Center and Margin
This post is a very rough sketch of ideas and may include unfinished, incomplete, or erroneous ideas that will later be corrected. This post will be part of a series that will form the basis of a new book I’m writing following on the themes of my last book, Thoughts From Reconstruction. All of these themes center around the New Covenant. You can find everything published so far in this series on the Highlights page under the My Most Important section.
While reconstructing our moral order, we will leverage many different kinds of knowledge and wisdom, from the Holy Spirit to the Bible, pastors to teachers, family to friends, our own learning and experience, and our successes and our failures. One additional source of insight comes from having an understanding of universal patterns of being. These universal patterns help to at once simplify phenomena, identify how differing phenomena align, and tell us, by obvious demonstration, what outcomes will emerge from them. This will help us view moral choices from an additional angle.
Universal patterns are descriptions of reality, as such, how reality and being really play out fractally at every level. Their value is not just in showing us how reality plays out but in showing which patterns produce optimal results. In this way, universal patterns are something like vectors in mathematics in that they can be seen as not only descriptors but predictors. Patterns are not special, magical, or “woo”, they’re just descriptions for how reality plays out during trivial observation. Once you start seeing universal patterns in your own life, you won’t be able to stop seeing them, and you won’t be able to deny their incredible value to inform.
But what patterns are there? Patterns include the pattern of The One / The Source / The All, The Center and The Margin, The Outside and The Exiled, The Scapegoat, The Opposing Force, and more. There are potentially an infinite number of patterns depending on the level of detail of analysis. They need not be complex, they can be simple, as with The All, or The Center and The Margin, but they can also encompass complex phenomena, as patterns interact with each other, overlapping, complementing, influencing, and opposing.
Patterns are helpful because there is a symbolic sense to being that patterns serve as a very apt way of describing. They not only describe what we observe but they also help us understand what patterns will emerge as we continue in the practice of observing and thinking about and with patterns.
One of the most basic forms of universal patterns is the concept of the center and the margin. The center in this case represents any core or foundational tangible or intangible phenomena relating to an outer or shell phenomena. Everyone understands the idea of a center, where most things reside because reality as such means being there is easier, and a margin, where fewer things reside because reality as such means being there is harder. Think of high school and the “normal” kids vs the “weird” kids. It’s easy just to blend in and act and look like most other students. That’s the center. The punks, goths, nerds, and geeks are the margins. Later on, some from the Center will move to the Margin and vice versa. There is a relationship and interplay between the layers.
Like other patterns the pattern of center and margin can be seen and applied at many levels of meaning. For our case, moral order, the center contains the easy moral choices. The center also represents the majority of people who are not testing the margins of the moral order. The margin represents those others who, by their being, raise questions about the moral order of the center. The margin is where choices become difficult and it is the margin that most challenges our beliefs. So, it is to the margins that we will look. This is also why it becomes increasingly uncomfortable to approach these issues, because the margin necessarily represents the things that are not ‘easy’.
Prescriptive and Descriptive Moral Orders
Prescriptive moral order would have us categorize choices under labels and then those labels would be looked up in an authoritative source and we would find a cause-effect solution prescribed for us. The cause/action of murder is given the effect/action of death. This is largely the mode of the Old Covenant Law: No other gods, no idols, no murder, no lying, etc.
Descriptive moral order, on the other hand, is the type of rule that describes an ideal from which a more freely formed effect/action emerges. The ideal of Love God does not prescribe particular actions but describes a mode that enables a freedom to find and choose effects/actions that fulfill that ideal. This is the mode of the New Covenant Christ gave us in Love God and Neighbour which clearly lacks any precise cause-effect prescription for fulfilling the ideal. Neither does the Greatest Commandment, nor the Great Mercy, have any precise action to fulfill the ideal of Preach the Gospel and Make Disciples, or Mercy Triumphs Over Judgment. It is this paradigmatic emphasis between Old and New Covenants that grants us a new way to understand life and being and its moral challenges.
The center contains more obvious prescribed moral order simply because it is more easily accepted by most but we must not lose the truth that, even at the center, it is not truly prescriptive moral order but descriptive moral order that reigns. We make a mistake similar to the Pharisees when we forget the center is, at its base, still a descriptive moral order under the New Covenant. This is why Jesus said the greatest commandment was to love God and neighbour because the Law and Prophets hung on those ideals.
Choices on the moral margin become more difficult when you move from prescriptive moral order to descriptive moral order, as we are now granted under the New Covenant. Under descriptive moral order, one cannot rely on easy look-up solutions and, instead, we have to use learning, knowledge, wisdom, advice, experience, prayer, fasting, contemplation, meditation, and more to come to a conclusion rather than merely following a list of dos and don’ts.
It is because of this difference, between prescriptive and descriptive moral orders, that universal patterns become useful tools as the simplified nature of patterns is more easily mapped to descriptions of reality rather than prescriptions of particular actions.
Toward The Margin
We now move toward the margin of moral law where we will be hard pressed to judge rightly now that we have been given the descriptive New Covenant moral law in the place of the prescriptive Old Covenant moral law. We are intimately familiar with the chaos of the complexity of life and some moral choices threaten to undo us. So, let us dip our toes before we dunk our heads.
This series will continue. Please check back from time to time, if you’re interested in reading new parts as they become available. The entire series will be made available on the Highlights page under the My Most Important section as each part is published.