Is Faith Oppressive?

I will get back to the last installment of my expert knowledge series soon, once I figure out what I'm actually going to write for it - I had planned what is there already, and I want to see where it all leads as much as anyone else (assuming that others are interested). But first, a brief tangent that I was thinking about: is faith in a given revelation oppressive?

Now, of course, such a question cannot be answered for all cases of faith, nor perhaps can a definitive answer be given in any case. I merely want to raise some issues. It seems to me that Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism (and I've seen similar Buddhist statements) make a virtue out of faith and a vice out of doubt. One should believe authority by default; the Bible says it, the church says it, the Qur'an, the Vedas, enlightened beings, etc., and so you ought to believe what you have been told. A skeptical, critical attitude has often been regarded as not simply a misfortune keeping one from the truth (perhaps you merely have a bad luck to not be able to rationally accept an important belief, even though you have virtuous mental habits), but something evil in itself: it is a vice, and it is blameworthy.

Two things have made me think about the oppressive character of this attitude. First, I went to a conference on a text by the medieval Jewish thinker Judah Ha-Levi. The text was about a king who was searching for the right way to lead his country, and who asked a philosopher, a Christian, and Muslim, and a Jew about what he should do. The text went beyond typical religious polemics and actually gave a thoughtful response and some interesting empirical investigations into what should mark a true religion. One can still quibble with the naive trust of scriptures given, but overall Ha-Levi gave a better response than I've seen from anyone else in the Middle Ages, and probably a better response than I've seen in most contemporary apologetics. Is part of this due to the fact that the Jews were marginalized, and had to actually work through their beliefs, while Christians and Muslims have been able to mandate belief from a position of power? How could any believer hold to the obviousness of her faith without at least a history of power backing it up? Even conservative members who feel themselves under attack from the surrounding culture can only feel under attack because they used to hold the more dominant view.

Second, my master's thesis was on concerns about certain interpretations of Zen Buddhism. Some of these concerns were about the social and ethical ramifications of Zen belief: one throws away rational critique (supposedly) and therefore loses the ability to analyze one's society. This lack of critique has led to Zen involvement in WWII, and sexual abuses by roshis in American Zen centers (to put it simply; of course, there are ways in which Zen can save itself, I think). But (to make a claim which I don't have space here to elaborate), it did not seem like the problematic Zen attitudes were any different from expressions of faith in, say, an Abrahamic tradition, in which one puts some authority beyond rational critique in order to have peace (whether internal or communal). But this has led to social problems whenever it has occurred: groups become marginalized and oppressed, because the the group members are considered malformed and cannot accept the revelation that all truly virtuous people accept.

The Jews should obviously accept the New Testament because they already have the prophecies concerning Christ; the Buddhists are obviously wrong because their practices don't have the sattvic characteristics of the Vedantins; the Qur'an is obviously the work of God and anyone who says otherwise is obscuring her original nature as a Muslim; polytheists are obviously wrong because, well, they're just plain stupid, because no one has ever sat down to think through the pagan worldview. And because of this obviousness, we are justified in putting the authority beyond criticism and expecting others to do the same. For anyone who says otherwise, that this is not how the virtue of faith has worked, point me to a single work of apologetics that does not grant a special status to a view which cannot rationally support itself and that deals honestly and faithfully with other positions. Heck, simply get me one that can take simply the general skeptic's position seriously.

Now, of course these aren't the only expressions of these traditions, and not everything is wrong with some sort of faith (although in my more cynical moments I do tend to think that all acts of religious faith whatsoever are problematic in this way). I mean, I do consider it worthwhile to dedicate my life to studying religious thought, after all! But there does seem to be some problem here, and I hear enough assertions by various believers to this effect (that they know best and everyone who disagrees simply doesn't see things appropriately) that something needs to be done. We live in an age of multiple, competing authorities. We can't just wish them away, and each one calls all of the others into question. We now have a better vantage point to see how oppressed groups have been treated in the past, and we have an ethical imperative to act conscientiously.

(To point out a couple of problems with the above broad sweeps, in interest of fairness: early Christianity does seem to have the emphasis on faith even without much power, and one can see a positive role for skepticism in C. S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength. And some Islamic views concerning our original nature as Muslims are content with any affirmation of the unity of the source of being. But I think that the problems I've raised are real enough, even if the narrative is incomplete.)

Expert Knowledge - Part 4 of 4

In the previous posts, I have argued that (1) knowledge is built on expert communities, (2) these communities legitimately structure knowledge claims in a hierarchy, and (3) they can by and large avoid issues of oppression insofar as they stick to their own internal goals without adding in extraneous concerns. Whether I have argued these well is a separate issue, and I am sure that they need (and probably have received elsewhere) much more fleshing out. But in any case, I want to see what happens with religious expert communities. I will first start with the relation of communities to each other, in a couple brief senses; it really is going to be two posts in one, but I want to finish this series and I've already labeled it as as 4 post series. I may (highly) edit this and add in some citations to risk sending to a conference at some point, so please, please, PLEASE leave a philosophical criticism or two on these entries to help improve the mess if you have the time. Or let me know if this has all been said before by some continental guy I haven't read (which would be any of them) and who has said it better.

Novices vs. Ousiders

There is a difference between two different sorts of non-knowers. The first group is that of the novices, who belong to a given expert community for the time being and so are responsible to that community. If one starts asking medical questions, one is beholden to the medical experts if one actually wants to understand medicine; if one does not, one is not really asking medical questions. On the other hand, there are outsiders. If someone does not want to learn about dead white men, then those communities who specialize in dead white male culture (should) have no control over them. So one can be in a community without being considered a knower. A problem here is that outsiders may have nowhere else to go, but that is another (albeit important and relevant) issue.

Essence vs. Existence

There is also a difference between knowing about a particular topic, and knowing how it fits with other topics. A physicist may know physics thoroughly, but this does not mean that her opinion concerning the relation of physics to other sciences (or worse, to politics or religion) has any weight, except insofar as it is knowledge of physics. Of course, this is already extremely problematic; even what "physics" is has been determined by different conversations between different and interrelated communities sharing many individuals. One cannot simply delineate "this" community from "that" community in reality. But for practical and general purposes, there seems to be some sort of knowledge in which the physicist participates, being trained and ratified by a given community within which she continues to dialogue, and I can't think of a better shorthand term for this sort of knowledge than "physics".

I will refer to this division as between the essence of a body of knowledge (what it is about) and its existence (that is obtains within the broader context). There can be a community of experts about (put your favorite pseudo-science here), and they can legitimately have some body of knowledge, but there are also the interrelations between this community and other communities to be considered. Every body of knowledge both is something, but also fits within the larger context of humanity in a certain way, and these are separate issues. "Existence" as I am using it here refers only to how a thing exists, since it must already exist in some way as a communal practice if any community discusses it, but it seems for the present to make a handy technical term so I will keep it unless someone objects. Someone can talk about a phoenix, and even state truths about it (a phoenix is a bird, for example), so it must exist in some way, or we would have nothing stable to talk about. We could (in theory) disagree over whether it exists in physical reality (whereupon I could reach out and touch it) or merely in the reality of social construction (or perhaps, a differently constructed social reality than the physical one and less likely to harm me via physical contact).

The essence of the topic is something understood truly only by the given community; math is understood by mathematicians and medicine by medical experts (although again, these are not necessarily clearly delimited and defined essences which can be neatly separated from each other). The existence of the topic, though, is even less clearly delimited. There are wider communities which can discuss such issues: how physics exists is discussed in the wider community of modern science, for example. But poets and philosophers and university boards all have some relation to the different ways in which the physics community interacts within the larger world, and ultimately, so does all of humanity (and beyond, if we were to encounter other beings capable of considering these issues). Essence then is largely decided within communities, while how the essence exists is decided within ever-increasing circumferences. To fully and completely understand how anything exists, we would need all of the approaches available to us.

Members of a community must, then, listen to those outside of the community in this respect in order to understand their own field better. The mathematician does not need to listen to everyone concerning what mathematical theorems are true, but she does need to listen to others in understanding what math is. The poet may be clueless when it comes to physics, but can both heighten our appreciation of the grandeur which physics shows us as well as call into question its unjustified dominance; for this reason, the physicist may need to listen to the poet to understand physics. In the end, knowledge and communities are both internally and externally constituted and any individual (whether a human being or a specific community) is also made up by the other communities.

Religious Expert Communities

So, where does this leave religious communities? First, different religious communities set their own rules on a lot of things according to their own internal life. Muslims get to exegete the Qur'an, not Christians or Hindus. Evangelicals, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox each get their own communities of understanding their authoritative sources and of understanding. Different religious groups have their own specific experts, and in order to be considered a knower, one must be trained and accepted by these specific experts, as in any other field.

It is one thing to be the spokesperson for a given group; it is another to say that one's given belief really obtains, and this is why I wanted to refer to an essence/existence distinction (which probably makes more sense here with religions than it did with, say, physics). The Christian can argue that, within the Christian community, God's justice needs to have been satiated by Christ's atoning death. But this pulls in notions of justice which are shared by other communities; it is not Christian justice which demands God's act, but some feature of reality which should be accessible to people in general. (In general, any rational argument is such that it should connect together ideas appropriately; other communities may disagree with one's starting position, but if you have a good argument from your own premises, this should be widely recognized or else suspicious). When no one else gets the necessity of atonement, ostensibly argued from concerns beyond those of the Christian community, the Christian community needs to revise its claims. Otherwise, it is stretching beyond its community's own inner life and being either oppressive or foolish, dictating what, say, "justice" is to others without having formed the proper expertise. The Christian community, in this case, can (a) restrict their claims to some specifically Christian form of justice which of course no one else holds by definition (but then, what about original sin?); (b) reject the argument and work within the larger community to come to a better understanding of justice and how it fits with the Atonement (as many contemporary theologians are doing); or (c) revise their arguments so that they actually explain their arguments appropriately to others so that the others can see the internal logic of the Christian position (but then the Christians must also listen to other voices in response).

So the Christian community in this case is making claims beyond itself, as it seems to me that world-wide religions must all do to preserve their claims to heal the human spirit in general. While Christians are the finally arbiters on what Christians actually teach (and not, say, militant atheists or well-meaning religious pluralists), they are not the arbiters on what they say that falls within the scope of humanity at large or within other groups' expertises'. To say otherwise would be like allowing a peculiar sort of Christian math which can trump everyone else's math, perhaps because of some rounding found in the measurements of the bath in Soloman's temple. But this is ridiculous; the community which actually understands math through constant practice and training and in which one can be recognized for knowing math is the arbiter for interpreting Christian mathematical claims, not vice versa. But at the same time, when Christians are confronted by other communities, it is the Christian community which decides how to respond based on its own internal life. It may be oppressive (or foolish) to continue claiming knowledge outside of the community's marked expertise, but there is no single response to having a problem pointed out, as shown in the example above with justice. Religious communities must change based on their own internal principles, as mathematics did in the 18th and 19th centuries when it split into modern math and physics.

Religious Expertise and Laypeople

So this goes some way toward outlining how communities can relate to each other, though it is at best a beginning. But what about the novices in the community of faith? How do they relate to the experts of their faith? Are professors, pastors, and priests more members of a given faith than the common people? That depends on the faith and what it requires for practice; one can practice correctly without complete understanding. The experts in the community decide what is actually the knowledge-base of that community. But, since that community does not have any say outside of its own legitimate principles without becoming oppressive, novices in religious understanding may be the relevant experts in some areas upon which the religion touches. When the experts of the community say that the Bible denies evolution, the microbiologist within that particular church is dependent on those experts for their understanding of the Bible; evolution, however, is also discussed by the scientific and especially biological community, and so she is the expert there. One could also say that married people are better experts on family and procreation than celibate priests, no matter how well the latter have been trained in their own expertises.

So the common people of the religion do lack the sort of knowledge which the experts of their religion have. Further, insofar as religious dialogues are concerned with intersecting expertises, lay people uninvolved with these expertises will be left out. But some issues have broader human concern, and so while many people will have no legitimate opinion about the essence of any of these bodies of expert knowledge, they do have some say on how these bodies of knowledge exist. The working-class person's opinion of what is true in physics is irrelevant, but her opinion of how physics impacts her own life (perhaps in being replaced by a machine at work?) is part of the larger discussion. So too does the person sitting in the pews (or standing, or sitting on the floor, or kneeling in prayer) have some aspect in which her religion is affecting her, as will even the ardently non-religious.

Expert Knowledge - Part 3 of 4

In my last post, I argued that it does make sense to include certain people within the category of expert knowers and others outside as non-knowers. However, this raises the specter of unequitable power relations, with which I hope to deal in this post.

Someone may criticize this view as being elitist, and the concern seems to come up often enough that it should be dealt with. Is the attribution merely descriptive, or pejorative? If descriptive, then it probably fits; so what? If pejorative, then what exactly is wrong?

It is the denial of elitism that is problematic. On the one hand, it is harmful to deny one's own superiority in a given area if one clearly knows more. I rely on my doctor having more medical knowledge than myself; if she were to play humble and average Jane on me, claiming that she really doesn't know any more than I do, or any more than I could figure out on my own relatively efficiently, then she would have trouble curing me.

It also seems that a frank admission of elitism, that some people really do know more than others, that some people really are experts and this is something that it takes years of effort to achieve (and so is not open to the general public for scrutiny), is the ground on which we can even talk of oppression. If people are oppressed, they are actually oppressed. They are actually deprived of some good. To act as though we are all equal when we are not in actuality is to say that those deprived of an education have not actually missed out on anything; that is, they have not been oppressed, and we can all breathe more easily.

In addition, to deny elitism in this sense is to place either an undue burden on the individual, who must now shoulder all responsibility herself for everything she needs, or we must cheapen knowledge acquisition, as if understanding the world and the Other were a simple business. We live and learn communally, which entails our dependence on others who know better than us, even if dependence can be painful.

With that said, the problem with expert knowledge is deciding who the experts are. When we fill the concept of "rationality" and "expert" with content determined by the experience of white males, for example, then this perpetuates a cycle. Men do math, because men are good at math; they are the ones rational enough to do math. Which means that in the next generation, mostly men will be drawn to do math, which means that the stereotype sticks. Maybe a couple women are "unfeminine" enough to be mathematicians, but most women (and all the "real" women) stay out. And of course, examples could be adduced; it was the experience of privileged, rational, land-owning Whites who gave content to the Enlightenment notion of a person, for instance, such that it was a simply matter to consider black slaves as non-persons.

The problem here, it seems to me, is that we multiply the final causes (that is, the goals, that which unifies) of a discipline. We implicitly (since we dare not explicitly) hold both that medicine must work empirically, and that the doctors conform to our image of what a doctor should be. But what is it within each disciple that justifies it? We have our expert community pursuing a discipline; what justifies that community?

It seems important here that we can pick out some immanent criterion, something tangible and readily within experience. If we say that the certainty of math is what legitimates it, then the current experts are the ones who tell us what certainty is, and who can have it. This seems to me to be a way in which those experts in power continue their dominance against minority voices, perhaps illegitimately. But this problem is lessened if we look for a clear mark. What has distinguished the mathematical community of experts? Their unanimity. If a sizable body of people claiming to do math, and who have put in the requisite time for study, come to different conclusions, they could not simply be written off. This is because writing them off would both assume unanimity (which is why they must be wrong) and deny it (since not everyone has agreed). Therefore, this community must be admitted and their claims critically analyzed from within the community, perhaps leading to a redefinition of mathematics.

This can come about because communities are not static. Every expert community can have its common goals for the time being which unify that community. These may need to change; there is no reason to assume eternal essences to disciplines. After all, mathematics today is not the same discipline as of a couple centuries ago. Leibniz saw no need to have a mathematical basis for continuity, because everything in nature is continuous. Modern math doesn't care about the natural world, although it can be applied to it, and no principle can be left undefined. But the changes in math came about due to internal specifications of its goals, and internal processes changing those goals. When the goals split in different directions, we got two different bodies of experts: the mathematicians (favoring logical rigor) and the physicists (favoring description of the natural world). But both of these communities naturally grew out of earlier mathematics.

How does this relate to power relations? The goals of a community are what define the community; these in themselves do not seem to set up unjust power relations. If you don't want to empirically test medical techniques, you're simply not doing what the typical modern medical community is doing. Other aspects (to be covered below) may create injustice, but for the present we are simply defining the communities. Therefore, what creates the power imbalance is the community ignores its unifying principle, its form of life, for tangential concerns. If medicine is defined by being empirical, but we don't even bother to look at the empirical investigations of other sources of medicine or of medicine done by certain minority groups, then we have transgressed the inner life of the medical community itself. But racism within medicine is not to claim that medicine is set up such that minorities are bad doctors; it is to claim that the minorities would be good doctors but are prevented from being such by extrinsic concerns (if minorities would truly be bad doctors, they shouldn't be doctors, since they wouldn't be able to cure people well; I simply don't admit the starting hypothesis). Racism and sexism are problems precisely because they are at odds with the internal goals of the community.

So now the question might be: what keeps there from being a community which defines itself in terms of being white and male, and dedicated to preserved the white male culture? Nothing, really, and I'm not sure that there is anything intrinsically wrong with this. Kant and Plato said some good things, after all, and it would be a shame to lose them. But there should also be room for a community dedicated to preserving, say, black culture. There would be two reasons why our white male community could be problematic. First, it could dictate the concerns of other communities, preventing the black cultural community from existing, or at least flourishing. Second, and perhaps simply a variant of the first, such a community could create exocentric values; that is, values for those outside of itself (and poisoning individuals within, for that matter), which state that not only does the community have its own goals and processes and standards, but that these should be normative for others: people in general ought to study white male culture, since it is superior to other cultures.

Both of these points, though, seem to be illegitimate uses of expert knowledge. The specialist in white male philosophy is only an expert in that area, and so unless she is an expert in, say, black culture as well (and all expertise must be ratified by the community itself), she must defer to the experts in that field when making claims about it. Similarly, the mathematical community can say what it wants to about math, but mathematicians cannot in themselves set the value of math for everyone else (although they can extol the praises of why they themselves love math). There is a plurality of expertises, and experts in one field do not thereby have any claims in other fields until they have proven themselves again.

In summary, then, it would seem that a strategy for reducing unjust power relations in expert communities would be for such communities to a) pay attention to their own internal workings and to hold themselves to such internal standards, and b) respect other communities as being other with their own separate expertise.

Of course, this leaves other problematic issues. Do we say that Nazi Germany was free to abide by the inner life of its own community? It seems to me that political entities have their own problems, not least because the criterion of expertise is missing (there seems to be relatively little knowledge required for political behavior, other than how to gain power for oneself). At any rate, I do not claim to be solving all problems of injustice in this essay; I merely want to lay out some ways in which expert communities can keep their claims to expertise and their stratifications of knowledge-bearers, without thereby necessarily introducing concerns about race, gender, etc.

Now that I have something of a working theory, I would like to turn it to the problem of knowledge within religious communities as given through testimony.

Expert Knowledge - Part 2 of 4

In the last post, I argued that even deductive systems of knowledge such as math are based on socialized systems of expert knowledge. Now, I will analyze ways in which we separate knowers from non-knowers.

If I am a math teacher, and some arrogant high school student claims to know more about math than I do, I am justified in dismissing their claims. It could always be the case that I have a Carl Friedrich Gauss in my classroom, and I am truly in the wrong. Or there are cases when I may be wrong in a given problem on the board and the student correctly points out my mistake, which was a temporary blip on my part and not a product of habitual ignorance. When it comes to substantial mathematical claims, though, assuming typical (and even precocious) students, I don't have any reason to listen to their concerns insofar as I am a mathematician. Insofar as I am a teacher, I should respond to their concerns, but even here, I am the knower communicating to the non-knowers.

So people may agree to this example; no one really likes math, so no one cares if they don't really know math. But what about medicine? People care about their health, and will follow any crazy diet or alternative source of medicine they can find to support themselves. The trained doctor, though, seems to have real knowledge on this score. If the patient disagrees with the doctor, the doctor, again, doesn't have to pay attention to any epistemological concerns that may arise; the doctor only has to pay attention insofar as it means that she has a stubborn patient that needs extra persuasion. This case is more difficult, since there is greater disagreement within the medical profession than within the mathematical. In addition, it is not as though traditional medicines of other cultures have been entirely non-empirical, and they could potentially bring something to the table that modern scientific medicine has ignored. But in most cases, the medical advice offered by average people who have not done the research is bogus. It doesn't matter that it impacts their lives more than math.

This is leading up to the touchy subject: ethics and religion. So it seems justified to have expert communities of knowledge; mathematicians really know math better (as demonstrated by near-unanimous agreement) and doctors really know medicine better (as demonstrated by empirical efficacy). And as seen with medicine, the fact that people care about the subject does not make them knowers. So why should the principles concerning how we live our lives be any different? The person who spends time familiarizing herself with long hours of study concerning how to live well, and who engages in constant dialogue with others doing the same, all the while paying attention to how the great experts in thinking and living in the past have done the same thing, therefore knows better how to live than the person on the street. The person investigating religious truths in whatever manner is appropriate to them, who spends long hours studying the appropriate material and engaging in dialogue, etc., knows the religious life better in a way that entails that the average person does not know the religious life as well.

I want to return to the latter point in discussing some points in the nature of religious faith and testimony. But a problem arises here: while it seems right to say that in some cases, we have the right to ignore opinions of those who do not know, this same attitude has in the past also been used to silence minority voices in order to preserve positions of privilege. So next, I will discuss how relations of power should also introduce a skeptical element into expert communities.

Expert Knowledge - Part 1 of 4

When one gets right down to it, it seems that, at least from our standpoint, all knowledge comes down to expert knowledge. Practice within a field and a developed intimacy with the object of knowledge precedes any statements about logical certainty and deductive reasoning.

Let's take math, for example. Math is the most straightforwardly deductive and certain of all of our bodies of knowledge, and so if I can show that math is based on expert knowledge, then it would seem that all knowledge would be. As a math student, I had to be taught how to reason mathematically. I had to be inducted into the community of mathematicians and taught their methods of argument. When I started learning, the experienced certainty which I had of some wrong arguments was no different from the experienced certainty of many right arguments. My experience of certainty, then, was not on its own a sign of mathematical truth. I had to practice the field and learn how the mathematical community goes about doing things. Therefore, I had become an expert from the experts; it was not a bunch of reasoning which I could just show to any supposedly rational human being and have them come to the same conclusion.

Does this mean that that knowledge was just a human construction, or that there is nothing more than the agreement? Not at all! In math, the experts almost unanimously agree on the main part of the subject. In other fields, by contrast, there is a greater degree of disagreement, and so therefore the agreement does not appear to be the socialization in itself, since the practice of socialization is shared across the disciplines. It would seem that the greater the agreement is in the community of individuals looking at the object, the better our knowledge of that object is. If a bunch of people look at a visible object and agree in their description of it, it is likely that the object is what they see (more or less, subject to metaphysical and epistemological qualifications). If the people disagree, then they may not be looking at the same object, or they may not be equipped to see the object properly (perhaps it is dark). But their report of the object becomes suspect without agreement.

But if we don't have certain deductive knowledge to fall back on, since that arises out of expert knowledge and not vice versa, then the problem of competing viewpoints becomes difficult. And we cannot fall back onto deductive knowledge itself, until someone can provide a way in which I can have certainty which does not come through my own (fallible and socialized) feeling of certainty; even if they could offer anything other than a purely dogmatic assertion to the point, how would this non-perceived certainty be the certainty of my knowledge? But if we start from any system of knowledge which relies on consensus within the community, then Any time people disagree on a topic, we would seem to have reason to believe that they are not really apprehending the object of knowledge. But expert knowledge relies on stratified communities; that is, some people are included as knowers, others as non-knowers, with a range in between. It is this to which I will turn in my next post.