization, it is monopoly of force that backs, defines, and makes possible the rule of law. (This is not heaven, after all.)

Consider civilian law. Would laws be obeyed by all if police forces were abolished? Are laws obeyed by all if people believe that police FORCE will not be brought to bear effectively to stop disobedience?

How that monopoly of force is subdivided and controlled differs from community to community, of course. Wheat and Tares threads, such as this one on war crimes, contain their share of political debates about how that control should be exercised, but that there is a connection of monopoly of force to civilian law seems pretty self-evident.

Therefore, when the control of any monopoly of force is itself violently contested, either within a “community” — as in the case of a civil war or rebellion — or between communities having their own separate identities, histories, and power structures, we enter a situation that fits uncomfortably with notions of civilian law.

Things do not automatically descend into total chaos; there is still the possibility of a power structure, even in hell. And so, “laws of war” can exist even during conflict. They can even be codified by the winners of past conflicts, even if everyone knows that those laws will be retroactively redefined by the winners of the current conflict.

Such codification can actually serve to deter violations, if only because the leadership of each competing power structure understands that they could end up on the losing side of the contest. And such deterrence can serve an important moral value in opposing the descent into chaos. However, such deterrence has its limitations, precisely because the winners can (and do) often grant themselves absolution. You might lose, but you might win, too.

So the strategic and tactical particularities of a given conflict tend to produce unpredictable changes in the laws of war that get ratified or rejected afterward by the winning community according to its own values, needs, and interests. The ending of the World Wars thus led many to hope that the existence of a single winning community would be powerful enough to extend the sphere of “civilian” law into universally agreed “laws of war”. First the League of Nations, and then the United Nations, was embodied to substitute a supranational authority that could act to impose an effective, global monopoly of force. The United Nations, in particular, made its most powerful institution the Security Council, enshrining the idea of “collective security” as an ideal superior to national self-defense (though it could only be so enshrined by allowing porous self- and allied-defense exceptions to continue to exist in international law).

But these global monopolies of force collapsed rather quickly. The League of Nations was certainly a joke after Italy (one of the key members of the winning coalition in WWI) invaded and conquered Ethiopia without the League intervening to stop it. National interests of France and England in (futilely) trying to keep Italy from siding with Germany in the future made the supposed police department impotent to respond.

As a vehicle for collective security, the United Nations was able to respond to aggression only where the national interests of the Western and Communist blocks coincided, and that was largely over by the time of the Korean War (a war that taught all permanent members of the Security Council to not boycott sessions of the Council, thereby missing the opportunity to cast a veto). Nations have largely realized that they can ignore or reinterpret entire strings of Security Council resolutions as they wish; enforcement power ultimately rests with the national military and economic powers just as if we were fighting plain old national wars.

What has certainly changed, however, is the amount of lip service nations pay to the codification of the laws of war, even if the spirit of that code is completely ignored. Indeed, it is at least arguable that the world has been in near-continuous states of war since shortly after the end of WWII, with only the location and “temperature” (e.g., the “Cold War”) shifting. The Cold War was certainly “hot” on multiple continents at multiple times, but large portions of humanity have gotten very good at convincing ourselves that we are personally living at peace, even as we avert our gaze from the horrors that are happening “somewhere else”. Perhaps that is a manifestation of the psychological defense mechanisms necessary in hell.

In addition, national governments (and wanna-be governments, too, but that’s a whole topic in itself) have increased reliance on strategies to enhance their ability to fight while maintaining public satisfaction among their supporters that their countries are still behaving with long-suffering restraint. This often requires not only that the governments exploit loopholes in international law, but that they seek loopholes within their own national laws (presuming that the governments are not dictatorial in the first place) in order to act.

Because January 23 is the 10 year anniversary of the kidnapping and subsequent slaughter of reporter Daniel Pearl, it is perhaps useful to focus this post on one such tendency: to tie an enemy’s contribution to war-making  as tightly as necessary to justify striking it directly (as opposed to merely as collateral damage), and to simultaneously authorize methods of attack that horrify other targets to the maximum possible extent.

As Asra Nomani, a Muslim woman who was also a personal friend of the Pearl family wrote in the Daily Beast:

“Danny…slipped into a car outside the Village Restaurant in Karachi, setting off for an interview where he thought he was going to meet the facilitator for “shoe bomber” Richard Reid. In the days that followed, Danny was bound, pistol-whipped, and, ultimately, slaughtered with a butcher’s knife. He tried to escape once, climbing a boundary wall, his cries of “help” alerting sleeping guards, who then beat him up. Danny was not only beheaded, but the alleged murderer, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, triumphantly held Danny’s head by his hair for the propaganda video. An autopsy report from Pakistani doctors later said that Danny’s murderers had cut his body into 10 pieces; the pieces were buried in one spot in the compound where Danny was held — stuffed into three blue shopping bags and tossed into a hole.

“…The dismembered body found in 10 (Ten) pieces is buried in a sandy land but damp soil, in an area 4x2x5 feet (length x width x depth). The cut/amputated parts found overlapping each other.” In one bag: ‘A portion of track suit that includes left sleeve & front portion with a zip, made up of green, black & dark pink cloth pieces with white internal lining is present on the left upper limb.’ His right foot was attached to his leg with a light brown sock still on it. ‘Nothing could be opined about the oozing of blood from the nose mouth and ears,’ the report said. It turns my stomach to write these words, but this is “desecration.”

“…To suggest we violated cultural norms in a way that the people of the region don’t do is to give the people of the region a pass. The legacy of the degradation of bodies in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region is historical. When the Taliban took seige of Kabul in 1996, they dragged a former Afghan leader, Dr. Mohammad Najibullah, from a United Nations compound, cut off his penis while he was still alive, stuffed it into his mouth, and hung him from a lamp post to send a message to the community about the new sheriffs in town.

“…A Human Rights Watch report on a massacre in Afghanistan, Blood-Stained Hands: Past Atrocities in Kabul and Afghanistan’s Legacy of Impunity, chronicles the horror of how the dead have been treated in war in Afghanistan, starting with a man, identified as Faizal Ahmed, who had one of his arms and one of his legs cut off, in addition to his penis, which was put in his mouth.

“Says the report, ‘The first person we found was Faizal Ahmed, an old man. He was decapitated. One of his arms was cut off and one of his legs. And his penis was cut off, and his penis was put in his mouth. Then we collected three other corpses, near Balki’s shrine, and four others from the street between the Academy of Social Science and the police academy … We found one seven-year-old boy, he was decapitated. His head was nearby, it had been cut off, from behind …’ “

So reporters, children, humanitarian aid workers, and diplomatic personnel from neutral nations can be targeted and terrorized because their presence contributes to stability of the enemy regime, whether or not those targets directly enhance combatant capabilities? Do we now embrace military assault, economic assault, and psychological assault as all valid forms of warfare, subject only to the deterrence imposed by the calculus of winning and losing? If so, what are the steps we need to take as individuals with moral, as well as physical concerns?

In her piece, Nomani includes a moral judgement, and a recognition:

“…As a society, we shouldn’t seek moral equivalency, because we are then doomed to live according to the lowest standards of humanity. But we also don’t live in a moral vacuum. We don’t live in a utopia. We’re in a war.”

So, what, in practice are today’s laws of hell? What characteristics describe how they are evolving, and are they merely returning toward ancient barbarism while covered by a fig leaf?

I previously wrote about Crossan’s central concept in The Historical Jesus. That concept is of a “brokerless kingdom”, with emphasis on the “brokerless” part.  Crossan devotes a whole chapter of some 25 pages to explaining how central the relationship between patron and slave was in early Rome.

Crossan points out that this relationship is not always obviously exploitative. Indeed, the patronage relationship could sometimes be almost like that of a feudal lord to his knights. It became a way for both parties to rise in society vis a vis all other parties not linked to the patron.

In rarer cases, the patronage was between social equals (The Historical Jesus, page 61).

“An example of a horizontal relationship is the case of Cicero and Manius Acilius Glabrio… They are social equals, so that the patron-client relationship is not one of permanent hierarchical inequality but rather of delicate, reciprocal, and alternating indebtedness. It is more precisely and politely termed… friendship, but the term must be understood in their sense and not necessarily in ours.  It began, probably in the fifties B.C.E. with Cicero defending Acilius in two capital cases…

“Cicero would not at the time have submitted a bill to Acilius for his legal and oratorical representation. To have done so would have concluded and closed their mutual indebtedness and thereby violated the ethics of amicitia, or friendship, as such alternating patronage and clientage was called…

“The ‘bill’ would be paid in installments, as it were, and would be ‘paid’ as favors done to friends of Cicero rather than directly to Cicero himself. The patronal web enlarges… as Cicero becomes a broker between the now powerful [proconsul of Sicily] Acilius and his own clients.”

In a very real sense, then, patronage is merely a different (from the “corporation”) form of dog-eat-dog competition. It arose historically in Rome from raw military rather than purely economic conquest, and after it did, it persisted with the velvet glove shown to those inside a particular patronage web. However, the iron fist was always obvious to those outside the web. Rome was primarily different in scale and efficiency rather than in nature from all of the other agrarian societies that arose around the Mediterranean Sea. Rome did begin its rise to power, after all, with the Rape of the Sabine Women. And women eligible for marriage were among the scarcest resources of all in the Mediterranean region (which motivates a lot of Old Testament stories, as well).   

Clossan quotes anthropologist David Gilmore in regard to modern times:

“Mediterranean societies are all undercapitalized agrarian civilizations. They are characterized by sharp social stratification and by both a relative and absolute scarcity of natural resources. There is little social mobility. Power is highly concentrated in a few hands, and the bureaucratic functions of the state are poorly developed. These conditions are of course ideal for the development of patron-client ties and a dependency ideology…patronage relations provide a consistent ideological support for social inequality and dependency throughout the Mediterranean area.”

Crossan then concludes (page 68-69):

“Whether, then, in the ancient or modern world, and whether between individuals or nations, the patron and client relationship is one of exploitation at best and repression at worst.”

It is against this framework, therefore, that Crossan paints the original teachings of the Jesus of history as being specifically directed against the exploitative and repressive patronage ideology shared by both the Roman and Jewish elites and taken for granted even by his own disciples.

Although reported only by Mark, and therefore not central to Crossan’s textual analysis of the development of the early church (which requires multiple ancient sources to verify the text), the events regarding the initiation of Jesus’ ministry in Mark 1: 16–38, and particularly Mark 1:35–38, are illustrative of Crossan’s position:

“Finally, the whole city [Capernaum] and all its sick are gathered together at Peter’s door once the Sabbath has ended. Any Mediterranean person would recognize what should happen or is already happening. Peter’s house is becoming a brokerage place for Jesus’ healing, and Peter will broker between Jesus and those seeking help. What happens?”

What happens is that Jesus immediately quashes that process. He leaves during the night without telling his disciples, forcing the disciples to pursue him. When they ask him to come back because everyone is waiting to be healed, he tells them he must go and preach, too, in the next village, because that is why he left Capernaum. On page 347, Crossan notes:

“Peter, if Mark had granted him a reply, would have said that it makes much more sense to stay right here at Capernaum, let the word go forth along the peasant grapevine, and await the crowds that would come to his door… It was, after all, what John the Baptist had done…That entire day is a Markian creation opposing Jesus to Peter and showing their, from Mark’s point of view, incompatible visions of mission…The egalitarian sharing of spiritual and material gifts, of miracle and table, must be atopic; else it will inevitably become another hierarchical operation.”

Jesus seemingly had no intention of replacing one patronage web with another. But that vision gradually was eaten away among his followers by the culture of patronage that surrounded them.

Crossan (beginning on page 68 of The Historical Jesus) follows G. E. M. de Ste. Croix in showing how the early ecclesiastical history of Catholicism traces the evolution of political Rome with merely a time lag in something as fundamental as the selection of leaders.

“During the Republic, the word meant the vote of free people, although, of course, votes might often be bought or co-opted. But by the end of the common era’s second century, suffragium came to mean ‘influence, interest, patronage, by a powerful man’…Such patronage was ideally based on the moral obligation of reciprocity, but, where and as that ethos disintegrated, patronal influence could be bought and paid for in cash. Finally…’not later than the end of the fifth century’ the word suffragium came ‘to mean not only the influence which the great man exercises but also the actual sum of money or other bribe given him…”

As to the religious parallel:

“‘St. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage …prior to his martyrdom in 258, several times uses the expression suffragium plebis…but…he is not thinking of any popular vote: it is the comprovincial bishops whose judicium is to decide the choice, suffragium can only be expressed through acclamations. …Cyprian appears to be the earliest surviving writer to advocate this method of electing bishops, which he represents as the only proper one’. Such popular acclamatory concurrence was considered essential, at least theoretically, into the fourth and fifth centuries, and popular acclamation alone sufficed to elect very special bishops…even in the second half of the fourth century. But by the middle of the sixth century, the participation of the laity in ecclesiastical elections was a thing of the past.’

“‘By the later fourth century the term patrocinium has begun to be applied to the activity of the apostles and martyrs on behalf of the faithful. … The expression suffragium then finds its way into everyday religious terminology in the sense of intercession.’ Just as the terrestrial patron is asked to use his influence with the emperor, so the celestial patron, the saint, is asked to use his influence with the Almighty.”

“Finally, there is the third usage, suffragium-as-bribe. From the fifth century onwards we begin to hear frequently of simony, the sale or purchase of ecclesiastical preferment or spiritual gifts, an offence with which the Church seems not to have been seriously troubled under the pagan empire, but now becomes rife. It need not surprise us to find the word suffragium applied to the corrupt practices by which bishoprics were so often procured.’”

So, do you think Crossan makes a good case? Should a prophetic church be concerned about whether the political culture in which it lives is following the patronage path of Rome in contrast to the “unbrokered” model of Jesus? Should we wonder about the extent to which that patronage model is leaking into our own religious and ethical understandings? Maybe rent-seeking is just the tip of a very dangerous iceberg.