10

The Jewel of Truth

THE FIRE HAS BURNT pretty well down now, and it’s getting late. Shall we throw one last log on? Yes, that nice piece of oak. There’s one more story I’d like to tell, and then talk over for a bit if you’ve a little more energy. A fairy tale, not too long. One log should do. I call it “The Three Lions of the Deep Earth.” No, I don’t need any more chocolate—for the moment, at least! Oh, but another splash in my glass would be very nice. Perfect. Thanks. You good too? Great.

Once upon a time, there was a King and a Queen who had three sons and one daughter. The sons were all handsome and clever, and the daughter was beautiful and smart. Why? Because this is a fairy tale, that’s why.

One day, a prince from a neighboring kingdom came to visit, and he immediately fell in love with the daughter and she with him. They decided to wed. When the King and Queen heard of it they were overjoyed, for the visiting prince was handsome and clever like their own sons. The wedding date was set for a year hence.

The King and Queen wanted to send their daughter off in style into her new life. What to give her as a present but a new crown, set with the most beautiful jewel that could be found? Yes, that was it. They called their three sons before them and instructed them each to go out and find the most beautiful jewel that they could. The one that brought home the most beautiful jewel within the year would then be awarded rulership of the realm, for the King and Queen had tired of being monarchs.

So off the three sons went. Almost a year later, as the eldest brother was riding along the foothills of some faraway mountains, he encountered an old man with three moustaches, sitting beside the road, swinging a glittering jewel on a string.

“That is a beautiful jewel,” said the eldest son.

“Yes,” croaked the old man, “but not as beautiful as the Three Lions of the Deep Earth. Those are the most beautiful jewels in the world, although they are as yet uncut.”

The eldest son, excited, exclaimed, “Oh wise old man, where can I find the Three Lions of the Deep Earth, and where can I get one of them cut?”

“See there,” said the old man, nodding in the direction of the mountains. “You must cross the Waterfall of Love, climb the Mountain of Great Truth, and enter the Cave of the Bright Mysteries, where you will find the Three Lions of the Deep Earth. Take one, and bring it to the jewel cutters in the three huts over there, across the road.”

There were indeed three jewel cutters’ huts, conveniently located just across the road. Why? Because this is a fairy tale, that’s why.

So the eldest son crossed the Waterfall of Love, climbed the Mountain of Great Truth, entered the Cave of the Bright Mysteries, and found the Three Lions of the Deep Earth in a recess at the back of the cavern. He took one—they all looked exactly the same, rounded and glassy and not very impressive, for they were as yet uncut—and brought it back down the mountain to the jewel cutters’ huts.

One of the jewel cutters was sitting outside in the sunshine. The eldest son said to him, “I am looking for a jewel cutter. Who is the best one here?”

“It is I, of course,” the cutter replied. “I was trained by a great guru in the dharma, the eternal laws, of jewel cutting. Let me cut your Lion of the Deep Earth.” The eldest son agreed, and the jewel cutter truly cut the Lion into a beautiful jewel. The eldest son paid the jewel cutter well and happily headed for home, contented with the thought that he would gain the rulership of his parents’ realm.

The next day, the middle son passed by the same road and had the same conversation with the old man with the three moustaches, crossed the Waterfall of Love, climbed the Mountain of Great Truth, entered the Cave of the Bright Mysteries, took another of the Lions of the Deep Earth, and brought it to the jewel cutters’ huts.

This time, a different one of the three jewel cutters was out sitting in the sun. “I am looking for a jewel cutter,” the middle son said to him. “Who is the best one here?”

“It is I, of course,” the cutter replied. “I was trained by a wise monk in the dao, the essential Way, of jewel cutting. Let me cut your Lion of the Deep Earth.” The middle son agreed, and the jewel cutter truly cut the Lion into another beautiful jewel. The middle son paid the jewel cutter well and happily headed for home, contented with the thought that it would be he who gained the rulership.

And the very next day after that, the youngest son passed by the very same road and had the very same conversation with the very same old man with the very same three moustaches. He too crossed the Waterfall of Love, climbed the Mountain of Great Truth, and entered the Cave of the Bright Mysteries. He took the last of the Three Lions of the Deep Earth, and brought it to the same three jewel cutters’ huts. Why? Because this is a fairy tale, that’s why.

This time, the third of the three jewel cutters was out sitting in the sun. “I am looking for a jewel cutter,” said the youngest son to him. “Who is the best one here?”

“It is I, of course,” the cutter replied. “I was trained by a brilliant scientist in the nature, the physical realities, of jewel cutting. Let me cut your Lion of the Deep Earth.”

But the youngest son was good-hearted and wise beyond his years. He went and knocked on the doors of the other two huts as well, and learned about the dharma and the dao of jewel cutting too.

“You all seem like excellent jewel cutters,” said the youngest son. “So I will have each of you take turns at cutting the Lion into a jewel.”

The annals do not record which cutter cut first. But as each received the jewel after the other had worked it, he saw new and different possibilities for how best to bring out the brightest beauty of the Lion. Each had three turns at cutting the jewel. And when they were done, the Lion glittered with a fire and a luminance that rivaled the Sun itself. The youngest son tried to pay the three jewel cutters, but they all refused the money, so overjoyed were they at what they had accomplished together.

The three sons soon returned home with their three jewels. They laid them out in front of the King and Queen, and the King and Queen called in the sister to choose which was the most beautiful, her not knowing which brother had brought back which jewel and would therefore gain the rulership of the realm.

But the sister, like her youngest brother, was good-hearted and wise beyond her years. She looked over the jewels and said, “One of the jewels is plainly the most brilliant, and has a luminance that rivals the Sun itself. Yet I refuse to choose it, or either of the others.”

“My princess,” spoke the King, with some agitation, “how can you refuse? If one is the most brilliant—and I can guess which one you mean, for it truly does rival the Sun itself—choose it!”

“I will only choose it on one condition: That all three of my brothers rule together.”

“But that would never work,” replied the King. “As in jewel cutting, only one person can hold the tools at once.”

“I mean for them to rule in turn, for a year each,” replied the sister. “As in jewel cutting, when one person cuts after another he sees new and different possibilities that bring out the brightest beauty.”

“Not just he. He or she,” added the youngest son. “Let all three brothers rule together with our sister, each in turn finding those different possibilities of brightest beauty.”

And so it was. The wedding of the sister and her prince took place the next day. She wore a crown set with the third Lion of the Deep Earth in the middle of the other two, radiating like the Sun and illuminating all the wedding party, far into the night. Plus the sister’s new husband had three sisters who were beautiful and smart like her. The three brothers each married one of the sisters, and the four couples took turns at ruling, year by year in rotation.

Never before was a land ruled so justly and so wisely, with so much beauty and prosperity, and so much profound joy.

Why? Because this is a fairy tale, that’s why.

Although it is a fairy tale, I think this fable has much truth to offer—even if I made it up.

Indeed, the truth is always something that we make up, and then re-make up as we go along, a settlement we build on the banks of the river of our lives, before passing on to some other new settlement further downstream.1 How could it be any other way? What we call truth is a human construct, a community construct, the product of our continual mutual (if often conflictual) learning. Sometimes we hear people of faith say, no, truth comes from God, from the divine and therefore from beyond the human community, if the truth is truly divine. Sometimes we hear rationalists say, no, truth comes from science, from nature, which they too argue lies beyond the human community, if the truth is truly natural. But the sociological response is that we humans can know only as humans know, for we are just that: human.

Which doesn’t necessarily make our truths less true. Maybe just the opposite. Because we make stuff up as we go along, because we are always refining our understanding, the truths we use to guide our actions have a better chance of being relevant to the conditions in which we find ourselves at any given moment.

The trouble, of course, is that we may be fooling ourselves, and perhaps fooling others, with the truths we make up. We want outcomes that are to our advantage, quite sensibly, and to the advantage of those we care about. So the temptations of mendacity pull strongly on our hearts and minds.

We all know this, having been fooled many a time in our past, and most likely having attempted some fooling on our own, at least on occasion. We have all encountered instances where it seemed plain that others had conspired to project truths that suited the politics of their interests, and where we recognized that we too had painted our desires and not our realities. And so we look for truths absolute and unchanging, stretching across history and circumstance, the better to be sure that we haven’t been fooled, either by others or by ourselves, victims of a hidden conspiracy.

The trouble is, our desire to avoid such a conspiracy may make us susceptible to easy formulations that appear to be free of politics, as we silently agree to hidden conspiracies—as long as those conspiracies remain hidden from us, and perhaps even hidden from those who formulated them, even if that them is us. There are indeed circumstances where we consciously conspire to create truths that support our political interests, big and small. Sometimes conspiracy of ideas and interests does happen. But people can usually arrive at such support by an easier means, without engaging in deliberate manipulation: what I earlier called the “interests bias” that comes from our tendency not to fire up critical passion when our ideas and interests happily line up.

Mighty among our interests is support for the communities we trust to help us sort between what we need to know and what we may safely ignore, as I also discussed earlier. But our communities may be wrong about that need and that safety. Moreover, our communities may enact interests that do not altogether line up with our own, even though they are our own communities. A community is not sameness; it is a connection across our inevitable differences. Moral entrepreneurs may tug on that connection for purposes other than ours. They may even consciously lie to us.

In short, there is plenty of scope for being fooled in our attempts to avoid it. Thus it is great to hear from others—other people from other cultivations of knowledge and the ignorable. But an absolute does not welcome the voices of others. An absolute yields one-sided truth, truth that looks at the object of our contemplation and desire from just one perspective. It yields flat truth. It yields truth that reflects only what looks at it from that same viewpoint. It yields uninviting truth, uninviting to further reflection from other angles of vision and experience. It yields truth that embodies only one logic out of the manyness of our understandings and circumstances. An absolute may seem to give us hard truth but rather gives us truth that is all too easy, for it allows us to proceed with eyes and ears closed to challenge. Such truth is also dull truth for it mirrors only what is directly in front of it, and thus shines little and reveals little.

Instead of a one-sided approach to truth, let us have a truth with many sides, many angles of reflection, a truth that sparkles with the full light of activity around it and that draws our imagination into its interior where the glimmers play and dance as we move our perspective from side to side, incident to incident, explanation to explanation, person to person. Let us have a jewel of truth, a truth with many facets. And let us all contribute to cutting and recutting that jewel, and to polishing its surfaces with the grit of circumstance and experience so that it glitters and glints with more and more understandings and potentials. A jewel, through its beauty, invites the careful scrutiny of each facet from where we each stand, as we collectively seek to improve the jewel’s luster and light through ever more cutting and polishing. Plus let us have not just one jewel of truth but lots and lots of them, each the work of a community of jewelers but arrayed so that they reflect upon the facets of the others, radiant with ever-changing sparklings of the all.

Such an array of jewels would reflect not a monologic but rather a multilogical truth that develops from our dialogues and considered agreements and disagreements with one another and the world, and that challenges us toward intellectual honesty—a truth that is not just the reflection of one flection, one bent on things, but a constant re-reflection of the many flections, the many logics, of all our lives.2 This jewel would be no less comforting and useful for its manyness, criticality, and endless change. Rather, it would comfort us with connections and interconnections. And it would gain us the greater utility, for it emerges from the diversity of practice and know-how that it brings together, and because it gives context to truth, and therefore truth to context. In other words, a multilogical truth is a contextual truth, relative and relevant because it is relational.

But relative is not the same as relativist—at least as relativist is usually meant. Considering that views of truth may look different from the perspective of another is not to suggest that there is no truth other than the solipsism of one’s personal account of experience. Nor is it to suggest that no idea, statement, or declaration about truth is any better than any other. Quite the opposite: rather, it is to suggest that others have views and experiences of value to us, that we may learn from, as we collectively scrutinize all our efforts at adding facets to the jewel, seeking to improve the results. Yes, truth is relative. That’s why we often gain so much from each other’s views and experiences. But truth is not solipsist any more than it is absolutist. Indeed, solipsism is just the absolutism of the personal.

I have been borrowing here from a Mahayana Buddhist image, the jewel net of Indra. Some colleagues of mine—their names are Loka Ashwood, Noelle Harden, and Bill Bland—and I recently suggested another metaphor for this vision of truth as the contextualized, ever-changing, connecting up of difference.3 We called it grounded knowledge, knowledge that recognizes its grounding in local context but also recognizes that it ultimately connects to all other contexts, just as all grounds in a landscape ultimately connect to every other. To accept grounded knowledge does not mean denigrating your own views for being different, partial, and parochial. Nor does it mean denigrating the views of others. But nor does it mean necessarily agreeing. We each have grounds for what we know, grounds that come out of our specific experiences in our specific contexts. We can trace connections to all other grounds through welcoming yet critical evaluation of the accounts of others—but also, through them, encouraging scrutiny of our own accounts of experience. And when we do, when we consider others’ experiences as our own, and in light of our own, we find that our knowledge has changed, even if we do not necessarily fully agree. It becomes not just local knowledge but multilocal knowledge, drenched in our similarities and our differences like so much water drawn from springs issuing out of many grounds, rushing together into an ever-changing stream.

The jewel of truth is not a new idea. It is one of the foundation stones of our sociality. And although we often seem to forget this basic insight of our social condition—or seem to want to forget it in the political heat of the moment—related ideas can be found in many traditions.

Take Judaism and its openness to debate as recorded in the Talmud. Here Jewish scholars did not merely write down the “Oral Torah.” Rather, in assembling the Talmud, they combined what Jews call the Mishnah with what Jews call the Gemara. The Mishnah dates from about 200 CE and inscribes the results of centuries of religious debate over the meaning of the Oral Torah. The Gemara dates from about 500 CE, when the Talmud was first assembled, and inscribes the results of religious debate in those three intervening centuries. And the Gemara is not merely tacked on at the end of the Mishnah. Rather, the Talmud puts the commentaries of the Gemara side by side on the same pages as the relevant passages in the Mishnah. Plus the Gemara often comments on other Gemara, again often on the same page. The Talmud’s debates continue on in a series of medieval commentaries called Tosafot, now included in most printings of the Talmud on the outer edges of the pages. The result is commentaries on commentaries on commentaries: Tosafot commenting on the Gemara, the Gemara commenting on the Mishnah, and the Mishnah recording commentaries on the Oral Torah—all of which have commentaries internal to themselves, the rabbis recorded in the Mishnah debating one another, the rabbis in the Gemara debating one another, and writers of the Tosafot debating one another as well.4 It doesn’t stop there. Judaism has long been open to new minhag, or local customs and traditions that contextualize practice in circumstance.

Christianity also has a strong tradition of openness to debate and deliberation. Consider the ceaseless conversation embodied in Christian hermeneutics, the practice of Christian biblical interpretation and reinterpretation, mediating like the Greek god Hermes between the heavens and the Earth. Indeed, the Christian dialogue of difference begins right with the Gospels. There is no one Gospel truth. There are at least four—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, who have many differences—encouraging Christians to continually think and rethink the origins and implications of their faith. Gnostic Christians would include at least a half dozen more Gospels, like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Truth. The New Testament’s Epistles continue the dialogue, as do the later writings of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Milton, Wesley, Merton, Niebuhr, Armstrong, Cobb, Pagels, Pope Francis, and thousands and thousands more. Let us recall as well that there are over two hundred seminaries of various Christian denominations in the United States alone and dozens of scholarly journals devoted to Christian theology.

Islam too has a vast tradition of deliberation and debate. Despite all the current attempts East and West to box it into one supposed stability, Islam has a deep commitment to continual learning and change through ijtihad, the Islamic practice of diligent critical thinking. The two oldest degree-granting universities in the world—Morocco’s University of al-Qarawiyyin (founded in 859) and Egypt’s Al-Azhar University (founded in 970)—are Islamic, home to scholarly debate over ijtihad for over a millennium. As well, Islam maintains at least eight current madhhabs or schools of interpretation and jurisprudence.⁵ Ijtihad is central to those schools, but is also independent of them. Even a scholar working within a school of thought is supposed to think through an issue independently from the school’s traditions. As Muslims say, the “gates” of ijtihad are always open.

And in science, there is the commitment of all scientists to have their ideas and findings tested and contested by others, based on new evidence and new interpretations that bring ever more experience and perspective to bear not on truths that never change, but rather on truths that never stop changing. Although we often look to science to settle matters once and for all—to make discoveries that will hold up for all of time, like those we imagine of a Newton, a Darwin, or an Einstein—scientists themselves know that’s not how it works. Newton was an alchemist. He wanted to convert base metal into gold, and he spent years looking for the elixir of life. Darwin was a sexist. He believed that evolution acts only on males because evolution requires competition and only males are competitive; the only reason why females evolve, he felt, is that they have fathers.6 Einstein rejected quantum mechanics. He didn’t like its probabilistic linearity.⁷ These are all ideas that scientists of today no longer hold to, even as they continue to accept or recontextualize other aspects of the work of these foundational figures.

Science too is interpretation, but careful interpretation that scientists keep open to the careful interpretations of others. It’s a dialogue—or, at least, it should be—not a monologue. It tries to answer every question but also to question every answer. Thus, the most dedicated scientists, I have long thought, are those who most sincerely want their work to go speedily out of date.⁸ Because if it does, that means others found it so relevant and so important that they looked into the matter further, and brought new evidence and new perspectives to bear on it. So, of course, as we know more, our knowledge changes. In a way, as we know ever more we know ever less, for we come to see that there is so much more that we do not know with every new thing that we do know.⁹ The awesome coolness of truth is that it always changes, not that it doesn’t. All truth, however apparently firm, always retains an element of the mystery of the unknown. The most sincere scientist hopes that will always be the case.

Perhaps the most sincere adherent to a faith should hold this hope for a changing truth just as earnestly. It would be a hope that is highly likely to be fulfilled, if past history is any guide, for all our faith traditions have in fact changed quite a bit since their origins—as we should expect they would, the better to respond to changes in our contexts. Moreover, they all exhibit wide diversity of interpretation in the present, with their many branches, schools, sects, and constant discussion within and between them. One can see this diversity even in the life of one individual adherent of a faith. Think how different the faith understanding of, say, an eleven-year-old is likely to be than when that person is, say, mid-fifties. (Think of the appropriateness of even presenting an eleven-year-old with the original texts of a tradition—the error I made in reading the Bible as a bedtime story to my daughter when she was that age.)

And how exciting and valuable that diversity is! In the previous chapter, I noted that one does not need to agree with everything in a faith tradition to identify oneself with it, or to learn from it. The value we find in a tradition is as much in our disagreements as our agreements, as we engage with that tradition’s thoughts, stories, and writings reaching out to us from the past and from elsewhere in the present. The question should not be whether a tradition is altogether right or not but whether we find it a helpful basis for thinking through, and re–thinking through, to our own moral understandings.

Now let’s take another step with this line of reasoning. It is actually impossible to agree with everything in a faith tradition, just as it is impossible to agree with everything in science because, like science, no faith tradition agrees with everything in itself. The Protestant and the Catholic do not completely agree. The Orthodox Jew and the Reconstructionist Jew do not completely agree. The Shia Muslim and the Sunni Muslim do not completely agree. The Vaishnavite Hindu and the Shaivite Hindu do not completely agree. We can subdivide it further. The Baptist Protestant and the Congregationalist Protestant do not completely agree. Or even further. The Southern Baptist and the Northern Baptist do not completely agree. Or still further yet. A member of the Southern Baptist Convention and a member of the Southern Baptist Alliance do not completely agree. Or still further even yet. Been to a Southern Baptist Convention service recently—or a service at an assembly of any other denomination of any other faith tradition? A few moments of conversation with the attendees will quickly show a range of views, and not just about matters of faith: about any topic at all. That’s how humans are, and we should love each other for the richness of that variety of insight.

The trouble comes when in the battle between religions, and in the battle between religions and science, adherents fall back on natural others and their communities of thee, me, we, and, regrettably, them. One thing that all sides frequently have in common is a weakness for presenting a unified and solidified conception of truth that admits no politics, especially in moments of conflict—precisely the time when we are most in need of admitting politics. Challenged, science often rushes to present itself as having methods that remove the potential for human interference in its findings. Challenged, the various denominations of bourgeois faiths typically do as well. Each falls back on a claim that it presents a truth beyond question and beyond error. But when you start out by saying you can’t be wrong, it makes it very hard to admit it when you are. Of course, we all are at times. Even scientists. Even theologians. Even me. And when it is hard to admit you might be wrong, it makes it hard to have a productive conversation about what might be right.

Perhaps recognizing the historical and sociological context of monological traditions of truth can help us overcome these absolutist tendencies in our conversations with each other. At least that hope has been the main motivation for me in writing this book.

The context I have emphasized throughout is the difference between pagan and bourgeois: between rural, agrarian ways of living and urban, class-based ways of living. The spread of city life associated with the rise of state societies raised new moral concerns about material and sexual desire that little troubled the pagan forebears of city folk. These social uncertainties made absolutism attractive and convenient, even if often problematic and tragic. Meanwhile, those still in the country remained focused on the uncertainties of ecological sustenance and on loyalty to the social forms that helped one contend with them. Their lives were no less nor no more uncertain, but did not hinge on attempts to justify or criticize new social forms and their hierarchies of social and material standing.

These were not simply differences. I have also been arguing that they manifested, and manifested from, a deep social, cultural, and economic conflict that, I believe, we still need to reckon with. Commentators have long noted the vertical axis of conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Equally decisive is the horizontal axis of bourgeois conflict: between bourgeois and pagan, the people of the city versus the people of the countryside. The power of urban state societies derives from this double conflict of bourgeois life—a conflict that manifests in tensions over vertical and horizontal differences in material accumulation, the transgressive powers of bourgeois sex, and the challenges both can pose to our loyalties.

I say the conflict of bourgeois and pagan and not the difference of bourgeois and pagan because our moral traditions don’t just leave it at a difference. Bourgeois faiths have not been content simply to make a distinction between themselves and the pagan. They have rather been at considerable pains to label the pagan as immoral, backward, and parochial. They continue to react with embarrassment and hostility to suggestions that there is still some pagan in the bourgeois—that there is still some silver mixed in with the gold, and sometimes quite a lot. Doing so has long enabled urban state societies to argue for the morality of extending imperial reach over the realms of the pagan, gaining territory, capital, cheap labor, and an indirect means of ecological sustenance. (Urban people have to eat too.) For a faith of universal absolutes supposedly applies to all. Thus the backward pagan both threatens the civilized and needs to be controlled by the civilized, our moralities imply. Much of the contention over what we today label as race echoes these old tensions.

I have, however, been able to only hint at the connection of the double conflict to racial oppression.10 A more substantiated case will have to await another book. This one is long enough.

But I do want to synthesize one more important theme of this book before I close. Why do we find that we must now green our major religious traditions? Why did Pope Francis feel that he needed to release a special environmental encyclical for Catholics—his wonderful Laudato Si’, which has inspired more than Catholics to a greener sense of religion?¹¹ Why are there parallel movements within Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Protestantism, and more? Why do these traditions have so much catching up with environmentalism to do? Any developed faith should have considered the Earth and our ecological relations holy already, one might well expect. Moreover, as the religious scholar Bron Taylor has noted, the greening of faith has as yet generally attained only rather pale shades of green and usually has not given ecological concerns the central place that Taylor calls “dark green religion.”¹²

My argument has been that the major universal religions—that is, the religions that claim to universality—primarily respond to the moral concerns of bourgeois life. They have little to say about pagan matters of ecology and sustenance because they arose to speak to other worries, worries brought about by the rise of class and the decline of kin in the burgeoning cities of expanding states and empires. At least they have little new to say: they do all arise out of pagan traditions, with which they all retain some degree of alloy, however disguised, feared, or unacknowledged.

I sense an opportunity here, for in those alloys we can find considerable substance for deepening bourgeois religion’s shades of green. Consider Passover, the favorite holiday of most Jews—the dryness of matzo aside. Almost all Jews celebrate it as a bourgeois holiday about freedom, a chance to retell the story of the Exodus from slavery and its resonances with the struggle with Rome, with the diaspora, and with continuing anti-Semitism. Jews often widen the celebration of Passover to being about everyone’s freedom from poverty, oppression, and other ills of bourgeois life in contemporary class-based states, not only that of Jews—a general social justice theme increasingly appreciated by the increasing number of Christians who also commemorate Passover, in part as an acknowledgment that the Last Supper was a Passover meal in resistance to poverty, oppression, and the state. That is all great. But as I noted earlier, few recall that Passover began as pesach, a spring festival of ecological renewal at the time of the first ripening of barley in the agricultural calendar of the ancient Hebrews. That dry matzo, which bubbles up with no added leavening, historically symbolized the Earth’s capacity for self-regeneration and revitalization, returning to life after the deadness and hardness of winter. Why not bring the Earth back in and make Passover a festival of both social and ecological renewal? Or consider the Passover seder plate, with its shank bone, roasted egg, bitter herbs, spring greens, and haroseth (a paste of fruit, nuts, and wine). Jews generally take the items on the plate to symbolize aspects of the Exodus story, such as the bitter herbs for the bitterness of slavery and haroseth for the mortar for the bricks Jewish slaves in the story had to make, with no comment made about the obvious agricultural and ecological resonances of each of these elements. But it so easily could be an electrum celebration: a pagan-bourgeois sacralizing of both ecological justice and social justice.13

Christianity also has many opportunities within its own traditions for re-embracing its entangled pagan roots. Most obvious, perhaps, would be explicitly treating Easter as the springtime celebration of rebirth that it so clearly is at a subliminal level. Jesus’s resurrection from the dead in Northern Hemisphere spring resonates with the same ecological sensibilities of Passover—which perhaps should be no surprise, given that the New Testament describes Jesus’s resurrection as taking place four days after the Last Supper, a Passover meal. It would not necessarily compromise Christian theology to hold that Jesus’s resurrection was divinely intended to speak as well to our ecological connections. Anglo-Saxon and Germanic Christians also have the opportunity to go further with the heritage of celebrating the resurrection as Easter or Ostern in German, terms that derive from the ancient Germanic goddess of spring and fertility, Eostre or Ostara, whose name and attributes may derive from the even more ancient Sumerian goddess Ishtar.¹⁴ (Most other European languages use names derived from pesach for the celebration of the resurrection: for example, Pâques in French, Pasqua in Italian, Påske in Norwegian.) Instead of passing fast with an embarrassed look over the complete absence of any mention of rabbits and eggs in biblical accounts of Jesus’s death and resurrection, Christians could express reverence for, along with the fun of, the Easter Bunny as a symbol of the fertility of spring and renewal.

And why stop there with reforging an electrum connection to pagan sensibilities and traditions? Why should not Christians note with joy, rather than defensiveness, that Jesus’s birthdate of December 25 corresponds with the ancient optimism of the return of the sun and longer days following what was originally the date of the Northern Hemisphere winter solstice?15 Why not reembrace All Hallows Eve as Halloween, a time to celebrate the harvest and the Earth’s provisioning through the harshness of northern winter?¹⁶ Why not have Christians in the Southern Hemisphere celebrate all these holidays—Easter, Christmas, and Halloween—six months offset from Northern Hemisphere Christians, so as to fit the agricultural and ecological rhythms of the South? Why not think of the consumption of communion wafer and wine as a ritual of ecological communion with the “fruit of the Earth” and the “fruit of the vine”—as it is in the original Hebrew for Jewish Passover and Sabbath celebrations, from which Jesus’s instructions to eat of his body and drink of his blood derive—as well as a ritual of social and theological communion? Indeed, why not think of ecological communion as social and theological communion? Given that eating the “fruit of the Earth” and drinking the “fruit of the vine” remain part of Jewish Passover and Sabbath celebrations, as well as virtually all other Jewish holiday celebrations, although rarely paid attention to for their ecological significance, Jews have as much opportunity here as Christians do.

I’ll let others speak to the electrum potential of greater pagan-bourgeois synergy in Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, Hinduism, and other traditions for which I have less direct personal connection.¹⁷ The observations about opportunities for pagan-bourgeois synergy that I mention above are only the start of what could be done, were all our universal religions to embrace that their adherents actually have every reason to be as concerned about ecological issues as they do about social issues. For ecological issues are social issues and social issues are ecological issues.

Does this pagan-bourgeois synergy mean, then, that we all join Thoreau on his walk west through the woods, away from Boston? I think not. For one thing, he probably wouldn’t like it. Not only would we intrude on his solitude, we are sure to bring our politics with us (even if we do not smoke cigars). More importantly, I don’t think Thoreau’s west is the direction we should be trying to walk. “Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free,” he said.¹⁸ But the west of which he spoke was but another name for the bourgeois. He thought he was walking away from the city, but he was actually walking right back toward it—right back toward the concerns about desire that bourgeois life has long raised. Much environmentalism, as is typical of our world religions, looks for a city of the good built of pure moral gold. But lusting for the absolute does not quell the troubles of desire. Rather, it accentuates them, encouraging us to walk away from the conversations we should be having with each other, with all their frustrations, yes, but also their many fulfillments.

Let’s not have a bourgeois environmentalism. Our lives are too entangled for that—too entangled with one another and our ecologies. But let’s not have a purely pagan environmentalism either. My point has not been to argue that pagan traditions are better and that bourgeois traditions—whether based on absolutes of nature or religion—should do all they can to become like them. If my argument comes across that way to some readers it is perhaps because our bourgeois traditions, due to their political upper hand in the long-standing pagan-bourgeois conflict, are so used to denigrating pagan traditions that any suggestion of their value seems unjust partiality and an attempt to upend and put the bottom on top and the last first. No, the issues of desire that bourgeois moral traditions intend to help us think through are indeed crucial issues. Absolutism is a clumsy and sometimes terrifying moral tool for dealing with them, however. Morality isn’t so easy. It’s a tangled affair—tangled because morality is entangled with the world, not apart from it.

Besides, there is a lovely effect when you mix silver and gold together into electrum. It doesn’t just strike the eye as a paler yellow. The metal actually takes on a greenish luster, leading jewelers to sometimes call electrum “green gold.” It’s not the dusty green of tarnish. It’s not the dull green of money. It’s a gentle ecological luminance. So let’s reforge the ancient triangle out of this green gold, and set and reset our many jewels of truth within it as we cut and recut them.

Or, to put it in terms of the other major metaphor of this book, what I am asking is that we not seek to live in a city of the good, absolute and final, separate and solved, but, rather, that we seek each other and the ever-changing worthiness of lives lived in the everywhere.

St. Augustine didn’t understand the human situation in this way. In the City of God, he advised that

[a]nyone can now easily gather that the blessedness which the intellectual being desires with unswerving resolution is the product of two causes working in conjunction, the untroubled enjoyment of the changeless Good, which is God, together with the certainty of remaining in him for eternity, a certainty that admits no doubt or hesitation, no mistake or disappointment.19

The unswerving, untroubled enjoyment of a changeless Good. Eternal certainty with no doubt, hesitation, mistake, or disappointment. Find it in that which is external to the social and political: in God, the eternal external—external to what Augustine elsewhere termed the “standard of the flesh.”²⁰ This hardly seems a call for openness to further learning, from and together with each other and the world.

Thoreau, for his part, similarly sought truth through separation from people and their desires. He had no doubt or hesitation about, and saw no mistake or disappointment in, seeking the goodness of truth. “No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth,” he wrote in the conclusion of Walden, his account of his two years of living alone in his lakeside shack. “This alone wears well.”²¹ What keeps us from finding the truth? Like Augustine, Thoreau accused the desires of our bourgeois sociality. As he put it, in one of his most quoted lines, “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”²² That truth is the more likely the less social we are in discovering it, he contended. The solipsism of the shack led Thoreau to advise, in the conclusion to Walden:

Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made…. If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.²³

If Thoreau was right, why expect others to read and listen to this recommendation, since it comes from someone else? But many have. Dozens of editions of Walden are still in print.²⁴ Indeed, “a different drummer” is one of his most widely cited phrases. But as well we should feel no necessity to step along in agreement when we listen to, read about, and gain some lift from the drumming of someone else’s experience. I have taken much from their writings, but I don’t agree with Thoreau and Augustine about the evils of desire (among other matters). For my part, I think it all depends on the what, why, and how of our desires, and on our continued debate over the specificities of their justice. Plus I think there is nothing inherently wrong with disloyalty—including, potentially, disloyalty to the ideas of Augustine and Thoreau and the traditions and communities they represent. That too depends; there is much in our lives that deserves our loyalty and much that does not. But reading Augustine and Thoreau has helped me hugely in coming to this very sentence, the current moment (as I write) in the stream of my understanding.

To be social, to be moral, to be just does not require concordance and conformity. It requires engagement with our differences. We all have a democratic right with regard to any notion, including what I have written here, a right that underlies all other democratic rights: the right to say I disagree, for what I think are sound reasons, so let’s talk about them, and equally about your reasons, deeply and honestly.

How do we take up that conversation? Maybe the way we should take up every conversation: by remembering that we don’t know everything. Because if you and I did know everything, why should we bother to converse anyway? There would no point, no surprise, no life to it. And life is surprise. As I like to say, if you have all the answers then you don’t have all the questions.25 Face it, you can’t know everything, and nor can I. No need for despair here: it’s awesomely cool that we can’t, for it means we have reason to stay awake to the world and its creativities.

I am not arguing that we need to get rid of concepts and traditions like nature, religion, and community. I am not arguing that we should level our cities nor that we should dispense with bourgeois ideas because of their inevitable connection, like all ideas, to power, morality, and other manifestations of the political. I see no necessity for, nor possibility of, a postmodern world without categories. What turns our search for the good into the bad is not the ancient triangle that we forge in the smithies of urbanism. The problem is when we try to hammer the ancient triangle out of the lead of absolutes, claiming through some moral alchemy that it is actually now pure gold. But it is possible to have ideas of nature, religion, and community that are not absolute. We know we can have them because we long have had them, even if we have not always recognized them.²⁶

For alongside the frequent assertions of absolutes that our politics have so often made so attractive to so many has always been another, better politics—a politics that is open to both transcendence and immanence, both the bourgeois and the pagan, and to the constant entangling work of bringing them and everything else about our lives into dialogue. The multilogical, multilocal truth of that better politics promotes what we might term transimmanence, an electrum understanding—a green gold truth—that carries across but also draws from local circumstance and experience, never completely resolving, and thus always evolving. It seeks not just transcendence from our traditions but immanence as well, in order to bring transcendence home and to bring home to transcendence.27

No, the great issue with multilogical truth is not its critical view of absolutes. Rather, its great issue is the problem of power, resulting in the sometimes enormous inequalities in people’s ability to resist the experiences and entreaties of others. For dialogue is not just an exchange of words. It is as well an exchange of power, granting one another the right to speak and be heard, to disagree and be honestly taken into account. Those with greater power can more easily say what they know to be a lie or a partiality and get away with it—and can as well more easily say what they believe to be true and get away with it. Those with greater power can also more easily say what they do not know to be a lie or a partiality and not contend with, or learn from, the perspectives and insights of others. And those with greater power can more easily ignore or denigrate what they know to be well-substantiated in experience—either their own or that of others—when it contradicts their interests. There is, thus, a constant struggle for who controls the tools for cutting the jewel of truth, for we are not all equally committed to each other. We will not create conditions more favorable to dialogue and multilogical truth without addressing this striving.

The aspects of striving that I have focused on in this book are the double conflict of bourgeois life, of bourgeois versus both proletarian and pagan. Yes, it is political to undertake the work of addressing these contentions. But seeking a nature, supernature, or community that is absolute is just as political as seeking one that is not. Hiding our politics does not purge our politics. Rather than retreating behind the loftiness of the absolute, a non-absolute politics commits to perpetual openness—perpetual openness to this diverse universe.

Too much we who live dominantly bourgeois lives have looked to our traditions for the gold of Great Truths, for stabilities in the face of uncertainties, for definitions in the face of undefinability, for the power to deny the power of another. We have asked them to be traditions of the known, and they have often complied, even when it led to refueling fearful hotness, for that was often part of the intent. Perhaps they would serve us better as traditions of the unknown. As they often have been. For alongside worship of the definite, our traditions of nature, faith, and community—from science to environmentalism to universal religions to our various borderlands of community—have also given us moral means for appreciating the endless indefinite and the silver of its Great Mysteries. Our traditions of the ancient triangle do indeed have veins of this silver to draw upon, as I have tried to show. They do have the electrum, green gold capacity to open us to the awesome coolness of the unknown and to why there is no need to fear it—to open us to how, rather, the unknown releases us from our fears, most especially our fears of each other.

My point is not to call for everyone to abandon conviction. We have to go on from here with what we think we know, and we need enough conviction to have a direction in which to proceed. But let us not turn our convictions into jail sentences. We should not allow our convictions to turn us into convicts of the mind, locking ourselves up and closing ourselves off from the potential surprise present in every interaction.28

To put it another way, we all need starting places: the knowledge and traditions from which we began. Yet let us not turn our starting places into ending places, our confidences into defenses, our interpretations into fortifications. As we seek the good, we should be wary lest we find ourselves instead building city walls of the good: crenellated, gated, and guarded.

I’m ending on a sermon, I guess. Multilogical truth is, I hope, an everyday truth, not some rarified new discovery. But to accept it is to accept its call to moral action: we need to encourage ways of conceiving the good that promote the constant questioning and discovery that come from admitting difference—nay, welcoming difference—and thus politics. The trouble comes when we try to escape politics and to convince ourselves that we have succeeded in this escape.

And why make this futile effort at escape? The good is not the absence of politics, for there is nothing inherently bad about politics. Rather, politics is just people working out how best to get along with others, both human others and nonhuman others. That seems to me a very good thing for us to try to work out. No, instead of seeking to escape our politics, we should rather embrace our politics. For to do so is to embrace our humanity with all its needs and passions, ecologies and societies, natures and supernatures, individuals and communities, challenges and possibilities, conflicts and contentments, truths and mysteries.