Eyre Lines

As my last post indicated, I’ve just been reading “All Things in Common”, and have been seriously persuaded that communism (not the State-centered kind, but the informal kind which obtains among friends) is the way Christians should manage their economic relationships. I’ve also followed a friend’s recommendation and viewed the video of Rob Bell’s 2016 “Everything is Spiritual” talk.

Rob puts forward a compelling view in which, in essence, what we refer to as the “Spiritual” or as “God” is, at least potentially, an emergent phenomenon. Elementary particles group together and become atoms (and display different behaviours), atoms group together and become molecules (and display different behaviours), molecules group together and become cells (and display different behaviours), cells group together and become organisms (and display different behaviours), and eventually you get consciousness – which displays another set of rules entirely. What happens when you group together conscious organisms? Well, he suggests that then you get a next level of behaviour, and that might be what we refer to as “spiritual”.

Rob isn’t the only person to have come up with that idea. I blogged a while ago about Nancy Abrams book “A god that could be real”, which uses the same concept. It does, indeed, stand to reason that a higher level grouping is going to display a different set of behaviours, and (in the usual way of emergent phenomena) one which cannot be predicted from looking at just a large collection of units of things from the next level down.

The thing is, we also know something about how groups of people behave, and it isn’t always an advance on what individual human beings do. Mob psychology, for instance, is something far nastier than you might predict from looking at the individuals who form the mob – and, indeed, something nastier than they would have thought would happen when they became involved with it. There is a famous definition of a committee as “an animal with six or more legs and no brain”; groups of people sometimes look more stupid than the individuals who comprise them, in other words (and that goes for mobs, too). My worry is that what emerges from a collection of humans might be more vicious and more stupid than any of the individuals composing it. Indeed, the result might look a little like some of the Old Testament pictures of God, or the God concept which gives rise to the idea of Penal Substitutionary Atonement.

[By the way, dear reader, if you happen to belong to the conservative/evangelical wing of Christianity, I am not suggesting that God is actually stupid or vicious, merely that some of his past followers have seen God in a way which inevitably leads to that conclusion, and have written down their understanding – though, as some of that is now scripture and some is doctrinally ingrained in much of Protestantism, that might not decrease your unease…]

If, however, I put together the overwhelming ethos of mutual care which Montero suggests is at least a main message of Jesus (if not the main message), things look a little different. Evolutionary biology has shown us that while competition between individuals tends to select the most able individuals, where there is competition between groups, the groups which perform best are those in which the members cooperate the most. This is actually the major reason why a hairless ape ill suited for being an apex predator (namely humanity) has become, collectively, the most fearsome apex predator on the planet; we cooperate with each other.

If we are moved mostly by a spirit of cooperation and mutual care, therefore, any emergent phenomenon arising out of humanity in bulk may not be more stupid and vicious, it may actually be something more intelligent and more compassionate than we can be individually. You can see elements of this in the phenomenon which makes “ask the audience” a better strategy than “phone a friend”; as long as a group is reasonably well informed, the group will deliver, on average, a better answer than any individual member.

In my dim and distant childhood, I can recall my parents saying that we were on this planet to help others, and my response tended to be “If I am here to help others, what are they here for?” (my parents were pretty much Sermon on the Mount Christians, and I was a precocious little toerag). Emergence provides the answer – it isn’t a matter of a chain of one helping another with eventual circularity; if we cooperate, the purpose will emerge from the whole group. As Rob suggests, we will be like the limbs and organs of a greater whole (the Church as the body of Christ), and “what are they here for?” becomes something which is above our pay grade – but something which will emerge. Something looking a lot like the Kingdom of God, perhaps?

And what of the situation if we do not adopt Jesus’ prescription for humanity? We will then, I think, be contributing to the System of Satan. A brood of vipers, in fact…