Why Heaven and Hell

Bart Erdman is a Biblical scholar who is prolific and clear. He says that his job is not to say whether religious beliefs are true or not but to examine how the ideas and emotions associated with them develop. He does, however, offer hypotheses or explanations for why they develop, and so I can wander in as a mere sociologist of religion to offer alternative explanations. Erdman claims that the reason people venture into ideas of Heaven and Hell is because people are just about universally afraid of death, the afterlife portrayed, at best, as a dismal thing. Erdman thinks that people elaborate on Heaven and Hell so as to posit an afterlife. There has to be a just reward for the pains of life while one is living and so there has to be a way to mete out that justice by having both options. A lifetime is long enough by which a person can establish whether one is worthy of the better of the two alternatives-- or provide for a third possibility, which is to work off one’s liabilities after death through Purgatory.

I don’t think Erdman is correct because, among other things, it is necessary to contemplate why so much pain is involved in Hell and why people for most of Christian history have had relish of how awful are the conditions that prevail in Hell. Why does God require so much suffering? A modern Christian might say that there are no occupants in Hell, but certainly most of Christian history thought otherwise. Why the gore along with the glory? I want to offer two standard explanations for the punishment of the dead and then offer two fresh ones, one psychological and one sociological.

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Politics Akilter

There is a widespread perception afoot, so announced by a number of pundits, that American politics and American society are out of whack. The evidence that suggests that the regular institutions and the usual arrangements and interests of the various demographic populations are not doing what they are supposed to be doing include the fact, central to me, that half of the Republican congresspeople have not admitted that Biden was legitimately elected, that Congress does not want to investigate an insurrection at the Capital, and that poor people are supporting Republicans and that farmers are also supporting Republicans even if trade wars against China have not been to their economic advantage. What is going on? The usual explanations have come up empty.

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Folk Metaphysics

There are a set of adages that people offer to explain and organize their lives that go beyond whatever are their doctrines or experiences of their religions or their philosophies. These adages, which are foisted by relatively uneducated people as an alternative to religion and philosophy, nevertheless have a persistence which crosses generations. The point of these adages is to provide a natural justice whereby people, in the nature of things, get their just deserts as well as their opportunities to act freely in life. These adages are often harsh and crude and yet satisfying. I want to point out some of them to give a flavor of this subterranean world of understanding that surfaces whenever any of them are needed to articulate what has to be and whatever has always been.These can be considered as the folk metaphysics which is currently present but which we suspect is of very long duration in that people need a metaphysics even if and in addition to more overt and formalized systems that do exist. These constitute what we might call the implicit beliefs to which people adhere and have adhered, and so make up the social glue that sociologists search to find in community or primitive religion rather than these rational if possibly mistaken views of how the social world works.

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Historical Mysteries

An historical mystery arises when historians consider why events happened and, after considering all the forces that are at work, there is no satisfactory explanation for why the event or events took place. A good example of an historical mystery is the outbreak of World War I, a topic rigorously investigated from the overly ample materials of the circumstances and events of what is called The July Crisis that occurred after Prince Ferdinand (and his wife) had been assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914 and had for some reason precipitated a World War from which we might say we did not all recover until the Soviet Union collapsed and Germany was reunited in the late 1980’s. How had this apocalypse, none of its member states believing it would happen (Germany mistakenly thinking it would be a short war), had nevertheless occurred?

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The Iron Laws of Emotions

The theory of emotions is a field of endeavor that concerns the causes of emotions, whether they are responses to physiological events, or are mediated by thoughts, or some combination of the two or is impacted by some other kind of factor offered for consideration. Are you anxious because you sweat or sweat because you are anxious or because you think there is a reason to be anxious? I want to suggest a different approach. Consider the nature of emotions rather than the cause of emotions. What are their basic characteristics? Identifying those is, first of all, possible and, second of all, result in non-obvious findings about emotions.

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Radical Sociology

The philosophical movements of the Twentieth Century included Anglo-American analytic philosophy, Existentialism, Phenomenology, and social and psychological theories that had philosophical implications, such as psychoanalysis and Marxism. But the one I have found the most important philosophical perspective is that of the sociological perspective that developed in mid twentieth century America and Europe that had been based on the earlier generation of American Pragmatism, by Dewey and Nagel, even though the sociologists themselves, such as Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton, were not philosophers but sharp observers and analysts of the social scene. I want to take note of their dominant procedures because they do what all philosophers do, which is to turn ideas about what has to be to go topsy turvy as when they eliminate ideas that are to be regarded as superfluous because they are not necessary ideas, which is the case when Spinoza thought that “justice” and “cause” were unnecessary terms, or thought that terms are to be added as necessary, as when Kant based the idea of free will on the necessary invocation of the word “should” so as to make the world what it is.

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Justice Is A Bad Idea

I am going to say something outrageous, but hear me out. What I will say is clear and has deep philosophical roots. I am saying that there is no justice. I do not mean that the ideal of justice is rarely fulfilled, that life is full of disappointments. I mean that the concept of justice is empty. It is a word without a meaning and so not part of the metaphysical furniture of the world, while truth, beauty and goodness are some of the many metaphysical things that do exist. The word “justice” is used to evoke a sense of a final rectification whereby wrong action is compensated through the action of courts, whether by those who adjudicate that Orestes should not be punished or that Charleton Heston intones the Ten Commandments. Life can do without the concept and is better rid of it because the invocation of justice always creates unnecessary suffering and so people are worse off rather than better off.

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The Nature of Evil

Trump is “unquestionably” evil, Marty has said for years now, because Trump separated immigrant children from their parents. Harold, Marty’s son, responded, “You still holding on to that?” Harold’s meaning, according to Roland, is that Trump’s action of separating parents from children has been forgotten by everyone, held onto only by extremists like Marty. Extremist reasoning is inherently dismissable.

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Time and Qualities

Philosophers in the Anglo-Americabn tradition during the Twentieth Century followed the idea that there is wisdom in language in that its various forms-- it tenses, its contradictions, its phrases-- reveal the fundamental ways in which reality is constructed. That is very different from the Continental philosophers in the Twentieth Century, the various Existentialists, who would go to no effort to twist around language by inventing new terms so as to plumb the depths of experience which language itself could only indicate. A good example is G. E. Moore, one of the foundational creators of what was called “ordinary language philosophy”. He proposed what is called Moore’s Paradox. Moore proposed the sentence “It is raining and I believe it is not raining”. How is that possible? It seems contradictory even so the first statement is a fact and the second is a belief. If it is obviously raining and if a person sincerely thinks that it is not raining, how can it be possible to utter that statement? There must be something in the language that would indicate that it would show that the compound statement was contradictory even though it is not. But there is no paradox at all if language does not embody wisdom but that a term such as “and'' is not a monitor of meaning, just a conjunction. Language is just a makeshift account and it often errs. Language is not up to describing what it does in ordinary as well as peculiar cases. Here are two cases that show how language leaves us tongue-tied, and so has to be unpacked. The first of these concerns the trouble language has handling time and is an easier problem to unravel than is the second case, which deals with the trouble language has handling qualities.

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The Truth of Conversation

When I was a child and went to visit relatives with my parents, I thought how fortunate I was to be a child because I could go off to play in my room of my relative’s child and use his toys as well as the ones I had brought with me while the adults spent their time in the living room just talking. That had to wait until I was slightly older when I would sit on the stoop outside my apartment building and go over with friends what we had seen on television or what we knew about girls. It is worth pondering conversation as being an essential human activity, something we very much recognize during the pandemic in that people crave to be with people to flirt and drink and talk with one another, even if doing so can incur fatal risks. We have to be free to talk. There are many explanations for this. Talking allows people to convey information and to also hector and intimidate one another and also to display relative social prestige. Putting these and other functional advantages of talk aside, one of the most miraculous and existential qualities of talk is that it is unalienated, which means that people are likely to tell the truth of what they are when they converse with one another. It isn’t just that people will unload when in stress and so unload the truth. Rather, it is that in the ordinary course of events that we say what is the truth and that we have only with great difficulty do we manage to confide the truth or avoid blaring out what is in our mind. Yes, there are turns of phrases that distract and there are exaggerations and circumlocutions. But people are, in general, like dogs in that they are also not inclined to lie. A dog gives over that he is trying to lie. He will act submissively when the bad thing he has done, such as poop on the rug, will soon be revealed. No dog is an accomplished liar, and the same is with people.

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Politics and Time

Politics is one of only a few social institutions that are complex in that they embody an existential paradox. On the one hand, politics is dramatic. The 1968 Democratic nominating process and the campaign that followed afterwards where Nixon went from a close to thirty percentage point lead over Humphrey to pulling out a victory by only about a half of one percent is testament to that. The same is so in any number of elections when people come from behind or, even more surprisingly, simply solidify their leads, as happened for George W. Bush in his bid for reelection, despite having led the nation into war under false pretenses, the Iraq War at its peak when the election was held. Politics provides the public with a bevy of interesting characters whose repeated exposure to the public makes the public think that it knows what these people are really like; campaign spectacles like rallies and even, up to forty years ago, the intrusion of assassinations and assassination attempts to provide dramatic reversals that keep the plots intriguing. Yet at the same time, politics is dramatic without doing what drama does, which is elide time so that the boring parts are cut out or shortened or compressed. Far from exemplifying Aristotle’s principle that there are unities of time and space in drama, politics works itself out in real time, events moving no faster than it takes them to unfold, however extended may be the longueurs between pivotal events. This fact about politics, that it is dramatic without eliding time, goes far to explain the texture of the public’s exposure to political life as well as the dynamics within politics itself.

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True Lies

Immanuel Kant is a philosopher who is easily parodied as the one who thought people should tell the truth in all circumstances, no matter what, because only in that way would a person be treating himself and those he was talking to as full human beings. You should even reveal the whereabouts of a friend to the murderer who comes to your door asking where your friend is. Kant had obviously never heard of the Gestapo.

Not so fast. Kant's depiction of moral life makes sense if we compare his description of true lies—lies that are truly lies—with something else that is closely akin to true lies: white lies, the kinds of things people do all the time and which are regarded as necessary evasions that help move life along without doing great damage to our stature as moral beings. Consider the following examples of white lies that are drawn not from fiction but from social transactions in which I was myself involved.

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Opinions on the Current Demonstrations

Opinion is a burden. If I have an opinion about something, whether a Presidential candidate, or when is the right time to reopen the economy, or whether the protesters in the street are correct even though looting is going on under the cover of protest, then I am responsible for saying why that is plausible to me or even just feel the emotion that goes along with the opinion and so attest to the validity of that insight even if I cannot explain it. Time can tell whether my opinion was correct or not and so an opinion is a forecast, as when one says bad people receive their just deserts, even if proof or refutation is never unambiguous. I am rooting for the future to be one way or another, to support or negate my opinion, and so I am always, as an opinionator, making a gamble on the future and that can render me tense, because I could be wrong about the future, while to be liberated from opinion means that I do not have to worry about the future. I can just watch it play out, proceed as it will, me a bystander rather than a participant. Being without opinions is therefore to no longer carry everywhere Kant’s burden of responsibility, life one set of obligations after another, even if there are also judgments of taste that people also make, but those have no cost, in that whether you prefer Schiller to Lessing makes no difference unless you mix with a set of people who think taste has a moral gravity. Rather, to be without opinion is to leave to history and, more directly, the knowledge of experts, how to proceed from here. They will know when to open up the economy if anyone knows because it is a technical matter rather than a moral one or open to everyday reason, and the unfolding statistics will tell if they are wrong or right. As a citizen, I am entitled to my opinions, but they are relevant only at election time or when a profound change of group opinion takes place, as happens when people may, now, at this moment, come to think that occasional instances of police brutality are not to be swept aside but are perhaps part of the continued subjugation of black people.

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The Essential Forces

What is the fundamental process that governs social or physical existence? This is a very old sounding question in that the Greeks wondered which of the four elements predominated in the makeup of the world. Was it air, fire, earth or wind? And, later on in the ancient world, there was a search for the greatest good, the most perfect emotion. Was it stoicism or cynicism or pleasure? Far from being put away, this same question crops up in modern thought. When I was a graduate student, people discussed whether Hobbes had found out the true secret of social life, that the fundamental force was violence; that was what guaranteed social order and so economic forces and other social forces paled in comparison with the ability of violence to dominate the scene. Hobbes had discovered not invented a solution, never mind that Hobbes thought reason rather than violence governed human interaction or that violence is useful under certain conditions but that under other circumstances money and prestige are more important motivators. People die for their country for a reason and arms merchants are motivated by greed. Violence is useful only when there is anarchy in the air or when there is foreign invasion or there is a crime of passion.

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Living in the Past

A number of old fogies, including me, were lined up in front of the steam tables at a Chicago cafeteria (“Mannie’s”, for those of you in the know) a few days ago when the first guy on the line, an old, thin, stooped, Black dude with very few teeth, started inquiring about what was in stuffed derma and what was the difference between corned beef and pastrami, apologizing to the rest of us for making us wait, we returning the good humor by remarking that we were all old and retired and so had nothing else to do but kill time. I, on the other hand, was listening with my inner ear to the counterman, wondering whether he would say something condescending or dismissive to the old black man. Would he act as if the customer should have known what the different products were? Would he be annoyed that the oldster was holding up the line? No, he just described the cuisine in a chatty and goodhumored manner. I, however, was looking to hear something from fifty years ago, which would then have been seen as an expression of prejudice and would today be called an example of “microaggression”. That places me. I am still conscious of the feelings I had at the time of the Civil Rights Movement and so the lack of hostility by the counterman was a sign of how far we had all come even if I could not get over noticing how far we had come.

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Three Kinds of Knowledge

I used to tell my students that I would carefully label the three kinds of knowledge I would offer them so that they could make up their own minds about how much they could trust to what I said. The first kind of knowledge I would offer would be consensus knowledge, which is what all experts in a field would attest to. An example of that in sociology is the general belief among sociologists that immigrant groups assimilate into American society within two to five generations of arriving on these shores. That is different from what happens in Indonesia, for example, where three separate groups-- the original Polynesians, the Muslims and the Chinese-- have coexisted in a three tiered caste system for hundreds and hundreds of years. The second kind of knowledge I would offer is where there is a strong difference of opinion, contending sides, in an intellectual debate. That kind of knowledge is represented by the debate over what are the causes of continued poverty in the Black community. There is one school of thought that poverty is the result of cultural forces. Poor people got that way because of historical conditions but by this time have internalized dysfunctional relationships and so poor people are overcome by anger, poor child raising habits, inadequate family life, and other cultural forces that make it difficult for people to compete in a market economy or simply to hold down jobs. The alternative hypothesis is that the continuing social structures which engulf people are the forces that keep people from prospering. There are not enough men in Black urban areas to go around so as to provide young women with partners to set up stable families. That is because young men who might otherwise settle down are either dead or in prison. The two theories converge in that one can be a precursor of the other but they are still distinct in that the causal factors are independent of one another. The third kind of knowledge, I offered, was my own educated judgment, something not shared by other sociologists, but a point for which I thought I could make a good case. An example of that was when I argued that the reason Black poverty from the Sixties on was not better dealt with was that LBJ’s War on Poverty did not deal with male unemployment but rather with providing benefits for women who had to raise children without the benefit of a spouse. During the New Deal, there had been work programs for Appalachian white youth. There were no such programs for Black male youth a generation later. Some sociologists have caught up with this view in recent years.

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Wendy Brown's "Neoliberalism"

Political theory in the Twenty-First Century is very old fashioned because it engages in the kind of theorizing that took place in the Nineteenth Century, when Marxism was in vogue. That means that Wendy Brown, among others, is still mired in the attempt to separate illusion from reality, the ruling classes and the working class engaged in a dialogue whereby the ruling class is trying to foist upon the workers and the poor a distorted view of their real economic condition. For Marx, that meant that religion served as an opiate of the people. Racist ideology and a moronic popular culture would also serve as ways to keep the poor, the working class, and even part of the middle class, from recognizing the true root of the evils that befell them, which was a social structure controlled, as the contemporary argot has it, by the upper one-percent of the population.  Ideology and cultural superstructure keep the exploitative economic and social system in place. 

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The High Victorian and The Late Victorian

The Victorian period shares the characteristics that mark other cultural periods. It lasts about fifty years, in its case from the accession of Victoria to the throne in 1840 to the performance in London in 1893 of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome”, so different in texture from the melodrama and sanctimonious morality of Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray”, which had appeared earlier in the year, and so illustrates another characteristic of periods, which is that periods come to abrupt ends and beginnings. (Queen Victoria herself lingered on until 1901.) A cultural period also has a set of themes that are unifying among the various arts of literature and painting and drama, which in the case of the Victorian means the fate of the individual in the complex world of the city and in the midst of an industrialized landscape, every person both ambitious to make their own way and also alienated from what seems emotionally unsatisfying about generally accepted customs and overly rigorous laws, as that is exemplified by both Oliver Twist and Jean Valjean. A cultural period is also international in scope in that all the nations of Europe and North America are part of it even if it is known in France as the era of Pre-Impressionism and Impressionism in honor of the central role of painting in French culture during those years. A cultural period is also dominated by certain cultural forms, and in the Victorian that means the novel and grand opera, both of which are sprawling affairs, employing plots and subplots wherein often outrageously individual characters play out their lives against the background of a richly imagined society. Think of “Great Expectations”, “The Count of Monte Cristo”, and “Rigoletto”. 

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Language and Reason

There are two extreme ways by which to understand the relation of language to reality. One is to think of language as a representation of reality and in that case, as Bertram Russell put it, a well formed, which means grammatical, proposition is always either true or false because it cannot but be an assertion about reality. That allows for a lot of badly formed propositions, those to be regarded as not much more than nonsense, of no use to the speakers. A professor of mine, a pragmatist, took this view, when he held that what most literary critics were doing when they talked about symbols or what sociologists were doing when they spoke about norms, was just mumbo-jumbo, sounds without meaning, because they could not give clear definitions of their basic terms. Most exercises in language should simply be dismissed as nonsense, however sincere the speakers. It should be remembered that even Aristotle, who supposed that most argument was rhetorical in that it was aimed at winning over people to a leader by persuading them in ways that would appeal to them, still imagined that those forms of persuasion were made up mostly of deformed or short circuited logic, a leap of inference required to get from one place to another. Even tyrants sounded somewhat logical.

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Death is Unjust

Death is supposed to be just. It is part of life and therefore not to be feared. That is why the quote from Ecclesiastes, “There is a time for everything: a time to live and a time to die”, is interpreted to mean that thee is a balance in life so that what is made has to be unmade, when what Ecclesiastes is saying is simply that sometimes one thing happens and sometimes another and that there is no use getting all that bothered about it. The mistaken conception is brought closer to our own era when William Hazlitt wrote in 1815 that when people died they were prepared to die. Maybe he thought that because the people he knew who had died had suffered from long term debilitating illnesses which left them with ever less energy and concentration so that death was both a blessing and the continuation of a downward spiral which was inevitable, making a person into a different person from the one they had been when they had been actively engaged with life.  

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