Believers and Black Swan Scotoma

This is the third blog-essay I have been moved to write by the simple sentiment expressed by American President Abraham Lincoln: "We dare not promise what we ought not, lest we be called upon to deliver that which we cannot." - Abraham Lincoln

Since at one time not so very long ago, I wrote and edited definitions for a well-known dictionary for a living, it seems

apropos

to start this essay with a definition:

sco•to• ma | scah-tó-ma | the psycho-physiological process

by which the mind sees within an entire field of vision only what fragments it chooses to see.

I write the following with the greatest of respect for the ministry and sincerity of musician, Stephen Curtis Chapman. One day before this famed Christian singer-songwriter's teenage son ran over and killed the singer's seven year old daughter with their family 's car, Chapman could have been the author of faith-based "how to" books on acquiring meaning, impact, fame, fortune, and family happiness in the path of God-following; and

Believers desiring the same blessings would buy the books

by the ten-thousands, hoping to learn how Chapman "did" it, so they can "do" the same things, and "get" the same results.

One day after the Chapman tragedy, his target market for such a book would have dwindled to near zero. No one would want to "do" what he did, and "get" what he "got." If Chapman later wrote a book, it would most likely be on "how to" survive and recover from such a tragedy and remain a Believer; and his market would be entirely different for that book.

This different book would be bought by Believers whose lives have also been touched by deep darkness, who are also looking for a way to survive the devastation Heaven saw fit to allow into their lives.

It would probably have nearly as little value for the man on the street as the previous book on success; because the man on the street does not have what is surely among the most important keys to Chapman's "keeping on keeping on" - the knowledge that his income and continued fame derive from his public commitment to his faith, and his private adherence to it in such a manner that exposure as a fake could not ruin that income and status. That kind of unrepeatable, random factor is what "Black Swan" author Nicholas Nissim Taleb called in an earlier book, "randomness" – and one of his core premises driving him to write was the public's misunderstanding of how significant a role randomness plays in scenarios like wealth-building, benefit acquisition, or any other issues of good or bad fortune.

Right now, Joel Osteen is the poster-boy for Two-Testament faith's "positive" side. Big congregation, apparent family blessings with spouse and children, impact, happiness, apparent "favor" from On High. How

does

he

do

it?

The truth is - Joel Osteen has no more idea why deep darkness has not touched his children, than Stephen Curtis Chapman knows why it has touched his.

Marketing what Osteen "has" right now is as charlatan a move as it would have been for Chapman to market what he "had." Both men are clueless. Scripture declares it so. In Ecclesiastes, King Solomon goes out of his way to point out that

anyone who is actually looking at the whole world instead of a small slice of it

can see plainly there are wicked people having a great time, and righteous people suffering devastation, as well as the opposite, and every stripe in between. Art DeMoss, among the premiere evangelical philanthropists of our era, dropped dead suddenly on the tennis court at age 50; and a short while later, one of his children was horrifically injured and impaired in an automobile accident. Before this season, every New Testament zealot with assets wanted to

be

Art DeMoss - and afterwards? We see his widow, Nancy DeMoss from time to time on talk shows and in print interviews

describing how she keeps on keeping on.

Yet - do you see high ratings for cable re-runs of any Art DeMoss interviews, tapings, how to be like Art seminars,

"The Wisdom Of Art DeMoss,"

or the like? Yet - you cannot turn on cable or satellite without seeing in fairly short order somewhere on the channel guide ... you guessed it ... Joel Osteen.

Most people who

buy "how to" books buy them to learn how to become like the author,

and acquire things the author has that they want.

Many people adhere to faith because they believe their adherence buys them a certain amount of insulation from disaster, or advantage in competition for resources.

Both sets of customers are walking in delusion. God has never been a reliable source of invulnerability or credit in the human sense: His faithfulness to his promises is peppered with irregularities that boggle our minds and bewilder our spirits. Consider the following ideas.

Mathematician and options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb caught my attention a while ago as I was listening to Bloomberg Business Radio on my way to lead our regular midweek prayer meeting in Manhattan. He spoke of how misleading much or most of the entire stock advising business was, existing on what he called,

"the illusion of being able to turn a mathematical uncertainty into a certainty."

The uncertainty is whether or not a particular investment or array of them will do well. The advisor

creates the illusion that he or she somehow has the knowledge and experience to be able to turn that uncertainty into a certainty:

all the while, issuing in very small print disclaimers about past performance being no reliable indicator of future success. The reason the print is small is because what it says is unattractive, and the reader is usually too lazy to read it, or is using the smallness of print to avoid reading what he does not want to know. The small print is there because without it, the claims of the advisor are false advertising due to ... you guess ed it ... promising a certainty he is unable to provide.

In his best sellers,

"The Black Swan"

and

"Fooled by Randomness,"

Taleb explains how the impact of small-but-crucial factors in success creating extreme randomness in whether either success or failure actually happen, make virtual folly out of any "system" or "expertise" claiming to overcome the uncertainty. This truth is made obvious by a few simple observations:

- The most successful investors in the world have had their behavior tracked, analyzed, distilled, and then published into "how he did it" books - none of which reproduce another Warren Buffett, Donald Trump, or other baron of investing.

- Almost none of the genii guiding people's investments have been able to predict the stock market crashes of 1929, 1987, or 2008.

- Almost none of the people guiding others' investments are überwealthy themselves. Most investment advisors are "grunts" having earned degrees in undergraduate college, or perhaps a master's in business or math: but have no record of success and no substantial wealth, themselves.  Yet, as "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" author Robert Kiyosaki points out, people still put their fortunes into the hands of these people who cannot genuinely guarantee or predict anything, and are often less wealthy than the people whose investments they advise.

Moreover, people still buy the "how to" books by the millions, thus increasing author-baron's success while continuing not to obtain their own - and seem not to notice this pattern.

Why?

There is a story about playwright Arthur Miller, that after he won the Pulitzer Prize for,

Death Of A Salesman,

he took a stroll through his old, poor neighborhood in which he grew up - and saw an old friend selling hot dogs as a street vendor. They greeted each other and the vendor asked what Miller had been doing. He responded, "I became a playwright - and my play just won the Pulitzer Prize!" The vendor shook his head as he made a hot dog for his old friend, and said,

"Yeahhhh - play writing: I shoulda gone into that."

It is astonishing that any a reasoning process could believe for a fraction of a moment that the difference between a hot-dog vendor's life and Arthur Miller's is only the choice of whether or not to become a playwright.

If he had only done

a few of the things

Artie did, naturally he would be just like Artie: right?

Obviously, not.

In a recent movie called,

The Incredibles,

about a family of superheroes, the parents try to get their gifted son, Dash, to hold back his speed so his other classmates won't feel badly about not being as fast. The mother tells Dash, "Remember, everybody is special in some way." Dash hangs his head and replies

sotto voce

, "Saying 'everybody is special' is the same as saying 'no one is.'" Smart boy. King Solomon - a very special person - put what Dash's parents were trying to say this way: "I have seen an evil in the earth, that for every good thing a person accomplishes, his neighbor is exceedingly jealous."

Here is the delusion

upon which the Investment Advisors and the Joel Osteens feed: the inaccurate notion that

the only difference

between the life of Warren Buffett and the guy living in poverty, or Joel Osteen and the guy with three out of his five kids having Multiple Sclerosis -

is nothing but a series of steps anyone can learn and reproduce

, and which will transform anyone from who they are into Warren Buffett or Joel Osteen.

Where am I going with this?

Joel Osteen

cannot tell you wh

y

the Chapman's little girl died while his kids are still all alive; but Joel Osteen and his like

can ONLY succeed at selling you his books and CDs

if he or his marketing team can get you - if not directly, then by implication - to

believe he DOES know and CAN teach YOU.

The only difference between the televangelist playing to huge crowds and you - is a few things you need to know how to do, that a master or guru can teach you. Of course, you pay them to get the information you hope will be your fiscal and social salvation - so more money goes into their success column - while you do what? For the most part, you remain who you are and what you are. What is really going on in this ongoing game?

The Book of Job comes into play here.

Job is not a book about how to handle disaster.

It is a book about facing human cluelessness.

It tells us Job did not flee God or sin with his lips, but it does not give us much information on how he achieved this.

At the end of the book, we receive no shattering insight.

Job tells us that he heard of God before, now he sees him clearly: but

Job does not clarify the specifics of the difference between his earlier and later experiences: he only describes what seems to be an upgrade in his perception of God: "I

formerly

heard of You with the hearing of my ears;

but now

I see you, and I repent."

 Yet, he does not tell us what he sees, or of what he repented: because he is not charged with sin: he his merely called human, and thus, limited in perception and understanding. We are left mystified because the book of Job does not convey self-help secrets for handling hard times:

it presents how utterly absent we are of enough crucial information to know definitively what any given situation really "means".

Job's main theme is that we humans are so far out of the loop that the only thing we genuinely know is that we know too little to know what is really going on in human affairs. The Book of Job starts by showing us the actual motivations of Job's situation

occur in another universe

to which has no access. They involve matters between God and His Adversary (

sah-táhn

) in Hebrew.

The core-factors at play are never even factors of which Job and his friends are aware.

Job's friends' offerings of analysis and advice are not only worthless in the end, but are offenses against the truth so foul that God says it will take forgiving intercession from Job to prevent them from being punished from On High for their little advisories.

Neither testament of Jewish Scripture is allergic to the idea of a mystery.

E

verybody wants a pass: some people

seem

to get them.

But we never genuinely

know

why one person has it tough and another easy.

Why does one child die and another live?

Why does one person seem to suffer and another seem to luxuriate?

Why does one person appear blessed while someone far less righteous endures hardship or loss.

If you say you

know

... you may have joined the company of Job's comforters and the self-help booksellers club.

Nassim Taleb wrote in

Fooled by Randomness

, "It is impossible to assess the quality of the knowledge we are gathering without allowing a share of randomness in the manner it is obtained, and

cleaning the argument from the chance coincidence

that could have seeped into its construction."

There are too many untraceable random factors in the success of Warren Buffett, or the suffering of Stephen Curtis Chapman, for anyone to write a "how to" or "how not to" book on either.

The ancient Greek philosopher, Solon, was asked by the immensely rich King Croesus to declare if Croesus was the happiest man on earth. Solon's response what that due to his knowledge of how suddenly and drastically a man's circumstances can change, Solon could not make such a declaration until the life of the king was over. Later, when Cyrus of Persia had conquered Croesus and was about to put him to death, the Greek king told the Persian ruler of Solon's words, and that he was prepared to die: Cyrus was so moved, he spared life of Croesus. None of these twists and turns could be seen by Croesus when he considered himself the happiest of all men on earth; and in Hebrew, the word "happy" is also rendered "blessed" (

ashér

).

If we are to be honorable advocates of God-following and truth-following, we must not try to put people in the pews, sell books and teaching series, by incautiously pretending that we know more than we do, or are more insulated from harm than we are.

We dare not promise

(nor imply promises)

we ought not, lest we be called upon to deliver that which we cannot

- and so become religious frauds, and break the hearts of our hearers.

There is great merit in calling a mystery a mystery.

There is great comfort in

letting go of the notion that faith is a magic one can learn, which will repel all harm and attract all enjoyment

.

God takes complete responsibility for the full range of the human experience: "I kill and I make alive, there is no other God with me," - and "Not a sparrow falls to the ground apart from Your Heavenly Father." He is in it all - not just the fun stuff.

He has not built the universe as we would have.

The universe does not "work" as we think it should.

What did King Solomon of Israel tell us he gleaned from a long life of observation as one of the most gifted intellectuals in history?

"The final word on everything is this: respect God and obey his commands, because this is all humanity."

What does this mean?

These two choices are in reality all any human being has within actual reach. We can choose to honor the reality of eternity and we can choose to obey the promptings of moral law set in our hearts (Ps. 19, Romans 1, Ecclesiastes 3:11). Beyond that - we are in the company of The Black Swan whenever he shows up; and he arrives always without warning, and contrary to the "how to" books pontifications the prevention of his arrival.

Abraham Lincoln said, "We dare not promise what we ought not, lest we be called upon to deliver that which we cannot."

Believers cannot, in the material universe, deliver certainty of any kind - and it should not be part of what we "market." Eternity is the only thing about which we can speak with genuine certainty.

And we cannot advance the kingdom of truth merely by telling people the lies we know they most want to hear.

We can wholeheartedly advocate the merits of truth, truthfulness, and truth-following. 

This we should do.

Truth should be followed

because

it

is true.

Justice should be done 

because

it is just.

God should be honored

because

He

is God.

Any guarantees of what people choosing to walk these paths might "get" from it - other than the eternity of blessedness the exact description of which Scripture directly tells us "had not entered into the mind or heart of humankind" - is folly and fraud.

Folly and fraud are not the bricks of which the kingdom of truth will be built.

We are not "selling" anything.

We are supposed to be holding for truth for anyone who wants it.

Holding forth something that is attractive but untrue may put people in the pews - but they will not be the people Scripture describes as "saved" (2Thess. 2:11), and we in the pulpit will not be doing them any good by preaching with our fingers crossed, hoping nothing ill befalls them we cannot, with our pontifications on CDs and DVDs for a mere $19.95 per set, nor for people's weekly tithes and offerings, explain away.

Rabbi Bruce L. Cohen

New York City

8 July 2009