‘I give you my word.’ Do people still say that? ‘My word’ – the dictionary says ‘my undertaking’ or ‘my promise’. ‘She has kept her word,’ we say when someone does something they’ve agreed to do.
I’ve been thinking about trust. In Christchurch this week thousands of people have turned out to help strangers. And a few people have turned out to help themselves; in one case, to a couple of generators that were powering communications (the two offenders were caught and are being held without bail – the generators are back in action).
In an interview in 1999, recently published on InsideCatholic, Wendell Berry, the American writer and philosopher, talked about trust as the base requirement for a community:
There certainly is a prevalent loss of trust operating in this society now, and if you have enough people who don’t think they can trust each other, you’ve got some serious problems. There’s a famous crisis of confidence in government; a lot of people think it’s useless to vote. If we can’t trust each other to do what we’ve said we’ll do, cooperation is impossible.
Cooperation means working together. If you can’t work together, you can’t have a community. Yes, I think that question of whether or not people stand by their word and take it seriously is a real issue. As I said in that book, I think the fundamental fact of a marriage is that you’ve given your word.
There it is: ‘your word’. A word given by each to the other, and witnessed by the community.
Marriage for me has great power as a metaphor or analog of other relationships. In an intact community, the marriage vows are given before the membership. The couple doesn’t just exchange them with one another. The vows are given before witnesses, who are there partly because they are party to the contract. This young couple is pledging from now on to be to a certain extent predictable in their behavior. It’s a terrible thing to say those vows. Something like that ought to be witnessed by people who will acknowledge that it happened and that these awe-full things were said. And in my own experience the sense of having loved ones’ expectations directed toward me has been very influential, and it still is.
The immediate parties to [a marriage] are the couple themselves and their children. But it branches out. They’re right at the center of the pattern, of the crisis of expectation. If one marriage falls apart, that means that other people are going to have to take more responsibility. That is what a community is for. If you have family failures in an intact community, the community takes up the slack. If there are enough failures, then that becomes a community failure. The community can’t any longer take up the slack and repair the damage and look out for things.
We tend to treat marriage differently to other relationships. If a person betrays friends – cheats them by giving what is theirs to someone else, lies to them, keeps secrets from them about things that affect them, threatens their economic and emotional future- we call that person by the worst possible names we reserve for traitors. Unless the friends are that person’s spouse and children; unless the betrayal has been to turn away from a marriage. Our society calls this by other names: marriage problems – even seeking happiness, or falling in love elsewhere.
Berry says that marriage and community need trust, fidelity, sticking to one’s word.
What marriage does is say to you to stay and find out. It doesn’t say what you are going to find out. When you think this is it, we are at a complete dead end here, the marriage says to you: Wait, stay, and find out. Always you find out more. The thing is too great to be belittled by any decision that you can make about it. This is the same for your relation to the community or anything else. Wallace Stegner said that we Americans divide into two groups, boomers and stickers. The boomers are always thinking that something is better somewhere else, that whatever they have or whatever they are is no good.
And underpinning all of that is Berry’s belief in the Word.
I begin with the Christian idea of the Incarnate Word, the Word entering the soul as flesh, and inevitably therefore as action…. Our words, in sum, always refer to and assume the divine Word. Words are sacred; we dare not speak them falsely or lightly. False words, because they cannot possibly refer to God’s Word, have no meaning. If words have no meaning, there is no way we can speak to each other in community.
And it was going so well until the last paragraph… 😉
KA
‘Do you think a community can exist without religious belief?’Berry was asked. He answered:
‘Probably not. It’s either some kind of an authentic religious impulse working to authorize right behavior, or reason alone. I have great admiration for reason, but I can see that it doesn’t go but just so far, and I think, ultimately, you have to have religious faith for community life to work.’
It’s a good discussion topic, I think.
We’ve agreed that individual morality is not dependent on religious faith – that individual atheists, buddhists, catholics, Mormons, Muslims etc can be highly moral (or the reverse). What about agreed community morality?
“We’ve agreed that individual morality is not dependent on religious faith – that individual atheists, buddhists, catholics, Mormons, Muslims etc can be highly moral (or the reverse). What about agreed community morality?”
## The UK is no one’s example of a theocracy, though apparently it is less secular than some European countries; very surprising (to YTly, anyway) – yet it is managing to survive. It’s pretty broken down in some ways, but by no means defunct.
Is the UK a community? Or is it a group of linked communities?
I didn’t define community – and I’m not sure I even can. In context, Berry was talking about a small country town and its environs.
But I’ve been thinking about it further while I’ve been tying up the boysenberry canes.
How about a continuum? There are some people who, in any environment, will follow a standard of ethics that fits into the ‘do as you would be done by’ category. There are some who, in any environment, will follow a standard of ‘me first, and who cares what happens to everyone else’.
The rest of us fit somewhere in between. We take our morals largely from our environment. So, if we are Hutu and we have been taught that Tutsi are cockroaches, we will walk past their dead bodies in the street without giving it a second thought. If we are Nazi, we will kindly feed the poor little Jewish children before taking them out the back and shooting them in the head. (Both of these incidents happened.) There is no discrepancy between their actions and their conscience, because they form their conscience by the opinions of their community.
Those closer to the ‘me first’ end of the continuum may, in a moral environment that praises ‘do as you would be done by’, keep their selfcentred acts hidden. So, for example, the ostensibly Christian 1950s and 1960s were a safe time, on the whole, to let your children play in the streets and wander all holidays unsupervised. But those children were just as unsafe in their own homes as they are today. There were fewer murders. But those murders there were usually involved close relations, friends, and business associates.
“Is the UK a community? Or is it a group of linked communities?
I didn’t define community – and I’m not sure I even can. In context, Berry was talking about a small country town and its environs.”
## It’s a community composed of, and related to, other communities.
Juridically, it’s a perfect community/society – that is, it is not dependent on another community to provide it with qualities needed for its common good, “perfect” meaning here what it means in Latin: “complete”; The Oxford Union is not a perfect society, because it is not equipped with all the means of self-governance: it is not sovereign. Neither is the State of Colorado, because it is governed by Federal law, & not only by its own. A family is far from perfect in that sense – including the Holy Family, for to call a society “perfect” in that sense has nothing to do with the moral or spiritual character of its members. A “small country town and its environs” is a community/society (unless all social ties have broken down); but not a perfect society.
So the answer to your questions: “Yes”, to both.
As to formation of conscience: it’s something that is done, but, quite how such a thing is possible, well…
Could you turn it around and say a community is a group of people who agree to trust each other (to a degree)?
I was worried sick gama. I forgot the website adress and i had to ask people on Damiens blog if they had heard from you. I had trouble sleeping not knowing about you after the quake. Thank god youre ok.
Joyful,
I am glad you are fine too. I was praying for you.
Regards,
Savvy
Thanks Wayne, Savvy. I appreciate your kind thoughts and your prayers.
I’ve not been affected, but – like most people here – I have family, friends, and colleagues in Christchurch. Most of them have come through okay, too. But it looks like the death toll is going to be somewhere around 300, and they’re saying 25% of the central business district will just have to be bulldozed. It was a bad one.
I was reading this morning that there have been 5117 aftershocks since the earthquake in September. Over 300 of them measured more than 3 on the Richter scale. It’s hard to fathom how people can live and work in those conditions..
Thank god youre ok. says St Bosco. I wonder if St Bosco is thanking his/her god for the people who died?
This is one of my major arguments against theism of any kind, It seems it’s fine to thank and praise your god when someone gets pulled from the rubble alive after x days, but I don’t hear many people thanking their god when 300 people die.
KA
“This is one of my major arguments against theism of any kind, It seems it’s fine to thank and praise your god when someone gets pulled from the rubble alive after x days, but I don’t hear many people thanking their god when 300 people die.”
Diagoras the Atheist made a similar remark on being shown votive offeings made by survivors of marine disasters: “Where are all the offerings from those who did not survive ?”
The objection means only that people are being one-sided – rather than not thanking God in the one set of circumstances, it would be more consistent to thank him in both sets of experiences. So Calvinists say Christians should thank God for *everything* – sickness, disability, death, bereavement, trouble, the lot, as well as for the good stuff. Not that we should thank God for our miseries as such; that would be masochistic: but rather because there is nothing, however adverse to us, in which we cannot see God’s action – if only we have the eyes to see it. AFAICS, they are on to something. God is thanked, not insofar as things are evil, but insofar as they are good.
With a caveat: people should be grateful for their *own* miseries – not for those of others: “Thank God so and so has died in agony” is not decent humam behaviour, far less is it Christian; it’s gloating.
A stranger can’t be grateful for the earthquake or, more important, the misery it has caused; that would be an impertinence of a very unfeeling & very unChristian kind; for the stranger is not touched it by it in the way that someone directly affected is. In the words of C. S. Lewis’ Aslan: “I tell no one any story but his own” – that earthquake, and its effects on the community, is not part of a stranger’s story, in the direct way that it is part of of the story of the people of Christchurch. If there is to be any discerning of God’s action & gratitude for it – it has to be theirs, not that of strangers. So people who have suffered a disaster can be given encouragement – but not *told* what to think. The way in which an event is judged, must come from the person judging – what the judgement is, cannot be dictated.
It’s easy to be aware of evils that look bad. Less obvious are things that are good up to a point, or that look good but are not. And none of this addresses the very large question of what is or counts as evil, or as good. Not that intellectualising people’s problems helps.
I don’t hear many people thanking their god when 300 people die.
The Church has always prayed for the dead and we do give thanks for their lives.
It is a Catholic belief to thank God for whatever happens, including the bad and miserable stuff. If we can’t do that then we seem to lack faith that God really is in control and will eventually overcome all evil by love.
Sure that takes considerable faith, and needs to be carefully distinguished from appearing to rejoice in other’s misery, but I think that KA has a point that we should give thanks for all that happens, the bad as well as the good.
After all, when we attend Holy Mass, we’re actually celebrating a horrific crucifixion.
http://vox-nova.com/2011/02/15/praise-god-in-times-of-sorrow/
God Bless
Ick! That example you give is just utterly repugnant! No doubt partly because there are many who would find it entirely valid to think that such a tragic accident would happen because obviously its better that way since he might grow up to be a sociopath. Frankly, it makes me want to vomit that anyone could even speculate that this is valid justification.
KA wrote: I don’t hear many people thanking their god when 300 people die.
The Church has always prayed for the dead and we do give thanks for their lives.
It is a Catholic belief to thank God for whatever happens, including the bad and miserable stuff. If we can’t do that then we seem to lack faith that God really is in control and will eventually overcome all evil by love.
Sure that takes considerable faith, and needs to be carefully distinguished from appearing to rejoice in other’s misery, but I think that KA has a point that we should give thanks for all that happens, the bad as well as the good.
After all, when we attend Holy Mass, we’re actually celebrating a horrific crucifixion.
http://vox-nova.com/2011/02/15/praise-god-in-times-of-sorrow/
God Bless