Moral Feelings

In August of 2013 Thabiti Anyabwile set off an Internet firestorm with his TGC post on the “Ick Factor” in the discussion of gay marriage. One blogger wrote “Your Gagging Isn’t Loving” 

While you can’t base community morality on your individual emotional response to a particular a practice you find revolting, it’s important to note that these kinds of deep, intuitive emotional responses to practices are an important component of an individual and communal moral matrix. It’s not hard to understand that a heterosexual male would find the idea of sexual contact with another male revolting just like it isn’t hard to imagine that a gay man wouldn’t find the idea of sex with a woman to be revolting. This kind of “ick” factor is commonly accepted all over the place. Marty McFly doesn’t want to kiss his young mother whose infatuated with him in “Back to the Future”. Gagging and vomiting is a part of many comedy sketches with it comes to sexual acts with different classes (taboos) or individuals.

Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of good work on what makes up moral intuitions. (Check out his two books The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind along with his TED talks for more background.) Many of these feelings are pre-rational. Haidt uses the illustration of an elephant and a rider. The elephant is the irrational, pre-conscious, emotional brain that informs us of its thinking through our feelings. The rider is the rational part of the brain that seeks to direct the elephant usually with mixed results (See Paul in Romans 7). The rider has a certain amount of influence over the elephant but usually not control, which really isn’t such a bad thing. The rider and the elephant have different kinds of smarts. The elephant is deeply practical, conservative, and focused on self-preservation. The elephant is very aware of its immediate surroundings. The rider can look beyond the immediate surroundings through reason and engagement with other riders. The rider might say “I should eat fewer calories my food supply is secure” but the elephant says “let’s just keep a few extra pounds on us because elephants throughout the centuries have known that good times come and go and if something unexpected happens you might not eat everyday and this fat will help you survive.”

Neither the elephant nor the rider are infallible and they are both having conversation with other elephants and riders. They are both communal. One strong function of the rider is to make their elephant look good among other riders. The riders make up stories to justify many of the decisions of the elephant. Riders fabricate justifications for the intuitive decisions of elephants and share those with other riders. The elephants meanwhile are taking cues from the other elephants as to why what they should do and how they should think about things. This is why sociology of knowledge works.

Riders and Elephants in Moral Tribes

If you were raised in a loving, supportive, nurturing, happy community your elephant will feel right at home with a myriad of central and non-essential aspects of that community. The riders in that community will likewise share reasons why the elephants are so happy and quite likely many of them are right.

Many of us in the CRC were raised in conservative communities with healthy and happy riders and elephants. If things went well our elephants absorbed many cues about what happiness means and what is comfortable and our rider learned rules and justifications for these practices. Clearly devotion to the Bible and these religious practices yield happy, healthy safe spaces where our elephants and riders thrived.

If, however, things didn’t go well for riders and elephants, things go differently. If your elephant experienced your CRC upbringing as unhappy or unsafe, or you were mistreated or abused by other elephants whose riders justified their behaviors using community norms, your elephant is going to be suspicious and your rider is going to make up reasons why the elephant needed to get out.

The same happens in other communities. If your parents were hippies your rider and elephant are going to pick up all sorts of cues. If the hippy lifestyle resulted in abused and neglect rather than nurture and love, the rider might look around for a different tribe and if the elephants says “yes, this feels predictable and safe” they might decide to join a religiously conservative tribe.

There’s clearly a lot of rider and elephant stuff happening in the same sex marriage debate. I was raised in a happy, safe CRC context. My elephant is very happy and comfortable in the CRC. Because I was also raised in a African American urban context AND a CRC Dutch colonie Christian school context my elephant is happy and comfortable in both of those contexts. That’s why I’m a bit odd in the CRC. My rider was trained in the Bible, the Heidelberg Catechism and Reformed Theology and so it tells my elephant “these are important things to help us find our path forward through change” and the elephant says “OK, sounds good.” I also feel at home in the urban, African American context. It isn’t a mystery why Living Stones was a good fit for me.

Living in California

Now what happens when the elephant and rider experience dissonance. When I move to California I experience new things. I meet gay and lesbian people, some of which share my CRC background, others don’t. I get regular contact with gay and lesbian couples, some of whom are raising kids. Now my rider, who can see further and have information far broader than my elephant says “Oh, I’ve heard about this. This is dis-ordered. Elephant, be careful!”. The elephant who usually (especially in my case) trusts the rider says “OK”. But elephants are intuitive, communal beasts and even while the rider is busy (riders are mono-focused, single taskers) doing all their rider things, directing, justifying, looking at things the elephant can’t see because the rider can read, the elephant keeps an eye on the gays and lesbians and is starting to come up with its own opinions. Whereas initially the elephant was suspicious increasingly it says “I don’t need to be afraid of these people. They don’t seem to be doing me any harm. They treat people with respect, they pay their taxes, they seem to love their children. How bad can it be?” Now the elephant and the rider have something to talk about.

When we get together for church, classis and synod the rider and the elephants all have their own separate conversation. My elephant may really like someone my rider has disagreements with, and visa versa. This is why factions are so complex.

The Conscience and the Moral Law

Now it would be easy to say that the rider “knows God because it can read and interpret God’s word” and the elephant just needs to get in line, but that’s not really what our Reformed tradition says either. The conscience and the “sensus divinitatus” are more with the elephant than the rider. Just like there are lots of issues with trying to hear God speak through the Bible for the rider, there are also lots of issues for the elephant hearing God speak through our consciences. Neither the rider nor the elephant are divine and both are fallen and broken. They need each other, both have strengths and both have weaknesses.

Riders and Elephants and Same Sex Marriage

There are a lot of rider and elephant dynamics in this debate. When Thabiti says “gays are gross” his elephant is talking. When an ardent supporter of same sex marriage says “It’s just OBVIOUS that the quality of this gay marriage is equal to that of an opposite sex relationship” that “obviousness” is likely also coming from their elephant. It’s also the truth that in both cases the riders are talking for the elephants and because the riders are what they are they will find, list or fabricate reasons to justify the intuitive moral feelings of their elephants.

This is also the reason that in conversations about race, gender, and religion people will assert that it is important to have first hand relational experience with a group before unleashing the impressive verbal skills of the riders in the culture war. Elephants have their own way of knowing that is important and usually the only way that elephants can learn is by being with other elephants. Elephants don’t learn much or well through books or reasoning. They do, however, learn through story which is why “telling stories” becomes a big factor in culture wars.

At the same time, the riders note that elephant knowledge is by nature anecdotal. Religion and science (including social sciences) attempt to approach reality as a universal. Just because this type of pairing works for these people doesn’t necessarily mean that it is morally right or should be embraced as a norm.

Elephants and Rider in Conflict

Most of what I’m doing in this blog series  is rider work. Our riders are talking. What we are saying is being overheard by our elephants. Chances are if you know me personally and trust me the words of my rider will have more influence with you. If on the other hand even if you know me, but I’m not adopting a posture your elephant has strong feelings about, if I’m not saying “Same sex marriage is an obvious JUSTICE issue in the church so the prohibition is EVIL” or “Same sex marriage is an obvious moral violation so even talking about it opens the door to moral compromise!” then some of your elephants will just walk away and your riders will make up reasons to justify it.

The Open Letter now sent to City Church SF was a classic example of riders and elephants. While the text of the letter pretends to be all about the rider, the long list of names was all elephant talk. “Look at our large and impressive herd. Our elephants are telling you you’re breaking from the pack and we’re concerned.” Their riders had to quickly jump in when in the comment section (and probably back channels too) it became clear that other elephants said “we’re uncomfortable with some of this elephant tactic, it feels like bullying, shouldn’t our riders in formal assemblies be conducting this process and not a herd of self-selected bull elephants?!” You can see how complicated these dynamics are.

Helping Riders AND Elephants work this conversation

What is clear is that this process MUST involve both riders and elephants, and both sides will at different points resist it.

Riders and elephants have to be critical of each other. The rider has the advantage of being able to appropriate a broader sample of information but usually in a narrower range. The elephant can know more things, things riders struggle to put into words, yet elephants struggle to know much apart from personal experience or story.

Story is popular today partly because of its power with elephants. Stories also have their limits. You might say “grandma smoked a pack a day and she lived to 100 and never had cancer” which may be true, but it is not helpful to the community in recognizing that smoking is bad for your health.

If you are reading this series and the primary question you have is “is he for or against” you may be frustrated. Some posts sound like I’m “against” and some sound like I’m “for” but what you’re really hearing a lot of is my rider and elephant trying to work things out. I think among the turtles (am I using too many animals?) there is a lot of rider/elephant dissonance going on.

Riders, Elephants and the Third Way

It’s a very rider thing to say “there’s no third way” and riders on both sides will make that statement. That’s a very rider way to see the world. Rider major in universalistic perspectives like religion and science. Elephants, however, know that local things are also important. “OK, so my rider says this friend is “a bigot” or “disordered” because of where they stand on this issue. I love my friend and I know that even with our disagreement I feel safe with him.” This is elephant knowledge and it shouldn’t, can’t and won’t be dismissed for how I live here and now. If God is here and now God knows and sees this too.

The local church is where riders and elephants must work things out together. The rider says “there is no third way” but the elephant says “I’m not good at rider ways and how many there are but I know we need to make A way together on this.”

This is especially true when there are deep ties of family and community involved. This is why we’ve got lots of non-rider ways of dealing with conflict like avoidance, don’t ask-don’t tell or “my rider says this person is disordered by this gay friend seems to know and love Jesus better than I do at least in some areas. My rider doesn’t know what to do but my I likes his company so I don’t care what you think.”

There probably is no “third way” but we will all find “some way” to live with this. We all ARE living with this in one way or another. There are multiple ways, just like how we deal with other rider/elephant conflicts we have in life. We’re just going to have to find some good ones, and we’ll have to find them together.