Christian Well Being Articles

by Gregg Walborn Untitled Document

In Matthew chapter 5 Jesus describes how the righteousness of the Law had failed and how, out of that failure, the world had become dependent upon the virtues of the Roman Empire and the harms it would promote as social and moral goods. The justified harms of Rome that would dominate and then destroy this phase of history would finish their work perhaps 500 years later when the last (Western) emperor was deposed.

Nations rise and fall based upon the justified harms they require to maintain their security, legitimacy and material stability. The cycle is not difficult to see; and, although there are many different versions, the underlying common factor is a dependency upon increasingly unrecognized or intentionally disguised harms that function as social and moral goods.

Typically, the justified harms necessary to sustain a society begin to overwhelm it. Discontent increases. Income, wealth and power become concentrated. The productivity necessary to sustain the preferences of those in power is threatened. Those on the outside find themselves locked in social and economic tiers from which there is no escape. Discontent, when tolerated, is met with reforms that are in fact nothing more than disguised harms meant to favor the preferences of those in power. The more these disguised harms accumulate, some intentionally, others by accident or ignorance, the greater the moral confusion and material suffering. Eventually, “harms” are no longer identifiable as harms and “goods” no longer recognizable as goods unless framed within a network of harms.

The story is the same throughout history. A fresh arrangement of justified harms brings new prosperity until social and economic confusion increases due to distributive inequalities and inequities.

Jesus understood this cycle for it would be justified harmful actions that would nail his humanity to the cross. When Jesus said, “I came not to destroy the Law or the Prophets” but “to fulfill,” he was saying not that he had come to restate the Law, for the Law had been restated many times before. Instead, Jesus came to fulfill the Law by rebuking “the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees” for they had flourished while the purpose of the Law had withered. He is teaching us that the Law, that words and sentences, are not inerrant including the interpretations of religious authorities and judges.

What comfort could Jesus bring those resigned to living a life of poverty, abuse and suffering but the changeless well being to come. He could see no other way, no beam of hope but that of faith, for the struggle to overcome the problem of justified harmful actions and the paradox could not be accomplished through war and conquest. His crucifixion was a call to stop the unending cycles of the paradox, to bring an end to the history of justified inequality, when civilizations and nations are no longer dependent upon disguised harms to produce their social and moral goods.

The Force Behind The Paradox & Harms That Function As Social & Moral Goods

When is an apparently correct and justifiable action unfair or unjust? When is the Law unfair or unjust? Is not what is right absolute and universal for all ages? In Matthew 5:21-42 (NIV), Jesus gives us examples of how prejudicial justified harmful actions can be cloaked by the letter of the Law and false righteousness. In Matthew 5:22 (NIV), Jesus is teaching us that anger, even if one feels one is justified in being angry, is in fact a harm disguised as a social and moral good. Through this illustration of human moral psychology he is telling us how a seemingly harmless social and economic conflict can disguise a serious harm.

But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca,' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.

The attempts of early copyists to change Matthew 5:22 to make it more palatable is but one example of why Jesus’ most important message, the problem of justified harmful actions (the paradox of the right and the good) has been overlooked.

In verses 22-38 Jesus refers to other disguised harms that function as social and moral goods involving adultery, divorce, taking oaths and retribution.

Then, in Matthew 5:43-48 (NKJV) Jesus informs us about the behaviors that will be necessary to rid the world of these disguised harms.

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you sow more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so? Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.

But the essential question remains. What is it that inexorably and relentlessly makes the cycles of the paradox so intractable? The Christ within Jesus arose within the context of his biology. It was a light that would illuminate the path that history was now meant to take.

The problem of justified harmful actions cannot be resolved until we understand the biology that makes the paradox so unyielding and difficult to mitigate.

In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus shared the biology of fear, foreboding and suffering that the poor, the incapable and the diseased endure as they await their moment of death.

And being in agony, he prayed more earnestly. Then His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” (Luke 22:44 NKJV).

And in Mark 15:34 (NKJV)we see the biology of Jesus’ humanity questioning the Christ within him:

My God, My god, why have You forsaken Me?

And in Matthew 26:38-39 (NKJV)

My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death.
O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me…

Out Of The Past—The Biology Of Justified Harm

One of the most serious threats to our human ancestors was the presence of mutually cooperating hominid groups ready, willing and able to harm one another to reach their desired objects of support.¹ Such threats have shaped “in-group and out-group reasoning”,² making it biologically rational for competing social groups to justify harming outsiders (including disaffected insiders) to maintain the cooperation necessary to survive and flourish within their own particular social framework of the good.

This ancient biological dilemma has been preserved in today’s global marketplace of cultures and nations, making justified harmful actions an essential factor in promoting and preserving the “good” each nation and nation-group believes its norms and values represent.

Another key factor in the social and moral dilemmas of the paradox is the role that strong reciprocity plays in social cooperation between unrelated individuals. Strong reciprocity can be understood as “a combination of altruistic rewarding, which is a predisposition to reward others for cooperative, norm abiding behaviors, and altruistic punishment, which is a propensity to impose sanctions on others for norm violations.”³

Paul Seabright in The Company Of Strangers⁴ frames the evolutionary context of strong reciprocity when he writes:

Two kinds of disposition have proved important to our evolution: a capacity for rational calculation of the costs and benefits of cooperation, and a tendency for what has been called reciprocity—the willingness to repay kindness with kindness and betrayal with revenge, even when this is not what rational calculation would recommend. Neither disposition could support cooperation without the other. People given to calculation without reciprocity would be too opportunistic, so nobody would trust them. People given to reciprocity without calculation would be too easily exploited by others.

Research demonstrates that “Altruistic punishment is probably a key element in explaining the unprecedented level of cooperation in human societies.”⁵

As Seabright observes, research experiments have “established a systematic tendency for individuals to repay unkind behavior with unkind behavior even when this rings no benefit to themselves.”⁶ The “systematic killing of unrelated individuals is so common among humans human beings that, awful though it is, it cannot be described as exceptional, pathological, or disturbed.”⁷ According to Seabright, “Even in the absence of slavery or genocide, what Adam Smith famously described as the human propensity to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ has always coexisted uneasily with a rival temptation to take, bully, and extort.”⁸

Justifying That Self Is Good

According to Harvard developmental psychologist, Jerome Kagan,

One of the unique products of human evolution is the automatic habit of imposing symbolic meaning on experience, especially the tendency to evaluate events and self with a good or bad gloss…This universal preoccupation with good and bad is a characteristic derivative of human biology.⁹

Principles, rules and standards establish the social framework of ethically good and bad choices. Yet, individual compliance does not mean acceptance. The feeling that self is good is as variable as the biological differences that define each person’s individuality. The neural and social context of each person’s body and brain biases the justification process. A good example is how people with different temperaments will see the world differently. Individuals who have “high reactive” temperaments will tend to feel uncertainty and fear in situations that other individuals with “low reactive” personality characteristics will not.¹⁰ They also tend to be more judgmental of their own moral shortcomings.¹¹

The feeling that self is good (or not) can be understood as a perception that arises from emotions or “any set of homeostatic reactions”¹² that end up representing ‘the material me’ in terms of a “certain body-state and the perception of a certain accompanying mind state”.¹³

The symbolization of mental images shapes synaptic activity to the degree that the greater the emotional importance of these symbols, the more people are motivated to fixate their beliefs to fit their self-perception regardless of how that perception may change over the course of a lifetime.¹⁴ Justifying that self is good is one of the more important emotional factors in a person’s life. For example, people who “believe that they have been reasonably consistent” and “reasonably stable” over the course of their “lifetimes” will recall “their past in a biased fashion…that maximizes the (apparent) stability of their lives.”¹⁵However, even if a person’s “views on this point change…memory changes accordingly.”¹⁶

Next--The Moral Validity Of Every Person’s Genetic Individuality.

Notes

John Cartwright, Evolution and Human Behavior, (The MIT Press, 2000), 295-296.
John Cartwright, Evolution and Human Behavior, (The MIT Press, 2000), 295-296.
Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher, “The nature of human altruism,” Nature 425 October 2003:785-791)
Paul Seabright, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life in Nature, Princeton University Press, 2004, 27.
Dominique J.-F. de Quervain, Urs Fischbacher, Valerie Treyer, Melanie Schellhammer, Ulrich Schnyder, Alfred Buck, Ernst Fehr, “The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment,” Science Vol. 305 27 August 2004: 1254-1258
Paul Seabright, p. 55
Paul Seabright, p. 53
Paul Seabright, p. 233
Jerome Kagan, “Biological Constraint, Cultural Variety, and Psychological Structures”: 188.
Jerome Kagan, 186.
Jerome Kagan, “Biological Constraint, Cultural Variety, and Psychological Structures”
Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, (Harcourt, Inc., 2003), 85.
Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, (Harcourt, Inc., 2003), 89.
Daniel Reisberg, Cognition: Exploring The Science of Mind 2nd edition, (W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), 221.
Daniel Reisberg, 221
Daniel Reisberg, 221