Searching for God #25

 If we are going to mediate both violence and retribution from our attitudes, beliefs and actions, we are going to have to face some painful truths. And while James Hillman writes about our “love of war” and all of the contextual implications causing, sustaining and resulting from war, the incidence of violence is not dissipating. Whether it is actually rising or not may follow the oscillating tides of information that has grown to saturation levels in the last two or three decades in a 24-7-365 media.

If Hillman’s ‘love of war’ perception applies to the gestalt of the culture, what he would call the anima mundi, there are also individual psychic dynamics that beg for illumination, so that we might better understand and grapple with our inherent and nefarious tendencies.

Is it possible that the ‘social’ situation provokes violence, that may or may not be inherent in humans? In a paper entitled, Social Perspectives on Violence, in Michigan Family Review, Spring 1996, Volume 02. Issue 1, on umich.edu, Thomas W. Blume writes:

Violence is a social phenomenon. For an action to be considered violent, it needs a victim or a group of victims. The interpersonal nature of violence seems to call for explanations or understandings that also are interpersonal. Rather than look inside the perpetrator for the causes of violence, social perspectives look in the social situation for factors that may explain why violence is not universal but instead varies in frequency and intensity. The social question is not, ‘Why does violence occur?’ but rather ‘Why does that naturally occurring, socially undesirable activity happen more in some circumstances than in others?

Somehow my mind, like a small cruiser idling with the motor barely operating, and the wind having some influence on our direction, clearly in what we call ‘open water’ (as opposed to a narrow river where the wind has no opportunity to torment), I have a nagging question about the degree to which we are all engaged in, or perhaps enmeshed in, a kind of psychic tension as a constant, inescapable, universal human dynamic.

The Pope, it is reported today, claimed that those who are opposed to abortion and yet support war cannot be pro-life. And while I would frame that dichotomy differently, as one who is open to abortion depending on the situation (situation ethics) and opposed to war, I consider my ambivalence to be slightly less dramatic than the one posed by the Pope. For me, the right and opportunity to choose on the abortion question rests with the pregnant woman and her doctor and family. And while there are questions of biblically contained ‘laws’ it is the evolution of the application of those laws that comprises an even greater divide.

None of us can or will control the intimate details of every other person’s life, nor should or could we expect to, even as a matter of ethics or morality, law or psychic health. And even  to penetrate into the finest details is a matter of extreme delicacy, sensitivity and confidentiality, that requires detailed and mutually supported covenants between individuals. Perhaps, such a model of a covenant openly discussed, openly and voluntarily agreed to and then monitored carefully and sensitively by each party, could embody a baby step toward green-housing a shared common heritage of just how complex is the business of personal relationships.

And such a covenant demands considerable time, patience, mutual active listening and especially a degree of acquiescence from both, given that each is giving up a slice of autonomy, independence, and even absolute freedom. So entrapped are we in a language or vernacular that oscillates from one absolute to its opposite, with rarely a considered pause for the reflection that is needed in order to gain perspective on the limits to those very absolutes.  And those very absolutes, like electrified fences around universal and ubiquitous expanses of ‘mental land’ leave each of us ‘free’ of any perceivable boundaries on our speech, especially when it comes to reviewing the performance and lives of others.

Even the Pope’s absolute of  the ‘pro-life’ position, as required of all Catholics, is a significant cultural model of the kind of absolute which not only condones other absolutes, but actually gives license to the very notion of using absolutes in our everyday lives, as an implicit and inherent code of our shared morality. Naturally, the public consciousness ‘believes’ (or at least perceives) that absolutes are absolutely necessary in order to preserve and protect the order of any stable society. Underlying that perception and belief, is the notion that people, if left to our own choices, would run amok and create both havoc and strip all semblance of personal and social security from our lives. So,we have laws, and law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, security agencies, courts, and soldiers, sailors, and pilots to ‘surveille land, sea and air. Additionally, we have all of the needed weapons to back up all of those security agencies. And those needs continue to ‘grow’ as the other countries develop their own agencies and weapons for protection and national security.

Another absolute?

The military, the bombs, the jet fighters, the missiles, the drones and the surveillance AI that keeps on backing up the back-up, over and over, layers upon layers…in what amounts to a shared, absolute delusion that we are safe!

Really?

And, to buy into that delusion is not a solitary phenomenon. How about the absolute of the path to the Christian salvation??….through the grace of God, following upon the penitential atonement for personal private sins, irrespective of our shared complicity in supporting and sustaining the kind of social and political and military and diplomatic absolutes of war, guns, bombs and spies, both human and digital.

And we might add to that absolute belief, perception, attitude and cultural foundation that those who have a respectable career and/or profession, with an adequate or bountiful income, and the capacity to feed, clothe, educate and provide health care for their families, are the role models of our society, who pay the taxes, spend their incomes on consumer goods which drive the economy ((75% of the American economy is based on the sale of consumer goods) and thereby provide the jobs to keep others working, earning an income and keeping the system operating effectively, efficiently and absolutely the way it is support to run.

Absolutely! Of course! And who is going to question such an obvious set of premises.

Aren’t those premises ordained by God, and sanctified by the various governments at least of those nations claiming to be both Christian and democratic? Oh, and isn’t democracy also ordained by God? Just like capitalism? And militarism? And the complicity in generating and sustaining poverty, disease, pandemics, and that absolute indisputable ethical and moral value, white Christian nationalism? Is that not another one of the many absolutes to which we have all hitched our wagons, as Christians?

At what point do our absolutes absolutely ensnare us in our own leg-shackles? At what point do we awaken to the very obvious reality that we have bought into a cultural, psychic, political, economic, corporate, academic scientific, moral and ethical trap of absolutes that effectively and essentially can and will only lead us down a dead-end tunnel of darkness?

Hillman argues against what he calls our ultra-dependence on the literal, the empirical, and the scientific perception and reality which surrounds our psychological diagnoses relegating many into the clinical diagnosis as psychologically ‘abnormal’. Tolstoy argues that within each of us is a true and certain knowledge and awareness of the brotherhood of humanity, and that it is our blindness that has yet to clear in order for us to realize the promise of that ‘Christ-given Sermon on the Mount theology and life commitment.

Behind Tolstoy’s argument runs the premise that authority, all forms of authority, need force in order to stay in power and that that persistent and universal need for force is behind much of the violence in which we are still drowning, at the home, school, church, political, military and geopolitical levels. Such force, in the hands of those who have power (mostly too those who need that power in order to consider themselves worthy) runs the gamut of parking tickets, gun-toting police officers, all the way up to the highest officers of the land.

His claim is that the whole edifice is a house of cards, based on the delusion that violence and force are essential for humanity to function. And part of that edifice of ‘cards’ in his view is the Christian church, whose promise of an absolute ‘forgiveness and salvation’ is based on a single interpretation of the scriptures…which effectively skirts, denies, avoids or dismisses that Sermon on the Mount. He argues that it is because that sermon does not fit comfortably with the power structure of the society, with those in power, that it has received such short shrift in both theological theory and practice.

We can all ‘see’ our own blindness, (even this scribe can see how I have complied with many aspects of our shared cultural blindness for decades, and if I can see it, so can you, dear reader!).  Given that the abuses of absolute power, in the hands of men whose need for power vastly exceeds their merit to serve in political leadership, in so many quarters (think the U.S.A., Russia, Hungary, Israel, North Korea, Sudan and others) is so exaggeratedly and hourly displayed on our screens around the world, is it just feasible to imagine that every hour and day more and more people are coming to a consciousness of complicity, blindness, and conformity with which we can no longer co-operate, or even tolerate?

We need not abandon science nor the methods and processes and discipline of its laboratory and lecture hall. We need not through out the baby with the bath-water; it is feasible to inject some legitimacy to the poetic imagination, both on the academic/scientific front as well as on the political and religious fronts.

We all have the capacity to regard others (pick your victim) with disdain, bigotry, and contempt. So racism is only one, a primary one, of our shared blindnesses. In order to open our eyes, we have to come to acknowledge our previous blindness. Whether or not that blindness was deliberate, defiant, overtly abusive or less so, it is nevertheless racism, and we all have to look in the mirror to see that racism in our eyes.

Similarly, we are all complicit in supporting and sustaining a status-driven culture in which the rich and the powerful have become role models, while many at the same time have betrayed our confidence and trust.  How could they not betray us, given the fragility of their ‘lofty’ and inflated position, especially given the inflations we have permitted and genuflected in front of?

As for the abuse of force that needs to be non-violently resisted by force, we have all complied with rules and regulations with which we all know, at the very moment of their insertion into our lives, that they were inappropriate, some were even illegal, but satisfied the neurotic needs of those enforcing the law. And that goes for the church as well as the schools, the family and the legal system. Absolutes, by their very nature, are defined epistemologically as if they were papier maché, and then debated as if they were the pillars of reality, when they were really among a range of academic ‘labels’, parental ‘givens,’ political and economic ‘principles’, psychological and psychiatric ‘diagnoses’….and then only the designation of some man or woman, and then perpetrated as ‘gospel’ depending on the theatre and the actors whose credibility sanctioned and sustained that specific theatre.

We are not only drowning in absolutes, but also in specializations….all of them dependent on absolutes, when, in fact, most of those specialities, and the personnel within each, know and declare almost universally, that their speciality is still working diligently to discover more theory in order to refine their practice, without every coming to the absolutes with which the public seems to want to sanctify their lofty academic achievements.

Neither absolutes, nor professional specialities nor their communities comprise a theology, nor an ethical or moral perfectionism. None of them are or identify with God, nor should they be expected to. None of them either seeks nor wears comfortably the alb or chasuble or mitre of perfection, moral and ethical purity nor special ‘connect-line’ to the divine. And that exclusion includes all Popes.