CHURCH AND STATE AS SEMICULTURES
edition date 11/07/06
F Richard Singer III mailto:pndp@sbcglobal.net and Paul Zeiger mailto:paulzeiger@aol.com
Abstract: A complete culture is conceptualized as a community whose institutions provide the means for its members to at least minimally satisfy all of their basic human needs. The adjective ‘complete’ is used because the term ‘culture’ is also commonly used in reference more limited communities. A community is a semiculture if at a minimum it sustains social practices that meet some major parts of its member’s basic human needs. This term is intended primarily to emphasize the cultural aspects of church and state and to focus on the similarities and difference in the way they relate to basic human needs. Some parameters for thinking about church and state are considered. Some suggestions are given about how these parameters might be used to provide a perspective on the relationship between church and state. This is augmented by a panel discussion in which several imaginary characters consider some church-state issues. These characters have not reflected on a conceptual analysis of church and state. Finally the conceptual analysis along with concepts from Descriptive Psychology are use to reflect on the panel discussion.
Preliminary Remark: This is a conceptual paper, i.e. it develops and illustrates concepts rather than uses them to discuss some state of affairs these concepts are intended to help us access. Although we draw on a variety of specialized concepts taken from Descriptive Psychology, they are used in such a manner that an ordinary understanding of these concepts should be sufficient for the purposes of this paper. For more perspective how these concepts are formulated see Appendix 0. For a detailed account of them see (Shideler, 1988) or see the concept dictionary-encyclopedia in the Descriptive Psychology section of the website indicated above.
SECTION 0
INTRODUCTION TO THE MAIN CONCEPTS
Complete Cultures: A
human need is basic if behavioral options would be severely limited if it were
not met. A basic human need is vital if behavior is impossible without it. A
complete culture is conceptualized to be a community whose institutions provide
the means for its members to at least minimally satisfy all of their basic
human needs. Furthermore, a complete culture is self-contained in the sense
that its main institutions can functions without support from any external
communities. Most cultures will also provide opportunities for members to
enhance their behavior potential in a multitude of realms of interest. Except
for emphasis, the phrase ‘complete culture’ will be abbreviated as ‘culture’.
Multicultural: X is a subculture of Y if X is a culture in its own right and if most of the members of X would be willing to regard themselves as also members of Y. For instance, American Culture is a subculture of Western Culture, since most Americans think of themselves as culturally American. Ordinary language also uses the term ‘culture’ for communities that are not capable of providing their members the opportunity to fulfill all of their basic human needs. One of the core functions of such communities is to provide a way of life that gives members an identity status for significant aspects of their way of living. Since many members think of being an X as an extremely important aspect of who they are, the term ‘identity culture’ could be used to distinguish such communities from cultures and their subcultures. However we will not use this concept except to say that a community of any type is multicultural to the extent that it contains different but interdependent identity cultures.
Comprehensive Paradigms: A detailed formulation of the concept of a paradigm that we are using can be found in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. For our purposes it should be sufficient to note that a paradigm utilizes a network of conceptual relationships for some realm, but that it goes beyond this to include core beliefs and commitments. It presumes to know what this realm is like and practice in relation to this realm. While a human H will have ordinary paradigms for dealing with a multitude of ordinary and specialized realms, H will probably have a broader paradigm. This will include a cosmic version, i.e. some way of looking at the nature of the universe and the way that humans fit into the general scheme of things. These concepts and the beliefs and commitments expressed using them are likely to be so intertwined that they will routinely be used unreflectively. Separating concept from beliefs may not even be considered. This conglomerate is a comprehensive paradigm. It will contain both ordinary and cosmic components. Its realm of interest potentially includes everything. This means that while it may not explicitly focus attention on many ordinary matters, it influences everything that H thinks about or does, and there will be no act or thought that cannot be judged by the paradigm. The comprehensive paradigm used by H is likely to be a rather faithful version of the comprehensive paradigm of some community that is central to H’s way of life. Comprehensive Paradigms gives a paradigm case formulation of this concept.
Spiritual Needs: In Spirituality (Shideler, 1992, p33), the spiritual is conceptualized as dealing with the ultimate, totality, boundaries, transcendence, timelessness, and holiness. Roughly speaking, a basic human need is spiritual to the extent that it relates to longings for something beyond our mundane wants and desires. One prevalent spiritual need relates to comprehensive status concerns, i.e. to the place we have in the greater scheme of things.
Temporal Needs: A need is temporal to the extent that it relates to ones ability to engage in a variety of ordinary behaviors. Some vital temporal needs are biologically apparent, such as the needs for oxygen and food. One basic temporal need is for routine safety. This is our need to feel that our basic wellbeing is not being continually threatened by external circumstances beyond our control. Although not vital, since behavior is clearly possible without routine safety, our behavior options are likely to be dominated by any major lack of it. Meeting this need is an essential purpose of governments.
Note: We will talk of a community as acting and having actor characteristics, such as interests, values, beliefs, etc. An intuitive notion of what this entails should be sufficient for the purpose of this paper.
Semicultures: A community is a semiculture if at a minimum it sustains social practices that meet some major parts of its member’s basic human needs. This is a minimal condition for being a semiculture. A semiculture may go far beyond this, having many institutions that not only support basic human needs but that also help humans enhance their behavior potential in a multitude of ways. Since a complete culture is a community whose institutions enable its members to at least minimally satisfy all of their basic human needs, a complete culture is a special case of a semiculture. Two types of semicultures, that may or may not be complete, are conceptualized below. However there is no conceptual reason that a culture must contain either of these types.
Global Churches: A global church is a semiculture sharing a comprehensive paradigm and having social practices dedicated to all of the spiritual needs that it deems basic for all humans, although it may only focus on the spiritual needs of its own members. Since a global church will consider the fulfillment of temporal needs as a basis for the spiritual life rather than as merely an end in itself, a global church may also have institutions dedicated to some of the temporal needs of humans. (This is not meant to imply that the satisfaction of spiritual needs is the sole reason for existence of a global church, but that satisfaction of those needs serves to distinguish global churches from other kinds of semicultures.)
The Physicalistic
Semiculture: A physicalistic cosmic version is one claiming that everything
is reducible to matter and energy, usually as understood in the science of physics.
While many scientists do not have a physicalistic cosmic version, the
impressive power of empirical science has made such a cosmic version plausible
to many people. There are enough adherents of physicalistic cosmic version who
share a comprehensive paradigm to constitute a semiculture. This semiculture
has an epistemology that says all empirical knowledge can be reduced to the
laws of physics and that the only reliable way to validate knowledge is through
studies that can be replicated. See, for example, (Margulis,
2005). The presence of a physicalistic global church, how it would meet
spiritual needs by denying the existence of anything supernatural and how this
can affect church-state interaction is considered later. For an account of
physicalistic cosmic versions see (Dawkins, 1996) (Dawkins, 1998) (Goodenough, 1998).
Sovereign States: A sovereign state is a territorial community having social practices dedicated to some important basic temporal needs its members. It must have an institution of government, which addresses the temporal need for safety. However altho the term ‘state’ is often used for the government, in this paper we use this term for a broader concept that includes more than the government. A state will have other institutions that address basic temporal needs. In particular, it must have institutions that at least support basic economic needs, such as the need for nourishment and protection from the elements.
Note: When a church and a state have the same members, they may or may not be considered as the same semiculture. This depends on whether or not they have independent institutional networks. It also depends on how most members of the church and the state think of their cultural identity.
Terminology:
The term ‘semiculture’ is only used in this section. It is used as a temporary
heuristic device to focus attention on the cultural aspects of church and
state. We have not even tried to imagine other communities we would call
semicultures. The adjectives ‘global’ and ‘sovereign’ are added because
ordinary language uses the terms ‘church’ and ‘state’ in a variety of ways that
are not cultural. The term ‘church’ may refer to a building or a specific
congregation that is a community using that building. It may refer to the
network of institution for a religious community. Likewise, ‘state’ may be used
for a political subdivision that is not a semiculture or it may be used to
refer to a government that is an institution or an institutional network rather
than a community. Here the term ‘sovereign state’ includes non-governmental
institutions. An institution X is an institution of a sovereign state if X is
intertwined with the government of that state in the sense that X is
significantly sustained by the government or its internal affairs are
significantly within the purview of the government. Although the conceptual
distinction between a sovereign state’s institutions and independent
institution’s allows for borderline cases, there are clear examples of each. American labor unions would currently be classified as
institutions of the
SECTION 1
GLOBAL CHURCH CONCEPTS
This section develops only a few global church concepts,
augmenting the ones given earlier only to the extent needed for the sections on
church and state. Although some comments indicate ways in which global churches
may vary, parameters are suggested rather than formulated. The focus is on
which basic spiritual needs a global church would be expected to support.
Global Churches: A global church was conceptualized as sharing a comprehensive paradigm and having practices dedicated to all of spiritual needs that it deems basic for all humans. Since it will consider the fulfillment of temporal needs as a basis for the spiritual life rather than as merely an end in itself, a global church may also have institutions dedicated to some temporal needs.
Each of the great religions of the world qualifies conceptually as a global church. So would some branches, as long as they provide the main way that members think of their spiritual identity and satisfy their spiritual needs. For instance, Roman Catholics may constitute global church. Protestants probably do not, although traditional Protestants may. Since ‘global’ does not relate to size, a very small community can be a global church. A global church G is global in several senses. Unlike a sovereign state, G has no territorial boundaries. G is concerned with all spiritual needs, basic and otherwise, of all humans. Typically, membership is open to anyone who accepts what G considers as spiritually essential, and membership whether formal or informal must involve a self-assigned status. For instance, to be a Buddhist one must think of oneself as being a Buddhist
Attitudes within G can vary in how members view their comprehensive paradigm. G is fundamentalist to the extent that members are expected to (and do) adhere to what are considered the immutable truths of their beliefs and their essential practices. G is ecumenical to the extent that they regard other global churches as sister churches and are open to major aspects of other comprehensive paradigms. G is evangelical to the extent that an influential part of its membership makes an effort to bring all humans into the fold. A fundamentalist church may or may not be evangelical. It may even try to destroy non-believers or merely act as if non-believers must come to them. An ecumenical church is less inclined to be evangelical, but it might be if it considers the advantages of its own paradigm to be significant. G is mystical if direct personal experience of the divine is central to its comprehensive paradigm. (Although mysticism and fundamentalism are logically independent, they have tended to occur together in Judaism, apart in Islam, and in uncomfortable coexistence in Catholicism.) G is politically active if it has core practices aimed at influencing the political sphere. This characteristic is important in multi-religious societies.
Basic Spiritual Needs: The broadest spiritual needs relate to comprehensive status concerns. The core of these is a need for some sense of belonging in the greater scheme of things. For many this involves making sense of the universe, usually in terms of a comprehensive paradigm with a substantive preeminent cosmic version. Substantive means having a commitment to what there really is. Preeminent means that while other versions might be intellectually acknowledged, no other version is a live option. Since a comprehensive paradigm usually operates in an implicit fashion, most purely spiritual needs are basic but not vital. Behavior is possible without comprehensive status, although most global churches would claim that without it life would be spiritually impoverished. However even an implicit comprehensive paradigm can have an impact on almost anything a person does. For the spiritually-oriented person even the most mundane actions connect to spiritual purposes, somewhere up the significance ladder See the idea of ‘Under the aspect of eternity’ in (Shideler, 1985, Chapter 2). This partially explains the tendency for e.g. The Hasidic community to have spiritual concerns penetrate all mundane activities. Naturally this creates a huge overlap of concerns common to both church and state.
It is time to expand on some such spiritual needs, taking the practices of global churches and their members as a starting point for what this need has been and may continue to entail. This suggests at least seven basic types of interrelated needs that we call spiritual community, intrinsic spiritual practices, moral compass, integrated purpose, external support, supernatural safety, and confronting mortality.
Spiritual Community: Images of sages meditating on mountaintops notwithstanding, hardly any person with a spiritual life goes it alone. Even persons of the stature of Theresa of Avila and Francis of Assisi had mentors and followers. One’s spiritual community is the maintainer of the comprehensive paradigm of its spirituality. It also provides the participants for spiritual practices.
Intrinsic Spiritual
Practices: An intrinsic practice is one for which no motivational
explanation is called for. Mundane examples include enjoying a tasty meal, a
delightful concert, or a great massage. “Intrinsic practice” contrasts with
“instrumental practice” – those practices done in order to accomplish something
else. A person lacking intrinsic practices has no way of terminating, even for
himself, a chain of questions of the form: “Why did you do that?” Thus
intrinsic practices provide a boundary for chains of motivation. Persons
lacking such a boundary are vulnerable to depression (Bergner, 1998). Intrinsic
spiritual practices might include the singing of hymns or chants, prayer,
meditation, or bringing others into the fold.
Moral Compass: Although different religions have different moral guidelines, all stress moral competence in some form. This competence can be expected to be acquired the same way as any other competence: by practice and experience in the practices that call for it. Most communities leverage this experience with some kind of guidance toward right living, e.g. a scripture, a trusted spiritual leader, or some kind of internal revelation, perhaps in meditation or prayer. The moral compass can never solve all problems of choice, that would violate free will, but it is important that each person not start from square one in matters moral.
Integrated Purpose: In a mundane sense, saying that life has no purpose is preposterous. We live immersed in an ocean of purposes. It is not the scarcity of purposes that plagues us, but their overabundance and apparently arbitrary character. The basic spiritual need is how to chose among purposes and actions, what to do about our tendency to go in many directions or even collapse in confusion. Altho this need is not vital, failure in meeting this need makes one feel like chaff in the wind. However, having some way to chose between purposes is only the basic part of the spiritual need for integrated purposes. To have an enriched behavior potential, we cannot merely accept the purposes we find motivating us. We need to justify and evaluate what we have done, place it within a moral order, judge the extent to it makes sense. This may not be a basic need, but without something to further integrate our purposes, our behavior potential narrows. The significance ladder from the concept of a behavior description can be used to describe ways in which humans integrate their purposes. What serves this integrated purpose need may not come from a global church. Being driven to accumulate wealth or power may do. Pure hedonism may do. What most global churches maintain is that something ultimate is needed for our spiritual well-being. They may believe that not only do our purposes need to be integrated, they need to be integrated with integrity, that all the parameters of our behavior need to be in harmony with each other, e.g. purpose with knowledge, competence, performance, etc. Particularly important for integrity is that the upward significance chain from an action be harmonious at every step of the way, all the way to the top, which is where spirituality often comes in.
External Support Needs: Desire outstrips our personal powers. Prayer for forgiveness and other religious practices not only meet safety needs, they also illustrate to the need humans feel to have a access to a power beyond our own inadequate powers. Although supernatural assistance is not the only way to meet to obtain external support, the need for supernatural assistance has been felt in a wide variety of manners and ways. The common saying ‘there are no atheist in foxholes’ illustrates this. Prayer is used to help insure the success of specific enterprises and the realization of specific aspirations. Most important supernatural assistance is deemed essential for rooting our life and values in the divine will. Without this, many feel that we not only fail, we perish. Nor is it only the gods who may provide supernatural assistance. A rabbit’s foot may even help. A global church that denies the existence of the supernatural must have an alternative way to satisfy this external support need. Since a vast number of humans have at times turned to the supernatural for such support, finding a widely acceptable alternative may be difficult. The concept of the supernatural may be taken in the ordinary way it is used by most people. For a developed concept, see Natural and Paranatural and Supernatural.
Supernatural Safety Needs: That doctrine has played a major role in the life of global churches seems evident, and this is one reason why a comprehensive paradigm with a substantive preeminent cosmic version was suggested as a central spiritual need for integrated purposes. However doctrine indicates more than this. For many people there seems to be a spiritual need for detailed certainty about what to believe and what to do about the realm of the spiritual. Especially relevant is what to believe and do about the supernatural. The realm of certainty for the vast majority of humans past and present includes beliefs about the supernatural. Even among people who do not believe in the supernatural, most explicitly deny its existence. So we consider it as highly plausible that spiritual needs include some way to deal with the supernatural. Even if this need is not basic for everyone, it certainly been a major concern for many. We illustrate this not as evidence for such a need, nor to assert either the existence or the nonexistence of the supernatural, but in order to better understand its role in communities.
Although the practice of making animal or human sacrifices has been used to seek supernatural assistance, it even more illustrates a way in which people have tried to satisfy a need for safety from the wrath of the gods. Penance and rites of confession have been used for similar reasons. However the actions of the gods are not the only supernatural activity from which safety has seemed to be needed. Witches have been burned and demons exorcised. Even people who do not believe in such beings may know protection strategies from vampires and werewolves. At a much more mundane level, people may avoid crossing the path of a black cat, take care not to step on a sidewalk crack, know that breaking a mirror causes seven years of bad luck, etc. What child has not felt fear when walking at night past a cemetery, even if claiming that ghosts do not exist?
Mortality
Confrontation Needs: Intertwined with the needs for external support and
safety from the supernatural is an awareness of biological death. Although we
may be able to postpone thinking about our own death, most of us will not be
able to avoid thinking about the death of others. The need to cope with the
death of loved ones is a spiritual need that no purely temporal institution has
been able to meet. It is one in which religious practices have had a central
role from as far back as we know. Awareness of the death of others confronts us
with our own biological mortality. What if anything comes after and how does it
relate to the life we lived? Consider the concept of reincarnation. Consider
the concepts of heaven and hell. The Protestant doctrine of justification by
faith and the Catholic sacrament of last rites are indicative of the attitudes
that nothing we can do is adequate to insure our safety after our biological
death. To cope with this, most humans appeal to some global church, even if it
tells them to fear nothing for they will cease to exist. Even the affirmation
of the beliefs of some global church can help meet this need. Acting as if this
alone is sufficient has been called fire insurance by some whose faith is a
more significant part of their life.
SECTION 2 SOVEREIGN STATE CONCEPTS
This section develops sovereign state concepts only a little beyond what is needed for the sections on church-state interaction. The presentation of the concept of a sovereign state is a paradigm case formulation followed by some parameters. The general paradigm case is a nation state, which is currently a prevalent type of sovereign state. After presenting this paradigm case, some allowable transformations are indicated. These yield additional cases of sovereign states that are not instances of what we used as the general paradigm case.
A General Paradigm
Case of a
(0) It possesses a defined territory. To be sovereign is to be recognized as having the final political jurisdiction over that territory. The majority of human beings in this territory will typically think of themselves as fundamentally one people united by bonds that are stronger than any divergent tendencies.
(1) Although the central institution of a sovereign state is a government that is related to all its other institutions, a state is more than its government. It government is intended to defend the state from external aggression and insure domestic tranquility. In line with this, it will act broadly with the purpose of promoting the general welfare of the state as a community. A distinguishing feature of a sovereign state is that its government is the only institution commonly recognized as having the legitimate authority to use extreme measures of coercion, including property confiscation and imprisonment and even deadly force in a wide variety of situations.
(2) A sovereign state will have a network of interrelated economic institutions, addressing not only vital economic needs but also providing opportunities for enhancing the material wellbeing of its members. Some economic institutions will be governmental and all of them will be subject in many ways to governmental jurisdiction and regulation.
(3) A sovereign state will have traditions, and perhaps even a constitution, that delineate governmental powers and the limitations of these powers. All these define the arena over which the sovereign state has final jurisdiction.
(4) The jurisdiction and legitimate right of a sovereign state to exercise this jurisdiction is recognized by almost everyone residing in its territory and by other sovereign states.
(5) Most persons within the jurisdiction of a sovereign state will be recognized as citizens having established rights and privileges and not all of these rights and privileges will be available to residents who are not citizens. It is only the citizens who are fully members. However there may be different classes of citizens having different rights and privileges.
Allowable
Transformations: A state meeting all of these is called a nation state.
Transformations provide for sovereign states (e.g. The Soviet Union, the
(A) Weaken (0) in various ways, up to the point of allowing the bond to depend only on the coercive authority of the state
(B) Narrow the scope of government action to promote the general welfare
(C) Significantly weaken the role of government in the economic life of the community
(D) Omit (3)
(E) Weaken (4) to being recognized by a class having sufficient power to control the government
(F) Modify or omit citizenship, using various classes of subjects, such slaves or serfs or nobles
Governmental Descriptions: The parameters below are for thinking about sovereign states by focusing primarily on government. The authority parameter indicates anything that relates to the authority allowed to government. The welfare parameter indicates anything about the governmental role with respect to the general welfare, including its role in relation to non-governmental institutions. The participation parameter indicates anything about how citizens can participate in governmental affairs. The structural parameter indicates various types of feature involving the structures and organization of governmental institutions. In what follows, S denotes an arbitrary sovereign state.
Authority Parameter: S is totalistic to the extent that it acts as a complete culture that claims final authority over all communities within its territory and all aspects of the life of these communities and their members, and uses government to maintain this authority. S is libertarian to the extent that its government claims only the authority to maintain sufficient order to enable its citizen to live with as little threat as one could reasonable expect to their life and wellbeing from the coercive actions of others. In between are constitutional states in which the powers and limitations of delineated either in a constitution or in other recognized documents or traditions.
Welfare Parameter: This parameter indicates anything about how the government may influence the welfare of those within its territory, regardless whether this is or is not implemented thru the direct use of governmental authority. S is a general welfare state to the extent that scope and obligations of the government to affect the general welfare is interpreted and implemented broadly. A general welfare state has a government that has a significant impact on educational and health care institutions within the state, perhaps even having these as governmentally managed or controlled. S is privatized to the extent that non-governmental institutions have an impact on the general welfare. S is collectivized to the extent that governmental institutions are the main ones having an impact on the general welfare.
Participation Parameter: S is democratic to the extent most of its members are citizens and that its institutions provide effective opportunities for all of its citizens to participate in the government and influence any institution having a significant influence on their life. S is oligarchic to the extent that an elite group has influence on the government. S is autocratic the extent that one person has overwhelming influence on the government. This parameter also indicates the specific ways in which citizens and other members participate. For instance, it might indicate which citizens are eligible to serve on a jury. It might also include “sunshine” rules, which regulate public access to the workings of government.
Structural Parameter: This parameter indicates the main types of branches of government and the relationship they have to each other. It indicates the way in which powers are separated or integrated. It indicates how and to what extent governmental powers are centralized or decentralized. It indicates how continuity of government is maintained.
Relationship between Parameters: Although the parameters are conceptually independent, there may be various paraceptual relationships. For instance there is no conceptual reason that S cannot be both totalistic and highly democratic, since a government can have both extensive citizen participation and authority over all aspects of the culture. However for a multi-cultural state, its seems reasonable to conjecture that this is not a stable combination. Likewise S could be a totalistic private enterprise state, since institutions can be subject to significant governmental control without being governmental institutions. In fact, it seems reasonable to conjecture that a national crisis tends to move private enterprise states in that direction.
SECTION 3 CHURCH AND STATE
INTERACTION
Although concepts from earlier sections could be widely applied to church-state interaction, results would vary considerably depending on the type of sovereign state and types of global churches involved and other multicultural considerations. We illustrate the application for an imaginary culture (referred to as the Culture), and only make a few comparisons to actual cultures. The Culture is a complete culture that contains a democratic general welfare state (the State). The State is almost a culture in its own right. It is more privatized than collectivized and is to some extent an oligarchy of wealth. The State is highly secular, i.e. most citizens find meeting their temporal needs sufficient to integrate their purposes, give little thought to spiritual needs, etc. Except in a crisis, more than 2/3 of them seldom think about cosmic versions, meeting most spiritual needs by unconsciously relying on some traditional attitudes. However about 85% of them at least implicitly accept the comprehensive paradigm of one of the global churches {the Traditional Church 40%, the Modern Church 35%, the Physicalistic Church 10%, }. Furthermore, all of theses global churches have members in other territories. See Appendix 1 for how these numbers compare to global churches in American Culture.
The
The
The
Interaction: A slogan for thinking about church-state interaction was given long ago. (Matthew 22:21)
Render therefore to Caesar the things that
are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.
To use this slogan we must be able to tell the difference between spiritual and temporal concerns. However this is not enough. Although a global church is conceptualized as supporting basic spiritual needs, and a state is conceptualized as supporting basic temporal needs, there are other life quality concerns of both. Furthermore, the spiritual and temporal needs of humans are intertwined, and both church and state have exhibited strong tendencies to expand beyond their minimal concerns.
Since the State supports the temporal need for safety, at a minimum it must deal with conflicts between global churches. However, looking at the paradigm case of a sovereign state, the State has the potential to become a complete culture and to extend itself far beyond its minimal purpose. Since global churches are prone to expect their values to provide guidance for the State even in regard to purely temporal concerns, having global churches with incompatible comprehensive paradigms can lead to serious interaction problems as they compete for the support of the State. We consider four of the many potential interrelated areas and then discuss approaches to interaction problems.
Law: Many of
the laws are a major concern of global churches, and although there are also
temporal reasons for such laws, laws have also been influenced by differing
comprehensive paradigms. For the
Family: Although
family is an institution predating both church and state, it is an institution
that sustains both spiritual and temporal needs. One problem is that family law
may have different spiritual and temporal implications, such as those involving
the termination of parental rights. It should not be surprising that a church
institution of family and a state institution of family are so intimately
intertwined. This blurs the line between civil and religious marriage. Problems
are likely to occur when the global churches hold strongly divergent views
about social practices that impact the family and want the powers of government
to be used to enforce or influence the social practice they advocate.
Furthermore, global churches have often been able to influence The State on
such matters. For the
Education: Although
the family has been and remains an educational institution, church and state
have both supported and developed educational institutions. What is taught and
how it is taught can influence a student’s comprehensive paradigm, and global
churches have a stake in such matters. Educational institutions have not found
a way to remain neutral, and even if they did, the churches might not want
neutrality. Due to the influence of science, physicalists have had a major
impact on higher education, and thus on secondary and elementary school
teachers. For the
The State also has requirements for a citizenry that is
well enough educated to vote intelligently on vexing issues, e.g. questions
concerning conservation of the physical and biological environment, on which
the global churches have come down on different sides. The state role tends to
expand both because education directly impacts temporal needs and because the
power to tax gives it a huge funding advantage over other providers of
education. Since the
Financing: One
important factor is the ability of the State to access to financial resources
far beyond those of any global church. In addition to financing governmental institutions,
it channels extensive finances into education, research, entitlement programs,
public health, etc. Global churches can have different priorities in any of
these areas. The
Examples: Although we made the Culture imaginary to focus on conceptual rather than paraceptual matters, example like those above abound in American Culture whose similarity to the Culture may have been noticed. Examples of church-state interaction areas include abortion, birth control, adultery, blue laws, gambling, prostitution, alcohol use, drug use, indecent exposure, polygamy, divorce, gay marriage, teaching evolution, school prayer, pledge of allegiance, conscientious objection, stem cell research, child labor laws, public funds used by religious institutions, slavery, discrimination, jury nullification.
Approaches to Interaction: Approaches such as rigged elections, civil war, terrorism, etc., are currently considered unacceptable by most members of the global churches (not to mention the citizens of sovereign states). The acceptable approaches can be classified as symmetric and asymmetric. This distinction is best partially explained using some the want and performance parameter of the behavior description concept, although some of the other behavior parameters might also be relevant. For instance, different person characteristics would be involved in these different types of action. Suppose a person or a group X is engaged in a course of action Y related a value cluster V for X.
Y is a symmetric approach if the want parameter for X is to resolve issues in manner that the values of all concerned are enhanced as much as possible and if the performance of X involves authentically looking for a way to do so. The relationship change formula (Ossorio, 1982/1998, pp68-69) can be used to analyze a symmetric approach in which unilateral action is taken by X in order to sincerely support the aspirations of someone with a different paradigm. The negotiation process gives another way to think about a symmetric approach. Both the relationship change formula and the negotiation process are explained in Appendix 0.
Y is an asymmetric approach if the want parameter is for X is to obtain as much of V as possible for itself and if the performance involves using any lawful tactics to marshal political power in ways that take a primarily a prudential perspective on what tactics are to be used. Using power politics is one way of engaging in an asymmetric approach. Although negotiated compromises are not the goal of asymmetric approaches, they can emerge because of a balance of power. The relationship change formula and the negotiation process can also be used to analyze asymmetric approaches.
Since power politics may involve the use of misleading propaganda or unprincipled alliances, the term ‘power politics’ may have some pejorative connotations. This is not our intent. The term ‘political power’ merely indicates the ability to make something happen in the arena of political action. This can be accomplished by a variety of tactics that most people find commendable, such as peaceful demonstrations, voter registration, informing the public, etc. Given the comprehensive paradigms of these global churches, it is such tactics that might best serve them. However when crucial values are at stake, it seems reasonable to conjecture that less commendable asymmetric tactics may be tempting.
Even if committed to commendable tactics, when an
evangelical fundamentalist global church enters the political arena because
crucial values seem to be at stake, power may seem essential. This is the case
for the Traditional Church, since it has been loosing political power but has
enough members to exert more political power, and since it views many trends
supported by the other global churches as contrary to God’s will. The
Although X cannot simultaneously engage in asymmetric tactics and symmetric approaches, it is possible for X to use each at different times. However, as can been seen from the relationship change formula, the use of certain types of asymmetric tactics may raise suspicions that later negotiations are not sincerely symmetric approaches.
There are status considerations that relate to negotiations involving global churches. To be eligible to negotiate for a global church, a person must be recognized by members of that church as having that status. Since mutual negotiation is only possible when jointly employed, for X1 to exercise this eligibility there must be some X2 with a similar status in another global church to negotiate with. Obtaining negotiators with the necessary status is aggravated by the decentralized nature of the global churches. On the other hand, the status needed to engage in power politics is largely self assigned, although to be effective sufficient resources are needed. Furthermore, even a small group engaged in power politics (let alone violence) can place barriers to those actually engaged in sincere negotiation.
Although negotiation among global churches is complicated by the decentralized nature of the global churches, this should not be a problem for grass roots negotiation. For H1 to negotiate with H2 about reaching a consensus on what position to take on an issue, only H1 and H2 are needed to make the status assignments. For instance, members of a family who belong to different global churches can engage in symmetric negotiations, and although this may have little immediate cultural impact, it can certainly enhance the wellbeing of that family. Furthermore a multitude of symmetric grass roots negotiations might eventually have a deeper effect than high level negotiations.
Sample Scenarios: We now sketch (in random order) some scenarios that might result from church-state interaction in the Culture. Although these scenarios are clearly paraceptual in tone, they are given primarily to illustrate the potential utility of concepts we have developed. Thus, we hope that for each scenario you can imagine some persons who might find it somewhat plausible. Since different people have different plausibility attitudes, other scenarios that some people would consider more plausible could have been used. What seems plausible depends on a person’s comprehensive paradigm and paraceptual beliefs, so a scenario that seems highly plausible to a member of one global church could seem highly implausible to a member of a different global church.
(1a) The State becomes more totalistic as the struggle
between global churches focuses on obtaining political power. As power shifts
back and forth between the global churches, governmental policies also
fluctuate. More and more members of the
(1b) A long-term balance of power between global churches results in a weary acceptance of gains and losses. Disillusionment with politics and the global churches sets in. The Culture becomes more secular as faith in traditional comprehensive paradigms fades and the State turns most of its efforts toward temporal concerns. With the decline of spiritual community and the failure of moral compass and with insufficient attention to other spiritual needs, the Culture slowly looses its vitality.
(1c) Pragmatic elements in the State, sensing the
downsides of divisiveness, back away from the positions of the
(2a) The Traditional Church mobilizes its base, converts
members of the
(2b) As more questions are raised about the non-empirical
nature of cosmic versions and their relevance to scientific practices,
commitments to them become less significant. The
(2c) The Traditional Church mobilizes its base and accepts
more of the social progress concerns of members of the
(3a) The Physicalistic Church expands its influence in the
media and in higher education. The secular trends in the Culture are
accentuated. Skepticism about the supernatural becomes widespread among the
younger generation. The
(3b) The Physicalistic Church expands its influence in the
media and in higher education. The secular trends in the Culture are
accentuated. Skepticism about the supernatural becomes widespread among the
younger generation. The
(4) As citizens become disillusioned with divisiveness,
members in the global churches begin to shift away from fundamentalism. Members
of the
The next section considers an extended example of how, in
present-day
SECTION 4 CHURCH AND STATE PANEL
Introducing our
roundtable participants:
FH: Christian fundamentalist housewife with teenage
children (Intelligent, earnest and
thoughtful, devoted to her children, looks to Bible for ultimate truth)
ST: High school
science teacher (Steeped in modern
science but somewhat limited by its comprehensive paradigm, eager to share it
with his students, enthusiastic and engaging teacher)
LT: Liberal
protestant theologian (Has studied a
range of theologies and philosophies, has an implicit understanding of
Descriptive Psychology without having studied it explicitly)
CP: Centrist politician (Good-hearted pragmatist, specializes in finding a wedge of consensus leading to beneficial action)
(Note: All
participants evidence a certain fair-mindedness and an
implicit feel for some of the distinctions made in Descriptive Psychology
without having studied it explicitly.)
Their Discussion:
Moderator: Welcome to today’s roundtable discussion and call-in session on the subject of church and state. To get things rolling, What should be taught in High School science classes about evolution, the origins of living thing things, and the geological history of the earth?
FH: I just don’t want my tax dollars spent teaching my children beliefs contrary to those of my religious community.
ST: My students come from many religious communities. If we remove from the curriculum anything that contradicts any of them, there may not be much left in the curriculum.
CP: Is there an issue of the rights of minorities here? Could we teach the stories of creation according to several of our main communities?
FH: In my neighborhood my beliefs are those of the majority!
ST: But truth is not something determined by majority vote. There are scientific methods and standards that have been refined over thousands of years with the purpose of looking squarely at the available data, drawing valid conclusions, and avoiding error. People who have worked with these methods and standards all their professional lives are in pretty good agreement about the history of the earth. That has to count for something. And the majority of the American public agrees with them. Furthermore, high school students need to know those methods and standards for their future roles in the workplace.
LT: Once the methods and standards of science are in place, what is true and what is false follows as a matter of sound empirical work. But the methods and standards themselves are not determined empirically. They are created by people, negotiated by people, and judged by people on the basis of the success or failure of the empiricism that they ground. And even today they are a work in progress.
ST: I’ll grant that scientific method is still a work in process, but are you going so far as to say that some future version of accepted scientific method might assign some sort of truth to religious creationism?
LT: That would be a very long stretch, but I will say this: today’s scientific method is quite deficient in its concept of “person”, and this deficiency shows up any time you try to take a scientific approach to, say, theology or psychology. For example, there are productive traditions of psychotherapy (cognitive behavior therapy springs to mind), with substantial bodies of empirical fact behind them, and those bodies of fact all rest on commonsense notions of person very different from the “scientific” notion of person as a bag of cells. The better scientific notion of person would include both the bag of cells and the commonsense notions in a coherent logical framework, and that logical framework would support better theology as well as better psychology.
FH: Aha! It is just as I thought. Evolution is just a theory, and might be eclipsed at any time by a better one.
ST: Careful! The better one would have to preserve all the successes of the current science, including lots of very practical stuff in, for example, geology, which rests on a history of the earth, and genetics, which rests on the histories of species.
CP: We are heading down a road familiar to me. When people with different conceptual frameworks get to arguing about what is true, they are sure to go nowhere. In politics, such a deadlock can sometimes be avoided by shifting the subject from what is true to what is useful. For example, the creation story of science was constructed in order to explain a body of observations of the physical world. The creation stories of religions have a different purpose: to point to the fundamental characteristics of human beings, and lay the foundation for their moral development.
ST: I’ll take a shot at that. I have to teach present-day science to any student who might go into geology or genetics or any field where that science is used to obtain practical results. I am committed to that by law and custom. But I am not committed to teaching morals, and if a student wants to reason from science’s creation story when she is doing geology and from her religion’s creation story when making moral judgments, I have no objection.
FH: Does that mean you are willing to give class time to my religion’s stories?
ST: No, I’ll leave that to your Sunday Schools, where the expertise lies.
LT: If the question comes up in class, you might point out that present-day science has shown tremendous explanatory power regarding the practical aspects of the physical world, but little such power in the world of persons and behavior. On the other hand the stories from all the world’s religions focus very heavily on what it means to be a person, what relationships and achievements are open to persons, what choices of actions are advisable or inadvisable, and what constitutes a good life.
FH: It seems to me that you are trying to position science as useful in one domain of life (dealing with the physical universe) and religion as useful in another domain of life (dealing with people) and never the twain shall meet. Are you really saying that there is no overlap at all between science and religion?
Moderator: That is certainly a good approximation to what I am hearing, and I think that it is a good guideline for what happens in a High School science class. But I think the twain do meet now and then, especially in our next question: Under what circumstances should abortions be permitted?
Let me be more specific. There have been statistical studies made of a mysterious dip in the teenage crime rate 16 to 19 years after Roe v. Wade. After carefully eliminating other possible causes, there remains statistical support for the hypothesis that the dip was caused by babies not being born who would otherwise have grown up in poverty (with young single mothers ill-equipped to socialize them) and become contributors to the crime rate when in their teens. I do not propose that we debate the truth or falsity of this very controversial hypothesis, but instead consider: if it were well-supported, should it be admissible as evidence in the abortion debate?
FH: Certainly not. Abortion is morally equivalent to murder, independent of any real or imagined downstream benefits.
ST: But some cases of murder itself are justified by downstream benefits – by arguments that the available alternatives are even worse. I’m thinking of killing in self-defense or in a war.
FH: You can’t be serious. In those cases you are facing an already murderous enemy, not a helpless child.
LT: The controversial hypothesis reminds us that the child will not be helpless, and may be dangerous, 17 years later. Nevertheless, the hypothesis does not justify abortion, because we do not kill people who have committed no crime yet, even if it can be shown there is a high probability they will murder somebody in the future.
FH: All this is irrelevant. Abortion is a crime. The Bible says so.
LT: The passing of laws forbidding all the actions prohibited by any of the scriptures of the world’s great religions would not leave us much of a democracy.
ST: What about the rights of, say, a rape victim, not to be forced into 9 months of pregnancy, and perhaps 18 years of child care, against her will?
CP: I’m hearing three threads to this discussion. The first is theological: What does God decree? That is decisive for the religious person, but not for a democracy embracing a variety of contrasting religions. The second thread has to do with value judgments regarding when killing is justified by some higher good. The third, and most important, thread is linked to the second: How many of the rights of a full-fledged person are acquired by a potential person between conception and birth? There is plenty of precedent for assigning (or withdrawing) rights and responsibilities to an individual over the course of a lifetime. Consider graduations, elections, marriages, sentencings to and releases from prison.
LT: You might get good agreement that the right not to be poisoned by drugs or alcohol in the mother’s bloodstream is acquired at conception. On the other hand, some philosophers contend that ascribing anything called “rights” to something with virtually none of the capacities of a typical person makes no sense, and that arguments against abortion ought to be made on grounds other than rights -- for example, that violence against something that is expected to become, in due time, a person, is wrong but not murder. The really tough questions come when rules like this one conflict with the welfare of the mother.
CP: Or of society, if the controversial hypothesis that began this discussion is to be believed. There is a question of investment, by family and society, in the individual. The loss of even a full-term newborn is much less of a tragedy than the loss of a 21 year old. Value judgments like this involving societal investment come up in medical ethics, when a doctor gets to save only one of two individuals.
FH: My theological position is that the right to life is acquired by the potential person at conception, and that it trumps any rights of the mother to convenience, self-fulfillment, or even life, and that it also trumps any societal interests like resource allocation or public safety.
CP: You could hardly find a more spectacular conflict of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness than that between a woman and her undesired, newly-conceived fetus, especially when the pregnancy threatens her own life and her family’s well-being.
LT: (Tentative) I’m beginning to think that the real stickiness of the moral issues here has its roots in the differences between potentials and actuals. Both the paradigm cases we are arguing from, the right of an individual to life and the right to kill in, say, self-defense, involve actual persons with actual histories, capacities, and communities. But in the abortion case, everything is potential: both the future of the fetus and the downstream effects on the mother and her community. I believe that our moral philosophers need better tools for dealing with potentials.
Moderator: Nobody expected consensus from such a diverse group on so controversial a question, but we have sharpened the picture of the practical issues to be confronted. Future decisions of our society’s courts and legislative bodies will have to evolve a body of law and custom around two questions: (1) What legal protections should accrue to the potential person at what stages, from conception on? And (2) when conflicts arise between these protections and the legal protections of others (also involving potential situations), how are these conflicts to be resolved? I expect that the latter question will be addressed case by case.
Our next question is a little more abstract, but has practical applications to the preceding questions. Some have claimed that for many persons, science has taken the place of their religions, and that therefore science itself should be considered a kind of religion, competing on an equal footing with the other religions of the world. Others hold that science has grown from universal common sense, extended via logic, mathematics, and careful observation, and is therefore both culture and religion free. If the first view (that for some science has replaced religion) is correct, the multi-religious state should keep some distance from science in order to maintain its neutrality with respect to religion. If the second view (that science is culture-free) is correct, science provides the state with a powerful reservoir of religion-neutral thought.
ST: Everything in my scientific and educational training leads me to the second view, and that is what I try to represent in my classes.
FH: What about the implications of the theory of evolution for the place of human beings in the greater universe? The Bible says we are special, evolution says we are an accident.
ST: Maybe we are a special accident.
CP: I see some signs of scientists (and science-oriented people) as a community forming a voting block in favor of typically progressive causes: the environment, energy policy, maybe even a woman’s right to choose. I wonder if this reflects a morality growing out of science, not as a body of knowledge, but as a community of scientists and science-oriented people.
FH: I certainly worry about that.
ST: In southern
LT: I think we are playing here with two meanings of the word “science”. One refers to a relatively culture-free body of concepts, methods, and facts, and the other refers to a body of scientists and science-oriented people constituting a community having principles that include moral principles that could possibly conflict with the moral principles of religious communities.
CP: What might such science-based moral principles be?
LT: (Rattling off) Simplicity is good. Skepticism is prudent. Arguments not grounded in direct observation are bad. If it is not made of subatomic particles it doesn’t exist. Results are only valid if reproduced by independent observers. Intuitive judgments are always suspect. So is authority. Personal experience doesn’t count. (Margulis, 2005)
ST: Wait a minute! Those are pretty good principles for doing science (in the first sense of the word), but nobody says they are rules for doing life!
FH: Oh yeah? I’ll bet I can find many scientists (and others) who take them as principles for doing life.
LT: My point exactly! This is the issue I was trying to bring to the surface.
CP: Let me get this straight. Within the community of scientists, there are rules for how you do science. These rules play a role analogous to morals special to that community in its scientific activities. If you have been playing by these rules in your professional life, it would certainly be tempting to play by them in your life as a whole, in spite of the fact that a somewhat different moral order might be more appropriate in a different or larger community.
ST: And sometimes it even makes sense to do so.
FH: And sometimes not.
CP: But right or wrong, whenever you start playing the game of life, and especially the game of politics, by the rules of the game of science, you are likely to collide with others who are playing by different rules.
FH: Right! Like the rules of the Bible.
LT: And the methods available for resolving those collisions are not those of science. (If they were, there would have been no contest to begin with.) They are the methods of general negotiation among people, which we learn through social contact from birth on, and which, unlike the rules of empiricism, do not guarantee eventual agreement. We may agree to disagree.
CP: These are the same resources we have to resolve the collisions between the different moralities of the different religions in a multi-religious state! I would add, however, that just as the world’s religions offer some valuable moral guidance on how to create a good life, we can expect from science some valuable moral guidance on how to determine empirical truth, whether it is truth about the physical universe or something else.
Moderator: As usual, the hard political negotiations remain. But we have pretty much resolved the question with which I started this segment of the discussion. On the one hand, science is religion-neutral when we are talking about the body of facts amassed by scientific method over the years. On the other hand, the scientific community competes in the political arena with other special interest groups, including religions, at least whenever a rule special to the scientific community is used in the broader context. I would add that present and future politicians are going to have to exercise a certain acumen both about science and about life to discern which of these two cases is staring them in the face at the moment.
Note: This next
section is intended to integrate a multitude of remarks from members of the
Society for Descriptive Psychology. These will be added later.
APPENDIX 0
Community Parameters: A community description uses some or all of the seven parameters below to characterize a community and differentiate it from other communities.
{members, statuses, concepts, locutions, social practices, choice principles, world}
Below is a simplified account of these parameters. For
more see (Putnam, 1981) or (Shideler 1988) or Concept Dictionary-Encyclopedia in the
Descriptive Psychology section of conceptualstudy.org.
Members: To be
a member of a community normally is to identify oneself as a member and to be
recognizable as such by other members of that community. The distinction
between members and non-members will also normally be recognizable to
non-members. Furthermore, this distinction behaviorally significant, i.e.
members will be treated in some manners differently than outsiders. Membership
may be awarded by a formal ceremony, such as an initiation in which an
individual becomes a member of sorority. It may be recognized with specific
criteria but without ceremony, such as being a member of the community of
Statuses: Having a status is to have a certain set of relationships. For any X each of X’s statuses refer to X’s place in some world in the broadest possible senses imaginable. An eligibility for X is being able to play certain role. Statuses determine P’s eligibilities, i.e. P’s potential for behavior. A status may or may not have anything to do with a community. For instance, an adult great white shark has the status of being at the top of a food chain, and this has considerable implications about what it can do. For a community the most basic status is membership, however in number of other statuses will be available in any community. They may be explicitly recognized, such starting point guard for the Boston Celtics. The may be more casual, such a person you can rely upon in a crunch.
Concepts: To engage in deliberate action a person must be able to make conceptual distinctions. The concepts of a community are those that are essential for meaningful participation in its practices, and especially in its core practices. These concepts may also be recognized by non-members, but when they are they may not be understood in the way they are understood by members. Members share these concepts in being able to act upon them in a similar manner. For instance, the community of boy scouts uses the concept of an Eagle Scout, and furthermore this concepts is understood in terms of its merit badge requirements. An outsider may also be able to use this concept, but many will use it more vaguely and few outsiders to the scouting community will know the requirements.
Locutions: The locutions of a community may include the language spoken, such as English or French. More important, they include the ways in which it is spoken and the concepts and conceptual distinctions this indicates. This involves the use of jargon and terminology and expressions that are intertwined with the social practices of the community. The distinction between locutions of members of a community and non-members can vary from being minor subtle to being highly pronounced. For pilots and bridge players the term ‘ace’ represents different concepts, but members of each community, as well as outsider to both communities, could probably understand the essence of the difference. Of course an insider would use this term with greater sophistication. The community of mathematicians uses the terms ‘ring’ and ‘field’ in ways that have no apparent relation to their use in ordinary language. In fact the meaning use of these terms would be difficult to even explain to most non-mathematicians. However a mathematician who did not know English could easily acquire full use of these locution, having similar locution in his own language.
Social Practices: A community is especially distinguished by the things members do as members of the community and the way in which they do these things. These are the social practice of the community, and the point of being a member is to be eligible to engage in these practices. There are optional social practices, in the sense that a member can be in good standing without engaging in the practice. The are also core social practices, i.e. Those that a member must engage in to be considered a member of the community. For instance, using planting wheat might be an optional social practice in a farming community. However planting some crop would be a core social practice, since no person who never planted a crop would not be considered a farmer.
Choice Principles: The actions of members as they engage in its social practices are guided by choice principles. Choice principles include any of ways a community accepts the justification of the behavior of its members. For instance, a member may appeal to custom or principles. Choice principles are often expressed in the form of value statements, norms, policies, slogans, etc. They are often illustrated in stories or myths.
Worlds: In
describing what we do and think about we use elements that we think of as
{objects, processes, events, states of affairs}. A world for a person P is a
large interrelated set of such elements that P is willing to act on. P will
have a multitude of such worlds. For instance, P might have world W of cycling.
That P’s bicycle tire has a nail would be a state of affairs W. P’s tire and
tire gauge are objects in W. Having the tire go flat is an event in W. Repairing a flat tire is a process in W. There are other persons who have similar
worlds. A cohesive set of such individuals sharing a common world forms a community
of cyclists. In general, members of a community share a world. This means they
react to this world by manifesting values and attitudes and interests that are
similar in a multitude of ways, that they make distinctions in a common manner,
and that there share social practice and choice principles.
Cultures: As
indicted in the main text a complete culture is conceptualized as a community
whose members have an interdependent way of living and whose institutions
provide the opportunity for these members to at least minimally satisfy all of
their vital human needs and enhance their behavior potential in a multitude of
realms of interest. Furthermore, a culture is self-contained in the sense that
its institutions can do so without support from any external communities.
Institutions: An institution is an organized set of social practices and principles along with an established network of human and other resources that is intended to sustain these social practices and principles. The word ‘sustain’ is used broadly to include support, enhance, enable, etc.
Behavior Descriptions: This is one of the most basic concepts of Descriptive Psychology. The paradigm case of a behavior description uses all of the parameters below to describe a course of action X by a person called the actor. The person giving the description is called the observer. The observer and actor can be the same person. For more about these parameters see (Shideler, 1988, Chapter 1)
¨ Identity (I) specifies who is the actor for X.
¨ Wanting (W) indicates what the actor intends to achieve by X.
¨ Factual Knowledge (KF) has to do with facts the actor knows and uses in relation to X.
¨ Know-how (KH) has to do with the competencies the actor displays relation to X.
¨ Performance (P) encompasses the processes the actor is implementing.
¨ Achievement (A) is what X accomplishes, what difference it makes.
¨ Characteristics (C) includes some of the actor’s characteristic are being expressed by doing X.
¨ Significance (S) includes what else is being done X, what importance X has for the actor.
Allowable Transformations: There are various types of behavior descriptions in which some of the parameters may be omitted. A behavior description that uses at least the first five of these parameters is an intentional action description. A deliberate action description is an intentional action description in which the KF parameter includes (reflexive) information about what action this action constitutes. An observer can give a behavior description in which there is more than one actor. Furthermore, an actor need not be a person. For instance, an actor could be an animal or a robot. The observer can be a team working together to give a behavior description.
As a simple illustration, suppose it is Jill’s turn in a game of Gin Rummy. The face up card would improve her hand, but the card on top of the deck might be even more useful. For an illustrative purpose, we give a description in which the parameters are simple. Each could be expanded if we had reasons to give a more elaborate description. The I-parameter in our description is Jill. The W-parameter is her desire to improve her hand. By saying that Jill knows (KF) that she is playing Gin Rummy we make this a deliberate action description. The KF-parameter also includes knowing what is in her current hand and which cards that would improve this hand. The KH-parameter includes knowing how to count the points she would be caught with if her opponent goes down or gins. She takes the card from the deck, the P-parameter. Since the card drawn is useless, the A-parameter is the negative achievement of failing to enhance the hand to the extent the face up card would have done. One value of the S-parameter is that Jill is trying to win the game. One noteworthy instance of the C-parameter is Jill’s risk taking attitude while playing games. To see why this might be used as part of the behavior description, consider a person with the same value for the other parameters, but who usually avoids risks. For such a person taking the card that is face down would involve a different value of the C-parameter. Perhaps that person was in a state of frustration that overcame the aversion to risk taking.
Significance
Ladder: By sitting and typing at a keyboard I am writing a paragraph. By
writing a paragraph I am contributing to a paper on Church and State. By
contributing to a paper on Church and State I am attempting to make public
debate on the subject more productive. If I make that debate more productive,
perhaps it will improve the quality of life in the
Bargaining Process: This is the process, common in most cultures, in which person A offers some good or service to person B in return for some good or service offered by B to A. It is expected that several offers and counteroffers may be necessary before closing the deal. There is a flavor of zero-sum to the process, as each party may be trying to maximize what he gets while minimizing what he gives. But there is also a flavor of win-win, since the deal does not close unless both parties are satisfied that they will come out of it better than they went in.
Negotiation Process: Descriptive Psychology distinguishes negotiation, in which two or more persons attempt to reconcile their perspectives to the point of getting consensus on some portion of the real world, from bargaining as described above. The goal in negotiation is to come up with some description of some portion of the real world that simultaneously improves on both the descriptions that the two negotiating parties came in with. As such it is a way of searching for truth. An example from the world of science is the reconciliation of the wave nature of light with the particle nature of light.
Symmetric versus Asymmetric Bargaining and Negotiation: To the above distinctions this paper adds an (orthogonal) symmetry distinction. Bargaining or negotiation is symmetric if all parties are trying to maximize the good of all; it is asymmetric if the participants are trying to maximize their individual goods.
Relationship Change Formula: In short, relationship follows behavior. In other words, if person A behaves toward person B as if relationship R existed between them, it will indeed tend to create relationship R. In addition to being the stock in trade of con men and seducers, this principle has a host of beneficial applications: making friends, courting, moving into a new job or neighborhood, or establishing a therapeutic relationship. A particularly strong application is known as “Move Two”. If person A comes up to person B and makes the second move of a game G, it tends to put B in the position that (1) game G is being played, and (2) B has made the first move. (Of course, B can reject this positioning, but it takes work.) See also (Ossorio 1982/1998 p16, 87, 88, 98, 100).
Basic Human Needs: According to Shideler (Shideler, 1988, p211), a human need is basic if behavior would be impossible if it were not met at all. Shideler (Shideler, 1988, p212) asserts that without competence to do some of what we set out to do behavior is impossible. She calls this the need for adequacy. Without adequacy, we cannot imagine either our comprehensive status or any more ordinary status that makes us eligible to do anything. Using her terminology, she appropriately indicates that love is not a basic human need. We use the term ‘basic human need’ for a somewhat more inclusive concept that will include love, safety, belonging, etc. A human need is basic if behavioral options would be severely limited if it were not met. We refer to the type of need she conceptualized as a vital human need. One reason for using this more inclusive version is that it allows us to also formulate concepts for thinking about church and state in terms of basic human needs. Both support such vital needs. This may lead to church-state interaction. While church and state may address the needs given in Shideler, they tend to leave them to more indigenous communities and to institutions that have their origin in cultures which did not even have such semicultures. For instance the institution of family addresses many such needs, and while this institution is currently both a state and a church institution, its origin is much earlier than church and state. Incidentally family is an institution that can give rise to either cooperation or discord between church and state.
Basic Human Needs: This account below of Basic Human Needs and the Common Social Practices and Relationships for Meeting Them in U.S. Culture is taken from Lasater, 1983.
Physical Health: (a) maintain an adequate diet; (b) obtain sufficient sleep; (c) engage in regular physical exercise; (d) secure adequate shelter; (e) access medical and dental care; (f) make an adequate living or obtain other means of support; (g) work in a safe environment.
Safety and Security: (a) live in a protected residence in a safe community; (b) access to police and fire protection services; (c) access to medical and dental care; (d) make an adequate living or obtain other means of support; (e) access to necessary means of transportation; (f) work in a safe environment; (g) obtain job security and retirement benefits; (h) secure insurance, savings, or other financial reserve.
Self-esteem and Worth: (a) develop and maintain a good physical self-image; (b) understand and accept one's personal strengths and limitations; (c) develop and maintain a loving sexual relationship; (d) attain the respect and acceptance of significant others; (e) create and raise children in the family unit; (f) resolve major developmental tasks and life crises; (g) live in a way that affirms one essential values; (h) attain status commensurate with personal aspirations (i) attain economic self-sufficiency; (j) maintain a positive personal identification with a valued group.
Love and Affiliation: (a) develop and maintain a loving sexual relationship; (b) maintain a caring relationship with one's family; (c) develop and maintain meaningful friendships; (d) receive culturally appropriate demonstrations of affection; (e) express culturally appropriate demonstrations of affection.
Agency and Autonomy: (a) engage in self-determining action; (b) express one's personal rights, wishes, and opinions; (c) express one's individuality and choose one's own lifestyle; (d) resolve major developmental tasks and life crises; (e) initiate and be responsible for successful activity; (g), take independent action which affects one's environment.
Adequacy and Competence: (a) develop and maintain a loving sexual relationship; (b) fulfill family roles and responsibilities; (c) develop and utilize skills at work and at home; (d) attain economic self sufficiency; (e) receive recognition for personal accomplishments; (f) attain occupational and social status commensurate with personal aspirations.
Identity: (a) accept one's own masculinity or femininity; (b) accept one's own racial and ethnic identity; (c) understand and accept one's personal strengths and limitations; (d) accept one's occupational role; (e) develop and act i