The Spirit of the Assembly

The Presbyterian Church (USA), my church, just passed two resolutions in favor of marriage equality. I am very glad we did. I believe it was the right thing to do. What I am worried about is the way some people are saying that the Spirit was uniquely present at this year’s General Assembly, as if driving or blessing or simply rejoicing in the event. I was there for part of it, and there was a certain electricity in the place, and a certain feeling of deep satisfaction and solidarity. But let’s state what should be obvious: much of the feeling experienced there was the feeling of being in a room where a group of people who have been committed to a cause for a long time were finally getting their way. It was the feeling we sometimes experience of being in a room with people who agree with us about things we think are important. That feeling was not in itself a special visitation from on high, and to attribute it to that would be obnoxious, and theologically stupid.

Those are harsh words, I know. They come from a particular history. I grew up a Southern Baptist during the conservative takeover of that denomination, and I remember reading similar testimonies from the perspective of the victors of those national gatherings. I’m in the unusual position of having been sympathetic to each of these movements in the church as they unfolded: I grew up rooting for conservatives in the Southern Baptist world, and now I root for progressives in the PC(USA). What can I say? I like to win. But of course I cannot affirm that the Spirit was or is uniquely behind both movements, contradictory as they are. Nor can I affirm that the Spirit has been driving the movement I now support. Southern Baptist conservatives cloaked themselves in the Spirit as they marched to power in the eighties, but they were the ones doing the marching and gaining the power. It was subterfuge and intellectual laziness that compelled them to short-circuit substantive argument with rhetoric about the presence of the Spirit, and my worry is the same kind of avoidant rhetoric is arising within my current tribe today. We human beings, we progressive Presbyterians in particular, have made these changes to our polity, and we find it satisfying to have done it. Good! Let’s celebrate our accomplishment, and thank God who gives power to both sides to maneuver and persuade. It’s pleasant, and awe-inspiring, to be a part of this exchange of human powers, especially when we come out on top.

Of course we want more than that—we want legitimation, even divine sanction. But to succumb to this desire would be, I believe, a failure of nerve. It would be a refusal to accept responsibility for what we have done, to embrace the fact that we have engaged successfully in good old fashioned church politics, making good use of changing public opinion and denominational demographics to fashion a new reality in the church. It would be as if we don’t want to acknowledge that what we are doing and have done is political, a deeply human, open-ended and uncertain struggle. It would be as if we don’t want to recognize what we are doing, the power we are wielding.

But perhaps I am setting up an infelicitous zero-sum game. Perhaps invocations of the Spirit are being made more in the manner of Kathryn Tanner, who argues that there is no competition between divine and human activity: each can be fully in play without prejudice to the other. Following this line perhaps further than Tanner herself would, we could say that the Spirit has been present in the assembly in, with, and under the attitudes and actions of the political body gathered at Cobo Center in Detroit—that is to say, in, with, and under the arguments, amendments, questions, points of order, the maneuvering and persuading and forcing. The Spirit would not be a force of unity, then, guaranteeing a “good” outcome in which all differences are reconciled and overcome. Rather, it would be a spirit of contention and turmoil, unending and always unfinished.

I have to admit that this would be more to my liking. It would be a way to dismiss and dissolve the subterfuge and the cloaking of interests that often happens when people talk about the Spirit’s presence. It would be a way of acknowledging that the Spirit’s power and presence is anything but a guarantee of anything, anything but an end to a debate, anything but a failure of nerve. If the Spirit was present at this year’s assembly (which is actually not yet over as I am writing), it was there in the way it is always there—empowering a bottomless multiplicity of perspectives and agencies, breaking apart rather than melding together, dissolving human aims and ambitions rather than consolidating them. Here’s my main point: the Spirit’s presence would only be power expressed in difference, and not purpose expressed in unity. So, in the end, following this line, we can’t attribute the outcome of a General Assembly or anything else to the Spirit, because the Spirit doesn’t accomplish anything. We do. This, as always, is our doing, for better or for worse—and, as always, these actions will likely be both for better and for worse, though I’m happy to take the risk and the ambiguity. And then we cast those accomplishments on the restless waters of the future over which the Spirit continues to hover, and see what may happen next. 

The Tangled Wing

My copy of Melvin Konner’s The Tangled Wing:  Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit is held together by four long pieces of old fashioned, plain silver duct tape.  It fell apart on me during this last reading, suggested by a mentor who has taken issue with what may look like (perhaps because they are?) exaggerations about the human capacity to change that seem to be inscribed in the idea of “plasticity” that I’ve been promoting.

If you’ve never read the book, my recommendation would be that it is a delightfully readable presentation of the biological foundations of human nature, written by a scientist who is also a careful reader of fiction, drama, and other literary sources of insight, and who knows how to think about these things at the same time.  In other words, it is rare book.

This isn’t a review, but there are two things I take away from the book that are of interest to me as I think about human plasticity.  First, Konner’s account of human nature brings together in interesting ways the tremendous weight of our evolutionary inheritance (“biological constraints”), which places inevitable limits on what kinds of behavioral responses are possible to us as a species, and the other hand the absence of complete determination of human behavior by biological factors.  On this second item, Konner is very clear that genes don’t determine behavior—they rather influence behavior through a wide range of other, largely environmental factors.  Even the architecture of the human brain itself is not a product of the genes alone—whole areas of the brain may become larger or smaller as a result of differing kinds of experience.   Important experiments involving the social isolation of rats, for example, have demonstrated that detectable changes in the structure of the brain can be explained on the basis of neural developments that arise in response to stimulus-rich and stimulus-poor environments.

Konner himself summarizes these two aspects of the matter in terms of both “fixity” and “plasticity,” and you have to have both concepts in order to achieve some grasp of what is going on in human and other animal behavior.  This is a fine way to try and get our heads around what Konner is saying in the book, so long as we don’t think of that which is “fixed” as a particular part of human nature that can never change, and on the other hand that which is “plastic” as that other part of human nature that can change very easily, almost without any resistance at all.  It is doubtful, though it is possible, that there are five or six (or whatever number of) human characteristics that are always and everywhere the same, but it would be wrong (I believe) to think of these as “fixed.”  First, they are contingent developments that occurred over our very circuitous evolutionary history:  less momentary, perhaps, than waves cast up by a restless sea, but not logically different from them even if on a different time scale.  Also, they are always culturally and individually articulated and expressed.  Human beings are social creatures, for example, inevitably and everywhere gathering together in groups:  but this says little about what groups are for among particular peoples, how they are related to individual initiative, and a host of other non-trivial matters; nor does it say anything about how to understand what we call “anti-social” (or, perhaps more interestingly, socially indifferent) behaviors.  And, on the other hand, almost nothing about who we are is not entangled with a host of other things about us and thus easy to change.  What I’m getting to here is that “fixity” and “plasticity” can best be understood not as adequate descriptions of certain human characteristics but as polar terms:  each expresses one logical and not regional aspect of human nature.  Each applies to every one of human nature’s actual components or characteristics.  A homely example:  my coffee obsession is in some ways now fixed, because, even though I quit drinking coffee (with some “slips”) for medical reasons in 2009, I will always have the same synaptic receptor sites in my brain that are activated by certain stimuli that have been for me associated with coffee (this is the neurological description of craving), and it is also both a result of brain plasticity (since the wiring together of olfactory  and visual neurons with those that responded to actually drinking coffee came together when I began getting obsessed with coffee back in college) and subject to further plasticity in the forms of sublimation and other learned skills for coping with my cravings.

The second take-away from Konner’s book for me comes in its later chapters, when Konner comes to meditate on the human “prospect.” It is a little more difficult to sift out the science when he turns toward prognostication, because this is where he is most richly conversational with literary sources.  But what I can gather is that Konner is deeply pessimistic without being fatalistic. This mindset is the result of his polar emphasis upon fixity and plasticity.  His pessimism is unleashed with particular force on a group (the majority, I take it) of social scientists and reformers he calls “tinkerers.” These are they who think that people are basically good (or, in less value-laden terms, functional), but need a tweak or two here and there to make “everything all right” again.  These “tinkerers” are not condemned as deluders, but are critiqued as those who are deluded, perhaps by their methods, likely to some degree by a general unwillingness to face the unvarnished truth.  Everything, for Konner, is not going to be “all right.”  And that is because the human problem is much deeper than most social scientists and reformers are able to grasp. To take one example, we have capacities for both “pity” and “grief” as parts of our evolutionary inheritance, but grief is more personal and more laden with emotional force than is pity, so that, confronted everywhere by genuine occasions for grief, our capacity for pity is muted or dampened.  This would be ok (it was okay, in fact, when we lived in small, face-to-face societies), but in large-scale societies where real-world relations of cause and effect extend far beyond family and kinship ties, this diminution of pity by more personal grief is dangerous, and also quite ugly.  To take another example, our fearfulness over possible losses in an uncertain future creates in us an urge to accumulate (Side note:  “scarcity” is not something that we have invented in modern capitalism!).  As human nature as we know it was taking shape,  this was okay since it led to behaviors that were helpful during descents into long winters, but it has led to a spiraling concentration of resources into the hands of a comparative few, and the results are both ugly (Konner cites the “tinsel mansions” of Malibu) and dangerous.  The point for Konner is not the romantic one that if we could recover our ancient past, everything would be fine; it is the more tragic one that the very adaptations within human nature that enabled us to survive and flourish ultimately make flourishing problematic and survival actually somewhat doubtful.

But Konner is not fatalistic—in fact he cannot be.  It is unrealistic to think that we can educate or engineer ourselves out of human selfishness, for example (Its roots are far too deep for that to happen in the near future, and even in the distant future it is hard to see how it would happen.).  But as a society we can develop policies that deal with human selfishness in a clear-eyed and useful manner, limiting its disadvantages and perhaps even leveraging the motivations it entails for nobler or at least more sustainable purposes.  Developing policy, too, is a human behavior, and as such it is rooted in a nature that is both weighted by an ancient inheritance and capable of indeterminate modifications.  Out of this polarity could arise wisdom, not just in the sense of understanding human nature but in the sense of using such understanding to make life possible in the future.

Why did my mentor tell me I should read The Tangled Wing again?  Probably to get me thinking about human nature in broader, more adequate terms than are immediately suggested by the term “plasticity,” which seems to denote only one side of Konner’s polarity.  I will devote another blog entry at some point to defending “plasticity” as already inclusive of both inner structure (fixity) and malleability (Konner’s more narrow understanding of plasticity), but here let me acknowledge the importance of the point.  “Change,” in any useful or desirable sense, is itself in what we may call a polar relationship with continuity.  No one would really want a break from all that is familiar.  This is perhaps more keenly felt among Gen-Xer’s (my age group) and younger than it was among young people of immediately prior generations, since we are a cohort whose deepest longing is perhaps not to stumble into some form of life that is entirely new but to preserve some semblance of the life that we have now or that we grew up thinking we would have—to form bulwarks against social and economic catastrophes that rumble beneath our feet as the political compact of the twentieth century crumbles away from us; to stop or at least to slow the lurching of our world toward environmental catastrophe and the flooding of the cities some of us grew up in or (more likely) near.  In any case, it would be not only a fantasy but a frightful one to imagine change as somehow untethered from the continuities that give change both context and meaning.

So, no adequate account of human nature can effect such an untethering.  As I will write in a later post, the notion of plasticity is supposed to strengthen the tether, so that continuity and change are ontologically welded rather than opposed. Change is something that happens to and with continuity, and continuity as a temporal achievement is the product of and fodder for continual change.

This view of things is a step removed (abstracted) from Konner’s concerns, and it would hold, I take it, even if the human species doesn’t survive the challenges that we face, even if the tragic conflicts within human nature push us finally over the cliff once and for all.

To believe in God, I wrote in my first post, is to have passion for change.  To make this clearer, I add that it is to believe that change is not unconnected from or simply opposed to goodness or to various particular goods that perdure through the changes.  Change is not Chronos, perpetually devouring his children.  Rather, the change for which we are intelligibly passionate is the unending process of organizing, disorganizing, and re-organizing (configuring, disfiguring, re-configuring; forming, deforming, reforming, etc.) the fragile but flexible goods that circulate through our world, goods to which we can always commit ourselves in their unending profusion of forms, human and inhuman, come hell or high water.

Plastic People

The title of this blog site reflects a long-standing interest in notions of plasticity which has several sources.  But before I mention those, I should say why I think the notion of plasticity is important, or at least interesting.  The idea of plasticity is about the human capacity to change, a capacity which is not, however, infinite.  As philosopher Catherine Malabou argues (What Should We Do With Our Brain?), plasticity is not some completely amorphous malleability.  In other words, if you and I have natures that are plastic, that means that they can change, but it does not mean that they are simply passive receptacles for whatever influences befall us or whatever disciplines are imposed on us.  Rather, as Malabou suggests, plasticity invokes the thought of (plastic) explosives.  Our particular identities, along with our human nature itself, contain within themselves surprising and world-transforming resources that make them “agential” or active rather than simply passive.

Why is that important?  I suggest it is because if we have a human nature that does not simply adapt to external circumstances but contains within itself its own dynamism, then that which makes us human inevitably pushes back again regimes of domination or discipline (including, for the theologically minded among you, sin).  But of course, it doesn’t push back for the sake of an aimless freedom.  That’s the other side of plasticity.  To say that we have a plastic nature is still to say that we have a nature: there are some types of things that are fulfilling (classically, we call them “goods”) and others that, while perhaps enjoyable, are ultimately stultifying (“evils”).  Plasticity can take from classical Christian natural law tradition the notion of natural human ends, without making them static and inflexible.  It is a historicized way of interpreting human nature, in other words:  we have ends that are natural to us, but those ends are the products of a history that is still moving.  That is to say, what is good and what is evil for us can actually change--not just because of  changing contexts, but also because of changing ways in which we are put together.  "Tastes" are a good, if superficial, example:  green beans taste good to me as an adult, and thus they are not only good for my health but they are now an aesthetic good as well.  I take it that worship practices in churches may also serve to illustrate this. Music that once affected us one way (say, awe-inspiring) now affects us in another (say, comfort-inducing).  Both, we might say, are good, but we can enter into a conversation about what good is better (or whether the lesser good may actually be a kind of evil!), given the ends of corporate worship as we now understand them.

So what are the sources for (my own) thinking about human plasticity?  First, the plasticity of the brain, or neuroplasticity.  We now know a couple of very important things about human nature.  First, it is an expression of the workings of an enormously complex network of neurons that make up the central nervous system.  Whatever we identify as “natural” for human beings in terms of behaviors, desires, or inclinations will be represented by some set of neural pathways.  But second, and more importantly, these pathways are never completely “hardwired.”  In other words, the connections between neurons that form the basis of who we are both in general (human nature) and in particular (personal identity) are susceptible of change. The brain, we have learned, constantly rewires itself, as new connections are formed in response to new experiences.  This means that new desires can be created, or new associations between certain external stimuli and certain internal motivations can emerge.  This is largely how advertising in a consumer-driven economy works—we have to learn to want new things. But, thankfully, since it is a matter of the brain re-wiring itself (recall Malabou’s point) rather than being simply re-wired by external forces, we have agency, and responsibility, even here.

A second source is quite different.  I am indebted to Kathryn Tanner (Christ the Key) for putting me on to this one: Gregory of Nyssa’s account of human nature as indeterminately open.  Tanner actually uses the word “plasticity” to describe Gregory’s argument that human nature is to have no nature. For Gregory, as created in God’s image we human beings are oriented toward the infinite.  Nothing finite satisfies our desire for God, but we can “fill” ourselves with creaturely preoccupations so that that desire is stifled.  What we choose to fill ourselves with, according to Gregory, is what constitutes our nature.  We either become entangled in sin, and consequent mortality, or we become divinized.

On the face of it, Gregory’s account is surely an exaggeration:  to say in effect that we choose our nature flies in the face of what we now know about the evolutionary origins of human beings, but also of what we have long known on the basis of human experience.  But this is where Tanner’s use of the idea of “plasticity” is interesting, especially if we give it a Malabouan twist.   Perhaps it is best to interpret Gregory’s point as saying that the nature of human beings is to have a desire for the infinite, a desire that is productive and not simply passive.  As Calvin urged much latter, the human heart is a factory of gods.  The desire for the infinite bursts through mundane, utilitarian calculations about the use values of objects and invests some thing or things with ultimacy.   But, not letting Gregory’s point get swallowed, it is not a matter of indifference which objects are so invested.  If the “idol” is worshiped, our brains are wired accordingly and we come to desire the wrong things, things that do not satisfy and do not keep us open to the infinite.  If the “icon” (drawing this distinction from Jean-Luc Marion) is revered, then we are constantly ushered into the open spaces of eternity, because it is the nature of the icon not to allow our vision to rest upon it but to point beyond itself.  So, our plasticity has to do with our primordial openness to the infinite and also with the dependency of that openness upon objects of attention that do not close it.  Thus there are both active and passive components to plasticity:  a desire and a dependence; a transcendence and a creaturely limitation; an indeterminacy and a boundedness.

This duality (not dualism!) has to do not only with religious artifacts and ritual practices, but also with economic, social, and political transactions.  Our plasticity means that it is in our capacity to resist foreclosure of our relations to God and neighbor, to push back against stultification of our natures in the invisible hands of cruel, inhuman market forces, but also that we need mechanisms and institutions within which to live in order to preserve and to realize the possibilities for true human flourishing.  We need education, and systems of distribution, and functional political processes, or else the resplendence of the idols becomes all too glaring, and we are lured into the darkness of a gilded age.

Plasticity, as I understand it, is an account of the freedom of the human creature before God—not unlimited, not arbitrary, but also dynamic rather than static.  I’ve left a number of loose threads here, but this gives an idea at least of why I think it is important that we human beings are plastic people.

Why "theoplasticity?".... I begin this blog with a new adage:  belief in God equals passion for change.  Two linkages should probably be explained here.  First, and easiest, I am linking "belief" and "passion."  There is nothing too controversial about this, but it is important for me as a philosophically minded person to say that faith has nothing to do with cold acknowledgement of certain supposedly objective truths.  Rather, to be possessed of a belief, in the sense I mean here, is to be moved by something, to be drawn, compelled, fascinated, smitten.  Indeed, for properly religious belief, it is to be moved infinitely, in a way that troubles and transcends all other loyalties, confidences, and affinities.

A second linkage is somewhat more difficult, but no less important.  It is the link between "God" and "change."   Now, it may seem like this second link seeks to invert the traditional affirmation of God's changelessness. God is supposed to be impassible, beyond change, above the flux, ultimately reliable, etc.  Actually, though, my intent is quite the reverse of a repudiation of the tradition on this point.  Classical Christian theology insists on God remaining above change for some very specific reasons. To change is to become something different from what one once was.  But I want to say, with tradition (I think), that God is already different. That is to say, God contains the fullness of all differences that characterize the creaturely realm within God's self.  The traditional word for this is "plenitude."  Nicholas of Cusa wrote about a "coincidence of opposites" in God.  God is above distinctions between different things not because God is some pure abstraction that is irrelevant to qualities that can differ, but because God contains all of these differences of quality in the fullness of the divine vision. So, God cannot change.  But, the infinity of differences that would constitute change for finite creatures traversing those differences are already in God and thus do not need to be traversed.  So, in a sense, God is change.  More important than a fine doctrinal point about God, however, this thought suggests something profoundly important about change itself. Change is not disintegration, here; nor is it some kind of ultimate threat. Rather, change, as divine, is the eternal harmony or repose of all things in their becoming.  The coincidence of opposites in God's eternity holds out hope for a non-antagonistic relationship among differences in historical time.

Theoplasticity is a practical, perhaps mystical, quest to be relentlessly open to change because of an infinite passion for a God who is change.  It is driven, at this point, by philosophical ponderings (Deleuze, Serres, Latour, Meillassoux), engagements with tradition (recently Eastern Orthodoxy), political commitments, and simply a "sense and taste for the infinite" (Schleiermacher).  With no particular schedule in mind, I will post musings, reflections on readings, would-be conceptual breakthroughs in the development of a theology of plasticity, and probably some whining and ranting.  Theoplasticity is about me personally, it is about my parishioners, my friends, my family, about the church, the sectors or spheres of civilizations, and human nature. And above all, of course, it is about God in relation to these things.