I liked this book a lot. As a faithful person, that may sound strange. Especially with all the fighting that goes on right now between Christian fundamentalists and strong-willed Darwinian advocates, it must seem odd for me, as a very religious Christian, to say that I identify and agree with a lot of what I find in Freedom Evolves. In spite of this seeming oddity, Dennett has really expanded my mind here and given me a lot to think about. Although I’ve a whole lot of points of argumentation and, although we will come to different conclusions on the notion of “free will,” I am willing to say with equal fervor that God evolves.
But wait! Before you scream out “Heresy!” let me just say that I think taking a bit of influence from those we despise is probably what Jesus would recommend. It would be, after all, the most effective way to take them seriously as fellow children of God, wouldn’t it? I think so. The answer to why I think that will be the subject of my coming blog entries. For now, I would only like to say that, even as I become vulnerable to the shunned intellectually disabled among us, I would also like to become vulnerable to the shunned intellectually astute among us.
The major thesis of Freedom Evolves is that Free Will (the notion that we have the capacity to choose things for ourselves) is compatible with the notion of Determinism (the notion that, at any given point, there is exactly one possible future). His position on the issue of human free will is therefore called, “Compatiblism.” Dennett identifies himself consistently as a “Compatibilist.”
As Dennett is very clearly a naturalist and a Darwinian, I can respect his viewpoint that the “we,” as human beings are a species; a collection of individual biological conspecifics, formed by the processes of evolution. I would have to agree with that definition of “we,” but its function for the purposes of philosophy should be changed. As an organized group of species members, we are not inert. “We” is no mere collection of happenstance. Rather, the use of the term “we” or “us” should be a way in which we can understand our intentions as a whole. As a group, a society, we intend things. “We” make things happen that individuals cannot make happen. As Dennett himself makes clear in this book, the whole can be freer than its parts. Indeed this, it can be said, is why “wholes” are formed.
Instead of grasping this concept, however, Dennett fails the notion on a social level by continually referring to human beings in only a biological and (largely) individual sense. Throughout the book, he uses the term “We” to describe a general collection of people, all functioning independently (as brains). He ought be more keen to note that when the phenomenon of culture is added to individual, biologically-functioning conspecifics, a new level of Being itself is created. Together, we literally make a new thing. To begin a critique, I take issue that this new thing of society escapes Dennet’s notice.
“We are the species that discovered doubt. Is there enough food for winter? Have I miscalculated? […] Other creatures are often visibly agitated by their own uncertainties about just such questions, but because they cannot actually ask themselves these questions, they cannot articulate their predicament for themselves or take steps to improve their grip on truth (Dennett 165).”
The human person, as an individual conspecific, begins to form, in part, some larger gestalt, which we usually call a “community” or a “society.” Right now, you and I are having a conversation, albeit separated by some time and distance, but a conversation nonetheless. We are speaking to one another as I write and as you read (and then think). When you are speaking to “me” here, you do not face a single, merely biological entity. For, if I am equipped with language and culture (and technology, subsequently), then the being to which you speak is precisely that: a construct of culture. I the person, I the one made of this genetically-bred flesh and bone, am merely a terminal for that thing with whom you actually communicate: my society. This is true when reversed as well: I’m not actually speaking to you, the human mass of flesh, but I am talking to your society (my “audience” as a writer and thinker). Indeed, being separated by time and space, this is the only way that you and I can talk to one another as “I” am currently thousands of miles away, on an island somewhere in the southern Pacific Ocean. Yet because we share a common society, my experiences as a conspecific being can be “uploaded” into terms of cultural transmission and then “downloaded” to you as another conspecific. (In this case, the analogy also happens to be quite literal, as I am literally uploading my thoughts to this blog.) Together, our “speaking” here in this space of thought literally makes something that is one size up the ladder: a society. (“Where two or three are gathered…”) The whole of our culture puts us into place as individual members of it, even as it is dependent upon “us.”
So, think of it this way: The human person is like a computer. On its own, you or I can run a lot of programs; process a lot of information. Our society, however, is more like the internet. It is freer and more “powerful” than any of its constituent parts. IBM’s “Blue Gene” may be a truly awesome super-computer, but even it can’t compare to the data-processing capabilities of cloud computing, done over the internet. Although the internet is composed of many, much smaller data-storing entities, although it depends upon these devices for its survival in general, it is an entirely different mode of being. It has a 'life of its own,' so to speak. Given that, there is no reason to believe that the computer on which I currently type is synonymous with the whole internet. Likewise, I would not make the mistake of saying that one particular mind is synonymous with the whole functioning of a society.
It isn’t the duty of one particular mind to actualize the whole “free-floating rationale” of a society, because it can’t. One mind is only one part. Your concept of “Self,” then must become bigger than just your mind as it participates. It’s stretched, up and down, across the ladder of Being. The proposition of an entirely self-contained and “self-forming” mind is ludicrous, and yet this is a notion akin to this which Dennett is upholding by referring to the to mind of a person as the totality of the Self.
Referring to the quotation above, we do not “ask ourselves” questions. At least, not really. To continue the analogy of the internet, we do not fetch our own packets of HTML or AJAX code. We fetch packets of information written (gifted to us) by others. It is our society which gives us these questions. When we “ask ourselves” something, it is only further evidence that our larger social reality is asking things of its constituent parts. There is no meaning before order. (Is there memory before language?) You've got to make sense of something before you can take part in it and your society gives you that sense. Language just makes things easier. When we surf, we take our cues from this only semi-actual construct known as the internet. In the same way, we can’t really understand the totality of our society as individual conspecifics. Nevertheless, it is this construct from which we take our cues. It is this amorphis construct which orders us for the benefits of its own intentions, even as it depends upon us.
“In fact, we wouldn’t exist–as Selves ‘inhabiting complicated machinery,’ as Wegner vividly puts it–if it weren’t for the evolution of social interactions requiring each human animal to create within itself a subsystem designed to interacting with others. Once created, it could also interact with itself at different times. […] As Wegner puts it, ‘People become what they think they are, or what they find that others think they are, in a process of negotiation that snowballs constantly’ (Dennett 249).”
So to use an analogy, if you as an individual person are a gene, then you don’t get a phenotypic expression until your society (the larger organism) hands one down to you. The only thing that is “innate” to a gene is the gene itself. Everything else, including its expression in an organism, is up for determination by exposure to an environment. Your brain has lots and lots of different intentions (hundreds of different “processing modules”), all working at the same time, and often in different directions, against each other. In order to get the freedom that it wants, your society can’t micro-manage those intentions. It needs an 'operating system,' to use Dennett’s terminology.
Enter consciousness. Consciousness, as an objective phenomenon, doesn’t actually “do” anything, at least not so far as your brain’s machinery is concerned. It does, however, have the very important function of “summing up” the totality of your intentions as an active conspecific. Usually this has the objective of providing this summation to your society. In this regard, then your personhood is not “free,” but constantly bound and directed.
To use another analogy: your consciousness is more a “spokesperson” than a “manager.” It doesn’t really get its hands dirty in the work of cognition itself, but it does make cognition a whole lot easier. That change in modeling from “executive control” to “representation” is not particularly innovative, however. The deeper revelation is that, as a spokesperson, your consciousness doesn’t get employed until it has an audience to give reports to: your society. What reputable organization would hire people it doesn’t need to represent teams that don’t exist? An employer simply wouldn't do that and neither do you. Your brain is a team with nodes that all have different functions. Therefore, it needs a spokesperson because the investors upstairs (this gestalt level of society that thinks you’re valuable as a whole) need to understand what’s going on, but can't afford to become experts in everything themselves.
“We have added a layer on top of the bird’s (and the ape’s and the dolphin’s) capacity to decide what to do next. It is not an anatomical layer in the brain, but a functional layer, a virtual layer composed somehow in the micro-details of the brains anatomy […]. We can engage in the practice of asking, and giving, reasons. It is this kind of asking, which we cal also direct to ourselves, that creates the special category of voluntary actions that sets us apart (Dennett 251).”
But simply because our being forms this gestalt of society, this should not mean that we cannot process information by ourselves. Even as individual conspecifics, we have the equipment (the intelligence) to do so. Now, the analogy of consciousness as an operating system, is a bit oversimplified, but I’m going to ignore those questions for now and try to focus on this problem of free will. For here, let me simply say that it is possible to have consciousness without also having a society. The two are not requisite for each other; they’re just a really helpful tag-team geared more for co-operation than independence. Of course, an individual web designer can code, construct, and run a web page while offline, blind to the inspiration of pages and technologies which already exist, readily available out on the internet. In the same way, a human person can imagine things for him or herself and discern goals and attitudes. We can have dreams and imaginings without words for expression, we can have spiritual experiences outside of religious institutions, we can reason and observe patterns without the aid of education. In short, we can have culture without language. But...why would we want to, when it’s so helpful and efficient to just borrow designs and notions from those who are already successful?
Even without our usually dependency on others, human beings can, to a certain extent (with a lot of energy, time, and effort) come up with designs and notions that can truly be called “original.” When we pass on these adaptations (mutations, really), they become vertical transmissions with the intention of continuing cultural evolution in each successive generation. In short, because we want our kids to have lives better than our own, we have the capacity to experiment. It’s notable however that “truly” original ideas and designs are a bit of a rarity. They’re not very typical because in order to come up with such adaptations; in order to have culture as an individual member of a species (without the aid of others and their language), a very energy-intensive, mistake-prone, and inefficient process of (mostly) trial-and-error is required. It doesn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel for every generation when another person can just as easily show you a wheel and explain how it works. Dennett apparently agrees.
“[T]here is one species, Homo sapiens, that has made cultural transmission its information superhighway, generating great ramifying families of families of families of cultural entities, and transforming its members by the culturally transmitted habit of vigorously installing as much culture as possible in the young, as soon as they can absorb it. This innovation in horizontal transmission is so revolutionary that the primates that are its hosts deserve a new name (Dennett 173).”
Before I turn back to critique here, let me be clear in that there is nothing Dennett says in the above quotation that I disagree with. It’s all very true. Horozontal transmission is a useful and readily usable mechanism. Perhaps we should get a new name for having the additional replicators of memes as a part of our lives as a species. However, I do have some serious difficulties with Dennett’s postulates on culture being used as the qualifications for whether or not something or someone is considered a person. This is what Dennet does, beginning with the sentence which directly follows:
“We could call them [human beings] euprimates–superprimates–if we wanted a technical term. Or we could use the vernacular and call them persons (Dennett 173).”
This is inconsistent with Dennett’s view of consciousness (which I've already allied with). In exploring conscious free will, Dennett has the one particular goal of eliminating the “Cartesian Theater” from our thinking. Consciousness as a Cartesian Theater just doesn’t happen. It's fallacy. “You” are not inside your brain. Rather you are a kind of summation of it, stretched taut over a mesh of flesh and culture. “You” are not in the loop of thinking; “You are the loop.” The Cartesian Theater model simply makes the Self too small to be of use. (Am “I” in the practical reasoning centers, the memory centers, the visual receptors maybe?) Instead:
“[W]e [can] remove [the] Cartesian bottleneck, and with it the commitment of the ideal of the mythic time t, the instant when the conscious decision happens […]. Then we can see that our free will, like all our other mental powers, has to be smeared out over time [emphasis added], not measured at instants. Once you distribute the work done by the hommonculus […] in both space and time in the brain, you have to distribute the moral agency around as well. You are not out of the loop; you are the loop. You are that large. You are not an extensionless point. What you do and what you are incorporates all these things (Dennett 242).”
If human consciousness is smeared out over time and space, as it is, then so too must our personhood be smeared out over time and space. It must be divided up into many many smaller parts, all functioning, all sharing, to create some whole. In that way then, we can accurately say that (however infinitesimally small) a fire has some personhood, as would a hurricane or even a bolt of lightning. In these phenomenon, personhood is extremely limited; freedom is not particularly large, but we can’t deny that, in some capacity of minutia, it is there. Yet again, however, Dennett seems to miss his own observations, preferring instead to stick with that good old Enlightenment model of personhood, founded on a poor definition of freedom, which is in turn founded on the outdated, objective version of (capital-R) Reason.
“Our sociality is a multi-layered phenomenon involving mutual recognition (of recognition of recognition…) and hence opportunities galore fur such distinctively human activities as promise-making and promise-breaking, veneration and slander, punishment and honor, deception and self-deception. It is this environmental complexity that drives our control systems, our minds, into the own many layers of complexity, so that we can cope with the world around us effectively–if we are normal. There are those unfortunate human beings who for one reason or another cannot, and they must live among us in a reduced status, rather like pets, at best, cared for and respected, restrained in necessary, loved and loving in the own limited ways, but not full participants in the human social world, and, of course, lacking morally significant free will (Dennett 169).”
As an aside, this quotation moves me to a great sadness. How many human beings just got thrown away? I feel sorry for anyone who resonates with the above statement. Dividing those “unfortunate human beings” from (one sentence later) “the rest of us,” is an exercise that I can see leading only to loneliness and pain.
Here, Dennett inadvertently invokes the prison of the “normal.” What makes one normal? He doesn’t say explicitly, but the implication goes something like this: You’re normal if you’ve got a normal brain which can give you a normal toolset of reasoning to empower a typically human version of freedom. How restrictive. Emmanuel Levinas would never call this model ethical and neither will I. A good example of runaway morality perhaps, but this version of freedom, so prized by Dennett as being founded on logical reasoning, leaves no room for the Other. Why is it that these naturalists like Dennett and Kane insist on being “Self-formed?” Such a notion is entirely incompatible with Determinism. And, further, leads to the very kind of human exceptionalism that The Enlightenment was supposed to help us overcome!
“Recognizing our uniqueness as reflective, communicating animals does not require any human ‘exceptoinalism’ that must shake a defiant fist at Darwin and shun the insights to be harvested from that beautifully articulated and empirically anchored system of thought. We can understand how our freedom is greater than that of other creatures and see how this heightened capacity carries moral implications: noblesse oblige. We are in the best position to decide what to do next, because we have the broadest knowledge and hence the best perspective on the future (Dennett 308).”
How paradoxical. ‘We’re no exceptions, but we’re the best, by golly.’ If secular humanism, as a system of belief, wants to develop good and (moreover) ethical spirituality (and remember, we don’t need to be superstitious to be spiritual), then it will need first to shed its hold on the Empire of the Human. God has no such sense of nostalgia about the human genome. (Do you suppose God would put the double-helix on a glass shelf and dust it off longingly every fortnight, like an old baseball trophy? 'You know, I made a championship genome once.' Dennett has no "God" as such, but we could easily say that he is guilty of this caricature.)
In order to have an ethical spirituality, Secular Humanism will need to become vulnerable to all the other myriad members of the created universe beside human beings. Those thoughts are for another time, however. Here, I would only like to say that I’m not critiquing Secular Humanism itself. I hold no grudges against people with different narratives of meaning. I only want to critique every form of Empire; every ugly head of fundamentalism.
I think that a truth to discover here is the idea that reason is a very good tool, not an objective or a virtue. We shouldn’t reach for reason in the same way we reach for courage or goodness. Dennett ends up defining free will as the ability to see farther and farther into the future; to reason more thoroughly and anticipate more effectively. This definition, however, is over-reliant on the objective positioning of the human mind. History, and even Science (thank goodness), continue to demonstrate that, although human beings are habitual, we are by no means reasonable. The same is true for our minds. And, furthermore, we don’t need to be reasonable. We might want to be. It’s certainly helpful to be reasonable and logical, but clear thought is not requisite to a good life. (As is demonstrated by every “backwards” alternative community and “crazy” fringe group.) To continue to uphold this Enlightenment-era notion of Reason, more than 100 years past its prime, is to turn a useful crutch into an inadvertent cudgel. I say ‘crutch’ because, using Darwinian models, we must acknowledge that our advancement in morality and freedom is, by even Dennett’s own admission, done by “cranes, not skyhooks.” Good for its time, capital-R Reason, like capital-T Truth, is now too simple to serve our continuing inquiries in human striving. How odd it seems to me that Dennet would throw his allegiance behind a tool instead of a goal.
Let me comment on Dennett’s "normative" statements by making only one point: What the hell is “normal”? Cui bono, my friend? Who benefits? Isn’t that the question that underscores every piece of Ethics and Moral Philosophy after WWII? Have we learned nothing about how dangerous it is to throw around the term “normal?” How much would I like to invite Dan Dennett into a L’Arche community. Here we can demonstrate, better than anywhere else on Earth (in my opinion) that ability (levels of performance) ceases to matter entirely when faced with a paradigm that looks at gift. Gift will always be more important than ability, but that will be the subject of later entries. For now, let’s restrict ourselves to gifts and language and have a chat about memes and things.
Believe it or not, plants are "newer" than animals. Early bacteria on Earth were mostly simple sorts of carnivores, getting resources where they could. I say "carnivores" because the most reliable source of spare parts for a bacterium is...its neighbors. So, on they went, those first little lives, eating each other just to stay ahead of the game. But there's a problem here because, eventually, the Law of Entropy says, that enough energy will be lost in the constant transfer of heat (all that munching and chomping) so that there is no more energy left at all within the system. Everyone dies; a zero-sum game. That is, until at least one bacteria started getting energy from a new source: sunlight. How did it achieve this innovation? Something within its genetic code busted. It became broken. Something got screwed up so that these bacteria started devoting energy to the production of chlorophyll instead of devoting energy to eating other bacteria. A less able hunter, a less able consumer, this new thing would surely just die that much faster, but it didn't. Instead, it spawned every plant that we see today, not because of it's "ability," but because of its acceptance of a random-seeming gift; a deep wound to its Self. Ability counts, but Gift counts more. Let's talk about a human gift: culture.
“We alone can be racked with doubt, and we alone have been provoked by that epistemic itch to seek a remedy: better truth-seeking methods. […] We invented culture (Dennett 165).”
Did we? I’m going to have to answer that question in the negative. Simply because we (the individual, purely biological members of our species “we”) use culture, simply because we have made culture our most precious method of information transference, we shouldn’t be duped into thinking that “we” are its creators. Since culture is the method by which we human beings tend to replicate ourselves, isn’t it more plausible to say that culture has created us? If culture has ordered my life in any way, if it is culture, empowered by language, that gave me a name, then the answer must be yes to at least a certain extent.
But it must never be entirely yes, because, since my society is also vulnerable to my existence as an individual, I affect my society even as it effects me. Think of it this way: You and I (as conspecifics of our species) are like cars built for modern, “first-world” countries. We were made to meet the restrictions and demands of the current and established network of roads and tunnels and bridges that we will undoubtedly encounter: our transportation system (our society). Although certain parts of these autos are not absolutely necessary for travel (catalytic converters, mufflers, smooth suspension systems, cup-holders, seatbelts, etc.), we have these design elements to contribute to the health of the larger transportation system (fewer potholes, fewer accidents, less damage, less death, less road rage, etc.). In these design elements, we can see that the system as a whole is shaping the design of the individual.
Yet that’s not to say that autos need the transportation system in order to function. A few can go “off road,” as we say. An auto with the right “on-board” equipment might be able to (conceivably) travel from coast to coast without so much as touching asphalt. Although this is far less efficient than using the already established transportation system, if enough autos follow the same path, they effectively make a road, not requiring a fully-formed path in advance. In these travels, we can see that the individual is shaping the aspects of the system. So it goes back and forth, doesn’t it? With respect to these last two paragraphs, Dennett clearly understands the latter, but somehow doesn’t understand the former. Or at least, he doesn’t seem to get the connection insofar as societies function as wholes; entirely new entities with intentions different from the intentions of their constituent parts.
And this is most curious, given that he also understands the relatively edgy concept of ‘memes’ quiet well. The major point here in using the notion of memes is to say that humans have culture as a part of our construction. In that regard, we have a “newer” and more complex sort of being than most other species. Dennett uses this notion to combat the specter of genetic determinism.
“It is culture that provides the fulcrum from which we can leverage ourselves into new territory. Culture provides the vantage point from which we can see how to change the trajectories into the future that have been laid down by the blind explorations of our genes. As Richard Dawkins has said, ‘The important point is that there is no general reason for expecting genetic influences to be any more irreversible than environmental ones’ [Dawkins 1982, p.13]. […] Shared Knowledge is the key to our greater freedom (Dennett 167).”
And again, Dennett’s really spot-on about memetics:
“[A human is a] hominid with an infected brain, host to millions of cultural symbionts, and the chief enablers of these are the symbiont systems known as languages (Dennett 173).”
Precicely! I couldn’t agree more. What’s really distressing about Dennett’s comments, however, more than their content (which I have a lot of agreement with, as it is well informed by scientific discovery), is the sense of entitlement that they come packaged in. Always, he is pronouncing the victory, the specialness, of human beings; our species. Time and time again the statement, “we alone,” can be heard, ringing loudly and proudly in his work.
Dennett essentially claims that, because of how absolutely cool this innovation called ‘culture’ is, we are somehow “newer” than other species. In narrative terms, this is comparable to the Greco Roman myths of the Gods who won victory over and subjugated the mythical Titans, their predecessors. ‘We’re younger, stronger, and better looking than you are. Eat your heart out, dad!’ But, even as humans, we’re not really “newer” than anything else around, even by Darwinian standards. Although our complexities as a species are more recent developments in evolutionary history, the process of evolution itself cares nothing for their subjective novelty. It’s humans who make history, not evolution itself. According to this blind watchmaker, all currently living members of every species are equally as new as we are; just as alive and just as eager to replicate themselves.
You can care about the novelty of culture. You can draw a history that makes culture a more “recent” development and, in that, you can participate in evolution; advance it as a creative enterprise, but I’ve got to ask Dannett a question: In this participation, why should starfish, fruit flies, and bacterium be sacrificed on the alter of human ego if they are equally as alive? It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t help us to discover the good.
I don’t know the source of Dennett’s pride here, but I can speculate that it emanates from a severely truncated definition of personhood, which is highlighted above.
“Or we could use the vernacular and call [ourselves] persons (Dennett 173).”
“[I]f we are normal. There are those unfortunate human beings who for one reason or another cannot, and they must live among us in a reduced status, rather like pets […] lacking morally significant free will (Dennett 169).”
So far as evolution is concerned, as individual conspecifics, we don’t need culture in order to survive. We ought not use the phenomenon of culture to classify personhood then, but it should be very clear that the expansion of culture, empowered by language, aids our survival. Dennett’s got some good logic, but, unfortunately, he has no sense of Gift. I only wish to further the ideas presented by Dennett here in saying that, when culture helps us survive, its natural consequence is to create some new and greater gestalt whole, which we call “community” or “society.” In many ways, this is similar to how genes create cells in order to aid their replication. In time, the cells come to replicate as separate entities with intention that differs entirely from the intentions of individual genes. This is especially true in the case of sexual reproduction, whereby seemingly useless or even harmful genes may be saved within an organism for later use by a subsequent generation. See the following link:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/sex/advantage/page04.html
How cool is that!? Organisms, harnessing the selfishness of their genes, to replicate themselves (as whole organisms, not bare genes). Genes that fight malaria is perfect for our use. Having one gene coded to fight malaria is good, but with two, the host is subject to sickle-cell anemia. In being vulnerable to the weaknesses of their genes, the cells harness the genes desire to reproduce in order to further their own reproduction. The cells have, in effect, learned to “use” their genes, swapping them out via sex and trying new combinations when needed. The cells replicate then as separate entities, dependent on their genes, but with entirely different intentions than the genes themselves. Since it is intentions which create what we know as morality, personhood must be larger than Dennett makes it out to be.
In much the same way, we as individual human beings can have intentions, but our desire to survive has the consequence, the “cost” we could say, of creating something larger that will seek its own survival by harnessing us. In many ways, this is a fretful notion because of the ways in which this harnessing can do damage. We must remember at this point, every hateful and misguided political regime that ever imprisoned, tortured, or murdered its own citizens. But this notion is not supported only by its negative consequences. Phenomenon such as patriotism, loyalty, democracy, and egalitarianism are also outpourings of the completely acceptable desire of human conspecifics to be ordered within their respective societies. To be used, as participants, for the “greater good,” as we so often say.
Dennett uses the example of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Though it changes members, thought it is continuously evolving, its existence as a new gestalt allows it to live longer and have much more freedom than any one of its constituent parts. And yet, we must recognize that this is not an undetermined or undetermined phenomenon. The BSO is quite determined. Just as real and just as determined as anything else in human life.
We ought to see that we participate to be free, as Dennett says, but also that our participation has a life of its own. As Christians this is a fundamental truth: The Body of Christ has many members, as Saint Paul said. It’s really true that we all have different gifts. Here at L’Arche, I face this realization every day. I try to do so with a sense of genuflection. Perhaps we can share that with the likes of Dan Dennett.
As a personal note: Things are going rough for me lately. I’m not as good of an assistant or community member as I thought I was. Although I’ve been here for 7 months, my training wheels, as it turns out, are still on. I have never in my entire life felt so woefully underqualified. I have no moral superiority and neither does Dan Dennett. Neither does our species. To reach into my own tradition: It must be God who teaches this humility to us. You can go a lot of places by following Jesus, but one thing you can’t do on that path is build an Empire. With that realization, my “Descent Into Littleness” continues. Stay tuned to see how. In coming entries, I'll be building a kind of manifesto for what I believe and how those beliefs have come to me. I've got a lot of influences to untangle, so it should be fun.
