Thoughts on this extract from 'the Hogfather'

[Cassius]

I stumbled across this extract from the TV adaption of Terry Pratchett's novel 'the Hogfather', which brought back some fond memories of watching it and reading the book all those years ago (by my standards at least). For those who aren't familiar with it, the basic plot of the book is that its set in the fantasy 'Discworld', where the guardians of the laws of the universe, the 'auditors', decide to clear up some of humanity's imaginative clutter by attempting to assassinate the 'hogfather' (this world's equivalent of Father Christmas). He disappears, and thus Death (as in the personification of death) is called upon to undertake his duties on a temporary basis.

The following extract comes from Death discussing morality and fantasy with his granddaughter (it's bizarre, but then it is from a Discworld novel). The caps represent Death speaking (not him shouting, its just the way its presented)

All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY.

Here's the same extract from the TV version. In my opinion it gets the point across a bit better (largely because Death is voiced by the late, great Ian Richardson, of House of Cards fame), especially since I couldn't find the entirety of the extract from the book (I lost it some years ago).

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AnaQXJmpwM4

Now, what do I think? To be honest, I doubt the conclusion that I reach is the same as, perhaps, Pratchett intended, what with him being an atheist and I a theist (though of course, our ability to draw different conclusions from the same words I one of the great things about being human). But, basically, I agree with what Death says, to some extent. Looking around at the world, there are many things that we cannot prove to be naturally true that we take for granted anyway. Belief in God is one, but then so are the pervasive beliefs in the ideals of justice, of duty, of (expanding upon what Death said) friendship, love, honour, dignity etcetera. We humans come to... shall we say an arrangement, to believe in these things, and not question them too deeply, for if we do, then we find things which are very much not to our own satisfaction. I believe that to be a good thing, for, even if we have differing interpretations of what these things mean, most of us hold that they do exist, even if they cannot be proven through scientific methods. More importantly, a steady stream of noble 'untruths' like the ones above, in my view, are what make the world go round and keep humans sane and content. Not an endless quest for 'truth' (a highly subjective concept in of itself) which, from my experience, is a deeply unsatisfying and unrewarding experience. What do you think?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I've always loved this dialogue (and being a Christian I have a similar interpretation of it to yours--which honestly I'm not really sure would bother Pratchett that much, as he's written quite lovingly of his Church of England upbringing in the past). I maintain that Pratchett is one of the finest writers working in English, and would be much more widely recognized as such were it not for the unfortunate circumscription of fantasy and comedic fiction--his writing of course being both--from 'serious' literary discussion.

[afleitch]

'St Paul should have been introduced to a good woman'

I've written about this at great length buried somewhere here and forgotten. Ideals like 'justice' and 'duty' are for humans changeable concepts. They are amended by societies experience and enriched by them. There is no 'universal' application of these concepts, they cannot be considered naturally true; we enable them because we can conceive of them and we then exalt them. The metaphysical is rooted in the physical. If they remain independent of any dogmatic influence other than human influence, then as concepts they remain 'free'. The problem with many peoples interpretations of god, after they preconceive it, is that it is an unchallengeable entity which gifts concepts such as justice and love and right and wrong which are also unchallengeable. For humanists, we understand these notions to be part of our biological and evolutionary 'inheritance' on which we continue to build. Humans are instinctively 'good'. We are not broken. We are not to be broken down. Leave people be, and they tend to be pleasant.

Pratchett and myself broadly speak from the same viewpoint; 'We tell the universe what it is'. He calls us the universes conscience because we are, to our knowledge, it's only observer. Our religious experience as humans, for want of a better word should not be rooted in the hypothetical or the metaphysical or even in the stars but in our evolutionary story. It is more honest and more fascinating and more fulfilling to think of ourselves as 'man ascending' than as 'man falling'.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I find the concept of 'man ascending' to be as wrong-headed as the concept of 'man falling'.  My own view of the universe is that 'man is'.  It's probably wrong-headed as well, but it best fits what I have observed of the universe.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Oh, and to clarify, by 'man is' I do not mean that man is static.  Man changes as does everything that has life.  However, any perceived inexorable direction in that change is merely an artifact of our incomplete attempts to ascertain the order hidden within chaos.

[afleitch]

I find the concept of 'man ascending' to be as wrong-headed as the concept of 'man falling'.  My own view of the universe is that 'man is'.  It's probably wrong-headed as well, but it best fits what I have observed of the universe.

Oh, and to clarify, by 'man is' I do not mean that man is static.  Man changes as does everything that has life.  However, any perceived inexorable direction in that change is merely an artifact of our incomplete attempts to ascertain the order hidden within chaos.

Individual men degrade and die like any process in the universe. Mankind rises. What Pratchett was inferring when he said he’d rather be a‘rising ape’ than a ‘fallen angel’ is that Genesis is not only literally false, but is metaphorically false too. The story, even as a metaphor is very out of sync with our understanding (with this god creating plants before the sun, and flowering plants before insects and so forth) The story of Genesis serves no purpose in describing either creation, literally or metaphorically, or mankind’s ‘awareness’; the ‘knowing’ of oneself. It describes a literal state of ‘perfection’ from which man has since fallen. We know from evolutionary theory that species evolve towards ‘perfection’ in terms of utilising the resources around them to their advantage. His life experience has also taught him that men left to their own devices are inherently ‘good’. Man’s goodness and man’s evolutionary ascent should be what sparks our spiritual interest.

On concepts such as justice, Pratchett notes that we show far more benevolence than the supposed creator who dishes out disproportionate punishment. Those who exercise power without constraint will remain unchecked and will become increasingly irrational in their exercising of authority. Why else would a god punish two beings that had no concept of good or evil prior to attaining knowledge? They may have done wrong, but it is not a wilful wrong. It’s only an objective wrong if contravening god’s will is wrong in itself. But how can you even contravene or transgress the law, if you are not capable of knowing the rightness and wrongness in things? ‘Adam and Eve’ had less cognitive abilities in their ability to discern the goodness or wrongness in things than small children, and even Christian teaching acknowledges that children are at a disadvantage because they do not fully understand. Nor is there such thing as ‘fully understand’ for anyone as far as limits to human knowledge and experience can stretch.

As for the rest of us, no crime is worthy of the infinite punishment of an infinite consciousness. Given that 8 seconds or 80 years or 8 million years as fractions of infinity are effectively of the same value (i.e, they are nothing), it is an eternal condemnation of a consciousness that has had no time in which to think, develop or grow with respect to itself, including reaching the 'right conclusion.' It’s a punishment of the ungodlike for not possessing the capabilities of a god. It’s capricious and malicious. No one would expect this from any man and if they did encounter it, they would have every right to challenge him. If they could not, then at least that oppression would last as long as whoever died first. To draw on similar themes from Pratchett, but also authors such as Pullman, if you were to ever come face to face with that god, then as an act of compassion, you should end it. Given that gods capricious nature manifests itself in the Bible, then why trust it?  Of course he says he’s all powerful, of course he says he’s compassionate, of course he says he’s the first. That’s what the powerful would say! Even those who have usurped the power of others.

Now of course Pratchett and Pullman and others in their stories can deal with physical gods; gods who make themselves known. We can’t do that because we’ve ensured that most of the relevant gods of our time don’t come down, as the gods of the Ancients did and meet us face to face in the field of battle or the bedroom. We have made them metaphysical concepts (I have an essay on the association of gods with ‘minimal counterintuitives’ on here somewhere so I won’t go into that again) which affords them a great deal of protection from outright dismissal. In either event, the notion of god, for the humanist even though it isn’t real, usurps mankind and our own inheritance which I hope, brings me back full circle to the first point.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I realize that the traditional interpretation of the Eden story is one of a perfect past lost because man sinned and he was thus punished by being ejected from that perfection.  I believe I've detailed my own thoughts on Eden here,so I won't repeat them here in full, but suffice it to say I don't hold to that interpretation.  It was a more blissful past, but the story makes it clear that it was a bliss of ignorance and man made the irrevocable choice to trade that bliss for knowledge, which we have been striving off and on to increase ever since.   Man certainly has more knowledge today than ever before, but his essential nature remains unchanged over the span of recorded history.  But with that knowledge we lost the garden of ignorance.  By the very act of eating that metaphorical fruit, we ejected ourselves from a garden we could no longer be content within and if anything God barring us from returning to the garden was an act of mercy, not punishment.  (It's also mixed in with a couple of just-so stories to explain why snakes have no legs and human females have trouble with childbirth that other mammals generally so not.  That latter story actually has a ring of truth to it, since it is our comparatively large brains—and the skulls containing them—that is the cause of that problem.)

[afleitch]

If you’re looking for the metaphor underneath the metaphor isn’t that perhaps a tacit acknowledgement that Genesis isn’t actually telling us anything?

The main thrust of my argument was more on the latter half of what I posted earlier. But I’ll respond to your point. With respect to Genesis as a handy metaphor, there has never been an ‘idyll’ in the evolutionary sense. Genesis specifically mentions an idyll in which essentially we were both protected and secondly had command of the land around us (with the insinuation that man has had access to farming and had domesticated animals from the get go; an easy mistake to make given that Genesis is a facsimile of other Sumerian creation myths) We have always struggled against nature. If there is any ‘idyll’ in which people want for nothing and indeed are bombarded with comforts that they don’t actually need relatively speaking, contemporary society is pretty close! Our intelligence has led us towards an idyll, not away from it. In terms of gaining intelligence/knowledge and losing our ignorance, again Genesis fails as a metaphor. If we are made in the ‘image of god’, then with evolution in mind, Neanderthals were made almost in the image of god. At what point in our evolution does god decide that we are close enough to his likeness to be special? To touch very briefly on the ‘just so story’ part of Genesis, it’s worth noting that Gods ‘punishment’ for the snake in removing it’s legs made it a more effective hunter

To touch on something I’ve argued before, the Neanderthals ritualistically buried their dead. They buried them with flowers and trinkets; offerings and gifts to the dead. More than likely they were involved in ritualistic and spiritualistic behaviour. But they were not human. DNA evidence suggests that Neanderthals and Sapiens diverged from a common ancestor some 400,000 years ago. If both us and the Neanderthals ritualistically buried their dead which is suggestive of spirituality (and I say ‘suggestive of’ for the same reason that early Homo Sapiens show the same traits) then our common ancestor, Heidelbergensis that may date as far back as 1.3 million years may also have done the same. We have less physical specimens that survive in a social setting but recent findings from Spain suggest that they may have been the first ‘Homo’ to bury their dead. They also knew how to make and use rudimentary paints. So potentially the emergence of spiritual awareness and ritual predates mankind as we know it by as much as 1 million years.

There’s something deceitful in suggesting that humans, in their current iteration, are somehow ‘first and finest’. Indeed, the latest line of thinking on Neanderthals is that they displayed their intelligence so aptly they were perceived as potential mates and effectively diluted their own line. Given that both Sapiens and Neanderthals were successfully mitigating the difficulties caused by environmental changes, they came into increasing contact with each other. We know from cave paintings that they were capable of abstract thought. Their brains were bigger than ours with larger parts devoted to vision and simple function in turn producing different thought processes and perceptions of the world. Place them in today’s context, without the pressures of immediate survival and it’s feasible that their brains would make a better or different ‘sense’ of things than ours currently do.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

You assert that we have always struggled against nature in your last post.  I would argue that was not always the case and that we didn't always perceive nature as something separate from ourselves with which we could struggle.  Indeed, one of the things I find attractive in Eastern philosophy is its rejection that such a struggle is either essential or desirable.  Now it certainly is the case that in a material sense that struggle has led to us "ascending" materially, but I see no evidence that spiritually we have.  (And if our material lifestyle proves ultimately unsustainable, our material ascension may well prove to be an ephemeral blip.)  To me it appears that there is as much mercy and justice in this world as in our earliest known history, and just as much cruelty and injustice.  What changes over time is mainly where mercy and justice predominate and where cruelty and injustice are in ascendance.

You happen to be fortunate and live in a place where mercy and justice predominate and are held in general esteem, and my personal opinion is that your good fortune has colored your views on the subject and misled you into thinking utopia is attainable here in this physical realm.  I suspect you might not think the same had you been born in Central Africa, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Xinjiang, Chechnya, or any number of other places not so fortunate.  Indeed, it's probably easier in such a situation to fall into what I see as the opposite fallacy, that man is inherently evil and heading towards an ultimate collapse and destruction.

[afleitch]

You assert that we have always struggled against nature in your last post.  I would argue that was not always the case and that we didn't always perceive nature as something separate from ourselves with which we could struggle.  Indeed, one of the things I find attractive in Eastern philosophy is its rejection that such a struggle is either essential or desirable.  Now it certainly is the case that in a material sense that struggle has led to us "ascending" materially, but I see no evidence that spiritually we have.  (And if our material lifestyle proves ultimately unsustainable, our material ascension may well prove to be an ephemeral blip.)  To me it appears that there is as much mercy and justice in this world as in our earliest known history, and just as much cruelty and injustice.  What changes over time is mainly where mercy and justice predominate and where cruelty and injustice are in ascendance.

You happen to be fortunate and live in a place where mercy and justice predominate and are held in general esteem, and my personal opinion is that your good fortune has colored your views on the subject and misled you into thinking utopia is attainable here in this physical realm.  I suspect you might not think the same had you been born in Central Africa, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Xinjiang, Chechnya, or any number of other places not so fortunate.  Indeed, it's probably easier in such a situation to fall into what I see as the opposite fallacy, that man is inherently evil and heading towards an ultimate collapse and destruction.

Again, you're broadly missing what I was proposing but again I'll answer the points you raise. hopefully you can revisit some of mine from earlier.

What are you doing right now? Is there a roof over your head. Are you having to plan to hunt for your next meal? Are you incapable of having anything but fleeting moments of joy or thought or spirituality because you don't know if you'll be eating tonight and that's more important? Are you a hunter and gatherer like your ancestor would have been 10,000 years ago? Or 100,000 years ago, or a 1 million years ago? I am not suggesting at all that life is perfect. People starve, some tribes still hunt. But relatively speaking is mankind more at ease with his surroundings now, in this brief part of our biological existence?

I agree that spiritually, we may not have ascended, but for broadly different reasons than you do

And to touch once again on matters of justice and not to drift too far from the original topic, the only justice that we have is that which we make for ourselves. I would contend that the worst atrocity and the gravest injustice inflicted upon a person in life is far more just than any hypothetical eternal punishment for the actions carried out in a fleeting physical moment of your eternal consciousness.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I suppose I'm not responding to your point about whether God's punishments are just because as a Universalist, I don't believe God imposes everlasting punishment (in the sense that certain people will be roasting for googleplexes of years and more) on anyone.  So, I don't have any inclination to argue about a perception of the nature of God as cruel and vindictive that has no relevance to my own beliefs.  I don't have the fundamentalist viewpoint your argument seems to be largely in opposition to, so I can't speak to it.

As an aside, the annihilationist viewpoint (there is an eternal fire sinners will be consigned to at the day of judgement, but the sinners sent to it get utterly and completely consumed, making their destruction everlasting, not the destructing itself) of at least some Adventists fits within my conception of what a just God might do, if God had exhausted all possible means of redeeming that person.  But I have my doubts that God is so limited in his means as to have to resort to such a final expedient.