At Best Exhausted Managers

I need to address a difficulty I have in sharing my views about the gospels.  To be fair to myself, I suppose that my notions about us human beings and our thought-lives would be difficult notions in any event, regardless of my religious beliefs.  It happens that my religious beliefs include a belief in the primacy of understanding ourselves individually as households of jostling personality-elements, but those religious beliefs are not attached necessarily to the criticisms I have of our tendency to see ourselves in contrast as single, integrated perceivers of our thought-lives.  The commonplace notion we have often of ourselves as "individuals" is attended unfortunately by the conceit that the self-perception we have of ourselves at any given moment is a comprehensive perception.  It is not.

We have things in ourselves that are below the surface, and we have things in ourselves that surprise us.  None of this, of course, is generally denied.  We accept that we have a subconscious, and a store of things that we have forgotten momentarily, and perhaps things we have repressed.  What we do generally with these realizations, however, is inherently problematic.  We think of ourselves as individuals with flaws, or fissures perhaps, but we assign to ourselves nonetheless the status of possessors of ourselves.  Even the standard Christian insistence on seeing ourselves as not our property because we were created and (hopefully) ransomed by the divine merely assigns the titular ownership of our self-images to another.  None of this addresses in substance the potential implications of our lack of total cohesion.

If we are not totally coherent in our status as individuals, then the question remains open, whether we are viewed properly as individuals with partially disjointed elements, or as collections of partially-joined individuals under the headship of a self that is actualized not in individual realization, but rather in the realization of self-submergence into the role of custodian.  And of course, any mixture of the preceding elements will have the same implications for us: Any allowance that we are each of us comprised of interacting individual wills--any allowance of this in the slightest degree--will stand in implacable binary opposition to the disallowance of this notion.  There can be no mixing of "we are individuals composed of parts" and "we are composed of this individual in part, and that individual in part (and perhaps more)," such that the latter notion does not obliterate the former.

In common interaction, this does not really amount to anything more than the assertion that we do not really know ourselves.  Also in common interaction, however, is the notion that it is anywhere from impolite to presumptuous to abusive to throw that assertion at one's fellow participants in debate.  In virtually every scenario, it would be entirely logical to participate in debate with the common understanding that a person's stated beliefs were held by him or her in such coherence and totality that they would be accepted at face value, and that their genuineness and thought-out quality would be beyond question.

This is all very civilized, of course, but it is not true.  The "I accept that you believe your viewpoint such that your belief is unquestioned in this debate" assertion is certainly an assertion likely to engender respectful discourse, but it is an assertion that is also a convenient social construct, and it does not sit well with any comprehensive definition of "truth."  It is, after all, the responsibility of participants in debate to question themselves constantly about their own beliefs, and about the genuineness of their own beliefs.  It's just not polite for other people to intrude into that business.

The problem for me arises with the notion that any philosophical contention can be a subject for respectful debate, yet I find myself drawn to the idea that people do not speak directly for themselves as individuals, but rather as spokesperson-managers of "households" of jostling personalities.  This idea, of course, makes it surely an awkward undertaking to introduce said idea into debate.  Embarking on a debate with "I accept that you really know what you believe, but I want to argue that none of us really knows what we believe" would seem to be a trifle difficult.  Couple this with the assertion--which is really a compliment to one's debate opponents--that each of us in any debate will question constantly whether we individually really believe what we say we believe, and the whole scenario can become difficult indeed.

I am thinking of this particularly because of a recent post in P. Z. Myers' Pharyngula.  Myers writes:

When I say what I am, that I’m an atheist, believe me. I’ll return the favor by accepting that you actually sincerely believe in your goofy mythology.

 Myers also writes:

One last thing I really detest finding in my mailbox: mindreaders. You know the type: they tell you that everyone has a god-shaped hole in their heart, or that all humans are hardwired to seek god, and therefore they know deep-down that I actually believe in their god already. No. Humans throughout our history have been looking for explanations for phenomena in the environment — we are pattern seeking animals. If we can’t find a pattern that fits, we tend to invent one, and god is just a one-size fits all stop-gap explanation that people have stuffed into the lacunae in their understanding of the world. I’ve never found deities to be satisfying. I do find people who try to tell me what I really think to be irritating.

I do not think it would be unduly presumptuous of me to extract from Myers' post that he believes humans are "hardwired" to be "pattern seeking animals."  Insofar as Myers is addressing the desire for religion to be found (at least in part) in the outworkings of unsurprising information-handling in sentient beings, the point is well taken.  Ordering, categorizing, predicting, and extrapolating from a limited amount of available data is how our minds work.  Making convenient over-generalizations, unfortunately, is also how our minds (and psyches) work--hence any number of insipid "evidences" and "proofs" of the existence of the divine.

Unfortunately, we are also hardwired to see patterns in ourselves.  We have a set of physiological tools with which to interact with the world, and whatever momentary consciousness (when, at least, we are awake and conscious) happens to hold sway in that experiential cockpit defined behind our eyes and between our ears is who "we" define ourselves as.  All other elements of ourselves are at least crudely rank-ordered below our "real" selves.

We have no warrant to seek to impose our will (or to seek to impose a pattern) on the elements of ourselves, as though those elements were foreign to ourselves.  Neither have we warrant to impose will or pattern on the elements of ourselves in the pretense that such elements are seamlessly parts of ourselves.  We know that such things are ludicrous.  And yet the expectation of civilized debate is that we would accept without question someone's assertion that "I decided on atheism thirty years ago and I have never doubted it" or "I came to belief in Christ thirty years ago and I have never doubted it," while an incidental assertion from a debate participant that "I made a decision to marry so-and-so thirty years ago and I have never doubted it" would be met with an internal eye-roll.  People's thought-lives just don't work that way.

To address the immediate problem that bedevils me--the problem of debating the proposition that none of us can truly stand as a single spokesperson of our raucous inner households--is just part of the larger problem of addressing life in general on the same terms.  The teachings of Jesus are superficial and stilted--at least in effect--when we have a superficial and stilted view of ourselves.  We have to tell ourselves and everybody else that human beings are roiling, squirming masses over which our identifiable moment-by-moment selves are at best exhausted managers.