Results tagged “religion” from Eccentric Eclectica

In the spirit of answering my own questions from last weeks Kierkegaard discussion I noticed this interesting article on the cross-cultural similarities in moral development.

Researchers have been conducting studies of moral development across cultures. The summary by Bruce Bower at Science News suggests that there are universal themes to moral development across cultures. This contradicts the arguments of some scholars that Eastern and Western cultures have different values about the role of individuals, family, institutions, women, etc.

Children everywhere stew in the same pot of family conflict, with different cultural seasonings added for flavor, in Helwig’s view. When parents restrict behaviors that children regard as personal choices, such as what clothes to wear or which friends to hang out with, disputes inevitably arise. Parental restrictions on behavior that kids view as morally wrong or as a violation of conventional social rules are often accepted, even if grudgingly.

During the teen years, kids in Asian and Western cultures alike gravitate toward a broader class of moral imperatives, including rights to privacy, education and freedom of speech, Helwig and colleagues find in another new study published in the August Social Development. Adolescents also appeal to democratic notions, such as majority rule, to justify a preference for representative forms of government — even if they live in a communist or authoritarian society.

Helwig’s conclusions trigger skepticism from some psychologists, including Shinobu Kitayama of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who contend that moral reasoning fundamentally differs in Eastern and Western cultures. In Kitayama’s view, only individualistic Westerners put a premium on personal freedoms and rights. Asians steeped in responsibilities to family and society guard the moral integrity of their assigned roles and duties.

Kierkegaard proposed a three-stage theory of psychological development: aesthetic, ethical, and religious. As far as I know he was one of the earlier stage-based theorists of individual development. In the twentieth century the action switched to psychology and the big names of Piaget, Kohlberg, Turiel, and Gilligan. The studies summarized by Bower suggest that whatever type of development occurs during childhood it is similar across cultures.

I wonder how Kierkegaard’s highly individualistic explanation of faith would be received by Eastern cultures. To me Kierkegaard’s individual relation to God parallels a lot of the mystical experiences described in many religious traditions. It’s been a long time since I read about mysticism East or West, but one of the things I remember in the Western tradition is the role of paradox and individual experience.

If there is a God I’ve always been attracted to apophatic or negative theology as a route to belief or understanding. God cannot be described by human expressions, just as Abraham cannot be explained by Johannes de Silentio. We can only approach the divine asymptotically.

I just finished rereading Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard. I read it for a philosophy course in college and returned to it at the urging of my book club.

One of the questions discussed during our meeting was what we got out of reading the book. I recognize the value of such a pragmatic criteria for book reading and use something similar more often than not. I’ve abandoned plenty of books because I didn’t think I’d get anything from them or felt like I’d learned enough from the pages I did read. Business books are especially prone to bloat and I drop them faster than a lot of other works.

The difficulty with using such a pragmatic criteria to evaluate Kierkegaard is my lack of religious faith. I waffle between describing myself as an atheist or an agnostic, but I’m certainly not a mainstream believer. Kierkegaard was a believer, but he wasn’t mainstream, in fact he disliked the church of his time more than I do the churches of today. So I think it’s hard to get a practical fact out of reading Fear and Trembling that I can apply to my everyday life.

The best I’ve been able to come up is the difficulty of faith. What makes Kierkegaard interesting, even to a person who doesn’t share his religious belief, is the psychological struggle he describes as being central to the action of faith. For Kierkegaard faith is hard, perhaps the hardest action a man can perform. I sympathize with that difficulty because the movement of faith is difficult for me as well.

I also like the idea that the movement of faith is an individual move, an action that can’t be done by, or at the urging, of a group of people. Ethics is something universal and shared by the group, but faith is absolute and particular. Part of the reason I distrust so many organized religions is the missing individual component. Sometimes faith seems to easy for a fundamentalist. Of course the personal experience may be different than the appearance of outward activity. It’s this distinction between inwardness and outwardness that is most valuable to me and hopefully of value to other believers.